Terra sancta nullius

Een korte geschiedenis van het niemandsland

Samenvatting

Before 1992, the legal foundation of the state of Australia relied on the fiction that the land had been empty and unowned when the British arrived. The ‘empty land’ presumption, popularly rendered as terra nullius, reminds one involuntarily of the founding dictum of Zionism: ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, as both amounting to a dispossession of native peoples and the denial of their natural title to the land, in favour of newly arriving (European) settlers. This article traces the history of both concepts and investigates the degree to which they may be justifiably said to amount to equivalent terms. It finds, in brief, that, despite sharing certain elemental features, the Zionist epigram represents a rallying cry, an appeal to European Jews, whereas the terra nullius doctrine was called upon as a justification of a past episode, to retroactively legitimise what had already been enacted.