Critical evidence negating the claim that the Arabs in the Land of Israel had been there “from time immemorial.”  Via IsraelNN.com:

Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas says the Arabs of the Galilee city of Tzfat left in 1948 not because they were driven out, but on their own volition.

Many biographies of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas imply that his family became “refugees” because of the War of Independence in 1948. For instance, a BBC profile on Abbas when he succeeded Yasser Arafat as PLO chairman in 2005 writes, “In the light of his origins in Safed in Galilee – in what is now northern Israel – he is said to hold strong views about the right of return of Palestinian refugees.” Answers.com states, “As a result of the Arab-Israel War of 1948, he became a refugee.” Wikipedia articles on the topic say the same – all giving the impression that the Abbas family was driven out and became homeless.
It is notable that the Abbas family moved back to Damascus, as that is likely the place where it had originated less than 90 years earlier.

However, Abbas himself – co-founder of Fatah with Arafat, and known as Abu Mazen – now tells a different story. Speaking with Al-Palestinia TV on Monday, Abbas admitted that his family was not expelled or driven out, but rather left for fear that the Jews might take revenge for the slaughter of 20 Jews in the city during the Arab pogroms of 19 years earlier.

In the words of Abbas (engineer of the “Black September” terror attack during the Munich Olympics, which killed 11 Israeli athletes and a U.S. citizen on September 4, 1972)

“I am among those who were born in the city of Tzfat (Safed). We were a family of means. I studied in elementary school, and then came the naqba [calamity, namely, the founding of the State of Israel – ed.]. At night, we left by foot from Tzfat, to the Jordan River, where we remained for a month. Then we went to Damascus, and then to our relatives in Jordan, and then we settled in Damascus.

“My father had money, and he spent his money systematically, and after a year, the money ran out and we began to work.

“The people’s basic motives brought them to run away for their lives and with their property. These [motives] were very important, for they feared the violence of the Zionist terrorist organizations – and especially those of us from Tzfat felt that there was an old desire for revenge from the rebellion of 1929, and this was in the memory of our families and parents.”

The “rebellion” Abbas referred to was a series of brutal Arab attacks on Jewish towns in the summer of 1929. Nearly 70 Jews were slaughtered in their homes in Hevron, 20 in Tzfat, 17 in Jerusalem, and others were murdered in Motza, Kfar Uriah and Tel Aviv.

Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, the current Palestinian Authority chairman, was also behind the Maalot High School Massacre in which 26 Israeli school children were killed and 66 were wounded, not including the immoral palestinian Muslim terrorists. This slaughter was planned by Mahmoud Abbas, the current “moderate” head of the PLO.

Here is a PowerPoint Presentation on Mahmood Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, via Israel Behind the News. (You will need to have a PowerPoint Player to view this). The 22 slain youths are referred to as the “22 Flowers”. They are buried together in a special enclave in the Safed Beit Olam.

Via I*Consult:

Parts of the Etzion Bloc, on the road from Jerusalem to Hebron, were purchased by Jews 20 years before the State of Israel was declared in 1948.

When Arab militias attacked Jewish communities throughout the region in 1947 and 1948, the Haganah dispatched soldiers to hold the Etzion Bloc, a key position on the southern approaches to Jerusalem.

Five months of siege and attacks against the Jews of the Etzion Bloc ended with the massacre of 250 Jewish defenders on May 13, 1948.

After Israel captured the West Bank in June 1967, the children of the Etzion Bloc’s defenders returned.

Today, the Etzion Bloc is one of the “major population centers” in the West Bank cited by then-President George Bush in a letter to Ariel Sharon in 2004 that would remain under Israeli control after a peace agreement.

Hat tip to Ocean Guy for a comprehensive account of British perfidy in 1948:

According to the editor of Emperor’s Clothes, in 1948 the Arab armies fought for genocide, not National Liberation, and it was not the Jews but Arab leaders who were agents of imperial Britain. It certainly suggests that their protégés are not fighting for National Liberation today.

The memorandum from the May 8, 1948 issue of The Nation contradicts widely held views about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, including those put forward in today’s Nation magazine.

Just for starters, the memorandum proves the falsity of the common perception that the creation of Israel was a project of Western colonialism. The Nation shows that during the half year prior to the all-out Arab invasion on 15 May, Britain incited, micro-managed and did public relations work for a campaign of Arab troop infiltration and terror. And this at a time when Britain was responsible for security in its Palestine Mandate territory.

The intelligence documents cited below show that before the 15 May invasion, British intelligence knew that the Arabs terrorizing the future Israel were being led in part by Nazi advisers. These included Bosnian Muslims from the infamous Handzar Division of the Waffen SS. According to a French intelligence document published by The Nation seven months later, the British sent thousands of Nazi prisoners of war, including top war criminals, to assist the Arab attack.

Click on May 8, 1948 issue of The Nation and discover the roots of pernicious British hatred for anything Jewish.

What happened in 1967 that caused Israel’s borders to change? Did Israel just decide they wanted more land?

No.  Israel was attacked by warring Arab Muslim nations.

But before we discuss 1967, let’s roll back the clock to the year 1917. 1917 is the year Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration which stated that the British government favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. . . .”

As you may already know, Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for 400 years before the British came along in 1917. At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire and other imperial powers agreed to surrender their colonies. In 1919, Emir Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein who led the Arab revolt against Turkey, signed a declaration in support of the Balfour Declaration, even supporting all necessary measures “…to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale, and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil.”

As a result, Great Britain issued the British White Paper of June 1922, agreeing to give Arabs almost 80% of Palestine, which was severed from the rest of the colony and called Transjordan (later re-named Jordan). All of the land given to Arabs was to the east of the River Jordan. Then came The Palestine Mandate. It is from this time that the Arabs living in this area get the name Palestinians. Of course, at that time the Jews living in the region of the Palestine Mandate were called Palestinians too.

In August of 1929, due to the instigation of Muslim clerics in the mosques, a series of riots broke out in which many Jews were massacred. In the Jewish Holy City of Hebron, 67 innocent men, women and children were slaughtered by Arabs while praying in their synagogue. The 1930s saw more rioting and more massacres, especially in Jaffa and again in Hebron. In response, the British convened the Peel Commission which almost totally did away with the Balfour Declaration that had originally promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine on both sides of the River Jordan.

In July of 1937, the Peel Commission issued a report that gave Jews only a tiny, 1-3 mile strip of land that could not possibly become the Jewish National Home because it was far too small and included only one major city – Haifa, but not Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, etc. It also included a small piece in the north abutting the west side of the Lake Kineret (“Sea of Galilee”). Such actions went totally against Article 5 of the Mandate which explicitly state that the British shall not divide the land.

This was an example of British perfidy at its worst. The Brits betrayed their legal document, their legal contract, with the Palestinian Jews.

The Arabs greeted the Peel Commission recommendation with a revolt which lasted until 1939. In 1939, Britain issued the White Paper of 1939 almost shutting down Jewish immigration, thus violating the League of Nations Mandate which calls on the Brits to promote Jewish immigration. The White Paper of 1939 also stated that Palestine shall not become a Jewish National Home and instead should be converted into an Arab state. From a legal point of view, UN resolutions were not needed to establish a Jewish state in Palestine because such state could be legally based on the League’s Mandate.

And that’s when on November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 181 recommending division of the land given to Jews under the Mandate. Great Britain did not support the resolution. From a political and practical point of view, the 1947 U.N. partition plan served as reason for the legal declaration of a Jewish State.

However, the 1967 lines are not a border. After the 1947- 48 war, the Arabs refused to recognize Israel, and insisted the boundaries were only ceasefire lines, and this remained their legal status. The eastern borders of Israel are yet to be decided. Moreover, UN Resolution 242, the foundation stone of Arab-Israeli negotiations, explicitly avoided requiring an Israeli retreat to the 1967 lines, its drafters believing those were indefensible.

Resolution 242 calls for the recognition of Israel’s right to exist, an end to the state of war maintained by the Arab world against Israel and secure and recognized boundaries for Israel. 242 does NOT require Israel to return to the non-secure borders of pre-1967.

What does 242 say?

“Termination of all claims or states of belligerency… ”
“…respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every State in the area… ”
“…[every State's] right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”
“Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories in the recent conflict.”

What does 242 mean?

- The Arab states must end the state of war initiated and maintained by them since 1948.
- The Arab states must recognize Israel’s right to exist.
- Israel is entitled to clearly defensible borders.

This is not a privilege, but rather a right guaranteed by international law.

- Israel should withdraw from some, not all, of the territories captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.
- Israel’s indefensible pre-1967 borders provided no security.
- The Arab states should sit down with Israel, without preconditions, to negotiate peace.

A few days before the UNSC vote on 242, President Johnson summoned UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg and Undersecretary Eugene Rostow to formulate the US position on the issue of ’secure boundaries’ for Israel. They were presented with the Pentagon Map, which had been prepared by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle Wheeler. The map displayed the “minimum territory needed by Israel for defensive purposes,” which included the entire Golan Heights and the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria. The participants of the meeting agreed that the Pentagon Map fulfilled the requirements of 242 for ’secure borders.’ (Prof. Ezra Sohar, A Concubine in the Middle East, Geffen Publishing, p. 39; Makor Rishon weekly, March 10, 2000).

242 does not refer at all the 1949/1967 Lines;
242 mandates negotiation – give and take, rather than give and give;
242 never refers to withdrawal from ALL the territories, which would negate the principle of negotiation;

242 calls for the introduction of a NEW reality of ’secure and recognized borders’, which indicates that the OLD reality of the 1949/1967 Lines is neither secure nor recognized.

The reality is that if Israel is to protect itself, it must achieve a comprehensive military victory over the Palestinians, so that the latter give up their goal of obliterating it.

Not one of the land suggestions addresses the real problem: the Palestinians’ conviction that, by continuing to hammer away at Israel, they can defeat and destroy it. Every piece of evidence suggests and every opinion poll confirms that the Palestinian assault on Israel is a wildly popular undertaking.

Ending the Palestinian assault will be achieved not through some negotiated breakthrough but by Palestinians (and Arabic-speakers more generally) concluding that their effort to destroy the Jewish state will fail, and so give up this ambition. There is a war under way, but nearly all prefer to ignore this unpleasant reality, preferring instead to suggest meaningless fixes and solutions.

Let’s not leave out the San Remo Resolution. The last legally binding document to be adopted regarding the areas of Israel in question remains the 1920 San Remo resolution, which deeds full sovereignty to the Jewish people. This resolution, consisting of the Balfour Declaration and Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, is the basic document upon which the Mandate for Palestine was constructed. The San Remo Resolution concerning Palestine and the Jewish National Home was adopted at the San Remo Peace Conference on April 25, 1920 by the four Principal Allied Powers of World War I who were represented by the Prime Ministers of Britain (David Lloyd George), France (Alexandre Millerand) and Italy (Francesco Nitti) and by the Ambassador of Japan (K. Matsui).

The Resolution was a binding agreement between these Powers to reconstitute the ancient Jewish State within its historic borders “from Dan to Beersheba”, an agreement that was incorporated into the Treaty of Sevres and the Mandate for Palestine.

But it really is futile to have a discussion about a “legalized framework” when a “legalized framework” was already in place with document after document after document that I cited above.

The Arabs have deceived the world for decades with their mendacious protests that their land has been “stolen” from them. One might take such proclamations seriously if it came from a pacifist people such as the Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by the Communist Chinese in 1950.

The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic; who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964—sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel and three years before the Six Day War in 1967; and who to this moment continue to seek Israel’s destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the creation of the manufactured entity of “palestine”, the Arab state they demand.

The only religious argument that makes sense is to point out how so many Jewish holy places exist in Israel. It’s hardly irrational that Jews should want to live near the Wailing Wall or other sites of great importance in Jewish history and Jewish religion, particularly given how poorly Muslims have treated such sites.

The fact is that the West Bank and Gaza were annexed by Jordan and Egypt fifty years ago with no Arab complaints. Israel has absorbed a million Jewish refugees from Arab lands and the Soviet Union with no complaints. The 3.7 million seething refugees who live abject poverty on the West Bank, and who have received more than a billion dollars in aid from Israel and the rest of the world are refugees only because the Arab states themselves have rejected them and kept them in poverty so they can be cannon fodder for the holy war to push the Jews into the sea. The “Palestinian problem,” is entirely a creation of the Arabs themselves, a product of their refusal to live side by side with any infidels they think they can destroy. If they want peace, they can start with rejecting the Hamas Covenant and the Palestinian National Charter, the only document that I know of where a state defines its national vision by calling for the destruction of another state.

I don’t believe in a two-state solution at all, and a one-state solution with the “law of return” will turn the entire nation of Israel into a land where only Arabs may live – with the goal to supplant Israel – not to live side by side with it. Therefore, there is no solution.

Bibliography: Moshe Auman, author of “Land Ownership in Palestine”, and Mitchell Bard:

The question of land ownership in Israel – or before 1948, Palestine – has been the subject of much discussion. What is the status of the land on which, from the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish settlements – kibbutzim, moshavim, villages, and cities – were established?

For decades, Arab propaganda has been reiterating the claim that, legally and ethically, the Arabs are the true owners of the land and that the portion actually belonging to the Jews is minute.

The Arab claim rests on two premises:

(1) At the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Palestinian Arabs were living and cultivating their lands in peace and security, until the European Jewish immigrants drove them from their territory, creating a large class of landless and dispossessed Arabs;

(2) In 1948 a small Jewish minority, which owned only 5% of the territory of the country, took over the 95% that belonged to the Arabs, and, illegally and immorally, established the State on that territory.

It is necessary at this point to examine the state of the land and its inhabitants during the period of Turkish rule. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – long before the beginning of modern Jewish settlement and Jewish acquisition of land – the population of the country was minuscule and continually decreasing. In 1738, the land was described by the English archeologist Thomas Shaw as “lacking in people to till its fertile soil” (Travels and Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant). The French historian Conte Constantine Francois Volney writes:

“The peasants are incessantly making inroads on each other’s lands, destroying their corn, durra, sesame and olive-trees, and carrying off their sheep, goats and camels. The Turks, who are everywhere negligent in repressing similar disorders, are attentive to them here, since their authority is very precarious. The Bedouin, whose camps occupy the level country, are continually at open hostilities with them, of which the peasants avail themselves to resist their authority or do mischief to each other, according to the blind caprice of their ignorance or the interest of the moment. Hence arises an anarchy which is still more dreadful than the despotism that prevails elsewhere, while the mutual the contending parties renders the appearance of devastation of this part of Syria more wretched than that of any other.” (Travels Through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, and 1785)

There were, in addition to the local disputes, actual wars. In the beginning of the nineteenth century Napoleon’s armies invaded the land; in 1831 it was conquered by the Egyptians, and nine years later again by the Turks. All these – in addition to the internal fighting – created in the country a climate of insecurity, which led to a sharp decline in its physical state and to the emigration of its inhabitants, who left in search of better living conditions elsewhere. Many of those who nevertheless stayed and continued to work their land were forced to relinquish ownership of it and find refuge with people of means or with the Muslim religious endowment fund (“the wakf”). A situation was created, then, in which the true owners of the lands did not reside on them, but leased them to others while they themselves spent their lives in such distant places as Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo.

H. B. Tristram, who wrote of his travels in the Holy Land in his 1865 book The Land of Israel.- A Journal of Travels in Palestine, presents a revealing description of the living conditions in the Land of Israel as he found them in the middle of the nineteenth century:

“A few years ago, the whole Ghor (Jordan Valley) was in the hands of the fellahin and much of it cultivated for corn. Now the whole of it is in the hands of the Bedouin, who eschew all agriculture except in a few spots cultivated here and there by their slaves; and with the Bedouin come lawlessness and the uprooting of all Turkish authority. No government is now acknowledged on the east side; and unless the Porte acts with greater firmness and caution than is his wont… Palestine will be desolated and given up to the nomads.”

Alexander Keith, recalling Volney’s 1785 description (quoted above) fifty years later, commented:

“In his day [Volney's] the land had not fully reached its last degree of desolation and depopulation.” (The Land of Israel).

Other travelers and pilgrims recorded similar reports of the dreary state of the Land around the middle of the nineteenth century. Here are just a few examples:

Alphonse de Lamartine, in 1835:

“…a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways, in the country … the tomb of a whole people” (Recollections of the East, Vol. I, p. 308).

A contemporary German encyclopedia (Brockhaus, “Allegmeine deutsche Real- Encyklopaidie”, Vol. VIII, p. 206, Leipzig, 1827) calls Palestine

“desolate and roamed through by Arab robber-bands.”

In 1849, the American W. F. Lynch described the desertion of Palestinian villages

“caused by the frequent forays of the wandering Bedouin” (Narrative of the United States Expedition to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea, p. 489).

And again H. B. Tristram, in 1865:

“… both in the north and south (of the Sharon plain), land is going out of cultivvation, and whole villages ar rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages have been thus erased from the map (by the Bedouin) and the stationary population extirpated” (p. 490).

Better known in this context, perhaps, are the words of the American author Mark Twain, who records personal impressions of a visit to the Holy Land in 1867. His account abounds in descriptions such as these:

“Desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds – a silent mournful expanse … We reached Tabor safely … We never saw a human being on the whole route” (p. 451, 480); “There is not a solitary village throughout its (the Jezreel Valley’s) whole extent – not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings” (p. 448); “Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren … the valleys are unsightly deserts… It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land… Palestine is desolate and unlovely… Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition – it is dreamland” (pp. 564, 567).

Referring to the same era, the Christian historian James Parkes writes in Whose Land?:

“Peasant and Bedouin alike have contributed to the ruin of the countryside on which both depend for a livelihood… In spite of the immense fertility of the soil, it is probable that in the first half of the nineteenth century the population sank to the lowest level it had ever known in historic times.”

Conclusion: The propagandist myth of an “entire Palestinian people uprooted from its soil by the Zionists” is shattered against the reality of the nineteenth century: plunder and devastation, war and destruction, chaos, anarchy, a population dispersed and declining. All this occurred many years before the beginning of the Zionist settlement, while the Jewish population still resided in the “Holy Cities” of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed, long before these Jews together with Jewish immigrants from the lands of the Diaspora began purchasing land and tilling the soil.

Moreover, at the end of the nineteenth century the Jewish pioneers began to make the desert areas of the land bloom, rendering the country highly attractive to Jews and Arabs alike. It is an undisputed fact that after World War I the pattern of Arab emigration was reversed: Until that time, the number of Arabs who left the land exceeded that of those who came to live in it. Starting in the 1920s, there were more immigrants than emigrants. And where did they settle? Usually in those areas which were developed by the Jewish settlers.

What was the state of the land – its ownership and cultivation – at the end of the period of Turkish rule?

Most of the territory was concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy landlords, most of whom lived far from their property. In many cases these lands were, or seemed, unfit for agriculture, and were therefore neither settled nor cultivated. Occasional plots were worked by tenant farmers.

According to a Turkish register drawn up shortly before World War 1, there were at that time 3,130,000 dunams in the hands of 144 landlords that is, approximately 22,000 dunams average per family. In the Nablus and Tul-Karem districts, five families held a total of 157,000 dunams, of which the Husseini family owned 50,000 dunams in various parts of the country, and the Abdel-Hadi family 60,000. The largest single holding, 230,000 dunams in the Jezreel valley, was in the hands of the Sursuk family, which resided in Beirut and Cairo.

The Palestinian peasant, then, was indeed exploited and at times dispossessed, not by the Jewish settler, but rather by his fellow-Arabs: the local sheiks, the Bedouin village elders, the Turkish tax collector, the merchants and moneylenders (at interest rates as high as 60%), and if he was a tenant-farmer, as was usually the case, by the absentee landlord as well.

When considering the issue of the lands which passed from Arabs to Jews, and on which the pioneering Zionist settlement was founded, six facts should be borne in mind:

1) The land was paid for in full.

2) Most of the land purchased involved large tracts belonging to absentee landlords.

3) Most of the land acquired was uncultivated because it was swampy, sandy, or rocky, or for other reasons considered unsuitable for agriculture.

4) For this reason, the initial purchases did not involve large sums of money, but with the passage of years the price of land began to rise as Arab landowners took advantage of the growing demand for rural tracts.

5) Modern agricultural methods introduced by the Jewish pioneers, which improved the lands and increased their yield, were quickly adopted by the neighboring Arab farmers.

6) The number of farmers forced to leave their land due to the Zionist undertaking was relatively very small. All those who left were compensated in accordance with the law, either by monetary payment or by other agricultural land; and indeed most continued to be farmers. Furthermore, a large number of Arabs from other parts of the country or from neighboring countries settled in the areas developed by the Jews.

Following are some revealing statistics:

1) Out of the 429,887 dunams acquired by PICA (Palestine Jewish Colonization Association) from private landowners between 1880 and 1947, 293,545 dunams – close to 70% – were large tracts of uncultivated land, most of which belonged to absentee landlords.

2) The purchases of the Palestine Land Development Corporation included an even greater percentage of large tracts – approximately 90% (455,169 dunams out of a total of 512,979 which were purchased of private owners). If we add to this the 66,513 dunams of Beersheba desert land and the swamps of the Hula Valley, we will find that the purchases of the corporation totaled close to 580,000 dunams.

3) A third body which purchased property in Palestine was the Jewish National Fund, which leased the lands to groups or individual settlers for periods of forty-nine or ninety-nine years, in accordance with the principle that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish People, and no one has the right to hold permanent ownership of Israeli soil. In the first thirty years of its existence, the JNF acquired 270,084 dunams, of which 239,170 (close to 90%) were large tracts. This percentage dropped during subsequent years, but of the total area of 566,312 dunams purchased by individuals, at least 50% were large tracts of land which was either totally uncultivated or only superficially cultivated.

The prices paid by Jewish individuals and organizations for property in Palestine reached, during the 1930s, legendary proportions. The Palestine Royal Commission (“the Peel Commission”) of 1937 reported that in the year 1933 alone sums totaling 854,769 pounds sterling were paid; in 1934 the total reached 1,647,836 pounds sterling and in 1935, 1,699,488 pounds sterling. During those three years alone, then, the total sum paid to Arab landlords reached 4,202,180 pounds sterling, which was the equivalent of over $20 million at the time. Ten years later, in 1944, an acre (4 dunams) of good, fertile land in the State of Iowa cost $ 100, while in that same year Jews in Palestine were paying over $ 1,000 for an acre of parched soil.

The claim that the Arabs were being driven out was raised as early as the 1930s. This claim was investigated by the British, and rejected almost completely – and this at a time when British policy in Palestine was clearly moving from a pro-Zionist to a pro-Arab position.

Two official British documents from the year 1937 deal with this claim. One is the report of the Peel Commission (Chapter 9, Par. 61), which relates that during the years 1920-1939, 688 Arab tenant farmers were removed from their land as a result of purchases made by the Jews. Five hundred twenty-six of the Arab farmers remained in some agricultural occupation, and four hundred received alternative plots of land in other locations.

The second document is one of a series of memoranda prepared by the mandatory government and published in London (Colonial No. 133, p. 37). It contains the findings of the 1931 investigation of Lewis French, which totally refute the claim that the Zionist undertaking in Palestine caused the creation of “an entire landless people among the Palestinian Arabs”.

The memorandum notes that the total number of applications of registration as landless Arabs reached 3,27 1. Of these, the claims of 2,607 were rejected as not belonging to this category, and only 664 heads of families were recognized as having legitimate claims. Approximately half this number – 347 – agreed to accept the government’s offer of resettlement. The rest refused, either because they had found employment elsewhere, or because they were unaccustomed to the agricultural methods, such as irrigation, employed in the new locations, or because of other reasons. In his investigation of the hill country, where the Jewish purchases were minimal, French found that out of seventy-one Arab claims of eviction, sixty-eight were rejected (The Esco Foundation for Palestine, Inc., Vol. II, p. 716).

And finally:

What was the land ownership situation when the State of Israel -was established in 1948? According to the official data published by the outgoing British mandatory administration before the establishment of the State (Survey of Palestine, 1946), only 8.6% of the land was in fact owned by Jews, while over 70% was state land, which had passed from British to Turkish authority and now to Israel, the legal heir of the British mandate. The remaining lands – 33% belonged to Arab landowners, and 16.9% were abandoned by the Arab owners who hastened to obey the call of their leaders “to clear the way for the Arab armies which would annihilate the Jewish State”. These landowners did not consider the possibility that the Jewish State would remain.

The key to the entire problem lies in that large percentage of state land, most of which was in the Negev – an unsettled area of approximately 12,557,00 dunams, or close to 50% of the entire area (26,320,000) of mandatory Palestine. These lands had never been under Arab ownership, neither during the period of British rule nor even during the preceding Turkish regime. The contention heard time and again from Arab propagandists – that 95% of the territory of Palestine had belonged to the Arabs – is, therefore, entirely without basis in fact.

Bibliography: Moshe Auman “Land Ownership in Palestine”

On the site called Israel-Arab Conflict FAQ, there is an introduction and it reads:

“Israel has been losing the media war in regards to the Israeli-Arab conflict. This simple ‘Question and Answer’ formatted document is meant to help people argue and debase Arab and Palestinian claims.”

Question #17 on the FAQ is: What are Israel’s legal rights and title to Yehuda, Shomron and Azza?

The answer to this question outlines the (at least) triple underpinning of sovereignty Israel has in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. (In east Jerusalem, Israel has no less than a quadruple underpinning of sovereignty, since its annexation under the Jerusalem Proclamation (Extension of Municipal Boundaries) of June 28, 1967. )

Attorney Howard Grief’s original thesis is “that sovereignty over all of the Land of Israel or Palestine was vested in the Jewish People as a direct result of the adoption of the San Remo Resolution by Britain, France, Italy and Japan on April 24-25, 1920.”

The San Remo Resolution was inserted into the preamble of the Palestine Mandate and confirmed by 52 states.

This view finds support in Israeli constitutional law and the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel [See Howard Grief, "A Petition to the Supreme Court of Israel Challenging the Legality of the Oslo Accords," International Journal of Statesmanship (Foundation for Constitutional Democracy), Vol. I, No. 2, Summer 1996, Part 1, Division A, Chapter 5.].

Even though the Palestine Mandate was terminated in 1948, the rights that it gave to the Jewish people to develop “close settlement” in Yehuda, Shomron and Azza remain intact. Howard Grief explains, “Under the principle of acquired legal rights, though the international instrument upon which those rights were founded did indeed expire, the rights themselves conferred on the Jewish People remained in force. This principle of international law is now codified in Article 70(1)(b) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.”

Unlike the previous view, ignored in each of the following analyses is the interpretation of de-facto sovereignty abated during Jordan and Egypt’s occupation and reserved for the Jewish people (Cf. Alan Levine, “The Status of Sovereignty in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3, Winter 1972, p.495.):

“They include: (1) The rule that would attribute sovereign title in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza to Israel, by virtue of the fact that Israel is the state in lawful possession of territory affected by a “sovereignty vacuum” (view of E. Lauterpacht); (2) The rule that in a situation of disputed sovereignty that state is entitled that can establish the best title thereto, a rule well recognized by the International Court of Justice; (3) The rule that a state in lawful possession of territory to which no other sovereign has a supportable claim of sovereignty is entitled to take the step of formal annexation” (Julius Stone, Israel and Palestine: Assault on the Law of Nations. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1981, pp. 168-169.). The first two of these views “conclude that under international law, sovereignty is already vested in Israel” (Ibid., p. 116.).

For a comprehensive treatment of these and related issues, an excellent online resource is Israel White Paper.