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Understanding the Palestinian Movement An HIR Series, in four parts Historical and Investigative Research
- 30 April 2006
█ Introduction █ Where did
the name ‘Palestine’ come from? █ Where is
‘Palestine’?
█ Who are ‘the
Palestinians’? Introduction In Part 1 we
saw that historian Nathan Weinstock finds it “understandable” that, in 1929,
Arab mobs attempted to exterminate the Jews in British Mandate ‘Palestine.’
And why does he? Because “the Zionist leaders,” he explains, “clearly allied
with the British” against the “national consciousness” of the “Palestinian
anti-colonialist movement.” This is the standard anti-Zionist representation:
a population designated as the Arab Palestinian people, equipped with a
“national consciousness,” was living in a place called ‘Palestine’ when
Zionist Jews came to dispossess them at the point of a British imperialist
gun.[1] It’s a hypothesis. Can it be right? Not if it produces automatic absurdities. As you may
also recall from Part 1,
Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson, an offended eyewitness, accused at the
time that his own superiors in the British military were inciting the Arabs
to attack the Jews with terrorism because they needed an excuse to renege on
their treaty obligation to create a Jewish national home in British Mandate
‘Palestine.’[2] No, says Nathan Weinstock: the reason the British “encouraged”
genocidal, anti-Jewish Arab violence was to produce a “distraction from the
[Arab] anti-imperialist struggle.” You may ignore Nathan Weinstock’s explanation
because Nathan Weinstock has stipulated to the crime: he himself
concedes that the British “encouraged” (his words) Arab mob terrorism
against the Jews.[3] Under the
normal rules of logic, this refutes his claim that the Zionist Jews
and the British were allied against the Arabs. But Nathan Weinstock can be invoked to refute Nathan
Weinstock in other ways, too. On the question of the reality of ‘Palestine,’
Weinstock himself remarks on “how vague the borders of Palestine were,” and
points out that, in the 19th century, “Herzl [founder of the Zionist
movement]...referred to Sinai as ‘Egyptian Palestine.’”[3a] In
addition, he says: “When the
first Zionist immigrants arrived in the Holy Land, Palestine did not exist as
a distinct political entity. The territory which corresponded to this name
was composed, roughly speaking, of the western provinces of the region which
was traditionally known as ‘Syria.’ There were no borders to delimit it
precisely. In fact, the definitive borders of the country, which covers about
17,000 square miles, were established by a series of agreements and treaties
concluded between 1906 and 1922. The vagueness of the word ‘Palestine’ in the
19th century is illustrated by the vocabulary of the first Zionists, who used
the expressions ‘Syria’ and ‘Palestine’ interchangeably.”[4] So ‘Palestine,’ says Weinstock, “did not exist as a
distinct political entity” and in fact the territory Weinstock would like to
call ‘Palestine’ “was traditionally known as Syria.” The vagueness in the
location of ‘Palestine’ was such that nobody was sure whether ‘Palestine’ was
a part of ‘Syria’ or synonymous with ‘Syria,’ so they tended to use the terms
without much discipline. And Weinstock is right: ‘Palestine’ didn’t get
borders that stuck until 1922 -- and it was the British colonialists
(imperialist foreigners from Europe, mind you), who arbitrarily drew those
borders. This does not look like an impressive defense of the view that
‘Palestine’ had any political or cultural reality, which perhaps explains why
Weinstock’s next sentence reads like special pleading: “A good case can be
made, however, that, even then, there existed a specific Palestinian [Arab]
identity.” A “good case can be made,” can it? How
curious, then, that Nathan Weinstock should have neglected to make it.
Because, speaking as an author, when I think I have a good case and I've got
my fingers on the keyboard I cannot resist the urge to type it out for my
readers. It is hard to imagine an author who has a good case for something
and decides not to show it -- particularly when we are talking about a hotly
contested point. So here’s a hypothesis: perhaps, in truth, one cannot
make a “good case” that “there existed a specific Palestinian [Arab]
identity,” and so, lacking an actual demonstration, Nathan Weinstock has
insisted a bit ‘abstractly,’ shall we say, on the supposed correctness of his
claim. I think I can convince you that my hypothesis about
Nathan Weinstock is a good one. In order to convince you, I shall lay out
what I believe is a solid demonstration that there was no such alleged
“Palestinian [Arab] identity,” possessing a “national consciousness,” and
that any historian looking at the facts, as Weinstock has, cannot honestly
conclude otherwise. I shall begin with the name,
‘Palestine.’ After all, if there is such a thing as a Palestinian people, it
is or was attached to a territory named Palestine that exists or existed.
If, however, as Arab historian Philip Hitti testified in 1946 before the
Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’
in history, absolutely not,”[4a] then it would
be absurd to speak of a real Palestinian people. I will therefore first
examine the reality of ‘Palestine’ as an indirect way of assessing the
reality of the ‘Palestinians.’ Then I will examine the question of
‘Palestinian identity’ directly. __________________________________________________________ Where did the name ‘Palestine’ come
from? The ancient Romans gave the name ‘Syria-Palestina,’
in the second century, to land that previously had included the Roman
province of Judea (land of the Jews), and before that independent Judah (land
of the Jews). Why the name change? Because the Romans were wiping out the
Jews: exterminating them. Why? Because the Jews were defending the oppressed
masses whom the Romans daily brutalized.[5] At the time of the name change from Judea to
‘Syria-Palestina,’ the Roman Empire had brought to completion a great
genocide of the Jewish people, which lasted some 150 years. This required,
naturally, many episodes of mass killing, but historians usually make
reference only to the biggest three: the ‘First Jewish War,’ the ‘Diaspora
Revolt,’ and the ‘The Second Jewish War.’ A historian of Western
antisemitism, James Carroll, writes: “...[in] the
climactic war of 66-73 CE [‘First Jewish War’], ...Jerusalem was laid waste
and hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed, (Josephus and Tacitus put the
number of Jewish dead in this first war at around 600,000; in the second
‘Jewish war’ sixty years later, the tally of Jewish victims is put at
850,000)... Whatever the actual totals. . .the vast number of victims were
killed without the mechanized methods that make modern wars so lethal, which
is why analogies between Rome and the worst of twentieth-century dictators
[i.e. to Adolf Hitler] may not be misplaced here. . . .if the [Roman] legions
had had machine guns, bombs, railroads and [poison] gas at their disposal,
who is to say any Jew would have survived the second century?”[6] Well, in fact very few Jews did survive the
second century. As historian Robert Wolfe explains, “There were
close to 1 million Jews in Egypt alone at the start of this period, yet
hardly any remaining by the end of the 2nd century CE. The large Jewish
communities in Syria and Turkey were likewise decimated. . . By the end of
the 2nd century CE, only 750,000 Jews remained in Judah, home of something
like 4 million Jews prior to the Roman onslaught.”[7] Just as most Jews in Hitler’s occupied Europe were
exterminated, adds Wolfe, “most Jews within the Roman empire had been either
killed or enslaved” by the end of the second century. Now, the Jewish population before the Roman genocide
was not a marginalized minority but one of the largest and fastest-growing
populations in the Mediterranean, with multitudes of sympathizers and
defenders among non-Jews.[8] This means
that the first and second century Roman extermination of the Jews may well
have been, in proportional terms, a bigger Catastrophe even than the Nazi
crime. So James Carroll should hardly be appealing to the Roman lack of
“machine guns, bombs, railroads and gas,” as if there were a need to explain
why the Roman Final Solution was smaller than the Nazi version; because
it wasn’t smaller. This horrific mass killing of Jews began with
Augustus’ massacres at the turn of the first century and came to a close with
the defeat of the Jewish Bar Kochba revolt in the second century, under
Emperor Hadrian. In A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson summarizes how
this last chapter played out: “Fifty forts
where the rebels had put up resistance were destroyed and 985 towns,
villages, and agricultural settlements [also were]. [The ancient Roman
author] Dio [Cassius] says 580,000 Jews died in the fighting ‘and countless
numbers of starvation, fire and the sword. Nearly the entire land of Judea
was laid waste.’ In the late fourth century, St. Jerome reported from Bethlehem
a tradition that, after the defeat, there were so many Jewish slaves for sale
that the price dropped to less than a horse. [The emperor]
Hadrian relentlessly carried through to completion his plan to transform
ruined Jerusalem into a Greek polis. He buried the hollows of the old city in
rubble to level the site. Outside the limits he removed the debris to get at
and excavate the rock below to provide the huge ashlars for the public
buildings he set up on the leveled site... The city he built was called Aelia
Capitolina. Greek-speakers were moved in to populate it and the Jews were
forbidden to enter on pain of death.”[9] After finishing this great extermination of the
Jewish people, emperor Hadrian was attempting to cleanse remaining Jews from
their own land. To this effect he forbade entry to Jews and changed the name
of the Jewish capital (which he had pulverized) to Aelia Capitolina.
Something else that Hadrian did was...change the name of the place from Judea
to ‘Syria Palestina.’ So, the name ‘Palestine’ was invented by the
Romans as part of an effort to wipe out the Jewish people and erase any
connection between them and their homeland. I think this is rather
interesting. The Roman exterminators chose ‘Palestine’ in order to
allege that this was the land of the Philistines (that’s what ‘Palestine’
means: land of the Philistines), as opposed to the land of the Jews.[10] It is significant that the land which the
Philistines at one time occupied is much smaller than any of the
definitions of ‘Palestine’ -- even the Roman.[10a]
And it is also significant that the Greeks, from whom the use of the name
‘Palestina’ is supposedly taken, did not call this general area ‘Palestina’
when they ruled it. When the Ptolemaic Greeks ruled this general area they
called it ‘Syria and Phoenicia,’ and scholars refer to this Ptolemaic
possession as ‘Coele Syria.’[10b] But the most important question for us is this: can
this name, picked by the ancient Roman exterminators of the Jews, be applied
for cultural or ethnic reasons to any Arabs? The answer is no. The
Philistines, who no longer exist, were not Arabs. In fact, the Philistines
were not even Semites, having been most closely related to the Greeks.
Perhaps even more significantly, since the very name ‘Palestine’ fell into
ambiguous use/disuse for a long time, it is quite impossible that a group of
Arabs lived there who defined themselves as ethnic ‘Palestinians’ across the
ages. So, to see where ‘Palestine’ might be found, with
respect to the claims of modern Arabs, we must turn to the
question of how and when this name came back into use, in recent times. I
turn to this next. __________________________________________________________ Where is ‘Palestine’? __________________________________________________________ “The name
Palestine was revived after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and
applied to the territory in this region that was placed under the British
Mandate for Palestine.”[11] As anti-Zionist historian Nathan Weinstock
himself told us above, “the definitive borders of [Palestine]...were
established by a series of agreements and treaties concluded between 1906 and
1922.” It was the British colonialists who
gave ‘Palestine’ its borders in 1922. The way this happened contains an
important lesson. “In June 1922
the League of Nations [the highest international authority, precursor to the
United Nations] passed the Palestine Mandate. The Palestine Mandate was an
explicit document regarding Britain’s responsibilities and powers of
administration in Palestine including ‘secur[ing] the establishment of the
Jewish national home,’ and ‘safeguarding the civil and religious rights of
all the inhabitants of Palestine.’”[12] Rather than honoring their treaty obligations about
“secur[ing] the establishment of the Jewish national home,” and “safeguarding
the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine,”
the British fomented genocidal Arab mob violence against the Palestinian Jews
(see Part 1). As
mentioned, Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson accused at the time that the
British wanted to create such awful anti-Jewish conditions that they could
appear to be scuttling the project for a Jewish national home under duress.[2] The British did something else, too. Having
arbitrarily drawn borders around a first piece of land, baptized with the
name ‘Palestine’ in 1920, the British Empire soon decided that this was not
really ‘Palestine,’ after all, and redrew the borders in 1921-22.
The 1920 definition of ‘Palestine’ included what is
present day Israel plus what eventually became the Kingdom of Jordan (see
maps above). The second definition of ‘Palestine’ that was made official in
1922 lopped off what was now called ‘Transjordan’ (later to become Jordan) --
and this was well over half of the territory, mind you -- leaving as
‘Palestine’ just the territory of present-day Israel (including the disputed
territories of West Bank and Gaza). “The [1922
British] White Paper stated that the Balfour Declaration could not be amended
and that the Jews were in Palestine by right, [but] it partitioned the area
of the Mandate by excluding the area east of the Jordan River [now
‘Transjordan’] from Jewish settlement.”[12a] The British changed the definition of ‘Palestine’ in
1921-22 in order to restrict Jewish settlement to a smaller territory.
You see, according to its treaty obligations with the League of Nations,
the British had to allow Jews to settle in a territory called ‘Palestine,’
where the Jews would make for themselves a national home; so, one way for the
British Empire to pretend to stay within the letter of the Palestine Mandate
(and Balfour Declaration) and still reduce Jewish opportunities for
settlement in the Middle East was to reduce the boundaries of the place
called ‘Palestine.’ This is what the British did, and they indeed forbade
Jews from settling in Transjordan.
Such sudden, arbitrary changes in the boundaries of
‘Palestine’ undermine the view that there was much reality to ‘Palestine’ to
begin with. And the narrowing of the boundaries of ‘Palestine,’ with its
restriction of Jewish settlement, is consistent with Lieutenant Colonel John
Patterson’s hypothesis that the British were trying to destroy Zionism. What
all of this is not consistent with, once again, is historian Nathan
Weinstock’s interpretation that, “clearly,” as he claims to see it, the
Zionist and the British were allied against the Arabs. By the way, an interesting contrast impresses itself
on the mind when studying these events. Precisely because the name
‘Palestine’ was associated, in international law, with the creation of a
Jewish national home, most Westerners speaking in the first half of the
20th century used the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’ in reference to
Jews. The Jews themselves spoke this way. Hillel Kook (alias Peter
Bergson), a Zionist leader, expressed himself thusly: “I am a Hebrew. My
allegiance is to the Hebrew nation. My country is Palestine.”[13]
What one cannot find, by contrast, as late as the late 1940s, is much
recognition on the Arab side that a place called ‘Palestine’ even
existed. In fact, quite a few Arabs went out of their way emphatically to deny
that such a place existed. “...the Arab
historian Philip Hitti testified in 1946 before the Anglo-American Committee
of Inquiry that ‘There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely
not.’ Earlier, in 1937, a local Arab leader appearing before the Peel
Commission similarly declared, ‘There is no such thing [as Palestine].
‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented.’ ...During the [illegal]
Jordanian occupation of the West Bank and the Egyptian occupation of Gaza [at
the conclusion of the War of 1948, in which the Arabs had proudly attempted
to exterminate the Israeli Jews[14]],
the [so-called] Palestinian Arabs had [likewise] not claimed a distinct
peoplehood or sued for self-determination.”[15] Consistent with all the preceding, the Arab body
given the most exalted UN official recognition as a ‘government-in-exile’ for
the ‘Palestinian Arabs,’ the ‘Palestine Liberation Organization,’ would, in
the late 1960s, rather comically deny that Palestine exists. This
story is so full of useful lessons that I will delay the punchline a bit,
that we may better appreciate all the minor epiphanies decorating the setup. The PLO
(Palestine Liberation Organization) denies that ‘Palestine’ exists! The original PLO Charter, elaborated in 1964, states
in article 24 that: “This
Organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank
in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.”[16] Notice: when it was formed in 1964, the PLO went out
of its way to state that the West Bank and Gaza (1) were not ‘Palestinian’
lands, (2) rightfully belonged to Jordan and Egypt, respectively (this was
false: Jordan and Egypt were illegal squatters), and (3) were of no interest
to the PLO. Isn’t it curious that the ‘international community’ has forced
down Israel’s throat a ‘Palestinian state’ precisely in those territories, the
West Bank and Gaza, that the founding constitution of the Palestine
Liberation Organization explicitly declared, in a special article, were not
‘Palestinian’? I think this is curious. There is more. The PLO took the extraordinary step of re-writing its
charter in 1968 in order to redefine what ‘Palestine’ supposely was,
and since then it has been demanding the West Bank and Gaza as part of
‘Palestine.’ The text of this 1968 (and still current) PLO Charter says: Article 1:
Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people. Article 2:
Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an
indivisible territorial unit.[17] Of course, these two articles also appear in the
original 1964 Charter, but the new 1968 Charter makes absolutely no reference
to the PLO renouncing sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza. It is from
this moment in time, therefore, that the PLO has been laying claim to these
territories. I must point out something: as we saw above, the
British changed the definition of
‘Palestine’ during the British Mandate, and yet the PLO does not explain
which of the two definitions it is adopting. One can understand this,
however, because it is embarrassing: the Palestine Liberation Organization is
choosing, for the definition of its supposedly ‘ancestral’ homeland, one of
the two arbitrary definitions of ‘Palestine’ that the foreigner
infidel British colonialists introduced. And yet this is supposed
to be Nathan Weinstock’s “Palestinian anti-colonialist movement.” I
point out, too, that of the two arbitrary definitions of ‘Palestine’ during
the British Mandate, the PLO has chosen the smaller one, and also the
least legitimate, for having been redrawn arbitrarily and unilaterally (and
hence illegally) by the British. Curiouser and curiouser... Further, the PLO Charter affirms that ‘Palestine’ is
“an indivisible territorial unit” (see above), but the PLO’s preferred
British definition of ‘Palestine’ in fact constitutes a division, by a
foreign power, of an earlier ‘Palestine.’ Shouldn’t the PLO be protesting the
British division, which reduced ‘Palestine’ to less than half its size? On
the other hand, it is true that such a complaint would be hypocritical,
because the PLO itself divided Britain’s division of
‘Palestine’: the PLO’s 1964 definition is smaller even than the smaller
British definition (and hence smaller than the PLO’s 1968 definition). So... Why,
if the PLO itself is apparently not sure where ‘Palestine’ is, and itself has
produced the most drastic division of ‘Palestine,’ does the PLO
insist that this is “an indivisible territorial unit”? Every way we turn: absurdity. But there’s more. Look at the problem this way: Why did the PLO change
its charter in 1968 in order to enlarge the definition of ‘Palestine’ so
modestly? If the PLO was going to risk the ridiculous spectacle, just four
years after having been founded, of redrawing the boundaries of its supposed
ancestral homeland, then it should have asked at least for the 1920
British definition of ‘Palestine,’ because this was the largest and legally
least problematic definition. No? But the PLO changed the charter merely to
add the West Bank and Gaza... Now, this was the most embarrassing move possible
because in the 1964 (and founding) Charter, the PLO had gone quite out
of its way to explain, in a special article, that the West Bank and Gaza were
not part of ‘Palestine.’ So why not keep the slightly smaller definition
of ‘Palestine’ of 1964? This one avoided a ridiculous spectacle and a major
embarrassment, and moreover did not require the political absurdity of the
PLO’s pretending to oppose Western colonialists while adopting the Western
colonialist definition of the PLO’s supposed ancestral homeland! And yet, no:
the PLO took the extraordinary step of re-writing its charter, in 1968, in
order to chose the ridiculous spectacle, the major embarrassment, the
political absurdity, and... the weakest legal case. Is there any logic to the PLO’s decisions?
There is. To discover this PLO logic the trick is to notice,
glinting like a needle in the haystack of tangled and nested absurdity, the
following consistency: 1) In 1964,
the PLO’s definition of ‘Palestine’ corresponded, exactly, to the borders of
the state of Israel. 2) In 1968,
the PLO’s definition of ‘Palestine’ corresponded, exactly, to the borders of
the state of Israel. The only difference is that in those two dates the
borders of Israel were not the same: in 1964 Israel did not control the West
Bank and Gaza, and in 1968 it did. What happened between 1964 and
1968? The Six Day War of 1967. In this conflict, the Jordanians, who
had been illegally squatting on the West Bank since the war of 1948, and the
Egyptians, who had been doing the same on the Gaza strip, were kicked out of
these territories when the Israelis defeated another proud attempt by the
Arabs to exterminate the Israeli Jews.[17a]
The Israeli Jews offered the territories back in exchange for a mere promise
of peace, but the Arabs would not do even this, so they didn't get the West
Bank and Gaza back.[17b] Which was
just as well, because:
And that will do for epiphanies. Let us now move
directly to the punchline: since it was the West Bank and Gaza changing hands
in 1967 that caused the PLO to re-write its charter in 1968, so that these
previously excluded territories could now be included in the PLO definition
of ‘Palestine,’ then we have found the PLO’s logic: The PLO will lay a claim, as
‘Palestine,’ to the precise boundaries of the territory controlled by the
Jewish state. The PLO’s definition of ‘Palestine’ is essentially this:
‘wherever the Jews are in the Middle East.’ This emphatically cannot be
submitted -- not even in principle -- as the definition of the ancestral
“homeland of the Arab Palestinian people.” That would be absurd. Since
the PLO nevertheless says this, I conclude that the PLO does not really
believe that ‘Palestine’ exists. They are just pretending. This was our quarry, remember? I promised that I
would show you how, in the late 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization
had denied that ‘Palestine’ existed. QED. And the following observation is merely for the
pleasure of savoring an additional -- delicious -- political
absurdity. The formula that obviously determines the PLO definitions of
‘Palestine’ -- ‘wherever the Jews are in the Middle East’ -- could, in
principle, be submitted for consideration as the definition of the
homeland of the Jewish people. So one way to interpret what the PLO
says with its behavior is that, according to the PLO,
‘Palestine is the homeland of the Jewish people.’ This takes the cake. Now, as a test of the analysis so far, we should
ask: Do we have other reasons to believe that the PLO’s logic really is,
simply, just to lay claim to whatever land the Jews are on? We do. The 1968 PLO Charter states the objectives of the
PLO as follows. Article 9 says that “armed struggle is the only way to
liberate Palestine.” That’s worth chewing on for a second, because the PLO
could have written the same thing like this: “it is required that Palestine
be liberated in the act of killing people.” Killing which people? This
is relatively obvious. Article 15 of the PLO Charter states that it is “a
national duty to repulse the Zionist imperialist invasion from the great Arab
homeland and to purge the Zionist presence from Palestine,” and article 22
declares that “the liberation of Palestine will liquidate the Zionist and
imperialist presence.”[19] In other
words, the PLO, which organization asserts that ‘Palestine’ may be
‘liberated’ only in the act of killing people, explains that its goal
is purging and liquidating -- that is to say, exterminating -- “Zionists.”
Doesn’t this agree perfectly with how the PLO, behaviorally, chooses
to define ‘Palestine’ as ‘the territory that Jews live on’? The PLO’s goal is the extermination of the Israeli
Jews, not the liberation of nonexistent Palestine. Now you understand why the PLO says ‘Palestine’ is
“an indivisible territorial unit.” It is such for the purposes of
‘liberation,’ not geographical definition. Since the PLO explains that it
will ‘liberate’ ‘Palestine’ by killing Jews, “indivisible territorial unit”
simply means that it must all be ‘liberated’: not one Jew will be left
standing. You can also appreciate now why the PLO never laid a
claim to Transjordan (included in the 1920 British definition of
‘Palestine’): because the British had forbidden Jewish settlements in
Transjordan: there were no Jews there. What’s the point of
‘liberating’ Transjordan, for the PLO, if they won’t be killing Jews in the
process? All of the absurdities, resolved. So, here’s what we’ve learned about the name
‘Palestine’: 1) In the
first instance, ‘Palestine’ was given a definition to assist the goals of a
Roman anti-Jewish genocide, when the Romans were cleansing Judea of Jews; 2) In the
second instance, ‘Palestine’ was given a re-re-definition by the
British in order to restrict Jewish immigration as part of a broader British
policy to scuttle the movement to create a state where the Jewish people
could live free of the threat of extermination; and, 3) In the
third instance, ‘Palestine’ was given two different definitions by the
leaders of the ‘Palestinian movement,’ both consistent with the following
formula: ‘Palestine’ is the land on which the Jews live, in the
Middle East, and which the Arabs will ‘liberate’ by exterminating these Jews. The nonexistence of ‘Palestine’ can certainly
explain why even the leaders of the supposed ‘Palestinian movement’ cannot
agree on its borders. But what explains the undeniable consistency in the
political logic of the various definitions of this fictitious entity,
‘Palestine’? __________________________________________________________ Who are ‘the Palestinians’? __________________________________________________________ In 1985 historian Arnold Blumberg published Zion
before Zionism:1838-1880 in order to document a period that is often
neglected in the historiography of this place, and which occurred right
before the great Zionist migrations began. His summary of the composition of
the population is as follows: “No census was
taken, but the best estimates point to a maximum of 300,000 inhabitants
living within the sanjaks of historic Palestine in 1841. The majority of the
population were Sunni Moslem. In the far north there were concentrations of
Shi’ite Moslems and Druse. Other major Druse settlements were near Haifa. In
a land which never totally loses any of its historic ties, the presence of a
small Samaritan remnant living among the Moslems at Nablus piqued the
interest of observers. They lent additional color to the religious mosaic of
the land. The four cities holy to Judaism in Palestine, Jerusalem, Hebron,
Safed, and Tiberias, had substantial native Jewish populations. Small Jewish
communities also subsisted in most of the larger towns and even in the
villages of the Galilee. At Bethlehem and Nazareth, Christian Arabs
constituted a majority of the inhabitants.”[20] It is difficult to discern in the above a
‘Palestinian people.’ If anybody insists that the place described above
really should be called ‘Palestine,’ then the ‘native Palestinians’ were all
of those people. And quite a few Jews, mind you, were represented among
the native Palestinians. Even if one wanted to claim -- though it would have
zero justification -- that the Arabs in ‘Palestine’ were the real
‘Palestinian people,’ this still would not work for reasons having to do
entirely with the Arabs themselves: some were Muslim (some Shiite, some
Sunni), some Druze, some Christian. They did not have a common identity. But the Sunni Muslims were the majority so,
in a desperate move, and likewise without justification, one might try to say
that the ‘real Palestinians’ are the “Arab Palestinian people” of which the
PLO pretends to speak, and that this means just the Sunni Muslims. Again,
this will not work for reasons having entirely to do just with the Sunni
Muslims themselves. Consider what historian Arnold Blumberg writes about
them: [Quote from
Arnold Blumberg begins here] Although such
modest commercial and political power as existed was concentrated in the
walled towns, the bulk of the Moslem population lived in the unwalled
villages and the nomadic encampments of rural Palestine. In a country having
no rain through the late spring, summer, and early fall, most of Palestine
was marginal desert. Farmers either depended upon the few fresh water springs
or rivulets which flowed all year, or dug deep wells free of the infiltration
of brine. The village
peasants were usually tenants, subsisting on a share-crop basis by contract
with great effendi landlords. The effendis, living in town houses within the
walled cities, had only a casual contact with their tenants, entrusting
day-to-day negotiations to resident stewards. Huddled on
hilltops for security, peasant villages maintained farms on terraced lower
slopes and in the valleys only by means of irrigation. The hardest working
Arab peasant, however, knew that the fruits of his labor might be torn from
him in an instant. Across all the land roved scattered bands of Bedouin
tribes. Each band moved independently with its sheep, goats, horses, and
camels, but stayed within an enlarged territorial range shared with a clan
descended from a common ancestor. To the Bedouin,
the Turkish sultan and his pashas were distant shadows having little
relevance to life. The Bedouin viewed the world from the perspective of the
friendships and enmities of his clan. Ancient blood feuds, whose origins
could be traced through centuries, were freshly etched on the communal memory
and made endemic warfare part of nomadic life. Complex clan loyalties existed
within an even larger matrix of blood loyalties, since almost the entire
native Arab Moslem population, whether nomadic Bedouin or settled villagers,
remembered that they were Yeminis or Kais. The Yeminis
recalled that their ancestors had been warriors from the southern Arabian
peninsula. The Kais, whose residence in Palestine was dated to the Moslem
conquest of the land in the seventh century, traced their roots to tribes
having hoary blood feuds with the Yeminis. Thus, for example, the
great clan of Abu Gosh, whose village dominated the mountain heights through
which ran the trail from Jaffa to Jerusalem, had to be paid handsomely to
permit pilgrims to make the ascent. As Abu Gosh was Yemini, however,
adherents of the Kais could not even pay for transit across their
lands, but had to make long detours. The
Bedouin...resented any peasant villager who attempted to fence a water
source. Their response was to destroy such walls and to seize any foodstuffs
hoarded by villagers in defiance of the Bedouin’s claim to free movement
across the land. Peasants, huddled on their hilltops, rarely had the will or
the military skill to defend themselves. A peasant, if
he was to survive Bedouin depradations and the claims of hostile villagers,
subsisted within a network of alliances, contracts and traditions governing
the rights of farmers and shepherds to share the same water and land. Thus, groves
of citrus fruit and olives might subsist if the farmer was willing to buy
their survival and to defend them by watchful guards. The Bedouin had long
since destroyed the native forests which had once covered the land. The
hillsides, eroded to bedrock and deprived of top soil, were mute witnesses to
a land subjected to man’s rapine. What the
Bedouin did not take by force or by threat, Turkish soldiery took in the name
of naked extortion. Far worse than the regular Turkish troops, who were at
least under some discipline, were the bashi-bazouk or howari irregular
troops. These Arab conscripts, though springing from peasant villages
themselves, had no scruples about seizing the poultry, cattle, or farm
produce of a village belonging to strangers to whom they were unrelated by
ties of blood or alliance.[21] [Quote from
Arnold Blumberg ends here] I cannot perceive in the above that the Sunni Muslim
majority in ‘Palestine’ in the mid-19th century had a common identity in the
least. Nathan Weinstock’s imagined “national consciousness” does not exist
here. The place was divided by complexly cross-cutting tribal, clan, and
lineage identities, constant warfare between nomads and peasants, extortion
by roving irregular and regular mercenaries, and considerable oppression by
the landowning class against the peasants. The most stable identities appear
to have been Yeminis and Kais, and these did not bind the Sunni
Muslims in ‘Palestine’ but divided (still divide?) them into a
stable political enmity. For such a small and underpopulated place,
‘Palestine’ contained quite a few different social identities, but one
identity for which simply no evidence appears to exist in mid-19th century
‘Palestine’ is ‘Palestinian.’ As if this were not enough, the dramatic population
changes that followed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in fact weaken
still further (this is possible) the case for a ‘Palestinian identity’ as
the modern enemies of Israel defend it. I turn to this next. Arnold Blumberg explains the population changes in
Palestine after 1880: “...1880...is
the last year before the great Jewish immigration began. ...The Turks had
begun the systematic colonization of non-Palestinian Moslems, notably
Circassians and Algerians, in 1878. After 1880, the forces of nascent Jewish
nationalism, foreign Moslem colonization sponsored by the Turks, and
spontaneous Arab immigration prompted by the new prosperity of Palestine
changed the demographic face of the land.”[22] So, an area that was mostly depopulated, with barely
300,000 inhabitants in the year 1841, now received a huge influx of
population. This was not, as many think, a Jewish influx. It was partly
a Jewish influx, yes, but it was also a Muslim influx, as we see above. The
two main causes of the Muslim influx, the Ottoman Turkish policy of “foreign
Moslem colonization,” as well as the reasons behind the “spontaneous Arab
immigration,” are quite interesting for us. First, the policy of the Ottoman Turks to flood
Palestine with non-Palestinian Muslims had a point: defeating Zionism
demographically. Historian Bat Ye’or explains: “Millions of
Muhagir (émigrés), Muslims fleeing the new Christian states in the Balkans
after defeats in the 19th century, abandoned the former Ottoman provinces of
Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Bosnia-Herzegovinia, Thessalia, Epirus,
and Macedonia. The sultan resorted to the traditional policy of Islamic
colonization and, determined to counter the Zionist movement, settled the
refugees in Judea, Galilee, Samaria and Transjordan. These were the same
Muslims who had combated the rights, emancipation, and independence of
Christian dhimmis (semi-slaves of the Muslims) in Europe [for an
explanation of dhimmis, see Part 1 --
FGW]. The sultan had sent some of them to Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon, and
Palestine where they were given collective land grants under favorable conditions
according to the principles of Islamic colonization imposed on [non-Muslim]
natives ever since the beginning of the Arab conquest. Circassian tribes
fleeing the Russian advance in the Caucasus were sent into the Levant at the
same time; most of them were settled around Armenian villages in Mesopotamia
where they soon began to massacre the local people. Other Circassian
colonists settled in historic Palestine -- today’s Israel, Cisjordan [West
Bank] and Jordan -- establishing villages in Judea, and near Jerusalem such
as Abou Gosh, or in Kuneitra on the Golan. Today their descendents
intermarry. In Jordan they make up the king’s guard.”[23] So, the Turkish Sultan resettled vast numbers of
Muslims in Palestine. He resettled them in other places too but it is
interesting that resettlement in Palestine was important to him as he was
“determined to counter the Zionist movement.” Officially, the Sultan was
charging handsomely for cooperating very weakly with some Jewish resettlement
schemes, and you may compare this to the British policy, which also combined
very heavy underhanded sabotage with a public face of supposed official
support. Let us now turn to the “spontaneous Arab
immigration” into Palestine. It may have been “spontaneous” in the sense that
it was not part of the Turkish Sultan’s deliberately anti-Zionist policy to
resettle foreign Muslims in ‘Palestine,’ but there was nothing random about
it: the Jews attracted them. As Blumberg states, this immigration was “prompted
by the new prosperity of Palestine,” which prosperity was a gift on the land
brought by the Zionist Jews. Historian Nathan Weinstock explains the effect that
the Zionist Jews had on the land: “[B]eyond all
question, the Jewish pioneers did drain the marshes, did reclaim unproductive
soil and afforest the hills, and did make them green again through the
judicious use of advanced techniques based on rational and intensive
irrigation.”[24] This assessment is mainstream but it is significant
to see that even an anti-Zionist historian cannot but admit that the Zionist
Jews lovingly transformed “a land subjected to man’s rapine” into something
closer to the Biblical “land flowing with milk and honey.” In A History of Israel, historian Howard
Sachar notes that the British Peel Commission, which was established to study
a partition plan for ‘Palestine’ in 1937 (following the ‘Arab Revolt’ of
1936), produced a proposal that… “...filled 404
pages, contained elaborate maps and statistical indices, and ranked as one of
the major documents of British foreign policy. First summarizing the views
expressed by Arabs and Jews, the report then detailed the accomplishments of
the Jewish National Home, not the least of which was an economy vigorous
enough to have stimulated a 50 percent growth of the Arab population since
1921. There was no question that Arabs, fellahin and landlords alike, were
enjoying unprecedented affluence in Palestine. The Arab charge that Jews had
obtained too large a proportion of the best soil could not be substantiated,
for much of the citrus land originally had been sand or swamp...”[25] Even the British -- who had been the ones fomenting
anti-Jewish Arab mob violence in order to derail the Zionist project, in
addition to reducing the size of ‘Palestine’ and reducing drastically the
allowed rate of immigration, later also turning back ships full of Jewish
refugees escaping Hitler’s massacres -- could not but admit in the Peel
Commission document that the Zionists were transforming the land for the
better. This Jewish-propelled prosperity caused so many Arabs to immigrate to
‘Palestine’ that there was, as Howard Sachar observes, “a 50 percent growth
of the Arab population” just between the years of 1921 and 1937! The Jews were producing jobs in ‘Palestine,’
and this attracted many Arab immigrants. It is not redundant to repeat it.
(By the way, quite a few demographic analyses of British Mandate Palestine
grossly underestimate the extent of Arab immigration because they --
irrationally -- refuse to even consider the massive illegal immigration
of Arabs that was going on.[25a]) You may recall that, about the period covering the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, historian Nathan Weinstock stated that “a
good case can be made... that, even then, there existed a specific
Palestinian [Arab] identity.” And yet historian Nathan Weinstock did not have
the courage to present this case. Perhaps it is now obvious why. Where is the
“Palestinian [Arab] identity”? I cannot find it. What I see is a population
of Muslims, some Arab, some not, who immigrated into this territory in the
last century at the same time that many Jews also immigrated. The Jewish and
Arab immigrants completely altered this place because it had been basically
empty in 1841, before Zionism and the opposing Turkish policy of resettling
Muslims in Palestine began in tandem. In ‘Palestine,’ essentially, everybody
is an immigrant. So from the point of view of where people come from, this
country belongs to the immigrants -- Muslim (Arab or not) and Jewish --
who began overwhelming the natives starting in 1878, when the Turkish Sultan
began his policy of resettling non-Palestinian Muslims in 'Palestine',
shortly in advance of the Zionist migrations, which began in 1880. But if other arguments relevant to ownership are put
forward, the Jewish immigrants have a better claim to ‘Palestine.’ After all,
it was the Zionist Jewish immigrants who lovingly improved what was a
ravaged and abandoned land, making it flourish with their hard work because
they loved it; and it was the Zionist Jews who called themselves
‘Palestinians’ and who accepted a legal UN vote in 1947 that would partition
‘Palestine’ to create, side by side, a Jewish and an Arab state. The Arabs by
contrast hotly denied that they wanted an Arab state precisely on the
territory where (thanks to US threats
against Israel) they will now
apparently get one, and moreover denied that ‘Palestine’ even existed;
following the 1947 vote at the UN, the Arabs launched the War of 1948, an
attempted extermination of the Israeli Jews (launched without any shame for
the fact that the European Holocaust had just ended, not three years earlier[14]). This War of 1948 was won by the Israeli Jews, who in
consequence ended up paying with the blood of their young sons and daughters
in arms, and with the blood of many civilians whom the Arabs attacked (as the
Arab offensive was terrorist[26]), for the
right to establish their country. One consequence of this conflict was that
many of the immigrant Arab and other Muslim families that had resettled in
‘Palestine’ as part of the Turkish Sultan’s policy of opposing Zionism, or
because they had been attracted by the economic boom created by the Zionists,
ended up displaced from the brand new homes they had only very recently established
in ‘Palestine.’ This is often referred to as the ‘Palestinian refugee
problem,’ by way of trying to suggest that the immigrants who lost their
brand new homes were ‘ancestral Palestinians’ -- but they weren’t.
Anti-Zionists have represented Israel’s War of
Independence differently. According to them, this war was only one episode in
a wrongful dispossession of the allegedly ancestral ‘Palestinian Arabs’ by
the Zionist Jews. And this brings us to the next question: Do the Arabs who
claim a grievance against the Israeli Jews -- however we may choose to call
these Arabs -- have a case? Were they in any way unjustly dispossessed of
their lands? The next piece in this series will examine these issues.
The next piece in
this series is:
__________________________________________________________ Footnotes and Further Reading [1] “...the
Palestinian anti-colonialist movement was deformed by racism. The distorted national
struggle expressed itself in anti-Jewish slogans (‘Palestine is our country
and the Jews are our dogs’), followed up by attacks upon Jewish passers-by
and store-owners, and eventually in mob violence akin to the all-too familiar
pogrom [ = unprovoked racist attack against unarmed Jews, with the
semi-unofficial assistance of the (in this case British) authorities]. These
attacks cannot, however, in any way be assimilated to straightforward
anti-Semitic outrages which had their source in classical European
coordinates of the Jewish problem, but should be seen as a deformed
expression of national consciousness, all the more understandable as the
Zionist leaders clearly allied with the British while the latter encouraged
this distraction from the anti-imperialist struggle.” SOURCE: Weinstock, N. 1979. Zionism: False
Messiah. London: Ink Links Ltd. (pp.166-167) [my emphasis] [2] The following
account of the 1920 anti-Jewish racist riots in Jerusalem is from Kenneth
Levin, who quotes at length from eyewitness John Patterson:
SOURCE: Levin, K. 2005. The Oslo syndrome:
Delusions of a people under siege. Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus.
(pp.203-204) [3] “...the
Palestinian anti-colonialist movement was deformed by racism. The distorted
national struggle expressed itself in anti-Jewish slogans (‘Palestine is our
country and the Jews are our dogs’), followed up by attacks upon Jewish
passers-by and store-owners, and eventually in mob violence akin to the
all-too familiar pogrom [ = unprovoked racist attack against unarmed Jews,
with the semi-unofficial assistance of the (in this case British)
authorities[1a]]. These attacks cannot, however, in any way be assimilated to
straightforward anti-Semitic outrages which had their source in classical
European coordinates of the Jewish problem, but should be seen as a deformed
expression of national consciousness, all the more understandable as the
Zionist leaders clearly allied with the British while the latter encouraged
this distraction from the anti-imperialist struggle.” SOURCE: Weinstock, N. 1979. Zionism: False
Messiah. London: Ink Links Ltd. (pp.166-167) [3a] Weinstock, N.
1979. Zionism: False Messiah. London: Ink Links Ltd. (p.108) [4] Zionism: False
Messiah. (p.51) [4a] “...the Arab
historian Philip Hitti testified in 1946 before the Anglo-American Committee
of Inquiry that ‘There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely
not.’ Earlier, in 1937, a local Arab leader appearing before the Peel
Commission similarly declared, ‘There is no such thing [as Palestine].
‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented.’ ...During the [illegal]
Jordanian occupation of the West Bank and the Egyptian occupation of Gaza,
the [so-called] Palestinian Arabs had [likewise] not claimed a distinct
peoplehood or sued for self-determination.” SOURCE: Levin, K. 2005. The Oslo syndrome:
Delusions of a people under siege. Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus. (p.288) [5] To learn more
about the Roman Final Solution against the Jews in the first and second
centuries, why it happened, and why you never heard about it, read chapter
one of The Crux of World History: Vol. 1. The Book of Genesis: The Birth of
the Jewish People (2005, Francisco Gil-White), entitled:
[6] Carroll, J. 2001.
Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
(p.90) [7] Wolfe, R.
2003. The origins of the messianic ideal. New York: J-Rep. (PP.58-59) [8] Robert Wolfe puts
the Jews at 10% of the Roman Empire. This, of course, is a relatively
uncertain estimate. The lowest estimate I have seen is William Horbury’s at
8-9%. Some estimates say higher than 10%. Wolfe, R.
2003. The origins of the messianic ideal. New York: J-Rep. (p.59) Horbury, W.
1991. "The Jewish dimension," in Early Christianity: Origins and
evolution to AD 600. In honor of WHC Frend. Edited by I. Hazlett. London:
SPCK. (p.40) Concerning the rapidly growing size of the Jewish
population, consider the following, from historian of Judaism Shaye Cohen: “Many
gentiles, both men and women, converted to Judaism during the last centuries
bce and the first two centuries ce. Even more numerous, however, were those
gentiles who accepted certain aspects of Judaism but did not convert to it.
In polytheistic fashion they added the God of Israel to their pantheon and
did not deny the pagan gods. Throughout the Roman empire various practices of
Judaism found favor with large segments of the populace. In Rome many gentiles
observed the Sabbath, the fasts, and the food laws; in Alexandria many
gentiles observed the Jewish holidays; in Asia Minor many gentiles attended
synagogue on the Sabbath… The phenomenon of [the so-called] ‘God-fearers’
implies… [that a]ncient Judaism was visible and open to outsiders. Gentiles
were able to enter synagogues and witness the Jewish observances. Josephus
insists that Judaism has no mysteries, no secrets that it keeps hidden from
curious observers (Against Apion 2.8, & 107). This claim is not
entirely true, but it is essentially correct.” SOURCE: Cohen,
S. J. D. 1987. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. Philadelphia: The
Westminster Press. (pp.55-56) The Jews were extremely popular with the
pagan masses of the first century, when Christianity began spreading like
wildfire by selling itself as an improved form of Judaism. To learn more
about why Judaism was so popular, read chapter one of The Crux of World
History: Vol. 1. The Book of Genesis: The Birth of the Jewish People
(2005, Francisco Gil-White), entitled:
[9] Johnson, P.
1987. A History of the Jews. New York: Harper & Row. (pp.142-143) [10] “. . .the
Philistines came from Caphtor (possibly Crete). They are mentioned in
Egyptian records as one of the Sea Peoples that invaded Egypt in about 1190
BC after ravaging Anatolia, Cyprus, and Syria. After being repulsed by the
Egyptians, they occupied the coastal plain of Palestine from Joppa (modern
Tel Aviv–Yafo) southward to the Gaza Strip. The area contained the five cities
(the Pentapolis) of the Philistine confederacy (Gaza, Ashkelon [Ascalon],
Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron) and was known as Philistia, or the Land of the
Philistines. It was from this designation that the whole of the country was
later called Palestine by the Greeks.” SOURCE: "Philistine." Encyclopædia
Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Online. [10a] To see a map
of the remarkably small territory of the Philistines, visit: [10b] Historian of
the Greek Ptolemaic empire in Egypt, Günther Hölbl, writes as follows:
SOURCE: Hölbl, G. 2001. A history of the
Ptolemaic Empire. New York: Routledge. (p.23) [11] “Where did
the name Palestine come from?”; Early History, Palestine Origin; Palestine
Facts. [12] British
Mandate of Palestine | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [12a] “How did the
Arab territory of Transjordan come into being?”; British Mandate Transjordan;
Palestine Facts. [13] Rapoport, L.
1999. Shake heaven and earth: Peter Bergson and the struggle to rescue the
Jews of Europe. Jerusalem and New York: Gefen. (p.192) [14] Azzam Pasha,
Secretary General of the Arab League: “This will be a war of extermination
and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres
and the Crusades.” SOURCE: Source: Howard M Sachar, A History of
Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, (New York: Knopf, 1979), p.
333 [15] Levin, K.
2005. The Oslo syndrome: Delusions of a people under siege. Hanover,
NH: Smith and Kraus. (p.288) [17] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/plocov.asp [17a] To see that the
extermination of the Israeli Jews was a point of Arab pride, visit:
[17b] Israel has,
more than once, returned territories that her Arab neighbors lost during
attempted exterminations of the Israeli Jews. The 1967 war would have been
another case in point because the Israelis offered the West Bank and Gaza
back in exchange only for a promise of future peace, but the Arabs refused
to give even this, so the Israelis, who had not asked for a war of
extermination against them, ended up in control of the West Bank and Gaza.
[18] The
Jordanian/Egyptian occupation of the West Bank and Gaza territories was
illegal because the UN had designated these territories in 1947 for the
creation of a ‘Palestinian Arab state’ in a vote that passed legally at the
UN but that the Arabs, who preferred to attempt an extermination of the
Israeli Jews than create a ‘Palestinian Arab state,’ rejected. In 1964, as
we've seen in the main text, the PLO would further correct the UN by
explaining in its founding charter that these territories originally slated
for a ‘Palestinian Arab state’ were not Palestinian. Below is the map of the 1947 UN partition.
( click to enlarge ) [18a] The Jews had
a right to settle in the West Bank and Gaza because these territories were
included even in the British-reduced definition of 'Palestine' of 1922. The
Jewish families that had settled there before 1948 were killed or had to flee
when the Jordanians and Egyptians occupied these territories in the War of
1948. [18b] After the
Six-Day War, the US put pressure on Israel to relinquish the territory
gained, even though it knew it was indispensable to Israeli defense; from
"IS THE US AN ALLY OF ISRAEL? A Chronological Look at the
Evidence"; Historical and Investigative Research; by Francisco
Gil-White. [19] Translation:
The Associated Press, December 15, 1998, Tuesday, AM cycle, International
News, 1070 words, Clinton meets with Netanyahu, Arafat, appeals for progress,
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent, EREZ CROSSING, Gaza Strip.
[Emphasis added]
[20] Blumberg, A. 1985.
Zion before Zionism 1838-1880. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press. (p.19)) [21] Zion before
Zionism (pp.23-24) [22] Zion before
Zionism (p.x) [23] SOURCE: Bat
Ye'or (2002) Jews and Christians under Islam: Dhimmitude and Marcionism.
Published in French as Juifs et chrétiens sous l’islam, Dhimmitude et
marcionisme [Commentaire, N°97, Printemps 2002] [24] Weinstock, N.
1979. Zionism: False Messiah. London: Ink Links Ltd. (p.142) [25] Sachar,
Howard Morley - A history of Israel : from the rise of Zionism to our time /
Howard M. Sachar. 1982, c1979. (p.204) [25a] On this
question, consider the following:
This data is actually relatively useful. The authors
of the Palestine Blue Book say that "if illegal immigration cannot be
recorded, no estimate of its volume is possible." Seems a rather extreme
statement. No estimate? On the contrary, I think that the data for
caught illegal immigrants in the year 1935 can be used to motivate productive
inferences. Let us consider. Under what conditions would the
numbers of Jews and Arabs caught immigrating illegally be roughly equal?
Well, this would happen if the numbers of Arabs and Jews immigrating
illegally into 'Palestine' were roughly equal, and if the British were trying
to find illegal Arab immigrants about as hard as they were trying to find the
Jewish. Under such conditions, the Arab and Jewish numbers of people caught
would be roughly equal. As we've seen, even anti-Zionist historians concede
that the British were inciting Arab terrorist violence against the Jews, and
British officer Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson accused at the time that
the British were doing this in order to ruin the Zionist project (see footnote 2).
Patterson's hypothesis is consistent with how the British reduced the size of
Palestine to restrict the area of Jewish settlement, and also with how they
kept reducing the legal immigration quotas for Jews. What follows? That it must
have been British policy to try harder when it came to catching illegal
immigrants who were Jewish. Assuming equal numbers of Arab and Jewish illegal
immigrants, this leads to the expectation that in the sample of illegal
immigrants caught, there will be more Jews than Arabs. Now, we know that very large crowds of Jews must
have been coming into British Mandate 'Palestine' illegally because the data
referred to above is from the year 1935, which is two years after Adolf
Hitler came to power in Germany, and therefore a time when the incentive for
Jews to immigrate to 'Palestine' was strong. There was a well organized
Jewish effort called Ha'apala
(Aliya Bet) to bring Jewish immigrants to 'Palestine' illegally, and it had
begun already the year before, in 1934. So in fact we expect that there will
be many more Jews than Arabs in the sample of illegal immigrants
caught by the British authorities. Unless...the crowds of Arab illegal immigrants were
bigger still, and much bigger. Only in this case would we expect to
find, in the year 1935, and knowing what British policy was, more Arabs than
Jews in the sample of illegal immigrants who got caught. And look: We learn above that in 1935, the British
reported to the League of Nations that out of 1557 illegal immigrants caught,
just 565 (36%) were Jews! It is a safe conclusion, from these numbers, that
the crowds of Arab illegal immigrants were large indeed. So there is little
question that the Arab immigrants overwhelmed the native Arab population,
just as the immigrant Zionists overwhelmed the native Jewish population. [26] To learn
about the contrasting values of the attacking Arabs and the defending Jews in
the War of 1948, read:
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“...the Arab historian Philip Hitti
testified in 1946 before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry that ‘There
is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.’
Note to the reader: Nathan Weinstock, whom we encounter repeatedly in
this series, claims to have made an 'about face' and to have seen the error
of his earlier ways. HIR has published an article that demonstrates how
Nathan Weinstock has merely found a new, more clever way to attack the Jewish
people.
Notify me of new HIR pieces!
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