The violence of the Arab Revolt starting in 1936 led Britain to set up a new Royal Commission (the Peel Commission) in to examine the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. A long term solution was needed for the political future of Palestine. The Jewish Homeland contemplated by the Mandate could develop as an independent state, a part of a federal state or within a binational territorial state. And what should be done with the Arabs, still the majority of the population? Should they be given control over the territory given their absolute denial of any national rights whatsoever to the Jews, a clear conflict with the fundamental basis of the Mandate?

In their Report of July of 1937, the Peel Commission attributed the underlying cause of the Arab revolt to the desire of the Arabs for national independence and their hatred and fear of the establishment of a National Jewish Home. The Commission recommended freezing Jewish immigration at 12,000 per year for five years and that a plan for partition of the land be developed.

With regard to partition, the Peel Commission advised that “the most strenuous effort should be made to obtain an agreement for the exchange of land and population” following Churchill’s perceptive comment that the implementation of Zionism presumed a policy of population transfer.

The Peel report suggested that in the last resort, “the exchange would be made compulsory.” The precedent cited was the Convention of Lausanne (1923), which provided, on paper, international legal sanction for the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey.

The Peel Commission recommendation for partition was rejected by the British Government and there was no further consideration of the idea of population transfer.

Sources and additional reading on this topic:

*The Peel Commission Report (July 1937)
*1936-7 - Peel Commission
*The Peel Commission Report
*History of Israel: The Palestinian Revolt, 1936-39

Article written by Palestine Facts:
http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_peel.php

Additional links were inserted by me for emphasis and clarification.

I thought that this would be a good time to repeat a previous post of mine about the history of England’s principled role in creating nations, carving up nations and occupying the Middle East:

During WWI, the entire Middle East, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire, was split into two parts. Half was controlled by France (the French Mandate), the other half by England (the British Mandate).

The French Mandate included the northern part of the Ottoman Empire. The British Mandate included the southern and eastern part of the Ottoman Empire.

It is important to keep in mind that the Ottoman Empire controlled the Middle East from the 16th to the 20th century — for some 400 years. During this time, the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc. did not exist. The residents in these areas were predominately Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire, living in loosely organized tribal communities.

The British Mandate included the landmass on the West Bank of the Jordan River all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the landmass on the East Bank of the Jordan River, an area known as Trans-Jordan. The British called this whole huge area “Palestine.”

When the British took over the land of Israel, suddenly the dream of a homeland for the Jews became a real possibility.

By this time, there were between 85,000 to 100,000 Jews living in the Land of Israel, of a total population of 600,000. (See “History of the Jews” by Paul Johnson, p. 430.) Most of the Arabs living in the land had migrated there only in the previous thirty years attracted by the jobs created by the Jews who were building and farming. (Note that when Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there.)

A big boost for a Jewish homeland came from Earl Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), then foreign secretary, who in 1917 promised British support for the cause.

Balfour became a friend of the Jewish cause in some measure because of Chaim Weizmann whose invention of artificial acetone, the chief ingredient in gunpowder, enabled the British to mass-produce gunpowder for the war effort. Balfour said that acetone converted him to Zionism.

Balfour’s support for a Jewish homeland became known in history as the Balfour Declaration which was issued in the form a letter to Lord Rothschild on November 2nd, 1917. It stated:

“His Majesty’s government looks with favor upon the establishment in Palestine of a national homeland for the Jewish people.”

But talk is cheap, and when it came to the reality of creating such a state, the British had many other considerations and interests to take into consideration.

Despite the support of certain British political figures, the British Foreign Ministry and others were generally much more pro-Arab, and the British government got busy carving out Arab countries from the lands of the Ottoman Empire.

Through their efforts the country of Iraq was created in 1921. It was a monarchy with Faisal ibn Hussein, the son of Hussein the Sherif of Mecca, as king. Soon thereafter Iraqi oil started to flow to the West.

Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world (after Saudi Arabia) and it is no wonder the British were interested in having a bond with this country as well as other oil-rich Arab states.

Another country created by the British was Jordan. In 1927, the British installed Abdullah ibn Hussein, another son of the Sherif of Mecca, as emir of the new country called Trans-Jordan, later Jordan. Jordan was confined to the East Bank of the River Jordan and did not include any part of the West Bank.

Why were the sons of the Sherif of Mecca made rulers of these countries?

The British wanted alliances with all the Arab kingdoms. They had shored up support for the Ibn Saud of the Arabian Peninsula, who had fought the Turks alongside them. Ibn Saud got Saudi Arabia.

But when that happened, the British had to pay off the Hussein Sherif of Mecca, who was in charge of the Islamic holy sites. (The Hussein family are Hashemites, the tribe of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, and have been traditionally the keepers of the “holy” city of Mecca.)

They had to give him and his children some land, so they gave them Iraq and Trans-Jordan — the land on the East Bank of the River Jordan.

Yet despite all this country-making, and despite the Balfour Declaration, the British could not get around to creating a country called Israel.

Why not?

There was a clear British bias against the Jews as is readily apparent to anyone who has studied the series of White Papers issued by the British government in the 1920s and 1930s.

The reasons for this bias were:

The British had to deal with the issue of an Arab majority living in what was left of Palestine. They came up with all kinds of partition plans all of which were rejected by the Arabs. (Not all Arabs were opposed by-the-way; King Faisal of Iraq signed an agreement with Chaim Weizman calling for peace and cooperation.)

Many members of the British government and military were clearly anti-Semitic and had a romantic/patronizing attitude toward the Arabs.

The Arabs had oil and England needed oil. In the final analysis, the British had to take into consideration what was in their best interest. Looking after their strategic interests and placating tens of millions of Arabs was more important in their eyes than saving a few hundred thousand Jews, even though this went against the conditions of the mandate that they were granted in 1920.

Meanwhile the poor Jews, not knowing that the British were going to back out of their promise, kept migrating to the land.

The third migration or aliyah (between 1919 and 1923) brought 35,000 Jews to the land. The fourth aliyah (between 1924 and 1928) brought 80,000 Jews to the land. The fifth aliyah (between 1929 and 1939 as Hitler rose to power in Germany) brought 250,000 Jews to the land.

The Arabs made it clear that they were not going to sit still for a Jewish state. In August of 1929, due to the instigation of the preachers in the mosques, a series of riots broke out in which many Jews were massacred.

The New York Times in its history of Israel (Israel: from Ancient Times to the Modern Nation, pp. 38-39) writes of this time:

“The riots of August, 1929, were ignited in Jerusalem over a rumor spread by Arab leaders that Jews were going to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third most holy shrine. Fighting soon spread throughout Palestine. The worst massacres were in Hebron, sacred to Jew and Muslim alike, where 67 Orthodox Jews - men, women and children - were slaughtered by Arabs and 50 more wounded. Pierre van Paassen, a reporter, described the horror that he witnessed by lamplight in a Jewish seminary in Hebron: ‘The slain students in the yard, the dead men in the synagogue, slashed throats and mutilated bodies.’ By the time order was restored 133 Jews had been killed, 399 wounded.”

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 which said that all the Jews should be confined to a tiny state that would include a sliver of land along the Mediterranean coast and a small piece in the north abutting the west side of the Lake Kineret (”Sea of Galilee”).

The Arabs greeted the Peel Commission recommendation with a revolt which lasted until 1939.
The Arab Revolt was led by Haj Amin Husseini, who was originally appointed as the Mufti of Jerusalem by the British. It is interesting to note that in addition to hundreds of Jews who were killed by Arabs, some 3,000 Arabs died in this revolt at the hands of other Arabs and at the hands of the British.

For all the British criticism of Israel today, at that time the British were not shy in their efforts to quell the rioting. They introduced the policy of housing demolition and used artillery to shell rebellious towns.
The revolt was finally crushed and the Mufti fled first to Beirut and later to Europe, where he became an ally of Adolph Hitler, organizing a Bosnian S.S. unit to kill Jews in the Balkans.

After the war he was captured but escaped. He was later involved in fomenting violence, including the assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan in 1951. He was last heard of living as a guest in Saudi Arabia. (Faisal Husseini, who was the PLO’s representatives in Jerusalem and who recently died of a heart attack was a relative of his.)

The British did not keep the promise contained in the Balfour Declaration and neither did they keep the promise contained in the Peel Commission report.

They did enforce one aspect of the Peel Commission report — that which limited Jewish migration to the land to only 12,000 a year for the next five years (1939-1943). By doing so the British doomed the Jews under the control of Nazis — they would no longer be able to find refuge in their homeland.

They did this, knowing full well what the Germans were doing to the Jews — this was after the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht (see Part 60). And still the British closed an escape route that would have saved millions of Jewish lives.

The Jews were desperate and they tried to come illegally. In response, the British set up a blockade to keep them out.

Many Jews managed to circumvent the blockade and it is estimated that 115,000 Jews got through. But 115,000 is a very small number compared to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust and who could not find refuge in the land of Israel.

The British presently show the same callousness in regard to Jewish men, women and children being murdered today, as they did during the British Mandate.

I gratefully acknowledge Aish for their assistance in providing facts contained in this post. You can read the White Paper of 1922, White Paper of 1939, and the Balfour Declaration, here, here, and here.

In 1903, the 6th Zionist Congress met in Basle, Switzerland. Herzl presented a British proposal for a temporary Jewish homeland in Uganda, as a refuge for Russian Jews in immediate danger. This settlement would be politically independent, with a Jewish governor and a Jewish administration. Herzl believed that the plan conferred an important stamp of legitimacy upon Zionism. The Zionist Congress approved the plan, and decided to dispatch an exploratory expedition to Africa. However, the idea was met with stiff opposition, and it split the Zionist movement. The Uganda Program was rejected two years later, but later exploratory missions were sent to Iraq, Libya and Angola. One project that gained traction was the Galveston plan which sent 9,300 Jews to Texas. In the end, it was understood that only the Land of Israel, with its deep historical and spiritual connections, would succeed as the Jewish homeland.

Excerpted from Aish

A ceremony in memory of the 67 victims of the 1929 Hebron Massacre was held on Tuesday evening in the ancient Jewish cemetery in the city.

What was the 1929 Hebron Massacre?

In 1929, 67 Jews of the ancient holy city of Hebron were brutally murdered by a bloodthirsty Arab mob.

The mob, fueled with anti-Jewish incitement, false reports that the mosque of Omar had been vandalized by “Zionists,” attacked a synagogue and slaughtered all the Jews they found inside. Men, women, and children were massacred - while they were praying. The Arabs then proceeded to the Hebron yeshiva, butchered students, and burned sacred books. The remaining Jews barricaded themselves inside the house of Rabbi Eliezer Dan Slonim.

The lynch mob managed to break into the house, and an orgy of bloodshed ensued.

Pierre Van Paassen, a journalist on the scene, wrote the following description:

What occurred in the upper chambers of Slonim’s house could be seen when we found the twelve-foot-high ceiling splashed with blood. The rooms looked like a slaughterhouse. When I visited the place in the company of Captain Marek Schwartz, a former Austrian artillery officer, Mr. Abraham Goldberg of New York, and Mr. Ernst Davies, correspondent of the old Berliner Tageblatt, the blood stood in a huge pool on the slightly sagging stone floor of the house. Clocks, crockery, tables and windows had been smashed to smithereens. Of the unlooted articles, not a single item had been left intact except a large black-and-white photograph of Dr. Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism. Around the picture’s frame the murderers had draped the blood-drenched underwear of a woman. We stood silently contemplating the scene of slaughter when the door was flung open by a British solder with fixed bayonet. In strolled Mr. Keith-Roach, governor of the Jaffa district, followed by a colonel of the Green Howards battalion of the King’s African Rifles. They took a hasty glance around that awful room, and Mr. Roach remarked to his companion, “Shall we have lunch now or drive to Jerusalem first?”

In Jerusalem the Government published a refutation of the rumors that the dead Jews of Hebron had been tortured before they had their throats slit. This made me rush back to that city accompanied by two medical men, Dr. Dantziger and Dr. Ticho. I intended to gather up the severed sexual organs and the cut-off women’s breasts we had seen lying scattered over the floor and in the beds. But when we came to Hebron a telephone call from Jerusalem had ordered our access barred to the Slonim house. A heavy guard had been placed before the door. Only then did I recall that I had inadvertently told a fellow newspaperman in Jerusalem about our gruesome discoveries.

What do the news services have to say about the events of 1929? A Reuters article published on MSNBC dismissed it in one sentence:

“On August 23, 1929, during anti-Jewish riots in British Mandate Palestine, 67 Jews were butchered in Hebron and the Jewish community withered and left.”

From reading the rest of the article, one might get the impression that “the settlers” committed the atrocity. After all, Reuters blames Jews for everything else.

For example, a Muslim family complains that “the settlers” are trying to drive them out of the home they have lived in “for centuries” (since 1929), by using the brutal coercion technique of offering them money to live elsewhere.

From reading the news services, it would seem that the Jewish residents of Hebron are responsible for all the violence in the Mideast, the spread of AIDS, the rising unemployment, the hole in the ozone, and the Windows Me operating system.

Click here to read more on the Arab massacre of Jews that occurred 38 years before there ever was an “occupation” in 1967.

Yael Korin is the co-founder of the Los Angeles branch of Women in Black and is an ex-Israeli Jew working for the destruction of Israel. Yael Korin is a pathologist at the medical school of UCLA who believes the canard that Jews have no right to live in Israel. She is associated with Greta Berlin, another she-pig at Women in Black, and as Discover the Network writes,

“…Yael Korin… joins other fanatically anti-Israel ex-Israelis, including such people as Avi Shlaim in Britain; Gabriel Piterberg (also at UCLA); Zalman Amit in Canada; and Yigal Arens, a Los Angeles extremist and son of Israel’s one-time Defense Minister Gilad Atzmon. “

These vermin seek to see their native homeland destroyed and replaced by an Arab majority.

Yael Korin may as well be a Muslim, because her hatred for Israel runs so deep and her lies are so vast.

Yael Korin is allegedly a child of Holocaust survivors, so she also brought shame to her parents as well as to the nation of Israel.

Watch her video here at a speech in California. Listen to Yael Korin’s lies. If you weren’t able to catch them all, I identify the mendacity below:

httpv://www.youtube.com/v/3yarZOTldZ8&rel=1

Yael Korin neglects to mention that Jews were also residents of the region of Palestine and were thrown out of their homes by Arabs.

Yael Korin neglects to mention that Palestinian Arabs do not have an absolute, natural right to self-determination without the reciprocal absolute natural right of the Palestinian Jews.

Yael Korin neglects to mention that Palestinian Jews had a prior right to create a national existence in the land of the Mandate of Palestine as was promised to them in several documents including the Balfour Declaration and the San Remo resolution.

Yael Korin neglects to mention that Palestinian Jews have the right to preserve themselves by defending themselves against a culture who wants to commit genocide against them.

Yael Korin was silent when Arabs forced hundreds of thousands of Jews out of their homes in 1948.

Yael Korin neglects to mention that when the West Bank and Gaza were “occupied” by Egypt and Jordan, from 1947 thru 1967, the palestinian leadership had no complaint about any “alien occupation ” and expressed no desire for self-determination. There was no movement toward a palestinian state when Gaza was under the control of Egypt and the West Bank under Jordan. Jordan didn’t give up its territorial claims until 1988.

Yael Korin neglects to mention that Fatah was founded in 1964 by Arafat; unless causality has no meaning, the resistance to Israel was born with no reference to 1967 or “ocupation”, but, rather, with Israel’s birth in 1948 and with the return of Jews to their homeland in the 19th century. Jews were living in Israel for 3000 years and the legitimate and sovereign nation of Israel is a resturn to their homeland, not an invasion, as Yael Korin and her minions claim. It only makes sense considering the archaeology, our Patriarch’s tombs, our Matriarch’s tombs, and most of all our Holy Temple, which Muslim supremacists usurped out from under the Jewish people just like they did to Christian chruches throught out the region. Talk about land grabs.

For Muslims and their apologists like Yael Korin, history starts anew each day.

For more on Yael Korin, see this.

Today is the 68th Anniversary of Kristallnacht.

What is Kristallnacht?

Kristallnacht, also known as Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht and “The Night of Broken Glass”, was a massive nation-wide pogrom in Germany on the night of November 9, 1938 including the early hours of the following day and was directed at Jewish citizens throughout Germany, the newly acquired territories of Austria and Sudetenland. Germans freely attacked Jews in the street, in their homes and at their places of work and worship. On those two days, this pogrom damaged, and in many cases destroyed, about 1574 synagogues (constituting nearly all Germany had), many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores. More than 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to concentration camps; a few were beaten to death with others forced to watch. The number of Jewish Germans killed is uncertain, with estimates ranging from 36 to about 200 over two days of rioting. The number of Jews killed is most often cited as 91.

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.

Entebbe is a city in Uganda.

On June 27, 1976, eight terrorists forced an Air France Airbus to land in Uganda.

Seven days before, Air France Flight 139, having taken off from Athens, Greece with destination Paris, France was hijacked, diverted to Benghazi, Libya airport and eventually forced to land at Entebbe, Uganda airport.

The hijackers were 8 PLO, which included Palestinians masquerading as Latin American tourists and 2 Baader-Meinhof Gang members. They were supported by the Ugandan regime of pro-Palestinian Idi Amin. This act of air piracy had been masterminded by Dr. Wadi Hadad, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, with the probable support of Carlos Ramirez, a.k.a. The Jackal.

They quickly demanded that Israel release 53 convicted terrorists. The hijackers freed the French crew and non­-Jewish passengers, while retaining 105 Jewish and Israeli hostages.

A 48­ hour deadline was set before executions of each Jewish passenger would begin.

The Israeli government announced that it would enter into negotiations. This bought the precious time needed to consolidate a seemingly impossible military option. A new ultimatum was issued for 13:00 on Sunday, July 4, 1976.

This was the start of Operation Entebbe.

Operation Entebbe, was renamed Operation Jonathan after the raid commander, Col. Jonathan “Yoni” Netanyahu, who died in it, and who was the older beloved brother of former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Yoni, who was thirty years old when he died, was the only soldier killed in the assault on the Ugandan airport.

The plan would require down to the second details and flawless operation to succeed - a small elite IDF response team would fly 2,000 miles into Uganda, free the hostages and return home. Ultimately, 200 of Israel’s best soldiers would participate in this action.

Brigadier General Dan Shomron was in charge of this military operation. This counter-terrorist operation was based on very calculated risks, which included:

1. Intimate knowledge of the hostage setting - Entebbe Airport where the hostages were being housed was built by an Israeli construction firm, so the IDF knew every detail about the layout of the airport

2. Detailed knowledge of the terrorists - The released hostages were able to provide important information regarding the terrorists, their weapons and their possible positions

3. The element of surprise – this was the biggest advantage that Israel had.

As a result, the IDF decided to send in an overwhelmingly powerful force: over 200 of the best soldiers the army had to offer participated in the raid, all of them heavily armed.

Finally, the element of surprise was probably the biggest edge that Israel held. According to Shomron: “You had more than 100 people sitting in a small room, surrounded by terrorists with their fingers on the trigger. They could fire in a fraction of a second. we had to fly seven hours, land safely, drive to the terminal area where the hostages were being held, get inside, and eliminate all the terrorists before any of them c