Why Must the Truth About Israel Be Damned?
by Peter A. Baum
img credit: U.S. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Digital ID matpc.18255. Lord Peel & the Right Hon. Sir Horace Rumbold, Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Palestine Royal Commission left the offices after taking evidence from the Arab Higher Committee.
The latest attempt to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians has exposed a new era in geopolitics — and a significant historical change to the way external actors behave in the future.
gMail subscribers: gMail may truncate this post,
click the title to view the post in its entirety
The Palestinian monopoly on support no longer exists.
The Palestinian rejection came as no surprise and followed established procedures having declined the previous attempts at resolution as listed below…
1937 Peel Partition (archive)
1939 White Book
1947 UN Partition
1967 Khartoum Resolution
1977 Egyptian Peace Deal
2000 Camp David
2001 Taba
2008 Olmert Offer
2009 Bar-Ilan Initiative
2016 Kerry Plan
2020 Trump
Other organizations that were hostile and rejected the proposal before studying it did so purely based on their detestation of the originator rather than for the well-being of the parties concerned.
However, such organizations are currently irrelevant and most likely to remain so for the next few years – such as the UK Labour Party and the Democrats in the U.S.
The difference to this proposed plan was the qualified support it received from important players who previously would have rejected such a proposal…
Saudi Arabia
the Gulf States
Egypt
Russia
U.K. and
France
These were just several major players promoting positively and encouraging the Palestinians to come to the table.
For the very first time since their creation in 1964, the Palestinians found themselves isolated and lacking support as never before.
Land Stolen? Or Sold?
When we study the first of the peace proposals – the 1937 Peel Report [archive] – we have indisputable evidence to dispel a myth that has morphed into current-day fact.
Israel’s enemies always use this myth to claim that the Zionists stole land from the “indigenous Palestinians” during their “colonial” period dating from the late 19th Century.
The transcript below – between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Sir Laurie Hammond on behalf of the Peel Commission – validates that as of July 1937, at least 700,000 dunams (approximately 30 square miles) had been sold to the Jewish people legally and registered as such.
When one goes on to read the full transcript, it is apparent that twice that area is subject to future contracts (a total area of approximately 2,100,000 dunams).
The claim that Zionists stole any land is false, preposterous, and used to increase hostility against Jewish people and in a perfidious attempt to reclaim land that is not legally owned by anyone other than those who purchased it.
Palestine was a League of Nations Mandate (archive) – created and assigned to Britain on the condition a Jewish state was created there, and land settled on was bought from the Arab owners.
Here is the Grand Mufti, leader of the Arab community, testifying before the Peel Commission in 1937…
SIR L. HAMMOND: Would you give me the figures again for the land. I want to know how much land was held by the Jews before the Occupation.
MUFTI: At the time of the Occupation the Jews held about 100,000 dunams.
SIR H: What year?
M: At the date of the British Occupation.
SIR H: And now they hold how much?
M: About 1,500,000 dunams: 1,200,000 dunams already registered in the name of the Jewish holders, but there are 300,000 dunams which are the subject of written agreements, and which have not yet been registered in the Land Registry. That does not, of course, include the land which was assigned, about 100,000 dunams.
SIR H: What 100,000 dunams was assigned? Is that not included in, the 1,200,000 dunams? The point is this. He says that in 1920 at the time of the Occupation, the Jews only held 100,000 dunams, is that so? I asked the figures from the Land Registry, how much land the Jews owned at the time of the Occupation. Would he be surprised to hear that the figure is not 100,000 but 650,000 dunams?
M: It may be that the difference was due to the fact that many lands were bought by contract which were not registered.
SIR H: There is a lot of difference between 100,000 and 650,000.
M: In one case they sold about 400,000 dunams in one lot.
SIR H: Who? An Arab?
M: Sarsuk. An Arab of Beyrouth.
SIR H: His Eminence gave us a picture of the Arabs being evicted from their land and villages being wiped out. What I want to know is, did the Government of Palestine, the Administration, acquire the land and then hand it over to the Jews?
M: In most cases the lands were acquired.
SIR H: I mean forcibly acquired – compulsory acquisition as land would be acquired for public purposes?
M: No, it wasn’t.
SIR H: Not taken by compulsory acquisition?
M: No.
SIR H: But these lands amounting to some 700,000 dunams were actually sold?
M: Yes, they were sold, but the country was placed in such conditions as would facilitate such purchases.
SIR H: I don’t quite understand what you mean by that. They were sold. Who sold them?
M: Land owners.
SIR H: Arabs?
M: In most cases they were Arabs.
SIR H: Was any compulsion put on them to sell? If so, by whom?
M: As in other countries, there are people who by force of circumstances, economic forces, sell their land.
It is noteworthy and enlightening to quote the words of Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, the Syrian leader of the Peel Commission…
There is no such country as Palestine. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented and there is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries Syria and Palestine is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it.
This unpalatable fact for pro-Palestinians was further endorsed by Ahmad Shukan the Arab spokesman at the United Nations in 1956.
Such a creature as Palestine does not exist at all. This land is nothing but Greater Syria.
Click the image below to view the David Meir-Levi post, “The Jews Stole Arab Land“ vs The Grand Mufi of Jerusalem…
problems viewing the above post? please click here for the archived version
The Peel Report Official Communique (archive) was published in September of 1937 and makes incredible reading for its pragmatism despite the pro-Arab politics of the British Administration.
Chapter V, ¶ 3 of the Report states –
The Arab population shows a remarkable increase since 1920 and has shared in the increased prosperity of Palestine. Many Arab landowners have benefited from the sale of land and the profitable investment of the purchase money. The Fellaheen ( Arab agricultural labourers ) are better off than they were in 1920. This Arab progress has been due to the import of Jewish capital associated with growth. 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.
Chapter IX, ¶ 5 of the Peel Communique states…
The Arabs have benefited both from the work of the British Administration and the presence of Jews in the country……The Arab claims that the Jews have purchased 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.
This Chapter further goes on to identify the international legal obligation of the League of Nations to facilitate a home country for the Jewish people and calculates that as at the time of writing some 400,000 Jews were living in the area.
Chapter XVI, ¶ 5 is both striking and familiar to this day concerning education, it states…
The contrast between the Arab and Jewish systems of education is most striking… the Jews have a university of high quality but the Arabs have none.
Part III, Chapter 22, § 3 ¶ 4(ii) (The Frontier) states…
The Jews have purchased substantial blocks of land in the Gaza Plain and near Beershaba and have options for the purchase of other blocks in this area.
Part III, Chapter 22, § 3 ¶ 4(iii) also identifies the Jewish historical connections since time immemorial to the land…
… the proposed frontier necessitates the inclusion in the Jewish area of the Galilee highlands between Safed and the Plain of Acre. This is the part in which the Jews have retained a foothold almost if not entirely without a break from the beginning of the Diaspora to the present day and the sentiment of all Jewry is deeply attached to the holy cities of Safad and Tiberias.
The opening paragraph of Part IV (titled Inter-State Subvention) is typically enlightening….
The Jews contribute more per capita to the revenues of Palestine than the Arabs which has enabled the Administration to maintain public services at a higher level than would otherwise have been possible.
Part IV, § 10 (Exchange of Land and Population) refers to the population of Jerusalem which, according to this Report, is a total irrelevance to Arab necessities in so far as no claim on it is made.
This is unsurprising given that Jerusalem was never mentioned in the Koran nor did the Palestinian National Charters which originated in 1964 and were updated in 1968.
The claim to any part of Jerusalem from an Arab Palestinian perspective is a result of a modern, political phenomenon.
The population of Jerusalem ”there are some 125,000 Jews as against 85,000 Arabs…”
Summary of the Peel Commission Report - English (1937)
click here for a PDF of the Peel Report Official Communique (archive)
Historical Context of the Peel Report
The Report from a historical context proves beyond doubt that not only did Jews purchase the land (usually at extortionate prices from Arabs), but also the barren land was cultivated by Jews and resulted in mass immigration into the area by Arab labor from surrounding countries.
The Report exposes the lies so frequently used by Israel’s present-day opposition that Jewish colonialists stole the land and kicked out the original owners through force.
As just one of numerous examples of the influx of non ‘Palestinian’ Arabs into the geographical area now being disputed, the Governor of Houran Province in Southern Syria, Tewlik Bey El Houran, stated in an interview with La Syne, August 12th 1934.
… that in the last few months up to 36,000 Syrians had entered to work in Palestine …
Notwithstanding the legal immigration of Arabs into Sinai, there was illegal immigration and this has been calculated as a multiple of at least 4 to 7 times that of legal migration…
The illegal Arab immigration was not only going on from Sinai but also from Transjordan and Syria and it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining States could not be kept from going in to share that misery. ~ Palestine Royal Commission Report 1937
So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied (due to immigration) until their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population.
~ Winston Churchill,1939
An Uncultivatable Lot of Dirt Flourishes Under Jewish Dominance
Palestine was a no man’s land until the Jewish people reappeared, cultivated, and attracted foreign Arab labor.
This is evidenced by the writings of noted authors, diplomats, and travelers to the area such as Samuel Clemence ( Mark Twain ) writing in The Innocents Abroad in 1867.
His comments are worthy of transcribing…
There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not for 30 miles in either direction. One may ride 10 miles hereabouts and not see ten humans.
For the sort of solitude to make one dreary come to Galilee…
Nazareth is forlorn…
Jericho lies a mouldering ruin…
Bethlehem and Bethany in their poverty and humiliation…untenanted by any living creature…
A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds…a silent, mournful expanse, a desolation.We never saw a human being on the whole route. Hardly a tree or shrub anywhere.
Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil had almost deserted the country.
Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes, desolate and unlovely.
Where were the ”Palestinians” hiding that Mark Twain did not see nor identify any of them during his months of travel to the places they claim they had inhabited for generations?
Many such travelers to the area wrote similarly of desolate land, uninhabited, and certainly never any notation relating to indigenous Palestinians.
Gunner Edward Webbe in 1590 wrote about Jerusalem
… there is nothing to be seen but a little of the old walls .
Thomas Shaw, a British archaeologist in the mid-1700s wrote….
The land in Palestine is lacking in people to till its fertile soil.
Wrote Count Constantine Francois Volney, 18th century French historian…
Palestine is a ruined and desolate land.
British Consul James Finn in 1857 wrote thus…
The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population.
The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate for Palestine legally obliging the League of Nations to create a country dedicated to the Jewish people created the conditions for population growth.
Jews were encouraged to return to the place of their birthright and Arabs leveraging from the benefits of better economic conditions generated by Zionist knowledge and capitalism immigrated in their tens of thousands.
Such economic benefits from the political changes after the fall of the Ottoman Empire did not impinge on any Palestinian rights because the Palestinians had never existed as a race, a people, or a culture.
Indigenous Palestinians as we know them today are an anthropological invention as the indisputable evidence exposes.
Evidence is in abundance to disprove the anti-Jewish ‘demographers’ who absurdly promote the thesis that the Arab population quintupled to nearly 2 million during the period 1920 to 1948 through natural childbirth.
No other group in history has ever proved to be so abundantly successful in natural human reproduction.
Mass Arab immigration, fueled by the economic benefits of Zionism, created the demographic explosion of the Arab population in Palestine.
Ironically this can also be validated by the family names of the imported Arab migrant workers.
A detailed study of analyzing the demographics makes very uncomfortable reading for the current pro-Palestinian lobbyists incorrectly dedicated to the myth that there were a majority of indigenous Palestinians before the Zionist migration started in the late 19th century.
The demographers U.O. Shmelz, Roberto Bachi, Gad Gilbar, and C.S. Jarvis all conclude that illegal Arab immigration was unrecorded and together with the legal Arab migrants made up the majority of the incoming population to the area.
The uncultivated land only supported sparsely inhabited civilization and the Arab tribes were mainly nomadic.
Only one demographer, Justin McCarthy, subsequently discredited, has absurdly concluded that Arab childbirth in the area caused the population increase and Arab immigration was tiny.
Naturally, the pro-Palestinian lobby uses this erroneous interpretation to counter the truth.
to continue viewing the post above, click here (archive)
The most striking and obvious thing to any student of the Report is the total lack of the term ‘Palestinians’.
No mention whatsoever of this collective term to identify a people, a nation, a race, or a past civilization.
Only the term Arab is used and this is further proof that the so-called Palestinians are an anthropological invention of the late 20th century.
The Palestinians were a political organization invented for the destruction of Israel and were originally made up of two-thirds Muslim Arabs and one-third Christian.
As a result of ethnic cleansing by Muslims of the Christian communities, the makeup is currently 95% Muslim.
The importance of the Peel Report is that historical evidence that no such indigenous Palestinian population existed and the non-Jewish influx was purely a result of the economic benefits of Zionism cannot be overstated and should be constantly highlighted.
Naturally, the anti-Israel lobby, currently so dominant within the media and political organizations, will never connect with historical evidence.
The truth be damned.
Unfortunately for the anti-Israel lobby, researchers like myself are still published by those seeking only the truth.
This post was originally published in DecisiveLiberty.News [archive] on 14 February 2020
About Peter A. Baum
Peter, International Political Affairs Editor to WeeklyBlitz.net, is a research scholar and pro-Israel activist who challenges the fake news narrative on Israel, the Holocaust, Zionism, the Middle East, Anti-Semitism, and racial issues by providing well-documented content and references to original source documents which uncover their fakery. You can find Peter regularly contributing to the subject matter through written articles, TV appearances, and lectures. Peter was chairman of Southend Young Conservatives, a founding member of Southend Friends of Israel, and is currently a delegate on the Board of Deputies and Executive Council member of Fair Reporting. Peter also writes for several newspapers and research global organizations, including the Gatestone Institute.