Exposing the Lies of Ben Shapiro and The History of Palestine #2
EBP Files (2) This is Myth#2 where he attempts to distort Historical events.
I’ve decided to split this article into 3–5 parts because there are so many events that are discussed inaccurately and have been overly simplified to favor Israel.
In this article, we’ll cover the history of Palestine from 1917 the Balfour Declaration to 1937 Peel Commission’s Land Partition.
Myth#2: Land partitioning failure is Israel’s fault
Ben’s Statement — Claim#1: In 1917, the British promised the Jews the entire area of Palestine at the time, Israel and Transjordan which is today’s Jordan.
This claim is inaccurate because the British never “promised the entire area of Palestine” to the Jews. Neither was the land area specified to them. You can read the Balfour declaration below. It was done as an act of support for the Zionist movement which I’ve never heard Ben acknowledge.
The question I would like to ask my readers is why the British would give land to the Jews in Palestine. Why not Britain or its allies who were in power at that time, why choose the Middle East of all places? And who gives them the right to give this land to someone else?
The British conquest of Palestine was completed in a month, after which a military administration was set up in the occupied territories. Palestine became the southern section of the OETA (Occupied Enemy Territory Administration), of which the western section was the territory now occupied by Lebanon, the north was Syria, and the east consisted of Transjordan. This system continued until June 1920 when the Near East was divided between the French and British Mandates. (1)
Britain was careful to distinguish this chain of command from the hierarchy already in place in Egypt in order to avoid being accused of entertaining any ambition to annex Palestine. However, once the system had been put in place, it enabled London to defer the fulfillment of the promises it had made to its various partners until the conclusion of the war.
France was thus frustrated in its plans to share the government of Palestine: Paris had been keen to take on the administration of the districts of Jaffa and Jerusalem, while those of Hebron and Gaza would be left to Britain.
The Arab revolutionaries, in a similar maneuver, were confined to the eastern bank of the River Jordan, while the implementation of the Balfour Declaration was also delayed until such time as the military regime might be terminated.(1)
Remember, this declaration was way before the Holocaust took place. If this doesn’t speak colonization of the land of Palestine (division between France and Britain, I don’t know what does). I concluded that it’s because when you answer my question, you will undoubtedly come across the foundation of Zionism —and its agenda which the Britishers are in support of. (I’ll write a separate article on that someday)
The day General Allenby arrived in Gaza, the British press published a letter that had been sent to the Zionist leadership from the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour a week earlier, on 2 November. The ‘Balfour Declaration’, as it became known, affirmed that ‘His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’ This public British commitment to the Zionist project gave rise to hostile comment in Cairo, Damascus and Istanbul. But in Gaza the population was too occupied with their cautious return to the homes from which they had fled at the height of the battle. The British expeditionary force busied itself with the northward extension of the railway line that ended at Deir al-Balah.
Negotiations at the League of Nations were nevertheless to occupy another two laborious years before the formal announcement of a British Mandate over Palestine, incorporating the Balfour Declaration and its reference to a ‘Jewish national home’. The Zionist inclination of the Mandate was accentuated by the personal sympathies of Sir Herbert Samuel, which prompted militant Arab circles to reject the very principle of the Mandate. (1)
While the Balfour Declaration expressed support for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine, it did not promise the entire area to the Jews. It’s important to note the nuances and limitations of the document. This public commitment to Zionism came during a complex time, with British forces occupying the territory and local populations dealing with the aftermath of the conflict.
And if you read the declaration carefully, you notice that they’ll help Jews establish a land without taking the civil rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine. This claim that they mention the land of Palestine (which Ben certainly doesn’t recognize) and the civil rights of the people in the official document is proof enough that its inhabitants (the current Palestinians) are the rightful owners of it and that the country of Israel is formed on an occupied land.
Ben’s Statement — Claim#2: In 1920, the Arabs began Pogroms, a mass murder of Jews in Jerusalem as a sign of anger at the British mandate in Palestine.
Claim #2 is highly inaccurate and misleading. While there were indeed clashes and tensions between Jewish and Arab communities in Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine during the British Mandate period, the statement falsely presents it as a one-sided “pogrom” initiated by Arabs against Jews. Here’s a breakdown of the historical context:
1. Pogroms: The term “pogrom” refers to organized massacres or persecutions of a particular group, often based on ethnicity or religion. While there were violent incidents involving both Jewish and Arab communities during the Mandate, attributing all of them solely to Arabs and labeling them as “pogroms” is inaccurate and simplifies a complex historical context.
2. The 1920 Jerusalem Riots: Specific to the claim’s mention of 1920, the Jerusalem riots stemmed from complex religious and political tensions. While the immediate trigger was a dispute over access to holy sites, underlying factors included Arab opposition to Zionist aspirations and growing Jewish immigration during the British Mandate. Both sides engaged in violence during the riots, resulting in casualties on both sides.
Also, Ben does not mention the 1920 Nebi Musa Riots but refers to it as Arab pogroms, which changes the entire context of the narrative. The death toll was 5 Jews and 4 Arabs.
Watch what Palestine 1920 events were like here: https://youtu.be/QUCeQt8zg5o?si=u-kZ4ngRUvR3H_l-
Ben’s Statement — Claim#3: In 1922, the British government in response announced in a white paper that the Transjordan area 70% of Palestine would be sliced off and made an Arab state that would become Jordan.
While it’s true that the 1922 Churchill White Paper did establish Transjordan as an Arab emirate (later becoming Jordan), the statement is inaccurate in a few ways:
- Percentage: The Transjordan area comprised almost half of the original Mandatory Palestine territory, not 70%.
- Motivation: The White Paper’s decision to allocate Transjordan wasn’t solely in response to the 1921 Jaffa Riots (Ben also either deliberately excludes the year 1921 when the riots happened or doesn’t find it as important to mention, thereby changing narratives.)
- Brief History of Jaffa Riots of 1921: The Jaffa riots were a series of violent riots in Mandatory Palestine on May 1–7, 1921, which began as a confrontation between two Jewish groups but developed into an attack by Arabs on Jews and then reprisal attacks by Jews on Arabs. The rioting began in Jaffa and spread to other parts of the country. The riot resulted in the deaths of 47 Jews and 48 Arabs, 146 Jews and 73 Arabs were wounded, and hundreds more were made homeless.
- Watch the part of Jewish Migration and settlement from @7:25 https://youtu.be/EtvqioF81BU?si=bdhUaY6U2tqmSfeO. “Hebrew labor” refers to the ideal adopted by some Jews in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and later embraced by Zionism to favor hiring Jewish rather than non-Jewish workers.
- Back then the British Legal official in Palestine quoted: “The settlements created an ‘economic apartheid’ which was bound to strengthen the resistance of Arabs to Jewish immigration.” Because, if you’re not watching the video or reading Wikipedia, the Zionist immigrants introduced a system of segregation in which Arab farmers were dispossessed and evicted. The Jaffa riots were the consequences of economic apartheid.
- Arab State: Although Transjordan became an Arab state, it wasn’t envisioned as a complete fulfillment of Arab aspirations in Palestine.
Here’s a more accurate breakdown:
- Churchill White Paper (1922): In response to Arab concerns and to manage rising tensions, the British government issued the White Paper. This document acknowledged the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to a Jewish National Home in Palestine but clarified that it “did not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home.” The violence led to British investigations and ultimately contributed to the formulation of the 1922 Churchill White Paper. This document clarified British policy on Jewish immigration, setting quotas and restricting land purchases in response to Arab concerns.
- Transjordan: The White Paper also formally established Transjordan as an emirate under Emir Abdullah, effectively excluding it from the territory envisioned for the Jewish National Home. This decision stemmed from various factors, including:
- Early British promises: During WWI, the British had made promises to Emir Abdullah, including support for Transjordanian autonomy.
- Geopolitical considerations: Transjordan served as a buffer zone between British territories and neighboring French mandates.
- Arab appeasement: Establishing Transjordan offered some concessions to Arab aspirations while still allowing for Jewish immigration and development in the remaining territory.
Ben’s Statement — Claim#4: In 1937, the Peel commission recommended a rump state for the Jews in which the British would retain control over Jaffa and Jerusalem, the Arabs would get the entire Negev and nearly the entirety of Judea and Samaria and the Jews would get a tiny swath of territory along the coast including Tel Aviv and Haifa.
He jumps directly to 1937, missing around 15 years of the history of Palestine. These are also the years when some of the most important events occurred in history, which you must acknowledge if you want to understand the ongoing genocide and the formation of Hamas in the first place. You can skip this part (from this line breaker to the other) and scroll down if you wish to only read the refutation of the above claim of land division.
Briefing a bit about those 15 years, the Britishers used a lot of internal politics in Palestine between the powerful wealthy families of the land (Husseinis and the Nashashibis) to ensure that a successful revolt against colonization would not be possible in the region.
As a result, Arabs did not have one leader to commit to, which created a lot of divisions in the region and gave rise to different ideologies that disrupted the inhabitants. The Divide and Conquer policy used by Britain had worked in this region as well.
A lot of revolutions took place because of the Zionist agenda of a land for the Jewish people in Palestine. The main ideology was to reject the British proposal of land division between Jews and Arabs. Arabs weren’t Anti-semitic, they were anti-Britain and anti-Zionist colonialist ideas. They were not against the migration but the settlement in itself was the problem.
The second foundational mythology was that the Palestinians, from early on, resorted to an anti-Semitic campaign of terror when the first settlers arrived and until the creation of the state of Israel. As the diaries of the early Zionists show, they were well received by the Palestinians, who offered them abode and taught them in many cases how to cultivate the land. It was only when it became clear that these settlers did not come to live next to or with the native population, but instead of it, that the Palestinian resistance began. And when that resistance started it was no different from any other anti-colonialist struggle. (2)
In Gaza as elsewhere in Palestine, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration on 2 November was marked each year by a strike of merchants and officials, and there was also widespread action of the same kind when Lord Balfour visited Palestine in March 1925. (3)
Military government in Palestine continued until July 1920 when the first high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, was appointed to head a civil administration. Negotiations at the League of Nations were nevertheless to occupy another two laborious years before the formal announcement of a British Mandate over Palestine, incorporating the Balfour Declaration and its reference to a ‘jewish national home’. The Zionist inclination of the Mandate was accentuated by the personal sympathies of Sir Herbert Samuel, which prompted militant Arab circles to reject the very principle of the Mandate. The Muslim–Christian Associations, (which organised nationalist activities), appointed an Arab Executive. In July 1922 it issued a reaction to the declaration of the British Mandate demanding a Palestine that would be ‘Arab, free and autonomous.’
In Geneva, Victor Jacobson, the representative of the World Zionist Organisation in the League of Nations, presented a plan motivated by the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. According to his plan, Palestine would be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state, into which more than 100,000 Arabs should be transferred, in return for financial compensation. Gaza would play a key role in this plan, since it would be the only coastal sector that would remain under Arab control. The future Arab entity would be empowered to enter into a confederation with the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. However, the nationalist Arabs were less alarmed by such Zionist projects than by the inflation in Jewish immigration, accelerated by the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany. There were 61,854 Jewish immigrants in 1935, as against 42,359 in 1934, 30,327 in 1933 and only 9,533 in 1932.
The discovery that arms were being delivered to the Jewish Haganah militia gave fresh impetus to the secret preparations that were being undertaken in Arab circles. Ezzedin al-Qassam was the first to go into action, leading a guerrilla force of a dozen men before being killed in an ambush set by British troops in November 1935. On 15 April 1936 the supporters of the late sheikh (now known as alshahid, the ‘Martyr’) took their vengeance when they halted a bus and killed three Jewish passengers. The Haganah reprisals that followed led to further Arab violence in Tel-Aviv and Jaffa. Hajj Amin al-Husseini called for a ‘Holy National Jihad’ (al-jihad al-watani al-muqqadas). Though there was no official representative of Gaza on the Arab Higher Committee, the general strike it called took effect as strongly in southern Palestine as elsewhere in the country. This was the onset of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, which the Palestinian nationalists began to call a ‘revolution’ (thawra).
A total of 20,000 British troops were deployed in Palestine against some 2,000 insurgents. In April 1937, the mayor of Gaza, Fahmi al-Husseini, warned the British authorities against any suggestion that the country could be partitioned in order to establish a Jewish state. As he put it: ‘It would be better for the British government to consign the inhabitants of Palestine to death and destruction, or even to envelop them with poison gas, than to inflict upon them any such plan.’
The British plan for the partition of Palestine, published in July 1937, led to a fresh outbreak of the nationalist uprising. In Gaza, where one of the local leaders of the rebellion was a Christian, Butros Sayegh, only the intervention of Father Elias Rishawi, the leader of the Greek Orthodox community, saved Muslims convicted of participation from being hanged. Three months later, Hajj Amine al-Husseini escaped arrest by fleeing to Lebanon, following which the rebellion, besieged on all sides, set up its headquarters in Damascus.
The British mobilised some 6,000 Jewish auxiliaries, mostly recruited from the Haganah, who were encouraged to build fortified settlements along strategic axes. These were built in salient positions, even in southern Palestine, in both the Negev and in the Gaza region. They formed part of Britain’s strategy to secure their access routes to Sinai and to the Suez Canal, an obsession of the British leadership.
The human costs quickly mounted for the Palestinians, whose death toll by mid-October was 1,000, by comparison with eighty Jews and thirty-seven British who had lost their lives.
The ‘Great Revolt’, launched in 1936, had by now effectively been bled to death. In three years, 3,000 men had been lost from the Palestinian population of less than a million people. Gaza had not suffered as much as the towns in central Palestine, but its trade was at a semi-standstill and a string of Jewish settlements had made their appearance on its near horizons. (3)
Refutation of Claim#4 — In 1937, the Peel commission recommended a rump state for the Jews in which the British would retain control over Jaffa and Jerusalem, the Arabs would get the entire Negev and nearly the entirety of Judea and Samaria and the Jews would get a tiny swath of territory along the coast including Tel Aviv and Haifa.
As for the rump state that he mentions and the amount of land division for both the Jews and Arabs is inaccurately stated, here’s what’s present on Wikipedia:
Check out the map proposed and the lies Ben spoke about the area division available on Wikipedia:
The solution proposed by the Peel Commission was partition. The Jews were to gain statehood in 20 percent of the territory of Palestine, including most of the coastline and some of the country’s most fertile agricultural land, in the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee. The Arabs were allotted the poorest lands of Palestine, including the Negev Desert and the Arava Valley, as well as the hill country of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
— Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History
The Zionist response was noted as this:
While some factions at the Congress supported the Peel Report, arguing that later the borders could be adjusted (On what basis??), others opposed the proposal because the Jewish State would be too small. The Congress decided to reject the specific borders recommended by the Peel Commission, but empowered its executive to negotiate a more favorable plan for a Jewish State in Palestine. In the wake of the Peel Commission the Jewish Agency set up committees to begin planning for the state. At the time, it had already created a complete administrative apparatus amounting to “a Government existing side by side with the Mandatory Government.
At the Bloudan Conference of 1937, parties from all over the Arab world rejected both the partition and establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, thus claiming all of Palestine. The Peel Commission’s recommendations were rejected by the participating delegates while the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine was ongoing against the British authorities who supported and increased Jewish immigration in Palestine. The Bloudan Conference held historical significance for being an early display of collective Arab concern regarding the Zionist movement.
Here’s why the Arabs rejected the plan, also from Wikipedia:
The proposed land swaps and population transfers were seen as annulling and inverting a century of economic development of the littoral region, with, apart from Jaffa and Gaza, Palestinians dispossessed of the essential rural and urban heritage that had evolved over the preceding century of coastal development. Jerusalem was placed outside the future Palestinian state.
Palestinians were shocked both by the declaration their land would be divided, and that they themselves would be denied statehood (but only a union with Transjordan), while the Jewish state, extending over a third of the country, would absorb the whole of the Galilee, where an overwhelming percentage of the land was owned by Arabs and Jews had only a slender presence.
In compensation, the Arabs were offered valuable areas to the east of Jordan and the southern portion of the Beisan sub-district where irrigation would have been possible. Indignation was widespread with Arabs complaining that the Plan had allotted to them “the barren mountains”, while the Jews would receive most of the five cultivable plains, the maritime Plain, the Acre Plain, the Marj Ibn ‘Amir, Al Huleh and the Jordan Valley.
For the Arabs, the plan envisaged giving Zionists the best land, with 82% of Palestine’s principal export, citrus fruit, consigned to Jewish control.
(1): Passage from Gaza — A History by Jean Pierre Filiu (The British Mandate — The Military Government)
(2): Gaza in Crises — Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe (Myth 2: Palestinians resorted to acts of terror against Jewish settlers prior to the creation of Israel)
(3): Passage from Gaza — A History by Jean Pierre Filiu (The Great Revolt)
We’ll continue from the events of 1939 in the next article.
