The Obama administration criticized Israel Wednesday for designating two Jewish holy sites supposedly on Palestinian territory as Israel national heritage sites but the dumb bastards in the Obama administration seem to forget that Rachel’s Tomb and the Tomb of the Patriarchs are indigenous to the Jewish people and were there thousands of years before the fabricated “Palestinians” fraudulently claimed the territory to be theirs.

“Hebron” is Jewish. It’s a Biblical town.  It is Israel’s most ancient city, resting place of  Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah, site of the anointment of King David and the tombs of Jesse, his father, and Ruth, and until 1929, when Arabs slaughtered 67 innocent Jews while praying in their synagogue, had a significant Jewish population.

Those 67 Jews were slaughtered for no other reason other than that they were Jews and mind you, that was 38 years before the “occupation”.

For Muslims and their apologists in the White House, history starts anew each day especially when it favors the fabricated “poorpalestinianpeepull”.

Sad, isn’t it, that the Arabs, who control more land than any other ethnic group on the planet besides the Russians, are simply unwilling to share even the tiniest sliver of the Middle East with the Jews.

Equally sad, is the United States telling Israel, a sovereign and legitimate nation, what it can or cannot do within its own borders.

Jordan, like all Arab nations that thrive on Muslim identity politics, wants to erase every shred of proof that Jews have an historical right to all the land in Israel, including the West Bank, Gaza and a little bit of the east side of the Jordan River. Via The Globe and Mail:

Jordan has asked Canada to seize the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea scrolls, on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. While confirming that Canada has received a message from Jordan, a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade said Thursday that “differences regarding ownership of the Dead Sea scrolls should be addressed by Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. It would not be appropriate for Canada to intervene as a third party.” The ancient Hebrew scrolls, discovered in 1947, were part of one of the greatest archeological discoveries of the 20th century. The scrolls had been hidden in caves to hide them from the Romans. Israel argues that all the scrolls in its possession are part of the Jewish heritage.

For more critical evidence that negates the claim that the Arabs in the Land of Israel have been there “from time immemorial”, see this, this, this and this.

he Mount of Olives in Jerusalem: Why Continued Israeli Control Is Vital

Nadav Shragai

Read the Entire Article

• The Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, that the Palestinians demand to transfer to their control, is the most important Jewish cemetery in the world. The area has constituted a religious and national pantheon for the Jewish people and the State of Israel, containing the tombs of the illustrious dead of the nation over the course of 3,000 years and serving as a site for Jewish gathering and prayer at the time of the ancient Temple and even prior to it.

• Under Jordanian rule, Jewish access and the continued burial of Jews on the mount was prohibited, despite Jordan’s explicit commitment in the Israeli-Jordanian Armistice Agreement of 1949. During the period of Jordanian rule, the cemetery was destroyed and desecrated, and 38,000 of its tombstones and graves were smashed to smithereens.

• Since Jerusalem’s reunification, burial ceremonies were renewed at the site and large sections of the cemetery were rehabilitated. Nevertheless, attempts by Palestinians to damage the cemetery have never totally abated, and there have been periodic attacks on Jewish mourners escorting their dead for burial.

• Previous Israeli governments that consented to discuss arrangements in Jerusalem with the Palestinians rejected their demand to transfer the Mount of Olives to PA sovereignty and control. Nevertheless, those governments were prepared to give their assent to the transfer of neighborhoods that control the access routes to the mount. Should any such agreement be implemented in the future, it could endanger freedom of access to the site and continued Jewish burial there.

• In any future arrangements, in order to allow continued Jewish burial on the mount, Israel must guarantee freedom of access to the site by controlling the arteries leading to it, as well as the areas adjacent to it. On the previous occasions that Israel transferred areas that included Jewish holy sites to Palestinian control, the Palestinians severely encumbered or refused to allow Jewish access to these places. Sometimes these sites were even severely damaged.

*Nadav Shragai is the author of Jerusalem: The Dangers of Division – An Alternative to Separation from the Arab Neighborhoods (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2008); At the Crossroads, the Story of the Tomb of Rachel (Jerusalem Studies, 2005); and The Mount of Contention, the Struggle for the Temple Mount, Jews and Muslims, Religion and Politics since 1967 (Keter, 1995). He has been writing for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz since 1983.

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 JCPA:

• The E-1 area is a part of the Israeli city of Maale Adumim, located immediately adjacent to Jerusalem.
  

• The main threat to Israel’s future contiguity comes from encroachments on E-1 made by illegal Palestinian construction. Israeli and Palestinian construction in the West Bank has been governed by the legal terms of the Oslo II Interim Agreement from September 28, 1995. The area around E-1 is within Area C, where, according to Oslo II, Israel retained the powers of zoning and planning.
  

• As a result, much of the recently completed Palestinian construction there is illegal.
  

• In contrast, none of the Oslo Agreements prohibited Israeli settlement activity, though Israel undertook unilateral limitations upon itself in this area in recent years.

• Contrary to reports, the completion of E-1 would not cut the West Bank in half and undermine Palestinian contiguity. Israel has planned a new road that would allow Palestinian traffic coming from the south to pass eastward of Maale Adumim and continue northward to connect with the cities in the northern West Bank. This Palestinian bypass road would actually reduce the time for Palestinian drivers traveling in a north-south direction who would encounter no Israeli roadblocks.

• Israeli construction of E-1 will not undermine Palestinian contiguity, but were Israel to lose control of E-1, the contiguity of Israel would be severely compromised.

*Nadav Shragai is the author of Jerusalem: The Dangers of Division – An Alternative to Separation from the Arab Neighborhoods (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2008); At the Crossroads, the Story of the Tomb of RachelThe Mount of Contention, the Struggle for the Temple Mount, Jews and Muslims, Religion and Politics since 1967 (Keter, 1995). He has been writing for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz since 1983. (Jerusalem Studies, 2005); and

To view the full article, Click here.

Muslims are giddy over a two-state solution. Via MEMRI:

PLO Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki told ANB TV on May 7:

“Even Ahmadinejad, leader of the rejectionists throughout the region, said he supports a two-state solution….With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status….If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.”

Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, engineered the “Black September” Terror Attack during the Munich Olympics, which killed 11 Israeli athletes and a U.S. citizen.  Like the filthy Arafat before him, Abbas/Mazen congratulated Hizbullah and all the resistance forces on their “victory” over Israel and on the return of “the heroes of freedom, the prisoners and the martyrs [to Lebanon].

Too bad the “international community” decided not only to meet Mahmoud Abbas’ request for $5.6 billion in aid, but to throw in almost $2 billion more. Why? Did the PA end its Jew-hating blood-lust terrorist ways?

No.

The US government has been pushing very hard to give Mahmoud Abbas’s Al Fatah its own state, carved out of the Jewish state. Al Fatah (also known as ‘the PLO’) was trained in the 1950s by CIA-sponsored German Nazis.

Hamas TV has aired a short videotape that seems to show Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas telling a security chief to “slaughter” Hamas’ men.

The snippet shows Abbas at a photo opportunity, shaking the hand of a man in uniform. Apparently confident that the audio would never be aired, Abbas asks him “are you the commander of the operational force?” and the man answers in the affirmative. Abbas then says one word forcefully: “itbakh!” – which is Arabic for the imperative “slaughter.”

Mahmoud Abbas/Abu Mazen yearns for death. The Muslim yearning for death is not limited to Hamas and has been inculcated primarily by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah organization.  Via NY Times:

PA leader Mahmoud Abbas on Monday dismissed a demand by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Palestinian negotiators have long refused to recognize Israel’s Jewish character. In an attempt to bolster the Palestinian argument, Saeb Erekat, a senior Abbas aide and veteran negotiator, on Monday produced a copy of a letter signed by President Harry S Truman on May 14, 1948.

In its original form, it recognizes the provisional government of the new Jewish state, but the typed words “Jewish state” in the second paragraph have been crossed out and replaced with the handwritten “State of Israel.”

Shlomo Avineri, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said Erekat was misinterpreting the American president’s intention. The Truman letter had been prepared hours before Israel declared its independence, before the new country had chosen its name. It was later corrected by a Truman adviser, Clark M. Clifford, after the declaration of independence in order to call the country by its name, not to deny its Jewish character.

If Jews were to even consider inflicting one-tenth of this horror on a tomb of an Arab sheik, the entire world would get up on its hind legs and protest. Once again, we have here another example of Muslim hubris and outrageous international double-standards for “thepoorpalestinianpeepull”. Via YnetNews:

Hundreds of Jewish worshipers who arrived at Joseph’s Tomb in the West Bank city of Nablus overnight were stunned to find the compound severely vandalized – yet again.

Israel pulled its forces out of the compound in October 2000. The IDF disallowed Jewish worshippers from entering it for a long period of time due to security concerns; and deserted, it has been burnt down and defaced many times.

December of 2008 saw Joseph Tomb’s restored and the military began allowing worshippers to visit it once more, but always at night and under heavy military guard, for their own safety.

Wednesday night’s visit was approved by the proper military authorities and the IDF provided the worshippers with an escort.

Boot prints in the concrete (Photo courtesy of the Shomron Regional Council)

The group which entered the compound was made up of some 500 people. Upon entering the tomb they found it had been defaced – the headstone smashed and swastikas sprayed on the walls, as well as graffiti of a blood-dripping sward over a Star of David, and another “trampled” by a boot.

Some reported seeing visible boot prints all over the compounds, which they claim are consistent with the Palestinian police standard issue boots.

‘We are to blame’

“Woe to the nation that allows its sacred places to be vandalized like this over and over again,” said Gershon Mesika, head of the Shomron Regional Council, who was among the visitors.

“Only barbarians could do such things. People who pathologically disgrace such a holy place don’t deserve to be called human beings,” he added. “The Palestinian police terrorists have long since lost all shred of humanity. The State of Israel must return to Joseph’s Tomb, as even the horrible Oslo Accords state.”

The Shoulder to Shoulder group, which facilitates worshippers who wish to take part in services held in Joseph’s Tomb called the situation “outrageous,” adding that “on many a visit to the tombs of the just throughout Samaria we find them desecrated. This situation is unacceptable and must be rectified.”

Yossi Dagan, of Homesh First, added that “if Jews were to even to consider inflicting one-tenth of this horror on a tomb of an Arab sheik, the entire world would get up on its hind legs and protest. What’s absurd is that we are to blame, since even the Oslo Accords place the tomb under our responsibility.”

“Ma’arat HaMachpela,” the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, is the second holiest site to Jews in the world. The site was off-limits to Jews and Christians for 700 years – from 1267-1967.  Jews were prevented from praying at the tombs despite its sanctity to Jews, and despite the fact that the building above the caves was built by Herod some 2,000 years ago, six hundred years prior to Muhammad’s birth.

Since Israel’s return to Hebron in 1967 the site has been accessible to all people of all faiths. However, Muslims refuse to accept freedom of worship, claim that it’s a mosque and declare that should they ever again control the site, it will be off-limits to anyone not Muslim. (Neither the site, nor the city of Hebron is mentioned anywhere in the Koran.)

Under the terms of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is obligated to safeguard holy sites and ensure free access to them.

For reasons unknown to me, Jews opened up the Ma’arat HaMachpela to Arabs several years ago so that they can pray there 10 days a year for their Ramadan.

While the Ma’arat HaMachpela, burial place of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs was closed to Jews for Ramadan, Muslim worshippers used the oppurtunity to desecrate the holy site. Hamas flags and puddles of urine were found near the Torahs inside. While these detestable acts were being perpetrated by Muslims, the godless Arab-loving mainstream media never reported it. Here is a video of the desecration:

Under the terms of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is obligated to safeguard holy sites and ensure free access to them. According to Annex III, Appendix I, Article 32 of the 28 September 1995 Oslo 2 accord:

“2. Both sides shall respect and protect the listed below religious rights of Jews, Christians, Moslems and Samaritans:

a. protection of the Holy Sites;
b. free access to the Holy Sites; and
c. freedom of worship and practice.”

Here is a partial list of assaults on Jewish Holy Sites by Muslim Arabs:

1) Abraham’s Oak Russian Monastery – located in the Palestinian-controlled part of Hebron, the monastery belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. On July 5, 1997, Palestinian policemen arrived at the monastery and ordered the monks and nuns to vacate the premises. The PA officers physically removed all of the monks and nuns, and took over the site.

2) Rachel’s Tomb – The Tomb, located on the outskirts of Bethlehem, is the burial site of the Biblical matriarch Rachel and is under Israeli control. During the September 1996 riots, the PA orchestrated riots near the Tomb in which a Palestinian mob assaulted the site and hurled rocks and firebombs at it, causing damage to the outer part of the structure. Palestinian policemen on the scene shot and wounded Israeli soldiers guarding the Tomb.

3) Joseph’s Tomb – During the September 1996 riots, a Palestinian mob led by Palestinian policemen assaulted the Tomb. Palestinian security agents opened fire on Israeli troops at the site, killing 6 Israeli soldiers. After the Israeli forces temporarily withdrew, the Palestinian mob entered the site and set fire to it. They burned the Jewish prayer books, Bibles and religious articles inside the structure and caused extensive damage.

Here is a partial list of Muslim Arab disparagement of Jewish Holy Sites

* “If the Jews really want peace, they must absolutely forget about having any rights over the Temple Mount or Al-Aksa Mosque… the Western Wall also belongs to Moslems, and was given to the Jews as a place of prayer only because the British asked and the Moslems agreed
out of the goodness of their hearts. The Western Wall is just a fence belonging to a Moslem holy site.”

— Sheikh Ikrama Sabri, the official PA Mufti (senior Muslim cleric) who was appointed to his position by Yasser Arafat, in an interview with the Israeli weekly Makor Rishon, May 22, 1998. [Note: PA Chairman Yasser Arafat has made similar claims in the past. Arafat said, "That is not the Western Wall at all, but a Moslem shrine." (Ma'ariv, 11 October 1996)].

* “Any extremist who enters the Temple Mount compound will not leave it alive.”

— Hatam Abdel Kader, member of the PA’s Legislative Council, in an interview with the official PA radio station the Voice of Palestine, when asked about the possibility of Jews praying on the Temple Mount. (Voice of Palestine, 24 May 1998).

* “The archeology of Jerusalem is diverse – excavations in the Old City and the areas surrounding it revealed Umayyad Islamic palaces, Roman ruins, Armenian ruins and others, but nothing Jewish. Outside of what is mentioned/ written in the Old and New Testaments, there is no tangible evidence of any Jewish traces/ remains in the old city of Jerusalem and its immediate vicinity.”

— PA Information Ministry Press Release, 10 December 1997.

* “Be alert and treat Joseph’s Tomb and Rachel’s Tomb as parcels of Palestinian land which must be liberated, and treat Joseph and Rachel as two people who died, like anyone else.”

— excerpt from an article in the official PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda, 1 December 1997, concerning Jewish holy sites in Nablus and Bethlehem.

* “The ‘Al-Buraq’ Wall [the Western Wall] is a part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Jews have no relation to it, whether or not a decision to expropriate it was made.”

— PA Mufti Ikrama Sabri in the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam, 22 November 1997.

Click here to read further about Jewish Holy sites desecrated by Muslims.

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”