The British Mandate
The Holy Land has seen precious little independence over the two thousand years since the Jews were exiled by the Romans. During this period, the land that currently constitutes the State of Israel would be unrecognizable to a time-traveler who ventured back even 150 years. In 1880, the American consul in Jerusalem stated that the area was continuing its ongoing decline: “The population and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last forty years.”
Perhaps recognizing the dearth of residents and improvements to the land, Darwood Barakat, editor of the Egyptian newspaper, Al-Abram, wrote that “[t]he Zionists are necessary for the country. The money which they will bring, their knowledge and intelligence, and the industriousness which characterizes them will contribute without doubt to the regeneration of the country.” It was this lack of development that led no less famous of an American than Mark Twain to state in 1867 upon a visit to the Holy Land that “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route . . . Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.” Is it hardly any wonder then that the early Zionists saw a land that not only was the home of their ancestors but that was also sparsely populated as a source of refuge from the ills of Europe and the other areas of the Middle East?
A common charge leveled at the Israelis is that they are no better than colonists. Yet, as the Austrian Jewish philosopher wrote to Mahatma Gandhi in 1939, “Our settlers do not come here as do the colonists from the Occident [Europe and the West] to have natives do their work for them; they themselves set their shoulders to the plow and they spend their strength and their blood to make the land fruitful. But it is not only for ourselves that we desire its fertility. The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively . . . The more fertile this soil becomes, the more space there will be for us and for them. We have no desire to dispossess them; we want to live with them.” (emphasis added) Can one imagine the early Europeans to North or South America expressing a similar desire to work with, much less live with, the indigenous peoples of the Americas? To that end, the term “colonialism,” which of course can be defined somewhat variously, nonetheless has as one of its core elements the concept of exploiting others. It is hard to see how the Zionist settlers sought to exploit the Arabs living in the Holy Land. Better yet, allow the words of the emir of Iraq, Emir Faisal, to clarify the contemporary view held by at least some of the leaders of the Arab world: “We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home . . . The Jewish movement is nationalist and not imperialist. And there is room in Syria [which was a broad term for the area in 1919] for us both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other.” Would Sitting Bull have proffered such an endorsement of the United States?
Despite these sentiments, during the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948), the British announced in the 1939 White Paper that an independent Arab state would be created within 10 years. This position statement also limited Jewish immigration to the Mandate. Yet, importantly, the Arabs rejected the proposal. This is essential to note as it will become, as we are to see, a recurring theme: an offer of the creation of an Arab/Palestinian state that its beneficiaries reject.
Despite strict restriction on Jewish immigration to the Mandate by the British, the Arabs were not similarly constrained. To the contrary, the report of the British Hope Simpson Commission in 1930 (which was formed to investigate the 1929 riots by the Arabs that resulted in the Arabs killing 133 Jews and injuring scores more) concluded that the British practice of ignoring the uncontrolled illegal Arab immigration to the Mandate from Egypt, Transjordan and Syria had the effect of displacing the prospective Jewish immigrants. Similarly, in 1937 the Peel Commission, which was a British commission charged with understanding the cause of unrest in the Mandate, stated that the “shortfall of land is . . . due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in Arab population.”
From the foregoing, it is logical to reach a number of conclusions. First, at least some of the key Arab leaders of the era, believed that arrival of the Jewish immigrants was to be welcomed and even necessary. Additionally, the Arabs were offered their own state by the British but refused to accept the proposal, a decision that is to haunt them to this day. Third, countless Palestinians who argue that the land was “stolen” from them ignore the reality that many of their ancestors were not indigenous to the land and, in fact, often arrived in the Mandate after many of the Jews (in addition, as discussed in the previous post (Lies and Truths – The History, Part I (sechel.info), to the Jews whose ancestors never left the Holy Land).
Another frequent half-truth, to state it generously, is that the Jews stole or otherwise misappropriated the land from the Arabs. This ignores the reality that a substantial portion of land in the Mandate was owned by absentee Arab landlords living in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut. At the same time, approximately 80% of the Palestinian Arabs were peasants laboring under substantial debt, seminomads and Bedouins. To the contrary, David Ben-Gurion stated that “under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs [Arab farmers/agricultural workers] or worked by them. . . Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.” Perhaps as a result of Ben-Gurion’s admonitions and influence, it was only after all of the uncultivated land had been acquired that the Jews purchased cultivated land. (Many Arabs were incentivized to sell their lands as a result of migration to coastal town and due to the desire to invest in the citrus industry.) Not only did the Jews not “steal” the land from its owners or its tenants (to whom one has only limited, if any, legal obligation), Sir John Hope Simpson, a Liberal member of British Parliament, stated that “[The 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.”
Undoubtedly, those determined to lay blame with the Israelis will criticize the British for their assertions. Fortunately for them, they need not listen to the Brits. Instead, they can contemplate the words of King Abdullah of Jordan, who stated (and republished in his memoirs) that “the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping.” In fact, many Arab landowners in the late 1930s had been so terrorized by their fellow Arabs that they decided to leave Palestine and sell their property to the Jews.
By 1947, Jewish landowning in Palestine totaled approximately 463,000 acres, of which (i) about 45,000 acres were acquired from the mandatory government, (ii) 30,000 acres purchased from various churches and (iii) 387,500 acres purchased from Arabs. In other words, over 83% of the land possessed by the Jews in 1947 – pre-partition – were purchased – legally – from the Arabs. It is worth noting that by 1944, Jews were paying at least $1,000 per acre in Palestine, mostly for arid or semiarid land, while in the same year fertile black soil in Iowa was selling for just over one-tenth of that price.
Who, exactly, stole the land from whom?
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