There IS an introduction to this series of articles which can be found on
PROVING THE JEWISH HISTORICAL CLAIM TO PALESTINE
Image via Wikipedia
1929 Hebron Massacre, epitomizes plight of the Jews, without Israel they are vulnerable, always!
(This is an update to the historical study [23 reasons to oppose a Palestinian State] from some years ago of Joseph Alexander Norland, who is a supporter of Israel who lives in Canada. His work has become difficult to access, such is the speed of change on the net. Furthermore, these historical studies are not in essence academic, but must be made to live through tight organization, people fighting to change reality, in the present)
Said Norland, in his 23 Reasons
“…On the other hand, it is easy to establish and document definitively that the “International community” has accepted the Jewish historical claim toPalestine, and consequently the claim of the Jewish people to a national home inPalestine. To substantiate this statement, I quote from the preamble to the text of the League of Nations Mandate:
“Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country ; and
Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country…”
NOTE ON SOURCES
The Arab narrative is based on antisemitism, hence on lies, so sources are most important to us on 4international
We source everything, but not only that, we are stringent in ensuring that our sources are true. Note that a reference to a book based on lies is no more than a reference to lies. This is the main method of lies and antisemitism today, to link to lies, under the cover of those lies being in a book. Publication in a book with a glossy cover does not add up to the truth.
The terms of the Mandate are now so readily available, even Wikipedia carries the full thing
The terms of the Mandate are thus very widely available. Even on Wikipedia.
The antisemitic lie about these terms of the Mandate do not lie in distorting them but in distorting the context (for example in minimising their importance and relevance for today)
There are many ways to tell a lie. One of the biggest problems is that the liars often simply ignore deliberately.
The Liars of antisemitism and anti communism also often lie by ignoring important facts or aspects of the historical reality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Mandate_for_Palestine
also
http://www.facebook.com/pages/British-Mandate-of-Palestine/104122972957338
THE ARABS AT THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE THEMSELVES ACKNOWLEDGED THE JEWS CLAIM TO PALESTINE
Among the parties present at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, were Felix Frankfurter and Chaim Weizmann on behalf of the Zionist movement, and the Emir Feisal on behalf of the Hedjaz (now Saudi Arabia). In the course of their meetings, Feisal wrote a letter addressed to Frankfurter and dated 3 March, 1919. The letter, which may be found at http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/feisal2.html stated:
We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Parisis fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.
{THE FULL TEXT OF THESE TWO LETTERS, FEISAL TO ASSOCIATE OF WEIZMAN, FRANKFURTER}
DELEGATION HEDJAZIENNE,
Paris, March 3, 1919.
DEAR MR. FRANKFURTER: I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American Zionists to tell you what I have often been able to say to Dr. Weizmann in Arabia and Europe.
We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.
We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.
With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national 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.
People less informed and less responsible than our leaders and yours, ignoring the need for co-operation of the Arabs and Zionists have been trying to exploit the local difficulties that must necessarily arise in Palestine in the early stages of our movements. Some of them have, I am afraid, misrepresented your aims to the Arab peasantry, and our aims to the Jewish peasantry, with the result that interested parties have been able to make capital out of what they call our differences.
I wish to give you my firm conviction that these differences are not on questions of principle, but on matters detail such as must inevitably occur in every contact of neighbouring peoples, and as are easily adjusted by mutual good will. Indeed nearly all of them will disappear with fuller knowledge.
I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of civilised peoples of the world.
Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
(Sgd.) Feisal. 5th MARCH, 1919.
Felix Frankfurter’s reply:
ROYAL HIGHNESS:
Allow me, on behalf of the Zionist Organisation, to acknowledge your recent letter with deep appreciation.
Those of us who come from the United States have already been gratified by the friendly relations and the active co-operation maintained between you and the Zionist leaders, particularly Dr. Weizmann. We knew it could not be otherwise; we knew that the aspirations of the Arab and the Jewish peoples were parallel, that each aspired to re-establish its nationality in its own homeland, each making its own distinctive contribution to civilisation, each seeking its own peaceful mode of life.
The Zionist leaders and the Jewish people for whom they speak have watched with satisfaction the spiritual vigour of the Arab movement. Themselves seeking justice, they are anxious that the just national aims of the Arab people be confirmed and safeguarded by the Peace Conference.
We knew from your acts and your past utterances that the Zionist movement-in other words the national aim of the Jewish people-had your support and the support of the Arab people for whom you speak. These aims are now before the Peace Conference as definite proposals by the Zionist Organisation. We are happy indeed that you consider these proposals “moderate and proper,” and that we have in you a staunch supporter for their realisation. For both the Arab and the Jewish peoples there are difficulties ahead-difficulties that challenge the united statesmanship of Arab and Jewish leaders. For it is no easy task to rebuild two great civilisations that have been suffering oppression and misrule for centuries. We each have our difficulties we shall work out as friends, friends who are animated by similar purposes, seeking a free and full development for the two neighbouring peoples. The Arabs and Jews are neighbours in territory; we cannot but live side by side as friends.
Very respectfully,
(Sgd.) Felix Frankfurter.
(A GRERAT RESOURCE!) This page was produced by Joseph E. Katz
Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst
Brooklyn, New York
http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/feisal2.html
Joseph Alexander Norland commented on the vital detail in these letters…”Unless Feisal himself recognized the Jewish historical claim toPalestine, there would be no meaning to the sentence, “we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home”. Hence it is clear that the Jewish claim toPalestinewas already well established even among the Arabs, when the League of Nations granted the British a mandate overPalestineon July 24, 1922.”
THE HISTORICAL PROOF OF THE JEWISH HISTORICAL CLAIM TO PALESTINE
As an example of the many web sites which deal with the Jewish connection to Palestine I quote from
http://www.rosenblit.com/Palestine.htm
In 135 CE, after having long-become a province of theRoman Empire,
Judea’s third and last revolt againstRomewas crushed by Emperor Hadrian; butRome’s army also suffered devastating losses, including the complete annihilation of its illustrious XXII Legion. In furtherance ofRome’s costly victory, Hadrian — in a blatant propaganda effort to delegitimize further national Jewish claims to the Land — renamed the province Palestina (Palestine) after the Philistines, a long-extinct Aegean people who had disappeared from History approximately a millennium earlier.
However, although the province had been converted from Judea (– Land of the Jews –) into Palestina (– Land of the Philistines –), it continued to be populated by Jews, together with substantial minority populations of Christians and Samaritans, but hardly any Arabs, at least until the great Arab invasion of 638 CE, as a result of which, 73 years later, Byzantium’s Christian basilica known as the Church of Saint Mary of Justinian, which then sat atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, was remade into Islam’s Al-Aksa mosque. But even under the rule of the Arab and all subsequently superseding empires, the Jewish people nevertheless maintained a continuous national presence in “Palestine” — right up until the resurrection therein of the Jewish nation-state ofIsraelin 1948 CE.”
With Britain accepting the mandate over Palestine, subject to the conditions of the League of Nations, Britain committed herself to establishing the Jewish National Home in Palestine by encouraging Jewish immigration and settlement.
VALIDATING THE CLAIM THAT BRITAIN WAS COMMITTED TO BUILDING A JEWISH NATIONAL HOME IN PALESTINE.
LOOKING AT THE VERY TEXT OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS MANDATE TO BRITAIN.
We reproduce some of the articles of the League of Nations Mandate.
The text of the mandate stipulates:
Article 2.
The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants ofPalestine, irrespective of race and religion.
Article 4.
An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the Administration, to assist and take part in the development of the country. The Zionist organisation, so long as its organisation and constitution are in the opinion of the Mandatory appropriate, shall be recognised as such agency. It shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty’s Government to secure the cooperation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home.
Article 5.
The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of, the Government of any foreign Power
Article 6.
The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency. referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews, on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.
THE SPECIFIC RIGHTS TO THE ARABS IN THE MANDATE
Clearly, the Jewish claim on Palestine is not only recognized, but specific measures are stipulated as to how to ensure that the right is transformed into a reality, especially with regard to immigration, settlement and soliciting help from world Jewry. In contrast, there is no reference whatever to political rights of any other group, such as Arabs. In fact, in the entire mandate text there is no reference to “Palestinians”, only to “non Jews”.
Of course, the “International community” was well aware of non-Jewish residents in Palestine, and, indeed, ensured that their “civil and religious rights” be enshrined in the text but no political rights, such as sovereigny, are mentioned.
THIS WAS TO BE A JEWISH STATE IN A TINY CORNER OF THE MIDDLE EAST
It was not deemed unjust to expect the Arabs to accept a Jewish National Home in a tiny corner of the Middle East, when huge Arab lands had just been liberated by the Allies from the Ottoman yoke, and when three new Arab kingdoms (Iraq, Transjordan and Saudi Arabia) were in the process of being born. This point of “injustice” was addressed many times by Churchill, Balfour and Col. Richard Meinertzhagen.
The bottom line regarding this point is that the “international community” and Britain in particular undertook the creation of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, and hence there is no justification for creating a second Palestinian-Arab state on part of this land.
MAPS SHOW THE GREATEST TRICK AND INJUSTICE AGAINST THE JEWS
The mandatory power, Britain, betrayed her mandate by slicing off the majority of the territory allotted to the Jews by the League of Nations; the Jewish people should not now be required to relinquish sovereignty over more territory.
1920 – Original territory assigned to the Jewish National Home
1922 – Final territory assigned to the Jewish National Home
The third map from Myths and Facts, shows what became of the Jewish Homeland, as Britain took over the Mandate
Inside the space of 2 short years with frenetic activity and international moves behind closed doors Britain managed to present the fait acompli of a vastly reduced Jewish state to be.
With Transjordan shorn off and presented to the Arabs, Transjordan now Judenfrei as if antisemitism was rubbing salt into the wound, the jews were left with the 22 per cent of the original. Note not the original of say 100 years previously, but the original of 2 years only before, as decided on in the International Law Treaty of San Remo
And this third map shows this very well
This is to be the new Zion, the new state for the Jews, where the Jews could have repose. But even that reality was never acceptable to antisemitism.
Delineating the final geographical area of Palestine designated for the Jewish National Home on September 16, 1922, as described by the Mandatory: from http://www.mythsandfacts.com/conflict/mandate_for_palestine/mandate_for_palestine.htm
IMPORTANCE OF SAN REMO CONFERENCE 1920
(Transjordania is excluded)
After WW I, the major powers at the 1919 Peace Conference inParisagreed on granting the mandate overPalestinetoBritain, along the lines of the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917 (Martin Gilbert, p. 42). The details were fleshed out in the San Remo Conference, April 1920, where the boundaries ofPalestinewere outlined to include contemporaryIsrael, Judea,Samaria,Gaza,Jordanand theGolan Heights.
The political events in 1919-1920 that are relevant to this article include the crowning of the Emir Feisal of Hedjaz as King of Syria and his ouster by force at the hands of the French army that occupied Syria and Lebanon in July 1920 (shortly after the San Remo Conference). As a result, Faisal’s younger brother, Abdullah, made his way to contemporaryJordanat the head of a small band of fighters to help Faisal. Contemporaneously, the Palestinian Arabs had become vocal in their opposition to the Zionist project.
Thus, at the Cairo Conference of March 1921, Churchill took another step in a long series of attempts to appease the Arabs: the east bank ofPalestinewas delivered to Abdullah as his future kingdom, together with a hefty subsidy (i.e., bribe), and the area was excluded from the Jewish National Home. In return, Abdullah gave up the attempt to reinstall his brother as king ofSyria. This exclusion of “Transjordania” from the Jewish National Home was enshrined in the mandate given by the League of Nations toBritainon July 24, 1922.
(Later – Britain’s useless attempts to appease the Palestinian-Arabs and the consequent emboldening of the Palestinian-Arab terrorists which ultimately backfired on the British themselves.)
The exclusion of the East Bank removed 78% of the total area allocated to the Jewish National Home by the League of Nations at San Remo.
(We will also see in the article by Martin Gilbert recently published (Also see Apendix section) which deals in detail with these critical years, 1917 to 1923, that one section of the League of Nations Treaty lays down quite specifically that the making of the to be Jordan into a Jew Free (Judenfrei) area was quite unlawful. That has been the role of Great Britain, to actually make a mockery of the whole process of the British role in the Mandate to create a Jewish Homeland. It is quite ludicrous when you think that in creating or helping to create the Jewish Homeland (supposedly) that Great Britain actually created a Judenfrei area on FOUR FIFTHS of the original space set aside for the Jewish Homeland. I MEAN THERE IS DAYLIGHT ROBBERY AND THEN THERE IS DAYLIGHT ROBBERY while Britain laughs at the Jews)
THE ILLEGAL CEDING OF THE GOLAN TO FRANCE BY THE BRITISH
In 1923, the Golan was ceded byBritaintoFrance, the mandatory power overSyriaandLebanon. The circumstances under which this chunk of land was lopped off the Jewish National Home is explained in an article (see website Camera) posted as follows:
Having discovered the Golan lacks oil but that theMosularea in northernSyriais rich in oil, the British cede the Golan toFrancein return forMosul. TraditionallyMosulwas part ofSyriawhile the Golan was part of theGalilee. In return for the Golan,Francerelinquishes any claim toPalestine.
It is unclear how this act was reconciled with the League of Nations Mandate which stipulated quite explicitly in Article 5:
Article 5.
The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of, the Government of any foreign Power.
FIRST POINT IS: JEWS DEVELOPED DESOLATE, EMPTY LAND
HERE WE DEAL WITH THE EMPTINESS OF THE AREA
(I do not believe that the Jews from 1860 to 1948 pushed one single Arab family out of their home or village)
(As for 1948 when you are a small country, barely on your feet, standing and no more, and you are attacked by 5 powerful countries then you have to take measures to protect yourself. The antisemites who write in a one sided manner about 1948 or 1967 always pick on incidents, true or untrue, and make hay with those incidents true or untrue while obscuring the context, that it was Israel which was attacked)
CIA FACT BOOK
For July, 2001, the CIA fact book gives the following population figures (in millions):Israel- 5.9; “West Bank” – 2.1. Thus, the total population in the area ofPalestinethat corresponds toIsrael, Judea,SamariaandGazais approximately 8 million.
But on the eve of the 1880′s Jewish immigration to Palestine, the country was both desolate and virtually empty. While the population figures until the 1922 Census are estimates, they will suffice to support this thesis.
WE USE DATA ON POPULATION FIGURES FROM PALESTINE SOURCES
The following data are quoted from Palestinian sources, so that the argument of pro-Zionist bias cannot be raised. Specifically, the 1860 and 1890 estimates may be found at http://www.palestineremembered.com/
The area concerned corresponds to contemporary Israel, Judea, Samaria and Gaza:
Total population inPalestine, in 1,000s: 1860 – 411; 1890 – 553; 1922 – 752.
Thus, forty years after the 1880′s Jewish migration toPalestineand the consequent Arab migration, the country still held less than 10% of its current population.
WE WISH TO REPEAT THIS
40 YEARS AFTER THE 1880 JEWISH MIGRATION TOPALESTINEAND SUBSEQUENT ARAB MIOGRATION
COUNTRY STILL LESS THAN 10 PER CENT OF PRESENT POPULATION
(Following on from that, if desolate and empty in 1920, then what was it like in 1880)
WE SHOW THAT PALESTINE WAS DESOLATE AND EMPTY IN THE EARLY 1920s
The fact thatPalestinewas desolate and empty even as late as the early 1920′s is further substantiated by the reports submitted by the British High Commissioner to theLeague of Nations. The following quotations are taken from the UNISPAL site, UNISPAL being the propaganda vector which the UN created specifically to support the Palestinian-Arab propaganda machine. (Surprisingly, I have not seen this material cited in any of the published books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
REPORT TO THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS ITSELF –FIRST REPORT 1921
In his first report for the period July 1920 to June 1921, the British High Commissioner reported to theLeague of Nationsas follows:
It is obvious to every passing traveller, and well-known to every European resident, that the country was before the War, and is now, undeveloped and under-populated. The methods of agriculture are, for the most part, primitive; the area of land now cultivated could yield a far greater product. There are in addition large cultivable areas that are left untilled. The summits and slopes of the hills are admirably suited to the growth of trees, but there are no forests. Miles of sand dunes that could be redeemed, are untouched, a danger, by their encroachment, to the neighbouring tillage. The Jordan and the Yarmuk offer an abundance of water-power; but it is unused. Some industries–fishing and the culture and manufacture of tobacco are examples–have been killed by Turkish laws; none have been encouraged; the markets ofPalestineand of the neighbouring countries are supplied almost wholly fromEurope. The seaborne commerce, such as it is, is loaded and discharged in the open roadsteads ofJaffaandHaifa: there are no harbours. The religious and historical associations that offer most powerful attractions to the whole of the Western, and to a large part of the Eastern world, have hitherto brought to Palestine but a fraction of the pilgrims and travellers, who, under better conditions, would flock to her sacred shrines and famous sites.
The country is under-populated because of this lack of development. There are now in the whole ofPalestinehardly 700,000 people, a population much less than that of theprovinceofGallileealone in the time of Christ.
IT IS WORTH THINKING ABOUT THIS. IN THE WHOLE OFPALESTINE, 700,000, MUCH LESS THAN INONEPROVINCE, GALILLEE IN THE TIME OF CHRIST
BUT READ ON, AND USE SOME COMMON SENSE, WHAT HAPPENS WHEN JEWS WITH THEIR NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS ZEAL, BEGIN TO DEVELOP THE AREA? YOUR HONEST CONCLUSIONS ON THIS ARE MOST IMPORTANT
(We are still on the League of Nations First report of 1921)
As to the contribution of the Jewish population since the 1880′s migrations, the report notes:
After the persecutions inRussiaforty years ago, the movement of the Jews toPalestineassumed larger proportions. Jewish agricultural colonies were founded. They developed the culture of oranges and gave importance to theJaffaorange trade. They cultivated the vine, and manufactured and exported wine. They drained swamps. They planted eucalyptus trees. They practised, with modern methods, all the processes of agriculture. There are at the present time 64 of these settlements, large and small, with a population of some 15,000. Every traveller inPalestinewho visits them is impressed by the contrast between these pleasant villages, with the beautiful stretches of prosperous cultivation about them and the primitive conditions of life and work by which they are surrounded.
(IF YOU WERE HONEST, THEN YOUR CONCLUSION WAS THAT THE ARABS FROM MANY SURROUNDING AREAS TO PALESTINE FLOCKED IN TO FOLLOW THIS DEVELOPMENT. THAT INDEED IS WHAT HAPPENED)
SECOND REPORT TO THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 1924
The spectacular manner and pace with which the immigrating Jews developed the country may be judged, inter alia, from the following passage, cited from the 1924 report of British High Commissioner
Industrial development has been stimulated by the arrival, among the Jewish immigrants, of a considerable number of men with manufacturing experience, and with capital. The majority of them come fromPoland. They have established a number of new industries, mostly at present on a small scale, the greater number in the Jewish town ofTel-Aviv, adjacent toJaffa. In addition, several large Jewish enterprises have been founded, and have either reached, or are about to reach, the producing stage. The most important of these enterprises are a cement factory, with an invested capital of £E.300,000; a flour mill, a vegetable oil and soap factory, and a factory of silicate bricks (made of cement and lime), each involving an expenditure of £E.100,000 or more; and, on a smaller scale, works at Athlit, on the coast, for the production of salt by evaporation, a silk factory and a tannery. The electric power station, with fuel engines, erected at Tel-Aviv under the concession granted to Mr. Rutenberg, has been obliged, after only a year’s working, to instal new engines, more than doubling its original capacity. Similar stations are in course of erection atHaifaand at Tiberias, to supply urgent demands for power and lighting there. The construction of the first hydraulic power station on theJordanhas not yet begun, but the preliminary measures have made further progress.
Jewish agricultural colonisation continues steadily. The extensive swamps of Kabbara, in the Maritime Plain, are being drained and brought under cultivation, in accordance with a concession granted to the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association; the difficulties which had arisen in connection with the claims of about 170 Arab families resident on part of the land having been settled after prolonged negotiations. The town ofTel-Avivis expanding with remarkable rapidity. The population, which was about 2,500 in 1920, is now estimated at over 25,000, and for some time past new houses have been completed at an average rate of two a day. There is much building activity also inHaifaandJerusalemand their suburbs. The Bio-Chemical Faculty, and the Institute of Jewish Studies, of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem have been inaugurated.
http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss307_odd.html
WHAT THE PEEL REPORT OF 1937 SAID ON THIS SUBJECT
DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS BUILT BY THE JEWS INSIDE THE MANDATE
Together with economic development came the entrenchment of democratic political institutions, as the Peel Commission underscored
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/peel1.html
also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Commission
The Jewish National Home is no longer an experiment. The growth of itspopulation has been accompanied by political, social and economic developments along the lines laid down at the outset. The chief novelty is the urban and industrial development. The contrast between the modern democratic and primarily European character of the National Home and that of the Arab world around it is striking. The temper of the Home is strongly nationalist. There can be no question of fusion or assimilation between Jewish and Arab cultures.
{The tiny scratch of land that the Peel outfit proposed to be the Jewish state really needs to be seen to be believed, and also worth studying is the comments by Passia on this, sheer Nazi propaganda in action, See APENDIX}
ARAB POPULATION INCREASE…FELLAHEEN BETTER OFF
As to the contribution of the Jewish development to the Palestinian-Arab population, the report states:
The Arab population shows a remarkable increase since 1920, and it has had some share in the increased prosperity ofPalestine. Many Arab landowners have benefited from the sale of land and the profitable investment of the purchase money. The fellaheen are better off on the whole than they were in 1920. This Arab progress has been partly due to the import of Jewish capital intoPalestineand other factors associated with the growth of the National Home. In particular, the Arabs have benefited from social services which could not have been provided on the existing scale without the revenue obtained from the Jews.
MUCH OF JEWISH LAND WAS SWAMP AND SAND DUNES
The Arab claims that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamps and uncultivated when it was bought.
The Jews contribute more per capita to the revenues ofPalestinethan the Arabs, and the Government has thereby been enabled to maintain public services for the Arabs at a higher level than would otherwise have been possible.
A FAMOUS REPORT FROM A FAMOUS WRITER ON THE ISSUE…THE MARK TWAIN REPORT ON A DESOLATE LAND WHICH WASPALESTINE. HOW MORE OF AN AUTHORITATIVE FIGURE CAN YOU GET!
TO WRECK AND RUIN!
The fact that prior to the Jewish migration,Palestinewas virtually empty and desolate is also supported by numerous accounts provided by travellers, archaeologists and diplomats of the 18th and 19th Centuries. A list of these may be found, inter alia, on the pro-Israeli Web site of http://www.eretzyisroel.org/
as well as on pp 41-44 of:
Netnyahu, Benjamin. Durable Peace.New York: Warner Books, 2000.
Of all the travellers’ accounts, the best known is Mark Twain’s journalistic report of his 1867 tour ofPalestineand other countries. Unlike the other accounts mentioned, which are virtually inaccessible to the average reader, Mark Twain’s book is on the shelves of many a public library. Following are a few quotations from:
From Mark Twain. The Innocents Abroad. Pleasantville (NY): Readers Digest, 1990 (first published 1869).432 pp.
You can find thse wonderful accounts by the great witha nd sage, now incidentally much hated by the pro Muslim Palestine Forever crowd, on this very good url
http://www.shechem.org/machon/mtwain/index.html
[Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain Visits Palestine 1867]
There is not a solitary village throughout its [the valley at the foot ofMountTabor] whole extent – not for thirty miles in either direction.
There are two or three small clusters of Beduin tents, but not a single
permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten
human beings. (P. 311)
MARK TWAIN ON PALESTINE
“ROCKY AND BARE, REPULSIVE AND DREARY LANDSCAPE”
The further we went [on the way fromSamariatoJerusalem] the hotter the sun got and the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became. There could not have been more fragments of stone strewn broadcast over this part of the world if every ten square feet of the land had been occupied by a separate and distinct stonecutter’s establishment for an age. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country. No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches toJerusalem… (P. 358)
Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I thinkPalestinemust be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. The Dead Sea and theSea of Galileesleep in the midst of a vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze or mottled with the shadows of the clouds. Every outline is harsh, every feature is distinct, there is no perspective–distance works no enchantment here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land.
Small shreds and patches of it must be very beautiful in the full flush of spring, however, and all the more beautiful by contrast with the farreaching desolation that surrounds them on every side. I would like much to see the fringes of theJordanin springtime, and Shechem, Esdraelon, Ajalon, and the borders ofGalileebut even then these spots would seem mere toy gardens set at wide intervals in the waste of a limitless desolation.
PALESTINESITS IN SACKCLOTH AND ASHES
Palestine is in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers, that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists – over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead – about whose borders nothing grows but seeds, and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
NAZARETH IS FORLORN
Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; 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 Saviour’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 and unblessed by any feature that is pleasant to the eye.
JERUSALEM A PAUPER VILLAGE
(Fits with later Karl Marx visit and report on Jerusalem)
RenownedJerusalemitself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all
its ancient grandeur and is become a pauper village…Palestineis
desolate and unlovely… (P. 394-5)
BUT VERY RELEVANT AND AUTHORITATIVE … THE MOST IMPORTANT REPORT OF ALL, BY KARL MARX WHEN HE VISITED JERUSALEM. THIS REPORT HAS BEEN HIDDEN FROM US BY THE LEFT OF TODAY.
To finish the picture, be it remembered that the fathers of the Latin Church, almost exclusively composed of Romans, Sardinians, Neapolitans, Spaniards and Austrians, are all of them jealous of the French protectorate, and would like to substitute that of Austria, Sardinia or Naples, the Kings of the two latter countries both assuming the title of King of Jerusalem; and that the sedentary population of Jerusalem numbers about 15,500 souls, of whom 4,000 are Mussulmans and 8,000 Jews. The Mussulmans, forming about a fourth part of the whole, and consisting of Turks, Arabs and Moors, are, of course, the masters in every respect, as they are in no way affected with the weakness of their Government at Constantinople. Nothing equals the misery and the sufferings of the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town, called hareth-el-yahoud, the quarter of dirt, between the Zion and the Moriah, where their synagogues are situated – the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins, and living only upon the scanty alms transmitted by their European brethren. The Jews, however, are not natives, but from different and distant countries, and are only attracted to Jerusalem by the desire of inhabiting the Valley of Jehosaphat, and to die in the very places where the redemptor is to be expected.
“Attending their death,” says a French author, “they suffer and pray. Their regards turned to that mountain of Moriah, where once rose the temple of Solomon, and which they dare not approach, they shed tears on the misfortunes of Zion, and their dispersion over the world.”
To make these Jews more miserable, England and Prussia appointed, in 1840, an Anglican bishop at Jerusalem, whose avowed object is their conversion. He was dreadfully thrashed in 1845, and sneered at alike by Jews, Christians and Turks. He may, in fact, be stated to have been the first and only cause of a union between all the religions at Jerusalem.
The whole piece by Marx must be made central, but never I notice is, because apart from the above it shows that Marx also was totally aware that Islam was somewhat different in that it had at its root a ready made “totalitarian” later to be Fascist ideology. Study it all please on http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1854/03/28.htm
CONCLUSION TO ARTICLE 1
- To study the issue of the “Palestine State” and other such formulations (the poor Palestinians” and so on) it is necessary to track the history (Apendix 3)
- The history involves the essential broken promise to the Jews, a promise which was not only solemn but enshrined in “International Law”, which then meant something unlike today, and this was the British Balfour Declaration, the defeat of the ottomans, the consequent Paris Conference goings on, and all of this placed firmly in law in the San Remo treaty of 1920
- The involvement of Britain is very complex, but always to the Jews treacherous, and needs to be understood from start to finish of the Mandate which they solemnly undertook, but did not carry out
- The British not content to betray the Jews on the stripping off of the 78 per cent, otherwise understood as the creation of the Judenfrei (always Judenfrei why does that word pop up so often!) then began to hack away at the remained, and the peel Commission was the low point of this, the British White Paper of 1939 its logical outcome, an outcome which had a big role to play in the gassing and shooting of MILLIONS of Jews in the Holocaust. Britain WAS at the centre of all of that!
APENDIX:
THE PEEL COMMISSION
The text with the map below (The proposed Jewish state is tiny, looks about a quarter of the size of the Arab area, and remember the Arabs as our story shows have already made off with the 78 per cent which was to be Jordan) is breathtaking in its anti-Semitism and Nazi hitler overtones. It follows…read it now or come back later to it)
THE PEEL COMMISSION PARTITION PROPOSAL, 1937
The 1929 Hope Simpson Commission of Inquiry had explicitly pointed to the incapacity of the economy and demography of Palestine to be further destabilized by Zionist immigration and settlement. Its recommendations were echoed by those of the 1930 Shaw Commission of Inquiry, named after Sir Walter Shaw, sent to investigate incidents of violence, which had peaked in a series of localized uprisings in 1929. The Shaw Commission stated that, “[a] continuation, or still more an acceleration, of a process which results in the creation of a large discontented and landless class is fraught with serious danger to the country.” The Commission urged the British government to urgently assess its immigration policy and to address the “meaning of the passages in the Mandate which purported to safeguard the interests of the non-Jewish communities.” The British ‘Passfield’ White Paper of October 1930 adopted these findings and ordered most land transfers frozen, while limiting immigration. However, PM McDonald, under pressure from Zionist leaders, revoked these clauses in February 1931 with the so-called ‘Black-Letter’, wherein he issued his personal assurances to WZO head Weizmann, going so far as to praise “the constructive work done by the Jewish people in Palestine [and their]… beneficial effects on the development and well-being of the country as a whole.” [i]
Unsurprisingly, the Palestinians were becoming increasingly frustrated with British policy, as the likelihood of their achieving their right to self-determination under the Mandate appeared to evaporate. In October 1933 nationwide strikes and demonstrations against Zionism and British collusion were met with force, leaving at least 12 Palestinians dead and fuelling outrage at Britain’s strong-arm tactics.
By 1936, seven years after the Hope Simpson Commission, the Jewish population had risen by more than a further 150%, an additional 62 settlements had been created and nearly 1.5 million dunums of Palestinian land was the property of the Zionists. [ii] The Zionists saw the settlements as “[t]he guardians of Zionist land,” and recognized early on that “patterns of settlement would to a great extent determine the [future Jewish] country’s borders.” [iii] JA Executive Chairman, David Ben-Gurion, called the settlers, “the army of Zionist fulfillment.” [iv] In mid-April 1936, a series of Arab-Jewish clashes in the Jaffa area proved the inevitable trigger, as Palestinian National Committees sprang up across the country in support of a call for a general strike issued by the Palestinian representative leadership, the Arab Higher Committee (AHC). The AHC was banned soon after by the British, but despite the arrest of its leaders and the nationwide imposition of curfews, the uprising surged and from April 1936 until October the Arab Revolt swept Mandate Palestine. [v]
The extent of the revolt and its support throughout the region worried the British, who requisitioned additional troops in September to put down the uprising. [vi] Fearing domestic instability and under pressure from their British benefactor, regional Arab leaders eventually provided the necessary mediation to bring about a lull in the uprising, while Britain again dispatched an investigative commission.
Arriving in November 1936, the Palestine Royal Commission, headed by Lord Peel, set out to assess the feasibility and future of the Mandate. Published in July 1937, the Peel Commission’s report concluded that, “the Mandate for Palestine should terminate and be replaced by a Treaty System…” The proposed treaty envisioned a partition of Palestine, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem retained under a separate Mandate, reaching to the port at Jaffa. The part allotted the Palestinians was to be united with Transjordan and the resulting Jewish state made to pay a subsidy to the Arab state, to which Palestinians within the area allotted the Jewish state would be compelled to move. The Peel Plan, with its twin premises of partition and ‘population transfer’, was to become the point of reference for most future schemes to solve the Palestine Question.
The Palestinians flatly rejected the notion of a Zionist state on nearly 33% of Palestine and the dispossession of hundreds of thousands that this would entail. [vii] Encouraged by the legitimization it granted their program, but not content with the scale of conquest, the Zionist leadership accepted ‘in principle’ but rejected ‘in detail’ the partition plan, while Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement rejected the idea outright and by September 1937 had commenced a violent campaign against Palestinians and the British, marking the resumption of violence and resurgence of the Arab Revolt. [viii]
MAP 7
[i] Abdul Hadi, Ed., Documents on Palestine Vol. 1, p. 71.
[ii] Populations & settlements: McCarthy, The Population of Palestine, p. 224 & p. 219.
Land acquisition: A Survey of Palestine Vol. 1, p. 376 & notes.
[iii] Segev, One Palestine…, p. 249.
[iv] Ibid. p.255. (Quoting Ben-Gurion’s memoirs.)
[v] The Arab Higher Committee was formally established in April 1936, with Haj Amin Al-Husseini elected its Pres. on the 25th of that month. Its members were: Jamal Husseini, Hussein Fakhri Al-Khalidi, Yaqoub Al-Ghossein, Fuad Saba, Ragheb Nashashibi, Ahmed Hilmi Abed Baqi, Ahmed Latif Saleh, Alfred Rock and Awni Abdul Hadi – all of whom would remain at the forefront of the Palestinian national movement throughout the Mandate period and beyond.
[vi] On 22 September 1936 additional troops were requisitioned. Palestinian historian Abdelaziz Ayyad attributes a part of the urgency of the regional leaders in exerting efforts alongside and on behalf of the Arab Higher Committee to gain a cessation of the Revolt to this news.
Yehoshua Porath attributes lasting significance in terms of the development of the pan-Arab movement to the support for the Palestinian Arab Revolt throughout the region, but also notes the economic necessity for the Palestinians to ‘deescalate’ the revolt due to the vital citrus harvest season and the dire state of the rural economy.
Ayyad acknowledges the role though of the many Muslim Youth and other less pan-Arab groups in mobilizing support, finance and volunteers at the same time. In all, Porath’s assertion that the period represented a formative moment in the development of the Palestinian cause in the face of Zionism as a bedrock of Arab solidarity is born out by most commentators, Ayyad included. Yoav Gelber, among others, points out the many recurring elements of secretive collusion and twin-channel maneuvering which characterized the political strategies of the regional governments at the time, attributing to the period formative patterns of betrayal and manipulation that have persisted throughout the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Ayyad, Abdelaziz, Arab Nationalism and the Palestinians 1850-1939, Jerusalem: PASSIA, 1999, p. 161; Porath, Yehoshua, In Search of Arab Unity 1930-1945, London: Frank Cass, 1986, p. 162; Gelber, Yoav, Jewish-Transjordanian Relations 1921-1948, London: Frank Cass, 1997, pp. 83-103.
[vii] Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora, pp. 189-193.
[viii] PASSIA, 100 Years of Palestinian History, pp. 57-58. Ben-Gurion accepted the proposal after judging its shortcomings vis-à-vis Zionist territorial ambitions to be outweighed by the immense value of a non-Zionist plan which endorsed the concept of “forced transfer.” He wrote of the Peel Plan in his diary: “This will give us something we never had, even when we were under our own authority, neither in the period of the First Temple nor in the period of the Second Temple… forced transfer.” Segev, One Palestine…, p. 403.
APENDIX 2
(recent research and book collection vital reading for this article)
| A concerted campaign is being waged against Israel to question its very legitimacy in virtually every aspect of its historical, political, and cultural life, with the aim of undermining the very foundations of Israel’s existence.In response, several world-renowned experts have joined to present an authoritative exposition of Israel’s Rights as a Nation-State in International Diplomacy, edited by Alan Baker, former legal counsel of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and former ambassador to Canada, and published jointly by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the World Jewish Congress.This book explains clearly why the Jewish people deserve a state of their own and refutes all the major claims against Israel’s rights. |
ContentsOverview The National Rights of Jews “An Overwhelmingly Jewish State” – From the Balfour Declaration to the Palestine Mandate Self-Determination and Israel’s Declaration of Independence The United Nations and Middle East Refugees: The Differential Treatment of Arabs and Jews Israel’s Rights Regarding Territories and the Settlements in the Eyes of the International Community The Historical and Legal Contexts of Israel’s Borders The Misleading Interpretation of Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) Defending Israel’s Legal Rights to Jerusalem Palestinian Unilateralism and Israel’s Rights in Arab-Israeli Diplomacy Is the Gaza Strip Occupied by Israel? The Violation of Israel’s Right to Sovereign Equality in the United Nations Countering Challenges to Israel’s Legitimacy
|
APENDIX 3
Churchill with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, 1916
If only the Jews had been led by Trotsky and Lenin and not by Weizmann and Ben Gurion things would have turned out a lot differently, but then again Trotsky and Lenin in 1917 were not the finished article either towards the national question. The Golsheviks under these great minds and leaders were very far advanced but this the natural and totally unsurprising path of all progress; it does not advance on all fronts in a straight line. Never has and never will. It is the human condition. Then the wierdos step in. Today there is a veritable spook and conspiracy industry afloat. I know of one case where a radio station is being attempted to be built on thaty very spooky foundation
G~d will provide, but will he, and did he in the period of 1933 to 1945. If the Man in the Sky did not provide for the Jews in the 1933 to 45 period then you would think that would be enough. But apparently not so. Humans find umpteen ways to avoid reality and to avoid drawing hard clonclusions from that reality.
I meet this all the time in my political struggle to warn the Jews that we are in the same situation as in 1933. We do not possess a magic wand and say that things concerning the Jews and concerning Israel are going to proceed in this form or in this timetable structure. But despite that inability to tell the future, since we are merely human, by studying history and by studying the present we can see very clearly the present trends, and it is the same pattern. Jews are faced with the danger of a new Holocaust with p[potential for a Great Killing of the Jews once again.
There is a whole industry out there based on anti-Semitism, which essentially takes the form of Holocaust Denial. If the Holocaust is taught correctly to children then the only main conclusion to reach is that it will happen again, given the continuation of capitalism, because the Holocaust emerged out of the crisis in capitalism, and not out of “Evil” as is taught
Just you wait! My Jewish friend wags his finger at me knowingly. Hashem once again is going to save the Jews and vanquish their enemy. Aye, they do even use such words as that.
In the meantime though! Political analysis based on the lessons from the past and the careful analysis of the present is pretty much lost on the “Hashem will vanquish our enemy” brigade. And Jews being on the go a very long time seem to be good at this approach, they have like a thousand words for their Hashem, and they leave my mind in a whirligig of sayings, but still I insist on the truth as it appears before my 5 senses.
But the essence of the problem was this and it is crystal clear on my reading of the Gilbert piece, even though Gilbert himself is majestically unconcerned, that is majestically ignorant of the matter:
Weizmann, who was the main negotiator in this critical period from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 over the next five years, was unclear on the issue of state power. His formula was disastrous. He said that we do not actually want or need state power. He was pressed on this by the American delegate in the article we are involved with here, penned no less than the great but politically inept Martin Gilbert, whose faulty method we will deal with later. Take my remarks on Gilbert in this regard with a pinch of salt please, Gilbert is great on facts, which we badly do need.
Lord Balfour also was very damaging to the Jews in this regard.
Balfour said that for the Jews to set up their state power or Jewish Government would be wrong
Thus Weizmann was backtracking all of the time on this vital issue. But state power was the key issue, very well understood by Lenin and Trotsky, in fact Lenin had devoted a whole campaign pre 1917 to this very issue.
We will return to this in many forms and often
But let me state the issue and problem
- The essence of the matter is that the Jews, the Jewish people, were a dispersed people (That is just totally fundamental. It is the starting point)
- Being a dispersed people, needing a Homeland to return to, there had to be a Homeland created
- The area of Palestine and here I mean the original Palestine was not a big area at all to give to the Jews considering that the Arabs (There were no “Palestinians” in 1917) were in the process of being granted a total of 22 states and a huge swathe of the globe
- But in the blink of an eye, as we speak as it were, the Arabs were making off with fully four fifths of this Palestine, in these very years from 1917 to 1922
- You would think, would you not, that the remaining one fifth of that original, not that large to begin with when it was fife fifths, would be firmly Jewish
THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE...THE ISSUE OF STATE POWER
And here the great problem looking back is clear to us today. People like Weizmann were unclear on the key issue of state power, as was Balfour and Churchill too.
It is stated that in this period, in the whole of Palestine, I emphasise again the word “whole”, that there were 60,000 Jews and 600,000 Arabs.
The essence of the issue of state power is this. 60,000 Jews was more than enough to exercise state power.
Jabotinsky also understood this issue. So did sections within Britain close to Balfour. It had to be held in trust by Britain or some other great Power to enable the Jews to return.
THE JEWS HAD TO CONTROL THE STATE...AND THAT CONTROL HAD TO BE HELD IN TRUST
Why in trust? Why was that so necessary?
Ah, there indeed we come to the rub!
Karl Marx about whom many lies to the Jews have been told had clearly identified the issue in his writings about Islam at the time of his historical visit to Jerusalem. And others had also identified the issue of Islam.
Out of the Mandate the Jews needed to have state power inside the remnant that was left after Churchill slashed Palestine in Cairo Conference.
They needed help because they faced Islam. That state power had to be held in trust by a Great Power.
BUT NOBODY APART FROM LENIN UNDERSTOOD THE GREAT SIGNIFICANCE OF STATE POWER
On all of these issues they were all deficient in understanding and only Lenin and Trotsky had really reached a clear (the clearest possible) understanding of the key role of state power, the power of the state to effect the necessary changes.
And thus the Jews from 1917 onwards entered on a path behind leaders who were theoretically, hence politically and practically, deficient. That told!
(A cautionary note to our readers, just do not believe anything you read on paper, you hear on an air wave or see on a screen…check! But you all know that by now, right!)
…Here we enter into the dialectic of history. Lenin and Trotsky were huge opponents of anti-Semitism. Opposition to anti-Semitism ran through the early Bolsheviks in power, specifically I mean the heady days post 1917. This opposition to anti-Semitism was very deep in the soul of these revolutionaries who came out of above all Russia.
(Much lies here! Much!)
The dialectic involved here is that Lenin did not understand Zionism totally, and he died very prematurely. Trotsky like Lenin was out of the same school and also did not understand Zionism fully THEN…
LENIN AND TROTSKY UNDERSTOOD ASPECTS OF ZIONISM, IMPORTANT ASPECTS, BUT STILL ONLY ASPECTS
The dialectic further complicates matters. Note I said “fully”! They both understood aspects of Zionism very well, much better than the Zionist leaders themselves did, which was that under capitalism not one of the desires of the Jews would be met. Few Jews apart from the very founders of Zionism, the associates of Marx, could ever understand that.
With Lenin dead it fell to Trotsky to carry on the Marxist heritage, and he did this against Stalin and against Imperialism with its Fascism. Inside 10 years Trotsky had pretty well cracked the problem and as I have repeatedly said, Trotsky had become the first Zionist who fought for Jewish national liberation from the standpoint of revolutionary socialism.
WE ARE NOT STARTING FROM SCRATCH
It looks as if we start from scratch today. But history always leaves its mark. There is always a trace of the past in the present.
This is why the name of Stalin is truly hateful in the Israel of today. Not so Leon Trotsky.
I was reminded of this by a Jewish colleague, Ted Belman, who has created his very own Hashem out of sections of the US Establishment, when Ted wrote to me about a visit he made to an old family relative in Canada. As the conversation spanned the years this Polish Jewish man suddenly, Ted observed, became very animated. And why? The name of Leon Trotsky had come up in the discussion and over the span of the decades the memory of the great revolutionary thinker had hit the elderly man with force. The thoughts and feelings of a once emotive and stirring time for the Jewish people had flooded back. But a new generation is needed.
THE MAN WHO WAS THE FIRST ZIONIST FROM THE STANDPOINT OF REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
And by the mid-1930s, just some 10 years later, Trotsky understood better than all others what it was that the Jews needed and needed to do.
Trotsky was the person who made the deepest study of the new phenomenon, which was Fascism, which he and only he Trotsky identified and insisted that this new phenomenon grew like a cancer out of the bowels of a capitalist system in mortal crisis.
And then Trotsky was very clear and the issue was STILL the issue of state power. In every word by this stage Trotsky was warning the Jews about Europe and advising, like Jabotinsky, get out and making your way to the only place possible, Palestine, establish your state there (state power you see!) and make it defensible by each and every means (state power again!)
But that is to move a little ahead of ourselves. At this point we are considering that Balfour,a friend of the Jews, Churchill also, a strange kind of friend of the Jews, and above all the weak Weizmann, did not understand the critical issue of state power at all.
This is just my conjecture, my hypothesis if you will but I believe there was general lack of clarity and sharpness on this issue of state power and what it meant among our Jewish friends at that stage…That was what gave Britain the leeway to play fast and loose with its Mandate.
And play fast with the Mandate they certainly did!
Just how! In this regard the factual account by Gilbert is remarkably useful and I think should be required (not casual reading) but close study. The facts tell their own story. [I will condense and place these facts in a separate Apendix because I do think they should be on their own and embedded into the consciousness of Jewish, Serbian and progressive people, especially youth!]
The Mandate states clearly that Britain was undertaking to create the Jewish National Home. But a Jewish National Home without a Jewish Government.
The following is a couple of excerpts from this Gilbert study of the years 1917 to 1923:
On 22 July 1922, when the League of Nations announced the terms of Britain’s Mandate for
Palestine, it gave prominence to the Balfour Declaration. ‘The Mandatory should be responsible,’
the preamble stated, ‘for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd,
1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty…in favor of the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people…’1 The preamble of the Mandate included the precise
wording of the Balfour Declaration.
Nothing in the Balfour Declaration dealt with Jewish statehood, immigration, land purchase or the
boundaries of Palestine. This essay examines how British policy with regard to the ‘national home
for the Jewish people’ evolved between November 1917 and July 1922, and the stages by which the
Mandate commitments were reached.
In the discussions on the eve of the Balfour Declaration, the British War Cabinet, desperate to
persuade the Jews of Russia to urge their government to renew Russia’s war effort, saw Palestine
as a Jewish rallying cry. To this end, those advising the War Cabinet, and the Foreign Secretary
himself, A.J. Balfour, encouraged at least the possibility of an eventual Jewish majority, even if it
might – with the settled population of Palestine then being some 600,000 Arabs and 60,000 Jews
– be many years before such a majority emerged. On 31 October 1917, Balfour had told the War
Cabinet that while the words ‘national home…did not necessarily involve the early establishment
of an independent Jewish State’, such a State ‘was a matter for gradual development in accordance
with the ordinary laws of political evolution’.2
24
How these laws were to be regarded was explained in a Foreign Office memorandum of 19 December
1917 by Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier, the latter a Galician-born Jew, who wrote jointly:
‘The objection raised against the Jews being given exclusive political rights in Palestine on a basis
that would be undemocratic with regard to the local Christian and Mohammedan population,’
they wrote, ‘is certainly the most important which the anti-Zionists have hitherto raised, but the
difficulty is imaginary. Palestine might be held in trust by Great Britain or America until there was
a sufficient population in the country fit to govern it on European lines. Then no undemocratic
restrictions of the kind indicated in the memorandum would be required any longer.’3
On 3 January 1919 agreement was reached between the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and
the Arab leader Emir Feisal. Article Four of this agreement declared that all ‘necessary measures’
should be taken ‘to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale,
and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement
and intensive cultivation of the soil’. In taking such measures, the agreement went on, ‘the Arab
peasant and tenant farmers shall be protected in their rights, and shall be assisted in forwarding
their economic development.’4
The Weizmann-Feisal agreement did not refer to Jewish statehood. Indeed, on 19 January 1919,
Balfour wrote to his fellow Cabinet Minister Lord Curzon: ‘As far as I know, Weizmann has never
put forward a claim for the Jewish Government of Palestine. Such a claim is, in my opinion, certainly
inadmissable and personally I do not think we should go further than the original declaration
which I made to Lord Rothschild.’5
Scarcely six weeks later, on February 27, in Balfour’s presence, Weizmann presented the essence
of the Weizmann-Feisal Agreement to the Allied Supreme Council in Paris, telling them that the
nation that was to receive Palestine as a League of Nations Mandate must first of all ‘Promote Jewish
immigration and closer settlement on the land’, while at the same time ensuring that ‘the established
rights’ of the non-Jewish population be ‘equitably safe-guarded’.
During the discussion, Robert Lansing, the American Secretary of State, asked Weizmann for
clarification ‘as to the meaning of the words “Jewish National Home.” Did that mean an autonomous
Jewish Government?’ Weizmann replied, as the minutes of the discussion record, ‘in the negative’.
The Zionist Organisation, he told Lansing – reiterating what Balfour had told Curzon – ‘did not
want an autonomous Jewish Government, but merely to establish in Palestine, under a Mandatory
Power, an administration, not necessarily Jewish, which would render it possible to send into
Palestine 70,000 to 80,000 Jews annually.’ The Zionist Organisation wanted permission ‘to build
Jewish schools where Hebrew would be taught, and to develop institutions of every kind. Thus it
would build up gradually a nationality, and so make Palestine as Jewish as America is American or
England English.’
The Supreme Council wanted to know if such a ‘nationality’ would involve eventual statehood?
Weizmann told them: ‘Later on, when the Jews formed the large majority, they would be ripe to
establish such a Government as would answer to the state of the development of the country and
to their ideals.’6
http://www.jcpa.org/text/israel-rights/kiyum-gilbert.pdf
That was the crux of the issue. The Jews had to have a Homeland. The Homeland had to be on Zion and centred on Zion.
But Islam had deliberately torn down the previous Christian Church which sat on top of the previous Temple in order to erect their supremacist Mosque
That fact encapsulates the reality that the Jews on coming back to Zion were facing an existentialist struggle against both Islam and Christianity.
And the Americans were dead against Zion from the very start, in opposition to Balfour actually
What is never done, because people as a rule do not understand history, is to be able to place themselves back in the actual time period. For Churchill and for all bourgeois in the days and years following October 1917 the clear and only aim was to prevent socialist revolution
Churchill was mainly interested in the counter revolution against the Bolsheviks as this final clip from Gilbert makes very clear.
The picture at the top is apt. That was Churchill always fighting for the interests of British Imperialism.
But also when you study the whole of the Gilbert article it is too simplistic. There were times when Churchill was defending the Jews and defending Zionism. My explanation is that Churchill also was caught up and attracted by the grandeur and pathos of the Jewish cause. Chuchill oscillated! He was a swinger!
In any case I do advise close reading of this Gilbert article which is not overly long, and is very accessible:
http://www.jcpa.org/text/israel-rights/kiyum-gilbert.pdf
The British Government supported the Weizmann-Feisal Agreement with regard to both Jewish
immigration and land purchase. On June 19 the senior British military officer in Palestine, General
Clayton, telegraphed to the Foreign Office for approval of a Palestine ordinance to re-open land
purchase ‘under official control’. Zionist interests, Clayton stated, ‘will be fully safeguarded’.7
26
Clayton’s telegram was forwarded to Balfour, who replied on July 5 that land purchase could indeed be continued ‘provided that, as far as possible, preferential treatment is given to Zionist interests’.8
The Zionist plans were thus endorsed by both Feisal and Balfour. But on 28 August 1919 a United
States commission, the King-Crane Commission, appointed by President Woodrow Wilson,
published its report criticising Zionist ambitions and recommending ‘serious modification of the
extremist Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to
making Palestine distinctly a Jewish State’.9
The King-Crane Commission went on to state that the Zionists with whom it had spoken looked
forward ‘to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine,
by various forms of purchase’. In their conclusion, the Commissioners felt ‘bound to recommend
that only a greatly reduced Zionist programme be attempted’; a reduction that would ‘have to mean
that Jewish immigration should be definitely limited, and that the project for making Palestine a
distinctly Jewish commonwealth should be given up’.10
The United States was in a minority at the Supreme Council. On September 19 the Zionists received
unexpected support from The Times, which declared: ‘Our duty as the Mandatory power will be to
make Jewish Palestine not a struggling State, but one that is capable of vigorous and independent
national life.’11
Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, and with ministerial responsibility for Palestine,
took a more cynical view of Zionist ambitions. On October 25, in a memorandum for the Cabinet,
he wrote of ‘the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine and who take it for granted
that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.’12
Churchill’s critical attitude did not last long. Fearful of the rise of Communism in the East, and
conscious of the part played by individual Jews in helping to impose Bolshevik rule on Russia,
he soon set his cynicism aside. In an article entitled ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism: the Struggle for
the Soul of the Jewish People’, he wrote in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on 8 February 1920 that
Zionism offered the Jews ‘a national idea of a commanding character’. Palestine would provide
‘the Jewish race all over the world’ with, as Churchill put it, ‘a home and a centre of national life’.
Although Palestine could only accommodate ‘a fraction of the Jewish race’, but ‘if, as may well
happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under
the protection of the British Crown which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event
will have occurred in the history of the world which would from every point of view be beneficial,
and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.’
Churchill’s article ended with an appeal for the building up ‘with the utmost rapidity’ of a ‘Jewish
national centre’ in Palestine; a centre, he asserted, which might become ‘not only a refuge to the
oppressed from the unhappy lands of Central Europe’, but also ‘a symbol of Jewish unity and the
temple of Jewish glory’. On such a task, he added, ‘many blessings rest’.
There was a big difference between the British buying land and the Jewish State which did not exist but should have buying the land. The Balfour formula of the British state buying the land and keeping Zionist interests to the fore was faulty, as the whole setup was faulty, which Trotsky identified almost immediately.
For example what happens to the Mandate when an out and out Labour anti-Semite like Bevin takes the power. The Jews are going to get stuffed in that arrangement.
Balfour was soon being opposed and isolated from all sections of the bourgeois world. (Read Gilbert closely and you will discover the pernicious role of who else…the French!)
Look at the King Crane Commission of the President of the US Woodrow Wilson…sheer hostility from Wilson to the whole idea of the Jewish State. The Arabs were getting about 5000 times more territory. Where did Wilson and his Commission expect the Jews to live anyways? Therein, in that American position, is the Nazi Holocaust. Taking different form, but it is there.
And it was a lie. The Jews on coming into Palestine did not seek the dispossession of the Arabs. If they did that then why were they buying land at their highly inflated prices? Colonialists and Imperialists do not buy land at highly inflated prices!
Also in reading the famous and stirring Diaries of Herzl in their entirety the Jews were seeing themselves also as benefactors to the Arabs, but in the context that the Jews were settling on a small strip, while the Arabs were taking possession of about 5000 times greater territory
THERE WERE NO PALESTINIANS
That has to be emphasised.
APENDIX 4
Ah, those poor poor “Palestinians”
Note that the Arab Muslim Brethern have given hardly a solitary cent to these poor poor Palestinian Arabs. But acknowledging that they are the most cosseted people on the face of the earth, and that Gazan supporters of the lethal Hamas are walking about the Gaza with burgeoning tummies, and that across the Jordan River in the once Judea and Samaria, Arab Palestinian malls are no different than say Las Vegas malls, except in the present climate more secure, where do the goodies come from???
Not from the Arabs, crafty lot that they are. They come from those kind hearted Europeans and Americans, with a few Russians and even Chinese thrown in. I expect even Iceland chips in.
Not a word about the really poor Africans, not a word about the Kurds who simply )going on now a thousand years) cannot get their state, not a word about say the rights of Argentine in its rightful battle for The Malvinas, or the Spanish in their rightful battle for Gibraltar, or for the people of the Basque Country in their battle, or the people of Catalonia in their battle agains the Spanish, or the protestant people of Ulster in their battle against Ireland
No instead all roads lead to Arab Palestine
While Hamascontinues to demand a full lifting of the blockade, the Gaza market seems to be doing alright. Gaza Mall, the first ever shopping center in the Strip was opened last Saturday with masses storming the new attraction.
The two-floor compound, each stretching over roughly 9,700 sq. ft, offers international brands as well as much-needed air conditioning. Tens of thousands of shoppers from Rafah to Beit Hanoun have already visited the site within a matter of days, making the center Gaza’s new craze.
“Not everyone comes to shop. There are those who are curious who just come to see the place and others who come for the air conditioning,” one of the mall’s workers said. Head of the mall’s board of directors, Salah a-Din Abu Abdo, told Ynet the center attracts more and more visitors every day.
Gaza Mall. Affordable prices and air conditioning
“We make a point of providing attractive and competitive prices in order to take on the outside markets,” he said. “Our goal is to develop a marketing and leisure culture among the residents of the Strip who for years have been subjected to a blockade. If profit was our only objective, than this investment would have been planned differently with more shops in other price ranges.”
The group of investors which established the mall, including Abu Abdo, promoted the initiative privately. “There are international firms such as Adidas and Lacoste and Paris’ top selling perfumes,” he said. “Nevertheless, the local traders and businessmen are those running the business. I hope that in the future we’ll get merchandise from other foreign chains wanting to open branches here.”
No elevator yet
The new shopping center is located in Gaza’s Kimmel neighborhood, which was once considered the most expensive in the Gaza Strip.
The official opening ceremony was attended by Hamas government ministers and senior officials who expressed their hope that the center will create additional work places for dozens of families and fulfill its vocation as a new culture, entertainment and consumerism center.
More surprises for shoppers in the near future, in addition to the center’s supermarket, clothing stores, food and beauty products, a children’s playground and a restaurant – all at affordable prices for local residents. Shoppers will also be able to purchase the products on-line and have them delivered home at even cheaper rates.
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3922441,00.html
04/27/2011
Dream of a Palestinian Tiger
Boom Times in the West Bank
By Juliane von Mittelstaedt
Masri is possibly the most unusual businessman in the Palestinian Territories. The 50-year-old is a frequent guest in the homes of Israel’s wealthiest citizens, his wife runs the largest advertising agency in the Palestinian Territories and studies in Tel Aviv, and his uncle is a billionaire from Nablus. Masri went to the United States at 17 to attend college, and afterward he worked there and married an American woman, until returning home in 1994. He founded Massar International and began building a small empire. He already had dreams of building a Palestinian city in those days, but then came the second Intifada, so he built in Morocco initially instead.
But he never lost sight of his goal to establish the first modern city in the Palestinian Territories — and he began building it in the West Bank near Ramallah more than a year ago. The new city, called Rawabi, comes at a price tag of more than $850 million (€586 million). Masri’s most important investor is the government of Qatar. In addition to 5,000 residential units, Masri is building a sewage treatment plant and a mosque, supermarkets and an administration complex. When the new city reaches its target population of 40,000 people, it will be larger even than Ramallah itself.
Masri has hired landscape architects, designers and event managers to invent the sort of city that has never existed here before: with green space and decorative fountains, and without uncollected garbage, potholes and unadorned concrete structures. “In Palestine, the world has an opportunity to build a new state that’s efficient and modern,” he says. Masri wants Rawabi to be the centerpiece.
The Palestinians hope to receive United Nations approval for an independent state in September, and the chances are good that the world will approve. In the last year and a half, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has brought radical change to the Palestinian Autonomous Authority, at least in the West Bank. Ministries now operate much more effectively than in the past, when they were little more teahouses for the minions of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. A commission is discussing a constitution, and Fayyad has had 2,250 kilometers (1,406 miles) of roads paved and connected villages to the power grid. Unemployment has declined to 17 percent in the West Bank, compared with 37.4 percent in the Gaza Strip. More than 500 new companies have been established in the last few months alone. From the UN to the World Bank, many seem convinced that Palestine is ready for independence.
Ramallah now has a five-star hotel, sushi restaurants and parking meters. A rotating, panoramic restaurant will soon open its doors on the 28th floor of the Palestine Trade Tower, floating above Ramallah like a spaceship. The economy grew by 9.3 percent last year. Samir Abdullah, the former planning minister, current president of the Rotary Club and head of an economic research institute, says: “When we finally have access to our resources and are no longer restricted by the occupation, our economy will be able to grow by 25 percent a year, and then we’ll be the new tiger economy.”
Bashar Masri also believes in his homeland’s economic potential. “You find successful Palestinian entrepreneurs and scientists everywhere in the world,” he says. “If they all come back here and invest, Palestine will become one of the most successful countries in the region.” Masri has founded 15 subsidiaries, as well as the first private investment fund, Siraj, which will invest $60 million in agriculture, logistics firms and, most importantly, in technology companies.
Masri would also like to build apartment buildings on a large scale in the Gaza Strip, where he already has an office and a staff — but because of the Israeli blockade there is no cement to be had. He recently failed in an attempt to buy an Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem after the developer had declared bankruptcy. But he already has 20 offers for building lots in East Jerusalem, and even a few Israelis are among the potential sellers. “If we didn’t buy land in East Jerusalem, you can be 99.9 percent sure that radical settlers would do so instead,” he says. “I don’t get involved in politics, but I feel better when I’ve defused a dangerous situation.”
But Rawabi remains Masri’s favorite project. He gets into a brand-new Jeep, has an ice cream brought to him and drives to the construction site. Excavators are in the process of removing the mountaintop and building terraces into the hillside. The first foundations have already been poured. Masri gets out of the Jeep and takes a deep breath. Even though the project has been underway for a year, he still behaves like the father of a newborn when he takes visitors to Rawabi. “You can see from Ashdod to Hadera from here, the ships in the harbor over there and the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv over there.”
Masri climbs back into the Jeep and drives across the bumpy, newly terraced terrain. “The downtown area will be up there, with a pedestrian zone like we have in old sections of Palestinian cities, but very modern. There will also be a convention center, a five-star hotel and a shopping mall, all in high-tech buildings, surrounded by high-quality residential units for the middle class,” he says. “I’m building a city for the Facebook generation.”
Suddenly he steps on the brakes. “Why is there concrete here? This is supposed to look natural,” he snaps at the construction supervisor. He’s referring to the border along a street, which he wants done in natural stone. He calls out to a group of Italian engineers who are building a factory for stone processing: “We have to speed up the pace here.” He drums his fingers against the steering wheel. “We’re ready,” he says. “We’re ready for a big thing.”
Masri doesn’t just want to create a new city, but a new society, as well. He is building kindergartens so that mothers won’t have to be housewives and installing high-speed Internet so that the fathers can work from home. The buildings are made of plain sandstone, and he has forbidden the architects from using the arches, small towers and columns of Palestinian Rococo.
Masri removed the prefix “al” from his name, because he thought it was old-fashioned, has placed women in senior positions and introduced a “casual Thursday” in his offices, when ties and jackets are forbidden. This particular day is such a day, and Masri is wearing jeans.
Israel, for its part, isn’t quite ready for Masri’s dream of a new Palestine. Although Rawabi is in Palestinian-administered territory, 2.8 kilometers of the future access road would pass through the area known as C territory, which is completely under Israeli control and constitutes 59 percent of the West Bank. Israel has not yet given its approval for the road and Masri has been waiting for the permits for three years — which has led to ongoing construction delays. For the government in Jerusalem, the road is a negotiating tool, a concession that has a political price. Masri also feels that the Autonomous Authority hasn’t given him sufficient support. “I don’t understand it,” he says. “Every dollar we invest here brings them 20 or 30 dollars in revenue, and still nothing happens.”
Some 7,000 potential homebuyers have already signed up, but selling cannot commence until the road is approved. Without the access road, Rawabi will be dead in the water. And then? “There is no turning back,” says Masri. “If we don’t take any risks we’ll never achieve anything.”
If Rawabi fails, it will be more than the failure of Masri’s dream. As a Palestinian national project, the city is meant to be a model for bold entrepreneurs and a symbol of a better future. “We are now experiencing a small boom, after so many bad years,” says Masri. “But that can change quickly again.” He has already noticed that his suppliers and construction companies, who were turning him down two years ago because they had more profitable contracts, are now begging for work. The World Bank is also warning that if the Israeli occupation continues and there is no further relief, growth will decline again.
Mohammed Mustafa is the man responsible for the boom. No one has moved more money in the Palestinian Territories than he has: $2 billion in the last five years, and with plans to move $4 billion in the next five years. Mustafa, 67, wearing a blue suit, is the managing director of the Palestine Investment Fund, which makes him the public version of Bashar Masri. He was working for the World Bank six years ago. Today he is charged with laying the concrete foundation for a future Palestine. His work involves planning new developments from Jenin to Hebron, business centers and hotels on the Dead Sea and in East Jerusalem. Mustafa plans to build 30,000 affordable residential units within the next decade and to facilitate borrowing opportunities for potential buyers.
On this day, he is standing inside one half of a duplex on a hill near Jenin. Once a breeding ground for suicide bombers, the Jenin region is now trying to market itself as a tourist destination. Mustafa says: “I would move in here immediately.” The house, with a small yard, four rooms and a guest bathroom, is available for $110,000. The residents of a refugee camp a few kilometers away can only dream of such houses. Some 86 have already been built on the hill, and the plans call for another 1,000 to go up in the next three years. “This ought to show the world that we Palestinians are not just poor, incompetent and violent, but are also perfectly normal people. I’m sure that this here will lead to more political and economic stability.”
Mustafa has ambitious plans to restructure Ramallah. As a realist, he isn’t waiting for East Jerusalem to become the capital of Palestine one day. He is building a business center only a few hundred meters from Arafat’s grave and has plans to build 10 new high-rise buildings on the site. The development will also include a shopping center, a hotel and apartments for the “representative residential experience.” One of the goals is “to solidify the commitment to Palestine.”
His message is that Palestine is ready for independence. Of course, he is also familiar with the numbers. No one receives as much per-capita foreign aid as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, about $500 a year for each resident, or a third of the gross domestic product. Prime Minister Fayyad has just applied for more aid: $5 billion over the next three years. “But you have to look at where we’re coming from,” says Mustafa. “The situation was much worse in the past.” In the past, during the Intifada, the economy was shrinking by 10 percent a year while unemployment was doubling.
“Although this is all true,” says Sam Bahour, “unfortunately the current growth is not sustainable.” The construction industry, he adds, makes up more than half of all investments, while the main exports are still fruit, olives and stone. “I don’t see economic independence. In my view, it’s economic survival,” says Bahour. He works as a consultant, has built a supermarket chain and established a shopping center.
Bahour has found a table at the Pesto Café, one of Ramallah’s new restaurants, where men sit at the dark tables with their laptops, eating $8 sandwiches. “The whole world is reporting that there are now sushi restaurants and cocktail bars in Ramallah,” he says heatedly. “Hotels and restaurants are important, but they don’t bring us a step closer to statehood.” The new Mövenpick Hotel? “A single five-star hotel for 4.6 million Palestinians. There are 15 in Amman.” Instead, says Bahour, people should focus on all the things that don’t exist. “The firm I established only opened 10 supermarkets in five years. The question ought to be: Where would they be without the occupation? I’m sure they would already have 40 branches.”
Although Israel has removed some checkpoints in recent months, thereby improving freedom of movement, many barriers remain. The official explanation is that they are meant to protect Israel from attacks. But as long as Israel blocks access to streets, water and resources, says Bahour, no development will be possible.
Bahour lists a host of obstacles the Palestinians face. The business owners in the West Bank cannot reach the 1.7 million people in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians are unable to drill for natural gas off the coast, worth about $4 billion. Exporting products to other countries is still complicated, if not impossible. Palestinian businesses and universities rarely manage to recruit foreign experts. And then there is the risk of political uncertainty. And, Bahour adds, completing his list, it is highly unlikely that any of this will change in September, all hopes of independence aside. “Israel prevents real growth because it wants to prevent a viable Palestinian state from taking shape,” he alleges.
An Israeli and a Palestinian founded Sadara, the first venture capital fund in Palestine. With $29 million in seed capital, they plan to support startups. The two partners are both well qualified. Yadin Kaufmann, the Israeli, is an IT entrepreneur, while Said Nashif, the Palestinian, is a software developer. Their investors include Google, Cisco and AOL founder Steve Case.
Although these are still small sums, they represent more money than has ever been in high-tech in the West Bank. Sadara is just as big, says Kaufmann, as the first Israeli venture capital fund was when it was launched in the late 1980s. After that, Israel became a pioneer in the field of Internet telephony. Now Palestine could very well become the next startup nation.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,759046,00.html
