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Showing posts with label John Hope simpson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Hope simpson. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Israel's Objectives Since 1967 Run Smack Against the Arab Objectives

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                     

When the Six Day War concluded, Israel's Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, was "waiting for a telephone call from the Arab leaders."  We're still waiting these past 46 years.  "Three weeks after the conclusion of hostilities, the first major incident occurred along the Suez Canal."  "Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan were the major combatants in the Six-Day War. In addition to these, other Arab countries played smaller roles in the conflict." That meant about 5 million population of Israel was up against 79 million in Egypt, 22 million of Syria and 5 million of Jordan.

Since the Six Day War of June 1967, Israel's main objective has been:

1.  To have peace within secure borders.  Israel has known only armistice lines and cease fire line.  It has been seeking borders which will be defensible.  This means borders that will not be a temptation to an aggressor as did the pre-1967 lines.

Israel has offered to negotiate since 1967 with the Arab Governments a true peace which would also provide for secure borders.  Israel has insisted that it makes no prior conditions, and that everything will be open for discussion in the negotiations.  Of course Israel has a few positions on where the secure borders ought to be.
2. "Israel vowed not to return to the vulnerable armistice lines of 1948 and '49 or to a divided Jerusalem, and yet to be "unbelievably generous in working out peace terms," as Foreign Minister Abba Eban put it. In direct talks with Arab countries, "everything is negotiable," he said."

3. Israel was prepared to return most of the Sinai back to Egypt with positions that it must remain in control of Sharm el-Sheikh so as to prevent Egypt from closing the Gulf of Eilat for a 3rd time.  Sharm el-Sheikh must be linked territorially to Israel.  The remainder of Sinai must be demilitarized.

4. Israel didn't wish to annex a large Arab population but its position was that the River Jordan should no longer be open to crossing by Arab troops and in order to assure this there must be an Israeli foothold in the Jordan Valley.

The Arab objectives of 13 Arab states led by Nasser since 1967 have been the three Noes of Khartoum in August 1967 where the Summit Conference of Arab leaders laid down 4 principals.
1. No peace with Israel
2. No negotiations with Israel.
3. No recognition of Israel
4. Insistence on the rights of the "Palestinian people in their own country."

Nasser held out for 12 years and then signed a peace treaty with Israel.  This made the 20 member Arab League so angry that they expelled Egypt from their group.  "The Arab League was founded in Cairo in 1945 by Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria,  Transjordan, then Jordan from 1946), and Yemen, (North Yemen, later combined Yemen).  An additional 15 Arab states and 4 observers were later   admitted. They exclude Israel, so really should call it the Muslim League.  Notice the present list of 22 member states includes Palestine with Jerusalem as their capital.  

    The Palestinian people are not in their own country.  They are not native to Palestine.  Many were in the land only 2 years before the last census was taken.  Most all were recent immigrants.  Very few were old timers with ancestors there before 1860's in which they were land owners.  Before Palestine was named as such, the land was Judah and Israel, taken by the Romans and renamed after the Jewish Bar Kochba rebellion of 135 CE.

This can only be considered for the rights of Arabs since 1948 who call themselves Palestinians in denial of the nearby lands they migrated from. They have become the 1.6 million Arab citizens of Israel.   In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Arabs were wandering in search of subsistence all over the Middle East.  Palestine had become a wasteland of which the remaining Jews had refused to leave.  Arabs there thought of themselves as Ottomans or Turks, or Southern Syrians, or just the Arab people but never once said they were Palestinians.  One thing though, they were full of religious prejudice and would  turn to anti-Jewish violence often, especially at the call of their Muslim leadership long before Israel's 1948 birth.

The land was designated to be the "Jewish National Home" and Britain held the Mandate which meant they had the responsibility to see that this came about back at the end of WWI in 1917.  Instead, the British treated the land as "Arab Land."  They brutally restricted Jewish immigration while Arab immigration was freely permitted which came to be known as the British "system" of immigration.  To appease Arab "discontent," the British violated the international League of Nations Mandate because they facilitated Arab settlement onto Jewish-settled land, and by treating Jews only on sufferance in their own Jewish National Home.  They didn't take any measure of Arab in-migrants and immigrants because the prevalent erroneous assumption was and still is that those Arab migrants had always been there.  Omitting such information facilitated the myth of today.

This came about with the 1939 White Paper restrictions from Britain when Hitler was carrying on a war against Jews.  This White Paper became a death warrant.  The White Paper remained a policy of Great Britain until Israel's birth on May 14, 1948.  England's War Cabinet had declared, in March 1942, that the British would continue to take all practicable steps to discourage illegal immigration into Palestine.  The Struma was sinking and the Grand Mufti declared a holy war against Britain and was demanding that Hitler, Ribbentrop, and the Bulgarian, Hungarian and Rumanian governments keep their promise of the destruction of the so-called Jewish National Home which was an immutable part of the policy of the greater German Reich.  The Nazi allies must do all that is necessary to prohibit the emigration of Jews to Palestine by sending them to the extermination camps in Poland.  So the British went along with these demands with their stopping Jewish immigration and encouraging Arab immigration instead.

They allowed Arabs to swarm into the Jewish settled areas of Western Palestine and take the places that Palestinian Jews were clearing for Jewish refugees, and then charged the Jews with displacing Arab natives in the Jewish-settled areas of Western Palestine.  The Arab found benefits they had never known before and shouldn't be able to claim to have been victims.  John Hope Simpson (1868-1961 British politician serving in Parliament, retired in 1916)  acknowledged in 1930 that the Arab demand for justice was seen instead to be injustice.  He recommended limiting Jewish immigration which went against the Mandate.on October 21, 1930 because there wasn't any agricultural lands for them to work.  This is when the Passfield White Paper was issued.  It was also the same time the Nazis were warming up to their intentions to rid themselves of Jews.

Arab traditional movement was the same migration equal to the situational migration of the Germans, Russians, Czech, Hungarians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghan and Lebanese refugees fleeing to become immigrants elsewhere, escaping from persecution, dictatorship or certain death, only they moved into Palestine's Jewish areas looking for work.  They were not the settled inhabitants for millennia.  They were simply shifting to where they thought their brethren were better treated.  They found life much better in the UNWRA camp setting than for the landless impoverished laborers anywhere in the Arab world.  With the Jews they had found better wages and improved living conditions but that wasn't as strong a motivator as the Arab leaders direction not to stay in 1948.  They obeyed leadership and fled with the instigating promise of taking the Jewish homes after their armies won, for the Arab armies didn't want to kill anyone but Jews.  

Resource:  From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hope_Simpson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_on_Immigration,_Land_Settlement_and_Development,_Cmd._3686
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/hope.html
http://www.sixdaywar.org/content/khartoum.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_Arab_League


Friday, June 29, 2012

How Jews Acquired Land in Palestine

Nadene Goldfoot
World War I started in July 1914.  At this time the Arab leaders of the Ottoman Empire  joined hands with the Germans against the English, Americans and Western Europeans.  Part of the land in Palestine, which was part of the Ottoman Empire, was owned by Arabs living in Cairo, Damascus, Beirut and even in France.  There was really nothing to attract them to this malaria infested swamp and desert.  Of the sparse migrant population living there, 80% were deb-ridden peasants, semi-nomads and Bedouin Arabs.

Many Jews returned to their land to join Jewish towns and cities and start new ones in droves in the 1880's and avoided buying land in places where Arabs might be displaced.  Many were interested in agriculture as this was something that they had been denied living in Russia's Pale of Settlement.  They bought land that was uncultivated, swampy, cheap and without anyone living on it.  From 1880 to 1948, 73% of Jewish plots were bought from large landowners, not poor fellahin.   People who sold land to Jews included the mayors of Gaza, Jerusalem and Jaffa.  As'ad el-Shuqeiri, a Muslim religious scholar and father of PLO chairman Ahmed Shuqeiri, took Jewish money for his land.  King Abdullah leased land to the Jews.  Many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, like members of the Muslim supreme Council, sold land to Jews.  In those days, they were just trying to make a living.      

In 1920, David Ben-Gurion, then a Labor Zionist, said he was "concerned about the Arab fellahin, who he felt was the most important asset of te native population."  He said that under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellas or worked by them.  He even advocated helping to liberate them from their oppressors.  Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price, he advocated."  


Jews bought all of the available empty unwanted land.  Then they had no other choice but to buy cultivated land.  They found Arabs willing to sell because of migrating to coastal towns and because they needed money to invest in the citrus industry.

John Hope Simpson, liberal Parliament member,  came to Palestine in May 1930 and saw that Jews had paid very high prices for the land and also paid people living on the land a lot a money which they were legally not bound to pay.  So in fact they had overpaid to people not holding title to the land.  He authored the Hope Simpson Report in 1930, following the widespread 1929 Palestine riots.  Arabs had slaughtered 133 Jews, and the British security forces wound up killing about 116 Arabs to stop them  Many on both sides were injured.  

Lewis French, the British Director of Development for Palestine, conducted a survey in 1931 of landlessness and finally offered new plots to Arab who had been dispossessed.  3,000 applicants were received by the British, of which 80% were found to be invalid because they were not filed by landless Arabs.  It was a racket.  They found only about 600 landless Arabs, of which 100 accepted the Government land offer.  

Now the German affect on Arab's attitude towards Jews was really taking effect and by April 1936, Arabs were attacking Jews.  They were instigated by Fawzi al Qawukji, a Syrian guerrilla who was close to the Mufti of Jerusalem.  The British sent out a new commission led by Lord Peel to investigate in November.  89 Jews had been killed and more than 300 wounded.  The Peel Commission found that the Arab complaints were baseless.

Original land owners who had remained on the land and had sold it  had been without resources or training needed to develop the land.  They saw a good deal and sold it.    Land now turned into orange groves was uncultivated swamp and sand dunes when it was bought by the Jews, but they were prepared to deal with it.  They also found that the Arab population had increased, making available land scarce for anyone to buy.

1938 was the height of the Arab revolt and Arabs were attacking Arabs and Jews.  The British High Commissioner to Palestine believed the Arab landowners were complaining about sales to Jews just to jack up the prices.  However, there were Arab landowners who had been terrorized by their own people and decided to leave and sell their property to the Jews.

In  1944 Jews paid between $1,000 and $1,100 per acre in Palestine for arid or semi-arid land.  That same year, rich black soil in Iowa was selling for about $110 per acre.  It was exorbitant and the Jews had been taken, but to them it was worth it.

Come 1947 and Jews owned about 463,000 acres in Palestine.  About 45,000 of these acres were acquired from the Mandatory Government.  30,000 were bought from the many churches and 387,500 were bought from Arabs.

King Abdullah of Transjordan had written in his memoirs that "Arabs are as prodigal (reckless, extravagant) in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping."  He was assassinated in 1951 at age 69.


Resource:  Myths and Facts:  a concise record of the Arab-Israeli conflict by Mitchell G. Bard and Joel Himelfarb
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hope_Simpson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Palestine_riots
http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_hope_simpson.php
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/ben_gurion.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_I_of_Jordan