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President Obama renamed Mt Mckinley as Mount Denali
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.co.il/2015/09/finally-obama-and-netanyahu-agree-on.html#links
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.co.il/2015/09/finally-obama-and-netanyahu-agree-on.html#links
The indigenous names of the area Obama refers to as WEST BANK are JUDEA AND SAMARIA.
Judea and Samaria are the historical and Biblical names. When the Romans razed Judea and either enslaved or expelled most of its JEWISH inhabitants, they renamed the land PALESTINE, so that Judea would be forever forgotten.
Palestine was the name that stuck for the next 2000 years because the anti-Semitic world also wanted Judea to be forgotten, so that Christianity, and then Islam, could take over what had been legitimate JEWISH HERITAGE.
Jews are the indigenous inhabitants of Israel.
Even after the Roman conquest there was always a population of Jews in Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria.
In the 20th century Israel was repopulated by Jews from Europe, and after Israel's independence by Jews from Arab countries, from where they had been expelled.
At least half of the Jewish population of Israel is are first, second or third generation Jews from Muslim countries.
So when Arabs shout "Go back to Europe," they ignore that half of Israeli Jews were either born in the Middle East, or are the children of those who were.
The irony is that for centuries Europeans used to shout "Go back to Palestine". When the Jews returned to their homeland, Europeans pounced on them for "stealing Arab land".
The fact is that it is the Arabs who are the real occupiers, having come from the Arab peninsula to conquer the Land of Israel in the 7th century. Later it was the Turks of the Ottoman Empire who ruled the land as occupiers.
Israel is now in the hands of her true owners, the indigenous people of the land, the Jews.
On this page also read:
- Are Arabs the indigenous people of Palestine? Map of Ancient Israel.
- Does Islam have a true connection to Jerusalem?
- What Mark Twain wrote about the Land of Israel after his visit.
- The myth of the stolen Arab land.
- The forgotten refugees: the million of Jews who were forced to flee Arab countries in 1949 and resettled in Israel.
- Obama denies Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem. Americans born in that city are not allowed to put Israel as their country of birth. He wants to give the ancient Jewish city to the Muslim occupier.
- Outline of the history of Jerusalem, and ancient map of the city.
http://www.israellycool.com/2014/01/09/israel-palestine-whos-indigenous/
The Land of Israel is full of archaeological evidence of Jewish history and culture dating thousands of years. Muslims have nothing to show for except what they built after their conquest in the 7th century.
The Land of Israel is full of archaeological evidence of Jewish history and culture dating thousands of years. Muslims have nothing to show for except what they built after their conquest in the 7th century.
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ARE ARABS THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF ISRAEL?
MUSLIM COLONISTS' identity theft. The truth about the Arab claim to Jewish land
The Muslim Colonists - Forgotten Facts about the Arab-Israeli Conflict
By: Ezequiel Doiny
The Yazidi in Iraq and the Christian Copts in Egypt are not “occupiers” or “settlers;” neither are the Jews in Israel. They are all victims of a common enemy that seems to want a Middle East free of non-Muslims.
The current Palestinian narrative is that all Muslims in Palestine are natives and all Jews are settlers. This narrative is false.
VIDEO - INVENTING THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE
There has been a small but almost continuous Jewish presence in Palestine since the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome two thousand years ago, and, as we will see, most of the Muslims living in Palestine when the state of Israel was declared in 1948 were Muslim colonists from other parts of the Ottoman Empire who had been resettled and living in Palestine for fewer than 60 years.
VIDEO - WHAT IS PALESTINE,
AND WHO ARE THE PALESTINIANS?
Continue reading
There are two important historical events usually overlooked in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
One is the use that Muslim rulers made of the jizya (a discriminatory tax imposed only on non-Muslims, to “protect” them from being killed or having their property destroyed) to reduce the quantity of Jews living in Palestine before the British Mandate was instituted in 1922.
The second were the incentives by the Ottoman government to relocate displaced Muslim populations from other parts of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine.
Until the late 1800s entire ancient Jewish communities had to flee Palestine to escape the brutality of Muslim authorities. As Egyptian historian Bat Ye’or writes in her book, The Dhimmi:
“The Jizya was paid in a humiliating public ceremony in which the non-Muslim while paying was struck in the head. If these taxes were not paid women and children were reduced to slavery, men were imprisoned and tortured until a ransom was paid for them.
Peters started her research with the intention of proving Arab rights to Palestine. What she found during the course of her work was that the opposite was true: Israel has belonged to the Jewish people since time immemorial.
Despite 1,300 years of Muslim Arab rule, Jerusalem was never the capital of an Arab entity, nor was it ever mentioned in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s covenant until Israel regained control of East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967. Overall, the role of Jerusalem in Islam is best understood as the outcome of political exigencies impacting religious belief.
Mohammed, who founded Islam in 622 CE, was born and raised in present-day Saudi Arabia and never set foot in Jerusalem. His connection to the city came years after his death when the Dome of the Rock shrine and the al-Aqsa mosque were built in 688 and 691, respectively, their construction spurred by political and religious rivalries.
In 638 CE, the Caliph (or successor to Mohammed) Omar and his invading armies captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire.
In 638 CE, the Caliph (or successor to Mohammed) Omar and his invading armies captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire.
ANCIENT MAP OF JERUSALEM
Author: Ryan Bellerose
There are two important historical events usually overlooked in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
One is the use that Muslim rulers made of the jizya (a discriminatory tax imposed only on non-Muslims, to “protect” them from being killed or having their property destroyed) to reduce the quantity of Jews living in Palestine before the British Mandate was instituted in 1922.
The second were the incentives by the Ottoman government to relocate displaced Muslim populations from other parts of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine.
Until the late 1800s entire ancient Jewish communities had to flee Palestine to escape the brutality of Muslim authorities. As Egyptian historian Bat Ye’or writes in her book, The Dhimmi:
“The Jizya was paid in a humiliating public ceremony in which the non-Muslim while paying was struck in the head. If these taxes were not paid women and children were reduced to slavery, men were imprisoned and tortured until a ransom was paid for them.
"The Jewish communities in many cities under Muslim Rule was ruined for such demands. This custom of legalized financial abuses and extortion shattered the indigenous pre-Arab populations almost totally eliminating what remained of its peasantry…
"In 1849 the Jews of Tiberias envisaged exile because of the brutality, exactions, and injustice of the Muslim authorities.
"In addition to ordinary taxes, an Arab Sheik that ruled Hebron demanded that Jews pay an extra five thousand piastres annually for the protections of their lives and property. The Sheik threatened to attack and expel them from Hebron if it was not paid.”
The Muslim rulers not only kept the number of Jews low through discriminatory taxes, they also increased the Muslim population by providing incentives for Muslim colonists to settle in the area. Incentives included free land, 12 years exemption from taxes and exemption from military service.
Bat Ye’or continues:
“By the early 1800s the Arab population in Palestine was very little (just 246,000) it was in the late 1800s and early 1900s that most Muslim Colonists settled in Palestine because of incentives by the Ottoman Government to resettle displaced Muslim populations because of events such as the Austro-Hungarian Occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Crimean War and World War 1.
"Those events created a great quantity of Muslim Refugees that were resettled somewhere else in the Ottoman Empire… In 1878 an Ottoman law granted lands in Palestine to Muslim colonists. Muslim colonists from Crimea and the Balkans settled in Anatolia, Armenia, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.”
Justin McCarthy, a professor of history at the University of Louisville, writing in his Annotated Map:
“Forced Migration and Mortality in the Ottoman Empire,” also notes that there were about five million Muslims displaced due to the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Crimean War, Balkan wars, the Turkish war of independence and World War I."
Sergio DellaPergola, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in his paper “Demography in Israel/Palestine: Trends, Prospects and Policy Implications,” provides estimates of the population of Palestine in different periods.
As the demographic data below shows, most Muslims living in Palestine in 1948 when the State of Israel was created had been living there for fewer than 60 years:
1890: Arab Population 432,000
1947: Arab Population 1,181,000
Growth in Arab population from 1890 to 1947: 800,000
The Yazidi in Iraq and the Christian Copts in Egypt are not “settlers” and “occupiers;” neither are the Jews in Israel. They are victims of a common enemy that seems to want a Middle East free of non-Muslims.
Source
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Are Arabs the indigenous people of Palestine?
By Daniel Grynglas
The wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors were fought for many years on the battlefield between armies. In recent decades the arena of conflict has shifted from hand-to-hand combat to a war of narratives.
Everybody agrees that the current affluence of Israel, its modern infrastructure and economy were developed by the Jews. The Palestinian narrative is that as the ancient, indigenous people of Palestine they feel dispossessed and they deserve to take over Israel’s riches.
Jewish claims to their heritage in the land of Israel are supported by abundant archaeological artifacts and historical records. Meanwhile, there are no records to support the Palestinian narrative. In history, art and literature there is no trace at all of any Muslim people referred to by anybody as “Palestinians.”
MAP OF ANCIENT ISRAEL
Kingdoms of David and Solomon, 10th century BCE
Records show that it was 19th and 20th century Jewish settlement and the resulting employment opportunities that drew successive waves of Arab immigrants to Palestine.
“The Arab population shows a remarkable increase ….. partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the [Jewish] National Home..” The (Peel Commission Report – 1937)
“..in the Jewish settlement Rishon l’Tsion founded in 1882, by the year 1889, the forty Jewish families settled there, had attracted more than four hundred Arab families…. Many other Arab villages had sprouted in the same fashion.” (Joan Peters – From Time Immemorial p. 252 – referenced further as: FTI)
British PM Winston Churchill said in 1939: “.. far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country [Palestine]..”
Before the Six Day War in 1967, when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt ruled in Gaza, there was never any suggestion on the part of the “Palestinians” that they wanted independence in their ancestral homeland. The reason was that the “Palestinian” nation hadn’t been invented yet.
In fact, before the State of Israel was born, the term “Palestinians” was used by the Jews to refer to themselves and their organizations. “The Palestine Post”, the Palestine Foundation Fund, Palestine Airways, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra were all purely Jewish enterprises.
The Muslim occupier.
Jews being expelled from Jerusalem, under the watch of a Jordanian soldier
We first hear of Arabs referred to as “Palestinians” when Yasser Arafat established the “Palestine Liberation Organization” in 1964. It was only during the 1970s that the newly minted “Palestinians” began to promote their narrative through murder and assassination. The Arabs have justified their attacks as acts of the indigenous people struggling for national liberation.
Joan Peters' research exposed the truth about Arab claims
Many individual authors have challenged the “Palestinian” narrative. Among these, one of the most ambitious was Joan Peters, who in 1984 published her thoroughly researched study of Arab immigration into Palestine, From Time Immemorial.
Peters assembled many accounts of 19th century travelers’ journeys through the Holy Land that paint the picture of a desolate and almost empty land. Mark Twain’s comments in 1867 are probably the best known:
“….. A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse…. a desolation…. we never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere.”
Peters documents how the current land of Israel with its millions of Arabs and Jews gradually emerged from its desolate 19th century beginnings. She analyzes the respective populations of Muslims, Christians and Jews based on data available from existing sources including Ottoman census figures, government documents, old publications, scientific research, etc.
Peters’ work was received with accolades and praise in most quarters and with predictable outrage by the supporters of the “Palestinian” narrative.
The rabidly anti-Israeli academic, Norman Finklestein, wrote a lengthy rebuttal trying to challenge Peters’ work and smeared her personally. Finklestein’s bogus charges were echoed by some other pro-Palestinian advocates.
The vehemence with which Peters was attacked was very telling. She had undermined the basis for the delegitimization of Israel. She had shown that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are not indigenous to Palestine but rather descendants of the Arab economic migrants who arrived in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Peter’s thorough analysis consists of 410 pages of text and 190 pages of documentary appendices. The general public could hardly be expected to wade through the 600-page tome full of data tables and quotes from hundreds of sources. Thus the book was unable to reverse the continuing fiction of the indigenous “Palestinian” people whose lands have been stolen by the Jews.
A simple new way to prove Peters' key conclusion.
In the midst of various arguments, what has been overlooked is a simple and incontrovertible way to prove that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are the descendants of the relatively recent Arab immigrants.
Peters calculated that in 1882, just the non-nomadic, settled Muslims in Palestine numbered 141,000.
Among them, those that resided in Palestine before the 1831 Egyptian invasion numbered 75 percent, or 105,700 (FTI* page 197).
By 2015, descendants of these 105,700 persons can trace their linage in Palestine for almost 200 years. Therefore, one might consider them to be the indigenous residents.
The date 1831 is important, because this was the beginning of the war with Arab Egypt, during which many thousands of Arabs settled in Palestine and changed its demographics.
The number of 105,700 thousand settled Muslims is in general agreement with other important data. Walter Lowdermilk gives the total number of 200,000 people residing in Palestine in 1850 (page 76 – Palestine Land of Promise 1944). Lowdermilk’s number includes Jews, Christians, travelling nomadic Bedouins and settled Muslims.
It also includes Arabs that immigrated after the war of 1831. Arthur Ruppin estimates the total population in year 1882 (The Jews in the Modern World, MacMillan – 1934 page 368) as 300,000 Palestinian inhabitants, including nomadic and settled Muslims, Christians and Jews.
If these 105,700 indigenous Muslims were to increase in numbers only through natural population growth, how many would they number today in 2015? This would represent the size of this population as if there were no Muslim immigration at all.
We can calculate the estimated 2015 native population, based on natural rates of population growth. I assume that the post-1882 Muslim population in Palestine — apart from immigration — grew at approximately the same rate as the populations of neighboring Syria, Egypt and Lebanon for which rates we have reliable data. That rate of growth was 1.1% per annum. (FTI page 529 table in note 78)
I used the compounded interest formula to do the math. Applying the 1.1% growth rate to the Muslim population resident in Palestine in 1882 yields a total number of 453,000 Muslim descendants in 2015 of these original 105,700 native people.
According to the 2015 World Almanac, the current “Palestinian” population, including Israeli Arabs, and Arab residents of Gaza, Golan, Judea and Samaria totals 10,523,715 people. 453,000 descendants of indigenous Muslim residents constitute only 4.3% of the current “Palestinian” population. Therefore the other 95.7% of present-day “Palestinians” are clearly those Arabs and their descendants who migrated to Israel between 1831 and 2015.
Despite the substantial documentation assembled by Peters, demonstrating massive Arab immigration into Palestine, anti-Israel propagandists continue to deny it. Based on what we know today, and the simple truths of basic math, the issue has become clear and unambiguous.
All historic records indicate that only insignificant number of long-term settled Muslims were present in Palestine before 1882, when the large Jewish immigration began. Muslim Arab numbers increased dramatically as Jewish settlements developed infrastructure and provided work opportunities to Arabs from the neighboring countries.
Also worth noting is that the “indigenous” 4.3% comprised many non-Arab nationalities. All of them were swamped by the Arab immigrants and within a few generations lost their identity.
Given the complete absence of any historical record to the contrary, we can authoritatively say that the “Palestinian people” never existed until they were invented in the 1960s as a tool for continuing the Arab war against Israel.
The claim that “Palestinians” are the indigenous people of Israel and that most of the present Palestinian Arabs have lived in these lands since time immemorial is a total fraud. Albeit posthumously, Joan Peters has had the last word on the subject.
Source
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/analysis/are-arabs-the-indigenous-people-of-palestine/2015/04/29/
RELATED
Review of Joan Peters' book From Time Immemorial.
Peters started her research with the intention of proving Arab rights to Palestine. What she found during the course of her work was that the opposite was true: Israel has belonged to the Jewish people since time immemorial.
Joan Peters began this book planning to write about the Arabs who fled Palestine in 1948-49, when armies of the Arab states attempted to destroy the fledgling state of Israel.
In the course of research on this subject, she came across a "seemingly casual" discrepancy between the standard definition of a refugee and the definition used for the Palestinian Arabs.
In other cases, a refugee is someone forced to leave a permanent or habitual home. In this case, however, it is someone who had lived in Palestine for just two years before the flight that began in 1948.
Continue reading: http://www.danielpipes.org/1110/from-time-immemorial
Link to this article on Otters and Science News
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DOES ISLAM HAVE A TRUE CONNECTION TO JERUSALEM?
Mohammad never set foot in Jerusalem. Muslims arrived in the 7th century. Islam is the real occupier.
Islam's tenuous connection to Jerusalem
by Eli E. Hertz
Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Quran and Mohammed never set foot on Its soil.
Despite 1,300 years of Muslim Arab rule, Jerusalem was never the capital of an Arab entity, nor was it ever mentioned in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s covenant until Israel regained control of East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967. Overall, the role of Jerusalem in Islam is best understood as the outcome of political exigencies impacting religious belief.
Mohammed, who founded Islam in 622 CE, was born and raised in present-day Saudi Arabia and never set foot in Jerusalem. His connection to the city came years after his death when the Dome of the Rock shrine and the al-Aqsa mosque were built in 688 and 691, respectively, their construction spurred by political and religious rivalries.
In 638 CE, the Caliph (or successor to Mohammed) Omar and his invading armies captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire.
In 638 CE, the Caliph (or successor to Mohammed) Omar and his invading armies captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire.
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| Kotel at sunrise |
One reason they wanted to erect a holy structure in Jerusalem was to proclaim Islam’s supremacy over Christianity and its most important shrine, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
More important was the power struggle within Islam itself. The Damascus-based Umayyad Caliphs who controlled Jerusalem wanted to establish an alternative holy site if their rivals blocked access to Mecca.
That was important because the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, was (and remains today) one of the Five Pillars of Islam. As a result, they built what became known as the Dome of the Rock shrine and the adjacent mosque.
To enhance the prestige of the ‘substitute Mecca,’ the Jerusalem mosque was named al-Aqsa. It means ‘the furthest mosque’ in Arabic, but has far broader implications, since it is the same phrase used in a key passage of the Quran called “The Night Journey.”
In that passage, Mohammed arrives at ‘al-Aqsa’ on a winged steed accompanied by the Archangel Gabriel; from there they ascend into heaven for a divine meeting with Allah, after which Mohammed returns to Mecca.
Naming the Jerusalem mosque al-Aqsa was an attempt to say the Dome of the Rock was the very spot from which Mohammed ascended to heaven, thus tying Jerusalem to divine revelation in Islamic belief.
The problem however, is that Mohammed died in the year 632, nearly 50 years before the first construction of the al-Aqsa Mosque was completed.
Jerusalem never replaced the importance of Mecca in the Islamic world. When the Umayyad dynasty fell in 750, Jerusalem also fell into near obscurity for 350 years, until the Crusades. During those centuries, many Islamic sites in Jerusalem fell into disrepair and in 1016 the Dome of the Rock collapsed.
Still, for 1,300 years, various Islamic dynasties (Syrian, Egyptian and Turkish) continued to govern Jerusalem as part of their overall control of the Land of Israel, disrupted only by the Crusaders.
What is amazing is that over that period, not one Islamic dynasty ever made Jerusalem its capital.
By the 19th century Jerusalem had been so neglected by Islamic rulers that several prominent Western writers who visited Jerusalem were moved to write about it.
French writer Gustav Flaubert, for example, found “ruins everywhere” during his visit in 1850 when it was part of the Turkish Empire (1516-1917).
Seventeen years later Mark Twain wrote that Jerusalem had “become a pauper village.”
Indeed, Jerusalem’s importance in the Islamic world only appears evident when non-Muslims (including the Crusaders, the British and the Jews) control or capture the city. Only at those points in history did Islamic leaders claim Jerusalem as their third most holy city after Mecca and Medina.
That was again the case in 1967, when Israel captured Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem (and the Old City) during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Oddly, the PLO’s National Covenant, written in 1964, never mentioned Jerusalem.
Only after Israel regained control of the entire city did the PLO ‘update’ its Covenant to include Jerusalem.
Author Eli E. Hertz is the president of Myths and Facts, an organization devoted to research and publication of information regarding US interests in the world and particularly in the Middle East. Mr. Hertz served as Chairman of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting.
His website - http://www.mythsandfacts.org/
Tags: Jerusalem Basic Law
Link to this article on Otters and Science News
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When Mark Twain visited the Land of Israel in 1867 he wrote of a desolate place with very few Arabs
In fact most of the Arab population in Israel today descends from Arabs from Iraq, Syria, Egypt and other places. They came to Israel looking for jobs once the Jews started to drain the swamps, and make the desert bloom.
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Mark Twain's Lessons for the Ages
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| MARK TWAIN |
By Dr. Joseph Frager
If we are true to history, it is clear that only one people has a genuine claim to the land of Israel.
When Mark Twain visited Israel after the Civil War in 1867 he was witness to a very different country that now exists. (It was then under the occupation of the Muslim Ottoman empire.)
It is a credit to the Jewish People that the rebirth of the State of Israel 66 years ago came to fruition.
Mark Twain had a great deal of respect for the Jewish People writing in his own unique style in Harper's Magazine regarding "the Jew" stating, "He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages, and had done it with his hands tied behind him. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass but he remains". This is one of the many lessons Mark Twain has taught us.
Mark Twain was the author of famous novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He also worked as a journalist. (What he said ...)
In his writings about his travels throughout Israel entitled, "Innocents abroad" - published in 1869 - he described the desolation of the Holy Land as follows:
"No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is mournful, dreary, and lifeless. Palestine sits in sackloth and ashes".
In Twain's own inimical words about the Arabs in Israel he describes:
"its minuscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available land for the people's own meager needs, could hardly be considered a serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a State of their own."
Any claim by the Arabs that they were living throughout the land of Israel for any length of time before the Jews came back is totally and unequivocally debunked by Mark Twain's writings. In 1867 there were only a handful of Arabs in the Land of Israel. That is the sum total of it.
All of the Arab claims that they were descendants of Arabs living in Israel is just not true. Yasir Arafat's family came from Egypt, not the Land of Israel. The Arabs only moved in after the Jews had already settled many areas of Israel in the 1800's. Mark Twain's 150th Anniversary of his visit to Israel is soon approaching. We should do everything in our power to honor this great man who set the record straight for the Ages.
Link to this article
Picture of Mark Twain - Wikipedia
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More on Mark Twain here:
Biography:
Biography
Quotes
Pictures of old Jerusalem, when Mark Twain visited, and a few years afterwards -
Excellent website Israel Daily Picture.
Israel Daily Picture archive of Jerusalem
The Myth of the Stolen Arab Land
While the Arab-Israeli conflict today is a diplomatic and military one, it is also composed of a third element — the media. Not being confined, the media debate has spread throughout the internet, online newspapers, online journals and of course, blogs.
Although contributors to online blogs and threads often offer nothing more than rubbish and repartee, there exists a lively and healthy debate on the Arab-Israeli conflict. One of the main points of contention on most blogs and discussions I have seen center around one issue.
Pro-Palestinian writers claim that in 1948, Israel appropriated Palestinian lands and villages to create their own cities and agricultural communities. Pro-Israel writers offer good counterpoints but these are often insufficient to properly negate the argument and win the debate.
Debaters from both sides of the argument often use sources gleaned from political, left or right-wing sources and this damages the quality of the argument since the proofs brought are often nothing more than the biased views of extreme groups. When making an argument, it is important to find credible information from sources that cannot be attributed to a specific political slant.
The first part of the argument that Zionists stole Palestinian land can refer to the British Mandate period before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Arab absentee landowners owned most of the land eventually used by the UN to create the State of Israel and their willingness to sell the land to Jews demonstrates evident disinterest in maintaining ownership over it.
Furthermore, Arab governments displaced their own populations in far greater numbers than the Jews displaced Palestinian Arabs up until the 1930's. Jews were careful not to buy land in areas that would cause Arab displacement and instead bought uncultivated land in remote areas. Israeli leaders at the time discouraged Jews from displacing Arabs and placed heavy importance on a continued Arab presence in the land.
In January of 1937, Ben Gurion testified before the Palestine Royal Commission in which he said, "We will work it out together, and we will see to it that not a single Arab cultivator is displaced, but he should not only remain, but his conditions should be improved, and, by intensification, new room should be created for new Jewish settlers."
However, even with this proposed cooperation, Arabs often sold their land to Jews when they decided to move elsewhere or when they needed the money to invest in promising Jewish-owned business projects.
THE PEEL COMMISSION OF 1937 FOUND ARAB CLAIMS THAT JEWS STOLE THEIR LAND AS BASELESS. Land shortages were due more in part to massive Arab immigration to Palestine from other Arab countries than to Jewish land purchases. Chapter IX of the Peel Commission states,
"The shortage of land is due less to purchase by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population. The Arab claims that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamps and uncultivated when it was bought."
JEWS MADE THE DESERT BLOOM -
AND IT ATTRACTED ARABS LOOKING FOR WORK
Whereas the British resigned much of Palestine to be "uninhabitable," the Jews took this "barren wasteland," drained the swamps and "made the desert bloom." Many of the Jewish-owned citrus groves at the time were situated on sand dunes viewed by the British as "uncultivable."
It is without doubt that the Jews, in their quest to purchase and acquire more land, did not take any land from Arabs unlawfully. Furthermore, Arab absentee landlords living elsewhere and real estate brokers sold their land to Jews at an inflated cost.
As of today, not a single person representing the pro-Palestinian view has been able to contradict this reality using any official documentation, land data or historical records.
Furthermore, the Peel Commission admitted that Arabs on the whole, benefited from a growing Jewish presence in the land as they brought economic prosperity and stability to Palestine and its inhabitants.
"The Arab population shows a remarkable increase since 1920, and it has had some share in the increased prosperity of Palestine. Many Arab landowners have benefited from the sale of land and the profitable investment of the purchase money. The fellaheen are better off on the whole than they were in 1920. This Arab progress has been partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the National Home. In particular, the Arabs have benefited from social services which could not have been provided on the existing scale without the revenue obtained from the Jews."
UP UNTIL 1948, THE PALESTINIAN ARAB POPULATION GREW APPROXIMATELY 120 PERCENT.
This population growth occurred in tandem with Palestinian Jewish population growth and for reasons often overlooked. Jewish immigration and subsequent economic growth in Palestine led to increased Arab immigration from other countries by those seeking economic opportunity. Many Arabs at the time wandered around the Middle East seeking sustenance and a means to support their families.
Arab claims that they were displaced from their homes after living there generation after generation for thousands of years were baseless and fabricated. Most Arabs living in Palestine prior to 1948 had come from Arab lands in search of subsistence and had not been in Palestine for more than a few years.
In addition, the Jews cleared unused land, drained swamps in the Jezreel Valley and surrounding areas and in doing so, helped rid the country of its widespread malaria problem.
They established medical clinics, improved water supplies and developed better solutions to deal with sanitation. All this, directly led to better health, higher standard of living, longer life expectancy and a lower infant mortality rate.
It is clear that Arab complaints against Jews were, for the most part, politically motivated, and did not reflect the reality in Palestine at the time. In comparison to their lives in Arab countries or the situation in Palestine before massive Jewish immigration, Arabs saw a consistently increased improvement in their standard of living, overall health and improved economic stability — all while cultivating their own land.
AUTHOR Israel Kasnett lives in Israel and is a pro-Israel advocate and political strategist. This article was published July 20, 2008 in Neo Constant
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THE FORGOTTEN REFUGEES
More than half of Israeli Jews have deep roots in the Middle East and a million of them arrived as refugees from persecution and violence in Arab countries
Yemenite Jews on their way to Israel in 1949 fleeing Arab violence.
We hear a lot about Arab refugees, but not much about a million Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Here is their story.
The story of Israel, as most people know it, is well trod.
MIZRAHI NATION - Long shut out of the country’s story, Middle Eastern Jews now make up half of Israel’s population, influencing its culture in surprising ways. Who are they?
- The typical Israeli pioneer is thought to be a European-looking Jew.
- Thus Israel is accused of being a European colony for Holocaust survivors.
- Rarely mentioned is the million Jews who returned to Israel from Arab lands.
- And no word is said about the oppression and murderous Arab violence they were fleeing from.
- Or about their possessions, which were lost without compensation.
- In the 1940s there were about 260,000 Jews living in Morocco, 140,000 in Algeria, 40,000 in Libya, 140,000 in Iraq, 80,000 in Egypt, 60,000 in Yemen, and many others in Arab countries and in non-Arab countries like Iran and Turkey.
- In fact, 1,000 years after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, nine out of every ten Jews on earth still lived in the Middle East.
- By the time European Jews began resettling in Palestine, as it was known then, Middle Eastern Jews were already well-established there.
- The notion that Arabs were tolerant of Jews in Muslim countries is a complete myth.
- Long before the reconstitution of the state of Israel in 1948, Arabs were already slaughtering Jews.
- While Mizrahi Jews were not native to Israel, neither were most of the Arabs who came to live there attracted by jobs within the Jewish community there.
- Mizrahi Jews were not well treated by the European Jews, who looked down on their culture.
The Mizrahi Nation
By Matti Friedman,
Matti Friedman is the author of The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World’s Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books, which won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize, the ALA’s Sophie Brody Medal, and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for history. He has been reporting on Israel since 1997.
It begins with anti-Semitism in Europe and passes through Theodor Herzl, the Zionist pioneers, the kibbutz, socialism, the Holocaust, and the 1948 War of Independence.
In the early decades of the return to Zion and the new state, the image of the Israeli was of a blond pioneer tilling the fields shirtless, or of an audience listening to Haydn in one of the new concert halls. Israel might have been located, for historical reasons, in the Middle East, but the new country was an outpost of Europe. Its story was a story about Europe.
Photo - Yemenite Jews in absorption camp in Israel, 1950 (Reuters)
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ANCIENT MAP OF JERUSALEM
OBAMA DENIES ISRAELI SOVEREIGNTY OVER JERUSALEM
He wants to give the ancient Jewish city to the Muslim invader.
The US Supreme Court defers to the White House and by doing so overrides an Act of Congress, and says that Americans born in Jerusalem cannot list their birthplace as Israel.
.Supreme Court dissenters: “The court takes the perilous step — for the first time in our history — of allowing the president to defy an act of Congress in the field of foreign affairs,” US Justice Roberts wrote, while Justice Scalia argued, “The text and structure of the Constitution divide responsibility for foreign policy.”
Jerusalem Post: And so Jerusalem, which is the home of the Knesset and the Supreme Court, and the city mentioned in Torah almost 700 times and never once in the Koran, is apparently not to be considered the capital of the Jewish State. Because they say so.
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A view of Jerusalem from the Tower of David - Photo National Geographic
Outline of Jerusalem history
The following list of twenty-one dates is a summary of the 3,700-year-old relationship of the Jewish people to Jerusalem.
1738 BCE The first Jew goes to Jerusalem
Abraham, the founding father of the Jewish people, was sent by God to Israel. After arriving in Israel, Abraham went to Jerusalem where he received a blessing from king Melchizedek.
1676 BCE The binding of Isaac
One of the most important events in early Jewish history was when Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac. This took place on Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem.
1590 BCE Jacob’s dream
One of the most important experiences in the life of Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, was his mystical dream about a ladder that reached to heaven. This dream took place in Jerusalem.
866 BCE Jerusalem becomes the capital of Israel
King David established Jerusalem as the capitol city of Israel.
825 BCE The first Temple in Jerusalem
King Solomon built the first Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple stood for 400 years until being destroyed by the Babylonians.
423 BCE Destruction of first Temple
The Babylonians conquered Israel, destroyed the Temple and exiled the Jews
352 BCE The second Temple in Jerusalem
The Temple was rebuilt and stood for another 400 years.
70 CE The second Temple is destroyed
The Romans destroyed the second Temple.
312 Christianity expels Jews from Jerusalem
The Christians ruled Israel for 300 years and made it illegal for Jews to live in Jerusalem.
638 The Muslims conquered Jerusalem
The Muslims conquered Israel and Jerusalem. Though they allowed Jews to move back into Jerusalem, they also built their mosques atop Judaism’s holiest site—the Temple Mount.
1099 Christians return to Jerusalem
The Christians defeat the Muslims and kill all the Jews in Jerusalem.
From the time of the destruction of the Temple, no foreign ruler paid much attention to Jerusalem and it became a poor, run down city that suffered from a lack of clean water, from disease, and from robbers.
Despite this, Jews everywhere dreamed of returning to Jerusalem and many literally risked their lives to travel and settle there. The Western Wall, the last remnant of the Temple, was the holiest place in Jerusalem for prayer.
1267 A new synagogue in Jerusalem
The Ramban was a great rabbi who was forced to flee Christian persecution in Spain. He went to Jerusalem where he re-established the first synagogue in 150 years. That synagogue became the center of a small new Jewish community and was used for 300 years.
1500 Rabbi Ovadia of Bartenura
Though Jews were scattered all over the world, many made heroic efforts to move to Israel and settle in Jerusalem. Rabbi Ovadia of Bartenura was a great scholar who moved to Jerusalem.
1517 The Turks conquer Jerusalem
The Turkish empire conquered Israel and Jerusalem and ruled for 400 years until the end or World War I.
1699 Yehuda Hachassid
Rabbi Yehuda Hachassid led 1,000 Jews from Poland to Israel where they settled in Jerusalem. The Yehuda Hachassid synagogue was in use for over 200 years until it was destroyed in1948 by the Jordanians. It is currently being rebuilt.
1742 Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar moves to Jerusalem
Rabbi Chaim Attar, a great scholar and mystic, moved with his family and many of his students from Morocco to Jerusalem.
1777 The Baal Shem Tov
The Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Chassidic movement, inspired many to emigrate to Israel. In 1777, Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk led a group of 300 Russian Jews to Israel.
1809 The Vilna Gaon
Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna (known as the Vilna Gaon) encouraged his students to move from Lithuania to Israel. From 1809 to the late 1830’s approximately 200 people a year left Lithuania for Israel where most of them settled in Jerusalem. The Vilna Gaon himself tried twice to make the move but was unsuccessful.
1917 The British conquer Jerusalem
England defeated the Turks in World War I and conquered Israel and Jerusalem.
1850 - 1948 The great return to Jerusalem
Over the centuries the Jewish population slowly grew until there were 10,000 Jews living in the city in 1850. (There were also 6,000 Arabs and 4,000 Christians living in the city.) At the end of World War I, the British promised to help the Jewish people rebuild a homeland in Israel. By 1948 there were 650,000 Jews living in Israel and 100,000 in Jerusalem.
1948 The Jordanians destroy the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem
In 1948 Israel fought and won the War of Independence, but it lost Jerusalem to the Jordanian forces. All of the Jews who lived within the walls of the ancient city of Jerusalem were either killed or driven out by the Jordanians.
The Jordanians destroyed all of the synagogues in the city and would not allow any Jews to live in Jerusalem or even visit the Western Wall to pray. Israel established its capitol in the new city of Jerusalem that was outside of the walls of the ancient city of Jerusalem.
1967 The Six-Day War and Jerusalem-Yom Yerushalayim
Though the modern state of Israel was born in 1948, for twenty years, Jews were cut off from the heart of Jerusalem. In the spring of 1967, the Arab countries that surround Israel were planning to attack and destroy the Jewish state. Instead of suffering defeat, Israel won the war in just six days.
On June 7, 1967—after almost 2,000 years— Jerusalem was united and the Old City of Jerusalem was once again the capital of the Jewish homeland.
The restoration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel 2,800 years after King David first made it the capital, and 2,000 years after it’s destruction by the Romans, just might be the most incredible event in all of world history.
Source
Computer-generated of Jerusalem in the first century AD with what researchers think the Jewish temple looked like.
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An Aboriginal Canadian writes about the Jews as the indigenous people of the Land of Israel
I am a Métis from Paddle Prairie Metis settlement. My father, Mervin Bellerose, co-authored the Métis Settlements Act of 1989, which was passed by the Alberta legislature in 1990 and cemented our land rights. I founded Canadians For Accountability, a native rights advocacy group, and I am an organizer and participant in the Idle No More movement in Calgary. And I am a Zionist.
Indigenous status
To begin, let us acknowledge that there is no rule that a land can have only one indigenous people; it is not a zero sum game in which one group must be considered indigenous so that therefore another is not. However, there is a very clear guideline to being an indigenous people. It is somewhat complex but can be boiled down to the checklist below, as developed by anthropologist José R. Martínez-Cobo (former special rapporteur of the Sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities for the United Nations).
This list was developed because indigenous rights are beginning to be respected across the planet. This recognition is incredibly important, so we as indigenous people cannot allow non-indigenous people to make false claims, which ultimately would harm our own rights. Israel is the world’s first modern indigenous state: the creation and declaration of the sovereign nation of Israel marks the first time in history that an indigenous people has managed to regain control of its ancestral lands and build a nation state. As such, this is incredibly important for indigenous people both to recognise and to support as a great example for our peoples to emulate.
The actual working definition of “indigenous people,” (not the Wikipedia version, nor Merriam Webster, both more suited to plants and animals) for purposes of this essay is that developed by aforementioned anthropologist José R. Martínez-Cobo. With this as my foundation, I will detail why Jews are indigenous to Israel, and why Palestinians are not.
Martinez-Cobo’s research suggests that indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.
This historical continuity may consist of the continuation, for an extended period reaching into the present of one or more of the following factors:
- Occupation of ancestral lands, or at least of part of them
- Common ancestry with the original occupants of these lands
- Culture in general, or in specific manifestations (such as religion, living under a tribal system, membership of an indigenous community, dress, means of livelihood, lifestyle, etc.)
- Language (whether used as the only language, as mother-tongue, as the habitual means of communication at home or in the family, or as the main, preferred, habitual, general or normal language)
- Residence in certain parts of the country, or in certain regions of the world
- Religion that places importance on spiritual ties to the ancestral lands
- Blood quantum – that is, the amount of blood you carry of a specific people to identify as that people. The concept was developed by colonialists in order to eventually breed out native peoples.
Let us now look quickly at the Jews. How do they fit this definition?
- Their lands were occupied, first by the Romans, then by the Arabs in the seventh century.
- They share common ancestry with previous occupants as determined by several genetic studies.
- Their culture can be traced directly to the Levant, where it developed into what is now known as “Jewish culture.” While different Jewish communities have slightly different traditions, they all share the same root culture, and it remains unchanged. They have resurrected their traditional language, and while many still speak Yiddish and Ladino, Hebrew has become the primary language again.
- They have spiritual ties to the land, which plays a large role in their traditions as a people.
Despite all the arguments about “European” Jews, they in fact meet all the criteria set forth by Martínez-Cobo. Even though Israel is the first modern indigenous state, it still has lands that are occupied by foreigners in Judea and Samaria. Those are ancestral lands and, many feel that they should be returned to the indigenous peoples for self-determination.
Now, for the flip side.
Palestinians have what are called “ rights of longstanding presence;” and although these are legitimate rights, they do not trump indigenous rights. The very nature of “longstanding presence” means that although they lived somewhere a long time, they do not have the right to occupy indigenous peoples and control them.
The argument that Palestinians are indigenous is incorrect for several reasons.
- Approximately 50% percent of Palestinian Arabs can track their ancestors back farther than their great-grandparents. Many are descended from Arabs brought to the Levant by the British to build infrastructure after World War I.
- The vast majority of Palestinians are Arabic speaking Muslims; the Arabic language is indigenous to the Arabian Peninsula, as is the Muslim religion. The Muslim religion’s holiest places are not in the Levant, but in the city of Mecca, located in the Arabian Peninsula. They have no specifically Palestinian culture that is completely Palestinian dating before the 1960s; in fact, prior to that, the majority identified as “greater Syrians.”
- Some Palestinians share common ancestry with indigenous peoples, but they neither follow indigenous traditions nor do they self-identify as those indigenous peoples. They share neither religion nor language with them. Blood quantum alone is insufficient to transmit indigenous status.
- The Arabs of the Middle East subsumed several indigenous populations, but no group can become indigenous through subsuming indigenous peoples. Rather, they conquered the entire region and spread their own language, customs, and religion. This is historical fact.
Now you might ask, why is this important? It is important to indigenous people because we cannot allow the argument that conquerors can become indigenous. If we, as other indigenous people, allow that argument to be made, then we are delegitimising our own rights.
If conquerors can become indigenous, then the white Europeans who came to my indigenous lands in North America could now claim to be indigenous. The white Europeans who went to Australia and New Zealand could now claim to be indigenous. If we, even once, allow that argument to be made, indigenous rights are suddenly devalued and meaningless. This is somewhat peculiar, as those who are arguing for Palestinian “indigenous rights” are usually those who have little grasp of the history, and no understanding of the truth behind indigenous rights.
If you should encounter the argument that conquerors may themselves become indigenous to a region by virtue of conquering, direct those who assert the argument to this article, and help them understand not only is the argument wrong – it is dangerous to Indigenous people everywhere.
Author: Ryan Bellerose
A member of the indigenous Metis people, Ryan grew up in the far north of Alberta, Canada
Source
REFERENCES
The League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine - The Facts
Recommended: Short and factual video about the fundamental significance of Jerusalem and Temple Mount for Jews and its very weak link to Islam - in history and doctrine
Muslims have no genuine religious respect for the sacredness of the site, which is routinely used as a soccer field and where Arab families go to picnic.
Video of Arab youngsters playing soccer and using dirty language on the Temple Mount
- http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/2254/travesties-temple-mount/#gmyQT5S2ZADSlRjz.97
Israel National News archive of Temple Mount reports
The Battle over Jerusalem and Temple Mount - Historical background
VIRTUAL TOUR of the ancient Jewish Temple of Jerusalem
PICTURES OF JERUSALEM TODAY
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