How is the 'central fiction' of Zionism to be understood politically?

Question

Deleuze in his essay, The Grandeur of Arafat, writes:

Zionism, then the state of Israel, will demand that the Palestinians recognise its right. But the State of Israel will never speak of Palestinians but of the Arabs of Palestine, as if they found themselves there by chance or in error. And later, they will act as if the expelled Palestinians came from outside, they will not speak of the first war of resistance that the Palestinians led all alone.

Since they haven't recognised Israel's right, they will be made into the descendents of Hitler. But Israel reserves the right to deny their existence in fact. Here begins a fiction that has had to stretch further and further and to weigh on all those who defended the Palestinian cause. This fiction, this wager of Israel's, was to make all those who contest the de facto conditions and actions of the Zionist state appear as anti-semites.

It is a historical fact that the Palesinians were in existence long before Israel took root in Palestine. A fact that was taken into consideration by The League of Nations that awarded Palestine a Class A Mandate recognising that their development was such that their claims to self-determination was to be honoured. A promise that was betrayed by the then mandatory power, Britain who had no intention of honouring it.

Now, the denial of this fact is no small part of Zionism but a central part of its mythology and repeated at the highest levels. For example, Golda Meir in a 1969 interview with the then Sunday Times editor, Frank Giles, stated:

There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either Southern Syria before the First World War and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestine people and we came and threw them out taking their country from them. They did not exist.

What makes this 'fiction' even more reprehensible is that as Deleuze points out in the preceding paragraph in his essay:

The United States and Europe owed reparations to the Jews. And they made a people, about whom the least could be said, is that they had no hand in and were singularly innocent of any holocaust and hadn't heard of it, pay this reparation. It's there that the grotesque begins, as well as the violence.

How are we to understand this central 'fiction' of Zionism politically? To call it part of the founding myth of Israel seems singularly careless and merely buying into their narrative. Even myths have a kernel of truth. But there is no truth to this founding 'fiction' at all.

Answer 1

I will answer purely in terms of exegesis, as political opinion has no place here.

First of all, I'm not sure you understood what the fiction Deleuze writes about is. He writes, as per your own quotation:

But Israel reserves the right to deny their existence in fact. Here begins a fiction that has had to stretch further and further and to weigh on all those who defended the Palestinian cause. This fiction, this wager of Israel's, was to make all those who contest the de facto conditions and actions of the Zionist state appear as antisemites.

I short: The fiction of Zionism, as described by Deleuze, is that every person who considers the rights and situation of Arabic persons in the area is automatically denying the right of existence of Israel and an antisemite. Nothing more, nothing less.

The question what this means politically is fuzzy at best. But the baseline is that Zionists won't allow for the rights of Arabic people to be considered at all (according to Deleuze!). Whether modern Israel is a Zionist state as a matter of fact is completely irrelevant here. It is a mere opinion of Deleuze we should not buy uncritically.

Answer 2

There is a deep flaw embedded in this discussion which isn't addressed in any of the comments, which has a significant philosophical component in it, as follows.

A few years ago, researchers working on Egyptian mummies managed to extract the genes of the tuberculosis bacterium from a mummified body, and declared that the cause of death of the human who was then mummified ~3000 years ago had been tuberculosis.

A prominent French postmodernist philosopher (I do not remember if it was Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.) then jumped into the discussion and declared on first principles that the conclusion on cause of death was wrong- because as everyone knows, the tuberculosis bacterium was not discovered until modern times- which made it impossible a priori for anyone 3000 years ago to have died from the disease we in the present call "tuberculosis". Having thus straightened out the controversy and settled the matter, the postmodernist dusted off his hands and departed the stage.

However, the tuberculosis genes did not thence themselves magically vanish in a puff of logic. Oddly enough, they were still there, and the evidence in hand still demonstrated that they were the reason the mummified man had died- 3000 years before the disease that killed him had a name and a proximate, demonstrable cause.

Now note that saying that "Palestinians" do not exist is not the same thing as saying that the people who call themselves "palestinian" for any reason themselves do not exist. They are still people, they are still there. Depriving them of an identity, as Golda Meir did, does not make their bodies vanish in a clever puff of logic. Nor did it in any way justify their being thrown out, to use Meir's own language.