Nadene Goldfoot
Jews began immigrating (making aliyah) to Palestine in large numbers in 1882. At the time fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there. Mark Twain visited earlier and saw very few.
WWI was fought from July 28, 1914 to November 11, 1918 and Woodrow Wilson and others said they had fought to make the world safe for democracy. They had a Paris Peace Conference and later, in the League of Nations, France and England were given mandated powers over the region held by the Ottoman Empire to prepare it for self-government of the Middle East.
At the beginning of the war, part of Palestine's land was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut. Almost 80% of the Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads and Bedouins. It was proposed that since the natives of the Fertile Crescent were not yet prepared to govern themselves, Britain and France would be given these mandatory powers over the region in order to get it ready for self-government.
We can see that today, Palestine is dependent on donations from their neighboring Arab states. They cannot pay their electric bills to Israel. They have no economy. All their resources and talents have gone into bomb-making.
So back at the end of WWI, Jews did not care to purchase land in areas where Arabs might be displaced. They bought land that was uncultivated, swampy, cheap and without tenants.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was written by Lord Balfour agreeing to a Jewish Homeland. What he promised was eventually reduced to 20% of the original piece which the Jews accepted. Palestinians did not.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement of September 1919 involved Britain and France. It concerned "Palestine" which had been held by the loser, the Ottoman Empire which was Turkey. The problem was settled in the San Remo Conference on April 24, 1920 when Britain was given the mandate over Palestine. They implemented the Balfour Declaration declaring a Jewish Homeland.
Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace conference, they said, "We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at anytime. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds."
In 1920, Labor Zionist lead David Ben-Gurion was concerned about the Arab fellahin, someone he thought was the most important asset of the native population. He said that under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to them or worked by them. He wanted to liberate them from their oppressors. "Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement," he added, "should we offer to buy his land at an appropriate price." David became the first Prime Minister and Defense Minister.
Arabs wanted to sell to the Jews because of the migration to coastal towns and because they needed money to invest in the citrus industry. By 1944, Jews paid from $1,000 and $1,100 per acre in Palestine or arid or semi-arid land when in Iowa land was selling for $110 per acre. Transjordan's King Abdullah wrote that Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping. Jewish holdings in Palestine amounted to about 463,000 acres. About 45,000 of these were from the mandatory government; 30,000 were bought from churches and 387,500 were bought from Arabs. Many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including the Muslim Supreme Council, sold land to Jews. Arabs entered the land from neighboring lands in the past 90 years in order to find work. When the Jews came, they followed.
Eighty-five years later, in a 2002 interview with The New Statesman, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed "A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past. .. ..The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis – again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one.
It is now, today, that Arabs call Jews "transplants" among other ugly adjectives. They didn't think of nationalism and state-building until 1967 when they lost a mass attack against Israel and they lost face as well as land. They forget that the land has always had Jews in it living among the Arab villages. Not everyone was taken away as slaves, transplanted by rulers or were driven out by 70 CE. . A remnant of our past remained for a reminder. We cannot forget Jerusalem because of giving our word to the one G-d that we wouldn't. Though international law clinches when we regained our land again, our religious law had us take the land with instructions from Moses as to just how much and where and why.
International lawyer Prof. Eugene Kontorovich on youtube below explains how law gave the Jews land legally if you missed my write-up on blog previoiusly. .
Reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2x5UvjUs4 Internation Law
Textbook: Middle East Past & Preseent by Yahya Armajani and Thomas M. Ricks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
Book: Myths and Facts: a concise record of the Arab-Israeli conflict by Mitchell G. Bard and Joel Himelfarb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/ben_gurion.html
"The Legal Case for Israel Video by Professor Eugene Kontorovich-words copied from youtube.
Jews began immigrating (making aliyah) to Palestine in large numbers in 1882. At the time fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there. Mark Twain visited earlier and saw very few.
WWI was fought from July 28, 1914 to November 11, 1918 and Woodrow Wilson and others said they had fought to make the world safe for democracy. They had a Paris Peace Conference and later, in the League of Nations, France and England were given mandated powers over the region held by the Ottoman Empire to prepare it for self-government of the Middle East.
At the beginning of the war, part of Palestine's land was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut. Almost 80% of the Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads and Bedouins. It was proposed that since the natives of the Fertile Crescent were not yet prepared to govern themselves, Britain and France would be given these mandatory powers over the region in order to get it ready for self-government.
We can see that today, Palestine is dependent on donations from their neighboring Arab states. They cannot pay their electric bills to Israel. They have no economy. All their resources and talents have gone into bomb-making.
So back at the end of WWI, Jews did not care to purchase land in areas where Arabs might be displaced. They bought land that was uncultivated, swampy, cheap and without tenants.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was written by Lord Balfour agreeing to a Jewish Homeland. What he promised was eventually reduced to 20% of the original piece which the Jews accepted. Palestinians did not.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement of September 1919 involved Britain and France. It concerned "Palestine" which had been held by the loser, the Ottoman Empire which was Turkey. The problem was settled in the San Remo Conference on April 24, 1920 when Britain was given the mandate over Palestine. They implemented the Balfour Declaration declaring a Jewish Homeland.
Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace conference, they said, "We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at anytime. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds."
In 1920, Labor Zionist lead David Ben-Gurion was concerned about the Arab fellahin, someone he thought was the most important asset of the native population. He said that under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to them or worked by them. He wanted to liberate them from their oppressors. "Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement," he added, "should we offer to buy his land at an appropriate price." David became the first Prime Minister and Defense Minister.
Arabs wanted to sell to the Jews because of the migration to coastal towns and because they needed money to invest in the citrus industry. By 1944, Jews paid from $1,000 and $1,100 per acre in Palestine or arid or semi-arid land when in Iowa land was selling for $110 per acre. Transjordan's King Abdullah wrote that Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping. Jewish holdings in Palestine amounted to about 463,000 acres. About 45,000 of these were from the mandatory government; 30,000 were bought from churches and 387,500 were bought from Arabs. Many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including the Muslim Supreme Council, sold land to Jews. Arabs entered the land from neighboring lands in the past 90 years in order to find work. When the Jews came, they followed.
Eighty-five years later, in a 2002 interview with The New Statesman, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed "A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past. .. ..The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis – again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one.
It is now, today, that Arabs call Jews "transplants" among other ugly adjectives. They didn't think of nationalism and state-building until 1967 when they lost a mass attack against Israel and they lost face as well as land. They forget that the land has always had Jews in it living among the Arab villages. Not everyone was taken away as slaves, transplanted by rulers or were driven out by 70 CE. . A remnant of our past remained for a reminder. We cannot forget Jerusalem because of giving our word to the one G-d that we wouldn't. Though international law clinches when we regained our land again, our religious law had us take the land with instructions from Moses as to just how much and where and why.
International lawyer Prof. Eugene Kontorovich on youtube below explains how law gave the Jews land legally if you missed my write-up on blog previoiusly. .
Reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2x5UvjUs4 Internation Law
Textbook: Middle East Past & Preseent by Yahya Armajani and Thomas M. Ricks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
Book: Myths and Facts: a concise record of the Arab-Israeli conflict by Mitchell G. Bard and Joel Himelfarb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/ben_gurion.html
"The Legal Case for Israel Video by Professor Eugene Kontorovich-words copied from youtube.
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