Moderator's Note: We have received this article today vide Mr Stanley
Barkan, a poet and publisher from New York who has conveyed his
concerne so Mr Jahed Ahmed of our moderation team, that ours is an
Anti-Semitic group. We did invite Mr Barkan to show us a single
article that he could find on our approved articles pages to support
this view, and, indeed, if he does, we would be happy to respond
based on whatever he has to show us. In the meantime, this is an
article that he would like us to post on our forums and we are happy
to do this. We would like our members to know that our invitation to
Messrs Barkan and Isseroff to join MM and participate in debate here
is open. On a different note, this seems to be a full turn of the
wheel from two months ago when the Daily Naya Diganta published an
article naming several of us calling us Mossad agents.
How did the Zionists get their land?
Ami Isseroff
I have read the very interesting article, "How did the Zionists get
their land" by A.H. Jaffor Ullah. I commend his willingness to let
bygones be bygones, as that is what must happen on both sides in
order to bring peace, but I must correct some obvious errors and
distortions in his work.
It is a deception to believe that Zionism began only in the latter
part of the 19th century, as Ullah claims, and the following
statement is somewhere between absurdity and blasphemy:
Many orthodox Jews in Israel held this weird view that the Jews
outside Israel were living in "exile" and could live a full life only
in the Promised Land, Israel.
The connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is attested
to the Qur'an and New Testament, as well as in the Old Testament
which Muslims profess to hold sacred. The ancient kingdoms of the
Jews were recorded by Roman and Greek historians, as was their
conquest by the Romans and the exile of the Jews, completed finally
by the Crusaders.
For 2,000 years, Jews prayed for the peace of Zion and prayed
for "Next Year in Jerusalem" - a dream that was impossible to
fulfill. Herzl's innovation was the invention of a political Zionist
movement that could turn the dream into the reality. The idea that
Jews outside Israel are living in exile has been a staple of Jewish
culture for 2,000 years, and it is shared by orthodox, conservative,
reform and secular Jews, as well as Christians Muslims and atheists
of every nationality who know the history of the Jews. It is a
historic fact, not a "weird view."
We Zionists got our land by living in it, by buying it, by working
for it and building it, and by fighting for it. About 1800, there
were about 200,000 people in all in this impoverished and neglected
area of the Ottoman empire, which included parts of various Turkish
Vilayets and Sanjaks, but was not a separate entity
called "Palestine." A few Jews lived here, and relatively more
Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs. In Jerusalem, there was a plurality
of Jews by 1844. The Turkish government, perceiving the
underpopulation, tried to rectify it. For some reason, the Turks
imported only Muslims from abroad, and frowned on the idea that the
Jews of Palestine should have the same rights as Muslims.
Nonetheless, Jews came to the land Palestine was never an entity
under the Turkish empire as Mr Ullah claims. The area of Palestine
had no politically separate administration under the Turks. It would
be interesting to know where Mr. Ullah got this fantastic idea.
Following the solemn promise of the international community that
Palestine could become the national home of the Jewish People, given
in the League Mandate for Palestine, the Zionists purchased land, and
Zionist industry and Zionist labor and investment transformed
Palestine and Israel from the armpit of the decaying Ottoman empire
to the jewel of the Levant. The British removed the largest part of
the Palestine mandate, 78% and illegally gave it to the Arabs under
Abdullah, thus providing for the rights of the Arabs of Palestine and
giving them a homeland. Nonetheless, the Zionists persisted in
developing the land. Land was purchased wherever Arabs would sell it
and public land was acquired as well. In violation of the terms of
the Mandate, the British were giving away the greater part of the
public lands in Palestine to Arabs, and later they restricted the
sale of land to Jews.
By 1948, each Palestinian Jew produced four times as much as each
Arab, and all the development of Palestine, including the education
and services provided to Arabs, was funded from the taxes paid by the
Jews. Nonetheless, the Arabs of Palestine, led by the Nazi Grand
Mufti of Jerusalem, insisted on blockng Jewish settlement in
Palestine and even on preventing the immigration to Palestine of Jews
escaping the Nazi Holocaust. The Mufti intervened personally to
prevent the rescue of 10,000 Jewish orphans, who were sent to
Auschwitz and murdered instead.
Far from suffering under the British mandate, the Arabs of Palestine
benefitted. Their standard of living rose until it was higher than
that of their neighboring Arab cousins in Egypt, Jordan Lebanon and
Syria, and Arabs streamed into Palestine. By 1948, thanks to high
birthrate and immigration, there were 1.8 million Arabs in the area
of Palestine left to the Jews after partition of Transjordan. Arab
Transjordan remained underpopulated and underdeveloped.
After World War II, the injustice that was being done to the Jewish
people became apparent to the entire world. The cynical British
imperialists were forced to relinquish their now illegal rule of
Palestine, which no longer fulfilled the purpose of the Mandate, and
to allow the creation of two states, a Jewish State and an Arab
state. Palestine was to be divided once again. In total, the Arabs
would have about 90% and the Jews would have a tiny part, with
another area given over as a "Corpus Separatum" comprising Jerusalem
and Bethlehem.
This partition plan solution should be familiar to your readers:
Pakistan, India and Bangladesh were created in the same way.
The Arabs opposed the UN resolution that partitioned Palestine, and
started a genocidal war to rid Palestine of the Jews. When they lost
the war, Arab Palestinians who had fled their homes found themselves
homeless, just as Jews who fled areas conquered by the Arabs found
themselves homeless. The Israeli government resettled the Jewish
refugees, whereas the Arab countries penned up the Arab refugees in
refugee camps and limited their rights.
Most of the land in Palestine was government land or land that
belonged to municipalities. When the state of Israel was formed, that
land, along with the tiny amount that Jews had been allowed to
purchase, became "Zionist land" and with it, the land that had been
abandoned by fleeing refugees. That is how the "Zionists got their
land. Arabs who stayed still have their land. When Pakistan was
formed, the land and property abandoned by fleeing Hindus became
property of the Pakistanis, did it not?
In the fifties and sixties, Israel got pitiful amounts of aid from
the USA, some Holocaust reperations from Germany and small donations
from Jews living abroad. In contrast, the Arab countries had
plentiful oil revenues that they could have used to develop Arab
Palestine, but did not. Egypt invested all of its meager resources in
purchasing arms from the USSR, mortgaging its cotton crop to do so.
While the supposedly evil and greedy Zionists constructed an
irrigation system to take their fair share of the waters of the
Jordan, the Arab states did nothing except to try to divert the
headwaters of the Jordan in order to deprive Israel of the water.
While the Jews built factories and farms and achieved the highest
standard of living of any non-oil state in the Middle East, the Arabs
built suicide bomber vests and invested in the most advanced Soviet
tanks and airplanes. When Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in
1967, the per capita GDP of the Arab inhabitants had been about $300.
By the time Israel relinquished foll control, per capita income was
$2,400. Under Arab Palestinian rule, income has sunk to about $800.
In a single day, more water is pumped today in Israel than was pumped
in all of the year 1948 in Palestine and Israel. More Arabs live
between the river and the sea than have ever lived in this land in
all of recorded history.
Since we reviewed how the Zionists got their land, it is interesting
to explore how the Arabs of Palestine got their land as well. Here
are a few examples - Many of the Christian "Arabs" are descended from
the Crusader invaders who came here, murdered Muslims and Jews,
settled down and married. The Nusseibeh family may have come with
Umar, who conquered Palestine about 638. The Husseini family came
with the Mameluk Turks. The Nashashibis were bowmen in the army of
Salah Eddin. Other "Arabs" of "Palestine" were imported by the
Ottoman government from Bosnia and Circassia and other places in the
19th century. These conquerers and settlers never paid a penny for
any land - it was all taken by force, from other conquerers who took
it by force from its only rightful owners - the Jews. Other Arabs
came from Syria in the 1930s and 1940s to build the port of Haifa and
to work in it.
Every Arab who ever lived here knew what Mr. Ullah denies: that the
land belongs to the Jews, and that the Arab names of the towns were
in reality mostly derived from the ancient Hebrew names. "Yibne"
from "Yavneh," "Birsaba" from "Beersheba" "Beisan" from "Beth
Shean," "Beit Lehem" was "Beit lehem" which the Christians know
as "Bethlehem" and "Jaffa" was "Yaffo."
Izzedin El Qassam, the hero of the Palestine terrorist movement who
inspired the pogroms of 1936-9 and whose name is given to the Hamas
terrorist army, was born in Syria, some time after my grandmothers
were born in Jerusalem. If he was "Palestinian" then I can be
a "Bangladeshi."
Ami Isseroff
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