Jews Cheated Out of Land to be Jewish Homeland: Facts of History of Palestine and Israel

                                                                                                                                                                                   
Nadene Goldfoot
All of Palestine was designated as a "Jewish National Home."  This was done legally through international law at the end of WWI in the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917.  What happened and how come the Jews wound up with only 20% of land to be theirs once again?  The Jews even had the agreement of King Feisal, king of Iraq and Syria  that it would work out for the Jews to return to their land.  He was one of the leaders who fought against the Ottomans.

"Understanding that Jews and Arabs would have to live together in the Land of Israel, Weizmann strove to create peaceful coexistence between the two peoples. Thus he met in Aqaba with Emir Faisal, leader of the Arab national movement. Faisal expressed sympathy for the Zionist cause, which he felt was similar to the Arabs’ national aspirations."  Weizmann was influenced by Theodore Hertzl, a secular Jewish Austrian reporter  who envisioned a Utopia for Jews.  Hertzl had written "Der Judenstaat" (The State of the Jews) outlining his ideas.

The British held the mandate and were trusted to follow out the rules.  Instead, they gave state domain lands, allocated for the "Jewish National Home,"  to those Arabs who were landless.  They did not own any land, but they claimed they were being "displaced by Jews" in Western Palestine.  The outcome was that land outside the limited Jewish-settled area of Western Palestine was then treated as "Arab" land which was more than 80% of the promised to the Jews' land.

These same Arabs did not think of themselves or even call themselves "Palestinians."  The bulk of all the Arab peasantry in the area came from East Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian and other neighboring states and had been landless due to the feudal-like societal structures of their own native-born people.  That, along with natural disasters, heavy taxation and corrupt loan sharks kept them poor.  It was not the Jews who were native to the land or the Jews who arrived in the 1880's that who made the Arabs landless.

The traditional land of Palestine included land both east and west of the Jordan River.  The few Arabs that lived there thought of themselves as Ottomans or Turks, as the land had been held by the Ottomans for the past 400 years.  Some also thought of themselves as southern Syrians or as Arab people..  None said they were Palestinians.

They were imbued with religious prejudice, and erupted into anti-Jewish violence often whenever their Muslim leaders would incite them.  This happened way before Israel was created in 1948.   After 1917 with the British in the area, they were referred to by the British as being "Nationalistic"-which was in truth subterfuge  to be  anti-Semitic.  The effendis and the Mufti tried to also incite this "nationalism" which meant attacks on Jewish civilians.  T.E. Lawrence did his part also in creating nationalistic feelings among the Muslims, a leftover from inspiring them to fight with him.

The charges from Palestinian leaders of today that the Palestinian people have had an identity with the land that goes back thousands of years is false.  A few nomadic people lived in the land in the 1860's (note Mark Twain's book "The Innocents Abroad".)  It was he and his friends who were the innocents, wanting to visit Palestine who answered the flier saying to join the excursion to the Holy Land and Egypt, the Crimea, Greece, and intermediate points of interest starting in Brooklyn, February 1, 1867.  They took a first-class steamer that would hold 150 passengers.  He gave an excellent description of what he saw.

The charge that alien Jews returned after 2000 years in 1948 to "displace" the Arabs in the new Jewish state is not true.  First of all, Jews hadn't all left in 70 CE.  There were a remnant who remained and were there to greet newcomers who returned throughout the 2,000 years.  Secondly, the plans Chaim Weizmann drew up for Israel included Arabs who were on the land at the time.  It was to be a state second to none as a Utopia. Instead, they were consistently greeted with gunfire.

Palestinians charge that there was no place for them in 1948.  The land to which Arab refugees moved in 1948 included lands that many Arab refugees had only recently left in order to gain the economic  advantages of the small Jewish region within Palestine.  These homelands where they originated included Jordan.  Those who deprived these Arab refugees of homes were the Arab-Muslim leaders.  Neighboring Arab states refused to grant citizenship to those they called their Arab brothers, so they wound up in camps where they reside today.  .  Arab who did not leave when their leaders told them to became citizens of Israel.

Unfortunately, the British treated the land designated to be the Jewish National Home as Arab Land.  The Jews who tried to immigrate during WWII before and after were brutally restricted while the Brits allowed illegal Arab immigration to enter.  Therefore the Brits violated the International League of Nations Mandate by facilitating Arab settlement onto Jewish-settled land and treating the Jews terribly.  (Read "Exodus" by Leon Uris).  They helped to build up the Arab population this way.
                                                           Weizmann and King Feisal

Perhaps King Feisal was not alone in his ability to see that Jews re-entering and developing their homeland would be good for Arabs as well, but these good people have been overcome by religious zealots who have pieced out the anti-Semitic clauses in the Koran and uphold them more than even the Arab countries that hosted Jews for the past 2,000 years as Dhminnis.  All good intentions of Weizmann and other Zionists of his day have been attacked by hatred from the Arab people, except that we see 1.4 million Arabs living as citizens in Israel today and living far better than their neighbors.    Weizmann and Feisal's dreams are working.

Resource: book:  From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters page 392-393.
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/feisal1.html  about King Feisal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
http://www.mygen.com/users/ufo/Israel_gets_the_Bomb.html
http://suite101.com/article/theodor-herzl-the-dreyfus-affair-and-modern-zionism-a407378

Who'd Ever Take a Vacation to Palestine? What You'd Most Likely Find

Nadene Goldfoot

"The Report of the Palestine Royal Commission quotes an account of the Maritime Plain in 1913, the year my mother was born:

The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts...no orange groves, orchards or vineyards were to be seen until one reached [the Jewish village of] Yabna [Yavne]....Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen....The ploughs used were of wood....The yields were very poor....The sanitary conditions in the village were horrible. Schools did not exist....The western part, towards the sea, was almost a desert....The villages in this area were few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants."       

Lewis French, the British Director of Development in Palestine in 1931 wrote the following that simply would not make it in a travel magazine to induce visitors.  "We found it inhabited by fellahin who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent malaria...Large areas...were uncultivated....The fellahin, if not themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these and other criminals.  The individual plots....changed hands annually.  There was little public security, and the fellahin's lot was an alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin." Fellahins are peasants or agricultural laborers in Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries.   Bedouins are nomadic Arabs  of the Arabian, Syrian, or north African deserts.  


That's not much different from Mark Twain's description in 1867 when he took the ship on February 1st for an excursion to the Holy Land, Egypt, The Crimea, Greece and Intermediate points of interest from Brooklyn .  "If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire.  I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little-not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining -rod or a diving-bell.  The Syrians are very poor, and yet they are ground down by a system of taxation that would drive any other nation frantic.  Last year their taxes were heavy enough, in all conscience-but this year they have been increased by the addition of taxes that were forgiven them in times of famine in former years.  On top of this the Government has levied a tax of one-tenth of the whole proceeds of the land.  ...The plows these people use are simply a sharpened stick, such as Abraham plowed with, and they still winnow their wheat as he did-they pile it on the house-top, and then toss it by shovel-fulls into the air until the wind has blown all the chaff away.  They never invent anything, never learn anything."

"Twain continues.  Palestine is only from 40 to 60 miles wide.  The State of Missouri could be split into 3 Palestines, and there would then be enough material left for part of another-possibly a whole one".  From Dan to Beersheba must be a trying trip a without railroad, he mused.... He spoke of the Bedouins and said he thought "these chaps would sell their younger brothers if they had a chance...They attacked our camp last night, and I bear them no good will.  Here a man rides a donkey (pigmy jackasses) and carries the child, and the woman walks.  The customs have not changed since Joseph and Mary's time.  ..We found water but no shade.  then they found a tree but no water.

So who was going to change their life for the better?  People who were not sympathetic to Jews returning to Palestine were the very ones who believed that the Jews could improve the condition of these Palestinian Arab.  Dawood Barakat, editor of the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram, in 1922 wrote:  "It is absolutely necessary that an entente (international understanding providing for a common course of action) be made between the Zionists and Arabs, because the war of words can only do evil.  The Zionists are necessary for the country:  The money which they will bring, their knowledge and intelligence, and the industriousness which characterizes them will contribute without doubt to the regeneration of the country."

That was  also the initial philosophy of the Zionists who moved to Palestine in the 1880's to build a country.  It cannot be said better.  There were those Arabs that also believed it and were counting on it as well.  But they were not living in a vacuum and the overseers, the British,  the French and the greedy disbelievers had other ideas.  

Resource:  Myths and Facts a concise record of the Arab-Isreli conflict by Mitchell G. Bard PhD and Joel Himelfarb
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/467/chrncls.htm , article, picture of Barakat
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Arabs_in_Palestine.html

Who Are the Palestinians?

Nadene Goldfoot
In 1882 the Jews came to Palestine in what was called the 1st Aliyah. There were always Jews there since the days of Abraham, but these people came from Europe for ideological reasons as well as from escaping from pogroms.

Knowing that they were involved in rebuilding the land, Arabs followed them hoping to find work. The Turkish and British administrators took little interest in these Arabs, but kept scrupulous records of Jews entering the territory.  These non-Jewish immigrants came from all parts of the Middle East, including Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Transjordan (now called Jordan), Saudi Arabia,  Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, and Libya. These Arabs benefited financially by these European Jewish settlers eager to build a country, and that's why they traveled hundred of miles for the possible jobs.

Palestinians, under the assumption that they are refugees, were either immigrants before Israel's creation in 1948 or the children of these immigrants. When Mark Twain visited in 1867, there were hardly any Arabs in the land at all.

This was all researched by Joan Peters, a Christian reporter who did a fantastic job finding this information. She began by being swayed to help the Palestinian problems of wanting a state and wound up finding out the much different facts that their immigration to Palestine took place during the first half of the twentieth century. People may have condemned Peters' book because of her journalistic style,  such as Professors Noam Chomsky, Norman Finklestein and Porath, but no one has been able to refute her findings.  Joan wrote "From Time Immemorial" the origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine.

Thus, the Palestinians are a mixed group of people who migrated to find work in the Jewish settlements. Now they are going to the peace table in Annapolis, Maryland in late November and demanding part of the tiniest country in the Middle East, Israel. They are backed by all the seven Arab countries who do not want to see a Jewish state in their midst.  Israel is a Jewish state, it's culture is more European and American, and the Arabs have done everything to prevent it's continuance. They have more power than Israel ever has had due to the oil that the Arab countries have and control. There never was a Palestine country. They never had their own country and never even thought of it till Israel was created, and even then they didn't until they lost the 1967 war against Israel.  . They were offered land for a country but turned it down time and time again.  . Though Israel has been attacked and has won its wars with what must be divine help, it's the Palestinians who are calling the shots at this conference and probably future ones, too.  .

Olmert is not exactly popular with his own people right now. Many feel he is ready to give away the baby and the bath water, so if he wants to stay in power, he may have to become tougher with the Palestinians at this meeting. The Palestinians are not happy with Abbas as their representative being he is a member of Fatah, and the Hamas terrorists will not recognize him as having any say in their matters. Under these conditions, Condoleeza Rice will have her hands full. Peace is the objective. Will it mean peace for Israel or a piece of Israel?

Update to August 2013.  Not much has changed.  A peace conference that has started will be going on for the next 9 months.

Resource:  From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters
Book:  "The I:nnocents Abroad" by Mark Twain