TIL about the phrase "The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man," which refers to a fundamental problem facing Zionist ambitions to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. - sh.itjust.works

“The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man” is a phrase used to refer to a fundamental problem confronting Zionist ambitions to found a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This problem lay in the non-Jews such as Arab Muslims and Arab Christians who lived on the land later claimed by the nation of Israel as this Jewish homeland in 1948. The phrase is of unknown origin, and no primary source supports its historicity. It is found in stories that are often set during the 1890s and feature a Jewish fact-finding mission to Ottoman or Mandatory Palestine. In these stories the phrase conveys a warning to this fact-finding mission that a Jewish homeland could not be reestablished in Palestine without interfering with the existing population. The Guardian’s foreign correspondent and expert on Israel and the Middle East, Eric Silver, told a version of the story in 1977: “An ageing pioneer was interviewed once on Israeli television. He explained how the elders of his Russian Jewish village had sent an emissary to Palestine to spy out the land. The man reported back: ‘The bride is beautiful, but she is already married.’” Professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi of the University of Haifa recounted another version of the story in his Original Sins (1992): "There is a famous story, told during a meeting between Prime Minister Golda Meir and a group of Israeli writers in 1970. A Jew from Poland visited Palestine in the 1920s. On his return to Europe, he summarized his impressions by saying: ‘The bride is beautiful, but she has got a bridegroom already.’ Golda Meir responded by saying: ‘And I thank God every night that the bridegroom was so weak, and the bride could be taken away from him.’"