ISRAEL vs PALESTINE
Part 2
This is the 2nd Part of this series of Israel vs Palestine. I did write the First Part, and here is a link to it. I would suggest that you do read it as it gives another part of the story.
https://medium.com/@chuckharrill/israel-vs-palestine-668f83bf5b59
I received a reply to my 1st part which they said that it is a very complex issue, and indeed it is. That is why this is being done in parts, as there is too much information out there to confine to one piece. I am providing source material, some history, as well as links to information that will, I hope, shed a bit more light on this. In doing that my desire is to educate you so that you will be able to see things a bit more clearer on this.
To start with in this discussion, I believe that we should get a bit of historical perspective. Yeah yeah, I know some are saying that Jews are some recent arrivals to the area, but that line of thought is not real accurate. It is the Jews, who are the aboriginal people of the Holy Land and have been for over 2000 years. The others who lived before, Phoenicians, Moabites, Philistines, it is the Jews who remain.
the Arabs, are aboriginal to Arabia, not The Holy Land. The Jews, and Hebrew existed some 1000 years before the rise of Islam. So to be a bit factual, it is the Arabs, who are the interlopers, especially after the second wave of Arab migration in the late 19th and 20th Centuries.
(1&2) https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3915966/jewish/Timeline-of-Jewish-History.htm#q2
As we can see by the above timeline, there were times of prosperity and dark days with invaders from Babylon, Persia, Greek and Roman, but we still stayed! Even after the Arabs came in the 7th Century CE, we stayed there. The dark days during the Crusades was especially brutal, with those from Europe killed as many Jews as well as Arabs. Then in the mid 16th Century Israel/The Holy Land became part of the Ottoman Empire. Yet the Jews stayed, even if it was brutal and were refused to worship at the ruins of the Temple.
The Turks taxed the Jews on the basis of the Qur’anic command that the “People of the Book” (primarily Jews and Christians) must be made to “pay the jizya [tax] with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” (9:29). In 1674, a Jesuit priest, Father Michael Naud, wrote that the Jews of Jerusalem were resigned to “paying heavily to the Turk for their right to stay here…. They prefer being prisoners in Jerusalem to enjoying the freedom they could acquire elsewhere…. The love of the Jews for the Holy Land, which they lost through their betrayal [of Christ], is unbelievable.”19 And Jews were coming from elsewhere to live there: “Many of them come from Europe to find a little comfort, though the yoke is heavy.”
It was indeed. Even aside from the political oppression, the land itself was increasingly inhospitable. By the end of the eighteenth century, only two hundred fifty thousand to three hundred thousand people, including ten thousand to fifteen thousand Jews, lived in what had become a backwater with a harsh and forbidding terrain and climate.21 Yet still Jews came. In 1810, the disciples of the great Talmudic scholar known as the Vilna Gaon arrived in the land of Israel from the Russian Empire, and rejoiced even though they were well aware of the hardness of the land to which they had come.
In 1847, the U.S. Navy commander William F. Lynch made an expedition to the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the surrounding areas, and encountered Jews all over the region. In Tiberias, wrote Lynch, “we had letters to the chief rabbi of the Jews, who came to meet us, and escorted us through a labyrinth of streets to the house of Heim Weisman, a brother Israelite.”23 He found that the Jews of the city “have two synagogues, the Sephardim and Askeniazim, but lived harmoniously together.” He found evidence of continued Jewish immigration: “There are many Polish Jews, with light complexions, among them. They describe themselves as very poor, and maintained by the charitable contributions of Jews abroad, mostly in Europe.”24 In Tiberias, the Jews outnumbered others: “There are about three hundred families, or one thousand Jews, in this town. The sanhedrim consists of seventy rabbis, of whom thirty are natives and forty Franks, mostly from Poland, with a few from Spain. The rabbis stated that controversial matters of discipline among Jews, all over the world, are referred to this sanhedrim. Besides the Jews, there are in Tiberias from three to four hundred Muslims and two or three Latins, from Nazareth.”
Spencer, Robert. The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process (p. 11). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition
Up until Jews a majority of Jews started to come back in the late 19th Century and making the land flourish again. Swamps had been drained and farms and orchards planted. Even Arab Nationalists liked and worked with the Jews to make life better for the Palestinian Arabs.
For example, Dawood Barakat, editor of the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram, wrote: “It is absolutely necessary that an entente be made between the Zionists and Arabs, because the war of words can only do evil. The Zionists are necessary for the country: The money which they will bring, their knowledge and intelligence, and the industriousness which characterizes them will contribute without doubt to the regeneration of the country.
Neville Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (University of California Press: 1976), 8.
Then there is a fallacy that the Jews wanted to be Colonists/Oppressors of the people and displace them.
Our settlers do not come here as do the colonists from the Occident to have natives do their work for them; they themselves set their shoulders to the plow and they spend their strength and their blood to make the land fruitful. But it is not only for ourselves that we desire its fertility. The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively; we desire to teach them further: together with them we want to cultivate the land — to “serve” it, as the Hebrew has it. The more fertile this soil becomes, the more space there will be for us and for them. We have no desire to dispossess them: we want to live with them. — Martin Buber
From an open letter from Martin Buber to Mahatma Gandhi in 1939, accessed at GandhiServe.com
Even Emir Faisal saw that the Zionist/Jewish Movement went hand in hand with the Arab Nationalist Movement, both fighting against Imperialism. And in a letter Harvard Professor and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter:
The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with deep est sympathy on the Zionist movement . . . We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home . . . We are working together for a reformed and revised Near East and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is nationalist and not imperialist. And there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other (emphasis added).
Naomi Comay, Arabs Speak Frankly on the Arab- Israeli Conflict (Printing Miracle Ltd., 2005), 8.
As we are able to see with what I have provided, the Jews have had a long attachment to the Land of Israel/The Holy Land. There have been good periods as well as dark and bad periods. We still stayed. We can also see that there was some sort of coexistence between Jew and Arab as when the Jews came the land began to prosper again, and may Arabs migrated in order to gain a better quality of life than n their home countries.
We now move to the early 20th Century, and the outbreak of the First World War, the Jews of Israel were caught between a rock and a hard spot. The Imperialistic British Empire and the War with the Ottoman Empire. There were a lot of promises made between Sherif Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon on what lands were to be ceded to the Arabs for their help fighting the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. From what have read there were a lot of promises, but the Independence of Arabs in Palestine was left out, on purpose.
I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphati cally, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to be lieve at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein.
“Report of a Committee Setup to Consider Certain Correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon and the Sharif of Mecca in 1915/1916,” UK Parliament (March 16, 1939).
The next part or Part 3, we will discuss from the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 , the Period of the British Mandate. Thought that I could include it here, but with the amount of information and what happened is mind boggling to say the least.
I thank you all for reading this and welcome any and all comments. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask, and I will answer. Especially if you would like any more information I will happily provide.
