Another important history lesson... How many times must the land be redeemed ?
From: Yardena3@aol.com Hasbara: Palestinian Arabs' false claims being "displaced"
The truth needs to be told now more than ever, Peace to Arab Islamists doesnt mean Shalom. Peace in Islam means "submission" or else!!
Despite the growth in their population, the Arabs continued to assert they were being displaced. The truth is from the beginning of World War I, part of Palestine's land was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut. About 80 percent of the Palestinian Arabs were debtridden peasants, seminomads and Bedouins.
In 1946, the British Mandate Government surveyed the land, ownership was as followes:
70% owned by the British government, in trust for the Jewish National Homeland transfered by international law to Israel
8.6% owned by Jews
3.3% owned by resident Arabs
16.5% owned by non-resident Arabs
When Jews started to buy Arab lands, Jews actually went out of their way to avoid purchasing land in areas where Arabs might be displaced. They sought land that was largely uncultivated, swampy, cheap and, most important, without tenants.
In 1920, Labor Zionist leader David BenGurion expressed his concern about the Arab fellahin, whom he viewed as "the most important asset of the native population.".
Ben Gurion said "under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them." He advocated helping liberate them from their oppressors. "Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement," Ben Gurion added, "should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price."
It was only after the Jews had bought all of this available land that they began to purchase cultivated land. Many Arabs were willing to sell because of the migration to coastal towns and because they needed money to invest in the citrus industry.
When John Hope Simpson arrived in Palestine in May 1930, he observed: "They [Jews] paid high prices for the land, and in addition they paid to certain of the occupants of those lands a considerable amount of money which they were not legally bound to pay." .
In 1931, Lewis French conducted a survey of landlessness and eventually offered new plots to any Arabs who had
been "dispossessed." British officials received more than 3,000 applications, of which 80 percent were ruled invalid by the Government's legal adviser because the applicants were not landless Arabs. This left only about 600 landless Arabs, 100 of whom accepted the Government land offer.
In April 1936, a new outbreak of Arab attacks on Jews was instigated by a Syrian guerrilla named Fawzi alQawukji, the commander of the Arab Liberation Army. By November, when the British finally sent a new commission headed by Lord Peel to investigate, 89 Jews had been killed and more than 300 wounded.
The Peel Commission's report found that Arab complaints about Jewish land acquisition were baseless. It pointed out that "much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased....there was at the time of the earlier sales little evidence that the owners possessed either the resources or training needed to develop the land.".
Moreover, the Commission found the shortage was "due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population." The report concluded that the presence of Jews in Palestine, along with the work of the British Administration, had resulted in higher wages, an improved standard of living and ample
employment opportunities.
In his memoirs, Transjordan's King Abdullah wrote: "It is made quite clear to all, both by the map drawn up by the Simpson Commission and by another compiled by the Peel Commission, that the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping (author's emphasis)."
Even at the height of the Arab revolt in 1938, the British High Commissioner to Palestine believed the Arab landowners were complaining about sales to Jews to drive up prices for lands they wished to sell. Many Arab landowners had been so terrorized by Arab rebels they decided to leave Palestine and sell their property to the
Jews.
The Jews were paying exorbitant prices to wealthy landowners for small tracts of arid land. "In 1944, Jews paid between $1,000 and $1,100 per acre in Palestine, mostly for arid or semiarid land; in the same year, rich black soil in Iowa was selling for about $110 per acre."
By 1947, Jewish holdings in Palestine amounted to about 463,000 acres. Approximately 45,000 of these acres were acquired from the Mandatory Government; 30,000 were bought from various churches and 387,500 were purchased from Arabs. Analyses of land purchases from 1880 to 1948 show that 73 percent of Jewish plots were purchased from
large landowners, not poor fellahin. Those who sold land included the mayors of Gaza, Jerusalem and Jaffa.
As'ad elShuqeiri, a Muslim religious scholar and father of PLO chairman Ahmed Shuqeiri, took Jewish money for his land. Even King Abdullah leased land to the Jews. In fact, many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including members of the Muslim Supreme Council, sold land to Jews. The weekly Fasl al-Maqal, owned by Arab-
Israeli parliament deputy Azmi Beshara and based in the predominantly Arab city of Nazareth in north Israel, ran a list of 54 leading Palestinians who sold land to Jews from 1918-1945.
The paper reported Thursday that Palestinian nationalist leaders, including the grandfather of the PLO's current top official in Jerusalem, sold land to Jews in the years before Israel's founding.
The paper ran a story titled "Our Fathers On The Take," takes the issue back to the era of the British mandate before Israel's founding in 1948, when the Zionist movement was seeking land in Palestine to create a Jewish state.
The paper reports that some of those highest up in the Palestinian nationalist movement which opposed the Jewish state were at the same
time selling land to the Jewish Agency, the body spearheading the Zionist drive. The weekly's editor-in-chief, Awad Abdel Fatah reports that the names came from an official document dating back to the British mandate in Palestine, which the paper received from official sources in Jordan. He said, "We published only a partial list from the document, showing the role of the Palestinian leadership in the flow of lands to the Jewish Agency before the disaster of 1948," he said.
The names are embarrassing to the PA as one is a relative of Yasir Arafat and he is one of the most prominent names on the list. His name is Mohammed Taher al-Husseni, father of al-Hajj Amin al-Husseni, the mufti of Jerusalem and supreme head of the Palestinian nationalist movement. Another was Kazem al-Husseni, grandfather on
the mother's side of Faisal Husseni, the top PLO official in Jerusalem. Kazem sold lands in Jerusalem, where he was mayor from 1918-1920. The list includes five other members of the Husseni family, one of the most prominent clans in pre-1948 Palestine and today.
Other members of leading Palestinian families also showed up on the list, as did members of the High Arab Committee, the High Islamic Council and the Arab Executive Committee, the main bodies which led the nascent Palestinian nationalist movement against Zionism. Mussa al-Alami, who headed the Palestinian delegation to the London Conference of 1939 convened to discuss the future of mandate Palestine, sold 90 hectares (222 acres) to Jews in Bisan, now the north Israeli city of Beit Shean, according to the list.
Ragheb al-Nashashibi, mayor of Jerusalem from 1920-1934 and head of the National Defense Party, sold over 120 hectares (296 acres) of land in Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv. Nashashibi also sold land in east Jerusalem upon which Hebrew University was later built.
Yaakub al-Ghussein, who headed the Arab Fund created to gather money to support the Palestinian cause, sold land to Jews in Jaffa and what is now the Gaza Strip for 4,000 Palestinian pounds, equivalent to British pound sterling at that era. And the other elite Muslim and Christian families of Palestine, including the Abdel Hadi, Bseiso, and Fahum clans, were represented on the list.
The Jews before the wars were already living as peasants, bought lands, cultivated them after years of neglect. The Jews restored the land and made it what it is today having an economy ten times the size of that of Egypt, Jordan and Syria combined, while the Arabs have been plotting wars against her since the 1920s and instead of wiping out every Jew in the area resulted in the displacement of almost 1/2 the Palestinians in 1948.
The Arab opposition to an Israeli state began after the Balfour Declaration 1917, which supported the idea of a Jewish national homeland. In the 1920s there were anti-Zionist riots in Palestine, then governed by the UK under a League of Nations mandate.
In 1936 an Arab revolt led to a British royal commission that recommended partition approved by the United Nations in 1947, but rejected by the Arabs.
When it became clear that the British intended to leave by May 15, leaders of the Yishuv decided to implement that part of the partition plan calling for establishment of a Jewish state.
In Tel Aviv on May 14 the Provisional State Council, formerly the National Council, "representing the Jewish people in Palestine and the World Zionist Movement, proclaimed the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, to be called Medinat Israel (the State of Israel) ...
On May 15 the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq joined Palestinian and other Arab guerrillas who had been fighting Jewish forces since November 1947.
The civil war now became an international conflict, the first Arab-Israeli War, called the war of independence by Israel. The Arabs failed to prevent establishment of a Jewish state, and the war ended with four UN-arranged armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The frontiers defined in the armistice agreements remained until they were altered by Israel's conquests during the Six-Day War in 1967.
The wars that were intended to annihilate the Jews ended up in Israel's victory. For Arabs to bring up atrocities, murders, incidents of violence by the Israelis as a result of trying to annihilate her can be expected, especially when 5 wars was waged on Israel, and hundreds of terror attacks intended to destroy every Jew in Israel. Wars throughout history has always had repercussions and Arabs are not immune from the bad taste of their own medicine.
Mr. Assad Sysria's dictator vowed at the start of the 1967 war: "Our forces are now entirely ready... to initiate the act of liberation itself and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland... The time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation." President Nasser of Egypt declared, "Our basic goal is the destruction of Israel". (Laqueur, op. cit., pp. 175-185).
Such statements has no effect on changing the hearts of the Arab and Muslim masses who know that MuhammadIslam's prophet annihilated the Jews from Saudi Arabia, and the unsophisticated Westerners mind and heart has been seduced to believe a lie, that the Arabs and Muslims worldwide have a great desire for peace, the "final solution" evil saga will continue as planed by Satan. Westerners forget who supported Hitler in World War II,the Soviet Union during the Cold War and Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, instead they rally behind Arafat who still refuses to change the PLO Charter calling for the destruction of Israel.