The Law of Return to Israel: Who and When Jews Returned

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                    

Jews suffered greatly when Jerusalem was taken by the Romans in 70 CE.  They were taken to Rome or other places as slaves.  Some managed to remain in Judah while others scattered to other parts of the Middle East.  It wasn't till May 14, 1948 that Israel was again re-created out of what the Ottoman Empire had taken of what was renamed as "Palestine."  This was because of the WWI when the Ottomans had lost the war-being they were on Germany's side

                    Israel is for the Ingathering of the Exiles

The Law of Return of 1950 gave legal sanction to all immigrant Jews. Israel was created as a haven for Jews who had suffered for 2,000 years from anti-Semitism in other countries for being what they were;  Jewish.  Judah  had been occupied by the Romans.  Jews had been blamed for killing Christ by causing him to be crucified, which was something that the Romans had done to thousands of Jews in Judah,  but Jews were blamed anyway being he had been Jewish even though they had denied causing this.   Jews had been the object of attacks by the Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, and then the Holocaust and actually were expulsed from countries or forcibly converted to Christianity.  Some communities had been annihilated even before the Holocaust.  They had not had the rights of citizens in these 2,000 years until after WWI.  In the Middle East they were treated as Dhimmis, which were not 1st class citizens.  There they were penalized in many ways for being Jewish.  The one country of safety was the USA, which had its share of anti-Semitism.
                                                                         

               Rome, parade of displaying Jewish artifacts stolen from Jerusalem

Now, what is a Jew?  There is no legal definition.  There are halachic concepts (rabinical law) and sociological ones.  By halacha, a Jew is a person born of a Jewish mother.  They can also be Jewish by conversion to Judaism.  Under 1970's amendment, the Law of Return grants Israeli nationality also to the spouse of any immigrant Jew and his descendants for 2 generations and to their spouses equally whether they were Jewish by halacha or not.
                                                                           

The population of Israel in May 1948 was 650,000.  By May 1972 it was 3,164,000.  This shows that 1,400,000 were immigrants (olim).  Immigrants entered in 4 large waves of immigration.  They have continued to arrive throughout all these years according to their own needs as well.

1.  May 1948-end of 1951:  754,800 came from :
     a. Holocaust in Europe mainly from Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia.
     b. Iraq (121,000 out of 130,000); Yemen (44,000 out of 45,000); Libya (30,500 out of 35,000).

2. 1955-1957:  165,000 came from:
     a. Morocco and Tunisia
     b. Poland and other countries such as Romania

3. 1961-1964:  215,000 came from:
    a. Eastern Europe
    b. North Africa

4. 1967-to end 1972; 200,000 on came from:
   a. North and South America
   b. Western Europe
  c. Soviet Union
                                                                     

1981:  Here I am in my Sachnoot apartment in Safed sitting on my bed-with pillows to look like a sofa in front of my barred window.  That's because we are on the ground floor.  We just moved in after living in Haifa for 10 months attending the ulpan (school).

5.  1980-2013 My husband and I made aliyah in 1980  and were in a large group of teachers of English from the Soviet Union.  We were one of the few actual professional teachers from the West and went through a 10 month program to earn our certification to teach English in Israel first.  There were over 40 in our class that was later divided into Hebrew language groups to bring us up to a level of higher ability.

19,135 olim arrived in 2011
18,691 olim arrives in 2012
Of them 2,432 were from Ethiopia.  Western Europe olim were 3,243 in 2012.  Soviet Union olim were 7,755 and France olim were 1,907.  North America had 3,512 olim in 2011 and 3,389 in 2012.  The UK had 560 in 2011 and 698 in 2012.

 The census now shows that there are 6 million Jews and 1.7 million Arabs living in Israel.  As conditions have become worse towards Jews in France and Sweden with much anti-Semitism, they have been forced to move to Israel. About 3 years after we arrived, Ethiopians were coming to Safed.
                                                                       

                                                               Ethiopian immigrant
   
6.  The Lost 10 Tribes of Israel:-taken by Assyria 721 BCE and Babylon 597-586 BCE
     a. Returning from Ethiopia
     b. Africa-Masai
    c. Asia-Myanmar(Burma), Bnei Israel from Bombay, India, Bnei Menashe of India
    d. Middle East, Mashadi of Mashad, Iran

In integrating Jews from 2 separate cultures from the East (Sephardis, Mizrachim) and from the West (Ashkenazis) ,  we find that the  half of the immigrants that came from Muslim countries in North Africa and Asia had to live in poverty and  the basic values were those of a traditional and authoritarian society similar to the Muslim country they had left.  Most had very large families.

The other half came from European and American countries where the basic values were of a modern democratic and technological society.   This caused a cultural gap which gave immigrants from the developed countries an advantage over the Jews from the Muslim countries so the administration had to be devoted to narrowing this gap.

Education has been the means to do this.  Only 13% of children in 1956 from Asia and Africa attended high school  but by 1969-1970 there were 44% attending.  At the same time, children from Europe and America had 41% attending in 1956 and this went up to 77% by 1969-1970.   By 1970, 18.5% of marriages taking place were of mixed cultural origins.  In other words, the means to even out the disparity was through marriage.  It has increased since then.  Another means is through serving in the IDF.  It has erased differences in sex and in origins.  A Jew is just a Jew today in Israel, back to the way we were before 70 CE.  No differences.

The big population centers in Israel were in the coastal regions between Tel Aviv and Haifa.  New towns and development centers have been built.  This is where many of the immigrants have settled.  They have gone to Eilat, Dimona and Arad in the Negev; Kiryat Gat, Ashkelon and Beit Shemesh in the center;  and Karmiel which is almost all American and Kiryat Sh'mona in the Galilee.  I settled in Safed which is also in the Galilee simply because it reminded me of Oregon with all the fir trees and because it was higher up.  We went where jobs were available.  Being a teacher, I found that Jerusalem, which is a highly desirous city to live in, was already full of teachers and a more expensive place to live.  Teachers were wanted in development towns.  Israel managed to send Russians to the desert and Ethiopians to Safed where it was very cold, but they had to consider where available housing was at that time of immigration.  It gave us lots to laugh about.  Russians preferred to be in Tel Aviv where culture was at the height with music and theater.  We all had our preferences.

It is important to Israel to reclaim Jews who have been found to be still practicing Jewish  beliefs after all these years of separation.  They have been studied by rabbis and even have taken dna tests for their proof.  Through one or both of these tests, they have been accepted as one of our Lost brothers' descendants.  This has been prophesied in the Torah to happen at the end of days.  It's very exciting to us to find that many are still living and claiming their proud connection to the rest of us.  To me, they have gone through much pain to continue their heritage.

Resource: Facts About Israel, Division of Information, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem
http://www.jewishvoice.org/messianic-education/messianic-vision/lost-tribes-of-israel.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/11/india-burmas-lost-menashe-tribe-of.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/12/lost-tribe-of-israel-living-in-india.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/04/10-lost-tribes-and-what-happened-to.html
http://www.jta.org/2013/01/21/news-opinion/world/israel-sees-slight-drop-in-jewish-immigration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Return

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

India-Burma's Lost Menashe Tribe of Israel Enter Israel

Nadene Goldfoot
Israel recognizes Bnei Menashe Tribesmen as one of the lost 10 Tribes.  More are due to arrive in a few weeks.  There were 12 tribes of Israel, with origins being  the sons of Jacob, his two wives and two concubines.  It was Jacob's family of 70 who descended to Egypt.  The Assyrians attacked Israel  in the 8th-7th Century BCE and took away many  of 10 of the tribes.  Most people thought they had been killed, or had assimilated amongst the other nations.  Jacob's first wife, Leah, was the mother to Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah,Issachar and Zebulun.  Rachel, his 2nd wife and sister to Leah was mother to Joseph and Benjamin.  Zilpah, handmaiden to Leah was mother to Gad and Asher.  Bilhah, handmaiden to Rachel was mother to Dan and Naphtali.   

"I Chronicles 5:26 And the God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pul king of Assyria, and the spirit of Tilgathpilneser king of Assyria, and he carried them away, even the Reubenites, and the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh, and brought them unto Halah, and Habor, and Hara, and to the river Gozan, unto this day."


The United Kingdom making up all 12 tribes of Israel was in existence starting with King Saul  from 1051 to 930 BCE.  The territory of the northern Kingdom of Israel comprised the territories of the tribes of Zebulun,  Issachar, Asher, Naphtali,  Dan,  Manasseh, Ephraim,  Reuben and Gad.

Its capital was Samaria.."  In 931 King Solomon died, leaving Rehoboam hereditary king which all the tribes refused to accept as king  except for Judah and Benjamin.  Rehoboam was a heavy tax person like his father had been.  Jeroboam, living in Egypt was sent for and  became king instead.  He's responsible for the division turning United Israel into Israel and Judah and was King of Israel, the northern kingdom, for 22 years..

In 721 BCE the Assyrians attacked Israel and the capital of Samaria, taking away captives.  They did it again in 701 BCE, this time attacking the other state of Judah.

Bnei Menashe Arrival

It seems that even with assimilation, some have managed to maintain their roots through oral history passed on down through the generations of about 2,700 years or 27 centuries since 721 BCE.  The tribe of Bnei Menashe, who have been living in north-eastern India and in Burma claims descent from the lost tribe of Menashe.They  believe that the legendary Kuki-Mizo ancestor Manmasi^[ was Menasseh, son of Joseph.  We know that Joseph was the father to Manasseh and Ephraim.  They found their roots and have been practicing Judaism for only the past 27 years.

By 2005 Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar ruled that the tribe had Jewish roots but must go through conversion to be eligible to immigrate under the Law of Return.  Our Jewish recognition is through the mother, not the father, so this was important as the tribal roots were of the father's line.  Though they had this connection, the mothers of today were not Jewish.

In 2006 some of the tribe entered Israel.  Five years went by and now the government of Israel has approved of continued immigration for them.  274 new immigrants will arrive in a few weeks.  Israel already has about 1,700 Bnei Menashe members living mostly in Judea-Samaria towns and in Kiryat Arba.  There are still about 7,000 to 9,000 tribesmen in India and Burma.

In 2007 the government policy changed by requiring mass immigration and conversions to be approved by cabinet decision, not just the Interior Ministry.  MK Meir Sheetrit of the Kadima Party and Interior Minister in 2007 was against renewed immigration for fear that it will endanger the Jewish identity of the state.  The thought is allowing people to come who will vote a certain way in elections.  (Isn't that a thought also in the USA?)

Another Kadima Party member, MK Otniel Schneller said that this is mainly about family reunification for people already here.  Shavei Israel, an NGO liaison between Israel and Bnei Menashe funds and manages renewed immigration.

Flights of the last remnants of the Jewish community of Falash Mura immigrants from Ethiopia has been renewed last week.  They will soon be arriving.  This is indeed a time of the Jewish people's ingathering again in Israel that has been prophesied.  They are not one of the lost 10 tribes but claim descent from King Solomon through the Queen of Sheba.

Resource: http://www.timesofisrael.com/bnei-menashe-immigration-to-resume-after-five-years/
http://www.bneimenashe.com/
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2011/06/manassah-one-of-10-lost-tribes-found.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1EeoXYdihs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Israel_(Samaria)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_Siege_of_Jerusalem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Lost_Tribes

The British 1939 Double Cross

Nadene Goldfoot
Even Churchill had second thoughts on what Britain had done with their mandate in Palestine, though he had helped to draw up the Churchill White Paper of 1922 hindering the Jews in achieving their national home.

   The British  were given the charge to help bring about the Jewish National Home and managed to double cross Chaim Weizmann and the Zionists by reducing the agreed upon allotted land and gave 75% of it to the Arabs instead. The idea that the White Paper tried to induce, that Jews were to be "illegals" in their "Home" was never universally accepted.  This had been about the  White Paper coming down on the Jews' heads keeping them out of the land.  In 1936, Protestant and Catholic leaders in New York said that the British government must uphold its covenanted pledges to the Jewish people and to the world...that the British rescind its illegal, unjust and indefensible partition of Palestine to restore Transjordania to its proper place as part of the Palestine territory and throw it open to Jewish settlement.   Britain disregarded their announcement.  


"I should feel personally embarrassed,"  Churchill said, "in the most acute manner if I lent myself, by silence or inaction, to what I must regard as an act of repudiation."  The breach, he explained, was the 1939 White Paper (McDonald's) declaration drawn up by Britain after the agreement they accepted of taking on the responsibility of the mandate to help bring about the Jewish National Homeland.  

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the USA, questioned the legality of the White Paper's policy, but the State Department supported it.  Later, the State Department acted the same way with Truman.  There was a clique of secret John Foster Dulles supporters inside the administration and were paying more attention to the British views than Truman's.  James  Forrestal, a manic, ambitious and very right-wing investment banker called the "boy wonder" of Wall Street with reservations about Palestine,  lunched with Loy Henderson, his ally and was told about the views of Ernest Bevin, the notoriously anti-Semitic British foreign secretary.  Bevin was out to get arrangements with Washington to keep London's role in the Middle East as the important one.  Bevin had described the president's support for Jewish immigration to Palestine as a "crude desire for votes in New York," and therefore was not one of Harry Truman's favorite people.  They were part of a clique against Truman ever  voting for the Jewish state.

Others shared Churchill's outrage.  A member of Parliament, Herbert Morrison, reminded the government of the aid being given by Hitler and Mussolini to the upper-class Arab leaders in Palestine ever since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had shown his partiality to the Arabs.  The White Paper had the audacity to give the Arabs the veto over Jewish immigration.  This was 1939, when Jews were passionately trying to enter their "Jewish National Homeland."  or die in Europe.  Countries either had small quotas for Jewish immigrants or didn't allow them in their countries at all.  The USA wouldn't even extend their Jewish quotas in this dire time of need.

Morrison begged his colleagues to stop this evil thing being done.  ..I ask them to remember the sufferings of these Jewish people all over the world.  I ask them to remember that Palestine, of all places in the world, was certainly the place where they had some right to expect not to suffer or to have restrictions imposed upon them.  Look at the extent of the country---this little patch of territory.  Transjordan has been taken away.  (Transjordan was included in the Jewish National Homeland but given to the Arabs).  

Nevelle Chamberlain (18 March 1869-9 Nov 1940) should have been thinking about the encroaching  Nazis.   "I believe the persecution arose  of two motives", he wrote to his sister in a letter:  A desire to rob the Jews of their money and a jealousy of their superior cleverness.  No doubt Jews aren't a lovable people;  I don't care about them myself---but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom."

Chamberlain believed in appeasement of an enemy.  The White Paper of 1939 reinforced his belief.  A year earlier was the agreement in Munich that sacrificed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis to gain "Peace in our time," as he put it.  Perhaps he thought that with the White Paper the Arab Revolt would die down.  Actually it must have encouraged what George Antonius, an Arab writer and representative called a "substantial advance towards the recognition of Arab rights" and what the Jews called "a surrender to Arab terrorism" which I say is still going on today at the UN.

Resource:  From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters, pages 346-349.
The Secret War Against the Jews by John Loftus and Mark Aarons p. 161
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_White_Paper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Morrison





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Revealing Facts About Sherif Hussein's Sons' Involvement Against Establishing Israel

Nadene Goldfoot
Sherif Hussein was the father of Abdullah, and Sherif had supported Zionism.  He must not have figured that this would lead to a completely independent Jewish state, though.  However, Abdullah's elder brother Emir Faisal had promised Chaim Weizmann his support in 1918 at the end of World War I. when Weizmann had visited him in his desert camp.  He had told him he would support the Balfour Declaration but did not mention conditions.  He thought Jews were very influential in the world and would help him achieve his coveted goal:  World sanction for an independent Greater Syria which he would head.  

Faisal didn't consider the Balfour Declaration to be the British rejection of earlier promises to the Arabs to support the establishment of an independent Arab world in the Middle East when the Ottoman Empire was gone.  After all, they had supported the British with an Arab military uprising against the Turks.  The promises to the Arabs were in vague terms by the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry MacMahon, in correspondence with Hussein.

Sherif Hussein was the ruler of the Hedjaz area that later became known as Saudi Arabia.  He had assured D.G. Hogarth, a British representative in 1918 that he would support the Balfour Declaration---if it did not mean the establishment of an independent Jewish state. He lost the chance to be king of Arabia to Ibn Saud.

Saudi Arabia had never been as opposed to Zionism as most other Arab states.  Harry St. John Philby, a British adviser to the first king of Saudi Arabia, a Bedouin,  King  Abdulaziz b: 1876-d: 9 November 1953, otherwise known as Ibn Saud, wrote that he suggested to Weizmann a plan where all Palestine would go to the Jews, who would give Saud 20 million pounds to resettle the Palestine Arabs.

Weizmann, in referring to this plan, said that Winston Churchill favored such a solution, under which Saud would become "Lord of the Middle East.'  According to Philby, Saud waited for Churchill and Roosevelt to make the first move, but they didn't.  Then, Saud showed an uncompromising attitude towards the Jews in conversations with Roosevelt following the Yalta conference while on a cruiser on February 4-11, 1945. He had grown afraid of the other Arabs' reactions.    Roosevelt decided then to take no action which might prove hostile to the Arab people.  When  Truman came into office, this was thrown up to him as a reminder.  He rejected it, and did vote for Israel's statehood.  

Abdullah was in his Amman Shuneh Palace on December 17, 1947 reading a report about the partition plan to divide the 20% that was left of the Jewish Homeland between the Arabs and the Jews.  The Mufti of Jerusalem's plans were to arm his supporters to be ready when the British troops left on May 14, 1948.  They had collected 10,000 rifles and other light arms to give to the Palestine Arabs and were recruiting about 3,000 volunteers ready to be trained and organized.  Abdullah  was against this and wanted the intervention of the regular Arab armies to enter as the Arab Legions was the only modern well-trained regular Arab force.  With them, he could occupy the area allocated by the UN to the Arabs in accordance with his secret proposal to the Jews.

The Muft of Jerusalem, Syrians and Egyptians feared the Arab Legion would then occupy Arab Palestine.  Saudi Arabia was against arming the Palestinians and also bringing in the regular armies.  Iraq's rulers, Hashemites like Abdullah, would not cooperate with Transjordan.  They were trying to get a defense agreement with Britain and wanted to counter protests at home that the government was soft on imperialism and Zionism.  The premiers decided to implement the secret decisions of the Bludan Conference.

June 1946 in Bludan, Syria, the Arab States had up to now paid only lip service to anti-Zionism.  They were too busy in their own problems to move against the Jews of Palestine.  The Anglo-American Commission recommended that 100,000 Jewish refugees be allowed to enter Palestine immediately.  This need was that the Holocaust was over and survivors had no place to go.  They were being placed in detention camps in Cyprus, for one.

These leaders  were eager to see a conflict between Truman of the USA and and the British who were against it.  The British needed "evidence" to show that immigration would lead to bloodshed, so the Arabs called a conference of the Arab League Political Committee in Bludan.  They rejected the American idea of allowing immigration and secretly decided that if the Palestine Arabs went to war, the Arab States would not be able to stop their people from coming to their aid with money, arms and volunteers.

The British were busy instigating Arab rebellion and the British Representatives in Amman asked Abdulla if he would permit volunteers to cross into Palestine from Transjordan.  He was against the crossing himself but agreed.  He could be accused of selling out to the British and Jews.  Bevin himself approved of this idea.  They agreed to have the volunteers pass secretly after midnight so others would think they had infiltrated into Palestine without official Transjordan or British knowledge.  They would move in a group with Arab Legion guards marching to the front and rear until they crossed into Palestine.  They wouldn't stay in Jerusalem, but march to the Nablus area in central Palestine.  It all ended up that Britain would continue to supply arms to Egypt, Iraq and Transjordan.  On January 21, 20 trucks with Syrian license plates carrying over 700 Arab Liberation Army men under Safr Bek, a Syrian officer, raced across the border into Palestine to fight.  However, the British-Iraqi arms agreement was cancelled shortly after it had been drawn up when mobs rioted in Baghdad in protest against British "imperialism."

Resource:  Genesis 1948 by Dan Kurzman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Saud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference

How Israel Has Grown Since 1948

Nadene Goldfoot
Moses, born in 1526 BCE,  left Egypt at the age of 80 (1446 BCE) with 600,000 slaves to start anew in Canaan.  Those Israelites had seen the genocide of their newborn male babies by the Egyptians who were trying to stem their growth, and Moses was saved from this as a newborn by being hidden away in some reeds. That makes it 3,458 years ago that we had been freed from slavery and had set out on a very special journey of 40 years to get to our homeland.

In May 1948 when Israel was re-born through the UN the population was 650,000.  By May 1972 it had grown to 3,164,000.  1,400,000 were immigrants or as they say in Hebrew, olim.  Israel had 4 waves of immigration.
1.  Between May 1948  to the end of 1961, 754,800 olim entered Israel including
       a. refugees from the Holocaust in Europe, remnants of the Jewish communities in Poland, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia.
       b. Entire Jewish communities from Arab countries including 121,000 out of 130,000 of the Jews in Iraq; 44,000 out of 45,000 of the Jews of Yemen, 30,500 out of 35,000 of the Jews of Libya.

2. Between 1955 and 1957, 165,000 Jews came from Morocco, Tunisia, Poland and other countries.
    A large number of Jews from Romania arrived in Israel under a family reunification scheme.

3. Between 1961 and 1964, 215,056 Jews came, mainly from Eastern Europe and North Africa.

4. Since the Six-Day War in 1967 there has been a new wave of immigration from countries in North and South America, Western Europe and the Soviet Union.  By the end of 1972, about 200,000 immigrants had arrived.  My husband and I arrived in 1980 from Oregon. We were teachers who were set to teach English.

Jews had been living in ancient Jewish communities in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya for over 2,000 years and they immigrated to Israel, virtually ending the existence of those communities.  In several Eastern European countries, immigration removed what was left of the Jewish communities after the Holocaust.  Poland, Hungary and Romania where they had been a minority only have a handful remaining if any now.  This makes Israel the largest Jewish population next to the USA.  Nearly 700,000 immigrants, almost half the total-came as destitute refugees from Moslem countries.  This number matches that of the Palestinian Arabs who became refugees in 1948.  

When the Jewish immigrants arrived in Israel the first thing they needed was housing and employment.  Israel was still an infant State dealing with heavy immigration in its first 3 years.  Most were housed in tents to start with called ma'barot-or tent camps.  They had to start by living on welfare grants or subsistence wages for work on public welfare projects.  Today they are taken directly to new homes or to absorption centers where they study Hebrew, which is what happened to me.  I was in such a place called an Ulpan in Haifa, studying to earn my credentials to teach in Israel,having been an experienced teacher in Oregon.

The problem Israel faced in those years was a cultural integration of half of the immigrants coming from Moslem countries in North Africa and Asia where most had lived in poverty and of a traditional and authoritarian Muslim society where they were 3rd class citizens or dhiminnis.  Another teacher in my school was from Iran where he had seen half of the male members of his family hung for being Jewish.   The other half came from Europe and America where their background had been of a modern democratic and technological society.  Today East is marrying West and things have worked out. In fact, by 1970, 18.5% of marriages were of couples of mixed cultural origins.    The results are that we have beautiful and intelligent people to be proud of.  Israel did it all by themselves with the help of grants and loans from the USA but never had to involved UNRWA.  They paid back the loans and integrated the people into the society.

Resource:  Facts About Israel, Division of Information, Ministry for foreign affairs, Jerusalem
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia