The Condition of Palestine
In a book called Heth and Moab, Colonel C. R. Conder pronounced the Palestine of the 1880s "a ruined land." According to Conder,
We have seen strong evidence that the Holy Land was inhabited only sparsely in the nineteenth century. For centuries the non-Jewish, particularly the Muslim, peoples who did inhabit the land had been largely composed of a revolving immigrant population of diverse ethnic origins who could not possibly have constituted a substantial indigenous "Palestinian" population, much less a nation of inhabitants for "a thousand" or "two thousand years." Rather, the majority of those inhabitants were migrants and peasants originating from other lands, many of whom had been unscrupuluously exploited by feudal or absentee landlords, moneylenders, and corrupt officials of the Turkish government. They in turn traditionally exploited and preyed upon the oppressed dhimmiJewish population.
Since the inception of modem Israel in 1948, that perception has been embellished. The Jewish "aliens" came as "refugees from Europe" and "stole" land from the Arab settled population, it is claimed. No doubt the Jews did suffer from the monstrosities of the Holocaust, but Jewish suffering should not be salved by inducing the suffering of the "Palestinian people," and "excluding" or "expelling" them from their land since "time immemorial," it is thought.
Immigration: Government Reports
Palestinian Refugees,
At the time of the 1948 war, Arabs in Israel were invited by their fellow Arabs -- invited to "leave" while the "invading" Arab armies would purge the land of Jews.1 The invading Arab governments were certain of a quick victory; leaders warned the Arabs in Israel to run for their lives.2
How many Palestinians Refugees?
Arabs, encouraged by their leaders to leave, fled from what is now Israel between April and December, 1948.1 The Arab leaders promised them that they would soon be able to return following Israel's destruction. In some cases the Jews, including Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, urged the Arabs to remain, promising that they would not be harmed.2 Those who remained became full and equal citizens of Israel, while those who chose to leave went to neighboring Arab states. Instead of welcoming their Arab brothers, and integrating them into the mainstream of their societies, the Arab states kept them in squalid refugee camps and used these Palestinians refugees as political pawns in their fight against Israel.
Palestine inhabited by a mixed population
The "chauvinist Arab version of history," then--so important to the current claim of "Palestinian" rights to "Arab Palestine," which Arab Palestinians purportedly inhabited for "thousands of years" --omits several relevant, situation-altering facts
History did not begin with the Arab conquest in the seventh century. The people whose nation was destroyed by the Romans were the Jews. There were no Arab Palestinians then -- not until seven hundred years later would an Arab rule prevail, and then briefly. And not by people known as "Palestinians." The short Arab rule would be reigning over Christians and Jews, who had been there to languish under various other foreign conquerors, -- Roman, Byzantine, Persian, to name just three in the centuries between the Roman and Arab conquests. The peoples who conquered under the banner of the invading Arabians from the desert were often hired mercenaries who remained on the land as soldiers -- not Arabians, but others who were enticed by the promise of the booty of conquest.
From the time the Arabians, along with their non-Arabian recruits, entered Palestine and Syria, they found and themselves added to what was "ethnologically a chaos of all the possible human combinations to which, when Palestine became a land of pilgrimage, a new admixture was added."1 Among the peoples who have been counted as "indigenous Palestinian Arabs" are Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Germans, Afghans, Circassians, Bosnians, Sudanese, Samaritans, Algerians, Motawila, and Tartars.
John of Wurzburg lists for the middle era of the kingdom, Latins, Germans, Hungarians, Scots, Navarese, Bretons, English, Franks, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Georgians, Armenians, Syrians, Persian Nestorians, Indians,Egyptians, Copts, Maronites and natives from the Nile Delta. The list might be much extended, for it was the period of the great self-willed city-states in Europe, and Amalfi, Pisans, Genoese, Venetians, and Marseillais, who had quarters in all the bigger cities, owned villages, and had trading rights, would, in all probability, have submitted to any of the above designations, only under pressure. Besides all these, Norsemen, Danes, Frisians, Tartars, Jews, Arabs, Russians, Nubians, and Samaritans, can be safely added to the greatest human agglomeration drawn together in one small area of the globe."2Greeks fled the Muslim rule in Greece, and landed in Palestine. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Greeks lived everywhere in the Holy Land--constituting about twenty percent of the population-and their authority dominated the villages.3
Between 1750 and 1766 Jaffa had been rebuilt, and had some five hundred houses. Turks, Arabs, Greeks and Armenians and a solitary Latin monk lived there, to attend to the wants of the thousands of pilgrims who had to be temporarily housed in the port before proceeding to Jerusalem.4"In some cases villages [in Palestine] are populated wholly by settlers from other portions of the Turkish Empire within the nineteenth century. There are villages of Bosnians, Druzes, Circassians and Egyptians," one historian has reported. 5
Another source, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911 edition (before the "more chauvinist Arab history" began to prevail with the encouragement of the British), finds the "population" of Palestine composed of so "widely differing" a group of "inhabitants" -- whose "ethnological affinities" create "early in the 20th century a list of no less than fifty languages" (see below) -- that "it is therefore no easy task to write concisely ... on the ethnology of Palestine." In addition to the "Assyrian, Persian and Roman" elements of ancient times, "the short-lived Egyptian government introduced into the population an element from that country which still persists in the villages."
. . . There are very large contingents from the Mediterranean countries, especially Armenia, Greece and Italy . . . Turkoman settlements ... a number of Persians and a fairly large Afghan colony . . . Motawila ... long settled immigrants from Persia ... tribes of Kurds ... German "Templar" colonies ... a Bosnian colony ... and the Circassian settlements placed in certain centres ... by the Turkish government in order to keep a restraint on the Bedouin ... a large Algerian element in the population ... still maintain(s) [while] the Sudanese have been reduced in numbers since the beginning of the 20th century.In the late eighteenth century, 3,000 Albanians recruited by Russians were settled in Acre. The Encyclopaedia Britannicafinds "most interesting all the non-Arab communities in the country . . . the Samaritan sect in Nablus (Shechem); a gradually disappearing body" once "settled by the Assyrians to occupy the land left waste by the captivity of the Kingdom of Israel."6
The disparate peoples recently assumed and purported to be "settled Arab indigenes, for a thousand years" were in fact a "heterogeneous" community 7 With no "Palestinian" identity, and according to an official British historical analysis in 1920, no Arab identity either: "The people west of the Jordan are not Arabs, but only Arabic-speaking. The bulk of the population are fellahin.... In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race." 8
Birthplaces of Inhabitants of Jerusalem. District circa 1931
| Moslems | Chnstians | Others |
| Palestine Syria Transiordan Cyprus EgyptHejaz-Nejd Iraq Yemen Other Arabian Territories Persia Turkey Central Asiatic Territories Indian Continent Far Eastern Asia Algeria Morocco Tripoli Tunis Other African Territories Albania France Greece Spain United Kingdom U.S.S.R. U.S.A. Central & South America Australia | Palestine Syria Transiordan Cyprus MaltaOther Mediterranean Islands Abyssinia Egypt Hejaz-Neid Iraq Other Arabian Territories Persia Turkey Central Asiatic Territories Indian Continent Far Eastern Asia Algeria Morocco Tripoli Tunis Other African Territories Albania Austria Belgium Bulgaria Czechoslovakia Denmark France Germany Gibraltar Greece Holland Italy Latvia Lithuania Norway Poland Portugal Rumania Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom U.S.S.R. Yugoslavia Canada U.S.A. Central & South America Australia | Palestine Syria Egypt Persia CzechoslovakiaPoland Rumania Switzeriand United Kingdom U.S.S.R. |
Languages In Habitual Use In Palestine circa 1931
| Moslems | Chnstians | Others |
| Afghan Albanian Arabic Bosnian Chinese Circassian English French German Greek Gypsy Hebrew Hindustani Indian dialects Javanese Kurdish Persian Portuguese Russian Spanish Sudanese Takrurian Turkish | Abyssinian Arabic Armenian Basque Brazilian [sic] Bulgarian Catalan Chaldean Chinese Circassian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish Flemish French German Greek Hebrew Hindustani Indian dialects Irish Italian Kurdish Latin Magyar Malayalam Maltese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Rumanian Russian Serbian Slavic Spanish Sudanese Swedish Swiss Syrian Turkish Welsh | Arabic Czech English French German Hebrew Persian Polish Russian Spanish Yiddish |
Source: Census of Palestine --1931, volume 1, Palestine; Part 1, Report by E. Mills, B.A., O.B.E., Assistant Chief Secretary Superintendent of Census (Alexandria, 1933), p. 147.
1. Richard Hartmann, Palestina unter den Araben, 632-1516 (Leipzig, 1915), cited by de Haas, History, p. 147.
4. Frederich Hasselquist, Reise nach Palastina, etc., 1749-52 (Rostock, 1762), p. 598, cited by de Haas, History, p. 355.
8 .In a handbook, prepared under the direction of the historical section of the Foreign Office, no. 60, entitled "Syria and Palestine" (London, 1920), p. 56.
Palestine, a land virtually laid waste with little population
A review of Palestine, before the era of prosperity began with the late nineteenth-century renewal of Jewish land settlement, shows that periodically Palestine was virtually laid waste, and its population suffered acute decline.
An enormous swell of Arab population could only have resulted from immigration and in-migration (from Jordan and the West Bank to the coastal area). It is helpful to see the land that was virtually emptied-and why.
Dio Cassius, writing at the time, described the ruin of the land beginning with the destruction of Judah:
Of their forts the fifty strongest were razed to the ground. Nine hundred and eighty-five of their best-known villages were destroyed....Thus the whole of Judea became desert, as indeed had been foretold to the Jews before the war. For the tomb of Solomon, whom these folk celebrate in their sacred rites, fell of its own accord into fragments, and wolves and hyenas, many in number, roamed howling through their cities.1
One historian after another has reported the same findings.
In the twelve and a half centuries between the Arab conquest in the seventh century and the beginnings of the Jewish return in the 1880's, Palestine was laid waste. Its ancient canal and irrigation systems were destroyed and the wondrous fertility of which the Bible spoke vanished into desert and desolation... Under the Ottoman empire of the Turks, the policy of disfoliation continued; the hillsides were denuded of trees and the valleys robbed of their topsoil.2
In 1590 a "simple English visitor" to Jerusalem wrote, "Nothing there is to bescene but a little of the old walls, which is yet Remayning and all the rest is grasse, mosse and Weedes much like to a piece of Rank or moist Grounde."3
"While Tiberias was being resettled by Jews from Papal states, whose migration was approved by a papal Bull, Nazareth was continuing its decline." A Franciscan pilgrim translated a Latin Manuscript that reported that " 'A house of robbers, murderers, the inhabitants are Saracens.... It is a lamentable thing to see thus such a town. We saw nothing more stony, full of thorns and desert.'"4 A hundred years afterward, Nazareth was, in 1697, "an inconsiderable village.... Acre a few poor cottages ... nothing here but a vast and spacious ruin." Nablus consisted of two streets with many people, and Jericho was a "poor nasty village."5
In the mid-1700s, British archaeologist Thomas Shaw wrote that the land in Palestine was "lacking in people to till its fertile soil."6 An eighteenth-century French author and historian, Count Constantine Frangois Volney, wrote of Palestine as the "ruined" and "desolate" land.
In "Greater Syria," which included Palestine,
Many parts ... lost almost all their peasantry. In others.... the recession was great but not so total.7
Count Volney reported that, "In consequence of such wretched government, the greater part of the Pachilics [Provinces] in the empire are impoverished and laid waste." Using one province as an example, Volney reported that
... upwards of three thousand two hundred villages were reckoned; but, at present, the collector can scarcely find four hundred. Such of our merchants as have resided there twenty years have themselves seen the greater part of the environs ... become depopulated. The traveller meets with nothing but houses in ruins, cisterns rendered useless, and fields abandoned. Those who cultivated them have fled... 8... And can we hope long to carry on an advantageous commerce with a country which is precipitately hastening to ruin? 9
Another writer, describing "Syria" (and Palestine) some sixty years later in 1843, stated that, in Volney's day, "the land had not fully reached its last prophetic degree of desolation and depopulation." 10
From place to place the reporters varied, but not the reports: J. S. Buckingham described his visit of 1816 to Jaffa, which "has all the appearances of a poor village, and every part of it that we saw was of corresponding meanness."11 Buckingham described Ramle, "where, as throughout the greater part of Palestine, the ruined portion seemed more extensive than that which was inhabited."12
After a visit in 1817-1818, travelers reported that there was not "a single boat of any description on the lake [Tiberias]."13 In a German encyclopedia published in 1827, Palestine was depicted as "desolate and roamed through by Arab bands of robbers."14
Throughout the nineteenth century the abandonment and dismal state of the terrain was lamented. In 1840 an observer, who was traveling through, wrote of his admiration for the Syrian "fine spirited race of men" whose "population is on the decline."15 While scorning the idea of Jewish colonization, the writer observed that the once populous area between Hebron and Bethlehem was "now abandoned and desolate" with "dilapidated towns."16 Jerusalem consisted of "a large number of houses ... in a dilapidated and ruinous state," and "the masses really seem to be without any regular employment." The "masses" of Jerusalem were estimated at less than 15,000 inhabitants, of whom more than half the population were Jews.17
The British Consul in Palestine reported in 1857 that
The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.... 18
In the 1860s, it was reported that "depopulation is even now advancing."19 At the same time, H. B. Tristram noted in his journal that
The north and south [of the Sharon plain] land is going out of cultivation and whole villages are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages there have been thus erased from the map [by the Bedouin] and the stationary population extirpated. 20
Mark Twain, in his inimitable fashion, expressed scom for what he called the "romantic" and "prejudiced" accounts of Palestine after he visited the Holy Land in 1867.21 In one location after another, Twain registered gloom at his findings.
Stirring scenes ... occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its 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. 22
In fact, according to Twain, even the Bedouin raiders who attacked "so fiercely" had been imported: "provided for the occasion ... shipped from Jerusalem," by the Arabs who guarded each group of pilgrims.
They met together in full view of the pilgrims, after the battle, and took lunch, divided the baksheeshextorted in the season of danger and then accompanied the cavalcade home to the city! The nuisance of an Arab guard is one which is created by the sheikhs and the Bedouins together, for mutual profit... 23
To find ". . . the sort of solitude to make one dreary," one must, Twain wrote dramatically,
Come to Galilee for that... these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal palms.... We reached Tabor safely .... We never saw a human being on the whole route. 24Nazareth is forlorn .... Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago: Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Savior's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang, "Peace on earth, good will to men," is untenanted by any living creature... Bethsaida and Chorzin have vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them, where thousands of men once listened to the Savior's voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.25
"Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.... desolate and unlovely.. . Twain wrote with remone. it is dreamland." 26
Jaffa, a French traveler wrote late in the nineteenth century, was still a ruin27. Haifa, to the north, had 6,000 souls and "nothing remarkable about it," another Frenchman, the author of France's foremost late-nineteenth-century Holy Land guidebook, commented. Haifa "can be crossed in five minutes" on the way to the city of Acre, he judged; that magnificent port was commercially idle. 28
Many writers, such as the Reverend Samuel Manning, mourned the atrophy of the coastal plain, the Sharon Plain, "the exquisite fertility and beauty of which made it to the Hebrew mind a symbol of prosperity."
But where were the inhabitants? This fertile plain, which might support an immense population, is almost a solitude.... Day by day we were to learn afresh the lesson now forced upon us, that the denunciations of ancient prophecy have been fulfilled to the very letter -- "the land is left void and desolate and without inhabitants." 29Report followed depressing report, as the economist-historian Professor Fred Gottheil pointed out: "a desolate country"; 30 "wretched desolation and neglect";31 "almost abandoned now"32"unoccupied";33 "uninhabited";34 "thinly populated."35
In a book called Heth and Moab, Colonel C. R. Conder pronounced the Palestine of the 1880s "a ruined land." According to Conder,
so far as the Arab race is concerned, it appears to be decreasing rather than otherwise.36
Conder had also visited Palestine earlier, in 1872, and he commented on the continuing population decline within the nine or ten-year interim between his visits:
The Peasantry who are the backbone of the population, have diminished most sadly in numbers and wealth.37
Pierre Loti, the noted French writer, wrote in 1895 of his visit to the land: "I traveled through sad Galilee in the spring, and I found it silent. . . ." In the vicinity of the Biblical Mount Gilboa, "As elsewhere, as everywhere in Palestine, city and palaces have returned to the dust; This melancholy of abandonment, weighs on all the Holy Land." 38
David Landes summarized the causes of the shriveling number of inhabitants:
As a result of centuries of Turkish neglect and misrule, following on the earlier ravages of successive conquerors, the land had been given over to sand, marsh, the anopheles mosquito, clan feuds, and Bedouin marauders. A population of several millions had shrunk to less than one tenth that number-perhaps a quarter of a million around 1800, and 300,000 at mid-century.39Palestine had indeed become "sackcloth and ashes."
1. Dio Cassius, History of the Romans, lxix, 12-14, cited by de Haas,History, pp. 55-56. De Haas adds: "In the third of the Schweich Lectures of 1922 the late Israel Abrahams ('Campains in Palestine from Alexander the Great' London, 1927) belittles Dio, Cassius' record of this war, and repeats the suggestion that the Jews were influenced by Hadrian 'consent to the rebuilding of the Temple.' This rebuilding myth, depending upon the alleged visit of Hadrian to Palestine on the death of Trajan, has been fully dealt with by Henderson in his biography of Hadrian. All the dimensions of the war, its gravity, and its duration, are fully attested by the inscriptions relating to the legions and by the honors distributed at the end of the campaign. The archeological records, carefully analyzed, support Dio Cassius and not his would-be corrector.
2. Carl Hermann Voss, "The Palestine Problem Today, Israel and Its Neighbors" (Boston, 1953), p. 13.
3. Gunner Edward Webbe, Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement, p. 86, cited in de Haas, History, p. 338.
4. De Haas, History, p. 337, citing Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement, 1925, p. 197, translation of Latin manuscnpt by a Franciscan pilgrim.
5. Henry Maundrell, The Journal of Henry Maundrellfrom Aleppo to Jerusalem, 1697, Bohn's edition (London, 1848), respectively pp. 477, 428, 450.
6. Thomas Shaw, Travels and Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant (London, 1767), p. 331ff. De Haas notes: "Hasselquist, the Swedish botanist, munching some roasted ears of' green wheat which a shepherd generously shared with him, in the plain of Acre, reflected that the white bread of his northern homeland and the roasted wheat ears symbolized the difference between the two civilizations' Had he known that Mukaddasi boasted in the tenth century of the excellence Of Palestine's white bread he might have been still more impressed by the low estate to which the country had fallen in seven hundred years.... Hasselquist joined a party of four thousand pilgrims who went to Jericho under an escort of three hundred soldiers. He estimated that four thousand Christians, mostly of the eastern rites, entered Jaffa each year, and as many Jews. The Armenian Convent in Jerusalem alone could accommodate a thousand persons. The botanist viewed the pilgrim tolls as the best resource of an uncultivated and uninhabited country. . ~ . Ramleh was a ruin." (Emphasis added.) De Haas, History, pp. 349, 358, 360, citing Frederich Hasselquist, Reise nach Palastina, etc., 1749-1752, pp. 139, 145-146, 190.
7. Norman Lewis, "The Frontier of Settlement in Syria, 1800-19 50," in Charles Issawi, ed., The Economic History of the Middle East (Chicago, 1966), p. 260.
8. Count Constantine F. Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, 1785 (London, 1788), Vol. 2, p. 147. According to Volney, ". . . we with difficulty recognize Jerusalem.... remote from every road, it seems neither to have been calculated for a considerable mart of commerce, nor the centre of a great consumption.... [the population] is supposed to amount to twelve to fourteen thousand.... The second place deserving notice, is Bait-el-labm, or Bethlehem, ... The soil is the best in all these districts ... but as is the case everywhere else, cultivation is wanting. They reckon about six hundred men in this village capable Of bearing arms.... The third and last place of note is Habroun, or Hebron, the most powerful village in all this quarter, and able to arm eight or nine hundred men . . ." (pp. 303-325).
10. A. Keith, The Land of Israel (Edinburgh, 1843), p. 465. "The population (viz., of the whole of Syria), rated by Volney at two million and a half, is now estimated at half that amount."
15. S. Olin, Travels in Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land (New York, 1843), Vol. 2, pp. 438-439.
17. No. 238, "Report of the Commerce of Jerusalem During the Year 1863," F.O. 195/808, May 1864. ". . . The population of the City of Jerusalem is computed at 15,000, of whom about 4,500 Moslem, 8,000 Jews, and the rest Christians of various denominations. . ." From A.H. Hyamson, ed., The British Consulate in Jerusalem, 2 vols. (London, 1939-1941), Vol. 2, p. 331.
18. James Finn to the Earl of Clarendon, Jerusalem, September 15, 1857, F.O. 78/1294 (Pol. No. 36). Finn wrote further that "The result of my observations is, that we have here Jews, who have been to the United States, but have returned to their Holy Land -Jews of Jerusalem do go to Australia and instead of remaining there, do return hither, even without the allurements of agriculture and its concomitants." Ibid., 1, pp. 249-52.
27. Jules Hoche, Les Pays des croisades (Paris, n.d.), p. 10, cited by David Landes, "Palestine Before the Zionists," Commentary, Feb., 1976, p. 49.
29. The Reverend Samuel Manning, Those Holy Fields (London, 1874), pp. 14-17. W.M. Thomson reiterated the Reverend Manning's observations: "How melancholy is this utter desolation! Not a house, not a trace of inhabitants, not even shepherds, seen everywhere else, appear to relieve the dull monotony.... Isaiah says that Sharon shall be wilderness, and the prediction has become a sad and impressive reality." Thomson, The Land and the Book (London: T. Nelsons & Sons, 1866), p. 506ff.
30. W.C. Prime, Tent Life in the Holy Land (New York, 1857), p. 240, cited by Fred Gottheil, "The Population of Palestine, Circa 1875," Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 15, no. 3, October 1979.
33. W. Allen, The Dead Sea: A New Route to India (London, 1855), p. 113, cited in ibid. 62), p. 466,
38. Pierre Loti, La Galilee (Paris, 1895), pp. 37-41, 69, 85-86, 69, cited by David Landes, "Palestine Before the Zionists," Commentary, February 1976, pp. 48-49.
Bareness and oppression of Palestine due to feudal system of taxes by absentee Arab Landowners
Just as today the myths are being perpetuated about the "Palestinian Arab identity for thousands of years" and about the "golden age of Jews in Arab Lands," so public opinion of the world was swayed by Arab propaganda to blame the plight of the wretched fellah (peasant) driven off his land "since time immemorial" -- on the "moneyed Jews of the world." The story goes: "But poor and neglected though it was, to the Arabs, who lived in it, Palestine ... was still their country, their home, the land in which their people for centuries past had lived and left their graves."1
In fact some Arab -- or Arabic-speaking -- peasants were displaced, but they were displaced by Arabs beginning long before the Jews' mass restoration of the land had begun, and continuing long after Jewish settlements thrived, as we will see in other chapters. It was those peoples----peasants crippled by the corruption in Palestine and land nearby-along with migrants by tradition, and immigrants "Planted" by the Turks-who would flood into the area of opportunity, the Jewish-settled areas of Western Palestine. And it was those same "Arabic" migrant-peasants and immigrants to the Jewish-settled areas who would later be 'Acounted as "settled" Muslims on their land "from time immemorial" who were being "displaced by the Jews."
The barrenness of the land, the bleak desolation of its disintegration from the once fertile biblical "milk and honey" to sour decay, resulted in and from the same conditions-ravages of conquest, epidemics, earthquakes, abandonment, and corruption.
As historians' findings indicate earlier in this book, the spoils system predominated from the time of the Prophet Muhammad and was regulated by his successor, Caliph Omar. According to the commandments of Allah,
Know that whenever you seize anything as a spoil, to God belongs a fifth thereof and to his Apostle .... 2
The rest belonged to the conquering Muslims as a collective group, not to any individual. 3
In the Prophet Muhammad's time, that fifth of the booty of conquest was portioned out to members of his family and purportedly to "the needy" as well. But as the booty passed to the leaders who succeeded Muhammad, it appears that patterns for an unequal distribution of wealth were set "as early as the days of Omar I." 4
In the centuries that followed, as spoils became spoilage, Palestine's wide open, virtually lawless state encouraged a perpetuation of the corrupt system. The dwindling number of peasants were so heavily taxed and extorted by whateve fiefdom. or feudal state existed at the particular moment that those who might have remained sedentary were compelled to join the traditional ranks of the wandering migrant population.
The fiefdom of the Mamluks (1260-1516) was replaced when the Ottomans conquered the country in 1516. The Ottoman feudal system only exacerbated the conditions of corruption. Bernard Lewis reports that
Harsh, exorbitant, and improvident taxation led to a decline in cultivation, which was sometimes permanent. The peasants, neglected and impoverished, were forced into the hands of money-lenders and speculators, and often driven off the land entirely. With the steady decline in bureaucratic efficiency during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ... the central government ceased to exercise any check or control over agriculture and village affairs, which were left to the unchecked rapacity of the tax-farmers, the leaseholders, and the bailiffs of court nominees.5
Another study of the land system found that
... Every day the law was circumvented, because the rich used to take over all the tenancies with the purpose of again letting them privately, and at a great profit to themselves, to sub-tenants, in clear contradiction to the express object of the State that the lands should remain in the hands of the actual tenants all their lifetime. These sub-tenants also endeavoured to squeeze out profit for themselves by laying an intolerable burden on the peasants.6
In 1730 reforms were attempted to abolish life tenancies, but "Various attempts made to introduce reforms in the fief system ended in failure." 7
Recognized authorities of the day traveled to the country and their recorded findings were unanimous. At the end of the eighteenth century, Count Volney found a wasteland, 8 where ". . . nothing is more destructive to Syria, than the shameful and excessive usury customary in that country." 9
Historians, sociologists, official visitors, tourists-all have described the devastating conditions of existence in the country. Tax farmers, who "were supposed to raise from the peasants only a stipulated amount ... enjoyed great power," and ". . . owing to the increasing weakness and corruption of the government, the peasants had practically no legal redress. . . ." 10
By the nineteenth century there was "cash farming," which prompted " a tendency for village or tribal lands to be appropriated by some powerful individual, e.g., tribal shaikhs, local landlords, or urban money lenders." 11
In order that the tax-gatherers -- the multazim -- might be able to extract from their venture the money which they had paid to the Government and a profit besides, they exploited and ransacked the peasants to the last penny, robbing them of half their produce and even more. The fellah was delivered hand and foot to the tax-collectors, since he had not the slightest protection against their tyranny.12
As a result, most peasants were "impoverished" and "could not ... seek a living in town for, by the 1840's, industrial production was sharply declining." The relative few among the peasantry who worked their own farms were "forced" to attempt to remain, "thus falling prey to the usurer."13 And those in the towns were reported, by witnesses of the time, to be equally poor, as the inhabitants of Jerusalem, who "really seem to be without any regular employment."14
The Arabs' migratory pattern of living had long been common in the region of Palestine. Well into the twentieth century the nomadic life was still the custom. As Sir John Hope Simpson wrote in 1930, "the fellah ... is always migrating, even at the present time."15 And in 1937, Lord Ormsby-Gore, Secretary of State for the Colonies, testified that "There has always been a certain amount of migration inside the Arab world."16
The coming and going of the populace was a constant throughout the literature of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars who visited the area. In the last decades of the eighteenth century there is evidence that many of the peasants migrated throughout the region in search of work.17
John Lewis Burckhardt graphically described the migratory patterns he found in the early 1800s:
The oppressions of the government on one side, and those of the Bedouins on the other, have reduced the Fellah of the Haouran to a state little better than that of the wandering Arab. Few individuals ... die in the same village in which they were bom. Families are continually moving from one place to another; in the first year of their new settlement the Sheikh acts with moderation towards them; but his vexations becoming in a few years insupportable, they fly to some other place, where they have heard that their brethren are better treated, but they soon find that the same system prevails over the whole country. . . . they are always permitted to depart.18
Burckhardt found that not only robbery but also incessant migration were largely responsible for the land's corrosion:
This continued wandering is one of the principal reasons why no village in the Haouran has either orchards, or fruit trees, or gardens for the growth vegetables. "Shall we sow for strangers?" was the answer of a Fellah, to whom I once spoke on the subject.... 19
In his journal Burckhardt noted, for example, that when he passed through the village of Merjan in 1819, only one family lived there. Two years later, he returned: to the village to find nearly a dozen families. Many were Druses who had come from another village, which in 1810 had many inhabitants but two years later was, deserted.20
One historian noted, in passing, "the emigration of many Druzes from Lebanon to Jebel Druze [Syria],"21 and another found "analogous" situations in Palestine in the 1840s, "where peasants from remote villages came to ... grain cultivation areas." The writer "struck up an acquaintance in the region of Hebron with a peasant from the village of Bait Jala...."22
The traditional roving was endemic: "...Trans Jordanian peasants ... left...their villages in 1847 owing to famine [and] found work in various villages near Hebron."23 Peasants from Western Palestine, west of the Jordan River, moved to cultivate land in Eastern Palestine. Other "Palestinian peasants" were "brought in" by prosperous merchants to cultivate a "considerable stretch of territory" and the emigres' efforts made the merchant "a wealthy notable." 24
Such was the custom.
In 1858 a reform was attempted, with destructive results.25According to Professor Elie Kedourie, it was "a new, European-model land law."
The Land Code did not create a European-style small landed peasantry with a stake in the land. On the contrary, the small agriculturist, whether member of a settled village community, or of a tribe which had never known individual ownership of land, found his customary rights and interests squeezed and destroyed by a law, the operation of which was made even more vicious by the corruption and malpractices that a large, unwieldy, centralized bureaucracy naturally entailed.26
In the 1860s and 1870s, here is one graphic example among the myriad reports of the unrelenting ruination of the peasant:
[The tax-collectors] extort from [the peasants) nearly all the produce of their lands in return for the doubtful advantage of having them stand between them and the officers of the government.... The farmer [tax-farmer] of a village ... is, in fact, a petty tyrant who takes all if he cannot otherwise get back what he has spent, and the iniquitous interest also.This system of tax-gathering greatly multiplies the petty lords and tyrants who eat up the people as they eat bread.27
The oppression of the peasant swept across the traditional barriers of Islam. With regard to exploitation,
The line of basic demarcation ran ... not between Muslim and Christian, Turk and non-Turk, but between ruler and ruled, oppressor and oppressed.... The maligned Turkish peasant . . . was generally no better off than the ordinary non-Muslim and as much oppressed by maladministration.28
But those barriers-separating Muslim from non-Muslim infidel-were powerful forces against reform. The leaders who sought reform were faced with an "imposing obstacle" -- "the conviction of superiority, which Muslim Turks possessed." It was a formidable "conviction," a bias bound to undermine a "reform based on equality of all Ottoman subjects.... Christians and Jews were inevitably considered second-class citizens" not only "in the light of religious revelation" but also because of "the plain fact that they had been conquered and were ruled by the Ottomans. The common term for the infidel, gavur, carried this implication of Muslim superiority."29
Compounding the difficulties of reform, the Muslims "opposed innovation .Cevdet Efendi (later Pasha) who began to learn French in 1846, had to do so secretly for fear of criticism."30 In 1868 a Muslim writer estimated that only about two percent of the Muslim population were literate.31 Another bemoaned the fact that most were "without pen and without tongue."32"Suleyman Pasa [sic] in the same period guessed that in the capital itself only twenty thousand Muslims could read a newspaper."33
The widespread illiteracy sustained and fed the coffers of the feudal extortionists. The peasant had to borrow to pay the taxes, and the debts he incurred from outrageous usurious rates of interest forced him to sell his land, often to the wealthyeffendis -- landlords -- in the town.34
But even after surrendering his property, the peasant still had to deal with moneylenders and their viselike usury, because the unstable conditions-Bedouin raids, earthquakes, epidemics, high prices-prevented the fellah from supporting himself through farming.35
A writer described the moneylending, a practice that carried on into the twentieth century:
Money lending ... was one of the curses of Palestine.Nearly everyone borrowed money, and the rate of interest was fantastic, not because the surety for the loan was not satisfactory, but because the borrower was completely in the hands of the lender. The fellah, even if he was in a good position, had practically never a penny to bless himself with. One day the Government official turns up and demands a large sum in cash. What is the fellah to do? But here comes a merchant from the town, or a Moslem frangi(i.e., a man in European dress) happens to be walking about in the village with his pockets bulging with money, and one of them is willing to accommodate the fellah. But the lender requires not only substantial security, but a good rate of interest also -20, 25, and even 30 or 40 per cent. "What can I do," thinks to himself the needy fellah He knows very well that just at this moment he will not be getting in any money, and if he will not be able to bribe the tax-collector and postpone the payment he will in the end be imprison as a defaulter. He also knows that to get out of prison will cost him a lot of money, much more than paying the interest to the lender, not to reckon his loss of time. On the other side it is clear to him that if the grain or olive crop is a failure he will not be able to liquidate his debt, and the interest payments which he will have to make every year will go on increasing.36
Another blight was the centuries-old traditional incursion by Arab raiders, which befell the few "sedentary peasant-farmers" who remained on the land.
... unless checked by firm government action, the nomads have always sought to thrust into the settled areas, terrorizing and exploiting the villagers and eventually causing them to give up cultivation and flee.37
One historian contrasted the "excellent roads and fortifications, and judicious alliances" of Judeo-Roman times with the spoiled, debauched Ottoman-ruled land at the end of the eighteenth century, following the emigration of the 'Anza tribes from Central Arabia.38 In 1785, Volney recorded the scene:
The peasants are incessantly making inroads on each others' lands, destroying their corn (durha), sesame and olive trees and carrying off their sheep, goats, and camels.... The Bedouin whose camps occupy the level country are continually at open hostilities with them (the Turks), of which the peasants avail themselves to resist their authority or do mischief to each other.... The mutual devastation of the contending parties renders the appearance of this pan of Syria more wretched than that of any other.39
As a direct result of the tribal raiding, "large portions of the country went out of cultivation, and hundreds of villages were depopulated."40
In the nineteenth century a great number of Bedouin tribes continued to filter into the region. "Arabia has always periodically overpeopled herself and, at this time, the emptiness of the Syrian plains and their almost absolute lack of defenses tempted the ... Arabia tribes. Once the movement was under way, this attraction communicated itself to other tribes." In addition, the "disturbances" in the warring Arabian plains caused still other tribes to emigrate. Tribes who lived in Syria and environs were forced, by raiding and tribal warfare among the new imigris, to flee into the "fringes of the desert," and plundering prevailed.41
Burckhardt recorded graphically a predatory practice long common to that terrain--one that is known in the latter-twentieth-century western world as the "protection racket."
The ... most heavy contribution paid by the peasants, is the tribute to the Arabs. ... Constant residents in the Haouran, as well as most of the numerous tribes of Aeneze, who visit the country only in the summer, are, from remote times, entitled to certain tributes called Khone (brotherhood), from every village in the Haouran. In return for this Khone, the Arabs abstain from touching the harvest of the village, and from driving off its cattle and camels, when they meet them in their way. Each village pays Khone to one Sheikh in every tribe; the village is then known as his Ukhta or Sister, as the Arabs term it, and he protects the inhabitants against all the members of his own tribe. It may easily be imagined, however, that depredations are often committed, without the possibility of redress, the depredator being unknown, or flying immediately towards the desert. The amount of the Khone is continually increasing, for the Arab Sheikh is not always contented with the quantity of corn he received in the preceding year, but asks something additional, as a present, which soon becomes a part of his accustomed dues.42
The journal of the Christian traveler H. B. Tristram was another among the plethora of documents that totally contradicted the widely believed propaganda claim by the Arabs that it was "Jewish immigration and settlement" that disrupted the Palestinians' "tranquility and stability." Tristram wrote in 1865 that,
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 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.43
A French writer reported that, during travels in Palestine and Syria in the late 1870s, he found that in order to buy seeds, the peasant paid an interest rate as high as 200 to 300 percent.44 According to one scholar,
This state of affairs was made possible by thefellahin's misery and lack of rights, which were the result of the high degree of feudal exploitation in villages.45
Not only regional rich effendis snatched up the land, but also enterprising foreigners saw the chance to reap the local profits.
Buyers operating in Syrian villages were usually agents of foreign merchants. Foreign capital found a fertile soil for its commercial and usurious activities in villages pressed beneath the feudal yoke.46
And these were Arab profiteers, not Jewish settlers, though a small number of native Jews and Yemenite Jewish immigrants were already assuming the task of developing and reclaiming future farmland. Most of the "Palestinian" Jews were still "paupers,"47 eking out an existence in the towns and villages of the "Holy Land."48 The great wave of Jewish settlement would not begin until 1882.49 Meanwhile, the effendis were gaining from their monopolistic grip on the land.
The British Consul in Jerusalem from 1845 to 1863 reported that a group of prominent landholding families in Jerusalem, exerting the influence of their wealth, had gained control of "all the municipal offices. In consequence they hold certain villages or groups of villages in a species of serfdom."50 By the end of the nineteenth century the political power was in the hands of those Muslim families "with names like al-Husayni, al-Khalidi and al-Nashashibi."51 The "Parasitic landlord class" had acquired, through the fellahins' ruinous indebtedness, huge landholdings, which the landlords seldom if ever visited, and almost never farmed.52
In the late 1880s, several years after the new major Jewish immigration had begun, the migratory patterns remained unchanged.
When the debts reach a certain figure the fellah takes his bundle of bedclothes, along with his cooking pan and water can, and if he is very fortunate, his small water jug and his shoes, and having loaded the whole on his one ass, if he has managed to retain an ass, and on to his wife, he flees on a dark night and crosses the Jordan Valley, until he reaches the Hauran or AjIun, where he finds a tolerably secure refuge from his pursuers and oppressors.53
As late as 1908, a German historian found that thefellah had turned Bedouin to escape the grip of his indebtedness. If the fellah sensed peril, he packed his family and they fled across the Jordan, where they became members of a nomad tribe.54 "The land was left without owners and without workers, and became mahlul" --a kind of state domain.55
So thorough was the plundering of the Bedouins, so corrupt the government and its feudal system, that despite the imported replenishment of peoples from near and far, Doughty, in his account of travels in the region, was moved to write in 1876 that
"The desert" (says the Hebrew prophet) "shall become a ploughland," so might all this good soil, . . . return to be full of busy human lives; there lacks but the defense of a strong government.56
Doughty found a "desert" that was devoid of but a few "human lives" at the precise moment when the Jews had begun to develop their settlements--on the semi-abandoned territory where one day the Arab propaganda would claim that Jews had crowded out, "displaced," and rendered the "Palestinian" Arabs "landless."
Thus, we are faced with the facts of the land once called Judah, Judea, and later the Romans' "Palestina" and "Southern Syria," a once fertile 'ploughland" laid waste, whose inhabitants sadly diminished in number through natural disaster -- and the greed of goat and man.
The peoples who roamed the country in the nineteenth century were not the peoples who conquered, with the Prophet Muhammad's troops, the land Judah-Palestine. Those peoples were not indigenous to the land. They did not stay on the land. Of the sparse population who were later counted as "original" settled "Arabs" in the nineteenth century when the arriving Jewish immigrants united with the native Palestinian Jewish population, many were in fact imported Muslim peoples from Turkey and other lands, whom the Turks, in many cases, had recently brought, to protect against the wandering Bedouin tribes-a kind of landed pirates who periodically attacked that settled multi-ethnic populace. "The Land's" vicious cycle of conquest and destruction had relentlessly claimed its inhabitants. Thus each new conqueror brought his own measure of the population with him as protective force, while other thousands went in and out from lands as distant as the Caucasus.
The government was often "directly responsible" for importing immigrants to spur development.
For example, Circassian and other colonists were deliberately planted on the frontier of settlement, especially from 1870 onwards.57About 1860 several hundred tents of the Wulda tribe crossed the Euphrates and eventually settled down about thirty miles south of Aleppo, in Jebel Samaane. Sections of other tribes, such as the Bu Shaikh, Lheib, and Aquedat also drifted west, usually after being defeated in raids or wars, half fleeing from the powerful desert tribes and half attracted by the possibilities of settlement.58
Kurds, Turcomans, Naim, and other colonists arrived in Palestine around the same time as the Jewish immigration waves began. Eighteen thousand "tents" of Tartars,59 the "armies of Turks and Kurds," whole villages settled in the nineteenth century60 of Bosnians and Moors and "Circassians" and "Algerians" and Egyptians, etc-all were continually brought in to people the land called Palestine.
This melting pot will be seen in following chapters to have been counted as "original settled Muslims" in "Palestine." However, it is clear by now that the claim that a numerous "descended Arab Palestinian people" exists, with "family ties to the land for thousands of years," is historically inaccurate.
"In 1878 the first Circassians arrived.... Two years later a second group settled.... In 1885 Circassian immigrants arrived to found three villages ...." The Circassians "effectively fulfilled the role allotted to them: to occupy and cultivate land, to weaken and to act as a buffer against the bedouin"61 -- in short, to fulfill the same function as the protective forces of Ibrahim Pasha: Ibrahim, Palestine's Egyptian conqueror, had left behind him "permanent colonies of Egyptian immigrants at Beisan, Nablus, Irbid, Acre, and Jaffa, where some five hundred Egyptian soldiers' families established a new quarter"-500 alien families, at least 2,000 persons, imported at a single moment-and that was only one among countless similar situations. "With this aid and the resettlement of the Jews, which dates from 1830, Jaffa began to grow."62 In another area, "The Muslims of Safed are mostly descended from . . . Moorish settlers and from Kurds ...."63
The land called Palestine was never considered a nation at all, and surely could not have been regarded by the later immigrants as their "ancestral" homeland, any more than a Norwegian immigrant to the United States would consider that his "ancestral" home was the United States when his ancestors were born in Norway.
As late as the time coinciding with Jewish reclamation and development, the
land was so sparsely populated that "landlords [were] bringing in peasants and former semi-nomadic tribesmen" from other areas "to work on their land." The Turkish land laws enacted in 1858 had worked to the disadvantage of the peasant, but "made it easy for landlords and speculators to gain control of disproportionately great areas of land." When the peasants and semi-nomads "fell prey to the usurer" and lost their tenancies, they fled and were replaced by new immigrants.64
land was so sparsely populated that "landlords [were] bringing in peasants and former semi-nomadic tribesmen" from other areas "to work on their land." The Turkish land laws enacted in 1858 had worked to the disadvantage of the peasant, but "made it easy for landlords and speculators to gain control of disproportionately great areas of land." When the peasants and semi-nomads "fell prey to the usurer" and lost their tenancies, they fled and were replaced by new immigrants.64
The majority of genuine "Arabs" among the sparse population in the "ruined" country when the Jewish settlers began to buy land for restoration were Arabian tribal nomads. The multi-ethnic "Arab" peasants who remained were so few -- despite the consistent replenishment of peoples -- and generally so impoverished that an Arab writer was prompted to sum up the harsh conditions thus:
... At the turn of this century, Palestine was no longer the land of milk and honey described by the Bible, but a poor Ottoman province, a semi-desert covered by more thorns than flowers. The Mediterranean coast and all the southern half of the country were sand, and the rare marshy plains were fens of Malaria which decimated the sparse, semi-nomadic population, clinging to slopes and bare hills.65
Much of the Muslim population that remained in the country was transient. As the Arab leader Sherif Hussein observed in 1918,
The resources of the country are still virgin soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants. One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering over the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain its hold on him... 66
How then does the profusion of evidence of an uninhabited Palestine jibe with the Arab propaganda claim of an overwhelming Arab settled population in a Palestine so crowded that the "Jews displaced the Arabs who had been there for thousands of years?" The rotation of multi-ethnic Muslims and Christians had been imported either by various conquerors or through traditional migratory patterns to Judah-cum-Palestine, where they had met with the omnipresent Jewish and Christian inhabitants-all have been abundantly documented. That they were "Arabs" who had been for "thousands of years," or even hundreds, as a consistent presence in Palestine is known to be inaccurate. Moreover, according to the Arab writer Ameen Rihani, confusion abounded with respect to an "Arab" identity "achieved mainly by exciting the fanatical spirit of the tribes." The Arabic-speaking peoples in Palestine were not motivated toward Palestinian nationalism or Pan-Arabism, and there were no prominent Arab negotiators in Palestine even to protest the "giveaway [of] Syria and Palestine."67
It was the Arabs themselves -- by tradition as well as corruption -- who prompted Arabic-speaking Muslims to disregard or abandon the land, and it was the Jews who would create a climate of opportunity that drew the peasant-migrants by the thousands to the Jewish-settled area of Palestine. But, as we will see, it was long after, not before, the Jews settled their new farms that the first claims of "Palestinian Arab" identity and an "age-old" tie to the land would be invented.
Even the Arabs' impressive propaganda effort could not obscure the unassailably recorded persistence of Jewish nationalism, or the lesser-known obstinate Jewish presence in Judah-cum-Palestine-a combination of historical factors that resulted in the international recognition of the Jews' renewed national liberation. So the Arab world has attempted to match the Jewish history by inventing an "identity" for the "Palestinian Arabs" that would, they reason, "counter Zionism." Thus has been largely accomplished the cynical rewriting of history, which in turn can only result in a perversion of "justice."
3. "In the book, Kitab al-Kharaj (Book of Offerings) by Abu-Yussuf, a disciple of Abu-Hanifa, in the chapter on 'The Division of the Spoils,' it is deduced from that chapter of the Koran, that ganima, the spoils, after a fifth has been set aside from it to God, belong to the victorious Moslems, not individually, but to all together, the collective body." See the translation of this chapter in the periodical Der Islam, vol. 1, pp. 347-353, appendix to the article by F.F. Schmidt, 'Die Occupato im islamischen Recht,1 ibid; p. 300ff., cited by A. Granott, The Land System in Palestine (London, 1952), p. 327, n. 8.
4. Belin, 'Du Regime des fiefs militaires dans l'Islamisme, et principalement. en Tur quie,' Journal Asiatique, 1870, Sixi6me s6rie, tome XV, pp. 196-197. Cited in A. Granott, The Land System in Palestine (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952), p. 18.
5. "During the seventeenth century some of the more permanently established lease-holders began to coalesce with the landowners into a new landed aristocracy-the ayan-i memleket or country notables, whose appearance and usurpation of some of the functions and authority of government were already noted at the time." Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modem Turkey (London, 1961), p. 33. Lewis notes the following: cf. the remarks of Huseyin Hezarfen, writing in 1669 (R. Anhegger, "Hezarfen Huseyin Efendi'nin Osmanli deviet teskilatina dair mulahazalari," TM, x(1951-3), 372, 387. The ayan-i vilayet already appear occasionally in Kanuns of the sixteenth century (Barkan, XV ve XVI inci asirlarda ... Kaunular, i (1943, index).
6. A. Granott, The Land System in Palestine, pp. 31-32. According to de Haas: "The sultans regarded Palestine as their personal domain, acquired by the law of arms and war. The inhabitants, except a few tribes like the Druzes who were never conquered, could not pretend to real or personal property. Even private inheritance reverted to the sultan. Though the peasants were not serfs as under the feudal system, and under no obligation of service, all the country was crown land. When this system of crown land was compromised by grants to nobles, the peasants did not go with the land. The census when it was introduced, was employed for imperial military purposes. The individual could not be imprisoned for debt though the village, as a unit, could be made to suffer for its collective obligation. The struggle, therefore, was between the land and the tax collector. If the assessor arrived at the right moment he seized what he claimed, and satisfied his demand. The peasant had no interest in thorough cultivation, or in the fertilization of the soil. His primitive tools were evidence of his poverty and indifference. The like picture was presented in Greece to the middle of the nineteenth century." From de Haas, History, pp. 361-362; also see Volney, Travels, vol. 2, pp. 370, 406, 408. (Emphasis added.)
7. Granott, System, p. 31. "They were abolished by the well-known edict of Tanzimat ('the new regime') ... of Gulhane in 1839. This proclamation declared that, in spite of its deplorable consequences, there was still to be found in the Ottoman Empire the 'destructive principle' of illizam-a principle which produced the unlimited rule of the governors in the provinces and a crushing exploitation of the inhabitants. The object of the reforms was to enable the State to recover for itself all its rights of ownership of the landed properties" (p. 32).
9. Volney, Travels, vol. 2, p. 411. He also said, "When the peasants are in want of money to purchase grain, cattle, etc. they can find none but by mortgaging the whole, or part of their future crop, greatly under its value. The danger of letting money appear closes the hands of all by whom it is possessed; and if it is parted with it must be from the hope of a rapid and exorbitant gain; the most moderate interest is twelve per cent, the usual rate is twenty, and it frequently rises as high even as thirty."
10. Issawi, Economic History, p. 72. "Their extortion was usually proportionate to the shortness of their tenure,- this led the government to introduce in the 18th century a system of life farming of taxes, malikane, in the hope of checking abuses but its application was not universal." (Emphasis added.)
13. I.M. Smilianskaya, "The Disintegration of Feudal Relations in Syria and Lebanon in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century," from Issawi, Economic History, p. 234.
16. W.G.A. Ormsby-Gore, Secretary of State for the Colonies, testimony at 32nd session of Permanent Mandates Commission, August 1937.
17. See C.F. Volney, Travels, vol. 2, pp. 40"3 1; Bernard Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, p. 33, text and n. 21.
18. John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (London, 1882), p. 299; according to Smilianskaya, "Reports from Volney, Petkovich and Uspenskii of peasants migrating in search of a living were substantiated by Urquehart ... .. Disintegration," in Issawi, Economic History, p. 235.
20. Ibid., cited by Norman Lewis, "The Frontier of Settlement in Syria, 1800-1950," International Affairs, XXXI (January 1955), pp. 48-W; reprinted in Issawi, Economic History, p. 261.
22. Writer P. Uspenskii, Russian Foreign Policy Archives (Embassy in Constantinople Fund), case 915, 1. 174, cited by Smilianskaya in "Disintegration," in Issawi, Economic History, p. 235.
24. N. Lewis, "Frontier," Issawi, Economic History, p. 265. He cites C. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (New York, n.d.).
25. "When the mandatory powers took over the territories of these four countries [Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq] [sic] after the last war, the system of land tenure was based on the Ottoman Land Code. This was a body of civil law ... on the statute books during the nineteenth century. Its weakness was that it was never generally enforced... [emphasis added] . . the main legal categories into which land was divided by the Ottoman Land Code (promulgated in 1858) ... are:
"1. Mulk Iands This is the land held in absolute freehold ownership. It is governed by the provisions of sacred law and not by those of the Civil Statute Law. Landownership comprises two rights: the raqaba, or right of absolute ownership, and the tasarruf or right of the usufruct of land. In mulk tenure both rights belong to the individual.
"2. Miri Iand:... the raqaba or absolute ownership belongs to the state but the usufruct to the individual. It is a form of heritable leasebold ownership in which the state leases land to the individual.
"3. Waqf Iand: ... dedicated to some pious purpose and is not very important in this region.
"4. Matruka: Land reserved for some public purpose as for example village threshing floors.
"5. Mawat land: Dead or unreclaimed land.
". . . these different divisions do not cover the leasehold tenancies between landlord and cultivator.... The Ottoman Land Code apparently does none of the things that a land-tenure code ought to do."
[The purpose of these categories of land, then, was really] "the collection of revenue. The real purpose of the code was to tax every piece of land, and therefore to establish clearly the title to it by registering its legal owner as a miri owner. The state's claim to ownership really meant only that the state did not recognize ownership unless the titles were registered and the land therefore taxable." Doreen Warriner, "Land Tenure in the Fertile Crescent," in Issawi, Economic History, pp. 72-73.
26. Elie Kedourie, "Islam Today," in Bernard Lewis, ed., Islam and the Arab World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 3 3 1. According to Kedourie, the new state law "resulted in the transformation of customary tenures and of land in common or tribal ownership or use into state-registered, individually owned free-holds. This reform rode rough-shod over customary rights which, though not set down in official documents, yet had immemorially regulated agrarian relationships in large parts of the empire."
28. Roderique H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 1963), p. 63. Davison refers to "forceful" evidence of such conditions in Mustafa Fazil Pasa's Lettre adresse a S.M. le Sultan (n.p., n.d., "but Paris, either late 1866 or early 1867").
30. Fatima Aliye, Ahmed Cevdet Pasa and His Time (Istanbul, 1332), pp. 33-34, cited by Davison, Reform, p. 67.
31. Davison, Reform, p. 69, citing Ziya Bey from Hurriyet #5, as quoted in Tanzimat, 1, p. 841 (The Tanzimat, on the Occasion of its Hundredth Anniversary) (Istanbul, 1940).
32. Ahmed Midhat, who wrote, "in exile, for Turkey and against Russia," quoted by Davison, Reform p. 69.
33. Suleyman Pasa zade Sami, ed., Suleyman Pasa muhakemesi (Suleyman Pasha's Trial) (Istanbul, 1328). "A biography and defense of his constitutionalist father by the son, with large portions on his interrogation and trial arising from his generalship in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877," cited by Davison, Reform, p. 69.
35. Thomson, Land and Book, pp. 497-498; C.T. Wilson, Peasant Life in the Holyland (London, 1906), pp. 288-297; also see Issawi, Economic History; Davison, Reform; Granott, Land
36. C.T. Wilson, Peasant Life in the Holy Land (London: John Murray, 1906), pp. 288, 290, cited by Granott, Land System, p. 64.
37. Issawi, Economic History, p. 258. He adds: "This process had been described and analyzed, with unrivalled depth and vividness, by the fourteenth century historian and sociologist, Ibn Khaldun."
40. Issawi, Economic History, p. 258. A "vivid account" by the British consul in Aleppo: Skene to Bulwer, May 12, 1860, FO 78 No. 1538.
42. J.L. Burckhardt, Travels, pp. 301-302. At one spot, ". . . the whole neighborhood of Aleppo is infested by obscure tribes of Arab and Kurdine robbers, who through the negligence of the Janissaries, acquire every day more insolence and more confidence in the success of their enterprises. Caravans of forty or fifty camels have in the course of last winter been several times attacked and plundered at five hundred yards from the city gate; not a week passes without somebody being ill-treated and stripped in the gardens near the town; and the robbers have been sometimes taken their night's rest in one of the suburbs of the city, and there sold their cheaply acquired booty" (pp. 654-655).
43. H.B. Tristram, The Land of1sraeb A Journal of Travels in Palestine (London, 1865), p. 490. According to de Haas, "To 1900 Beersheba had no permanent inhabitants, but about that year the government obtained control of the Negeb, and in order to exercise police power over the Bedouins established a station at the site of the Biblical wells." History, p. 445. Thus Beersheba in 1909 became "a straggling little town with government buildings, a few stores . . . and dwelling houses for eight hundred people." Ellsworth Huntington, Palestine and its Transformation (Boston, 1911), p. 115. Across the fifteen miles between Debit and Beersheba, Huntington found "no sign of any village, merely three ruins, and the tents of some Bedouins." The land was so impoverished that the government rented 7,500 acres in the Negev for an annual rental of $2,000. Huntington, Palestine, p. 117.
44. Lortet, La Syrie d'aujourdhui.- Voyages dans la Phinicie, le Liban et la Judie, 1875-80 (Paris, 1881), p. 137.
45. Smilianskaya, "Disintegration," in Issawi, Economic History, p. 234. Also see account in 1841 by K.M. Bazilli, Russian Consul General in Beirut, Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossii, fond "Posolstvo v Konstantinopole" (Russian Foreign Policy Archives, "Embassy in Constatinople" Fund), case 718, 1.112, cited by Smilianskaya, "Disintegration."
46. Ibid. ". . . representatives of the feudal class used the capital they accumulated by the exploitation of peasants. This capital was not invested in agriculture as a rule, but in trade and usurious operations.... One branch of the ancient feudal family of Dahdah, owners of a muqataa in northern Lebanon, had commercial offices in Marseilles, Paris and London" (p. 239).
47. "The Jews in Jerusalem are in general very poor.... the whole Jewish people are suffering the greatest distress-and if some relief be not afforded ... whole families must, during this next winter, perish from want.... In the midst of their wretched condition they look upon 500 as acknowledged paupers. . . ." Young to Palmerston, Jerusalem, May 25, 1839, FO 78/368 (No. 13), cited in Hyamson, British Consulate, vol. I, p. 5.
48. Exact population statistics for the mid-nineteenth century are unlikely, and estimates of the period varied broadly. One source, Murray's Handbookfor Travellers in Syria and Palestine (1858), was reprinted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th ed., vol. XVII, pp. 180-198 (1860). According to that set of statistics, covering a wider area than historic Palestine-the whole Turkish Pashalic of Sedon-coupled with the 1895 figures of Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban, the number of Jews in Palestine in 1858 is roughly estimated at about 15,000.
49. In 1839 the British Consul wrote from Jerusalem: "I commenced with the intention of numbering the whole Jewish population.... I found the religious prejudice so strong against their being numbered at all-for by their law it is not allowed-that at present I am only able to give your Lordship the aggregate number, which I think may be considered as pretty accurate-but certainly, rather under, than overstated, as the Jews will ever be considered less in number than they really are. " (Emphasis added.) Young to Palmerston, Jerusalem, May 25, 1839, FO 78/368 (No. 13), from Hyamson, British Consulate, pp. 4-7.
50. James Finn, Stirring Times or Record from Jerusalem Consular Chronicles from 1853-1856 (London, 1878), vol. 1, pp. 180-181.
51. Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, p. xxii. The office of Mufti of Jerusalem belonged to the Husseini family from the "mid-19th century on," Porath, "Social Aspects," in Society, Milson, ed., p. 98.
52. D. Warriner, "Land Tenure," in Issawi, Economic History, p. 77. One factor that "influences the land system is the existence of a parasitic landlord class, a result of the Turkish system in which grants of land were made to political supporters of the sultan or in which powerful chiefs seized in the rights to farm taxes. But the more general cause for the rise of the city-notable type of landlord is the perpetual indebtedness of the peasants, which results from the uncertainty of grain yields. One or two years of bad harvests impoverish cultivators, force them to borrow even to buy seed, and after borrowing at high rates of interest, they are eventually forced to sell their holdings to wealthy merchants in the town and to continue to exist as tenants of the big landowners....
"The landlords who have acquired land in this way are rarely farmers and may not even visit the villages they own.... Landownership is a credit operation and nothing more.... In this case the large landowner ... appears simply in the role of a money lender without responsibility to the land. This type of ownership is injurious, since it prevents constructive investment in the land."
53. G. Schumacher, "Der arabische Pflug," Zeitschrift des deutschen Palaestina- Vereins, 1889, Bd. XII, p. 165. According to Granott, Land System, pp. 335-336, n. 13: "There was no need to flee to a distance in order to escape the pursuers, since there were places of refuge within the country itself. Among the swamps of Nahr ez Zerqa in Samaria, between Caesarea and Tantura, there are several lonely stretches without a footpath and without any connection with the outer world, so that it is almost impossible to find anyone hiding there. These marshes were used as places of refuge by the Arabs who ran away to escape confiscation of their property, and other oppressive requirements of the Turkish Government. See G.A. Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931, 25th ed.), p. 145."
54.Hermann Guthe, Palaestina (Bielefeld und Leipzig: Verlag von Velhagen und Klasing, 1908), p. 47; cited by Granott, Land System, p. 61.
60. Parkes, Whose Land?, pp. 210, 212. See Parkes' map of various ethnic settlements in Palestine, and their locations, p. 211.
63. Ibid., p. 425; 3,000 Albanians were brought into Acre, according to Sir Sidney Smith's dispatch of May 9, 1799, in de Haas, History, p. 355.
64. N. Lewis, "Frontier," p. 266. According to Davis Trietsch, "In the last decades, several Turkish provinces have been lost to Christian neighbors because the Christian population was recognized as independent by the State (Ottomans). Many Muslims had to leave. " (Emphasis added.) JUdische Emigration und Kolonisation (Berlin, 1923), p. 31.
Native Population almost wholly descended from Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity, and later Islam, not Arab in origin
In Palestine the "small" number of Arab invaders who had been imported by the Arabian conquerors were wiped out by disease. Thus the "myth" of the "Palestinian Arab" descending "from the Arab conquerors" appears to be factually incorrect for all but perhaps a few. Supporting Hogarth, Hitti, and Lewis, the Reverend Parkes found that
During the first century after the Arab conquest the caliph and governors of Syria and The Land [Palestine] ruled almost entirely over Christian and Jewish subjects. Apart from the bedouin [nomads], in the earliest days the only Arabs west of the Jordan (not all of whom were themselves Muslims) were the garnisons... "
They "were small," and were "decimated" by epidemics within two years after the capture of Jerusalem. After a law, prohibiting the Arabs from owning land there, had been rescinded, "rich Arabs" came into ownership of "a good deal of the country."[83]
"But this change of owners" -- often through the dispossession of Christian owners -- "did not involve any extensive change in the nature of the population." Jews and Christians still worked the land, because the Arabs had neither the desire nor the experience for agricultural toil; they "heartily despised" both the toil and "the tiller" [84]
In fact, during the brief time of actual Arab rule -- the Omayyad from Damascus -- that rule was military only.
The clerical or theological view favoring a providential interpretation of Islamic expansion, corresponding to the Old Testament interpretation of the Hebrew history and to the medieval philosophy of Christian history, has a faulty philological basis...Not until the second and third centuries of the Moslem era did the bulk of the people in Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia profess the religion of Muhammad. Between the military conquest of these regions and their religious conversion a long period intervened. And when they were converted the people turned primarily because of setf-interest -- to escape tribute and seek identification with the ruling class.[85]
Islam and the Arabic language were disseminated by a multi-ethnic Muslim community that at first included "numbers of Arabians in the provinces," but by by the tenth century onwards," yet another "new ruling race, the Turks" joined the seemingly endless parade of conquest -- a kind of periodic rape of the Holy Land.
"From the tenth century" a multi-ethnic native population, which perhaps still included some few descendants of the Arabian invaders -- all together under the rule of the Turks -- commingled, and the possibility of singling out the Arabs as a people became unworkable; Arabic-speaking people would be a more accurate term. Already in the tenth century "the word Arab reverts to its earlier meaning of Bedouin or nomad, becoming in effect a social rather than an ethnic term."[86]
With the Crusaders' slaughters -- including mass murder in 1099 of all the 70,000 Muslims in Jerusalem -- the deterioration of the land in Palestine acelerated.
... Massacres and the fear of massacre had greatly reduced the number of Jews in Palestine and Christians in Syria.[87]
The "vast majority" remaining in Palestine was "native Christians," of "mixed origin ... carelessly known as Christian Arabs."[88]
Because the population was "decimated" by the endemic massacres, disease, famine, and wars, one Muslim ruler "brought in Turks and Negroes." Another "had Berbers, Slavs, Greeks and Dailamites." The Kurdish conqueror,[89] "Saladin, introduced more Turks, and some Kurds."[90]
"The flower of the Saracenes who fought the Crusaders were Turks," chronicled Philip Graves.[91] "The Mamluks brought armies of Georgians, and Circasians. For his personal security each monarch relied on his own purchase."[92] "In the Palestinian towns Greek was the common tongue..." [93] In 1296, 18,000 'tents" -- families -- of Tartars entered and settled in the land of Palestine. [94]
Thus, not only was Arab rule "extraordinarily short," but the "pure Arab peoples in Palestine for millennia" -- a romanticized notion discredited by serious scholars -- actually consisted of a non-Arabian, multi-ethnic procession of immirants.
In the fourteenth century, the identity was specifically a religious one. According to Bernard Lewis,
The majority belonged to ... the community or nation of Islam. Its members thought of themselves primarily as Muslims. When further classification was necessary, it might be territorial -- Egyptians, Syrian, Iraqi -- or social-townsman, peasant, nomad. It is to this last that the term Arab belongs. So little had it retained of its ethnic meaning that we even find it applied at times to non-Arab nomads of Kurdish or Turkoman extraction. [96]
The Myth of Palestinian Nationalism
Over the decades, as the nineteenth-century Palestinian Jews were reinforced by successive waves of Jewish refugees, anti-Jewish violence erupted spasmodically in the Holy Land. Observers labeled these outbreaks as "European anti-Semitism," "Ottomanism," and later, "anti-Zionism."
British officials attributed the violence-so-called "disturbances" -- to the manifestation of "Arab nationalism." The British, however, were never able to discover any manifestation of such nationalism on the part of the Arabs in Palestine. They did not try to set up a government or any other nationalistic institutions. Even when the notorious Nazi, the Grand Mufti returned from Berlin after WWII in 1948 to briefly set up a "Palestine Government" in Gaza, it was ignored.* The only mode of expression of nationialism before 1948 was the oppression and intolerance shown toward Jews.
This narrowly based "nationalism" of violence continued to grow as the Jews continued to struggle out of dhimmi(subservient) status toward freedom and equality. British investigators were eventually forced to concede, and officially to note, that "Arab nationalism in Palestine has been artificially puffed up.... Only a little firmness is needed to deflate it."1Unlike the "insurgent nationalip elsewhere,"
in Palestine Arab nationalism is inextricably interwovern with antagonism to the Jews.2Yet by so perverse a rationale was a movement of enmity dignified and the legend of Palestinian nationalism initiated.
For example, in 1848 about four thousand armed peasants and "numerous Bedouin allies acted as gangs for "two great chiefs," and lawlessness spread. Hebron's local governor was overthrown by an oppressive chief whose brutal tactics earned him the admiration of Jerusalem Is Pasha and the award of the "robe of honour." In Hebron, one of the holy Jewish cities, Jews were still "helpless" and "plundered" and the new ruler managed to confiscate booty of those trying to flee by sending agents to rob travellers on the road."3
In the following few decades (1848-1878) scores of incidents involving anti-Jewish violence, persecution, and extortions filled page after page of documented reports from the British Consulate in Jerusalem. A chronology would be over-whelming, but perhaps a few extracts from those complaints will show the pattern of terror that continued right into the period of the major Jewish immigration beginning about 1878.
May, 1848. I have the honor to report that after the disturbance in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre Easter Eve, in beating the Jew who had imprudently entered there -- The Prussian Acting Consul here, informed me that he had been told by the Pasha, and also by the Greek Patriarch, that a Firman exists, which allows Christians to beat Jews if found within that Church, or even if passing along the street in front of it -- and which declares that in case of a Jew being killed under such an infliction, the price of blood should be rated at only ten paras -- value about three farthings.4March, 1849: Reporting the complaint of a Jew ... of being assaulted and stabbed by a soldier, while his house was searched and his females beaten .... 5The tradition of contemptuous "fraternity" continued -- a tradition that illuminates what measure of credibility may be gifen to modern promises concerning a "Palestinian Arab state," which would "value people, independent of race and religion."20
September, 1850. Last month I visited Hebron to do what I could for the protection of the Jews.... Abderahhman [a "brigand chief"] vexes them with irregular extortions, but in return he keeps them in security from other oppressors, however He has had himself enrolled on the books of the Jewish Treasury, as a pensioner for 100 piastres a month, and always sends for his pension two days before the day of due.
During my last visit there I had a Moslem summarily bastinadoed in the open street, for pulling a Jew's beard -- the Mutesellim in his eagerness to satisfy me, inflicted the punishment with his own hands, to my great astonishment. Abderrahhman was absent at Dura but one of his sons was present at the scene. This. forms a strange contrast to the fact of the Austrian Jewish Agent being frequently beaten in the streets there... 6
July, 1851: It is my duty to report to Your Excellency that the Jews in Hebron have been greatly alarmed by threats of the Moslems there at the commencement of Ramadan -- For several days my Cancelliere staid there with two Kawasses and obtained from the Governor Abderrahhman the punishment of some offenders: but others were released from prison on the self-same night of their condemnation.
The Cancelliere reports that the old feuds between the partisans of Abderrahhman and his brothers still exist -- that the partisans of the latter steal cattle by force of arms during the night from Hebron itself, and that they did so close to his tent -- also that in one day the vines were cut down from twenty feddans of vineyard -- but that such proceedings are sure to cease instantly on every approach of Abderrahhman himself, which however is not frequent.
The Jews having complained that a freed slave named Saad Allah was more obnoxious to them than any other person in Hebron, -- and that Abderrahhman had released him almost immediately after sentencing him to imprisonment....
... the enormous avarice of Abderrahhman is peculiarly oppressive to them."7
December, 1851: ... the murder of a Jew named Gershon ben Abraham, under English Protection, in Jerusalem....
... the victim was extricated from the well ... he was found to be stabbed in the throat, heart and ribs, besides injured in a horrible manner for the mere purpose of torture....
A Moslem (he whose house I had examined in the morning) named Mohammed Damiatti, was immediately arrested on suspicion of having perpetrated the murder....
The distress of the bereaved family is very great -- it is not too much to expect that Moslems will prefer claims and swear falsely in matters of debt and credit, as the poor man carried his ledger about with him, and this has not been found -- and it is remarkable that his father was some years ago murdered in a Moslem house in Saloniki, and his only brother killed in Jerusalem two years ago by a fall from a scaffold.8
December, 1851: the Samaritans of Nablus ... consist of about thirty-five taxable men, with a synagogue and sacred books ....
They have probably for many generations, and especially within the last century, been exposed to cruel persecutions from the dominant Moslems-and Nablus is always noted as an especially fanatic town....
They generally contrive to have the cleverest man belonging to them employed as government Secretary for the district, by which means they have warded off much of fiscal oppression, just as Jews do in other countries, and Copts in Egypt -- but even this has not been able to protect them from violence, murder and spoliation in their houses or streets in past times....
I am informed by a Christian in Nablus that there is too much reason to fear evil consequences from the loss of their Secretary, as the Moslems are reviling them in the streets with menaces for the future.9
May, 1852. I proceeded to Hebron and lodged there in a Jewish house. The Jews were all so alarmed ... that they would tell me nothing of news: they protested that Abderrahhman had done no harm to any one, no houses had been rifled &c. and one of the leading Rabbis implored me not to inform Abderrahhman if he should visit me, that I had come to protect the Jews, as he would inevitably punish them the more for it after my departure....
As for the accusations preferred by Abderrahhman against the Effendis here - I cannot tell how true they are - but I know that these personages are constantly taking bribes in other cases, the sums however which are laid against each seem incredibly large. I should rather imagine that much of the bribery money was spent in Damascus and Beyroot.10
November, 1852. - Having learned that the peasantry levy of 4000 men from the Nablus district had committed excesses in the houses of British protected Jews in Tiberias I repaired thither, to induce the commander to keep better order.
... Remonstrance was made against petty thefts "and of their having brought their horses and asses during the rain into the Jewish Synagogues."11
July, 1853. . . . The Christians and Jews of Jerusalem were in a state of absolute terror, and especially on the preceeding day had been announcing to each other house to house that the Moslems were to massacre them after the prayers at noon. Persons shut themselves up in their houses, and shops were closed, and some persons are still ill in bed from the effect of that day's fear.12
October, 1853. The Jews in their Quarter of the city have had to suffer many insults of late from town's people of which I only hear some time after their occurence, as the subjects of the violence are afraid to acquaint me with the circumstances, lest they should draw upon themselves greater injuries by way of revenge after the Consul has obtained redress.13
December, 1853: [Regarding] the Algerine Jews of Caiffa [Haifa] ... I beg to represent to Your Lordship that the blessing of British Protection is a boon of inestimable valul, -- to these people. It would be a blessing to be exempted from Turkish oppression at any time, and peculiarly so at the present period, when fanaticism is liable at any minute to break out into violence and when the local governors are endevouring to extort money by every possible means. And these people fear that if left to Turkish rule they will be required to pay arrears of taxes for all the past years of their residence in this country....
A similar renunciation of Algerine Jews has been made in Safed, Tiberias and Shefa Amer as shown in Enclosure No. 2....
A peculiarity of the French Consulates as far as they have come within my observation, is that they always show a strong desire to get rid of Jewish Subjects. I have had frequent evidences of this in Jerusalem, where that desire has been often expressed to me -- and in Caiffa I regret to add that the Jews have complained of direct persecution from the French and Turkish authorities combined.14
July, 1858: I have the honour to report that in consequence of a series of disgusting insults offered to Jews and Jewesses in Hebron, I obtained such Orders as I could from the Pasha's Agent in this city, during His Excellency's absence -- which I sent by my Dragoman Rosenthal and a Kawass....
The streets of the town were paraded by fanatic Durweeshes -- and during my stay there a Jewish house was forcibly entered by night, iron bars of the window broken, and heavy stones thrown from invisible hands at every person approaching the place to afford help.
One of the Members of the Council affirmed that they were not obliged to obey Orders from the Pasha's Deputy -- and another declared his right derived from time immemorial in hisfamily, to enterJewish houses, and take toll or contributions at any time without giving account.
When others present in the Council exclaimed against this he said -- "Well then I will forbear from taking it myself, but things will happen which will compel the Jews to come and kiss my feet to induce me to take their money."15
November, 1858: . . . although the thief had previously confessed to the robbery in presence of Jews, the Kadi would not proceed without the testimony of two Moslems -- when the Jewish witnesses were offered, he refused to accept their testimony -- and the offensive term adopted towards Jews in former times (more offensive than Giaour for Christians) was used by the Kadi's servants.
I have no doubt of being able to set all this to rights (except perhaps the matter of Jewish testimony in that Court) but such circumstances exhibit the working of the present Turkish government in Jerusalem.16
May, 1863: . .. Galilee, comprising the modern towns of Nazareth, Safed and Tiberias, in which two latter places there are living upwards of 600 Jews in the enjoyment of British protection. The existence of so many protected subjects in these retired spots, residing as they do in the midst of a Moslem population, naturally gives rise to numerous questions with the local Governors who are prone tooppress them unless their interests are constantly cared for. My predecessor was required to make an Annual tour to those towns, in order that his appearance from time to time amongst our protected subjects there might keep within proper bounds the ill-concealed aversion which their presence never fails to excite amongst their Moslem neighbors...17
March, 1864: . . . the circumstances attending the death of the British subject Peter Meshullam, and to try Abdalla Abu Kakoora, the individual charged with his murder.... they declare, as the result of their enquiry, that P. Meshullam died in consequence of the fall from his mare, and, consequently that Abdalla is innocent of charges preferred against him.
I confess I was hardly prepared for such a finding and verdict.... I addressed to His Excellency a reply conveying my entire dissent from the decision of the Commission ... 18
June, 1864: . .. Her Majesty's Gobernment have little doubt that Mr. MashulIan's death was caused by violence and not by a fall from his horse... 19
* During the years that Jordan occupied the West Bank, from 1948-1967, the cause of "Palestinian Nationalism" was unheralded. Until 1970s, the PLO only focused on Pan-Arab issues.
3. Ma'oz, Ottoman Reform, p. 120, quoting Consul James Finn; F.O. 78/705, Finn to Palmerston, No. 7, Jerusalem, 5 February 1847; F.O. 78/755, Finn to Palmerston, No. 22, Jerusalem, 17 July 1848.
4. James Finn to Viscount Palmerston, Jerusalem, 2 May 1848, F.O. 78/755 (No. 19), Consulate, 1, p. 106.
5. James Finn to Sir Stratford Canning, Jerusalem, I March 1849, F.O. 78/803 (No. 8), abstract, ibid., 1, p. 110.
6. James Finn to Viscount Palmerston, Jerusalem, 27 September 1850, F.O. 78/839 (No. 20), abstract, ibid., 1, 168-169. Hyamson adds: "Abdeffahhman el Amer, a chief of the neighbouring village of Dura, for many years terrorized the inhabitants of Hebron, Jews as well as others, of which town he was for periods de facto ruler at times, despite the Government. He first appeared there on the expulsion of the Egyptians in 1840 when, murdering the local Egyptian governor in the street, he proclaimed the Sultan of Turkey, and appointed himself governor of the town." Also see James Finn, Stirring Times, 1, pp. 236 et seq., 250 et seq., and 392 et seq.; and Vol. 2, pp. 33 et seq.
7. James Finn to Sir Stratford Canning, Jerusalem, 15 July 185 1, F.O. 78/874 (No. 10), ibid., 1, pp. 171-172.
8. James Finn to Viscount Palmerston, Jerusalem, 29 December 1851, F.O. 78/874 (Consular No. 21), ibid., 1, pp. 183-184.
9. James Finn to Viscount Palmerston, Jerusalem, 29 December 1851, F.O. 78/874 (Political No. 10), ibid., 1, p. 185.
10. James Finn to the Earl of Malmesbury, Jerusalem, 29 May 1852, F.O. 195/369 (Political No. 2), ibid., 1, p. 198-202.
11. James Finn to the Earl of Malmesbury, Jerusalem, 18 November 1852, F.O. 78/913 Political No. 13), abstract, ibid., 1, p. 211.
12. James Finn to the Earl of Clarendon, Jerusalem, 19 July 1853, F.O. 78/962 (No. 9), ibid., 1, p. 215.
13. James Finn to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, Jerusalem, 13 October 1853, F.O. 195/369 (No. 32), ibid., 1, p. 216.
14. James Finn to the Earl of Clarendon, 28 December 1853, F.O. 78/963 (Political No. 33), ibid., 1, pp. 218-219.
15. James Finn to the Earl of Malmesbury, Jerusalem, 8 July 1858, F.O. 78/1383 (Political No. 12), ibid., 1, p. 260.
16. James Finn to the Earl of Malmesbury, Jerusalem, I I November 1858, F.O. 78/1393 (Political No. 34), ibid., 1, p. 261.
17. Thomas B. Sandwith, Vice Consul, Caiffa, to Noel Temple Moore, Caiffa, 20 May 1863, F.O. 78/1775 (No. 18), ibid., 2, pp. 311-312.
18. Noel Temple Moore to the Honorable E.M. Erskine, Jerusalem, 3 March 1864, F.O. 195/808 (No. 6), ibid., 2, pp. 330-331.
19. Earl Russell to Noel Temple Moore, Foreign Office, I I June 1864, F.O. 78/1816 (No. 1), ibid., 2, p. 332.
20. Ibrahim Abu Lughod, address at Palestine Human Rights Committee Meeting, November 1980, Chicago.
How Feudal Arab Landowners who exploited their peasantry became Nationalist Leaders
When Jewish economic success threatened to liberate their peasantry.
The same Arab politicians who protested that
they cared nothing for the money the Jews
brought into the country.... showed no such
contempt for money when it came to the
treatment of their own peasantry.
-The Reverend James Parkes, Whose Land?The Palestinians who are today's refugees in
the neighboring countries ... know all this ...
that their present nationalist exploiters are the
worthy sons of their feudal exploiters of
yesterday, and that the thorns of their life are of
Arab, not Jewish origin.
- Abdel Razak Kader, 1969
they cared nothing for the money the Jews
brought into the country.... showed no such
contempt for money when it came to the
treatment of their own peasantry.
-The Reverend James Parkes, Whose Land?The Palestinians who are today's refugees in
the neighboring countries ... know all this ...
that their present nationalist exploiters are the
worthy sons of their feudal exploiters of
yesterday, and that the thorns of their life are of
Arab, not Jewish origin.
- Abdel Razak Kader, 1969
We have seen strong evidence that the Holy Land was inhabited only sparsely in the nineteenth century. For centuries the non-Jewish, particularly the Muslim, peoples who did inhabit the land had been largely composed of a revolving immigrant population of diverse ethnic origins who could not possibly have constituted a substantial indigenous "Palestinian" population, much less a nation of inhabitants for "a thousand" or "two thousand years." Rather, the majority of those inhabitants were migrants and peasants originating from other lands, many of whom had been unscrupuluously exploited by feudal or absentee landlords, moneylenders, and corrupt officials of the Turkish government. They in turn traditionally exploited and preyed upon the oppressed dhimmiJewish population.
How does the history of those relationships mesh with the Arab claim that "displacement" and "landlessness" of Arab "natives" was caused by the Jews? If that claim is false, it is long-perpetuated. As such, it must be traced to its beginnings, in the Palestine of Turkish rule, when the Arab notables' charge of "Jews displacing Arabs" was devised.
It was 1878. Harsh conditions prevailed.[1] Into Palestine[2] came groups of Circassians, Algerians, Egyptians, Druses, Turks, Kurds, Bosnians, and others. One historian deduced that of 141,000 settled Muslims living in all of Palestine (all areas) in 1882, "at least 25% of those 141,000 . . . were newcomers or descendants of those who arrived after 1831 (Egyptian conquest)."[3]
A prominent British official had observed as early as 1840 that the barren Palestinian land needed the collective political return of the Jews:
If we consider their return in the light of a new establishment or colonization of Palestine, we shall find it to be the cheapest and the safest mode of supplying the wastes of these depopulated Regions.... [4]
Throughout the nineteenth century Palestine's occupying government had officially settled many foreigners. The "Egyptian" conqueror Ibrahim Pasha, son of the Turkish-speaking Albanian Muhammad Ali, had "left behind him permanent colonies of Egyptians at Beisan, Nablus, Irbid, Acre and Jaffa. . ." In Jaffa, some five hundred Egyptian soldiers' families established a new quarter.[5] Into Jaffa alone, then, "at least two thousand people" had been imported.[6] In 1844, "the American expedition under Lynch" recorded fewer than 8,000 "Turks" in Jaffa in a population of 13,000.[7] In 1857, Elizabeth Finn, the wife of James Finn, British Consul in Jerusalem, reported that "Greek and Latin foreigners hostile to Turkish power are endeavoring to grasp piecemeal and occupy the Holy Land so valuable to them both. The corrupt Pashas and Effendis [notables] allow them for [sic] money to do so as they list."[8] In 1858 Consul Finn reported the "Mohammedans of Jerusalem" were "scarcely exceeding one-quarter of the whole population."[9]
In 1860 Algerian tribes moved from Damascus en masse to Safed, and the Muslims there were "mostly descended from these Moorish settlers and from Kurds who came earlier to the city."[10]
In that same year, the British Consul wrote:
From Caiffa [Haifa] I learn the arrival of about 6,000 of the Beni Sukhr Arabs at Tiberias (who are very seldom seen on this side of the Jordan) .... [11]... I have omitted to mention the increase of Mahometan agriculturalists and pastoral Arabs from countries of Barbary, forming a small colony in the district north of Lake Tiberias. [12]
A report on "Disturbances" noted that "The Plain of Esdraelon is full of Turkoman Bedouins.. . ."[13] The restored Turkish government was continuously adding its own numbers in order to replenish and guard its administration, as had the Egyptians before them, as had dozens of conquerors over the centuries."
I have the honour to report to your Lordship that the excess of the Druses in the Lebanon remaining unchecked by The Turkish Government, the same practices are being extended southwards, among the Metawalis.These are a sect of Mahometans differing from the orthodoxy of the Turks, inhabiting a hilly district south of the Lebanon; their creed is the same as that of the Persians, and called the Sheah.
... but now they are acting on their own account. They have plundered the large village of Bassa on the verge of the plain of Acre, and plundered the village of Kefir Beraan near Safed .... [15]
Landlords imported workers to keep up their great areas, but the peasants and former nomads who came were subjected to the robbery of the usurers, until they ran off, to be replaced by new immigrants.[16]
Despite the constant immigration into Palestine, the land remained largely depopulated. However observers, travelers, and field workers may have differed[17] in their observations -- one found "fertility" and "the flush of green on the desert,"[18] while another found Sharon and the Upper Galilee barren[19] - records descriptive of Palestine concur on the state of depopulation and of the official wholesale importing of newly arrived emigres who continued to constitute a great part of the populace that did exist there.
As historians have noted, "The real source of the interest in the problem was the condition of Palestine":[20] "empty" [21] -- "silent" [22] -- "waste" -- "ruin."[23] Between 1840 and 1880 "writing travellers learnt on the spot ... to mistrust and hate the Turk and despise the Muslim population."
The village lands belonged in reality to the crown ... if uncultivated.[24] The population was hopelessly incompetent and lethargic, owing to the taxation... [25]
In Jerusalem, 1859, the British consul identified part of the "thinly scattered population":[26]
The Mohammedans of Jerusalem are less fanatical than in many other places, owing to the circumstances of their numbers scarcely exceeding one quarter of the whole population -- and of their being surpassed in wealth (except among the Effendi class) in trade and manufactures by both Jews and Christians.[27]
At the same time, an official report on "Disturbances" affirmed that "the Mahometan population is dying out, I can scarcely say slowly," and that the government had to supply a populace to "places formerly unknown." (Note below the reference to"not sufficient" numbers of "Mohametans" -- Muslims --immigrating at the same time as the "large numbers" of Jews):
Hence, for the present we are supplied with low-bred ignorant Turks, reigning in small towns or rural districts, and farming taxes.... While the Jews from Russia come also in large numbers and settle in Jerusalem and Safed ... I cannot tell whether the recent immigration of Algerine Mohametans in the North is invited or fostered by Turkish Governors. These bring fanaticism with them, but their numbers are not sufficient as yet.[28]
However distasteful he found the impoverished Arab immigrants who were "supplied," the British Consul complained that there were too few inhabitants of any sort in Palestine. "Palestine," he reported, was almost "empty of inhabitants," and urgently needed a "body of population irrespective of religious considerations."[29] In fact, another official British report-contradicting the alleged grounds for its own future policy [See Chapters 14 and 15] -- attested to the abandonment of the land when renewed Jewish development began. In one area, for example:
In 1878 Commission of Enquiry visited Beisan, as did another Commission 50 years later, to report on land situated there. The commission appeared to have reported that they found the lands in disorder, exposed to raids by marauding Bedouin from across the Jordan, abandoned by the cultivators and only scantily cultivated.There is, then, evidence for assuming that it is doubtful that any of the present-day cultivators can prove their occupation before 1870.[30]
Meanwhile, the Jewish population had been growing. They were the majority in Safed and Tiberias by 1851,[31] and by the late 1850s Jews formed at least half of the population of Jerusalem. Most of them were the "class called sephardem,"[32] and the Jews "greatly exceed the Moslems in number."[33]
The Turkish Sultan had enacted laws that promised "every encouragement to the cultivation of the land."[34] In 1856, Sir Moses Montefiore was granted an edict by the Sultan permitting Jews to buy land in Palestine.[35] At mid-nineteenth century, a "considerable number" of Jewish immigrants had come and settled in the four holy cities of Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias, largely -- but also on the land.[36] (They were not the first European, or Ashkenazi, Jews to join the native Sephardim; following the 1769 earthquake at Safed, "a new influx" of Russian Jews had refounded the town, about 1776.)[37]
In 1860 Sir George Gawler, a non-Jewish "Zionist," one of a group in England who had been staunchly advocating Jewish nationalism for decades, wrote:
I should be truly rejoiced to see in Palestine a strong guard of Jews established in flourishing agricultural settlements and ready to hold their own upon the mountains of Israel against all aggressors.I can wish for nothing more glorious in this life than to have my share in helping them to do so.[38]
By the 1870s, despite the traditional attacks -- "sometimes to death" -- on Palestinian Jews by "their Muslim neighbors," the situation was reportedly more secure.[39] Jews had "more redress."[40] And foreign-born Jewish pioneers were coming to join the Jewish fellahin who had clung to Palestine's soil.
The Jewish fellaheen -- those who have worked the land for centuries ... are not differentiated in their external appearance, their dress, their language or their daily life, from their non-Jewish neighbors.[41]
Contrary to other parts of the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century, in Judah-cum-Palestine Jews had remained on the Holy Land.
A significant characteristic of theirs [Jews] is that,except in Palestine, they are almost all city dwellers.[42]
Together they were beginning the Jewish development of depopulated land, decades before Theodor Herzl's "Zionism" was implemented in 1901. The newcomers' settlement of newly purchased areas would enable many native Palestinian Jews to shed the historically persecuted, poverty-strickendhimmi existence.[43]
But Jews had lived principally in urban areas of the Holy Land -- their "sacred" Jewish cities.[44] However "preferable" it might have been to hire Jews for land development, Jewish agricultural labor was scarce. Furthermore, most who were available were totally inexperienced and nearly useless. For generations in many countries Jews had not been permitted to own land, and most Jews in the Holy Land had been relegated to accepting religious charity as a means to survive. By 1859, however, the British Consul could observe that
The Jews are increasing in numbers, and the Rabbis tightening the ecclesiastical control; yet the mechanical class among them are learning, though slowly, to work for their own living, instead of depending solely for subsistence upon alms from Europe, distributed by the Rabbis.[45]
The "principle of using exclusively Jewish labor" would take longer to introduce to some areas.[46] One pioneer supposedly commented,
The transformation of a "tribe of schnorrers" [beggars, Yiddish] ... into a new breed of Spartan, self-reliant, technically accomplished tillers and reapers could not be accomplished overnight.[47]
In 1878, Petach Tikvah, the first modem Jewish colony, was founded, principally by native Palestinian Jews from Jerusalem.[48] Jews such as Edmond Rothschild believed projects should be "carried out with Jewish rather than Arab labour," even though "relatively few Jewish manual labourers could be found in Jaffa or Petach Tikva," and those were "at least twice as expensive as their Arab counterparts."[49] As a consequence, on the new settlement non-Jews were hired to assist for a time with the reclamation work by which the Jews would transform the country.
Many of the Arab laborers hired were new immigrants themselves. "After 1870," for instance, the Turks' "forward policy . . . included the planting of Circassian colonies" in the country.[50] Circassians "surrounded" the Jewish settlement of Sedjera, which had been purchased from an "absentee Arab landlord" in the late 1890s.[51]
At Hadera, founded in 1891, Egyptian workers were contracted because there was not enough local Arab labor, and those few locals available were not willing to run the "risk of malaria and yellow fever." At Zikhron Yaacov, founded in 1882, there were twenty-one Jewish workers to six Arab workers in 1893; five years later, in 1898, there were twenty-seven Jews to twenty-one Arabs.[52]
And in 1889, the forty Jewish families in the Jewish settlement Rishon I'Tsion (founded in 1882) had been followed by more than ten times as many Arab families from Egypt and elsewhere. The following letter from a pioneer provides a vivid illustration:
In Rishon L'tzion, there are now forty Jewish families, and most of them are financially supported by the noble.... Besides this forty, more than four hundred families are settled in the areas surrounding the moshava. The Arab village of Sarafand that stood ruined to the south of the moshava (Rishon L'tzion) is now called Srefand Harib, and is a large, spreadout village; many Bedouin and Egyptian families have settled within it. Those who left their villages to come here all find work. They, along with their wives, daughters and sons have split up into a wide variety of trades and vocations. Dozens of families have gathered in Bet Dagon (Badazshak), in Yadzor, in Safria, in Srafand Amar, in Agar and elsewhere (a few thousand dunam that was, and until today is, desolate and empty and used for putting sheep and bulls out to graze). Those who have come to the area are wretchedly poverty-stricken and destitute, and came with nothing to plant. Grains (income) were taken by the government, and they were left lacking of all. About one thousand Arabs work on occasion and (during the winter in Rishon), and how many in the villages? We ourselves are giving them plough blades that are sharpened -- into the hand of those who someday may stand as enemies against us.[53]
By 1897, at Petach Tikvah, one of the largest Jewish settlements, Jews were in a "rotating work force of some thirty-two hands" in an attempt to "avoid the need for Arab labour," and strengthen the spirit of the settlers.[54] Still, in 1914, Petach Tikvah's population would number 2,600 Jewish settlers, 600 resident Arab workers, and 1,100 "floating" Arabs.[55]
One condition was unique to Palestine, however: it was solely in Judah-cum-Palestine that the traditional Jewish dhimmi not only would be equal, but he or she would
1) help wrench the effendis' historical hold over the peasant-migrants and
2) create independence for the Jews.
2) create independence for the Jews.
As a counter, the effendis would set about inflaming the entrenched Jew-hatred of the Muslim masses by instilling fear in the only way the masses understood: by ominous warnings that Jews might begin to oppress Muslims as the Muslims had for so long oppressed the Palestinian Jews. According to one account,
In all eyes the Jew is becoming ... the traitor prepared to plunder his neighbor to take possession of his goods.[163]
It was in 1909, at the time when leading effendis felt their grip over the lives and fortunes of their erstwhile prey was getting too loose, that effendi Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi warned that the Jews would "displace the Arab farmers from their land and their fathers' heritage.... The Jews were not here when we conquered the country." [164] It mattered little that theeffendi's argument was false. It served his group's long-range economic interests, and at least some of his misstatements would be swallowed whole by a surprisingly large part of the world for the better part of a century.
In 1911, an Arab land official from a notable family based in Damascus charged that the Jewish settlers in Palestine wanted "solely to expel the poor Arab peasants from their land,"[165] while "treacherous Arab landowners" sold lands to the Jews. [166] In case some among the impoverished masses might question the sincerity of sudden concern shown by the Arab absentee landlord in question- whose wealth and holdings came from precisely the activities he was attributing to the Jews -- a more emotional and basic appeal was added to ensure the desired mass reaction: the Damascus landlord warned that the Jews were "disloyal" Ottoman soldiers and would "later shoot the Arabs." [167]
As Jew had been plundered by Arab, so now would Arab be plundered, the leaders alleged. As Arab had been stripped of land and money by Arab, so now the Jews would be blamed. Most important, as Jew was displaced by Arab in Palestine -- with each restriction on Jewish immigration, Arabs were coming into the Jewish-settled areas to take places and employment that the Jews were creating for other Jews -- so Arab would charge Jew with the Arab's action. The implanted fear that the new, bolder Jews would turn the tables on the Muslims fomented the desired violent reaction. It was the same tactic that would later throw fuel on the "Palestinian refugees" flight in 1948.
The effendis' somewhat disingenuous tactic in 1909 may have been the first specious charge of Jews specifically "displacing" Arabs. But the same effendi tactic had succeeded in pressuring the Turks to halt Jewish immigration to the Holy Land nearly thirty years before that. And the same tool would be cynically employed later by the Arabs with British support: later, "Arabs" in "Palestine" would be seen by the world as having been "displaced" and "excluded" from "their homeland" in 1948.
Despite the anti-Jewish solicitation inherent in his positions, as early as 1911 Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi proclaimed he was not an "anti-Semite, but an anti-Zionist."[168] It was perhaps the premiere performance of that protest of qualification that is prevalent today. One benefit accruing from prominent effendi al-Khalidi's pronouncement could have been that Jews might be more likely to continue to buy land surreptitiously from one who disclaimed any support of "anti-Semitism."
But the distinction was aimed only at influencing the Jews. As other non-Jews pointed out, the "masses were incapable of making the distinction" between one Jew and another. [169] One influential Arab writer candidly observed that there should be no distinction between "Zionists" and "non-Zionists," since all shared common goals.[170]
Anti-Jewish attitudes were the "daily bread in Palestine.[171] Sheikh Sulayman al-Taji, an "Ottomanist" patriot and landlord who, paradoxically, himself sold land to Jews, wrote a poem called "The Zionist Danger" about "Jews, the weakest of all peoples and the least of them ... sons of clinking gold, stop your deceit . . ."[172] The "poem" was published in November 1913, and that same month, murders were committed in Jewish kibbutzes (kibbutzim) of the Jewish-settled area of the country.[173]
By the time of World War I, the active Arab anti-Semitism, whether called "Ottomanism," "anti-Zionism," or "Arab nationalism,"[174] had evolved into a kind of Muftism after Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti and scion of the al-Husseini notables.
As Britain's Commander in Chief and Palestine's High Commissioner would conclude a generation later, in 1938, Arab "terrorism was not a national movement but bands of banditti of no genuine political significance [or] Arab peasants who are restless and anti-Jew, and who are not averse to joining violent action" for a fee. But, said the Commissioner, the "moderate" Arabs in Palestine who opposed terror feared they would become the victims if they took "a lead against the terrorists." "Other political leaders might arise," if Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini weren't "sitting just across the border."[175] But the terrorist leader and his effendi colleagues in Palestine had been "sitting" in control of the country's security for decades. As an anti-Jewish movement, Muftism would not only cooperate with the Nazis, but would actually succeed in efforts to cause the deaths of additional hundreds of thousands of European Jews whom the Nazis had earmarked for Palestine, as is documented later.
The 1938 & 2001 proposed partitions of Western Palestine & Policy of Appeasement
Quote from Text
Winston Churchill cautioned in 1939, the acts that we engage in for appeasement today we will have to remedy at far greater cost and remorse tomorrow.
Former President Clinton's talk of the "Partition of Israel & Jerusalem" harkens back to the last time it was proposed in 1938, the Palestinians rejected it then too.
Palestine Royal Commission Report had called "toleration by the [British] Government of subversive [terrorist] activities, more especially those of the Mufti of Jerusalem,"1 not only Jews but moderate Arabs and those effendis engaged in a power struggle with the Mufti were murdered. As the Palestine Royal Commission Report had observed, with uncharacteristic indignation,
... intimidation at the point of a revolver has become a not infrequent feature of Arab politics. Attacks by Arabs on Jews, unhappily, are no new thing. The novelty in the present situation is attacks by Arabs-on Arabs. For an Arab to be suspected of a lukewarm adherence to the nationalist cause is to invite a visit from a body of "gunmen." Such a visit was paid to the editor of one of the Arabic newspapers last August shortly after he had published articles in favour of calling off the str?ke." Similar visits were paid during our stay in Palestine to wealthy Arab landowners or businessmen who were believed to have made inadequate contributions to the fund which the Arab Higher Committee were raising to compensate Arabs for damage suffered during the "disturbances." Nor do the "gunmen" stop at intimidation. It is not known who murdered the Arab Acting Mayor of Hebron last August, but no one doubts that he lost his life because he had dared to differ from the "extremist" policy of the Higher Committee. The attempt to murder the Arab Mayor of Haifa, which took place a few days after we left Palestine, is also, we are told, regarded as political. It is not surprising that a number of Arabs have asked for Government protection.2
Many Christian Arabs, as well as the Muslims, opposed the Jews -- now predominantly Zionists -- and this common hostility toward Jews served to cool down the Muslim-versus-Christian resentments. As an example of the contributions to terror and violence directed by some among the Christian Arabs, Professor S. F. Albright cited an instance during one anti-Jewish onslaught, in which a prominent Christian Arab editor
called his little boy of five into the room and told him what he must do to a Jewish boy if he should get a chance. He even put cruel words into the little chap's mouth: "I will take a knife and stab him; I will take a pistol and shoot him."3
But the Christian Arabs were not exempt from Arab terrorism. The Christians were compelled at gunpoint to abandon their traditional head covering, the tarbush, and adopt the Muslimkeffiyah instead. The compulsory Muslim veil was forced upon Christian women. Christian Arab shopkeepers were forced to close on the Muslims' Friday sabbath as we?l as on Sundays, thus losing a day's revenue.4
As in the past, the Arab masses responded only to "the appeal of religious fanaticism and ... their tradition of violence which a single generation of British rule had. not eradicated."5 The ruling families had never pretended to any sort of reform: thefellahin were, in the 1930s, still plagued by "indebtedness and ruinous charges exacted from them by the Arab landowners and moneylenders."6
The effendi -- led attacks upon Jews and their supporters still were designed 1) to keep the "sweets" of feudalism and 2) to prevent the traditional dhimmi Jew from an "inconceivable" elevation to equality with Muslims.7 As one British eyewitness press report described the situation, 8
... For the most part the villagers are decent law abiding folk who have no great sympathy with the Arab rebels who are fighting to stem the tide of Jewish immigration and demanding an Arab Government for Palestine.They merely want to be left alone to sow and harvest; to marry and find the wherewithal in these troubled times to bring up their families.
Then one night a rebel band descends on the village. The rebel chief goes straight to the house of the village headman and orders him to produce 50 young men to come out on the hills to snipe at the British, and for another 100 men to tear up Government roads.
Hospitals were not exempted from the wanton violence. On June 24, 1938,
". . . Two Arabs working in a Jewish-owned stone quarry near Haifa were wounded by Arab raiders. The wounded men were taken to hospital, but two of the raiders entered the hospital in search of them, killing by mistake another Arab, a patient from Nablus."9
The "collection" of contributions to fund the terrorists was equally effective, following the same traditional methods that the Arabs had applied to extract funds for "protection" against raiding. According to the Chief of Staff under Lieutenant General Dill's command in 1936,
The collection of funds for "distressed Palestine" was carried out by methods similar to those employed by the racketeer. Large sums were collected under pressure from firms as well as from individuals. There was always the threat of the gun. At the same time pressure was exerted on individuals, and sometimes there was the use of the gun.10
Even though the Mufti had fled to Syria upon the "resurgence of violence"11 that he had instigated, Jews, British, and rival or moderate Arabs alike became the objects of his continued wrath. As the Times of London observed a year after the Mufti's flight,
... Many of the leaders of the National Defence Party [opposition to Mufti] have been murdered; others have been compelled by threats to leave the country.
... It is certainly true that during the last four months far more Arabs than Jews or British soldiers have been killed by Arab terrorists.12
From April 1936, the Mufti's "systematic extermination" caused the murder or flight from the country of any Arab suspected of less than total loyalty to the rebels: mayor, affiliated official, sheikh, village mukhtar (headman), rival Arab notable, and even prominent Muslim religious figures-all were victims.
The mayor of Hebron, Nasr el Din Nasr, murdered August 4, 1936, was a close ally of the Mufti's chief opponent, Ragheb Bey Nashashibi; the wife and daughter of the mayor of Bethlehem were wounded July 1937; the mayor Nablus, Suleiman Bey Toukan, who publicly warned the government of chaos if terrorism was not squelched, fled after attempted assassination in December of 1937. No fewer than eleven mukhtars were slain, along with family members, between February of 1937 and November of 1938.*13
[*A similar list of "moderate" Arabs who have been exterminated recently by the PLO-the modem "Muftism"--could be compiled today.]
Muslim religious leaders murdered or wounded included the following:
| March 1938 | Sheikh Yunis el Husseini, head of El Aqsa Mosque administration, was wounded. |
| July 1938 | Sheikh Ali Nur el Khatib, of El Aqsa Mosque, was murdered. |
| Dec. 1938 | Sheikh Dauoud Ansari, Imam of El Aqsa Mosque, was killed (after fourth attempt). |
Other Sheikhs who were murdered then by Arab terrorists included:
| July 1938 | Sheikh Nusbi Abdul Rahim, Counsel to the Moslem Religious Court, murdered at Acre. |
| July 1938 | Sheikh Abdul el Badawi, murdered at Acre. |
| Nov. 1938 | Sheikh El Namouri, murdered at Hebron.14 |
As the MacKereth-versus-British Foreign Office correspondence (cited earlier) indicated, the terrorists, or "rebels," were viewed by an increasing number of British officials and observers as "sincere Arab patriots" whose violence was "justified."
There were, however, those who resisted appeasement of the terrorist tactics for a time. One communication with a British "correspondent in Palestine," transmitted to the former Palestine High Commissioner Chancellor, expressed outrage at the reports in the London Times early in 1937:
. . . Who is "the Times" correspondent out here? This is obvious Arab propaganda. The Mufti has gone to Mecca with the avowed intention of getting help to continue the contest and as to objecting to violence, it is absolutely false; "Courage to disavow his own tactics"! It is their usual method always to disavow anything when convenient, and unless he wished it, it would not appear in any Arab newspaper. They are openly saying that the lawlessness will soon begin again, but if the "disavowal" is in the Arab newspapers ... the Arabs would merely laugh knowing quite well it was said just to deceive the foolish English. It is pure bluff. The correspondent is obviously pro-Arab and against his own country and ought to be shown up. It is disgraceful. The murders continue, as you will see in the paper I am sending you.... The Arabs hate civilisation and would like to keep the country in its present backward state but it is horrible to see it being spoilt. The goats are allowed to eat off all the young plants and the women take what is left for fuel. Fortunately, the Jews are enclosing their land and they are the one hope for the prosperity of the land. The Arabs don't care for taking any trouble. They talk big about their country but what have they ever done for it? They tread down the poor and take bakshish and that is all they care for.
You know all this as well as I do, but I can't help repeating it.15
Just before the Mufti fled to Syria, the British Commander of the Arab Legion was convinced that
the Arabs ... are still out of hand, and in my opinion we shall have in the end to teach them a lesson. Besides the Mufti's party which is bad enough we have all the young Effendi class, products of our education, and beyond them and probably most dangerous and well-organized are the Communists. That, a few weeks ago a police officer could be murdered in the middle of Haifa, and the assailants get clear away is an eye-opener; and now the same thing happens in Jerusalem. I am quite sure that lots of people knew all about those crimes, and probably many Arab members of the police do also, but they would be murdered if they came forward with their evidence.16
Upon the Mufti's arrival in Syria, a local British officer wired the Foreign Office that "Surveillance exercised over Mufti appears to be little short of a farce ... Mufti ... thanking French and Lebanese for their warm welcome here."17
Perhaps it was Ormsby-Gore's apparent outrage at the newest "reign of terror" that reversed his previous attitude toward offending the Arab world. Whatever the reason, in his capacity as Colonial Secretary, Ormsby-Gore wrote in a "secret Cabinet memorandum"18 that although the Jewish "mini" state "may temporarily accentuate Arab hostility in the countries surrounding Palestine," the Jewish state must be supported.
The "increase" of "Arab intransigence" would be caused more by the continuation of the "present uncertainty" of the British, he asserted, than by a firm position supporting the Jewish state.
It was Ormsby-Gore who had clung to the proposed "partition" by sending forth the Woodhead Commission, which, it was rumored, in the end "would decide against partition."
In August 1938, British Secretary of State Malcolm MacDonald communicated a "secret note" to friends in the Cabinet, confiding that
Great harm had already been done in Palestine by rumours that the wisdom of Partition had been questioned in the Cabinet, which have encouraged the Arab terrorists and those behind them to believe that if only they persist in their campaign they will force us to abandon this policy.
MacDonald noted that the terrorist leaders "virtually dictate Arab Policy."19
MacDonald had resisted pleas by influential Arabs, ranging from the Egyptian Prime Minister to the head of London's Arab Centre, to "recall" the Mufti and his supporters "from their exile ... to negotiate with them"; MacDonald insisted then that "the Mufti and his colleagues" were "in general" behind the "campaign of violence in Palestine." There was "plenty of information on that point." The terrorism was "being encouraged from a source outside Palestine. Terrorism could not continue without that encouragement.... I would not," MacDonald vowed, "trust the word of the leaders who had been exiled," nor would he allow them to come back.20
The Woodhead Commission, as the Arabs had anticipated, recommended against partition, after which the British government abandoned the proposal.21 The fact that "Arab opposition was a decisive factor in" the retraction of Government's partition plan was "generally understood," although the Woodhead Commission claimed its "rejection" to be "based ... on practical grounds."22 Malcolm MacDonald expressed the fear that if partition were implemented, "We should forfeit the friendship of the Arab world."23
The Permanent Mandates Commission complained of the British "policy of appeasement."
Mr. Van Asbeck ... reverting ... to the seeming leniency shown by the Palestine Government to the Arab population in suppressing the revolt, asked whether that leniency did not place other elements of the population in a very serious situation -- the Jews in their agricultural settlements were particularly exposed to raids and attacks by the Arab gangsters. Further, had it not the serious effect of weakening the authority of, and lessening the respect of, the Arab population for the Government? Had it not engendered the feeling that they could be as lawless as they like without feeling the strong hand of the Government on their neck?24
PMC member Rappard in particular deplored the "Policy of appeasement" (in 1937) and "felt obliged to confess that he was himself troubled on that point; he could not help feeling that the reputation of undue leniency ... was well established."25
Underscoring that observation, a British colonel explained to the president of the Jewish ex-officers association in Tel Aviv, "I am afraid that merely asking for justice ... is useless. In my experience, especially in times of difficulty, governments give way only to action. . . ."26
Within the Woodhead Palestine Partition Commission Report, however, was the clearly marked Jewish-settled area of Western Palestine, differentiated from the rest of the country and divided according to population of Arabs and Jews. As the Report stated unequivocally,
... no impartial person would think the Arabs justified in claiming sovereign rights over persons and property of Jews who have settled in other parts of Palestine on the faith of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate.27
Throughout the Mandate, the British attempted to gain peace by appeasing intimidation and terror. It was a self-imposed intimidation to a perception of oil-power and force that the Western powers by themselves in fact evoked. Yet, others are considering a similar course. But the lesson ought to be clear by now that the West's continuation of the protracted British policy of submission has not brought a peaceful life. As Winston Churchill cautioned in 1939, the acts that we engage in for appeasement today we will have to remedy at far greater cost and remorse tomorrow.
4. Arab vs. Arab, pamphlet (Wadsworth and Co., Rydal Press, Keighley, England, 1939), p. 3. Rhodes House Doc. 905 17.75 (22).
5. James Parkes, A History of Palestinefrom 135 A.D. to Modern Times (N.Y: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 321-322.
9. Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return, The Struggle for a Jewish Homeland (Philadelphia, 1978), p. 204.
10. Lieutenant Colonel H.J. Simson, British Rule and Rebellion (London: Blackwood, 1937), p. 315. Simson pointed out that "The label on the money box had been altered from 'strike fund' to 'distressed Palestine,' but otherwise there was no change," p. 290.
11. On October 15, 1937, Esco Foundation for Palestine, Palestine, A Study of Jewish, Arab and British Policies, vol. II, p. 879; the Mufti's "figurehead," Jamal Husseini, President of the Arab Party, had escaped earlier.
13. "The murdered were as follows-
Feb. 1937 Mukhtar of Arab Birket Caesarea
Sept. 1937 Balad Esh Sheikh
Dec. 1937 Shahmata
April 1938 Migdal. He was a Christian Arab. His wife was also murdered.
April 1938 Mafaleen
Aug. 1938 Ejn Razal
Aug. 1938 -Beth Mahsir
Sept. 1938 Wife and three sons of the Mukhtar of Deir Es Sheikh. Mukhtar was
absent at the time.
Oct. 1938 Mukhtar of Ard-el-Yehud, near Haifa. He was a Christian Arab.
Oct. 1938 Beth Hema
Nov. 1938 Akaba Quarter, Nablus
Feb. 1937 Mukhtar of Arab Birket Caesarea
Sept. 1937 Balad Esh Sheikh
Dec. 1937 Shahmata
April 1938 Migdal. He was a Christian Arab. His wife was also murdered.
April 1938 Mafaleen
Aug. 1938 Ejn Razal
Aug. 1938 -Beth Mahsir
Sept. 1938 Wife and three sons of the Mukhtar of Deir Es Sheikh. Mukhtar was
absent at the time.
Oct. 1938 Mukhtar of Ard-el-Yehud, near Haifa. He was a Christian Arab.
Oct. 1938 Beth Hema
Nov. 1938 Akaba Quarter, Nablus
"During the same period, attempts were made on the life of the Mukhtar of Lifta
village (July 1937), and the Mukhtar of Seir (October, 1938)"; cited in Arab v. Arab, pamphlet, Wadsworth and Co., Rydal Press, Keighley, England, 1939, p. 13; also see Palestine, October 6, 1937, vol. XII, no. 40, for list of Arab "notables" "murdered between April and September, 1937."
village (July 1937), and the Mukhtar of Seir (October, 1938)"; cited in Arab v. Arab, pamphlet, Wadsworth and Co., Rydal Press, Keighley, England, 1939, p. 13; also see Palestine, October 6, 1937, vol. XII, no. 40, for list of Arab "notables" "murdered between April and September, 1937."
15. Letter to James Malcolm, February 22, 1937, transmitted to Former High Commissioner of Palestine, John Chancellor, RH File 7/Box 15. From "an English correspondent in Palestine whose name for obvious reasons it is undesirable to disclose but for whose impartiality and veracity I can thoroughly vouch." J. Malcolm.
17. PRO FO 371/20817, Havard to Foreign Office, No. 15, "important, repeated to Jerusalem, Paris, Baghdad, and Damascus saving."
20. August 12, conversation with Dr. Izzet Tannous, Arab Christian head of the Arab Centre, London; cited in Gilbert, ibid., p. 206.
21. Palestine Partition Commission Report, 1938, Command #5458, p, 246; Esco Foundation for Palestine, Palestine, A Study of Jewish, Arab and British Policies, pp. 874-875, 1146, 1156ff.
23. October 24, 1938, Cabinet Committee Minutes: Cabinet Papers 27/651, cited in Gilbert, Exile and Return, p. 210.
27. Palestine Partition (Woodhead) Commission Report, 1938, from Martin Gilbert, The Arab-Israeli Conflict, Its History in Maps (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1974), p. 28
Substantial Immigration of Arab Migrant workers into Western Palestine from 1880-1948
.. it is very difficult to make a case out for the
misery of the Arabs if at the same time their
compatriots from adjoining states could not be
kept from going in to share that misery.
-- British Governor of the Sinai from 1922 to 1936... So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have
crowded into the country and multiplied till their
population has increased more than even all world Jewry
could lift up the Jewish population.
-- Winston Churchill [45]
l
misery of the Arabs if at the same time their
compatriots from adjoining states could not be
kept from going in to share that misery.
-- British Governor of the Sinai from 1922 to 1936... So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have
crowded into the country and multiplied till their
population has increased more than even all world Jewry
could lift up the Jewish population.
-- Winston Churchill [45]
l
Since the inception of modem Israel in 1948, that perception has been embellished. The Jewish "aliens" came as "refugees from Europe" and "stole" land from the Arab settled population, it is claimed. No doubt the Jews did suffer from the monstrosities of the Holocaust, but Jewish suffering should not be salved by inducing the suffering of the "Palestinian people," and "excluding" or "expelling" them from their land since "time immemorial," it is thought.
Immigration: Government Reports
and Their Contradictions
While the "Jewish population" of Palestine was "predominantly immigrant in character," according to the 1931 census of Palestine[7] the Muslims were assumed to be "the natural population" -- "Not quite two percent of the Moslem population are immigrants." By 1945, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry would report that, although the Jewish population had risen from 84,000 in 1922 to 554,000, and "three-fourths of this ... [Jewish] expansion was accounted for by immigration," the Arabs had increased "by a greater number" than the Jews.
"The expansion of the Arab community by natural increasehas been in fact one of the most striking features of Palestine's social history," the report stated.[8] The same sponsor, in an earlier report, has assessed that "the speed with which the Moslems have followed Western patterns in reduction of mortality has been very remarkable, probably more than could be expected by any observer twenty years ago."[9]
The Arabs allegedly were following the trends of improvements in the Jewish-settled areas and were "the gainers" from the Jews' higher health standards; [10] the death rate, which is central to determine the rate of natural population increase between 1922 and 1944, decreased proportionately, as would be expected, since standards improved as time passed. The Jews' death rate therefore was at its highest in 1922. Contradicting that logic, in the 1922-1944 period the death rate for the Arabs was reported at its lowest in 1922.[11] According to demographic experts, that phenomenon would have been incredible, considering the conditions in Palestine and the factors influencing the inhabitants at that time.[12]
Occasionally the British administration, noting "disproportions" and disparities in its data on Arab population growth, attempted to justify the conflicting assumptions in nonscientific terms, but the so-called "unprecedented"[13]. rate of "natural increase" among the non-Jews was never satisfactorily broken down or explained.
A very great disproportion is evident between the Moslem and Jewish death-rates and has been accentuated by a steady decline in the Jewish death-rate over the period under review.[14]
Nevertheless, a pivotal report during the same period concluded that
It must be observed that a smaller population may overtake a larger population in numbers as time goes on. This depends on the relative age-constitutions and potential fertilities of the two communities considered. Jewish immigration adds a yearly increment to the Jewish population which is potentially highly reproductive. The time might come some scores of years ahead when the Jewish natural increase exceeded the Arab natural increase, but it would take a very long time for the Jews to obtain a majority in Palestine by that means alone.[15]
The various reports usually acknowledge in one place or another that the Arab population of Palestine would have remained stable at the figure -- actually 300,000 to 400,000[16] -- where it had remained for the last two centuries,[17] if it were not for the better conditions introduced by the Jewish settlements and/or the British administration. "Fluctuations [were] cancelled out" by war, disease, natural disasters, and so on. An official 1937 report found that "The growth in their numbers [Arab fellahin -peasants] has been largely due to the health services, combating malaria, reducing the infant deathrate, improving water supply and sanitation," commencing with the advent of both the Jewish and the British mandatory influence. [18]
The actual thinly settled "existing" Arab population of the early 1900s -- to which the Balfour Declaration and Mandate give testimony -- would not have been "prejudiced" by immigration of Jews. But the Arabs, it is claimed, had grown "naturally" by an unprecedented number -- a number greater even than the enormous swell of Jewish immigration between 1922 and 1944 could raise the Jewish population. Even Zionist histonians[19] accepted the phenomenon of the Arabs'soaring "natural increase" without question, despite the fact that the evidence which contradicted that assumption often was noted on other pages of the same official British Government report that had made the "natural increase" assumption.
As late as the mid-1940s, the 1945-1946 Survey of Palestine stated that "It is probable that the high rate of natural increase of the population of Palestine is a phenomenon of the mandatory period. . . ."[20]
One source cited earlier -- a population expert who assumed that a populous indigenous Arab community had been in Palestine for a millennium -- noted elsewhere in the same chapter that, by the date of his book, 1936, well into that Mandatory period, "fall in the death-rate" was the "likely" cause of the Arabs' population increase. And yet, he contradicted his own explanation by stating that in fact by 1936, fourteen years into the Mandatory period, "Medical and sanitary progmss has made little headway among the Palestinian Arabs as yet, and cannot account for any considerable fall in the death-rate." After disqualifying all other excuses, that writer was left with one rather lame possibility: that perhaps the phenomenal rate of increase among Arabs in Palestine could be attributed solely to British "administrative measures" like "quarantine"![21]
In other words, the new "phenomenal" rise in the Arab population of Palestine, which had remained sparse and static for two hundred years despite constant replenishing, was attributed to a sudden, hyped natural increase of the "existing" long-settled indigenes. That phenomenon, or so went the rationalization, resulted from new conditions. Yet, it was alsoacknowledged that because of its recent timing, the introduction of those new conditions could not in fact have been responsible for the population increase in the period of time for which it was credited!
That same self-contradictory expert source was heavily relied upon by the Palestine Partition Commission in 1938, which tried to reconcile contradictory "facts": for example,
We thus have the Arab population reflecting simultaneously two widely different tendencies -- a birthrate characteristic of a peasant community in which the unrestricted family is normal, and a death-rate which could only bebrought about under an enlightened modem administration, with both the will and the necessary funds at its disposal to enable it to serve a population unable to help itself. It is indeed an ironic commentary on the working of the Mandate and perhaps on the science of government, that this result which so far from encouraging has almost certainly hindered close settlement by Jews on the land, could scarcely have been brought about except through the appropriation of tax-revenue contributed by the Jews."[22]
The same report referred to "a combination of circumstances unique in modem history." For the Jews, "an unusually high (though not unprecedented) rate of immigration"[23] and for the "Arabs," that is, Muslims, "an abnormally high (andpossibly unprecedented) rate of natural increase in theexisting indigenous population."[24]
Note the words "existing" and "indigenous. " They were not simply modifiers; their use, as we will see in following chapters, became central to our seriously uncritical acceptance of Arab propaganda's misrepresentation of migrants and immigrants as "displaced" and "landless Arabs" deprived of their homeland by the Jews.
While the Arabs were reportedly growing in number "naturally" by phenomenal leaps, the Jews were immigrating -- in all but depression times -- as heavily as the British immigration restrictions on Jews would allow. The 1937 Palestine Royal Commission Report -- often called the Peel Report -- noted that
The pace and extent of the development of the Jewish National Home must obviously depend on the rate and volume of Jewish immigration over a series of years. Having regard to their fear of being overwhelmed and therefore dominated by Jewish immigrants, the Arabs watch the immigration figures with close and anxious concern.[25]
Another practically unknown and unrecognized condition was indicated: the same report observed also that Arab immigration into Palestine might exist.
No accurate estimate can be made of the numbers of Arabs who have come into Palestine from neighboring Arab lands and settled there, but it may be reckened that roughly nine-tenths of growth has been due to natural increase, and it has been a growth of over 50 percent in 17 years. Those are remarkable figures especially in view of the general belief that the population of Palestine under the Ottoman regime was more or less stationary.[26]
Other references reported similar observations. Some examples:
Immigration has accounted in large part for the increase of the Jewish section of the population, though the Arabs have also received some reinforcement from this source .[27]The collection and compilation of the data of migration are beginning to reach a tolerable degree of precision; but in one main repect they remain incomplete since it has not yet been possible to arrange for a reasonably complete record of the movement of people to and from Trans-Jordan.[28]
4,866 travellers who entered Palestine during the year were registered as immigrants. Of these 4,114 were Jews and 752 non-Jews.[29]
Yet the possibility of substantial Arab entry into Palestine was dismissed, despite the "remarkable" growth of the Arab population compared to the admittedly "stationary" number of the "Arab" population for centuries, before and until the "Jewish National Home" was mandated.[30]
Reported Arab Immigration
If there had not yet been sufficient time for the improved health standards to affect the Arabs' rate of natural increase, then another, artificial factor had to cause the otherwise scientifically unexplainable Arab population increase.
The only demographic possibility remaining was that Arabs, like the Jews, had immigrated to swell their numbers. Yet, no record of substantial Arab immigration was recorded in Palestine by the British government. According to all the reports of the period, Arab "recorded" immigration to Palestine was minimal, casual, and unquantifiable.[31]
Any observer at the time, however, might have found strong indications that questioned the accuracy of the government's assumptions from the beginning.
The British Department of Migration itself quite candidly acknowledged that the "records" in respect to non-Jewishimmigration from neighboring countries such as "Syria" and "the Lebanon" were "defective"; that defect was deemed "of no great consequence," however, because, as the reports stated, the Department's records were intended to check only "Jewishimmigration into Palestine according to the capacity of the country to absorb immigrants." The report assured, "in that aspect of the matter that the statistics may be held to have a high degree of accuracy."[32]
Thus we find that in the British immigration system there was not even a serious gauge for considering the incidence of Arab immigration into "Palestine." The verbose description of the "mandatory policy" assumed that only "Jewish immigration" must be measured.
Yet, in the 1931 census, at least twenty-three different languages were reported in use by "Moslems," and most of those plus an additional twenty-eight were in use by "Christians"-many of whom were known as, or represented as "Arabs" -- a total of at least fifty-one languages.[33]
And the non-Jews in Palestine in 1931 listed as their "birthplaces" at least twenty-four different countries, in addition to the Americas and Europe. In Jerusalem alone, twenty different places of birth (outside the Americas and Europe) were reported by the "Moslems"; those plus another four countries were listed by "Christians."[34]
The "illegal" Jewish immigration was fastidiously reported-"One case is known in which a small party of Jews endeavored to enter Palestine via Trans-Jordan"[35] -- while the Arabs who immigrated illegally were addressed only when their "detection" had become "flagrant."[36] The British Colonial officials were "thinking of Jews" in matters of immigration as we will see later in some detail.
But the British Government, which recorded comings and goings within Palestine, occasionally was forced by its prevalence to give mention to the "illegal Arab immigration."[37] The movement, however, was underestimated and minimized, deemed "casual," and was never introduced as a factor in determining the population increase in the portion of Palestine area being settled by the Jews:
In addition to this increase by recorded immigration, a number of persons are known to enter Palestineillegally from both adjacent and European countries and to remain there permanently.[38]
In fact, in some instances the conclusion that Jews were increasing through immigration while Arabs were increasing only through natural increase was alleged in the same reports which observed elsewhere in their pages that "considerable" illegal Arab immigration was indeed proceeding without restriction or record from such areas as Syria, Egypt, TransJordan, and Lebanon, among others.[39]
Most Government acknowledgments of Arab "illegal immigration" were concealed from recognition by the cryptic nonspecific heading of "Unrecorded Illegal Immigration" or were obscured by discussion of "Jews and Arabs" together.[40] When "illegal entry" of Arabs was recognized separately in that regard, invariably the report in question would note that the volume "must be insignificant."[41]
Although the Jewish "illegal" inunigration -- comparatively small until Hitler rose to power in the 1930s -- was meticulously recorded, minutely detailed, and later even estimated in advance and deducted from the government's strict Jewish quota, the references to Arab "illegal immigration" were always presented ambiguously.[42] Almost without exception, the matter was obscured, negated, and overwhelmed by preponderant concentration on Jewish immigration as the primary issue.
Hints of Substantial Unrecorded Immigration
It was while studying documents pertinent to Palestine among the Winston Churchill papers[43] that the author first noticed a statement that challenged the very foundation of the current claim that Jewish settlement in Palestine had caused the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Arabs.[44] Churchill said in 1939,
... So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population.[45]
For the British statesman -- a veteran of the first days in Britain's administration of the Mandate -- to make that statement, surely he had to have become aware of significant evidence to back his assertion. And indeed, buried by the more recent propaganda campaign, politically targeted "fact sheets" distributed by organs of the United Nations and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the gospel according to the British Foreign Office, substantial evidence does exist to support Churchill's challenge of the Arab propaganda.
For example, according to the Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations,[46] La Syriehad published, on August 12, 1934, an interview with Tewfik Bey El-Hurani, Governor of the Hauran. Governor El-Hurani stated that "In the last few months from 30,000 to 36,000 Hauranese [Syrian] had entered Palestine and settled there."
The Mandates Commission -- which was overseer to all League of Nations Mandatory Administrations -- took special "note" in its Minutes of the fact that the Hauranese, not merely passing through, had indeed "settled." Yet no official account of that important wave of Arabs who entered illegally appears in British immigration records.
In "private" and "secret" British correspondence files, however, there were innumerable references to Syrians from the Hauran district "admitted" freely to "Palestine" "without passport or visa"[47] from the beginning of the British Mandate after World War I and consistently into the 1940s .[48] British reports were at times obliged by the prevalence of "Syrian countrymen in Palestine" to acknowledge the "illegal ... large proportion of Arab immigrants from the Hauran."[49]
But the data quoted from directly above were not included in any official report until after extensive evidence had been given in 1937 [See Chapter 14] and consequent pressure exerted by the Permanent Mandates Commission.[50] Even then, in that belated acknowledgment, the recorded "number of Hauranis illegally in the country" was grossly underestimated." Some of them had "fled" back to Syria and elsewhere to avoid prosecution for violence in the riots of 1936 -- but that factor will be examined later, along with more detailed evidence of the British policy of benign blinking.
The Permanent Mandates Commission had also addressed the incidence of illegal Arab immigrants from "Trans-Jordan." Its members had spoken of "free admission of TransJordanians into Palestine," which might "lead to abuse" since a number of them "remained in the country"; the Commission had indicated Arab illegal immigration from other countries as well, all of which is addressed in following pages.
For the moment, however, we turn back to the Syrian-Haurani influx, of "thirty to thirty-six thousand" Arab illegal immigrants from one area in just "a few months" of 1934, verified by an official international document and attested to by a Syrian leader.
That is, from spring to summer of 1934, from just one area in only one of the many depressed neighboring Arab countries from which impoverished citizens were known to be emigrating into Palestine-particularly into the Jewish-settled portion of the country-an Arab official's unequivocal report indicated thatmore Arabs illegally entered and remained in Palestine than the total number of Jews for twice that length of time in 1934 who were "approved" to immigrate into their designated "Jewish National Home. "[52] Yet the official British record of immigration to Palestine for the entire year of 1934[53] reports "recorded immigration" of just 1,784 "non-Jews," with only about 3,000 as "travelers remaining illegally," and those figures supposedly included Arab immigrants from all points into all of Palestine.
Although carefully categorized records were kept for age groups, occupations, amount of capital, etc. of those Jews who immigrated, there was no specific accounting of the "non-Jews" in the official reports. None except for one phenomenon -- despite the mandatory government's rigorous application of immigration laws for Jews and the official winking at the incidence of Arab illicit entry, the number of "non-Jews" recorded as having been "deported for immigration offences" was more than twice as great as the number of Jews.[54] The question arises: if there were so many illegal Arab immigrants that even an official policy which concentrated almost solely on limiting Jews was forced to identify and deport more than twice as many Arabs as Jews, then is it not possible or even likely that the number of illegal Arab immigrants had to be so much larger than recorded that it constituted a massive wave of entry?
Yet, in autumn of 1934 the Palestine High Commissioner stated that during that year "We do not consider that the numbers of those illegal immigrants exceed 100 per month."[55] In 1935, the number of deportations of non-Jews was even more significant: in a system admittedly overlooking all but the most blatant cases of illicit Arab immigration, the 1935 Annual Report stated that of 2,455 deported, 2,152 were "non-Jews. "[56]
Churchill's recognition of massive Arab immigration into Palestine was confirmed by many, including the British Governor of the Sinai from 1922 to 1936, who wryly observed that
This illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria and it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery.[57]
Nonetheless, Arab leaders and their British supporters attempted to make exactly that case. In order to appease the small but powerful Arab effendi community, the Mandatory power began imposing stricter limitations upon Jewish immigration.
While counting the newly arrived Arab illicit immigrants as indigenous deeply rooted Palestinians, the Biltish explained that it was the Jews who were flooding the country beyond its "absorptive capacity" and crowding out Arabs. The Hope Simpson Report of 1930 announced its seminal conclusion that Arabs were being "displaced" by Jews, even though in its own pages the report revealed that there was an uncontrolled influx of illegal Arab immigrants from Egypt, Trans-Jordan and Syria.[58]
Speaking unmistakably of "other than Jewish labour," the report states
The Chief Immigration Officer has brought to notice that illicit immigration through Syria and across the northern frontier of Palestine is material.[59]
Further, the Report speaks of "the case of the 'pseudo-traveller' who comes in with permission for a limited time andcontinues in Palestine after the term of his permission has expired" as being "present practice," a method that was"injustice" to the Jews.[60]
The broad implications of that seemingly casual observation within the Hope Simpson Report will become evident in the following pages. If large-scale Arab immigration was a recognized "practice," how could official reports justify a conclusion that only Jewish population was increasing through immigration and forcing out Arabs? If Arabs were incoming also, then might their increase in number be attributable not to the natural increase of natives present since time immemorial on the land, but instead, an increase swelled as importantly-perhaps even more importantly-by immigration than that of the Jews?
One British official conducted an investigation on the "displaced" and "landless" Arab situation. Despite an enormous unrecorded Arab influx-and even adding the illicit Arab immigrant community into the category of "native population" that had supposedly been displaced-the official concluded, after investigating the areas, that the allegation was largely inaccurate, as we will see later from excerpts of his testimony during an official investigation.[61]
The official would be slain shortly thereafter.[62] The land being cleared by Palestinian Jews, for Jewish victims of persecution in Europe, had been and still was being appropriated by Arabs. Yet the White Paper of 1939 was in the works. That legislation by the British at the instigation of the Arabs would so harshly restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine that hundreds of thousands of Jews would be prevented from entering what was to have been their sanctuary and thus be condemned to the fateful inferno of the Nazis. And that White Paper would be justified by the premise that the Jews were usurping the Arabs' places in "Palestine."
According to the British Government's 1937 Report to the League of Nations [63] the number of Arabs in Palestine had indeed soared higher, in Churchill's words, than "even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population." Yet this crucial and incompatible evidence went disregarded or unrecognized and was never figured into the political equation of Palestine.[64]
Palestinian Refugees,
Invited to leave in 1948
The people are in great need of a "myth" to fill their
consciousness and imagination....
-- Musa Alami, 1948Since 1948 Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem
in an irresponsible manner.... they have used the Palestine
people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and,
I could say, even criminal.
-- King Hussein of Jordan, 1960
Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees... while it is we who made them leave.... We brought disaster upon ... Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave.... We have rendered them dispossessed.... We have accustomed them to begging.... We have participated in lowering their moral and social level.... Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon ... men, women and children-all this in the service of political purposes .... [36]
-- Khaled Al-Azm, Syria's Prime Minister after the 1948 war
The nations of western Europe condemned Israel's position
despite their guarantee of her security.... They understood
that ... their dependence upon sources of energy precluded
their allowing themselves to incur Arab wrath.
-- Al-Haytham Al-Ayubi, Arab Palestinian military strategist, 1974
consciousness and imagination....
-- Musa Alami, 1948Since 1948 Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem
in an irresponsible manner.... they have used the Palestine
people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and,
I could say, even criminal.
-- King Hussein of Jordan, 1960
Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees... while it is we who made them leave.... We brought disaster upon ... Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave.... We have rendered them dispossessed.... We have accustomed them to begging.... We have participated in lowering their moral and social level.... Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon ... men, women and children-all this in the service of political purposes .... [36]
-- Khaled Al-Azm, Syria's Prime Minister after the 1948 war
The nations of western Europe condemned Israel's position
despite their guarantee of her security.... They understood
that ... their dependence upon sources of energy precluded
their allowing themselves to incur Arab wrath.
-- Al-Haytham Al-Ayubi, Arab Palestinian military strategist, 1974
At the time of the 1948 war, Arabs in Israel were invited by their fellow Arabs -- invited to "leave" while the "invading" Arab armies would purge the land of Jews.1 The invading Arab governments were certain of a quick victory; leaders warned the Arabs in Israel to run for their lives.2
In response, the Jewish Haifa Workers' Council issued an appeal to the Arab residents of Haifa: [See Official British Police Report ]
For years we have lived together in our city, Haifa.... Do not fear: Do not destroy your homes with your own hands ... do not bring upon yourself tragedy by unnecessary evacuation and self-imposed burdens.... But in this city, yours and ours, Haifa, the gates are open for work, for life, and for peace for you and your families."3
While the Haifa pattern appears to have been prevalent, there were exceptions. Arabs in another crucial strategic area, who were "opening fire on the Israelis shortly after surrendering,"4were "forced" to leave by the defending Jewish army to prevent what former Israeli Premier Itzhak Rabin described as a "hostile and armed populace" from remaining "in our rear, where it could endanger the supply route . . ."5 In his memoirs, Rabin stated that Arab control of the road between the seacoast and Jerusalem had "all but isolated" the "more than ninety thousand Jews in Jerusalem," nearly one-sixth of the new nation's total population.
If Jerusalem fell, the psychological blow to the nascent Jewish state would be more damaging than any inflicted by a score of armed brigades.6
According to a research report by the Arab-sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, however, "the majority" of the Arab refugees in 1948 were not expelled, and "68%" left without seeing an Israeli soldier.7
After the Arabs' defeat in the 1948 war, their positions became confused: some Arab leaders demanded the "return" of the "expelled" refugees to their former homes despite the evidence that Arab leaders had called upon Arabs to flee. [Such as President Truman's International Development Advisory Board Report, March 7, 1951: "Arab leaders summoned Arabs of Palestine to mass evacuation... as the documented facts reveal..."] At the same time, Emile Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Command, called for the prevention of the refugees from "return." He stated in the Beirut Telegraph on August 6, 1948: "it is inconceivable that the refugees should be sent back to their homes while they are occupied by the Jews.... It would serve as a first step toward Arab recognition of the state of Israel and Partition."
Arab activist Musa Alami despaired: as he saw the problem, "how can people struggle for their nation, when most of them do not know the meaning of the word? ... The people are in great need of a 'myth' to fill their consciousness and imagination. . . ." According to Alami, ar indoctrination of the "myth" of nationality would create "identity" and "self-respect."8
However, Alami's proposal was confounded by the realities: between 1948 and 1967, the Arab state of Jordan claimed annexation of the territory west of the Jordan River, the "West Bank" area of Palestine -- the same area that would later be forwarded by Arab "moderates" as a "mini-state" for the "Palestinians." Thus, that area was, between 1948 and 1967, called "Arab land," the peoples were Arabs, and yet the "myth" that Musa Alami prescribed-the cause of "Palestine" for the "Palestinians" -- remained unheralded, unadopted by the Arabs during two decades. According to Lord Caradon, "Every Arab assumed the Palestinians [refugees] would go back to Jordan."9
When "Palestine" was referred to by the Arabs, it was viewed in the context of the intrusion of a "Jewish state amidst what the Arabs considered their own exclusive environment or milieu, the 'Arab region.' "10 As the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser "screamed" in 1956, "the imperialists' 'destruction of Palestine' " was "an attack on Arabnationalism," which " 'unites us from the Atlantic to the Gulf.' "11
Ever since the 1967 Israeli victory, however, when the Arabs determined that they couldn't obliterate Israel militarily, they have skillfully waged economic, diplomatic, and propaganda war against Israel. This, Arabs reasoned, would take longer than military victory, but ultimately the result would be the same. Critical to the new tactic, however, was a device designed to whittle away at the sympathies of Israel's allies: what the Arabs envisioned was something that could achieve Israel's shrinking to indefensible size at the same time that she became insolvent.
This program was reviewed in 1971 by Mohamed Heikal,12then still an important spokesman of Egypt's leadership in his post as editor of the influential, semi-official newspaper Al Ahram. Heikal called for a change of Arab rhetoric -- no more threats of "throwing Israel into the sea" -- and a new political strategy aimed at reducing Israel to indefensible borders and pushing her into diplomatic and economic isolation. He predicted that "total withdrawal" would "pass sentence on the entire state of Israel."
As a more effective means of swaying world opinion, the Arabs adopted humanitarian terminology in support of the "demands" of the "Palestinian refugees," to replace former Arab proclamations of carnage and obliteration. In Egypt, for example, in 1968 "the popularity of the Palestinians was rising," as a result of Israel's 1967 defeat of the Arabs and subsequent 1968 "Israeli air attacks inside Egypt."13] It was as recently as 1970 that Egyptian President Nasser defined "Israel" as the cause of "the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land." Although Nasser thus gave perfunctory recognition to the "Palestinian Arab" allegation, he was in reality preoccupied with the overall basic, pivotal Arab concern. As he continued candidly in the same sentence, Israel was "a permanent threat to the Arab nation."14 Later that year (May 1970), Nasser "formulated his rejection of a Jewish state in Palestine," but once again he stressed the "occupation of our [Pan-Arab] lands," while only secondarily noting: "And we reject its [Israel's] insistence on denying the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people in their country."15Subsequently the Arabs have increased their recounting of the difficulties and travail of Arab refugees in the "host" countries adjacent to Israel. Photographs and accounts of life in refugee camps, as well as demands for the "legitimate" but unlimited and undefined "rights" of the "Palestinians," have flooded the communications media of the world in a subtle and adroit utilization of the art of professional public relations.16
A prominent Arab Palestinian strategist, AI-Haytham Al-Ayubi, analyzed the efficacy of Arab propaganda tactics in 1974, when he wrote:
The image of Israel as a weak nation surrounded by enemies seeking its annihilation evaporated [after 1967], to be replaced by the image of an aggressive nation challenging world opinion.* 17
[* As Rosemary Sayigh wrote in the Journal of Palestine Studies, "a strongly defined Palestinian identity did not emerge until 1968, two decades after expulsion." It had taken twenty years to establish the "myth" prescribed by Musa Alami.18]
The high visibility of the sad plight of the homeless refugees -- always tragic -- has uniquely attracted the world's compassion.19 In addition, the campaign has provided non-Arabs with moral rationalization for abiding by the Arabs' anti-Israel rules, which are regarded as prerequisites to getting Arab oil and the financial benefits from Arab oil wealth. Millions of dollars have been spent to exploit the Arab refugees and their repatriation as "the heart of the matter," as the primary human problem that must be resolved before any talk of overall peace with Israel.
Reflecting on the oil weapon's influence in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Al-Ayubi shrewdly observed:
The nations of western Europe condemned Israel's position despite their guarantee of her security and territorial integrity. They understood that European interests and their dependence upon sources of energy precluded their allowing themselves to incur Arab wrath.20
Thus Al-Ayubi recommended sham "peace-talks," with the continuation, however, of the "state of 'no peace,'" and he advocated the maintaining of "moral pressure together with carefully-balanced military tension..." for the "success of thenew Arab strategy." Because "loss of human life remains a sore point for the enemy," continual "guerrilla" activities can erode Israel's self-confidence and "the faith" of the world in the "Israeli policeman."
Al-Ayubi cited, as an example, "the success of Arab foreign policy maneuvers" in 1973, which was
so total that.... With the exception of the United States and the racist African governments, the entire world took either a neutral or pro-Arab position on the question of legality of restoring the occupied territories through any means -- including the use of military force.
As Al-Ayubi noted, "The basic Arab premise concerning 'the elimination of the results of aggression' remains accepted by the world." Thus the "noose" will be placed around the neck of the "Zionist entity."
But the Arabs' creation of the "myth" of nationality did not create the advantageous situation for the Palestinian Arabs that Musa Alami had hoped for. Instead, the conditions he complained of bitterly were perpetuated: the Arabs "shut the door" of citizenship "in their faces and imprison them in camps."21
Khaled Al-Azm, who was Syria's Prime Minister after the 1948 war, deplored the Arab tactics and the subsequent exploitation of the refugees, in his 1972 memoirs:
Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees ... while it is we who made them leave.... We brought disaster upon ... Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave.... We have rendered them dispossessed.... We have accustomed them to begging.... We have participated in lowering their moral and social level.... Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon ... men, women and children-all this in the service of political purposes .... 22
Propaganda has successfully veered attention away from the Arab world's manipulation of its peoples among the refugee group on the one hand, and the number of those who now in fact possess Arab citizenship in many lands, on the other hand. The one notable exception is Jordan, where the majority of Arab refugees moved,* and where they are entitled to citizenship according to law, "unless they are Jews."23
Palestinian leadership will not let the refugee problem be solved In 1958, former director of UNRWA Ralph Galloway declared angrily while in Jordan that
The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations, and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die.
Prittie, "Middle East Refugees," in Michael Curtis et al., eds., The Palestinians:
People, History, Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 71.
---
People, History, Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 71.
---
1. Habib Issa, ed., Al-Hoda, Arabic daily, June 8, 1951, New York; see Economist (London), May 15, 1948, regarding "panic flight"; also see Economist, October 2, 1948, for British eyewitness report of Arab Higher Committee radio "announcements" that were "urging all Arabs in Haifa to quit."
2. Near East Arabic Radio, April 3, 1948: "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees to flee from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and that certain leaders . . . make political capital out of their miserable situation . . ." Cited by Anderson et al., "The Arab Refugee Problem and How It Can Be Solved," p. 22; for more regarding Arab responsibility, see Sir Alexander Cadogan, Ambassador of Great Britain to the United Nations, speech to the Security Council, S.C., O.R., 287th meeting, April 23, 1948; also see Harry Stebbens, British Port Officer stationed in Haifa, letter in Evening Standard (London), January 10, 1969.
3. April 28, 1948; according to the Economist (London), October 1, 1948, only "4000 to 6000" of the "62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa" remained there until the time of the war; also see Kenneth Bilby, New Star in the Near East (New York: Doubleday, 1950), pp. 30-31; Lt. Col. Moshe Pearlman, The Army of Israel (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), pp. 116-17; and Major E. O'Ballance, The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 (London, 1956), p. 52.
4. David Shipler, New York Times, October 23, 1979, p. A3. Shipler cites Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, 0 Jerusalem, and Dan Kurzman, Genesis 1948.
7. Peter Dodd and Halim Barakat, River Without Bridges.- A Study of the Exodus of the 1967Arab Palestinian Refugees (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969), p. 43; on April 27, 1950, the Arab National Committee of Haifa stated in a memorandum to the Arab States: "The removal of the Arab inhabitants ... was voluntary and was carried out at our request ... The Arab delegation proudly asked for the evacuation of the Arabs and their removal to the neighboring Arab countries.... We are very glad to state that the Arabs guarded their honour and traditions with pride and greatness." Cited by J.B. Schechtman, The Arab Refugee Problem (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), pp. 8-9; also see Al-Zaman, Baghdad journal, April 27, 1950.
9. Lord Caradon, "Cyprus and Palestine," lecture at the University of Chicago, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, February 17, 1976. Similar statement by Folke Bernadotte, To Jerusalem, p. 113.
11. Ibid. p. 234, quoting a speech by Nasser at Suez, July 26, 1956; in 1952, Sheikh Pierre Gemayel, then leader of the Lebanese National Youth Organization "Al Kataeb," wrote: "Why should the refugees stay in Lebanon, and not in Egypt, Iraq and Jordan which claim that they are all Arab and beyond that, Moslem? ... Isn't it for that alone that these so-called nationalist elements are demanding to resettle the refugees in Lebanon because they are themselves Arab and Moslems?" Al-Hoda, Lebanese journal, January 3, 1952, cited in Schechtman, Arab Refugee Problem, p. 84; also see Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, "Quest for an Arab Future," in Arab Journal, 1966-67, vol. 4, nos. 2-4, pp. 23-29.
12. "Mohammed Hassanein Heykal Discusses War and Peace in the Middle East," Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 197 1. Heykal thus joined the Arab chorus heard after the 1967 war.
13. Vatikiotis, Nasser, p. 257; also see Mohamed Heikal, The Road to Ramadan (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), p. 56.
15. Charles Foltz, interview with Nasser, U.S. News and World Report, May 1970, cited in Vatikiotis, Nasser, p. 259; see also Le Monde interview, February 1970.
16. contrary to the popular view ... in the West," a "great many refugees" were living out of camps "in comfortable housing outside," in the beginning of the 1960s according to Fawaz Turki, The Disinherited- Journal of a Palestinian Exile (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 41.
17. Al-Haytham A]-Ayubi, "Future Arab Strategy in the Light of the Fourth War," Shuun Filastiniyya (Beirut), October 1974. AI-Ayubi, also called Abu-Hammam, has been military head of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Lieutenant Colonel in the Syrian army, and highly respected strategist on Israel. He perceived the "guerrilla" war against Israel as the ultimately successful one.
18. Rosemary Sayigh, "Sources of Palestinian Nationalism: A Study of a Palestinian Camp in Lebanon," Journal of Palestinian Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, 1977, p. 2 1; see also Sayigh, "The Palestinian Identity Among Camp Residents," Journal of Palestinian Studia vol. 6, no. 3, 1977, pp. 3-22.
19. In 1981, the Organization of African Unity's executive secretary, Ambassador Oumarou Garba Youssoupou from Niger, reflected upon why the millions of displaced souls in Africa were not as visible: "We're not getting the publicity because of our culture. No refugee is turned away from the host countries, so we're not dramatic enough for television. We have no drownings, no piratings.... We don't make the news ... .. Aiding Africa's Refugees," by Gertrude Samuels, The New Leader, May 4, 1981.
22. Khaled Al-Azm, Memoirs [Arabic), 3 vols. (AI-Dar al Muttahida Id-Nashr, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 386-87, cited by Maurice Roumani, The Case of the Jewsfrom Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue, preliminary edition (Jerusalem: World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries [WOJAC], 1975), p. 61.
23. Jordanian National Law, Official Gazette, No. 1171, February 16, 1954, p. 105, Article 3(3). Between 1948 and 1967, 200,000 to 300,000 Arabs moved from the West Bank to the "East Bank," according to Eliyahu Kanovsky, in Jordan, People and Politics in the Middle East, Michael Curtis, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1971), p. 111.
How many Palestinians Refugees?
Inflating the numbers
Arabs, encouraged by their leaders to leave, fled from what is now Israel between April and December, 1948.1 The Arab leaders promised them that they would soon be able to return following Israel's destruction. In some cases the Jews, including Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, urged the Arabs to remain, promising that they would not be harmed.2 Those who remained became full and equal citizens of Israel, while those who chose to leave went to neighboring Arab states. Instead of welcoming their Arab brothers, and integrating them into the mainstream of their societies, the Arab states kept them in squalid refugee camps and used these Palestinians refugees as political pawns in their fight against Israel.
1. Irving Howe and Carl Gershman (eds.), Israel, the Arabs and the Middle East (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. 168.
2. See, for instance, The Economist, Oct. 2, 1948, for a description of Jewish efforts in Haifa to persuade the Arabs to stay.
According to various estimates, the accurate number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 was somewhere between 430,000 and 650,000. * An oft-cited study that used official records of the League of Nations' mandate and Arab census figures[37] determined that there were 539,000 ** Arab refugees in May 1948.[38]
* The Statistical Abstract of Palestine in 1944-45 set the figure for the total Arab population living in the Jewish-settled territories of Palestine at 570,800.
** Walter Pinner began with a total of 696,000 Arabs living within the Armistice lines in 1948, from which he subtracted the 140,000-157,000 who remained in their homes when Israel became independent. Pinner further asserts that no more than 430,000 were "genuine refugees" in need of relief. See the population study in Chapter 12 of "From Time Immemorial" for new information and a detailed breakdown.
There was heated controversy over the exact number of Arab refugees who left Israel. In October 1948, there were already three "official" sets of figures: The United Nations had two, the higher of which estimated the number would "shortly increase to 500,000";[40] the Arab League's official figures reported a total already greater by almost 150,000 than the higher of the UN figures. The swollen Arab League figures could never be verified because the Arabs refused to allow official censuses to be completed among the refugees." Observers have deduced that the Arab purpose was to seek greater world attention through an exaggerated population figure and thereby induce the UN to put heavier pressures upon Israel, to force "repatriation."
But the propaganda use of erroneous, inflated, or otherwise manipulated population statistics was not a recent phenomenon restricted to the Arab refugee camps. As subsequent chapters reveal, this practice has long played a critical, underestimated role in shaping the perceptions and the resolution---or the lack of resolution---of the Arab-Israeli conflict.[39]
The former Director of Field Operations for the United Nations Disaster
Relief Project reported in July 1949 that
Relief Project reported in July 1949 that
It is believed that some local [Arab] welfare cases are included in the refugee figures.[42]
When the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) was established as a singular, special unit to deal with Arab refugees, practically its first undertaking, in May 1950, was an attempted refugee census to separate the genuinely desperate from the "fradulent claimants." After a year's time and a $300,000 expenditure, UNRWA reported that "it is still not possible to give an absolute figure of the true number of refugees as understood by the working definition of the word" [43] For the purpose of that census, the definition of "refugee" was "a person normally resident in Palestine who had lost his home and his livelihood as a result of the hostilities and who is in need." A reason given by UNRWA for falsified numbers was that the refugees "eagerly report births and ... reluctantly report deaths."[44]
One of the first official reports to question the accuracy of the refugee figures stated that there could be "no true refugee population" figures because the agency director "did not consider it practicable to ask the operating agencies to impose any kind of eligibility test and ... had no observers of his own for this purpose.'"[45] The report stated it was having difficulty excluding "ordinarily nomadic Bedouins and ... unemployed or indigent local residents" from genuine refugees, and
it cannot be doubted that in many cases individuals who could not qualify as being bona fide refugees are in fact on the relief rolls.
One of the camp workers in Lebanon who was questioned about the accuracy of the refugee count answered,
We try to count them, but they are coming and going all the time; or we count them in Western clothes, then they return in aba and kafflyah and we count the same ones again.[46]
UNRWA's relief rolls from the beginning were inflated by more than a hundred thousand,* including those who could not qualify as refugees from Israel even under the newer, unprecedentedly broad eligibility criterion for the refugee relief rolls. UNRWA now altered its definition of "refugees" to include those people who had lived in "Palestine" a minimum of only two years preceding the 1948 conflict." In addition, the evidence of fraud in the count, which accumulated over the years, was given no cognizance toward reducing the UN estimates. They continued to surge.
* UNRWA Director Howard Kennedy on November 1, 1950, reported to the United Nation Ad Hoc Political Committee that "a large group of indigent people totalling over 100,000 ... not be called refugees, but ... have lost their means of livelihood because of the war and post-war conditions ... The Agency felt their need was even more acute than that of the refugees who were fed and housed." In November 1950, Kennedy referred to "the 600,000 [Arab] refugees," although he had reported in May 1950 that UNRWA had distributed 860,000 rations, citing the hundreds of thousands of "hungry Arabs" who were not bona fide refugees but who claimed need.[47]
According to the Lebanese journal Al-Hayat, in 1959 "Of the 120,000 refugees who entered Lebanon, not more than 15,000 are still in camps."[49] A substantial de facto resettlement of Arab Palestinian refugees had actually taken place in Lebanon by 1959. Later that year AI-Hayat wrote that "the refugees' inclination-in spite of the noisy chorus all about them-is toward immediate integration."[50] The 1951-1952 UNRWA report itself had determined that "two-thirds of the refugees live elsewhere than in camps," and that "more fortunate refugees are not even on rations, but live rather comfortably ... and work at good jobs."[51] The recognition in the United Nations and in Arab journals that the refugee camps had largely been emptied, through absorption and resettlement ' raised appropriate subjects for inquiry with regard to correcting the number of persons receiving rations and seeking "repatriation."
After their 1960 investigation, Senators Gale McGee and Albert Gore[52] reported the surfeit of
Ration cards [which] have become chattel for sale, for rent or bargain by any Jordanian, whether refugee or not, needy or wealthy. These cards are used... almost as negotiable instruments.... many have acquired large numbers of ration cards ... rented or bartered to others who unjustifiably receive ... rations, much of which are now in the black market.
At the same time, the UNRWA Director admitted that the Jordan ration lists alone "are believed to include 150,000 ineligibles and many persons who have died."[53] Officials told the two senators of twenty percent to thirty percent inflation of the relief rolls,[54] and an American representative on the UNRWA Advisory Board added, "I have actually seen merchants openly weighing and buying supplies from recipients of distribution centers."*[55]
* According to the Mideast Mirror, a weekly news review published by Arab News Agency of Cairo: "There are refugees who hold as many as 500 ration cards, 499 of them belonging to refugees long dead.... There are dealers in UNRWA food and clothing and ration cards to the highest bidder.... 'Refugee capitaliste is what UNRWA calls them." July 23, 1955.
In 1961, UNRWA Agency Director John Davis acknowledged that the United Nations refugee counts included "other victims of the conflict of 1948 " and that it would be wrong to deny them aid merely because they weren't legaliy qualified.[56] However, they were persons neglected by their own Arab govern- ments, and they should not have been counted among the Arab refugees from Israel; by continuing to be unfaithful to its own mandate, UNRWA contributed to further distortion of an already misrepresented and misunderstood refugee situation. In fact, what were originally intended as humanitarian endeavors to aid needy Arab resident populations by the Red Cross and others would unwittingly contribute to the use of hapless humans for an entire political and military campaign. [57]
37. Jordanian National Law, Official Gazette, No. 1171, February 16, 1954, p. 105, Article 3(3). Between 1948 and 1967, 200,000 to 300,000 Arabs moved from the West Bank to the "East Bank," according to Eliyahu Kanovsky, in Jordan, People and Politics in the Middle East, Michael Curtis, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1971), p. 111.
38. In 1967, an additional 250,000 Arab refugees from the Israel-occupied territories were reported; added to the number who left in 1948, they brought the total to 789,000 Arab refugees.
39.A more current example of the traditional swelling of numbers was described by New York Times correspondent David Shipler during the 1982 Israeli routing of the PLO foundation in Lebanon. On July 14, Shipler wrote, "It is clear to anyone who has traveled in southern Lebanon ... that the original figures ... reported by correspondents quoting Beirut representatives of the Red Cross during the first week of the war, were extreme exaggerations."
40. This estimate was made by officers of the Disaster Relief Organization and confirmed by statistical calculation of the potential number of refugees who might have left after the second truce. Gabbay, Political Study, p. 166.
41. Marguerite Cartwright, "Plain Speech on the Arab Refugee Problem," in Land Reborn, American Christian Palestine Committee, November-December 1958; according to a United Nations Interim Report, 1951, A/145/Rev. 1, p. 17: ". . . the figures for Lebanon (128,000) are confused, due to the fact that many Lebanese nationals ... claimed status as refugees"; UNRWA was "forbidden" by Jordan Syria, and Gaza from counting newborn children among refugees, according to Falastin, Jordanian daily, January 25, 1956; see Joseph Schectman, The Refugee in the World (New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1963), pp. 201-207.
42. W. de St. Aubin, Director of Field Operations for the UN Disaster Relief Project, "Peace and Refugees in the Middle East," The Middle East Journal, vol. iii, no. 3. July 1949.
43. Report of the Director, Special Report of Director and Advisory Commission, UNRWA to Sixth Session, General Assembly, UN Document A/1905; compare, for example, with OAU (Organization of African Unity) definition at 1969 Convention: "Any person compelled to leave his place of habitual residence Quoted in "Africa and Refugees," by Neville Rubin, African Affairs, July 1974, Journal of Royal African Society, University of London.
44. UNRWA, Annual Report of the Director, July 1, 1951, to June 30, 1952, General Assembly, Seventh Session, Supp. No. 13 W217 1). See also October 1950, UNRWA Interim Report of Director, A/ 145 1: "there is reason to believe that births are always registered for ration purposes, but deaths are often, if not usually, concealed so that the family may continue to collect rations for the deceased." Cited by Schechtman, Refugee in the World, p. 206.
45. Assistance to Palestine Refigees, Report on UN Relief to Palestine Refugees (UNPRP) from December 1948 to September 1949; the UNRWA staff was largely "Palestinian" and "nationals of the countries" concerned, "increasingly assuming larger duties" regarding "UNRWA's responsibility." UNRWA, Annual Report of the Director, July 195 I-June, 1952, G.A. 7th Session, Supp. No. 13 (A/217 1), p. 8. 46.Cartwright, "Plain Speech," cited by Schechtman, Refugee in the World, pp. 200-201.
47. UN General Assembly, Official Record, 5th session, Ad Hoc Political Committee 31st Meeting, November 11, 1950, p. 194, and Anderson et al, "Arab Refugee Problem and How It Can Be Solved," p. 26.
48. Special Report of the Director, UNRWA, 1954-55, UN Document A/2717.
49. Schechtman, Refugee in the World, p. 248, citingAl-Hayat (Lebanon), June 25,1959.
50. ibid., p. 249, citing AI-Hayat, August 14, 1959.
51. UNRWA, Annual Report of the Director, July 195 I-June 1952, General Assembly, 7th Session, Supp, No. 13 (A/2171), pp. 3, 10.
52.Cable by McGee and Gore from Amman, Jordan, to President Eisenhower, Secretary of State Christian Herter, and the United Nations, October 1959, while traveling in the Mideast for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Appropriations Committee.
53.Dr. John H. Davis, October 1959, cited in Schechtman, Refugee in the World, pp. 207-208.
54. Ibid., quoting George B. Vinson, UNRWA eligibility officer stationed in Jerusalem.
55. Dr. Harry Howard, from the United States Congressional Record, April 20, 1960.
56.UNRWA, Annual Report of the Director. Under the auspices of the Arab Information Center in New York, by 1970 Davis was reporting the figures he himself had proved erroneous and grossly inflated, as the bona fide refugee count. "Why Are There Still Arab Refugees?", The Arab World, Arab Information Center, New York, December 1969-January 1970, p. 3.
57.See New York Times, May 15, 1949; Life magazine, September 29, 1958; Time
magazine, December 2, 1957.
magazine, December 2, 1957.
Arab-Jewish Refugees, the otherMiddle Eastern Refugee problem 1. Howe & Gershman, op. cit., p. 168. Source: The Jewish Agency for Israel: The Jewish Refugees 1948-1972 YemenThe entire Yemenite community of Jews, who swarmed almost 50,000 strong into Israel via "Operation Magic Carpet," believed that "King David" Ben-Gunion was actually the Messiah calling them home. Jewish settlements in Yemen existed more than 2,000 years ago,[35] and some claim the Jews' presence there has been longer -- from the Jews' Babylonian captivity and the fall of the First Temple in 586 B.C. Yemenite Jewry fled to Israel from what historian S. D. Goitein described as "the worst aspect" of the Arab mistreatment of Jews. A Yemenite law decreed that fatherless Jewish children under thirteen be taken from their mothers and raised in Muslim homes as Muslims."Children were torn away from their mothers," according to Goitein. Despite attempts of family and friends to adopt the children secretly, "very often the efforts . . . were not successful.... To my mind, this law, which was enforced with new vigor about fifty years ago, more than anything else impelled the Yemenite Jews to quit that country to which they were very muchattached. ... The result was that many families arrived in Israel with one or more of their children lost to them ... some widows ... [were] bereaved in this way of all their offspring."[36]Persecution was constant and extreme -- stoning Jews, an "age-old" custom, according to "an old doctor of Muslim law,"[37] was still common tradition at the time of the 1948 exodus -- although the bearability of life throughout the centuries of Muslim domination often depended upon whether the rule was Turkish or Arab. The Yemenite Jews' situation changed drastically for the worse in the seventh century, with the Arab conquest. After the Jews who lived in what is now part of Saudi Arabia[38] were either expelled by the Prophet Muhammad or obliterated, Jewish communities in the rest of the conquered Muslim territory fell under the new infidel status.[39] The Jews of Yemen were subjected to the severest possible interpretation of the Charter of Omar, plus carefully devised brutal improvisations on the dhimmi theme. For about four centuries, the Jews suffered under the fierce fanatical edict of the most intolerant of all Islamic sects.[40] In the twelfth century the conditions were so punishing, and formerly repugnant forced conversion to Islam was so eagerly sought by terrified Jews, that the "Great Rambam" -- the venerated Rabbi Moses Maimonides -- was prompted to write the famous "Yemen Epistle,"[41] in which he commiserated with Yemen's Jewry and besought them to keep the faith. The eighteenth century was one of almost unbearable burden, bringing the 1724 famine, in addition to insidiously varied humiliations and violence. Fanatical rulers ordered synagogues destroyed, and public prayers were forbidden. Many thousands attempted to follow "false messiah" Shabbetai Zevi on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but they were attacked on the way, and the Chief Rabbi of San'a was "tortured to death."[42] One overlord decided to rid the Arabian peninsula of Jews by ofrering them a choice of religious conversion or banishment; the overwhelming number chose to leave the capitals and head for the Red Sea coast. Those who had not died of starvation, thirst, or illness during the torturous journey -- for many, on foot -- were allowed to settle in a town called Mauza', where more casualties were caused by the cruelties of the climate. The Jews' exile at Mauza' was terminated by decree in 1781,[43] according to one report, because the exiled Jews had been the only craftsmen in the country and their work was keenly missed. The latter eighteenth century, with its more tolerant ruler, allowed Yemen's Jews brief respite from both hunger and humiliation. One Jew was even accorded an official position as Minister of Currency -- he was imprisoned for two years by his ruler, however, after many years of prominence. A visit was paid to Yemen in 1762 by a Danish-German explorer who described life in the Jewish ghetto under the "improved" circumstances of the eighteenth century: Completely shut off from the city of San'a is the Jewish village ... where 2,000 Jews live in great contempt. Nevertheless they are the best artisans, potters, goldsmiths, engravers, minters and others. By day they work in their shops in San'a, but by night they must withdraw to their isolated dwellings.... Shortly before my arrival, twelve of the fourteen synagogues of the Jews were torn down, and all their beautiful houses wrecked .... [44]Throughout the nineteenth century Jews were victims of hunger and of Arab attacks on the ghetto, which resulted in murder and pillage.In the middle of the nineteenth century a writer from Jerusalem described the Yemenite Jews' plight during the two years he lived with them: The Jews who have been living in Yemen for many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years, are now in a position of inferiority, and are oppressed by a people which declares itself holy and pious but which is very brutal, barbarous and hard-hearted. The natives consider the Jew unclean, but his blood for them is not unclean. They lay claims to all his belongings, and if he is unwilling, they employ force.... TheJews ... live outside the town in dark dwellings like prison cells or caves out of fear for murderers and robbers. Whoever has any money or valuables conceals them in the earth or in such secret holes as they have in their little houses so that nobody may see them....It is particularly bad for the Jew if he is himself accused of a crime. There is then no mercy. For the least offense, he is sentenced to outrageous fines, which he is quite unable to pay. In case of non-payment, he is put into chains and cruelly beaten every day. Before the punishment is inflicted, the Cadi addresses him in gentle tones and urges him to change his faith and obtain a share of all the glory of this world and of the world beyond. His refusal is again regarded as penal obstinacy. On the other hand, it is not open to the Jew to prosecute a Muslim, as the Muslim by right of law can dispose of the life and the property of the Jew, and it is only to be regarded as an act of magnanimity if the Jews are allowed to live. The Jew is not admissible as a witness, nor has his oath any validity.[45]Beginning at the turn of the century, the Yemenite Jews were even prohibited from fleeing the country to escape persecution. "Those who live in a country which discriminates against them most blatantly want to have, at least, one right: to leave that country," historian Goitein believes. But the Shi'ite Muslims in Yemen adhered to the "strictly inner Islamic legal basis" -- that "a Jew, a 'protected' subject, was not allowed" into "enemy territory"-which to the Shi'ites meant any region ruled by non-Shi'ites. The few who managed to emigrate "had to leave everything behind," and "for the great masses ... the old prohibition was a source of great suffering."[46]In one town, however, the Jews became the center of a power struggle between two Arab tribes: as a result, the town's ruler loosened Jewish restrictions to the extent that some Jews became wealthy and a few were allowed to have houses even higher than the Muslims'.[47] There have always been conflicting reports on the number of the Jews in Yemen, but because famine often struck the Yemenite Jews, death through starvation was "a common event." (Thus, even though the birth rate was high and polygamy occurred among the Yemenite Jewish community, the rate of natural increase was kept down in Yemen, into the twentieth century.) One visitor wrote, "Nothing moves the Jewish traveler so much as the sight of many places where all of the Jewish inhabitants have been carried off by the last famine. The average rate of mortality is terrible."[48] A teacher was sent from Beirut in 1910 to assess the constant reports of travail for the Yemenite Jews. He noted that, after more than a week, I have made myself acquainted with the life of the Jews in all its phases.... They are exceedingly unfortunate.... If they are abused, they listen in silence as though they had not understood; if they are attacked by an Arab boy with stones, they flee. [49]There were some Yemenite Jews who fled on foot over the desert in pilgrimage to the Holy Land, particularly during the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth. One group of Jews decided to sell their possessions for half their worth, and a movement to the Holy Land commenced. "In 1912 alone, over 2,000 Yemenite Jews disembarked at Jaffa." They kept embarking on the hazardous pilgrimage even during World War II, and many had to disguise themselves as Arabs to avoid being intercepted and imprisoned. Often it was the Jewish children who unwittingly exposed the disguise -- when the Arabs tested them by offering unkosher food (not edible by Jewish Orthodox law).[50]As late as 1946, an American missionary reported that a Yemenite Jewish mother and son had been put into chains for accepting a ride in the American's jeep. [51] Nearly 50,000 traditionally religious Yemenites, who had never seen a plane, were airlifted to Israel in 1949 and 1950.[52] Since the Book of Isaiah promised, "They shall mount up with wings, as eagles," the Jewish community boarded the "eagles" contentedly; to the pilot's consternation some of them lit a bonfire aboard, to cook their food! Aden"When I stood in the ancient graveyard of the Jewish community of Aden -- from which tombstones 700 and 800 years old had been taken away to museums, and looked toward the natural harbor where ships of local design were still being built, it occurred to me that King Solomon's ships, not very different from those I saw there, might have anchored nearby. . . ."[53]"Archeological evidence puts us on firmer ground," Goitein tells us. A room in Beth She'arim, Palestine, "dating from approximately 200 A.D. . . . was reserved for Jews from ... South Arabia."[54]Thus Jews are certain to have appeared in Aden in A.D. 200, and although the Jewish community seems to have eluded thorough historical documenting,[55] a letter yet remains, "sent by a Jewish merchant from Aden in South Arabia to Cairo about 850 years ago. In this letter he asks his business correspondent in Cairo to buy for him all kinds of goods for the needs of his household."[56] That there were prominent Jewish merchants in Aden in the early twelfth century hints at a difference in opportunities between the Jews of Yemen and Aden at that period.[57] Documentary evidence exists that some of the Aden Jewish community was substantial enough so that they could contribute "ample donations to a well-known Spanish poet" in the thirteenth century.[58] Still, the general quality of life for Aden's Jews during the Arab reign was hardly "golden." The proximity to Yemen and the same dominating power indicate that Jews of Aden suffered conditions of humiliation under Muslim rule similar to those of the Yemenite Jews "until Aden was conquered by the British in 1839."[59] Throgh the middle of the nineteenth century, most of Aden's Jewry continued to languish under the intermittent persecution and degradation that was the lot of the Jews in that area of Arabia. The exceptions were the "few Jews in Hadramaut and its environs (an area which was known as the Protectorate of Aden)." The Jews in the Protectorate paid their traditional head taxes to the Arabs but in return they were given "more comfortable conditions" than the hapless Jews of Yemen and of the rest of Aden.[60] In twentieth-century Aden, The Jews ... always knew that they were living on sufferance; the local Arab population never harbored anything but hatred towards them. They (the Jews) remembered that "light" pogrom in 1933, when a few people were beaten up and wounded outside the Jewish Quarter, when there was some stoning and when a number of rioters entered a Jewish house and did some looting.That reminiscence of the 1933 anti-Jewish uprising in Aden was contained in an eye-witness "memorandum" which described the "Disaster of the Jews of Aden," the Arab-led mass murder, pillage, and destruction that came down on Aden's Jews in December 1947. [61]An Englishman who was in Aden from 1931, and was appointed Aden's governor in 1951, later described a traditional enmity between Arabs and Jews that preceded the Palestine partition by decades. His report contradicted others, which blamed the bloody pogrom in 1947 on outside factors and incitement in behalf of the Palestinian Arabs [62] Sir Tom Hickinbotham wrote that The Jews are disliked by the Arabs whom they fear.... Therefore, we are always liable to have trouble between the Arabs and the Jews which might well spread to the Hindu community....[The Jews], generally speaking, kept very much to themselves, were self-effacing and their contacts with the Arabs were reasonably good.... The Arabs consider that the Jews are their social inferiors and, provided they keep their own place, or what the Arabs consider to be their place, there is no trouble at all and the two communities may live side by side in peace for years; but as soon as the Jews tended to forget that they were Jews and began to assert themselves as men, then there was always a likelihood of serious trouble[63]The British Commissioner of Police in Aden testified in 1947 that "Since I arrived in Aden there has been a steady growing antagonism between Jews and Arabs ... shown by many petty assaults and by children throwing stones at each other."[64]The antagonism that was evident in 1933 and more so in 1942 was inflamed by anti-Jewish broadcasts from Egypt just before the partition of Palestine. The messages of hate were relayed in public meeting places and helped to incite Arabs against Jews in Aden.[65] In addition to the Egyptian broadcasts, "Orders [were] issued by the Arab League to arrange strikes and protests against the decision to partition Palestine," and rumors were spread that the Jews had been killing Arabs[66] The pogrom that erupted on December 2, 1947, was devastating -- 82 Jews were murdered and 76 wounded; 106 out of the 170 existing Jewish shops in Aden were robbed bare and eight were partially emptied. Four synagogues were "burnt to the ground" and 220 Jewish houses were burned and looted or damaged.[67] There were a few wealthier Jewish families who lived in an area called "Steamer Point," where passengers disembarked from the large liners." But after the 1947 massacre most of Aden's Jews were isolated for their own security and "for months did not dare to venture out of" the Jewish Quarter. A visiting Jewish official reported in January 1949 that "one felt that the pogrom had taken place not a year ago but a week ago ... the Jews still live in a state of tension and anxiety.... the Jews still erect barricades at night."[69] Many thousands of the Aden Jews boarded the "wings of eagles" for Israel along with the Yemenite refugees." In 1958 some were victimized by murder and looting, and those diehard Jews who had remained in Aden after the 1947 massacre were alarmed. [71] A visitor at the time of the 1958 riots observed, It would seem that the problem of this Jewish community is not where to turn, but when to turn. They might be wise to remember that "he who hesitates is lost." They would not be the first Jewish community that waited too long.[72]The remnant of the Jewish community in Aden was victimized again after the 1967 Six-Day War. Murder, looting, new destruction to the synagogues-Jews were finally evacuated with the help of the British, when they discovered the Arabs were planning to massacre what remained of the Jewish community. The Jewry of Aden became virtually "the community that was."[73] IraqThe Jews of Iraq, too, flew to Israel-between 1949 and 1952 alone, more than 123,000[74] Iraqi Jews escaped or were forced to flee to Israel and to leave their assets and communal holdings behind.The Iraqi Jews took pride in their distinguished Jewish community, with its history of scholarship and dignity. Jews had prospered in what was then Babylonia for twelve hundred years before the Muslim conquest in A.D. 634 ;71 it was not until the ninth century that dhimma laws such as the yellow patch, heavy head tax, and residence restrictions were enforced. Capricious and extreme oppression under some Arab caliphs and Mamluks brought taxation amounting to expropriation in A.D. 1000, and in 1333 the persecution culminated in pillage and destruction of the Baghdad synagogues. In 1776, there was a slaughter of Jews at Basra, and the bitterness of anti-Jewish measures taken by Turkish-Muslim rulers in the eighteenth century caused many Jews to flee.[76]Just after the turn of the present century, the British vice-consul in Mosul wrote a report that illustrated the nature of the "traditional relationship" between Muslim and Jew in a less volatile moment: The attitude of the Moslems toward the Christians and Jews, to whom as stated above, they ate in a majority of ten to one, is that of a master towards slaves whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed. It is often noticed in the streets that almost any Christian submissively makes way even for a Moslem child. Only a few days ago the writer saw two respectable looking, middle-aged Jews walking in a garden. A small Moslem boy, who could not have been more than 8 years old, passed by and, as he did so, picked up a large stone and threw it at them -- and then another -- with the utmost nonchalance, just as a small boy elsewhere might aim at a dog or bird. The Jews stopped and avoided the aim, which was a good one, but made no further protest.[77]There was a particularly fearsome period just before the British Mandate; with the outbreak of the First World War, Jews were forced to finance the military expenses of the army stationed nearby. If they refused, they were tortured, and if they hid, they were caught and hanged.[78] The Jews of Iraq actually welcomed the Arab revolt against the Turkish governors, and they rejoiced after the war when the state of Iraq was established under British Mandate.[79]Some Jews were allowed to hold official posts; under the British Mandate Iraqi Jews were supposed to be treated as "equals." Many were writers, traders, and physicians, and some became quite wealthy through commerce and banking. Near the end of the British reign, Hitler's accession to power began, and by the time Iraq declared independence in 1932, the German minister in Baghdad had organized an efficient and influential power base for Nazi propaganda.[80] Within the first year of Iraq's sovereignty, the new government benignly pronounced that minorities would continue to have some measure of freedom. Almost immediately afterward, in August 1933, the Iraqi army massacred the Assyrians and the Jews began to feel increased foreboding. The London Daily News reported" that ". . . when the Iraq army returned after the weekend [following the Assyrian atrocity], not one Christian or Jew was seen on the streets." By now the increasingly violent demonstrations over the "Palestine problem" added to deteriorating conditions for the Jewish community; many Jews were murdered by agitated mobs," nitric acid was thrown by terrorists upon Jews in the street, and bombs were flung into synagogues.[83] In 1941 the violence exploded into a bloody farhud -- massacre -- of the Jews, with the police openly participating in the attack. The investigating committee appointed by the Iraqi government determined that "all these attacks were carried out by the army with the assistance of some civilians"; the massacre was executed "without the police arresting anyone or protecting the Jews," and "large British forces stood at the gates of the city, none of them lifting a finger."[84] "Judaism" was "a threat to mankind," the Iraqi Minister of Justice declared." According to the eminent Iraqi-born historian Professor Elie Kedourie, "...once the disorders started, . . . the soldiers and the police, debauched by Nazi propaganda, and bereft of leadership, ran amuck and themselves began the attacks on the Jews." None of the officials "were willing to assume the responsibility ...." Cowardice was universal.... As for the police, the report of the investigating committee pertinently pointed out that they had no need to seek orders from their superiors for firing on looters and murderers caught in flagrante delicto. The director-general of police and his assistants and themutasarrif forgot or feigned to forget, the report declared, that every member of the police had the right to fire in such circumstances.[86]The number killed is uncertain-.estimates range between 150 and "hundreds,"[87] but one member of the investigating committee "later told the chronicler Hasani (who had the story confirmed by the then-Baghdad chief of police) that the true figure was nearer six hundred but that the government was anxious for the lower figure only to appear in the official report."[88] Hundreds more were wounded, and more than a thousand Jewish-owned houses and businesses looted and destroyed.From that time, Arab documents chronicle a systematic attempt by the government, using official means, to destroy the Iraqi Jewish community.[89] Jews suffered indiscriminate torture, imprisonment without charge, and relentless persecutions. When Iraq joined the Arab war against Israel's independence, in May 1948, government terror increased; Jews, who had been restricted to some degree from travel, now were forbidden to leave the country, and many fortunes were extorted or confiscated. Despite the law, thousands escaped illegally by paying heavy bribes. After Israel's 1948 victory and official recognition of Jewish statehood, Nuri Said, fourteen times Prime Minister of Iraq, who "ruled the country in the 1950s irrespective of whether or not Nuri headed the cabinet himself,"[90] recommended a final Jewish solution for Iraq. Nuri Said proposed to the British Ambassador in Jordan at that time, Sir Alec Kirkbride, that "the majority of the Jewish community in Iraq" should be forcibly evicted "in army lorries escorted by armoured cars . . . to the Jordanian-Israel Frontier." There the "Iraqi Jews" would be ordered to "cross the line."[91] Kirkbride later assessed the fate of Iraqi Jews, had Nuri Said's plan been enacted: "Either the Iraqi Jews would have been massacred or their Iraqi guards would have had to shoot other Arabs to protect the lives of their charge."[91] The likelihood of the Jews' protection by the Iraqi guards was remote, considering the precedent established by the police and army participation in the 1941 massacre. Nuri Said's solution, then, was unambiguous, as was the temper of Iraq toward its Jews. Zionism became a capital crime, and Jews were publicly hanged in the center of Baghdad, with an enthusiastic mob as audience. Although no laws authorized, the confiscation of Jewish property in Iraq before 1950,[93] the Jews were stripped of millions of dollars through economic discrimination, "voluntary donations" appropriated by the government, and other subterfuges." An Egyptian journal[94] reported in 1948 that all Iraqi Jews who went Palestine and did not return would be tried in absentia as criminals. Those who were tried in absentia were sentenced to hang or serve extended prison sentences. There had been more than 130,000 Jews in Iraq in 1947, 100,000 of them living' in or near Baghdad. Although some part of the Jews' property had already been expropriated, the bulk still remained in Jewish hands, while vast amounts were taken by officials who participated in illegal escapes. Perhaps because of the desperate financial condition of the Iraqi government, Jewish "emigration" was legalized-upon confiscation of property and permanent loss of citizenship. In 1950, Iraq enacted a law that allowed Jews to "leave Iraq for good."[96] The Jews left their vast accumulated holdings behind, and within the first three years of the law, most of them were flown to Israel, with the Iraqi government taking "a handsome share of the profits" produced by the flights. [97] Thus, the Jews-who, according to Nuri Said, "have always been and will forever be a source of evil and mischief "-- had largely been forced from Iraq.[98] Between 1969 and 1973 at least seventeen Jews were hanged in a public square, and twenty-six others were "slaughtered" in their homes or in Iraqi prisons.[99] As of 1982, most of Iraq's Jewry had found refuge in Israel, and several thousand had found sanctuary elsewhere. EgyptIn 1948, 75,000 Jews lived in Egypt, in a community dating back to before the Babylonian captivity." After the Arab conquest, Jews in Egypt, as in other Arab countries, lived at the whim of erratic Arab sovereignty. One Arab caliph invokedsunna ("the Muslim term for customs ascribed to Mohammed") to tyrannize the Jews and Christians in Cairo in the ninth and tenth centuries. [101] Under the caliphs of Baghdad[102] life was restrictive at times, and generally unpredictable.One caliph, al-Hakim of the Fatimids, devised particularly insidious humiliations for the Jews in his attempt to perform what he deemed his role as "Redeemer of Mankind." First the Jews were forced to wear miniature golden calf images around their necks, as though they still worshiped the Golden Calf. But the Jews refused to convert. Next they wore bells, and after that, six-pound wooden blocks were hung around their necks. In fury at his failure, the caliph had the Cairo Jewish Quarter destroyed, along with its Jewish residents, in 1012.[103]The rule of the Ayyubids (1171-1250) continued the demeaning dhimma laws,[104] and during the thirteenth-century reign of the Burji Mamluks, Jews were particularly sought out for attack, with the result that the Jewish population "greatly declined."[105] At the end of the thirteenth century, the poll tax, or head tax, was "reintroduced in Egypt, where it had fallen into oblivion,"[106] and in the fourteenth century Jews were subject to "anti-dhimmi" mob "riots." With the reign of "mainly" Circassian-born Mamluks, "the prevailing attitude ... was more severe than ever." [107] In the sixteenth century, a religious fanatic wreaked terror among the Jews in Cairo. "He regarded himself as a religious and moral reformer and whipped and mulcted the Jews ... in Cairo, where the Mamluk sultan Kanush al-Ghauri was then in power.""[108] From even those scholars who have documented the Arab persecution of Jews, there are accounts of a "flourishing" Jewish community in Egypt under the Ottoman rule.[109] Yet Edward Lane's definitive report of the first half of the nineteenth century, which asserts that "the Jews ... are under a less oppressive government in Egypt than in any other country of the Turkish empire,"[110] puts the Jews' role in general, and the relatively "flourishing" Egyptian Jewry, into a somewhat more realistic perspective by that report's description of Egypt's "less oppressed" Jews: They [the Jews] are held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by the Muslims in general . . . the Jews are detested by the Muslims far more than are the Christians. Not long ago, they used often to be jostled in the streets of Cairo, and sometimes beaten merely for passing on the right hand of a Muslim. At present, they are less oppressed; but still they scarcely ever dare to utter a word of abuse when reviled or beaten unjustly by the meanest Arab or Turk; for many a Jew has been put to death upon a false and malicious accusation of uttering disrespectful words against the Kur-an or the Prophet. It is common to hear an Arab abuse his jaded ass, and, after applying to him various opprobrious epithets, end by calling the beast a Jew.A Jew has often been sacrificed to save a Muslim, as happened in the following case. -- A Turkish soldier, having occasion to change some money, received from the seyrefee (or money-changer), who was a Muslim, some Turkish coins called 'adleeyehs, reckoned at sixteen piasters each. These he offered to a shopkeeper, in payment for some goods; but the latter refused to allow him more than fifteen piasters to the 'adleeyeh; telling him that the Bisha had given orders, many days before, that this coin should no longer pass for sixteen. The soldier took back the ladleeyehs to the seyrefee, and demanded an additional piaster to each; which was refused: he therefore complained to the Bisha himself, who, enraged that his orders had been disregarded, sent for the seyrefee. This man confessed that he had been guilty of an offence; but endeavored to palliate it by asserting that almost every money -- changer in the city had done the same, and that he had received ladleeyehs at the same rate. The Bisha, however, disbelieving him or thinking it necessary to make a public example, gave a signal with his hand, intimating that the delinquent should be beheaded. The interpreter of the court, moved with compassion for the unfortunate man, begged to the Bisha to spare his life. "This man," said he, "had done no more than all the money-changers of the city; I, myself, no longer than yesterday, received 'adleeyehs at the same rate." "From whom?" exclaimed the Bisha. "From a Jew," answered the interpreter, "with whom I have transacted business for many years." The Jew was brought, and sentenced to be hanged; while the Muslim was pardoned. The interpreter, in the greatest of distress of mind, pleaded earnestly for the life of the poor Jew: but the Bisha was inexorable: it was necessary that an example should be made; and it was deemed better to take the life of a Jew than that of a more guilty Muslim. I saw the wretched man hanging at a window of a public fountain which forms part of a mosque in the main street of the city.* One end of the rope being passed over one of the upper bars of the grated window, he was hauled up; and as he hung close against the window, he was enabled, in some slight degree, to support himself by his feet against the lower bars; by which his suffering was dreadfully protracted. His relations offered large sums of money for his pardon; but the only favour they could purchase was that of having his face turned towards the window, so as not to be seen by the passengers. He was a man much respected by all who knew him (Muslims, of course, excepted); and he left a family in a very destitute state; but the interpreter who was the unintending cause of his death contributed to their support."[111][* It is surprising that Muslims should hang a Jew against a window of a mosque, when they consider him so unclean a creature that his blood would defile the sword. For this reason a Jew, in Egypt, is never beheaded."]One historian has documented persistent blood libel persecutions throughout nineteenth-century Egypt-six separate instances between 1870 and 1892 alone, preceded by others-in 1844 in Cairo, where "Muslims ... despised and sometimes abused the Jews," and even in such cosmopolitan communities as Alexandria, in 1869.[112] That such acts "undermined the confidence of the Egyptian Jews" was the cautious conclusion drawn by the definitive historian of the subject. Among the populous Muslim peasant (fellahin) community, the Jews were not better off. A Britisher long connected with thefellahin through his Egyptian government job, reported in 1888 that "Armenians, Syrians, Circassians, Jews, are all hated as well as the Turk himself. I think it would be difficult to discover which particular race is most hated (by the Egyptian fallahin) [sic] but I fancy that the Jew or Armenian would take the palm. I mention Jews because one of the most powerful and disliked Pashas ... is spoken [of] by many as a Jew, and always in terms of disgust."[113] In 1890 an Egyptian version of the false charge "documenting" the "Human Sacrifices in the Talmud" was published in Cairo.[114] Anti-Jewish "agitation" and persecution of the Jews in Port Said was frequent between the 1880s and 1908, when a Jewish leader in Cairo wrote of concern for the "insecurity of Port Said's Jews."[115] In 1926 the first Egyptian Nationality Code established that Egyptian citizenship would be offered only to those who belonged "racially to the majority of the population of a country whose language is Arabic or whose religion is Islam."[116] From the late 1930s, Egyptian nationalism, Arab unity against Zionists, and Nazi propaganda fused with traditional prejudice to ignite violently against the Jews."[117] Often the destruction victimized other infidels. One such major incident was the burning of synagogues and churches, and other communal buildings belonging to non-Muslims.[118] Beginning in the forties, many Jews were killed or injured in organized anti-Jewish riots, putting into fearsome perspective the 1946 report that "the general position of the Jews in Egypt is beyond comparison better than any [Arab and Muslim] country so far. . . "[119] Jews suffered extensive economic losses when the Egyptians passed a law that largely precluded Jews from employment; the government confiscated much Jewish property and "wrecked" the economic condition of the Jews within a few months.[120] In the days following the November 1947 vote to partition Palestine, Jews in Cairo and Alexandria were threatened with death, their houses were looted, and synagogues were attacked."[121] Anti-Jewish riots were rampant in 1948. According to an eyewitness account, in one seven-day period, 150 Jews were murdered or seriously wounded."[122] Perhaps the letter to the editor of an Egyptian newspaper from a Muslim providesan insight to the hazards of Jewish life then: It seems that most people in Egypt are unaware of the fact that, among the Moslem Egyptians, there are some of white skin. Every time I take the tramway I hear people around me saying, while pointing at me with their fingers, 'A Jew... a Jew... I have been beaten more than once because of this. This is why I beg you kindly to publish my photo, specifying that I am not a Jew and that my name is Adharn Moustafa Ghaleb.[123]With the outbreak of the 1948 war, Egyptian Jews were barred from leaving Egypt, whether for Israel or elsewhere. Then, early in August 1949, the ban was abruptly lifted, and much sequestered Jewish property was returned.From August until November of 1949, more than 20,000 of Egypt's 75,000 Jews fled, many to Israel.[124] There was a brief and surprising period under the more tolerant leadership of General Muhammad Naguib, but he was overthrown by General Gamal Abdel Nasser, who authorized mass arrests and property confiscation. At the beginning of 1955 the Nasser regime hanged two Egyptian Jews as "Zionist spies," an action the Egyptian Embassy in Washington justified by distributing a pamphlet called "The Story of the Zionist Espionage in Egypt," claiming that "Zionism and Communism" both sought "world domination.""[125] After the Sinai Campaign of 1956, thousands of Jews were interned without trial,[126] while still other thousands were, served with deportation papers and ordered to leave within a few days; their property was confiscated, their assets frozen.[127] Worldwide concern for Egypt's Jews was evidenced in 1957 by the statement issued at an international conference of Jewish organizations: Large numbers of Jews of all nationalities have either been served with orders of expulsion or were subjected to ruthless intimidation to compel them to apply for permission to depart. Hundreds who have reached lands of refuge have testified that they were taken in shackles from prison and concentration camps to board ships. In order to ensure that this deliberate creation of a new refugee problem should not evoke protests from international public opinion, documents proving expulsion were taken away from expellees before departure. Furthermore, they were compelled to sign statements that they left voluntarily. The victims of this barbaric process were deprived of their possessions.[128]The 1926 Nationality Code, with its racist tone, was "reinforced" by a 1956 version excluding "Zionists."[129] That law was "regulated" still further in 1958 by the Egyptian Minister of the Interior, stating in "unambiguous terms that all Jews between the ages of 10 and 65, leaving Egypt, are to be added to the list of persons who are prohibited from returning to Egypt."[130]In 1964 President Garnal Abdel Nasser declared, in an interview, that Egypt still pledged allegiance to the old Nazi cause: "Our sympathy was with the Germans." Nasser gave an example of that loyalty: "The president of our Parliament, for instance, Anwar Sa'adat, was imprisoned for his sympathy with the Germans."[131] Anti-Jewish publications deluged Egypt-including the infamous "Protocols" -- many of them circulated by the Egyptian government.[132] When the Six-Day War began, Jews were arrested and held in concentration camps, where they were beaten and whipped, deprived of water for days on end and forced to chant anti-Israel slogans.[133] By 1970, these Jews too had escaped the country. "Egypt," according to the officer in charge of an internment camp, had no place for the Jews..."[134] MoroccoFrom the Maghreb, known as North Africa, more than 300,000 Jews have crowded into Israel[135] since 1948. Almost 250,000 of them arrived from what is now Morocco, where Jews have lived since 586 B.c. The history of the Jews under Arab rule in North Africa is turbulent and erratic. The conditions of their lives as infidels under the Charter of Omar might have been bearable under a more tolerant Arab caliph of one region, while at the same time, in another, Jews would have been under siege, or massacred.[136]Practically from the beginning of the seventh-century Arab conquest, Jews were forced to live separately - in Morocco the ghetto was called mellah, while in Tunisia the Jewish area was a hara. Some "Jewish tribes" had lived separately for "reasons of convenience," in some pre-Islamic periods, but now Jewish Quarters were imposed by the Arab conquerors of North Africa, with their "special Maghrebi" type of Islam-the "Malakitemadhhab, school most intolerant of non-Muslims," and "the establishment of the tariqas, mystical fraternities headed by religious fanatics."[137]Because most of the Christian minority fled -- those who had not been massacred or converted to Islam by the twelfth century [138] -- restrictions became increasingly harsh toward the Jew. Native Jews were the sole dhimmi group who had neither the inclination toward conversion nor the Christian's claim to his European community's protection. [139] Although the dhimma law was amended in the eleventh century to allow a Jew to hold office -- with authority limited to taking orders, not giving them -- the one Jew who rose to real power in the thirteenth century was murdered with his family when he became the object of envy among his Muslim rivals. [140] Despite their general misery and deprivation, some Jews managed to accumulate wealth.[141] However, most Jews were outcasts who suffered not only the traditional contempt of the dhimma code, but were subject to imaginative interpretations thereof. Slaps in the face upon payment of the head tax, bullying, and insults were everyday occurrences. Rapes and looting, burning of synagogues, ripping of sacred Torah scrolls, even murder-all were "so frequent that it is impossible to list them." [142] In 1032, 6,000 Jews of Fez were murdered, and still others were "robbed of their women and their property." [143] In 1146, Fez was attacked by the Almohads, leaving "one hundred thousand persons killed." Marrakesh suffered similarly, when an unbelievable "one hundred twenty thousand" were slaughtered. According to an account of "eye-witness" reports, "On entering,. . . the Almohads tried to convert the Jews to Islam by debate and persuasion. . ." until "a new commander ... solved the problem by a more efficient method. One hundred and fifty were killed ... the remainder converted. . . ."[144] One of the frequent violent power struggles among Muslims that especially affected the Jews, the Almohad atrocities left a deep imprint on Jews throughout North Africa. Those few Christians still in the region were "completely wiped out" by the Almohads, leaving the Jews as lone infidel survivors to suffer "the spite of the second Almohad generation." [145] Forced conversion to Islam, death, or exile were the choices for the survivors of the Almohad massacres. It was the brutality of the persecution against Morocco's Jews that inspired Moses Maimonides to write the "Epistle Concerning Apostasy," in 1160, exhorting the Jews to remain true to Judaism. [146] Maimonides reminded the persecuted Moroccans: Now we are asked not to render active homage to heathenism but only to recite an empty formula which the Moslems themselves knew we utter insincerely in order to circumvent the bigot.... Indeed, any Jew who, after uttering the Moslem formula, wishes to observe the whole 613 precepts in the privacy of his home, may do so without hindrance. Nevertheless, if, even under these circumstances, a Jew surrenders his life for the sanctification of the name of God before men, he has, done nobly and well, and his reward is great before the Lord. But if a man asks me, "Shall I be slain or utter the formula of Islam?" I answer, "utter the formula, and live. . " [147]Because of the practical advice Maimonides gave to the Jews -- keep the faith while appearing to go through the motions of conversion in order to stay alive -- Maimonides became a marked man among the Arabs. He had written his letter Arabic, so that all the Jews in the area would be able to read it, but Maimonides made enemies among the Muslims, who also read it. He was warned by a Muslim poet that suspicion had "already fallen on the writer of the Letter."[148]At the same time, his friend, Ibn Shoshan, was "attacked and hacked to death in the course of an aroused religious frenzy." Perhaps that was the moment Maimonides decided to leave his home in Fez. Some Jews chose conversion. But those who chose to be Islamicized, rather than the inexorable alternative, found they were considered "Muslims of Jewish origin," ordered to continued demeanment and separateness. A thirteenth-century Arab historian quoted one ruler of the twelfth century who insisted that "the new Muslims" wear humiliating garments despite their conversion. Abu Yusif Ya'qub confided, If I were sure that these Jews have wholeheartedly embraced Islam, I should permit them to mix with the Muslims by marriage and in every other way. And if I were certain that they are infidels, I should put the men to death, sell their children into slavery and confiscate their property in favour of the believers. But I am perplexed about the matter.[149]In the latter part of the thirteenth century, "immediately before the founding of the New City [of Fez], the Muslims in the Old City rioted against the Jews."[150]One of the cruelest of the "forced Muslim" deprivations was denial of the right to raise children, "who were considered Muslims from birth," while the converted parents were deemed not to be true Muslims. "According to Islamic, law, a non-Muslim cannot be the natural ... guardian of Muslim children."[151] Many Jews among those who had chosen conversion over death or slavery continued to practice Judaism in secret. Whole Jewish movements were developed from their furtive but persistent fidelity to their faith.[152] And into modem times, the words "hypocrite" and "hypocritical" and other expressions of suspicion run throughout the modem writings of Arab theologians paraphrasing the Koran-"saying with their lips what was not in their hearts." "When they meet those who believe, they say: 'we believe.' " The converts were rarely if ever trusted despite their apparent renunciation of Judaism.[153] A relatively small number, particularly Jewish scholars of the Maghreb, sought asylum and escape from the death-or-conversion dilemma in Syria, Palestine, Egypt or Italy.[154]' But exile was generally unlikely -- the North African Jews had hardly anywhere to go. In fact, it was to Morocco that many of the exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews escaped, seeking sanctuary in 1391. Their reception was described thus: ". . . those who went to Arab countries endured untold suffering. . . . Especially the villagers rose against them-saying tha they were protecting their religion -- and put them in chains . . . part we impelled by their tribulations to say: Let us make a captain, and let us return..."[155] While Jewish martyrs had impotently defended themselves against insuperable odds, most Jews learned that the only comparative safety was to take cover in their mellahs until the storm had passed. Fez was the scene of repeat anti-Jewish scourges in the early fifteenth century. Jews were "plundered" by the Moors "from time to time," as "upon the death of a king." They were eventually "transferred to the new city of Fez."[156] But anti-Jewish propaganda was used to incite Muslim masses in a power struggle and many Jewish lives were taken. In 1465 Muslims of Fez attacked the collective Jewish community, accusing the Jews when they found a slain Muslim. "Men, women and children were killed ... and only a few families escaped."[157] The fact that "a few Jews" were appointed to the service of the Merenid rulers in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries "ought not to be interpreted" as evidence of harmony between the Muslims and Jews; according to Norman Stillman's comprehensive study The Jews in Arab Lands, it was the "marginal" status of Jews in Morocco -- without any "power base" -- that made the Jews a times most desirable as courtiers: because they found "no sympathy among the Muslim masses," they were "totally dependent upon their masters." [158] The bulk of Moroccan Jewry suffered still greater humiliation and brutality when Morocco was cut off from the rest of the Maghreb.[159] Although a Jewish elite existed -- one that achieved intellectual recognition as well as commercial and diplomatic success in the sixteenth century [160] -"indeed, there were few [Jewish] communities in Morocco and Algeria which escaped pillage and even massacre."[161] The "fierce persecution of 1640, called the al-Khada," was described by a victim of another assault, in a rare ancient manuscript; this report illustrates that in rare instances of Jew insulting Muslim, the Muslims reaped vengeance upon the entire Jewish community with utter disregard for individual innocence or guilt. ... in Fez.... the persecution ... occurred because the Jews had become so arrogant and lawless that they went to the Great Mosque, stopped up the source of the water pouring forth there and filled the marble basin from which the water poured with wine and drank there all night, and at daybreak they went away, leaving one Jew there drunk and asleep. And the Gentiles came and found him there, and they killed all the male Jews who were there, and only those escaped who changed their religion. And they killed children and women and brought Jews from another place and settled them in their stead. And during the second persecution, it was decreed that the Jews might only wear a garment made of hair. All this I found written on some faded paper, and I copied it in order that it might be remembered. I, the poorest of my clan, the smallest on earth, the lowliest of all, Moses the son of the honorable teacher and rabbi, Rabbi Jacob Gavison, may the Lord protect him and keep him alive. Tuesday, the 17th day of Tammuz (may God turn it to the good), 5449/1689.[162]Down through the nineteenth century, the Jews' existence in Morocco reamained insecure and tenuous, their misery often recorded by foreigners. The Jews were subjected at various times under Islam to "such repression, restriction and humiliation as to exceed anything in Europe."[163]Charles de Foucauld, a French officer who posed for two years as a rabbi an intelligence-gathering mission, was one of many who recorded Jewish life under Arab rule in nineteenth-century Morocco: Bled white without restraint.... they are the most unfortunate of men.... Every Jew ... belongs body and soul to his seigneur, the sid.... He came into the sid's possession through inheritance, as part of his personal belongings under the rules of Moslem law.... If he had settled only recently in the place where he lived then immediately on his arrival, he had to become some Moslem's Jew. Once having rendered homage, he was bound forever, he and his descendants... Nothing in the world protected the Jew against his seigneur: he was entirely his mercy.[164]De Foucauld was not sympathetic to the Jews generally, as many of his descriptions in "Reconnaissance au Maroc" illustrate, yet his accounts are poignant -- of Jewish children being snatched, slaves sold at auction, robbery followed by expulsion of whole mellahs and Arab enjoyment of Jewish wives; when "the sid was headstrong and a spendthrift, his treatment of his Jews [was] like the squandering of an inheritance."In even the "most fortunate of mellahs, " the miserable physical existence of Jews prevailed. Yet those regions which the Turks had captured for their empire found the Jews less desperate, occasionally affluent, and even wealthy by contrast. The wealth was accumulated through those limited occupations that Jews' political subjection would allow; although there were exceptions, the Jews became mainly occupied in trades that allowed for quick departure, and in which they could take their accumulations with them-namely, hard currency. The brutal carnage, however, did not cease for long. Five hundred Jews were killed in Marrakesh and Fez by "Muslim mobs" in 1864.[165] Two decades afterward, a "savage anti-Jewish" attack on the Jews of Demnate created a furor in the world's Jewish press. [166] French rule came to Morocco in 1912, and brought welcome relief for the Jews, despite yet another pogrom in Fez that killed sixty Jews and left 10,000 homeless. [167] Because Moroccans were not granted French protection in the same fashion as Algerian or Tunisian Jewry, local Arab rule continued and the Jews remained dhimmi, nonetheless, their confusing situation -- between French rule and Muslim tradition -- was measurably improved.[168] By 1948, Jews had become nominally involved in local politics. When Israel was established, French authorities kept vigilant watch, struggling to maintain an equilibrium between the Muslim and Jewish communities, and the Muslim sultan appealed to his subjects to restrain violence against the Jews-reminding them of the protection Morocco had always given to its Jews.[169] Early in June 1948, mob violence erupted simultaneously against the Jewish communities of several towns in northern Morocco, resulting in dozens of Jewish deaths. Shortly afterward, the first major group of Moroccan Jews -- 30,000 -- fled to Israel. The fate of Morocco's Jewish community fluctuated with each strong political wind: Moroccan independence as an Arab state was declared in 1956,and although emigration to Israel was declared illegal, 70,000 more Jews managed to arrive in the Jewish state. The sultan's return was followed by appointment of Jews to major government posts -- then, in 1959, Zionism became a crime. Two years later a new king ascended the throne and attempted to ease the panic among the Jews by legalizing emigration, but when he lifted the ban, another hundred thousand made their way to Israel. Israeli victory in the 1967 war brought heightened hostilities from Muslim mobs, and by 1982 Moroccan Jewry had shrunk to less than ten percent of its former number. AlgeriaThe fate of Algeria's Jewish community was harsh; despite some historians' judgments that life for the Jews there was relatively calmer than nearby Morocco's, the two were often interchangeable. At the end of the fourteenth century, the Jews of the town of Tlemcen were persecuted to such extremes that one eminent historian states that there is no indication of "how the indigenous Jews managed to survive the period of tribulations."[170]Even on the edge of the Sahara Desert, the Jews were plundered and murdered. In late-fifteenth-century Tu'-at, an "oasis" town, a sheikh incited the Muslims by accusing the Jews of "sorcery" and of the arrogance of their failing to conform to the "discriminatory" codes; many Jews were killed and others forced to wear conspicuous and peculiar garb. This took place, ironically, in 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain and were wearily arriving in North Africa in search of respite from persecution.[171]In the sixteenth century, Tlemcen was still a site of tribulation for its Jewish community. The town was an important power base and, regardless of who the changing parties to the power struggle happened to be, the Jews were invariably attacked. Some were forcibly converted, others were sold into slavery, still others "thrown into prison" to await their redemption, which sometimes came, but in the form of "a heavy ransom."[172] The Algerian Jewish community continued to bear the outrages of local "protectors," even after Algeria came under Turkish domination. In 1801 a would-be ruler promised, in return for assisting the overthrow of a rival, to give the soldiers "8 times their pay, white bread and the right to sack the Jews for three days."[173] In the next fifteen years, hundreds of Jews were massacred; during one episode three hundred Jews were slaughtered within a few hours, while as the result of another carnage, the Algerian Chief Rabbi was decapitated. The murder of a Jew by a soldier sparked yet another bloodletting: while desecrating a synagogue, it claimed among its victims more than a dozen Jews who were at prayer. An American consul in Algiers from 1816 until 1828 described conditions thus: The Jews suffer frightful oppressions. They are forbidden to offer resistance when they are maltreated by a Moslem, no matter what the nature of the violence. They do not have the right to bear arms of any sort, not even a cane.... A number of times when the janissaries [army] revolted, the Jews were pillaged indiscriminately; they are still tormented by the fear of similar occurrences.... Their lives [are] nothing but ... debasement, oppression and outrage. I believe that today the Jews of Algiers are perhaps the most unhappy remnant of Israel.[174]Recognizing the history of frequent ravages, one historian writes, nevertheless, that "Algeria was relatively peaceful"[175]' compared with Morocco, while another asserts the Algerian government was "most oppressive."[176]' Perhaps the reason for what appears to be a historians' dispute can be clarified somewhat by an eminent scholar's description of the limitations imposed even upon Jews of ",wealth": because "Jews were the only non-Muslims, . . . Jews were the only persons who traveled to European countries on political missions, and were agents and vice-consuls of European states .... At the same time, that wealthy stratum that had access to the authorities ... did not enjoy a favored status with the Muslim rulers; they were subject to the same humiliations as their fellow Jews."[177] For the relatively few Jews who possessed it, wealth, that universal symbol of success, tended to be misleading, and the trappings of affluence encouraged misinterpretation, when applied as a measure of freedom for the Jews in Arab lands.In 1830 Algeria was occupied by the French, marking the end of North Africa as a single political entity. The French colonization also signaled Algerian Jews' release from their unpredictable fate under Muslim rule. Although the French culture never was to penetrate local customs or alter religious rites,[178] the French were greeted by a deliriously happy Jewish community, which burst into freedom with exuberance. Jews became prime organizers in establishing schools, and in 1870 they were granted the dignity of French citizenship. There was resentment at the new Jewish freedoms, however, and Jews once again became the target for hostile action-in Tlemcen, 1881; Oran, 1883; and Algiers, 1882,1897, and 1898.[179] This time, however, the Muslims were not solely responsible; it was the European political element that incited a smear campaign in the press. Synagogues were once again desecrated, Jews were robbed and murdered, and anti-Jewish riots and massacres commenced. In 1898 anti-Jewish riots erupted in all the principal communities of Algeria.[180] The ascent of Nazi Germany gave rise to new waves of anti-Semitism, which reinforced compatible Muslim attitudes of the past. "The swastika appeared everywhere."[181] The massacre at Constantine in 1934 left twenty-five Jews slain, dozens wounded, and Jewish property once again pillaged.[182] Muslims involved in the massacre were apprehended and the year afterward they came to trial, where "it became clear that the almost criminal ineffectiveness of the local authorities" had facilitated the attack.[183] The appointment of a Jew as Premier of France[184] further inflamed the Nazi -- incited Algerians. Then, in 1940, the Nazi-allied Vichy government took over. Jews were stripped of French citizenship, banned from schools and public activities, and rendered "Pariahs"[184]' through the passage of a new law.[186] Only the Allies' landing prevented the transfer of Algerian Jews to European death camps. It should be noted particularly, however, that Messali Hadj, the "father of the Algerian Nationalist movement," refused to support Nazi Germany's policies. [187] The Jews struggled against the Vichy regime along with the Algerian Resistance.[188] After World War II, when they attempted neutrality between the French and the Nationalists, during the struggle for Algerian independence, their neutrality backfired -- the Jewish Algerians were hit by both factions. In addition, Algeria now had forged stronger links with the Arab League, which redounded to the detriment of the Jews. In 1960, Jewish Agency officials were kidnapped and assassinated; the historic and venerated Great Synagogue in Algiers and the Jewish cemetery in Oran were desecrated.[189] Jews were threatened ominously by the Arab Liberation Party. The Jews, a people who had "arrived with the victory of the first conquerors" (the Phoenicians), left 2,500 years afterward.[190] The Jewish community of Algeria, which had numbered 140,000 in 1948, diminished within months; many thousands of Jews fled to Israel, and 125,000 went to France. In 1962 Algeria gained independence as an Arab state -- one that the Algerian Liberation Front had touted as a "secular democratic state"; that the Jews of Algeria had largely disappeared was fortunate, because the Nationality Code of 1963 permitted "secular democratic" Algerian citizenship only to those residents whose father and paternal grandfather were Muslim.[191] TunisiaTunisian Jewry, along with the other Maghrebi Jewish communities, has been relegated to "a backwater of Jewish history"-mainly because of the comparatively meager supply of source material readily accessible until recently to Jewish historians, and also because, generally, the Arab historians understandably dwelt upon the Islamic chronicles, touching only peripherally the infidel communities. [192] Painstaking research by present-day scholars has closed the historical gap. The Jews of Tunisia "existed continuously for about 2300 years," numbering among them important intellectual and religious leaders, and, sporadically, prominent international traders.An apparently paradoxical role as detested dhimmi was allotted to the Jews at the same time: it is important to understand the special "otherness" of the Jew even in what some historians have judged to be the periods of "splendour" for the Jews in Arab lands.For example, perhaps the definitive historian on the North African Jews, H. Z. Hirschberg, notes that in fifteenth-century Tunis, several Jews held "positions of honor." To a Western-oriented reader, the "position of honor" would indicate freedom from persecution. Yet an authenticated and respected document of that period, written by a visiting Flemish nobleman, describes Tunisian Jews as "despised and hated." After noting the privileged positions of local Christians, the nobleman wrote: The Jews, on the other hand, have no freedom. They must all pay a heavy ... tax. They wear special clothes, different from those of the Moors. If they did not do so, they would be stoned, and they therefore put a yellow cloth on their heads or necks; their women dare not even wear shoes. They are much despised and hated, more than even the Latin Christians.... [193]When confronting the fact that the Flemish nobleman's observations contradicted his findings, the historian explained that the "special yellow headgear of the Jews" was a mark of "native-born [Jewish] residents and not foreign traders.... The contempt shown to the wearers of the yellow headgear, and their fear of transgressing the discriminatory regulations, likewise indicate that the reference is to people not enjoying the protection of a European state."[194] Those foreign Jewish traders wore a "round cape" to distinguish them.[195]Yet the historian notes that even "wearers of round capes" were subject to similar "humiliations." The point is that, through the careful, even hair-splitting research that establishes fact, academic disputes can result in the spreading of erroneous assumptions, which have had important political consequences in the Middle East refugee matter. While one scholar might argue that the Arab Muslims' massacres of Jews were "not necessarily specifically anti-Semitic," and another might conclude, from a superficial look at the incomplete source material readily available, that Jews in Arab countries were "better off than Jews in Europe," their statements, out of context, are misleading, and when quoted often enough, can serve as a conduit to the misconception that "harmony" and "equality" existed for Jews in Arab lands. Such obviously was not the case. From the seventh-century Arab conquest down through the Almohad atrocities, Tunisia fared little better than its neighbors.[196] The "complete expulsion" of Jews from Kairouan, near Tunis, occurred after years of hardship, in the thirteenth century, when Kairouan was anointed as a holy city of Islam.[197] In the sixteenth century, the "hated and despised" Jews of Tunis were periodically attacked by violence, and they were subjected to "vehement anti-Jewish policy" during the various political struggles of the period.[198] An Arab historian offered insight into the enormous uncertainty of Jewish life in Tunisia at that time: in 1515, the "fanatically religious" founder of the Saad Dynasty in Morocco incited the Muslims to anti-Jewish hostilities as he was "passing through Tunis on a pilgrimage to Mecca" by delivering inflammatory speeches against the Jews. He even extorted "contributions" from the objects of his capricious chastisement.[199] Tunisian Jews were somewhat better off than either their Algerian or Moroccan brothers at times throughout the last few centuries,[200] but the separate Jewish Quarter, or hara, of Tunisia was not much less squalid and miserable than were other North African ghettos before French rule began. Jews were permitted to live as dhimmis, and as such, they led an uncertain existence at the alternating inclinations of their overlords. The smaller community of Jewish elite in Tunisia was allowed by more moderate sovereigns to engage in commerce and, from earliest times, eminent scholars and rabbis emerged from the Tunisian ghettos. Yet, a historian reminds us, The success that Tunisia's Jews achieved in the various trades and professions should not ... obscure the fact that there also existed ... a large group of Jews of the lowest social status-the Jew of the hara. This urban proletariat was only slightly less unfortunate than that of the Moroccan mellah and there were many thousands of people who were permanently unemployed, the . . . misfits .... [201]An Italian observer described the hara of the mid-nineteenth century: "the ...hara appears as a labyrinth of muddy narrow alleys lined with ancient tumble-down buildings, at times frighteningly so, with middens of filth at the entry to the house. It lodges thousands of persons who live a life of hardship...."[202]When Muhammad Bey ascended the throne in 1855, he abolished the special dhimma tax for Jews, the first real attempt at legal reform of the contemptible infidel status.[203] The reaction in the Muslim community was hostile and immediate: the old dhimma law-whereby the word of a Jew was unacceptable in defense of a Muslim's charge of blasphemy against Islam - was invoked against a Jew. The Bey refused to intervene, and the Jew was decapitated.[204] The Muslim society had been unprepared for the Bey's attempt at uprooting its traditional persecution, and the revolution of 1864 sufficiently intimidated the Bey so that he was compelled to revoke the new liberal laws. Some ravages in the aftermath of that 1864 revolt are described among eyewitness reports.[205] One witness wrote: Another disaster to report! Muslim fanaticism ... unleashed against our brethren on the island of Djerba.... Arab tribes ... turned upon ... the Jewish Quarters, which they sacked, destroying everything .... [On] Yom Kippur ... synagogues profaned and defiled. The Scrolls ... torn in pieces and burnt ... men injured and trampled ... all the women and girls raped .... My pen refuses to set down the terrifying ... atrocities ... in all [their] horror .... The governor of the island refused to intervene to re-establish order; ... the pillage did not cease for 5 days and nights ....[206]Another complained of the Tunisian ruler's deviations: The Sovereign of Tunis found nothing better to do to pass the ... Ramadan than to take by force -- on the pretext that he had become a Muslim -- a Jewish youth ... not yet 15! He had the victim shut up in the men's seraglio and obstinately refuses to give him up to his parents .... [207]An outraged writer bitterly assailed the government's "protection": Eighteen Jews have already fallen in a few months to the knives of fanatical [Muslim] murderers; and His Highness's Government, far from punishing the guilty, protects and apparently encourages them.The Government's conduct toward us is macchiavellian beyond words. We are not directly persecuted but such is the scornful treatment we receive, when we ask for justice from the Bey or his ministers, that open persecution would be a hundred times better. Acknowledged persecution however, would expose the executioner and his victim to the world, and the Tunisian Government wishes to appear impartial whilst masking killers surreptitiously. * ... We do not seek an eye for an eye, blood for blood, but that the guilty should be . . . legally condemned.[208][* "The nineteenth-century complaint about the "government's wish to appear impartial" to the world while "masking" its persecution illustrates the sophisticated aptitude for image making that was practiced more than a hundred years ago. The "invitation" from the Arab world to its Jews (see Chapter 2 above) is one modem example of the continued tradition.]A Jew from Tunis protested assassinations in a neighboring community: Nabel is a town of fanatics, and we must unfortunately record six other murders of our co-religionists, the perpetrators of which have not been punished .... [209]The violence spread in 1869 to the city of Tunis, where Muslims butchered many Jews in the defenseless ghetto. The French Protectorate was established in Tunisia in 1881, and life improved considerably for many Tunisian Jews. In 1910 they were allowed to become French citizens, though they were not fully accepted in Muslim and French societies.[210]The subsequent Nazi occupation and Vichy regime did not improve conditions; the Great Synagogue in Tunis was put into use as a Nazi stable. When Tunisia became independent in 1956, a Jew was included in the Bourguiba cabinet, while at the same time, paradoxically, an authoritative report published in 1956 stressed that "the Jew in Tunisia has lost his position of middle man in the distributive industry-with commerce becoming more and more the privilege of a Moslem caste ... [211] The Jews of Tunisia soon began to flee from the extremism that the "Arabization" policy of the government had fostered. Of 105,000 Jews in 1948, 50,000 emigrated tot Israel and roughly the same number have gone to France and elsewhere. SyriaJewish history in Syria began in biblical times. By A.D. 70, 10,000 Jews dwelt in Damascus, and a consistent Syrian Jewish presence was maintained for more than two millennia. From the time of the Arab conquest, the Jews' position in Syria was found by a Christian Arab scholar to be ". . . outside the community; they were not allowed to carry weapons, to bear witness against Moslems in courts of law, or to marry Moslem women; ... they were subject to special ... taxation. But they were permitted to retain their beliefs and their property, . . . and to manage the internal affairs of the communities according to their own laws and customs. . . ."[212]The Jewish community of Syria became a refuge for Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.[213] For centuries under Ottoman rule, it has been maintained, the Jews were allowed to live "relatively secure," often "prosperous" lives-chiefly as merchants-in their mellahs. Spanish exiles were responsible for establishing many Jewish religious schools in Damascus and Aleppo, and more than one Jew held the post of Finance Minister.But in Syria, as elsewhere in the Arab world, the "position of Jews was in many ways precarious." [214] A thirteenth-century Syrian Arab writer provided a classic example of the durability and consistency of the Muslims' traditional Koran-inspired demoniacal image of "the Jew"-the image through which the Prophet Muhammad and his followers sought to avenge the Jews for favoring Judaism over the "new," seventh-century religion. The Syrian wrote that ... this [Jewish] group is the most cursed of all God's creation, the most evilnatured, and the most deeply rooted in infidelity and accursedness. They are the most evil-intentioned of mankind in their deeds, even they are the most ostentatious in humility and self-abasement.... When they manage to be alone with a man, they bring him to destruction, they introduce, by trickery, a stupefying drug into his food, and then they kill him.[215]As dhimmis they paid the special tax, and their testimony against Muslims was invalid in the Syrian courts. Jews bore many traditional dhimma discriminatory burdens: forbidden to ride a horse in town; forbidden to wear Muslim apparel; forbidden to carry arms; and "usually" prohibited from building or repainng places of worship. To those consistent humiliations were added the intermittent "oppression, extortion and violence by both the local authorities and the Muslim population."[216]One Jew who rose to the post of "treasury manager," at the end of the eighteenth century, ran the gamut of the schizoid Jewish existence under Muslim rule. In the first stage of his ascendancy, he was arrested, an eye was gouged out, and his nose and ears cut.[217] In the second stage, he gained prominence "unique" for Jews, under the tolerant reign of a new pasha -- a Christian writer in Damascus wrote that "Hayim the Jew ... doing whatever he wishes ... a Jewish person dominates the Muslims and Christians ... without any restriction ."[218] A Swiss writer observed at the actual time (1811) of "Hayyim the Jew's" influence, "There is scarcely an instance in the modern history of Syria of a Christian or Jew having long enjoyed the power or riches . . . he may have acquired. These persons are always taken off in the last moment of their greatest apparent glory."[219] True to this prophecy, "Hayyim the Jew" was executed in 1820 and his property was confiscated by yet another successor to the Syrian reign. [220] According to nineteenth-century historians, some Jewish families in Aleppo -which, like Alexandria, was an atypically tolerant cosmopolitan center of international commerce -- were affluent and relatively safe. Others, even in Aleppo, who were less well-connected were "subject to violence and oppression from various quarters."[221] Money was extorted by officials on every pretext, petty bullying was commonplace, and one Jew reported that "When a Jew walked among them [the Muslims] in the market, one would throw a stone at him in order to kill him, another would pull his beard and a third his ear lock, yet another spit on his face and he became a symbol of abuse.""[222] In 1831, Egyptian rule improved markedly the lot of non-Muslims; Christians finally gained full equality. Not quite so for the Jews, although some at times were now allowed to repair their synagogues, and extortion through illegal taxes was officially forbidden. Muslims and particularly Egyptian soldiers were "severely punished" for abusing Jews."[223] According to reports from the Jewish community in 1839, however, it was the European consuls who insisted on the protection of the Jews -- not entirely the beneficence of the occupying Arab government: "Had it not been [for] the consuls' supervision, we would have all been destroyed and lost, since the gentiles wish but to eat the Jews and to accuse them falsely. "[224] A gradual decline of the Jews' position continued during the Egyptian occupation. European settlers began to usurp the Jews' role as traders.[225] Then, in 1840 a general economic slump, and incitement by means of the vicious "ritual murder" canard, exploded into riots and a pogrom against the Jews-the infamous Damascus blood libel of 1840.[226] The Arabs adopted the inflammatory mechanism as their own and have used it until the present day, despite the fact that the false charge was eventually proved fraudulent in a Turkish court."' As the Egyptians were forced out of Syria, a Turkish imperial firman was issued, exonerating the Damascus Jews from the foul accusation,* and stating "that the charges made against them ... are nothing but pure calumny.... The Jewish nation shall be protected and defended."[228] [* Earlier, similar absurd charges were levied against Syrian Jews in Aleppo -- 1810, in Homs -- 1824, and in Anatakia --1826.] During the 1850s the Muslims began to concentrate violence upon the Christian community in Syria, and the nonplussed Jewish community remained unharmed. The Jews enjoyed a greater measure of religious freedom-to the extent that a synagogue was designed by the sultan's architect. Ottoman officials revered the chief rabbis, and life for the Jewishdhimmi-still forced to observe the discriminatory practices-was noticeably relieved.[229] The French were assigned mandatory rights over Syria in 1920, and in 1925, the time of the Druse revolt against the French, the Jewish Quarter of Damascus was attacked; many Jews were murdered, dozens were wounded, and homes and shops were looted and set afire. The French persistently attempted to protect Jews from the increasing attacks brought about by Arab resentment of foreigners in general and of the French in particular. But the rise of the Palestine antagonism crystallized hostility, and anti-Jewish riots were hurled upon the Jews of Damascus in 1936. The fact that the Jewish community made known its support of the Arab nationalists"' was to no avail; Syrian Jews were accused of being Zionists, and the late '30s were fraught with anti-Jewish violence.- Jews were stabbed by activist Muslims, and demands were made to boycott the Jewish Quarters. Damascus was now a headquarters of anti-Jewish activities, and in 1937 a Nazi delegation, conferring with its Nazi representative in the Middle East, paid a visit to Damascus. As a result, anti-Jewish propaganda intensified and closer affiliations grew up between German and Arab youth organizations. An armed extremist group, the Arab National Youth Organization, declared a boycott against Arab merchants who bought "Zionist goods from Palestine."[232] From Damascus the Arab Defense Committee warned the Jewish Agency president that "Your attitude will lead you and Jews of the East to the worst of calamities that has been written in history up to the present."[233] Despite the then-dominant Nazi-allied Vichy regime, local French authorities continued to defend the Jews from Arab extremist attack, although Jews were dismissed from official posts and penalized by economic restrictions. The Allied occupation in 1941 restored equilibrium somewhat, but Nazi propaganda continued. In 1942 the Axis radio in Damascus caused additional alarm through broadcast of the false report that Roosevelt and Churchill had promised Syria to the Jews as part of a post-war Jewish state. The Jewish Quarter was raided in 1944 and 1945 [234] and the end of World War Il intensified the persecution and restrictions against the Jews. Tens of thousands of Syrian Jews had fled between the world wars and after. The Jews numbered roughly 35,000 in 1917; in 1943 about 30,000 still remained.[235] In June 1945 the director of the Alliance Jewish-affiliated school was murdered. That same year Syria won its independence, and the Damascus Mufti warned at a religious conference that if Jewish immigration into Palestine was not halted, all countries of Islam would declare a "holy war" against the Jews."' Shortly afterward a Syrian student mob celebrated a Muslim holiday by desecrating the Great Synagogue of Aleppo, beating upon Jews at prayer and burning prayer books in the street.[237] Intimidation by the government was initiated, and Jews were prohibited from leaving. Jewish leaders were informed that unless they publicly denounced Zionism and surrendered Jewish refugees en route to Palestine, all refugees captured would be put to death along with their helpers. When the Jews protested, the Syrian Prime Minister amended the law to provide life imprisonment instead of death. But he exacted three conditions from the Jews: "Surrender all persons aiding the movement of refugees; cooperate with security forces in capturing refugees, and issue a public statement denouncing Zionism and calling on all Jews in the Arab states to support the struggle against Zionism."[238] It was through such scare tactics that Syrian Jews were induced to testify that "Jews of Syria were happy and not discriminated against; that their situation was excellent under the present Syrian government; and that they had absolutely nothing whatever to do with Zionism." A member of the Anglo-American Committee, investigating the precarious position of Jewish minorities in Arab states, reported that after the Syrian Jews raced through the "45-seconds of testimony," they fled to their seats amid "murmurs of sly amusement from the Moslem audience which said, as clearly as words, 'They knew what was best for them.'"[239] By early 1947, only 13,000 Jews remained; thousands more Jewish refugees had fled, many of them covertly, and the Syrian government, according to the New York Herald Tribune, [240] launched "an investigation into the disappearance of some 17,000 Syrian Jews since the last government census [1943]." Letters were smuggled out of Syria; one told of the war against Zionism [which] has turned into a war against the entire Jewish people.... Anti-Jewish propaganda is rampant in the press, over the radio and in special pamphlets.... Poisonous articles, full of degradation and employing the lowest form of expression, are read over the radio and in the mosques. The masses follow faithfully, since the sheikhs promise them ... paradise.... I am writing anonymously as I cannot give you my name for fear of vengeance .... "[241]Around the same time as the hate campaign, various restrictions brought Jewish economic life to a halt. Jewish leaders accused the Syrian government of "making their livelihood impossible by denying them jobs in the government, withholding import and export licenses, and making virtually impossible the admission of Jewish youths into secondary schools."[242] Jews were still forbidden to leave the country, and terrified of venturing even near to the edge of the ghettos.[243]In December 1947 anti-Jewish riots climaxed in a vicious pogrom; Syrian mobs poured into the mellah of Aleppo, burnt down most of the synagogues, and destroyed 150 Jewish homes, five Jewish schools, fifty shops and offices, an orphanage, and a youth club. Holy scrolls, including a priceless ancient manuscript of the Old Testament, were burned, while the firemen stood by and police "actively helped the attackers."[244] In the aftermath, the Syrian president asserted to a visiting Jewish delegation that "Incidents of this sort occur even in advanced countries . . . . "[245] and the Minister of Finance rejected the request for a loan to repair one of the synagogues so that the Jews could continue to worship. [246] A bomb tossed into the heart of the Damascus Jewish Quarter, in front of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, caused inestimable damage; most important, it reinforced terror among the Damascus Jews. On the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, in April 1948, several Aleppo rabbis wrote to a Brooklyn congregation: This is the third day we are in hiding. The Arab mobs are raging and threatening our lives. Pray for us. Act in our behalf before your government. Our lives are in total danger ... help us! [247]Addressing its Jewish former citizens, the government ludicrously warned all "Syrian" citizens that unless they returned immediately,[248] they would lose Syrian citizenship. Compounding the orders prohibiting Jews from leaving the country, they were forbidden to change their places of residence, [249] sell private property, or acquire land.[250] In 1949 all bank accounts held by Jews were frozen.In summer 1949, following the ascendance of a regime that promised "equality," the synagogue at Damascus was bombed during Sabbath preparations, with more than a score dead and twenty-six wounded. The new Syrian president called for an investigation and arrests, and when a Palestinian Arab confessed, the president promised justice based on the evidence.[251] But the new leader was killed in another military coup, with his successor's subsequent government becoming more unremitting in its severity than ever before. Palestinian Arabs, many militantly anti-Jewish, were given the Jewish public buildings and the vacant former living quarters of Jewish escapees in the mellah: there they confronted their Jewish neighbors with omnipresent threats, often fulfilled. Such was the quality of terrorizing that some members of the normally close-knit protective Jewish community became informers when an Israeli escaped from prison in 1953 and sought sanctuary at the Damascus synagogue: The congregation was in consternation. The hostile regime and the suffering it had caused them had destroyed their self-respect. Anyone suspected of aiding Israel only brought disaster on himself, and now an Israeli prisoner, escaped from jail. ... [His] fate was sealed the moment he crossed the threshold of the synagogue. ... A squad broke in and removed the "dangerous Zionist" . . .[252]The Jews were kept strictly within the confines of the ghetto, with penalties for escape as harsh as those of a prison. Yet many remained unintimidated-those Jews took great risks through carefully guarded secret routes, leaving everything behind, to escape from the oppressive existence, hundreds of Jews, including women and children, were arrested and tortured in the attempt to be smuggled out. [253]Since then, except for brief periods,[254] Syria's Jewish community has huddled together, its collective and individual human rights and dignity distinctly cut off. [255] LebanonJews have been in the Mediterranean coastal region now called Lebanon since A.D. 70, if not earlier.Although all thirty-five Jewish families living in Beirut were slaughtered by the Crusaders,[256] Jews survived elsewhere in Lebanon and their population was infused with Spanish Jews who fled from Spain in 1492. During the Turkish reign, Jews in Lebanon, as elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, paid the poll tax to ensure their protection,[257] along with other infidels in the Muslim state, and at times were subject to severe dress codes or harsh legal restrictions."[258]But life for the small Jewish community in Lebanon-fifty-five families in 1826-was comparatively easy,[259] until the infamous blood libel charges spread to Beirut in 1824 and to (Lebanese) Tripoli in 1834.[260] With the calumnies came the predictable attacks and suffering, which were compounded by the anti-Jewish attacks during the Druse Rebellion [261] -the uprising wiped out the Jewish community in the town of Dir el-Qamar in 1847. Under the early twentieth-century French occupation, Jews were less discriminated against in Lebanon than elsewhere in the Middle East; only "a few" recorded incidents of anti-Jewish attacks marred Jewish life there in the thirties. In 1945, the time of Lebanese independence, twelve Jews were murdered in the Muslim-populated town of Tripoli; following the 1947 partition of Palestine, houses and synagogues were attacked by muslims.[262] In 1948 a Beirut Jew was murdered; in 1950 a Jewish school was bombed and its director killed-acts predominantly executed by Muslim groups.[263] Money extorted from the Lebanese Jews as "contributions" often went directly to finance Arab Palestinian sabotage. Yet, on the whole, historians note that Jews were protected by authorities as Lebanese independence emerged in 1946. During the anti-Zionist demonstrations at the time of Israel's declaration of statehood, "police forces were posted" in Beirut's Jewish Quarter "day and night when required"-sharp contrast to the official behavior in other Arab states at the time.[266] During the 1948 war, Maronite Christians as well as Christian authorities protected the Jews from "Muslim fanatics"[265]' and offered assistance to Jewish refugees fleeing from Iraq and Syria. Jews retained their jobs, even as civil servants, until 1957, and authorities continued to guard the Jewish community from the Muslim opposition's attacks.[266] Until 1958, Lebanon was the sole Arab state where Jews had increased in number-to about 9,000-after the war of Israel's independence. When Lebanon officially began to finance terrorist activities by the newly inspired Arab Palestinian "Revolution" in 1968, many of the remaining Jews left. Although no Lebanese Jews were employed by the government, and the Lebanese could not communicate with the "enemy territory" of Israel, Jews were allowed to travel freely, even within the Middle East, before Lebanon's Arab-versus-Arab bloodletting was renewed in the early 1970s. But few of them visited the Arab countries of their own volition.[267] The Jews of Lebanon enjoyed greater freedom than any other Jewish group living in the Arab world, primarily because of the Christian-dominated government. It was not until the advent of Muslim revolt-the demise of "secular democracy" in the Arab world-that the Lebanese Jews became sufficiently insecure to flee in great numbers. LibyaLibya's Jewish community has virtually disappeared, its roots dug up after millennia of deep attachment to the North African terrain that is Libya today.Jews were attracted to the country before the destruction of Jerusalem-many from the "Egyptian diaspora."[268] According to Josephus Flavius, "100,000 Jews [were] transferred from Palestine" by Egyptian ruler Ptolemy around 300 B.C., and thousands of those Jews were "settled" in Libyan cities employed as a human shield to protect Egypt from its enemies.[269] The Jewish community was reportedly destroyed in the anti-Roman rebellion Of A.D. 73, reappearing in Tripoli before the fourth century.[270]The seventh-ceritury Arab conquest, taking fifty years to subjugate all of North Africa, brought Libyan Jews under the same fluctuating oppressive dhimma restrictions as elsewhere in the Maghreb. Once again the Jews became a buffer against attack-this time protecting the Arabs of Tripoli against the Byzantines.[271] From that period forward, the Jewish population was, in one city or another, sacked, cheated, and pillaged alternately by nomads and Bedouins, with sterner penalties and banishment meted out arbitrarily, according to the whim of whichever Muslim tribal leader had at that moment defeated his rival.[272] In addition to the reverberations of feuds, disease, and poverty, the Jews of Libya -- then Tripolitania -- were subject to the "nomad invasions, highway robbery and piracy" of the general populace.[273] The twelfth century brought the barbarity of the Almohads to the eastern plains, and the Jews were severely persecuted "for the purpose of conversion" about 1140.[274] ... the blood of sons and daughters was spilt on a sabbath day.... There is not a Jew, not a single one, in DaJayya or al-Mahdiya, and for Sabrat and Tura my eye always weeps."[275]The remaining historical fragments on twelfth-century "sufferings of African Jewry" are few: the above was excerpted from one, and the following mid-twelfth-century description from another: ... years of distress, oppression and persecution to Israel, and they were exiled from their localities: such as wer6 for death, to death and such as were for the sword, to the sword, and ... to the famine, and ... to the captivity.... and such as were destined to leave the community left because of the sword of Ibn Tumart, who went forth into the world in the year 4902 (1141/2) and who had decided to eliminate Israel .... And so he left no name of them in the whole of his kingdom nor remnant .... from the end of the world to the city of al-Mahdiya."[276]European travelers through the region have recorded the persistence of various compulsory dhimma demeanments inflicted by the Berber and Arab Muslims, who "despised and vilified" the Jews. Though there are writers who speak of the relative "haven" Spanish exiles found as refuge from the Inquisition, Tripolitania proffered something short of the sanctuary that the fleeing Spanish Jews had hoped for.[277]Because of the Maghrebi Jews' imposed "otherness"-the miserable living conditions in many ghettos and the stubbornness that resistance to conversion must spawn-the more cosmopolitan Jewish refugees from Europe reportedly "scorned" the peculiar, unfamiliar North African Jewish "locals," with whom the Spaniards were reluctant to identify. One historian admitted the difficulty of "merging the two strata"-which "took centuries and is still not complete"[278] in the 1970s. Another claimed the "confrontation ... passed on the whole harmoniously . . . with a minimum of communal damage. . . . [the] diversity . . . minimized."[279] Yet he, too, later reported the "friction" that developed between native and newcomer. In the late sixteenth century many of the Libyan Jews whose ancestors had fled the forced conversion of Spain ironically were faced with the choice of death -- or conversion to Islam.[280] "Hundreds" of Jews were murdered during the persecutions of Ali Gurzi Pasha's reign.[281] The Ottoman conquest of Tripolitania in 1835 brought a measure of relief to Jews in Tripoli and some other cities. At the same time, Jews in other regions of ripolitania did not benefit from the Turkish rule; they were subjected to forced conversion and anti-Jewish pogroms, and they shared the ghetto miseries suffered in other parts of North Africa. Numerous complaints were registered by Jewish leaders in Tripolitania.[282] A few excerpts might color one's perspective regarding the "relative security" of Jews among the Arab Muslims. Regarding the burning of a synagogue in Zliten- ... everyone knows what the Arabs, the Cadi [judge], the Ulema were doing to the Israelites.... If the Governor here had rendered justice to the Jews of Zliten, both with regard to their cemetery and their synagogue, the people of Zliten would not have dared to carry out this disgraceful act ... if, God forbid, they do not obtain ample satisfaction.... the Jews will be obliged to emigrate to save their lives and their few possessions.[283]Also at Zliten- ... some Muslims attacked the house of a Jew, and stole all he had after seriously injuring him.... [others] entered the house of another Jew, stripped him of all his possessions, struck and injured both him and his wife, and killed his son aged about 20.... robbed [another] Jew ... injured him and killed a young child at its mother's knees. Finally. . . at Zawiya Gharibya, only 7 hours away from here, the Sacred Synagogue was plundered and profaned in every ... way .... [284]Another plea came from the entire Jewish community of Tripoli- ... The situation of the Jews in all parts of Tripolitania is very dangerous. From all the rights ... we are unfortunately excluded by reason of extreme ill-treatment and persecution at the hands of the Muslims in our country, under the ... present [Governor] ... who does not wish to ... protect us against the cruel and inhumane Muslim population.... Last Thursday, a Jew on the way to his village was killed by Arabs and his companion was injured.... the authorities have not attempted to find the criminals.... to the Muslims, Jews are of no account, and our personal safety is in jeopardy and our belongings are not our own.[285]A final example is from the Sahara region- ... In these out-of-the-way places ... the Jew may not ride a horse or ass in an Arab's presence. The Jewish rider, on seeing an Arab coming, must dismount quickly and go on foot, leading his mount until the Arab disappears.... If the Jew forgets this or takes too long to dismount, the Arab brutally reminds him ... by throwing him to the ground.... The Jews of Gebel (one of these regions) told me that within the last 20 years three Israelites had been killed in this way. The testimony of a Jew is not accepted and he would never dare to accuse anyone of robbing him.... Along all this part of the Tripolitanian coast, small communities of Jews are living amongst the Arabs, more or less subjected to them.[286]The Libyan Jews, enjoying the "easier" conditions under the Ottomans, confronted arbitrary anti-Jewish cruelties, and taxation amounting to extortion, in most of the country through the end of the nineteenth century. Jewish religious institutions survived, but the hara, or ghetto, was at best barely above poverty level. With the Italian occupation in 1911, the Jews escaped from dhimmi status and the Jewish community thrived until the mid-thirties, when Libya, as the only Arabic-speaking Italian possession, became Mussolini's Muslim center for fascist propaganda.The Second World War brought a great wave of persecution-in 1941 and 1942 Benghazi's Jews were attacked;[288] Jewish property in Benghazi was pillaged and nearly 2,600 Jews were sent to a forced labor camp in the desert, where more than 500 died. Later in 1942, thousands more Jews from Tripoli and other towns were condemned to forced labor. On the eve of the Allied victory in Tripoli, Axis troops stormed the Jewish Quarter and slaughtered the leaders of the Jewish community. As the Allies freed he Jews from concentration camps and the British took control of Libya, anti-Jewish crowds stormed Tripoli and other communities.[289] Nonetheless, Jewish activities were revived. "Palestinian Jewish soldiers serving with the British army opened Hebrew schools for liberated Jewish children,"[290] and peace brought some restoration of security to Libya's Jews. The struggling community was totally unprepared for the violent anti-Jewish loodbath that began November 4, 1945. The Tripoli pogrom was inspired by anti-Jewish riots in Egypt a couple of days earlier, but the ravages in Tripolitania were even more devastating. Whereas the Egyptian violence was directed to pillage and looting, Arab nationalism and religious fanaticism in Tripoli was aimed at the physical destruction of Jews. According to the New York Times' Clifton Daniel, Many of the attacks were premeditated and coldly murderous in intent.[291]Babies were beaten to death with iron bars. Old men were hacked to pieces where they fell. Expectant mothers were disemboweled. Whole families were burned alive in their houses. Two brothers lost 27 relatives in one attack.... When the riots were raging, the thirst for blood seemed to have supplanted the desire for loot and revenge.[292]Forced conversion, girls raped with their families looking on-the Muslim gangs' bestiality was directed specifically against Jews, and only Jewish dwellings and businesses were devastated. Just one week after the atrocity had ended, an Arab leader was interviewed:[293] he warned that because of "Zionist activity"- Libyan Jewish Boy Scouts sang "Zionist" hymns and Zionist clubs were formed -- the Arabs "have become annoyed" and the Jews must disavow "militant Zionism." In the short period following the November 1947 vote to partition "Palestine" into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the Libyan mobs murdered more than 130 Jews. [294] Another Tripoli horror was perpetrated the following year, with impassioned zeal, and the erstwhile unswervable Jewish community began to flee. Libya's Jewish population in 1948 was 38,000; by 1951 only 8,000 Jews remained.[295]The precarious position of Libyan Jewry deteriorated further when the British began to move Arab families into the former homes of departed Jews, in the walled hara. Where before the Jews had felt some measure of security in isolation, now there was hostility on the doorstep. [296] By the time Libya achieved independence in 1952, there were relatively few Jews left to take advantage of the purported equality offered under the new constitution. From the time of Libya's entry into the Arab League, Jewish clubs were closed, and life, while less violent, was no more secure. By the 1960s, only some hundreds of Jews remained, and with the renewal of Arab mob violence after the Six-Day War,[297] practicafly all of Libya's remaining Jewish population was forced literally to run for their lives.[298] Leaving behind everything they owned, most became a part of the 37,000-member Libyan refugee community in Israel. In 1970, President Qaddafy confiscated Jewish-owned property that the fleeing Libyan-born Jews had left behind.[299] The expatriate Libyan Jewish community in Rome protested the property takeover, claiming that such action contradicted the Libyan constitutional decree of citizen equality. Thereupon a Libyan official invited the Libyan Jews to return to the country, and assured them that their property would then be released. Libya's "invitation" came on the heels of a new government regulation that prohibited those few Libyan Jews who remained from leaving Libya, no matter how short the duration of the requested visit.[300] When Qaddafy visited France during the 1973 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War to press the Arab oil embargo and negotiate arms, the Tunisian-born writer Albert Memmi responded to Libya's invitation to Jews in a personal address to Qaddafy: Is it true that you have said that the Jews have always lived at peace in the Arab countries? And that you have nothing against Jews, only Zionists? ...The error which may have been made at Deir Yassine* is constantly being thrown in our faces. Ali, but we have undergone a hundred Deir Yassines, a thousand Deir Yassines!~' And not only in Russia, Germany or Poland, but also at the hand of Arab people; yet the world has never been upset over it! ...The Arab world had been virtually emptied of its Jews, and the fledgling Jewish state would bear the burden of its hundreds of thousands of Jewish Arab-born refugees almost in secret.So unknown and undisclosed are these Arab-born Jews and the plight they have faced-the camps, squalor, uprooting, loss of property and security, discontent, unemployment, and what they sensed to be neglect of their problems in Isael -- that in countless conversations outside the Middle East with academics or professionals, from university graduates to blue-collar workers, including Jews as well as non-Jews, when the question of the "Middle East refugees" is raised, almost without exception the response is, "You mean the Palestinians-the Aabs, of course." It is as though the sad and painful story of the Arab-born Jewish refugees had been erased, their struggle covered over by a revision of the pages of history. Exchange of PopulationsFor every refugee - adult or child - in Syria, Lebanon, or elsewhere in the Arab world who compels our sympathy, there is a Jewish refugee who fled from the Arab country of his birth. For every Arab who moved to neighboring lands, a Jew was forced to flee from a community where he and his ancestors may have lived for two thousand years. The Jews escaped to their original homeland, where their roots are even older; the Arabs also arrived where they were in the majority, where they shared the same language and culture with fellow Arabs, and often only a few dozen miles from their places of origin.An exchange of populations has in actuality taken place and been consummated; by coincidence, even the total number of Arabs who reportedly left Israel is almost exactly equaled by the number of Jews exchanged. There has been a completed exchange of minorities between the Arabs and the Jews, and a more-than-even tradeoff of property for the Arabs. The Jews who fled Arab countries left assets behind in the Arab world greater than those the Arabs left in Israel.1 Jewish property that the Arabs confiscated in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Egypt apparently has more than offset Arab claims of compensation from Israel. In fact, the concept of an "exchange of Arab and Jewish populations" was introduced by an Arab leader as a solution to the "disturbances" in the Middle East long before Israel or the actual exchange came about. In 1939, Mojli Amin, a member of the Arab Defense Committee for Palestine, drew up a proposal, published in Damascus and distributed among Arab leaders, entitled "Exchange of Populations." Amin proposed that all the Arabs of Palestine shall leave and be divided up among the neighboring Arab countries. In exchange for this, all the Jews living in Arab countries will go to Palestine....The exchange of populations should be carried out in the same way thar Turkey and Greece exchanged their populations. Special committees must be set up to deal with the liquidation of Jewish and Arab property....At least a decade before the 1947 resolution to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, the British had proposed the exchange,of "Arab population in Palestine" for Jews elsewhere."3 In 1945 Herbert Hoover stated that "The Arab population of Palestine would be the gainer from better lands in exchange for their present holdings. Iraq would be the gainer, for it badly needs agricultural population. Today millions of people are being moved from one land to another." Therefore, Hoover suggested "financing" Iraq to "complete" the population transfer with greater facility.4 From the time Israel attained modem statehood, independent humanitarian pleas attempted to reveal the actualities of all the "Middle East refugees" and to spotlight the potential permanent relief. One example was clergyman Carl Hermann Voss, who hoped through his books to change the world's faulty perception. He wrote, Some appeals for aid have implied that there is only an Arab refugee problem, enabling Arab propagandists to blame the Arab refugee plight on Israel. If proper attention is called to both Jewish and Arab refugee problems, much ill-will may be avoided and genuine human need, regardless of race or creed, will be served.51.Maurice Roumani, The Case ofthe Jewsfrom Arab Countries. A NeglectedIssue, with Deborah Goldman and Helene Korn, vol. 1, World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC), Jerusalem, 1975, p. 82. 2.Transmission from Damascus, political agent, Political Department of the Jewish Agency, to Elialm Sasson, Political Department, Palestine, May 16, 1939 (from the English translation), CZA-525/5630 (Central Zionist Archives). 3. For example, see Permanent Mandates Commission, Minutes of the 32nd Session, pp. 111-118; particularly August 13, 1937: Lord William Ormsby Gore advocated the transfer of the Arab population of Palestine, who "had not hitherto regarded themselves as 'Palestinians' but as part of Syria as a whole, as part of the Arab world. ... They would be going only a comparatively few miles away to a people with the same language, the same civilisation, the same religion . . . " cited by Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return: The Strugglefor a Jewish Homeland (Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1978), p. 185. Also see reactions to Ormsby Gore, PRO FO, 371/E71 34/976/31, minute, E.W. Rendel, December 8, 1937: According to British Foreign Office official Rendel, the transfer of "the Arab population from the Jewish state ... seems clearly to have been regarded as a matter of enforcement by his Majesty's Government," judging from Lord Ormsby Gore's statements in the cabinet and his interview in the Jewish Chronicle of August 13, 1937. Rendel feared it would "be very difficult to answer the Saudi Minister's inquiry." In 1944, the British Labor Party officially endorsed the proposed transfer of Palestinian Arabs to Arab countries, and a year later the British Commonwealth passed a similar resolution. Schectman, European Population Transfers 1939-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 457. 4. Interview, New York World Telegram, November 19, 1945. 5.Carl Hermann Voss, The Palestine Problem Today: Israel and Its Neighbors (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), p. 36. Why are Palestinian Refugees treated differently than all other refugees in the world?Why was this de facto exchange of Arab and Jewish populations treated differently from all other population exchanges? Virtually all mass movements of refugees -- even those which went one way and were not reciprocal, as are population exchanges -- have been solved by resettlement or absorption of the refugees in either the original host country or another designated area.1In the roster of the world's unfortunate shifts of population the number of refugees is staggering: from 1933 to 1945, a total of 79,200,000 souls were displaced;2 since the Second World War at least 100,000,000 additional persons have become refugees. In times of conflict throughout history those who became insecure migrated to regions where they felt safer. Most are no longer refugees, because the resettlement and integration of these refugee transfers by the host country has been considered by the world community to be the normal and humanitarian course of action. The international legal precedent of granting refugees the privilege to live in dignity as citizens in their countries of asylum has been consistently urged for all refugees.3 There has been no successful mass repatriation by any refugee group except after a military victory; further, in instances of refugee exchanges there is no historical, moral, or other basis for one-way repatriation. The exchange between India and Pakistan in the 1950s was overwhelming in magnitude: 8,500,000 Sikhs and Hindus from Pakistan fled to India, and roughly 6,500,000 Muslims moved from India to Pakistan.4 Even in "crowded, water-logged West Bengal," according to the New York Times,5 where refugees streamed from East Pakistan, the refugees "felt their only hope for solace was among people who spoke their language, had the same dietary habits and shared their customs and traditions." This exchange-bad not come about peacefully. As reported by the Times of London,6 Moslems have been murdering Hindus and Sikhs, Hindus and Sikhs have been murdering Moslems. Each side blames the other with passionate vehemence and refuses to admit that its own people are ever at fault.Yet, contrary to Arab attitudes, Pakistani President Mohammed Ayub Khan, at a Cairo press conference in 1960, announced that he had directed his people to deal with their own refugees, without "substantial support from Muslim brethren over the world"; he suggested that Pakistan's settlement of its nearly seven million refugee-, from India might act as an example for the "three-quarters of a million refugees from Palestine" in the Arab countries."7 The modem precedent was set in 1913 when Turkey and Bulgaria began their equal population exchange; and in 1923, Turkey and Greece exchanged 1,250,000 Greeks and 3 55,000 Turks. An agreement was signed in 1930 abandoning individual appraisal in favor of wholesale liquidation of accounts by lump-sum compensation between Greece and Turkey.8 Since almost all the property of the Indians and Pakistanis who changed homelands had been taken over and put to use by the respective governments, India and Pakistan eventually had to reach a similar solution.9 Millions of refugees who left their homes because of religious, ethnic, or political pressures have been successfully resettled. Many millions more are now being absorbed slowly into the life of their respective countries of asylum. The United States Committee for Refugees' (USCR) latest official figure (1982)10estimated a current "Worldwide Total" of more than 10,000,000 refugees. As thatcommittee reported, ". . . few resettled refugees ever require assistance again from the UN," although the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) "lists resettled people as refugees until they acquire a new nationality."11 Among the dozens of countries to which tens of millions of refugees have fled for asylum, the only instance in which the "host countries refused," as a bloc, to assist properly, or even to accept aid in the permanent rehabilitation of their refugees, occurred in the "Arab states."12 In March 1976, the director of the United States Committee for Refugees said that while "everyone must accept their refugees - that's the world situation," still, the "Arab refugees are a special case.""13 Why is the "Palestinian refugee" problem treated as a special case? The United States Catholic Conference's eminent expert, John McCarthy, attempted to put the circumstances of the Arab refugees into the broader context, through his decades of first-hand worldwide experience with refugees. McCarthy's own private affiliations - he has wom "several hats" in Catholic-sponsored refugee resettlement organs - have accomplished the resettlement of roughly one hundredth of the world's hundred million refugees rendered homeless since World War II. During an interview in December 1978, he was asked: Q: Is the world really receptive to observing the precedent of finding new homes for refugees?McCarthy: We've settled about a million people in the past 30 years. At the present time we have from Southeast Asia-we can provide homes and jobs for 7,000 people a month, without regard to race, religion, what-have-you. There's no problem with this-it works. We're carrying out resettlement programs in Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Nordic countries, also New Zealand, Australia- all Southeast Asians. We're working with Egyptians, and out of Europe we're taking care of Ethiopians, Kurds, Iraqis, and the whole Iron Curtain. So we have quite a movement of people. There isn't any problem. It always works-if they're told the story as it should be told. You must remember that in any structure- black, white, green, yellow-there's always a certain resistance to the newcomer. If we can show that these people can contribute-that these people have a problem, that these people are good-if we can show that they're your brother, it works."Permanent resettlement" remains the general goal of the United States government as well. 15 Yet the current dialogue omits any mention of the rehabilitation or resettlement of Palestinian Arab refugees. It is the "right of the Palestinians to their homeland" that is consistently reiterated. The abuse of the refugees, their deprivation of real "human rights" from 1948 onward, and the true motive behind their rejection by the Arab world have all been buried by propaganda slogans and omissions. Humanitarian voices of concern for "human need" and dignity are now muted by the louder and increasingly prevalent trumpeting of the "rights" of the "Palestinians" to "return." Amid that campaign, the belated recognition of the "other" Middle East refugees, the Jews, was termed an ill-timed "complication" by United States officials during the Ford administration."16 To the benefit of the Arab propaganda mechanism, and perhaps to the ill fortune of many perpetual Arab refugees, Israel has not made an effective case for its own Jewish refugee claim; Israelis say that they have reserved the matter of the population exchange for overall peace negotiations, although they have referred to the exchange during discussions of refugee compensation, and in forums such as the United Nations. However, if the Israelis chose virtually to ignore the propaganda benefits to be gained from exploitation of their refugees, the Arabs predicted otherwise. Perhaps because of the Arab world's own political use of its refugees, some Arabs have anticipated with apprehension the Israelis' eventual use of what the Arabs see as a strong claim for Israel and its resettled Jewish refugees from Arab countries. There have been sophisticated warnings that the existence of those hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who fled to Israel from Arab states would trump the Arab refugee "propaganda card." Even before the propaganda line substituted the term "Palestinians" to replace the term "Arab refugees," the Arab world manifested popular recognition that its demand for the "return" of the Arab refugees to Israel was implausible: in 1966, a prominent Egyptian newspaper published an editorial stating that "we all know that Zionist influence ... brought about the transfer to Israel, of thousands of Jews from Yemen . . . thousands of Moroccan Jews, the same thing was done in Tunisia, and Syria also tried to follow the same policy . . ." As a result, the editorial reasoned, Israel can claim that, if "tens of thousands of Jews who previously lived in the Arab countries" are settled in Israel, "why should the Arab refugees not be settled in their stead? ... This proposal ... can serve as a propaganda card to arouse the interest of world public opinion.""17 In 1974 the question was obliquely raised again by the Arabs - this time by an Arab-born Israeli journalist, interviewing the head of the PLO delegation to the United Nations at that time, Dr. Nabil Shaat. The Israeli journalist asked, "Why did you send your people to kill innocent people in Ma'alot and Kiryat Shemona ... knowing they were mostly populated by Oriental Jews, whom you call brothers?" At the reference to the Arab-born Jewish refugees, Dr. Shaat responded, "I have no answer to that. I will personally raise the question in our organization when I return to Beirut. . . ." 18 The PLO's Dr. Shaat granted another interview months later, which he used as a platform for his answer: Shaat called for a "charter of rights of Arab citizens of Jewish persuasion."19Shortly afterward the series of "invitations" from the Arab world to "its Jews" resumed. Continuing Arab concern was indicated in May of 1975 by an unusually candid article written for the Beirut journal Al Nahar. Sabri Jiryis, an Arab researcher, author, and member of the Palestinian National Council, wrote that "the Arabs were very active" in the creation of Israel, although this is hardly the place to describe how the Jews of the Arab states were driven out of their ancient homes.... shamefully deported after their property had been commandeered or taken over at the lowest possible valuation.... This is true for the majority of the Jews in question.Jiryis warned that "Israel will air this issue in ... any negotiations undertaken regarding the rights of the Palestinians. . . . Israel has been assembling the minutest details about the Jews who left the Arab states after 1948 ... so that these can be used when the time comes." Jiryis concluded that Israelis will put these claims forward: "It may be ... that we Israelis entailed the expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians.... "However, you Arabs have entailed the expulsion of just as many Jews from the Arab states.... Actually, therefore, what happened was a . . . 'population and property exchange,' and each party must bear the consequences. "Israel is absorbing the Jews, . . . the Arab statesfor their part must settle the Palestinians in their own midst and solve their problems."20 Lebanese Arabs demanded in 1977 that the "Palestinian refugees be relocated to all Arab nations ... each according to its own capacity."21 That the motives for the Lebanese proclamation were political and not strictly humanitarian was evident: the PLO had contributed greatly to the transformation of Lebanon from international playground to countrywide battlefield. Significantly, however, the demand went to theArab countries and not to Israel. Thus the responsibility for the refugees was placed, albeit briefly, by Arabs upon the Arab world. Nonetheless, rumblings of renewed external recognition of this Middle East population exchange continued to appear in the late 1970s, nearly thirty years after the fact. University of Chicago population expert Philip Hauser, former United States Census Director, who represented the United States on the United Nations' Population Commission from 1947 to 1951, stated in 1978 that the exchange of populations between out-migrant Arabs and out-migrant Jews is real-precedents have been established. As far as the unprecedented refusal by the Arabs to accept Arab refugees-some quarters call this a deliberate means of destroying Israel. What the out-migration of Arabs from newly-created Israel did was to provide in Arab countries a milieu in which the Arab refugees had access to a common culture and language ... a unique historical situation, in the sense that most refugee populations are faced with the necessity of living in a new cultural and linguistic world.... In light of the total situation - and now I will speak not in the demographic vein but in the less familiar political vein - it would be absurd for the Arabs to insist on what would be double compensation from Israel .... 22Moreover, perhaps in view of the Israeli government's relegation of its refugee equation to a state of suspended animation, the Jewish refugees themselves finally began to coalesce into independent bodies; in several countries such organizations grew up. One international body calls itself WOJAC-World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries-with delegations of Arab-bom Jews representing sixteen countries of asylum. The Jewish refugees, who never had been clearly identified or adequately discussed in world forums, decided to become recognized, to explain why they can never go back to their lands of origin, and to demand "even-handedness." 23 It was precisely when WOJAC announced the convening of its organizing conference in Paris that the Arabs issued several of their invitations to the Arab-bom Jews to "come back." The Jews disdained the gesture of "hospitality," and composed a response. They enumerated the "miseries" they had endured in the Muslim Arab society at a press conference called to communicate their negative answer to the invitation.* [* In January 1976, the American Sephardi Federation "representing more than 1 1/2 million Jewish refugees from Arab lands" took a full-pagc advertisement in the New York Times to "decline" the Iraqi government's "invitation." A photograph of two bodies suspended from a scaffold, surrounded by angry-looking onlookers was identified as a "News Service Photo: Iraqis watch the bodies of Sabah Haim (left), and David Hazaquiel, both Jews, dangle from the scaffold after they were hanged in Baghdad." Beneath the photograph the organization responded: "INVITATION DECLINED." "We, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands whose history in those countries goes back more than 2,000 years, long before Islam--suggest that the Arab governments finance the welfare of their own brothers instead of using them as political pawns, while they spend huge amounts for hypocritical propaganda, half truft and outright lies." (January 11, 1976, New York Times.)] In 1981, the United States Committee for Refugees noted, as it had not done in many previous reports, the "600,000 Jewish refugees resettled from Arab countries ... three decades ago."24 By the next survey, however, that important recognition was singularly negated.25 Had the Jews initially drawn worldwide attention to their Arab-born Jewish refugees in Israel, had they broadcast the persecution of the Jews and other minorities in the Arab countries-and the social and economic burden of absorbing the Jewish refugees from Arab countries-the Arab demand for one-sided repatriation might be perceived today in a different, more evenhanded and objective perspective, and other, critical unknown elements in the conflict might have by now intruded into the consideration of "justice." As we have seen, all those hapless peoples counted as "refugees" were not in fact refugees: many were needy souls of other nationalities who found sustenance in the camps, and in the process became-and their children became-unwitting human weapons in a holy war that never ends. The immediate objective of the Arab world's propaganda strategy has been one-sided Arab "repatriation," a "return" in the name of "self-determination" of those Arab refugees who have been perceived as the Palestinian people from time immemorial, with "rights" to "their land." In the foundation for those claims, one cornerstone is the popular perception that the Arabs are the only hapless refugees who were uprooted in 1948. The Arabs well know how Jews were-and in least one case, still are-treated in Arab countries, [See Chapter 7] however they may have publicly congratulated themselves for "traditionally benign" treatment of "their" Jews. Consequently, they have grounds for concern for the success of one aspect of their program. If the world recognizes that there has been an irreversible exchange of Jewish and Arab refugee populations, this Arab political maneuver, perhaps, might be expected to reach an impasse. And yet, as illustrated earlier here, some in the world community have recognized the Arab world's cynical and heartless manipulation of those Arab brethren-men, women, and children who found themselves in refugee camps in search of a better life. Why has that recognition failed to bring about a reasonable solution? Why is this refugee problem different from other refugee problems? Why has UNRWA spent well over a billion humanitarian-contributed dollars-mostly from the United States-to perpetuate the refugee dilemma? More important, why does the Arab world of nearly 200 million people and millions of miles of territory remain so steadfast in its rejection of one minuscule Jewish state that the Arabs have been willing to sacrifice the human rights and often the very lives of their own people? And, given the honorable and predominantly well-intentioned motives of the free world community-oil-benefit seekers aside -how have the Arabs managed to perpetuate this status quo ante? The answers lie in what is known-and what is not known-about the region. Having worked to obliterate from the practical dialogue the history of the Jews as "Palestinian people," and having in fact denied Jewish historical ties to their Holy Land (as in, for example, Article 20 of the PLO Covenant), the Arabs have consistently claimed that in the proposed "secular democratic state of Palestine," most of the Jews who are now in their homeland of Israel would have to depart,"26 presumably back to their countries of origin-including the little-known major component of Arab-born Jews. But a mutual repatriation obviously could not be demanded if one side of an exchange of populations had fled from intolerable conditions and could not return. Hence the need for a revised scenario, the Arab "invitation" to Jews to return, and the alteration from "Arab refugees" to "Palestinians." Armed by myths, prevalent among outsiders, that the "alien" Jews lived harmoniously among the "native" Arabs before Israel became a state, the Arabs have tried, through consistent diplomatic and media repetition of statements by Arab leaders, to convince world opinion that the Jews would be "welcome again" in the Arab states if they were forced out of their homeland in Israel, the "Palestinian homeland" of the "Palestinian people from time immemorial." Because there are extensive contradictions to important popular perceptions and reports-discernible by reading the sentiments and strategies expressed by Arab writers and by visiting the Arab "confrontation" states-the purported "facts" and the "legitimate rights" that are part of the current rhetoric of the Arab-Israel conflict become recognizable as persistent and troubling questions. Despite the Arab nations' splintered, disparate reactions to what they consider greater threats than Israel - for some the primary danger is seen as the Soviet Union, for others Muslim Fundamentalism, and for the Gulf states its retention of the power of oil-the Arab world remains adamant and uncharacteristically united in its goal, as Al-Ayubi stated it-to tighten a "noose" around the "Zionist entity." It is the motive for the unchanging, overarching Arab strategy vis-i-vis Israel, the historical factors behind that motive, and the maneuvers that created a climate where that strategy is advocated as "morally" acceptable, which must now be traced. 1. See United States Committee for Refugees, Biennial Reports, C.G. Paikert, The German Exodus (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962); G. Frumkin, Population Changes in Europe Since 1939 (New York: A. M. Kelley, 195 1). 2. YMCA World Alliance, "World Communiqu6," no. 4, July-August 1957. 3.See speech by Charles S. Rhyne, past president of the American Bar Association, "Fundamental Human Rights of Refugees," August 1972, Vital Speeches, September 15, 1972. 4. United States Committee for Refugees, 1969 Report. 5. April 16, 1961. 6. August 28, 1947. 7. New York Times, November 12, 1960. 8.Schechtman, European Population Transfers, p. 12; Schechtman, Refugee in the World, p. 156; for Bulgarian-Turkish Convention of 1913, see Mark Vishniak, Transfer of Populations as a Means of Solving Problems of Minorities (New York: Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1942), p. 15. 9. See surveys of the United States Committee for Refugees, particularly 1975-76 Biennial Report. 10. United States Committee for Refugees, 1982 World Refugee Survey. 11. United States Committee for Refugees, 1981 World Refugee Survey. Contrary to the UN, the United States Committee for Refugees until recently excluded other de facto "resettled" peoples who had "not," as yet, "acquired a new nationality," but its Survey still included the total UN estimate of "1.8 million Palestinian refugees in the Near East," despite the fact that so many, as the Survey noted, were living "out of camps" throughout the Middle East and the world, p. 37. Also see Chapter 18. 12. United States Committee for Refugees, 1975-76 Report,- Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. 13. Matthew Mitchell, then director of the United States Committee for Refugees, to the author, March 1976. 14. Author's interview with John McCarthy, December 19, 1978, New York. 15. For examples of statements reiterating this policy, see an address by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David D. Newsom at the Consultations on Indochinese Refugees convened by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, December 11, 1978, Geneva; remarks by Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, Patricia Derian, on ABC, "The Boat People: No Port in the Storm?", February 5, 1978; "Refugees are Pawns of Natural and Man-Made Disasters . . . " (pamphlet), United States Committee for Refugees, Washington; Richard F. Jannsen, "The Uprooted," Wall Street Journal, July 18, 1975; Ronald Yates, "Asian refugees: 'Mother of Jesus have pity on us,' " Chicago Tribune, October 21, 1979. 16. "A solution will be further complicated by the property claims against Arab States of the many Jews from those States who moved to Israel in its early years after achieving statehood." Deputy Assistant Secretary Harold Saunders, testifying before House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Investigations, November 12, 1975, Department of State Bulletin, December 1, 1975, p. 798. 17. AI-Muharrir, January 25, 1966. 18. Interview by Yitzhak Ben Gad, Philadelphia Inquirer, December 1, 1974. 19. Interview, Jeune Afrique, July 4, 1975. 20. Al Nahar (Beirut), May 15, 1975. 21.Chicago Sun- Times, January 24, 1977, issued after a "secret conclave;" later the same year, a similar statement was issued by Lebanese Christian leaders'joint "manifesto," including Camille Chamoun, a former President of Lebanon, Suleiman Franjieh, President "during the recent civil war," Pierre Gemayel, then Christian Phalangist leader, and others, New York Times~ August 27, 1977. 22. Interview with author, November 25, 1978; March 15, 1981. Professor Philip M. Hauser, Director Emeritus, Population Research Center, University of Chicago, was, beginning in 1938: Assistant Chief Statistician for Population, then Deputy Director (until 1947), then Acting Director (1949-50), U.S. Bureau of the Census; U.S. Representative to UN Population Commission, 1947-51. 23. Statement of the organizing conference, World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC), Paris, November 24, 1975. In an Israeli Parliament debate in 1975, Mordechai Ben Porath (later a Cabinet Minister in charge of the rights of Jews from Arab lands) reproached the government: "The State of Israel, regrettably, has discriminated in this case, and has played down the rights of the Jews from the Arab States." Translation from transcript of Knesset Debate, January 1, 1975. 24. United States Committee for Refugees, 1981 World Refugee Survey, New York, p. 27. 25. United States Committee for Refugees, 1982 World Refugee Survey, p. 18. 26. See Article 20 of the PLO Covenant. Palestinian Refugees, were denied resettlement opportunitiesPalestinian Refugees, unlike other refugees in the world, were denied resettlement opportunties, so that they could be used as political pawns. Over the last thirty-odd years, numerous projects have been proposed, international funds provided, studies undertaken, all indicating the benefits that could be derived by the Arab refugees from their absorption into the brethren cultures of the Arab host countries. Various international bodies and independent Arab voices over the years have clearly challenged as immoral the position of the Arabs in promoting the continued languishing of the Arab emigres who came within their borders; also deplored on occasion is the Arab states' departure from the free world's unvarying precedent: of granting to refugees around the world the dignity of resettlement within a compatible environment where they can become productive citizens. From the beginning, the Arab host governments were offered unprecedentedly broad opportunities based on the refugees' rehabilitation, which could help develop their countries' vast potential under the proposed aid programs.International experts reported and published undisputed evidence that integration and resettlement of those who were refugees, when implemented by the community of Arab nations, would benefit not only the Arab refugees but also the underpopulated areas within the Arab world, which needed additional labor forces to implement progress. Iraq and Syria were judged by many specialists in the area to be ideal for resettlement of the Arab refugees." Among many such findings was the report by President Truman's International Development Advisory Board. Headed by Nelson Rockefeller, the board asserted that under proper development Iraq alone could absorb an Arab refugee population of 750,000. According to the report, ... Israel [which] in the three years of its existence has absorbed a Jewish refugee population, about equivalent in number to the Arab refugees; ... in flight from Moslem countries in the Middle East and North Africa, cannot reabsorb the Arabs who fled its borders, but it can and indeed has, offered to contribute to a fund for Arab resettlement. The exchange of the Arab population of Palestine with the Jewish population of the Arab countries was favored by the ... League of Nations as an effective way of resolving the Palestine problem. In practical effect, such an exchange has been taking place. The resettlement of the Arab refugees is ... much simpler ... in Arab lands.*1Another of the authoritative studies reported: Iraq could contribute most to the solution of the refugee problem. It could absorb agriculturists as well. This would benefit the refugees and the country equally.2Pointing to Iraq's special availability for resettlement and countering the Arab argument that the Arab refugees were "unemployable"-the same study emphasized that In the years 1950-51 100,000 Iraqi Jews left the country.... They left a big gap in the life of the city. Many of them were shopkeepers, artisans or white collar workers, while 15,000 belonged to the well-to-do. The gap could be ... filled. ... Again Iraq would also benefit....The study concluded that "host countries should take over responsibility for the refugees at the earliest possible date," and that "redistribution of the refugees among these countries is a primary requisite." According to yet another study, by S.G. Thicknesse,3 Iraq's were the "best long-range prospects" for resettlement of the Arabs from Palestine. Herbert Hoover suggested that "this would clear Palestine ... for a large Jewish emigration. . . ."4 El-Balad, an Arab daily paper in the Jordan-held "old city" of Jerusalem, stressed the value to the Arabs of the Jews' flight from Iraq, since "roughly 120,000" Jewish refugees had fled Baghdad for Israel, leaving all of their goods and homes behind them 5 Salah Jabr, former Prime Minister of Iraq and leader of Iraq's National Socialist Party had stated that the emigration of 120,000 Jews from Iraq to Israel is beneficial to Iraq and to the Palestinian Arabs because it makes possible the entry into Iraq of a similar number of Arab refugees and their occupation of the Jewish houses there.6A survey by the League of Red Cross Societies determined that thirty-five percent of the Palestine refugees were "townspeople" and could "easily fill the vacuum" left by the Jews. ... Their departure created a large gap in Iraq's economy. In some fields, such as transport, banking and wholesale trades, it reached serious proportions There was also a dearth of white collar workers and professional men.7Syria was also proposed by many experts as an area with great potential for absorbing refugees: according to one report, Syria required more than twice as many inhabitants as its then-current population of a little more than two million (after World War II.)8 According to Arab Palestinian writer Fawaz Turki, Syria "could have absorbed its own refugees, and probably those in Lebanon and Jordan."9 The British Chatham House Survey10 estimated that, with Syria's agreement, "Syria might well absorb over 200,000 Palestine refugees within five years in agriculture alone." Chatham House also recommended that about 350,000 refugees could be resettled in Iraq, further noting that the refugees themselves would "not offer serious resistance" if they were encouraged to realize that their lives would become more productive. In 1949 a newspaper editorial from Damascus stated that Syria needs not only 100,000 refugees, but 5 million to work the lands and make them fruitful.11The Damascus paper, earlier recognizing that Arab refugees were not to be "repatriated," suggested that the government place these "100,000 refugees in district[s] ... where they will build small villages with the money appropriated for this purpose." * 12 [* On June 27, 1949, Near East Arab Broadcasting, a British-run station, broadcast (in Arabic): "The Arabs must forget their demand for the return of all refugees since Israel, owing to her policy of crowding new immigrants into the country at such a rate that the territory she holds is already too small for her population, is physically unable to accept more than a small number of Arab refugees. The Arabs must face the facts before it's too late, and must see to the resettlement of the refugees in the Arab states where they can help in the development of their new lands and so become quickly assimilated genuine inhabitants, instead of suffering exiles." "Daily Abstracts of Arabic Broadcasts," Israel Foreign Office. Similar broadcasts were recorded on 10/31/50, 11/11/50, 11/29/50, 12/31/50.] In 1951, Syria was anxious for additional workers who would settle on the land. An Egyptian paper13 reported, The Syrian government has officially requested that half a million Egyptian agricultural workers ... be permitted to emigrate to Syria in order to help develop Syrian land which would be transferred to them as their property. The responsible Egyptian authorities have rejected this request on the grounds that Egyptian agriculture is in need of labor.*[* 200,000 Arab "refugees" were languishing in Gaza, along with "80,000 original residents who barely made a living before the refugees arrived," according to the UNRWA report in 1951-52, yet a project with "hope" to accommodate "10,000 families" in the "Sinai area" was "suspended."] Near East Arabic Radio14 reported that Syria was offering land rent free to anyone willing to settle there. It even announced a committee to study would-be settlers' applications. In fact, Syrian authorities began the experiment by moving 25,000 of the refugees in Syria into areas of potential development in the northern parts of the country, but the overthrow of the ruling regime in August 1949 changed the situation, and the rigid Arab League position against permanent resettlement, despite persistence on the part of isolated leaders, prevailed.15 Notwithstanding the facts, 16 the Arab world has assiduously worked to build the myth that no jobs were available in Arab lands for Arab refugees in 1948 or since, and that the refugees had become surplus farm workers "in an era when the world at large and Arab countries in particular already has too many people in the rural sector."17 At around the same time, the Egyptian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Muhammad Saleh ed-Din, in.a leading Egyptian daily, demanded the return of the refugees: Let it therefore be known and appreciated that, in demanding the restoration of the refugees to Palestine, the Arabs intend that they shall return as the masters of the homeland, and not as slaves. More explicitly: they intend to annihilate the state of Israel.18Thus, while the "refugee" count kept growing, Arab leaders' confusion over "return" or "not return" had been more or less clarified: they proclaimed that the "refugees" must indeed "return," but not before Israel was destroyed. The Lebanese paper AI-Ziyyad 19 anticipated a current expressed goal of the PLO charter, though it was less candid. In a sophisticated assessment, it suggested the recognition of Israel as a strategy that would accomplish the following results: The return of all the refugees to their homes would be secured, thereby we should, on the one hand, eliminate the refugee problem, and on the other, create a large Arab majority that would serve as the most effective means of reviving the Arab character of Palestine, while forming a powerful fifth column for the day of revenge and reckoning.Despite findings of the 1950 United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commission,20 which recommended "concentration on Arab refugees' resettlement in theArab countries21 with both the technical and financial assistance of the United Nations and coupled with compensation for their property," the Arab League22 insisted that relief projects should not prejudice the right of the refugees to return to their homes or to receive compensation if unwilling to return...23The Revue du Liban was among many dissenters who challenged the Arab League's position and discouraged Arab refugees from "return": ... it is a fact that many Arabs leave Israel today of their own free will.The paper pointed out that "in the event of a return of the refugees they will constitute a minority ... in a foreign environment ... unfamiliar together with people who speak a language they do not understand." Also, the paper stated, the refugees would "encounter the economic difficulties of Israel," and their settlement in Israel will cost much more than their absorption in the countries where they live today. After three years it is not human and not logical to compel them to wait without giving them concrete help. Syria and Iraq can easily absorb additional refugees.... They should form a productive force which might help to improve the economic conditions in the countries where they will be absorbed.24Despite tacit recognition of the actual "resident"- as opposed to "refugee' - identity of so many of those involved, projects unparalleled for refugees else where continued to offer to facilitate the Arab world's resettlement of all it "refugees."25Yet the Arabs rebuffed every effort to secure realistic well-being for their kinsmen. At a refugee conference in Homs, Syria, the Arabs declare that any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem which will not based on ensuring the refugees' right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason.26In 1958, former director of UNRWA Ralph Galloway declared angrily while in Jordan that The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations, and as a weapon agains Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die.27And King Hussein, the sole Arab leader who, for reasons that later become clearer, directed integration of the Arabs, in 1960 stated, Since 1948 Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem in an irresponsible manner.... They have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and, I could say, even criminal.28Eleven years after the Arab leavetaking, the late United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjbld reiterated that there were ample means for absorb ing the Arab refugees into the economy of the Arab region; he asserted furthe that the refugees would be beneficial to their host countries, by adding needed~manpower to assist in the development of those countries. Hammarskjbld detailed the estimated cost of the refugee absorption, which he proposed be financed by oil revenues and outside aid. But again, plans for permanent rehabilitation of the refugees were rejected by the Arab leaders, because such measures would have terminated the refugees' status as "refugees"; the Arab leaders reasoned that once the refugees accepted their new homes, they would eventually abandon their desire to "return" to former homes, as have other refugees. Such action would have resulted in the Arab world's loss of a weapon against Israel,29 and would have falsely implied acceptance of the Jewish state. While the vast majority of refugees has now left the camps for greater opportunities among their brethren-many in the oil-rich Gulf states-most have been denied citizenship in the Arab countries to which they had moved. Regardless of their contributions as "law-abiding" citizens de facto, and regardless of their length of time there, they have largely been discriminated against. As one Palestinian Arab in Kuwait toldForbes editor James Cook in 1975, They owe me citizenship. I've been here for nearly 20 years and I helped create this country's great wealth. I did. I haven't simply earned my citizenship, they owe it to me.30This Arab refugee, whose plight is representative of so many, according to Cook, was "unlikely to get it," although it is said that some of the Arabs who left Western Palestine for Kuwait have finally obtained Kuwaiti citizenship. In Iraq, Palestinians have been "allowed to live in the country but not to assume Iraqi nationality," despite the fact that the country needs manpower and "is encouraging Arab nationals to work and live there by granting them citizenship, with the exception of Palestinians.31 In this endeavor, the Arab world has received inordinate support from the United Nations, as a candid former United Nations Palestinian Conciliation Commission official admitted in 1966. Dr. Pablo de Azcarate wrote: ...solemn proclamation [of the "right of the refugees to return . . ."] by the [General] Assembly and its incorporation into the text of the resolution of December 14, 1948, have had three results.In the first place, a platform has been provided, of inestimable value to all those Arab political elements who are more interested in keeping alive the political struggle against the State of Israel than in putting an end, by means of a practical and reasonable compromise formula, to the tragic situation of the refugees. The truth is that since the resolution.... the Arab states, whenever the question arose, have done nothing but attack Israel....Arab propaganda has also managed thus far to direct all attention to one aspect of the Middle East refugee problem as if it were the only aspect of that problem, and thus to mask the overall reality. One crucial truth, among many that have been obscured and deprecated, is that there have been as many Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from the Arab countries as there are Arab refugees from Israel, and that the Jews left of necessity and in flight from danger. Palestinians burn effigy of Canadian ministerJanuary 17, 2001Reuters Palestinians burned an effigy of Canadian Foreign Minister John Manley on Thursday in a protest against Canada's offer to accept Palestinian refugees as part of a Middle East peace plan. Hooded gunmen fired into the air during the protest in Balata refugee camp near the West Bank town of Nablus and hundreds of demonstrators shouted slogans demanding the right of return to former homes. "We refuse resettlement of refugees," they shouted. Manley told the Toronto Star newspaper in an interview published on January 10, "We are prepared to receive refugees. We are prepared to contribute to an international fund to assist with resettlement in support of a peace agreement." Manley said there had been no discussion on the number of refugees to be resettled outside the Middle East. Canada heads the multilateral Refugee Working Group, a committee charged with trying to resolve the plight of Palestinian refugees. Arab League Summit in Beirut28 March 2002Reuters Following is an official translation of the full text of a Saudi-inspired peace plan adopted by an Arab summit in Beirut on Thursday... The Arab Peace Initiative The Council of Arab States at the Summit Level at its 14th Ordinary Session, reaffirming the resolution taken in June 1996 at the Cairo Extra-Ordinary Arab Summit that a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East is the strategic option of the Arab countries, to be achieved in accordance with international legality, and which would require a comparable commitment on the part of the Israeli government... 1. Requests Israel to reconsider its policies...2. Further calls upon Israel to affirm...Section 4 effectively continues the policy of forcing the Palestinian refugees to remain camps in Lebanon and elsewhere as political weapons rather than absorbing them. 1. International Development Advisory Board, Report, March 7, 1951. 2. F. T. Witcamp, The Refugee Aroblem in the Middle East (The Hague: Research Group for European Migration Problems, 1959), pp. 39-41. 3. S.G. Thicknesse, Arab Refugees: A Survey of Resettlement Possibilities (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1949), p. 51. 4. Herbert Hoover, reported in the New York World Telegram, November 19, 1945. 5. EI-Balad, September 13, 19, 1951, cited in Joseph Schechtman, The Arab Refugee Problem (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), p. 91. 6. Dewey Anderson et al., "Arab Refugee Problem and How It Can Be Solved," p. 39, citing EI-Balad (Jerusalem), September 18, 1951. 7. Schechtman, Apab Refugee Problem, p. 91; p. 94, n. 41. 8. Anderson et al., "Arab Refugee Problem and How It Can Be Solved," citing a report by Alexander Gibbs Co., "The Economic Development of Syria" (London, 1949). 9. Fawaz Turki, The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 37. 10. Anderson et al., "Arab Refugee Problem," p. 50, citing a report by a study group composed of members and associates of Chatham House and members of the Royal Asian Society under the chairmanship of Sir Harold MacMichael on Arab refugee settlement possibilities. Arnold Toynbee was also a participant. 11. Editorial in al-Qubs (The Torch), Damascus, January 1949. Quoted on March 28, 1949, in az-Sameer, an Arabic paper published in New York. Cited in Schechtman, Arab Refugee Problem, p. 80. 12. al-Quk quoted in az-Sameer, March 28, 1949, cited in Anderson et al., "Arab Refugee Problem," p. 52. 13. Musamaret El Geib (Cairo), June 3, 1951, cited in Anderson et al., "Arab Refugee Problem," p. 50. See Chapter 18 for interview with Syrian official who expressed similar needs in 1977. 14. Near East Arabic radio, May 12, 1949, cited in Anderson et al., p. 51. 15. W. de St. Aubin, "Peace and Refugees in the Middle East," Middle East Journal, Washington, July 1949, pp. 359-60. According to Schechtman, Arab Refugee Problem, P. 81, "In March 1951, premier Khaled el-Azarn stated in connection with the visit to Damascus of UN Secretary General Trygve Lie, Syria would be willing to accept refugees provided they were paid compensation for their property in Israel." (Emphasis added.) 16. From 1949 until 1951 Egyptians were receptive to resettlement proposals. In September 1949, Egypt was planning to hire the refugees to dig wells in Gaza, conditional upon Israel's cooperation with irrigation methods, New York Times, October 1, 1949; in 1951, Egypt and UNRWA negotiated to resettle 50,000 refugees in the Sinai at one point, New York Times, August 18, 23, 1950, and March 23, 195 1; an additional 20,000 refugees were agreed upon for resettling in the same period, New York Times, December 26, 1950, Times, London, January 23, 1951. 17. John Davis, "Why Are There Still Arab Refugees?", Arab World, December 1969- January 1970. Also see data on Syria and on Libya, etc., in UNRWA Annual Report of the Director, July 1952 to June 1953, General Assembly, 8th Session, Supp. No. 12 (A/2470), pp. 10-11; in UN Resolution 513 (VI) the General Assembly adopted the Authorization to '~ransfer" UNRWA funds "allocated for relief' into funds for "reintegration, " dated January 26, 1952, item no. 10. An American representative in Lebanon, Ambassador Ira Hirschmann, submitted a comprehensive report to the Assistant Secretary of State re: "Arab Refugee Situation," April 6,1968, Hirschmann to William B. Macomber, Jr. 18. Dewey Anderson et al., "Arab Refugee Problem and How It Can Be Solved," p. 77, citing AbMisr4 October 11, 1949. 19. Ibid., citing Al-Ziyyad, April 6, 1950. 20. "General Progress Report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine," covering the period from December It, 1949, to October 23, 1950 (pamphlet), General Assembly Official Records, 5th Session, Supp. No. 18 (A/1367/Rev. 1). 21. See UN Ad Hoc Committee Sessions, November 11, 29, 30, December 1, 1950, for positions of Denmark, Canada, Britain, Australia, Bolivia, Belgium, and Holland. Although giving perfunctory acknowledgment to the Arab position, a substantial bloc among the UN Ad Hoc Committee concluded that "the Arab refugees would have a happier and more stable future if the bulk of them were resettled in Arab countries." 22. League Resolution No. 389, October 10, 1951. 23. Mohammad lqbal Ansari, The Arab League 1945-1955 (Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University, 1968), pp. 71-74. 24. Revue du Liban (French), May 12, 1951, cited by Anderson et al., "Arab Refugee Problem," p. 38. 25. For additional support of resettlement see Thicknesse, Arab Refugees~ pp. 38-58; Vahe Sevian, "Economic Utilization and Development of the Water Resources of the Euphrates and Tigris," E/Conf. 7/Sec/W.397, August 1, 1949, p. 16; Doreen Warriner, Land and Poverty in the Middle East (London and New York: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1948), pp. 26-33, 75-80, 95. 26. Berlut al Massa (Lebanese daily), July 11-12, 1957, 'cited by Terence Prittie and Bernard Dineen, The Double Exodus. A Study of Arab and Jewish Refugees in the Middle East (pamphlet), (London: Goodhart Press, n.d.), p. 13. 27. Prittie, "Middle East Refugees," in Michael Curtis et al., eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 71. 28. Ibid., citing Associated Press interview, January 1960. 29. See Robert MacDonald, The League ofArab States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); also see Mohammad Khalil, The Arab States and the Arab League: A Documentary Record (Beirut: Khayat's, 1962), vol. 2, pp. 517-22, 9351f. 30. "Biggest Little Superpower in the World," Forbes, August 1, 1975; author's interview with Jim Cook, January 5, 1979. 31. Abbas Kelidar, "Iraq: The Search for Stability," Conflict Studies, No. 59, The Institute for the Study of Conffict, London, July 1975, p. 21. 32. Pablo de Azcarate, Mission in Palestine 1948-1952 (Washington, D.C.: Middle East Institute, 1966), p. 191. Resolution 194 (111) of the United Nations General Assembly, which de Azcarate dates December 14, 1948, is generally recorded as December 11, 1948. The UN "proclamation" referred to by de Azearate includes the following: "Resolves that the refugees willing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return, and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or inequity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible; "Instructs the Conciliation Committee to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation, and to maintain close relations with the Director of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees and, through him, with the appropriate organs and agencies of the United Nations." The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over PalestineBibliographyA B CDE F GHI J KLM N OPQ R STU V WXY ZAbbreviations: PRO-Public Record Office, Kew Gardens (London) I. Unpublished archival sources, periodicals, official publications, and reportsThe unpublished archival sources, periodicals, official publications, and reports drawn upon for this book have been cited fully in the reference notes. The following are only the official data referred to most frequently, which were often abbreviated after the initial citation in the reference notes.Despatches from Her Majesty's Consuls in the Levant, Respecting Past or Apprehended Disturbances in Syria. 1858 to 1860,- Further Papers Relating to the Disturbances in Syria. June 1860. London, 1860. Reports of the Commission of Inquiry, Palestine, Disturbances in May, 1921, Command # 1540, London, 1921 (the Haycraft Report). Statement of British Policy in Palestine, Command # 1700, London, 1922 (the Churchill White Paper). Report of the Commission on the Disturbances of August, 1929, Command #3530, London, 1930 (the Shaw Report). John Hope Simpson. Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development, Command #3686, London, 1930. Palestine. Statement of Policy by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, Command #3692, 1930 (the Passfield White Paper). Census of Palestine, 1931. Vol. I, Palestine, Part 1, Report by E. Mills, B.A., O.B.E., Assistant Chief Secretary of Census, Alexandria, 1933. Palestine Royal Commission Report, Command #5479, London, 1937 (the Peel Report). Palestine Partition Commission Report, Command #5854, London, 1938 (the Woodhead Report). Palestine: Statement by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, Command #5893, London, 1938. Palestine. A Statement of Policy, Command #6019, London, 1939 (the MacDonald White Paper). Report by His Britannic Majesty's Government to the Council ofthe League ofNations on the Administration ofPalestine and Trans-Jordan for the Year 1925, Colonial No. 20. Report ... for the Year 1926, Colonial No. 26. Report ... for the Year 1927, Colonial No. 31. Report ... for the Year 1928, Colonial No. 40. Report ... for the Year 1929, Colonial No. 47. Report ... for the Year 1930, Colonial No. 59. Report ... for the Year 1931, Colonial No. 75. Report ... for the Year 1932, Colonial No. 82. Report ... for the Year 1933, Colonial No. 94. Report ... for the Year 1934, Colonial No. 104. Report ... for the Year 1935, Colonial No. 112. Report ... for the Year 1936, Colonial No. 129. Report ... for the Year 1937, Colonial No. 146. Report ... for the Year 1938, Colonial No. 166. Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, A Survey offtlestine, 3 vols., Palestine, Government Printer, 1945-1946. Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Report to the United States Government and His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. Lausanne, Switzerland, April 20, 1946. Department of State, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1946. Supplementary Memorandum by the Government offtlestine, including Notes on Evidence given to the United Nations'Special Committee on Palestine up to the l2th July, 1947, Government of Palestine, Jerusalem, 1947. League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission: Minutes of the First Session, Geneva, 192 1. Doc. No. C. 416. M. 296. 192 1. VI. Mandate for Palestine C. 259. M. 314. 1922. VI. Mandate for Palestine C.P.M. 466. C. 667. M. 396. 1922. VI. (same as Cmd. 1785, 1922). Minutes of the Thirteenth Session, 1928. Doc. No. C. 341. M. 99. 1928. VI. Minutes of the Twenty Seventh Session, 1935. C. 251. M. 123. 1935. VI. Minutes of the Twenty Ninth Session, 1936. C. 259. M. 153. 1936. VI. Minutes of the Thirty Second (Extraordinary) Session, 1937. C. 330. M. 222. 1937, VI. Minutes of the Thirty Ninth Session, Geneva, 1939. II. Books, Pamphlets, and ArticlesEvery source drawn upon for this book is fully cited in the reference notes and each had a role in the development of the research. The list that follows is neither a repetitious account of every single source used nor an exhaustive compilation of the infinite number of publications on the subjects of this book. It is, rather, a partial listing of those works principally called upon and thus abbreviated in some of the reference notes. In a few instances, I have noted works that contain related information not directly discussed here, but of value to those interested in further reading.AAfricanus, Leo. The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained. Ed. Dr. Robert Brown. London, 1896.Alami, Musa. "The Lesson of Palestine." The Middle East Journal, October 1949. Al-Ayubi, Al-Haytham. "Future Arab Strategy in the Light of the Fourth War." Shuun Filastiniyya, Beirut, October 1974. Al-Azm, Khaled. Memoirs, 3 vols. Al-Dar al Muttahida lil-Nashr, 1972. Alkalay, Judah ben Solomon Hai. Destiny of the Lord. Vienna, 1857. Alon, Dafha. Arab Radicalism. Jerusalem, 1969. Alroy, Gil Carl. Behind the Middle East Conflict, The Real Impasse Between Arab and Jew. New York, 1975. "Do the Arabs Want Peace?" Commentary, February 1974. Al-Tall, 'Abdallah. The Danger of World Jewry to Islam and Christianity (Arabic). Cairo, 1964. American Christian Palestine Committee. The Arab War Effort, A Documented Account. New York, 1947. Ansari, Mohammed Iqbal. The Arab League 1945-55. Calcutta, 1968. Antonius, George. The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement Philadelphia, New York, Toronto, 1939. Antoun, Richard. Arab Village-A Social Study ofa TransJordanian Peasant Community. Bloomington, 1972. Arab Higher Committee: Its Origins, Personnel and Purposes. The Documentary Records submitted to the United Nations by Nation Associates, New York, May 1947. The Arab Refugee Problem: How It Can Be Solved. Proposals submitted to the General Assembly of the United Nations, December 1951, by Dr. Dewey Anderson, Dr. Henry A. Atkinson, Dr. Donald B. Cloward, Dr. Frederick May Eliot, The Rt. Rev. Charles K. Gilbert, Earl G. Harrison, The Very Rev. Ivan Lee Holt, Freda Kirchway, Dr. Kenneth Scott Lautourette, Archibald MacLeish, Dr. Daniel L. Marsh, The Rt. Rev. Norman B. Nash, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, James G. Patton, Paul Porter, Jacob S. Potofsky, Prof. James T. Shotwell, Dr. Russell H. Stafford, Sumner WeRes. Arab vs. Arab, pamphlet. Keighley, England, 1939. Atiyah, Edward. The Arabs. Edinburgh, 1955. Atlas of Israel. Jerusalem, 1970. Aumann, Moshe. Land Ownership in Palestine 1880-1948. Jerusalem: Israel Academic Committee on the Middle East, 1976. Avriel, Ehud. Open the Gates. New York, 1975. Azcarate, Pablo. Mission in Palestine 1948-1952. Washington, 1966. BBachi, Roberto. The Population of Israel. Jerusalem, 1974.Baer, Gabriel. Population and Society in the Arab East. London, 1964. Baldensperger, Philip G. "The Immovable East," Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly. London,1917. Barker, E.B.B. Syria and Egypt Under the Last Five Sultans of Turkey. London, 1876. Baron, Salo Wittmayer. Ancient and Medieval Jewish History. New Brunswick, N.J., 1972. A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 3 vols. New York, 1937. Barron, J.B. Report and General Abstracts ofthe Census ofPalestine, 1922. Jerusalem, n.d. Battuta, Ibn. Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354. Trans. H.A.R. Gibb. London, 1957. Bauer, Yehuda.,Flight and Rescue, the Organized Escape of the Jewish Survivors of Eastern Europe 1944-1948. New York, 1970. Beek, M.A. A Short History of1srael From Abraham to Bar Cochba. London, 1963. Begin, Menachem. The Revolt New York, 1977. Bein, Alex. Theodore HerzI, A Biography. Trans. Maurice Samuel. Philadelphia, 1940. 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