Maandelijks archief: juli 2025

The committee called for a general strike, non-payment of taxes, and the shutting of municipal governments. It demanded an end to Jewish immigration and a ban on land sales to Jews. By the end of the year, the movement had become a national revolt.

Britain again sent a royal fact-finding committee. In July 1937, it reported that the revolt was caused by the Arab desire for independence and concern over the idea of a Jewish national home. The committee advised the partition of Palestine.

Additionally, it recommended the compulsory transfer of the Arab Palestinians from the territories earmarked for the Jewish state.

Martial law

The Arabs rejected the proposal and the revolt was stepped up during 1937 and 1938. In the face of the continued uprising, the British declared martial law, dissolving the Arab High Committee, and arresting officials of the organisation behind the revolt, the Supreme Muslim Council.

Five thousand Palestinians were killed in the revolts of 1935 to 1939 and more than 15,000 were wounded.

Although the uprising did not achieve its goals, it is credited with signifying the birth of the Arab Palestinian identity, which is based on achieving independence within a free, powerful and united Arab homeland.”

ALJAZEERA

THE HISTORY OF PALESTINIAN REVOLTS

9 DECEMBER 2003

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/12/9/the-history-of-palestinian-revolts

It can be argued that one root cause for Palestine’s succession of revolts was the carve up of land by the colonial powers in the early 19th century.

In 1916, land in the Middle East was divided up under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This was a secretly conceived treaty drawn up between Britain and France marking out which country they would have control over in the region.

The two colonial powers divided the areas that had previously been ruled by the Ottoman Turks. Little consideration was given to the indigenous population, provoking widespread discontent.

Frustrations were compounded by the fact that in 1917 Britain backed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As a further insult, the Arab community was deceived into believing that it would be supported in its desire for self-rule.

Talks at San Remo

The decisions of 1916 and 1917 were reinforced at the San Remo Conference of 1920 and finally ratified by the council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922.

During the First World war the Ottoman Turks backed Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany. The Arabs, led by the Hashemite dynasty of Mecca, fought against the Ottomans in a bid to shake off their rulers and in an early show of Arab nationalism.

Turkish defeat left the European allies free to control its lands. The French were given the mandate for Syria, which included present day Lebanon, and the British were mandated Palestine, and also control over Iraq and Jordan.

The decision shattered any hopes the Arabs had of founding Palestine within a federal Syrian state. In 1920 the first High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, a British Jew, arrived marking the end of 400 years of Turkish rule and the start of Britain’s 30-year ascendancy.

Uprisings in Jerusalem

Palestinians, who were already resentful because of the increasing number of immigrant Jewish settlers, demonstrated in Jerusalem in February 1920. Approximately 1,500 people came on to the streets after the British general, Louis Bols, declared the enforcement of the Balfour Declaration.

A month later a second demonstration was followed by bloody outbursts, with Arabs attacking Jewish interests. Bols banned all demonstrations.

But in May 1921 an anti-Zionist riot broke out in Jaffa. Dozens of Arabs and Jews were killed in the confrontations.

Al-Buraq Wall – a flashpoint

September 1929 saw further serious unrest, this time centring on al-Buraq Wall. This site in the heart of old Jerusalem, known to Jews as the Wailing Wall, forms part of the western wall of the al-Aqsa mosque and is therefore viewed by Muslims as a sacred site not to be bought or sold.

But at the end of the 1920s, a group of rabbis urged Jewish immigrants to gather at the wall to perform a public prayer. The aim after the call was to seize the wall, and declare it as a sacred place for Jews.

Muslim Palestinians were outraged and clashes erupted. These confrontations swiftly turned into an uprising that spread across the country. Fights between Arab Palestinians and Jews backed by British occupation forces, continued for two weeks. Hundreds of Arab Palestinians and Jews were killed in the confrontations.

In June 1930 the League of Nations sent a fact-finding committee, the International Commission for the Wailing Wall, to investigate the reasons behind the uprising. After five months of investigations, the committee concluded that the area around the wall was an Islamic endowment, but that the Jews could continue their prayers at the wall with certain restrictions.

Jewish immigration intensifies

In the 1930s, after the Nazis had come to power in Germany, Jewish immigration intensified, reaching its peak in 1935 when 61,000 Jewish immigrants entered Palestine. By 1936 Jews from outside Palestine made up more than a third of the population of Arab Palestine.

Such huge numbers meant more land was obtained and tension between Palestinian Arabs and the Jewish newcomers escalated. Both sides realised that by the end of the British mandate, population figures and land ownership would determine the future political control of the country.

As early as 1929 a British inquiry investigated the destabilising effect of mass immigration, concluding that civil unrest was the likely outcome of making the indigenous population landless.

Full-scale uprising

In 1936, the first sustained revolution by Palestinian Arabs for more than a century started. Thousands of Palestinians and non-Palestinian Arabs were mobilised.

Jaffa once again proved a focus for dissent. The followers of Shaikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam – killed by the British in 1935 – initiated a general strike there and in Nablus, and launched attacks on Jewish and British installations. Also instrumental in the national uprising was Haj Amin al-Husayni, the president of the newly formed Arab High Committee, a coalition of political parties.

The committee called for a general strike, non-payment of taxes, and the shutting of municipal governments. It demanded an end to Jewish immigration and a ban on land sales to Jews. By the end of the year, the movement had become a national revolt.

Britain again sent a royal fact-finding committee. In July 1937, it reported that the revolt was caused by the Arab desire for independence and concern over the idea of a Jewish national home. The committee advised the partition of Palestine.

Additionally, it recommended the compulsory transfer of the Arab Palestinians from the territories earmarked for the Jewish state.

Martial law

The Arabs rejected the proposal and the revolt was stepped up during 1937 and 1938. In the face of the continued uprising, the British declared martial law, dissolving the Arab High Committee, and arresting officials of the organisation behind the revolt, the Supreme Muslim Council.

Five thousand Palestinians were killed in the revolts of 1935 to 1939 and more than 15,000 were wounded.

Although the uprising did not achieve its goals, it is credited with signifying the birth of the Arab Palestinian identity, which is based on achieving independence within a free, powerful and united Arab homeland.

END

This is part 2 of our introduction articles. We highly recommend reading them in order.

As we learned in the previous article, the fall of the Ottoman empire, the birth of the Zionist movement, and the declaration of Palestine as a British mandate, all contributed to birthing the Palestinian question. Even before Palestine was officially declared a mandate in 1922, British policies and preferential treatment of the Zionist colonists helped create a volatile political climate.

While Zionist settlement in Palestine predates the mandate years, the newly found British sponsorship, whether tacit or explicit, provided the perfect cover for the Zionist movement to ramp up its colonization efforts. For all intents and purposes the Jewish Yishuv became a proto-state within an existing nation. Aiming to establish an exclusive Jewish ethnocracy, the Yishuv had to contend with the fact that the entirety of the land was inhabited by the native population. This is where the settler “logic of elimination” came into play. Coined by scholar Patrick Wolfe, this means that the settlers needed to develop not only moral justifications for the removal of the natives, but also the practical means to ensure its success. This could take the form of ethnic cleansing, genocide or other gruesome tools of ethnocide.

If you’re at all familiar with Zionist talking points, you can see this logic of elimination in motion. “A land without a people for a people without a land“, “there is no such thing as a Palestinian“, “Israel made the desert bloom” and many other talking points illustrate this perfectly. The settlers would never admit that the Palestinians constituted a people, but rather viewed them as disconnected communities at best, and wandering rootless vagabonds at worst. Such arguments would form the basis for legitimizing the dispossession of the natives. This is hardly unique to Zionist settler-colonialism. For example, you can immediately see how denying the existence of Palestinians resembles the Terra Nullius argument used by colonists all over the world [You can read more about this here].

Historically, Palestine has always been a place of refuge for many populations fleeing war and famine; it is home to Palestinians of diverse origins, such as Armenian, Bosnian and even Indian Palestinians. They all came to Palestine for different reasons, and to this day form an integral part of its society. The issue was never with the idea of Zionists moving to Palestine, but rather that from the onset, the Zionist movement was not interested in coexistence. There is ample evidence -recorded by the Zionist pioneers themselves- that the native Palestinian population was welcoming of the first Zionist settlers. They worked side by side, and the Palestinians even taught them how to work the land, despite Zionists seeing the Palestinians as inferior and uncivilized. Only after it became clear that these settlers did not come to live in Palestine as equals, but to become its landlords, as the Jewish National Fund Chairman Menachem Usishkin said, did Zionism come to be perceived as a threat. For example, Zionist leadership went out of its way to sanction settlers employing or working with Palestinians, calling Palestinian labor an “illness” and forming a segregated trade union that banned non-Jewish members.

Consequently, as with every colonial situation, there was resistance by the native population; in this context, some of this resistance was aimed at the British and some at the Zionist settlers themselves. A prominent example of this is the 1936 revolt.

As colonial overlords, the British were exceptional record-keepers. Backed by empirical data, they compiled report after report in an attempt to monitor the tensions erupting all over Palestine. These reports showed that the distrust between the Palestinian and Zionist populations intensified after the British military administration of Palestine and the issuance of the Balfour declaration. The Haycraft report, for example, concluded that despite Zionist accusations the actions of the Palestinians were not at all motivated by antisemitism, but rather by the British military administration favoring the Zionist settlers to the detriment of the Palestinians. The Shaw report stated that there had been no such tension for nearly a century prior.

By the end of the mandate, in spite of the Zionist efforts to purchase as much land as possible and maximize the number of European Zionist settlers, they barely controlled 5-6% of the land in mandatory Palestine and constituted only a third of the population. This population had only just arrived, and did not amount to a clear majority in any region of Palestine. This population distribution would make establishing an exclusivist Zionist state in Palestine impossible.

It is under these circumstances that calls for partitioning Palestine into an Arab-Palestinian and Zionist-Jewish states started to gain traction in some circles.

THE PARTITION OF PALESTINE

When partition is brought up it is not surprising that most tend to think of the 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution. This resolution recommended the partition of Palestine into an Arab-Palestinian state and a Zionist-Jewish state at the end of the British mandate. This was seen by some as a solution to the escalating tensions and violence during the mandate years.

However, this was not the first partition scheme to be presented. In 1919, for example, the World Zionist Organization put forward a ‘partition’ plan, which included all the territory which would become mandatory Palestine, as well as parts of Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan. At the time, the Jewish population of this proposed state would not have even reached 2-3% of the total population. Naturally, such a colonial proposal would be unjust regardless of the population disparity, but it is an indication of the entitlement of the Zionist movement in wanting to establish an ethnic state in an area they had no claim to, and where they were so utterly outnumbered.

The bulk of the Zionist population arrived in Palestine during the 4th and 5th Zionist immigration waves -Aliyot- (Between 1924-1939). That means that the majority of those demanding partition of the land had barely been living there for 20 years at the most. To make matters worse, the UN partition plan allotted approximately 56% of the land of mandatory Palestine to the Zionist state, including most of the fertile coastal region.

The Palestinians, of course, rejected this. They were being asked to give away most of their land to a minority of recently arrived settlers. The rejection of this ridiculous premise is still cited today as the Palestinians being intransigent and refusing peace. This is often negatively contrasted with the claim that the Yishuv agreed to the 1947 partition plan, which is portrayed as a showing of good will and a readiness to coexist with their Palestinian neighbors. While this may seem true on the surface, a cursory glance at internal Yishuv meetings paints an entirely different picture. Partition as a concept was entirely rejected by the Yishuv, and any acceptance in public was tactical in order for the newly created Jewish state to gather its strength before expanding.

While addressing the Zionist Executive, Ben Gurion, leader of the Yishuv and Israel’s first Prime Minister, reemphasized that any acceptance of partition would be temporary:

“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”

This was not a one-time occurrence, and neither was it only espoused by Ben Gurion. Internal debates and letters illustrate this time and time again. Even in letters to his family, Ben Gurion wrote that “A Jewish state is not the end but the beginning” detailing that settling the rest of Palestine depended on creating an “elite army”. As a matter of fact, he was quite explicit:

“I don’t regard a state in part of Palestine as the final aim of Zionism, but as a mean toward that aim.”

Chaim Weizmann, prominent Zionist leader and first President of Israel, expected that “partition might be only a temporary arrangement for the next twenty to twenty-five years”.

So even ignoring the moral question of requiring the natives to formally green-light their own colonization, had the Palestinians agreed to partition, they most likely still would not have had an independent state today. Despite what was announced in public, internal Zionist discussions make it abundantly clear that this would have never been allowed.

However, the problems with the United Nations partition plan go even deeper than this. To be clear, the resolution did not partition Palestine. It was in fact a partition plan, which was to be seen as a recommendation, and that the issue should be transferred to the Security Council. The resolution does not obligate the people of Palestine to accept it, especially considering the non-binding nature of UNGA resolutions.

For its part, the Security Council attempted to find a resolution based on the UNGA recommendation, but could not arrive at a consensus. Many concluded that the plan could not be enforced. Israel was unilaterally declared a state by Zionist leadership while the Security Council was still trying to arrive at a conclusion. The plan was never implemented.

However, there is an argument that although the plan never came to fruition, the UNGA recommendation to partition Palestine to establish a Jewish state conferred the legal authority to create such a state. As a matter of fact, this can be seen in the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel.

This argument falls flat on its face when we take into account that the United Nations, both its General Assembly as well as its Security Council, do not have the jurisdiction to impose political solutions, especially without the consent of those it affects. There is nothing in the UN charter that confers such authority to the United Nations. Indeed, this was brought up during the discussions on the matter. Furthermore, not only would this be outside the scope of the United Nations’ power, it would as a matter of fact run counter to its mandate. This issue was raised by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine itself:

“With regard to the principle of self-determination, although international recognition was extended to this principle at the end of the First World War and it was adhered to with regard to the other Arab territories, at the time of the creation of the ‘A’ Mandates, it was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there. Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.”

This is a direct admission that the creation of a Zionist national home in Palestine runs counter to the principle of self-determination for Palestinians already living there. The United Nations needed to twist itself into a knot and make an exception to their own charter to recommend the partition of Palestine. However, even if it had been within their power to do so, and had it not ran counter to their charter, the UN still had no right to force the Palestinians to tear their homeland in half.

THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE

The demographic realities in Palestine had always troubled the Zionist movement. Despite their consistent sloganeering of “A land without a people for a people without a land”, they were acutely aware of the reality on the ground. Even from its earliest days, Zionist leaders spoke about removing the native population to make room for the colonists who would utilize the land in much more “civilized” and “advanced” ways [You can read more about this here]. Towards the end of the mandate, it would become clear that there would be no voluntary exodus of the native Palestinians.

It is within this context that Plan D (Tochnit Dalet) was developed by the Haganah high command. Although it was adopted in May 1948, the origins of this plan go back a few years earlier.  Yigael Yadin reportedly started working on it in 1944. This plan entailed the expansion of the borders of the Zionist state, well beyond partition, and any Palestinian village within these borders that resisted would be destroyed and have its inhabitants expelled. This included cities that were supposed to be part of the Arab Palestinian state after partition, such as Nazareth, Acre and Lydda.

Ben Zohar, the biographer of Ben Gurion wrote that:

“In internal discussions, in instructions to his men, the Old Man [Ben-Gurion] demonstrated a clear position: it would be better that as few a number as possible of Arabs would remain in the territory of the [Jewish] state.”.

Although it could be argued that Plan D did not outline the exact villages and cities to be ethnically cleansed in an explicit way, it was clear that the various Yishuv forces were operating with its instructions in mind.

It is important to stress that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began before the 1948 war, and before even a single regular Arab soldier set foot in Palestine. This is important to understand because many still erroneously argue that the Nakba -Arabic for catastrophe- was a byproduct of the Arab war on the fledgling Israeli state. Approximately 300,000 Palestinians had been expelled through ethnic cleansing campaigns before the onset of war or the end of the mandate. These campaigns were accompanied by massacres and war crimes, even against villages that were neutral and had non-aggression pacts with the Zionist Yishuv. The ethnic cleansing of the village of Deir Yassin demonstrates this perfectly [You can read more about this here].

For many reasons, the Arab states, mainly Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, were not interested in a war. However, after the monstrous ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Palestinians, they finally reluctantly intervened. However, an aspect that is often ignored is the inter-Arab rivalries and disunity that were among the chief causes for the intervention in 1948. Barely coming out from under colonialism themselves, their actions during the war showed that they never really joined the war with eliminationist intent, as the popular narrative goes. The Jordanians were more interested in acquiring the West Bank as a stepping stone to their real ambition, which was greater Syria. As a matter of fact, there is ample evidence of collusion between the Israelis and Jordanians during the 1948 war, with deals under the table pretty much gifting parts of the West Bank to Transjordan in return for not interfering in other areas.

The Egyptians joined in an attempt to counter the Hashemite power-play that could change the balance of power in the region. For these reasons, the Arab armies generally intervened in the territories of the mandate destined to be part of the Palestinian Arab state according to the 1947 partition plan, and with very few exceptions, stayed away from the area designated to be part of the Zionist-Jewish state. Yes, support for Palestine and Palestinians played a large role in the legitimization of such interventions, but they were never the real reason behind them. As per usual when it comes to international relations, interests are always at the center of any maneuver regardless of the espoused noble and altruistic motivations.

END

New York, 1980

INTRODUCTION

Palestine’s special place in history derives from its spiritual significance for the three great monotheistic faiths.  Palestine thus should be a land of peace, but, in fact, historical forces, sometimes religious, sometimes political, have brought conflict and conquest.

Today, the area continues to be riven by tension and strife, posing a potential threat to world peace.  The events during our century that led to this dangerous situation are often blurred by the intense controversy over “The Palestine question”.  This short study traces the evolution of that question.*

__________

*This study dealing with a highly complex issue is intended for younger readers and is an abbreviated version of more exhaustive studies published by the United Nations under the titles: The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem – Parts I and II (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1979).

I. PALESTINE IN HISTORY

The “Palestine problem” of today had its origin in policies introduced while Palestine was a responsibility of the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations.  A report issued in 1930 by a commission* appointed with the approval of the League of Nations contains what might be the closest to an objective survey of the early history of Palestine.  The following summary is taken from that report.

In early times, Palestine was inhabited by Semitic peoples, the earliest being the Canaanites.  According to tradition, Abraham, the common ancestor of the Jews and the Arabs, came from Ur to Canaan.

When the tribes of Israel came to Palestine after their captivity in Egypt, they were united into one kingdom by King David in 1000 B.C.  This kingdom reached its greatest heights under King David’s son, Solomon, who built the first Temple of Jerusalem on Mount Moriah.  However, after Solomon’s death, the history of the people of Israel – or rather of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah – is a record of civil wars and struggles with alien tribes.

In fact, the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, a secret Anglo-French agreement on the recognition of Arab independence, had excluded independence for Palestine, and instead had specified an “international administration”.

The future of Palestine was also the subject of separate assurances given by the British Government to the World Zionist Organization.  In 1897, the organization had declared its aim “to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law”.  Under the leadership of Theodor Herzl, the organization considered areas in East Africa and Argentina as sites for the Jewish national home.  However, it finally decided on Palestine, claiming it as a national home on the basis of ancient Jewish links with the holy land.

Zionist leaders worked for support from the British Government, emphasizing the strategic advantage of gaining a new ally that would help Guard the Suez Canal.  The British, still seeking support in their war effort, reacted favourably.  Accordingly, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, addressed a letter on 2 November 1917 to the World Zionist Organization.  This letter, which came to be known as the Balfour Declaration, stated that:

“His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

Some Jewish communities, sensing a conflict of loyalty with their own countries of citizenship, opposed the Zionist plans.  Sir Edward Montagu, the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet, strongly criticized. it.  Even Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, just 10 years later, was to write:

“The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was built on air … every day and every hour of these last 10 years, when opening the newspapers, I thought: Whence will the next blow come?  I trembled lest the British Government would call me and ask: `Tell us, what is this Zionist Organization?  Where are they, your Zionists?’ … The Jews, they knew, were against us:  we stood alone on a little island, a tiny group of Jews with a foreign past.”

To counter Arab protests against this new policy, an Anglo-French declaration reiterated promises for complete independence for the Arabs.  The declaration of November 1918 assured the Arabs of “the complete and definite emancipation of the [Arab] peoples … and the establishment of national government and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations”.

Despite the assurances made in the November declaration, Palestine’s subsequent history was to show that the wishes of the vast majority of the indigenous people of Palestine counted for little.  Their land had been promised to another people by a foreign Government, which, at that time, held no sovereign rights over Palestine.  Citing these factors, several authorities have asserted that the Balfour Declaration had no binding or legal effect beyond being a statement of the intentions of one Government,

By being made part of the Palestine Mandate, the Balfour Declaration was given an international dimension.  The Mandate concept itself was a compromise between the prevailing colonial system and the principle of self-determination of people under foreign rule – a principle championed by President Woodrow Wilson.  Following the victory of Britain and her allies in the First World War, the Mandate system of the League of Nations placed many of the former subject peoples of the Ottoman, German and Austro-Hungarian empires under the tutelage of certain victorious Powers.  The stated aim of the Mandates was to guide the peoples ultimately to independence.

There were three classes of Mandates, ranging in levels according to the perceived degree of political advancement of the population as determined by the victorious Powers.  All the former Ottoman Arab territories, including Palestine, were placed under Class “A” Mandates.  As the most advanced class, the Covenant of the League of Nations described Class A Mandates as communities “whose existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized” while they received “administrative assistance and advice” on their way to independence.  Syria and Lebanon were placed under a French Mandate, and Palestine and Transjordan were placed under a British Mandate.  Under the Covenant’s provisions for independence of Mandates, the two French Mandates achieved their independence before the end of the Second World War, Lebanon’s independence came in November 1943, followed by Syrian independence in January 1944.  Jordan received independence in 1946.  Palestine, however, became a scene of conflict.

The Covenant of the League of Nations required that the wishes of the communities affected be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.  This, however, was ignored in the case of Palestine.

On President Wilson’s insistence during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, a commission was appointed to ascertain the wishes of the indigenous populations.  The Commission recommended an American Mandate over Syria, including Palestine.  In assessing the wishes of the indigenous population of Palestine regarding the Jewish immigration there, the Commission called for “serious modification of the extreme Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews” . The Commission declared that this programme, aiming “… finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish State [would be] a serious injustice”.  Dealing with the Zionist claim “that they have a ‘right’ to Palestine, based on their occupation of two thousand years”, the Commission remarked that this claim “can hardly be seriously considered”.

The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, warned that the term “national home” really meant “a Jewish State” in which the Arabs would be second-class citizens.  He declared, “I think the entire concept wrong.”  Balfour himself acknowledged what was being done and noted, “that so far as Palestine is concerned, the [Allied] Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy … which they have not intended to violate”.

Nevertheless, the plans for Palestine moved forward.  In April 1920, at the San Remo conference, France agreed that in return for freedom of action in Syria and Lebanon, Palestine would pass under British tutelage instead of the international régime as originally planned.  Moreover, a stronger and more explicit version of the Balfour Declaration was made part of the Mandate.  With the new version added, the Mandate recognized the Zionist Organization as the “Jewish Agency” which would help in the establishment of the Jewish national home by organizing large-scale immigration and settlement of Jews from abroad on the land the Agency acquired in Palestine.

Remarkably, the Mandate did not once use the term “Arab”.  Although the Palestinian Arabs constituted nine-tenths of the population at that time, they were referred to in the document only as the “non-Jewish communities of Palestine”.  Noting the irony, one writer likened the formulation to “calling the multitude the non-few”, emphasizing the obvious fact that the multitude was the Arab majority in Palestine.  The only protection given to the rights of the Palestinian Arab majority was a phrase stating that “Nothing should be done which might prejudice (their) civil and religious rights”.  Any reference to their national or political rights, however, was conspicuously absent.

The Mandate was signed on 24 July 1922 and came into effect formally in September 1922.  Although Transjordan had originally been included in the Palestine Mandate, on 16 September 1922, the League of Nations approved a separate administration for it.   Consequently, the Mandate thus applied only to Palestine itself, although the area claimed originally for the Jewish national home included parts of neighbouring lands (Figure 1).

One of the aims of the Mandate was specified as “the development of self-governing institutions”.  However, a British Government policy statement of 1 July 1922, subordinated this principle to a secondary consideration.  The statement, known as the “Churchill Memorandum”, made it “clear that the establishment of self-governing institutions in Palestine was to be subordinated to the paramount pledge and obligation of establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine”.

The contradictory elements in the Mandate led to what became known as Britain’s “dual obligation” to the Zionist Organization and to the Palestinian Arabs.  This “dual obligation” was a contradiction that soon led to conflict between the indigenous people of Palestine and the Jewish immigrants seeking refuge there from discrimination in Europe.

The building of the “Jewish National Home” started soon after the end of the First World War well before the Mandate was to come into effect in 1922.  The Zionist Organization promoted large-scale Jewish immigration that brought marked changes in the population pattern in Palestine.  The Jewish population in Palestine increased from 56,000 in 1918 to about 88,000 in 1922, when the total population was officially estimated at 750,000.  By 1939, the Jewish population had increased to 445,000 out of a total population of about 1.5 million.  This dramatic increase was primarily due to the large numbers of Jews fleeing the Nazi terror.

In percentage terms, the Jewish population rose from about 10 per cent in 1919 to 17 per cent in 1929 to nearly 30 per cent in 1939 (Figure 2).

The Palestinian Arabs regarded the Zionist Organization’s activities to increase Jewish immigration to and land holdings in Palestine as colonization of their ancestral land by foreigners.  Not yet politically organized, the Palestinians vented their anger through violence.  Anti-Zionist riots erupted in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1939.  These eventually culminated into a full-scale rebellion from 1936 to 1939. The British Government was only able to suppress the rebellion through the use of drastic measures and strong military force.

In 1931, a British Royal Commission headed by Lord Peel was sent to report on the turmoil in Palestine.  The Commission declared that the underlying causes for the earlier revolts and the rebellion was a combination of the Palestinian Arabs’ desire for national independence and “their hatred and fear of the establishment of the Jewish national home” in their land.  Further, the Commission commented that “… the forcible conversion of Palestine into a Jewish State against the will of the Arabs would clearly violate the spirit and intention of the Mandate system.  It would mean that national self-determination had been withheld when the Arabs were a majority in Palestine and only conceded when the Jews were in a majority …”.

Additionally, the Commission observed that the conflict was not “in its essence an inter-racial conflict, arising from any old instinctive antipathy of Arabs towards Jews. There was little or no friction … until the strife in Palestine engendered it.”  The Commission noted that Judaism and its rituals were rooted in the historical past in Palestine, and that some Jews had always lived there.  Instead the conflict stemmed from the Palestinian Arabs’ repudiation of the Balfour Declaration and their opposition to Zionist aims in Palestine.  They did not accept the creation of a Jewish national home and “they refused to co-operate in any form of government other than a national government responsible to the Palestinian people”.  Yet the Jewish community, in establishing its national home, had formed a “state within a State” in Palestine.

The Peel Commission concluded that the situation in Palestine had reached a deadlock where the “dual obligations” in Palestine had become irreconcilable.  The British Government could not both recognize the Palestinian Arab claim to national independence and secure the establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine.  Therefore, the Commission recommended the partition of Palestine into two independent States.  One State would be Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish, with Jerusalem to be an enclave under a League of Nations Mandate.

Neither side accepted this formula.  The Zionists alleged that it violated the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate.  The Palestinians refused to accept the division of their land and the establishment of a Jewish State on part of it.  Further negotiations in London failed.  Then in May 1939, the British Government announced that instead of partition, Palestine would in 1949 become a unified independent State with both Jews and Arabs sharing in government administration and rule.  The Zionist Organization rejected this policy.  Instead, in 1942 they met in New York and adopted the “Biltmore Program” which included a demand for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine.

By the end of the Second World War the Arab States and the United States of America were also involved in the Palestine issue.

In 1946, an Anglo-American Inquiry Committee presented yet another set of recommendations which the British Government considered unworkable.  Differing formulas were proposed during fruitless negotiations.  Finally, after three decades of rule, the British Government decided in February 1947 to hand the Palestine issue over to the United Nations.  The British Government declared that, “faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles in Palestine … [it had] reached the conclusion that the only course now open [was] to submit the problem to the judgement of the United Nations …”.

After three decades of implementing the Balfour doctrine in a radically transformed Palestine, the British Mandate neared its end.  The Jewish population had swelled from 56,000 in 1918 to 608,000 by 1946.  The total population had reached 1,850,000 (Figure 3).  Much of the immigration had been due to the Nazi persecution of European Jewry.  Palestinian Arabs sympathized with the plight of European Jews.  However, the sudden immigration brought undue hardship on the Palestinian Arab population.  And, since the Arabs were not responsible for the atrocities in Europe, they naturally objected to being made to suffer in turn.  As the Royal Commission’s report put it:

“An able Arab exponent of the Arab case told us that the Arabs throughout their history have not only been free from anti-Jewish sentiment but have also shown that the spirit of compromise is deeply rooted in their life.  There is no decent-minded person, he said, who would not want to do everything humanly possible to relieve the distress of those persons, provided that it was not at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress on another people.”

By 1947, Palestine was a land ravaged by violence.

The Palestinian Arabs had reacted with violence to the policies of the Mandate which permitted large-scale immigration and land transfer in Palestine.  Initially the Jewish immigrants often had practised the doctrine of Havlaga, or self-restraint.  By 1947, however, Zionist para-military organizations such as the Haganah and the Irgun became active.  They were later joined by the Stern gang.

These groups turned to terrorism in Palestine.  In 1940, according to an official report, the SS Petria, a refugee ship carrying illegal Jewish immigrants was “scuttled at her mooring … as a result of sabotage by Jewish sympathizers ashore, with the loss of 252 lives”.  In 1942, the British Minister of State was killed in Cairo by the Stern gang.  In 1944, states a British official report, “the campaign conducted by terrorist organizations reached a new climax with an explosion which wrecked a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem”.  Eighty-six public servants, Arab, Jewish and British, as well as five members of the public were killed in the explosion.  Palestine was described as “an armed camp”.

The United Nations, the de facto successor of the defunct League of Nations, was only two years old when charged with the resolution of the problem of Palestine.  In May 1947, the General Assembly created the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) and authorized it to link the European Jewish question to the Palestine issue.  This was done despite protests by Palestinian and other Arab representatives.  They contended that other countries should also give refuge to the large numbers of European Jews displaced by the war.  UNSCOP visited Germany and Austria in addition to Palestine and other Arab countries.

One of the purposes of the United Nations is respect for the principle of self-determination of people.  This principle was recognized internationally at the end of the First World War, and was extended to other Arab territories placed under Mandates.  However, the principle in effect was not applied to the British Mandate in Palestine.  In its report, UNSCOP commented on this:

… at the time of the creation of the ‘A’ Mandates, it (the principle of self-determination) was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there.  Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.”

UNSCOP recommended that Palestine should become independent without delay.  Its members, however, were divided over the form of independence.  A minority favoured a unified federal State with considerable autonomy for the two communities.  The majority proposed a partition into two States; one Jewish, the other Arab with Jerusalem as an international zone administered by the United Nations (proposed division of territory and population in Figures 3 and 4).

A lengthy debate ensued over the two UNSCOP proposals.  During the debates the United Nations legal authority to partition the country was questioned.  Finally, after intense political manoeuvring the General Assembly approved, with minor amendments, the UNSCOP majority plan to partition Palestine.*

The British Mandate over Palestine was to end and the two new States (one Arab, one Jewish) were to achieve independence on 15 May 1948.

The partition resolution provided for elaborate safeguards for the rights of minorities and for the “existing rights” of various religions in Jerusalem which had been secured during the Ottoman period.  Included was the guarantee of free access for persons of all faiths to the holy places located in Jerusalem.  These safeguards were required to be given constitutional status by each State.

Although the size of the Jewish State accorded in the partition resolution was smaller than the Zionist Organization had hoped for, the Organization had secured its objective of a Jewish State in Palestine.  Hence, the Zionist Organization accepted the partition plan.  The Palestinian Arabs and the other Arab countries rejected the resolution as unjust and illegal.

The violence, which had not subsided while the United Nations debated the Palestine issue, now flared up again. The violence intensified when the British forces first prepared to withdraw, and then when they advanced their withdrawal date to 15 May 1948.

On the one side, Zionist forces went on the offensive, implementing “Plan Dalet”.  Plan Dalet was to occupy the areas allotted to the Arab State as soon as British authority weakened.  The Zionists’ intention was to secure “a State made larger and Jewish by the Haganah”.  On the other side, Palestinian Arab irregulars also intensified their operations.  Violence spread, and the main sufferers were Palestinian civilians.

An especially bloody, terrorist incident was a Zionist attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem.  The village which had tried to avoid embroilment in the fighting lost 255 men, women and children in the Zionist attack.  Reprisals followed with an Arab attack on a Jewish convoy with 77 killed.  The terror caused by Deir Yassin provoked flight from other Arab Palestinian villages and towns.

On 14 May 1948, amidst mounting strife, the State of Israel proclaimed its establishment on the basis of the Zionist programme, the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate and the Partition Resolution.  As the last British troops ceremonially departed the following day, troops from bordering Arab countries entered the areas allotted to the Arab State, and the first Israel-Arab war began.

By the time the United Nations Security Council effected a cease-fire, Israeli forces had established a decisive superiority.  Additionally, they controlled large areas of territory allotted to the Arab State as well as the western half of Jerusalem, originally meant for internationalization.

Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world, numbering about 12.4 million, mark the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the near-total destruction of Palestinian society in 1948.

The Palestinian experience of dispossession and loss of a homeland is 69 years old this year.

On that day, the State of Israel came into being. The creation of Israel was a violent process that entailed the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to establish a Jewish-majority state, as per the aspirations of the Zionist movement.

Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.

Though May 15, 1948, became the official day for commemorating the Nakba, armed Zionist groups had launched the process of displacement of Palestinians much earlier. In fact, by May 15, half of the total number of Palestinian refugees had already been forcefully expelled from their country.

Israel continues to oppress and dispossess Palestinians to this day, albeit in a less explicit way than that during the Nakba.

What caused the Nakba?

The roots of the Nakba stem from the emergence of Zionism as a political ideology in late 19th-century Eastern Europe. The ideology is based on the belief that Jews are a nation or a race that deserve their own state.

From 1882 onwards, thousands of Eastern European and Russian Jews began settling in Palestine; pushed by the anti-Semitic persecution and pogroms they were facing in the Russian Empire, and the appeal of Zionism.

In 1896, Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl published a pamphlet that came to be seen as the ideological basis for political Zionism – Der Judenstaat, or “The Jewish State”. Herzl concluded that the remedy to centuries-old anti-Semitic sentiments and attacks in Europe was the creation of a Jewish state.

Though some of the movement’s pioneers initially supported a Jewish state in places such as Uganda and Argentina, they eventually called for for building a state in Palestine based on the biblical concept that the Holy Land was promised to the Jews by God.

In the 1880s, the community of Palestinian Jews, known as the Yishuv, amounted to three percent of the total population. In contrast to the Zionist Jews who would arrive in Palestine later, the original Yishuv did not aspire to build a modern Jewish state in Palestine.

After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1517-1914), the British occupied Palestine as part of the secret Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916 between Britain and France to divvy up the Middle East for imperial interests.

In 1917, before the start of the British Mandate (1920-1947), the British issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to help the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, essentially vowing to give away a country that was not theirs to give.

Central to the pledge was Chaim Weizmann, a Britain-based Russian Zionist leader and chemist whose contributions to the British war effort during World War I (1914-1918) made him well-connected to the upper echelons of the British government. Weizmann lobbied hard for more than two years with British former Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and former Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour to publicly commit Britain to building a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

By giving their support to Zionist goals in Palestine, the British hoped they could shore up support among the significant Jewish populations in the US and Russia for the Allied effort during WWI. They also believed the Balfour Declaration would secure their control over Palestine after the war.

From 1919 onwards, Zionist immigration to Palestine, facilitated by the British, increased dramatically. Weizmann, who later became Israel’s first president, was realising his dream of making Palestine “as Jewish as England is English”.

Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from nine percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants from their lands as Zionists bought land from absentee landlords.

Leading Arab and Palestinian intellectuals openly warned against the motifs of the Zionist movement in the press as early as 1908. With the Nazi seizure of power in Germany between 1933 and 1936, 30,000 to 60,000 European Jews arrived on the shores of Palestine.

In 1936, Palestinian Arabs launched a large-scale uprising against the British and their support for Zionist settler-colonialism, known as the Arab Revolt. The British authorities crushed the revolt, which lasted until 1939, violently; they destroyed at least 2,000 Palestinian homes, put 9,000 Palestinians in concentration camps and subjected them to violent interrogation, including torture, and deported 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders.

At least ten percent of the Palestinian male population had been killed, wounded, exiled or imprisoned by the end of the revolt.

The British government, worried about the eruption of violence between the Palestinians and Zionists, tried to curtail at several points immigration of European Jews. Zionist lobbyists in London overturned their efforts.

In 1944, several Zionist armed groups declared war on Britain for trying to put limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine at a time when Jews were fleeing the Holocaust. The Zionist paramilitary organisations launched a number of attacks against the British – the most notable of which was the King David Hotel bombing in 1946 where the British administrative headquarters were housed; 91 people were killed in the attack.

In early 1947, the British government announced it would be handing over the disaster it had created in Palestine to the United Nations and ending its colonial project there. On November 29, 1947, the UN adopted Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

At the time, the Jews in Palestine constituted one third of the population and owned less than six percent of the total land area. Under the UN partition plan, they were allocated 55 percent of the land, encompassing many of the main cities with Palestinian Arab majorities and the important coastline from Haifa to Jaffa. The Arab state would be deprived of key agricultural lands and seaports, which led the Palestinians to reject the proposal.

Shortly following the UN Resolution 181, war broke out between the Palestinian Arabs and Zionist armed groups, who, unlike the Palestinians, had gained extensive training and arms from fighting alongside Britain in World War II.

Zionist paramilitary groups launched a vicious process of ethnic cleansing in the form of large-scale attacks aimed at the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their towns and villages to build the Jewish state, which culminated in the Nakba.

While some Zionist thinkers claim there is no proof of a systematic master plan for the expulsion of Palestinians for the creation of the Jewish state, and that their dispossession was an unintended result of war, the presence of a Palestinian Arab majority in what Zionist leaders envisioned as a future state meant the Nakba was inevitable.

Why do Palestinians commemorate the Nakba on May 15?

The British occupation authorities had announced that they would be ending their mandate in Palestine on the eve of May 15, 1948. Eight hours earlier, David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, announced what the Zionist leaders called a declaration of independence in Tel Aviv.

The British Mandate ended at midnight, and on May 15, the Israeli state came into being.

Palestinians commemorated their national tragedy of losing a homeland in an unofficial way for decades, but in 1998, the former President of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, declared May 15 a national day of remembrance, on the 50th year since the Nakba.

Israel celebrates the day as its day of independence.

When did the process of displacement actually begin?

Though displacement of Palestinians from their lands by the Zionist project was already taking place during the British Mandate, mass displacement started when the UN partition plan was passed.

In less than six months, from December 1947 to mid-May 1948, Zionist armed groups expelled about 440,000 Palestinians from 220 villages.

Before May 15, some of the most infamous massacres had already been committed; the Baldat al-Sheikh massacre on December 31, 1947, killing up to 70 Palestinians; the Sa’sa’ massacre on February 14, 1948, when 16 houses were blown up and 60 people lost their lives; and the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, when about 110 Palestinian men, women and children were slaughtered.

How many Palestinians were displaced?

As units of the Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi armies invaded on May 15, the Arab-Israeli war was launched, and stretched until March 1949.

By the first half of 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians in total were forcibly expelled or fled outside of their homeland. Zionist forces had committed about 223 atrocities by 1949, including massacres, attacks such as bombings of homes, looting, the destruction of property and entire villages.

Some 150,000 Palestinians remained in the areas of Palestine that became part of the Israeli state. Of the 150,000, some 30,000 to 40,000 were internally displaced.

Like the 750,000 who were displaced beyond the borders of the new state, Israel prohibited internally displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes.

In the years that followed the establishment of Israel, the state extended its systematic ethnic cleansing. Though armistice agreements had been signed with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon in 1949, the newly founded Israeli army committed a number of additional massacres and campaigns of forced displacement.

For example, in 1950, the remaining 2,500 Palestinian residents of the city of Majdal were forced into the Gaza Strip, about 2,000 inhabitants of Beer el-Sabe were expelled to the West Bank, and some 2,000 residents of two northern villages were driven into Syria.

By the mid-1950s, the Palestinian population inside Israel had become about 195,000. Between 1948 and the mid-1950s, some 30,000, or 15 percent of the population, were expelled outside the borders of the new state, according to the BADIL refugee rights group.

Is the Nakba over?

While the Zionist project fulfilled its dream of creating “a Jewish homeland” in Palestine in 1948, the process of ethnic cleansing and displacement of Palestinians never stopped.

During the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, known as the Naksa, meaning “setback”, Israel occupied the remaining Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and continues to occupy them until today. While under the UN partition plan Israel was allocated 55 percent, today it controls more than 85 percent of historic Palestine.

The Naksa led to the displacement of some 430,000 Palestinians, half of which originated from the areas occupied in 1948 and were thus twice refugees. As in the Nakba, Israeli forces used military tactics that violated basic international rights law such as attacks on civilians and expulsion. Most refugees fled into neighbouring Jordan, with others going to Egypt and Syria.

What is the situation today?

The more than three million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem face home demolitions, arbitrary arrests, and displacement as Israel expands the 100-plus Jewish-only colonies and steals Palestinian land to do so. Palestinian movement is restricted by military checkpoints and the Separation Wall that has obstructed their ability to travel freely.

The Gaza Strip, where some two million Palestinians live, has been under Israeli siege for more than a decade whereby Israel controls the air space, sea and borders; the Strip has also witnessed three Israeli assaults that have made the area close to uninhabitable.

Within Israel, the 1.8 million Palestinians are an involuntary minority in a state for the Jews. Rights groups have recorded some 50 laws that discriminate against them for not being Jewish, such as ones that criminalise the commemoration of the Nakba.

Since the creation of Israel, no new Palestinian towns or cities were built within its borders, in contrast to the 600 Jewish municipalities that have been developed, according to Adalah, the legal centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

Since 1948, some one million Palestinians have been arrested by Israel, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Additionally, some 100,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished (not including the Nakba or the Gaza wars), according to BADIL.

Today, JNF embodies both heart and action; our work is varied in scope but singular in benefit. In recent years, JNF has delivered on its bold and unprecedented vision in the One Billion Dollar Roadmap for the Next Decade, an innovative plan for Israel’s future. JNF’s Blueprint Negev initiative has transformed Israel’s Negev Desert, making the Southern Israel an attractive place to live and work. Similarly, Go North initiative has begun to provide new economic development opportunities to grow tourism, increase employment, offer educational and housing options and make Israel’s north a desirable place to both visit and live.

JNF remains unique among Jewish charities as its long-term vision has grown to include building new communities in the desert, expanding the scope of river rehabilitation and water research, exploring energy production, increasing population in northern Israel, making all parks and playgrounds accessible to people with special needs, bringing thousands of people to Israel every year on missions and trips, and growing future leadership in our youth community through the Alexander Muss High School in Israel and Zionist education and advocacy programs.

WHAT WE DO

JNF strives to bring an enhanced quality of life to all of Israel’s residents and translate these advancements to the world beyond. JNF is “greening” the desert with millions of trees, building thousands of parks across Israel, creating new communities and cities for generations of Israelis to call home, bolstering Israel’s water supply, helping develop innovative arid agriculture techniques and educating both young and old about the founding and importance of Israel and Zionism. JNF is the single largest provider of Zionist programs in the U.S. Its work is divided into seven program areas: Forestry & Green Innovations, Water Solutions, Community Building, Zionist Education & Advocacy, Research & Development, Heritage Sites, and Disabilities & Special Needs.

SINCE 1901, JNF HAS:

• Planted more than 250 million trees

• Built over 250 reservoirs and dams

• Developed over 250,000 acres of land

• Created more than 2,000 parks

• Provided the infrastructure for over 1,000 communities

• Connected thousands of children and young adults to Israel and their heritage

JNF prides itself on honoring the pioneers of the past and celebrating their spirit by continuing the pioneering tradition in the areas of technology, environmental progress, community development, water renewal and building the land of Israel for many years to come.

JNF affirms the bonds of the Jewish family with their strength of unity, the understanding that each member can make a difference and the collective power to build prosperity, develop innovative solutions and promote the greater good.

OUR CREDENTIALS & PARTNERSHIPS

A registered 501(c)(3) organization, Jewish National Fund is recognized as a 4-star organization by Charity Navigator, America’s leading independent charity evaluator, for its sound fiscal management, accountability, and transparency. JNF has also been rated a top charity by the American Institute of Philanthropy and meets the 20 rigorous standards of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) Wise Giving Alliance, and the transparency standards of Tzedakah, Inc. No other Jewish organization meets all these standards.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

JNF believes in the endurance and prosperity of the Israeli homeland, the defense, and enrichment of its soil, the rejuvenation of its deserts and the security of its people. JNF’s mission is the invention of tomorrow. When you donate to JNF you become an integral part of Israel’s future and, in turn, play a role in whole-world growth.

JNF directs every dollar to where it is needed most and provides donors with the ability to know what they are supporting with full transparency. Donors are able to direct their support to fund program areas and projects specific to their passions and interests. Focused efforts within these areas include: alleviating Israel’s water shortage; promoting education; maintaining more than 250,000 acres of forests; providing safety equipment and new trucks for Israeli firefighters; building playgrounds, synagogues and day care centers; providing affordable housing solutions for young families, immigrants, seniors and Israelis leaving military service; offering therapeutic and rehabilitative services to people with special needs; and promoting tourism and recreation experiences and economic growth by creating parks, forest and recreation areas and preserving and developing historic sites.

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ABOUT JEWISH NATIONAL FUND

https://www.jnf.org/about-jnf

”In the 1880s, Jews, predominantly Ashkenazi,^[2][3] began purchasing land and properties across Ottoman Palestine in order to expand the collective territorial ownership of the Yishuv. Large Jewish corporations and private Jewish buyers led this effort through multiple intermittent transactions that continued after Mandatory Palestine was established in 1918. The largest of these arrangements, known as the Sursock Purchases, resulted in the procurement of the Jezreel Valley and the Bay of Haifa by the 1930s.”

First, it is important to note that the majority of the land purchased by Zionists were not sold by Palestinians, but rather by large absentee landlords, living mostly in Lebanon and Syria. Khalidi estimates that a little over the third (of the 5-7%) were sold by absentee landlords of Palestinian origin. And only 6% of the (5-7%) were sold by local landlords or peasants. These estimates are mostly corroborated by Walter Lehn and based on reports from the Jewish Agency that confirmed that the majority of land purchased was from large absentee landlords.”

MYTH: PALESTINIANS SOLD THEIR LAND

 

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinians-sold-their-land/

In yet another attempt to legitimize the Israeli take-over of Palestine, it was put forward by advocates of Israel that Palestinians had simply sold their land to the Zionist movement. Later, after witnessing how these lands were transformed into a paradise, Palestinians came to regret their decision and claimed that Israel stole their land. This conveniently ties together multiple Zionist myths and talking points into one neat package.

While this fairytale would certainly appeal to anyone trying to morally absolve themselves from the implications of their expropriation of large swathes of territory, unfortunately for them, detailed land purchase records exist. I’m sure you can already tell that these records dispel this ridiculous assertion.

The British were meticulous record keepers, and we have detailed numbers of the land purchased by the various Zionist organizations:

For reference, Mandatory Palestine as a whole had a territory of 26,625,600 dunams. The most generous estimations of Zionist land holdings were 2,000,000 dunums by 1948. For reference, a dunam is 1000 square meters. An acre is four dunams.

As you can see, at most the combined Zionist purchasing power could barely acquire 5-7% of the land, depending on source. Needless to say, huge swathes of it being strewn around the entire territory and being non-contiguous. Due to the ease with which this talking point can be debunked, it gradually fell out of favor -relatively speaking- among Israelis. However, it has since seen a resurgence among Arab Zionists desperate for normalization with Israel. In their eyes, this myth needs to be true so that they can blame the Palestinians for their own dispossession and legitimize their cynical political maneuvering.

THE GREAT THEFT

This talking point is further undermined by Israel’s own legislation and policy following the Nakba [You can read more about this here]. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine would not stop after the war of 1948, Palestinians in the Naqab, as well as those close to the ceasefire lines would continue to face mass expulsions into the 1950s. In the same period, Israel issued the infamous Absentee’s Property Law. This law was instrumental in systematically seizing the property of all the refugees it had created, this included their homes, farms, land and even the contents of their bank accounts. Through this law, the state took control of everything remaining behind when the refugees were expelled, and if not contested or claimed, they would then become the property of the state, free to be utilized in any way it saw fit. Given the fact that any refugee attempting to return was shot, you can see how this law served merely as a fig leaf to legitimize what can only be described as naked theft. A step which would be unnecessary had the Zionists actually purchased the land on which Israel was erected, as some ridiculously claim.

This in conjunction with the Land Acquisitions Law allowed for the mass transfer of the entire Palestinian economy to the Israeli state. Practically overnight, the state gained control of over 739,750 agricultural acres, vast majority of which were of excellent quality, 73,000 houses, 7800 workshops and 6 million pounds. This dropped the cost of settling a Zionist family in Palestine from 8000$ to 1500$, effectively subsidizing the creation of the Israeli state and kickstarting its economy.

So, while we have already shown that the record shows no such large-scale purchase of the land as asserted, let us take a deeper look at these smaller purchases and discuss their implications.

First, it is important to note that the majority of the land purchased by Zionists were not sold by Palestinians, but rather by large absentee landlords, living mostly in Lebanon and Syria. Khalidi estimates that a little over the third (of the 5-7%) were sold by absentee landlords of Palestinian origin. And only 6% of the (5-7%) were sold by local landlords or peasants. These estimates are mostly corroborated by Walter Lehn and based on reports from the Jewish Agency that confirmed that the majority of land purchased was from large absentee landlords.

There is also evidence that suggests that these local sellers did not always wish to sell their land. For example, one mode of land extraction was when the Jewish National Fund gave loans to farmers with the precondition that their land would be used as collateral, and when the farmer ultimately defaulted on their payments, they would take possession of the land. In other cases, these peasants thought they were simply selling land to new neighbors. They did not know that they were selling their land for the erection of a new foreign colonial state that sought to dispossess them.

Furthermore, even if the percentage of the territories purchased by Zionist settlers was higher, this would not entitle them to sovereignty over it.

Ultimately, the question of Palestine is not about property rights. It is about settler colonialism and the attempted ethnocide of an entire people. Palestinians deserve to return to their homes and live in dignity, regardless how much private property they lost or didn’t lose.

FURTHER READING

• Bisharat, George E. “Land, Law, and Legitimacy in Israel and the Occupied Territories.” Am. UL Rev. 43, 1993: 467.
• Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian identity: The construction of modern national consciousness. Columbia University Press, 2010.
• Shaw, John. A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December, 1945 and January, 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquir, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991.
• Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Metropolitan Books, 2020.
• Khalidi, Walid (ed.), Sharif S. Elmusa, and Muhammad Ali Khalidi. All that remains: The Palestinian villages occupied and depopulated by Israel in 1948. Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.

The Rothschild family, which issued loans to major governments and dominated the world, also wholeheartedly supported the dream of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine

The Ottoman government took certain measures against this movement, which threatened its territorial integrity. It feared that the law of 1869, which allowed foreigners to buy land in the Ottoman country, except for the Hijaz, on condition of reciprocity, would be abused. In 1871, 80% of Palestine was turned into state land. At that time, several thousand Ottoman Jews were living in Palestine.

Operation Rothschild

In 1881, the Jews who faced the pogrom in Russia wanted to immigrate to Palestine en masse, and they wanted world-famous people of Jewish origin to finance it, like the Rothschild and Hirsch families. This is called aliyah in Zionist literature.

In response, Sultan Abdülhamid II issued an edict banning Jews from resettling in Palestine in April 1882. It allowed them to settle anywhere else in the empire, though no more than 150 families. He then started to buy strategic lands in Palestine through his personal treasury called the Hazine-i Hassa.

From 1882, the Rothschilds began to buy land in Palestine on behalf of others. The Rothschilds, who had international power as they lent money to all governments, wanted the refugee Russian Jews to be allowed to settle in these lands. The embassies intervened. The Ottoman government was confused as to what to do. The first Jewish colony was established in Jaffa that same year, despite not having been granted permission. By 1918, one-twentieth of Palestine’s fertile lands belonged to the Rothschilds.

The dismissed grand vizier

In 1891, when Russia increased pressure on the Jews, refugees began to settle in Palestine using unofficial and illegal methods, aided by societies in Europe. Bribing local officials and using fake passports, identity cards and title deeds were the main ways this was done. For example, Tunisians in Tunis, occupied by France in 1881, were considered citizens by the Ottoman government. Jews entered the Ottoman country using fake documents and settled in Palestine with the status of Tunisian citizens.

Some 440 Jews who applied for citizenship in an attempt to settle in the Palestinian town of Safed were turned down on the basis that the Ottoman state was not to be resided in by those deported by the Europeans. Many edicts were issued one after another, drawing the attention of the provinces, and the negligent officials were ordered to be punished. Ottoman archives are full of correspondence on this subject.

Red Permit

Despite this, Jewish immigration to Palestine could not be prevented. Believing he could not prevent it, Grand Vizier Cevad Pasha came to an agreement with the Rothschilds and turned a blind eye to the settlements in exchange for a promise to not bring in more refugees. Subsequently, the sultan dismissed the grand vizier in 1894 and exiled him to Damascus where he remained until his death. In addition, two governors and some civil servants were dismissed and punished.

In 1900, conditions for entry to the holy land were introduced. Accordingly, every Jewish individual visiting Palestine was required to carry a letter or passport to show their occupation, nationality and reason for visiting. This “Red Permit” carried by Jews was checked and recorded by the official authorities when they arrived in Palestine. They were then deported after the 30-day period expired.

The Ottoman government also made an effort to prevent the local Jewish population from being influenced by the Zionists. Not all Jewish people were Zionists. It was important not to disturb the Jews who opted to live a more simple life and not engage in political issues. This required a delicate balance.

Herzl and his attractive offer

Meanwhile, Theodor Herzl from Budapest, the leader of the Zionist movement, wanted to meet with Sultan Abdülhamid II. When his request was declined, he made an offer in May 1901 through his Polish friend Phillip Newlinsky, who was also acquainted with the sultan. In return for opening Palestine to Jewish immigration and the establishment of an autonomous Jewish homeland, Ottoman foreign debts would be paid and propaganda in the sultan’s favor would be circulated to sway European public opinion.

The sultan refused this offer. Herzl was unable to make the agreement, and he repeated the offer the following year. Fearing what happened to the autonomous Ottoman province of Egypt due to debt, the sultan welcomes Herzl’s consolidation offer, viewing him as an intermediary in the matter. However, Herzl’s idea was the acceptance of the colonization proposal. (Britain invaded Egypt in 1882 on the pretext of not paying the debts taken for the construction of the Suez Canal.)

Struggle for virtue

The claim that the government allowed the Rothschilds to borrow money and buy a place in Palestine in return is a complete fabrication. The unpaid debts to foreign bankers, including the Rothschilds, for the financing of the 1854 Crimean War were restructured during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II. There was no need for him to engage in such acts for the sake of borrowing anyway. By establishing the Duyun-i Umumiye administration, he got the foreign debts under control and increased the credibility of the state. The small-scale foreign borrowing during his reign was also spent on high-cost zoning activities.

Those who believe the imaginary statement repeated by conservatives that Sultan Hamid lost his throne for not giving away Palestinian land are mistaken. It is possible that the

Ottoman government was unable to prevent the process because it at times acted incorrectly or was incapable. But it is absurd to claim that the Ottoman government condoned it in return for a loan.

If it were true, he would have agreed with the Rothschilds or Herzl and retained his throne. Moreover, the sultan prioritized preserving his throne over debt. But the Ottoman sultans’ mission was a struggle for virtue. In a letter written in 1913, he wrote to Mahmud Efendi, saying the main reason he lost his throne was for not agreeing to the demands.

Things getting out of control

The Young Turks, who dethroned Sultan Abdülhamid II and seized power, first nationalized the treasury lands belonging to the sultan. To please the Zionists who supported them, they allowed Jewish immigration to Palestine.

Even though they realized the gravity of the incident immediately after and banned the sale of land to foreigners in Palestine, things were already out of control. Between 1908 and 1914, the Jews bought 50,000 acres of land and established 10 colonies. In 1913, the Rothschilds bought the treasury lands.

According to the Ottoman censuses, the number of Jewish people living in Palestine was 9,500 in 1881, 12,500 in 1896, 14,200 in 1906 and 31,000 in 1914. In 1917, the Zionists came to an agreement with the British foreign minister, Arthur Balfour. Britain, which was greedy for Jewish capital, promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration. When the Syrian front collapsed, Palestine was occupied by British forces.

A grave mistake!

During the British Mandate of Palestine, Jewish immigration increased steadily despite obstacles. Nazi repression also fueled this migration. The Jews in Palestine could now own land as they pleased, by restoring unclaimed land but also by purchasing it from the government or individuals.

The Arabs were forced to sell their lands after being put in a difficult situation economically. For example, ships loaded with wheat that docked at the port at harvest time caused the price of wheat to fall. When this incident happened again the following year, the peasant, who mortgaged his land the year before, was then forced to sell his land.

During the Ottoman period, the villagers used tactics in order to pay lower taxes, such as registering the land under another person’s name or providing an underestimation of the area. These lands also passed into the hands of the Jews through purchase. By 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population was Jewish and more than half of the land belonged to them.

Jewish gangs compelled the British to evacuate the district with their terrorist acts. Deceived Britain declared in 1939 that the Balfour Declaration had been a grave mistake.

END

”Although he remained separate from the Zionist movement, and “rejected institutional and ideological Zionism,” The Baron Rothschild became an avid supporter of Jewish settlement in Palestine financing the site at Rishon LeZion.^[6] In his goal for the establishment of Palestine as a home for Jewish settlement, he promoted industrialization and economic development. In 1924, he established the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA), which acquired more than 125,000 acres (50,586 ha) of land and set up business ventures.”

WIKIPEDIA

EDMOND JAMES DE ROTSCHILD/ZIONISM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_James_de_Rothschild#Zionism

ORIGINAL SOURCE

WIKIPEDIA

EDMOND JAMES DE ROTSCHILD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_James_de_Rothschild