Creation of Israel

[theoldman]

I have always wondered how the state of Israel was created. Did the original rules allow the Israelis to push the Palestinians out of their homes? Who give the British and other counties the authority to take land away from the people who had lived there for thousands of years? I know that there are no short answers to these questions. I am most interested in what took place in the 1940's.

[sweetheart]

1. God did it nt

[WinkyDink]

2. Try an encyclopedia.

[theoldman]

3. I have done that but too many details are missing.

[Avalux]

14. Try Google then.

You can get more info than you ever dreamed online.

[LA lady]

4. Here's one

http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/publish/101conflict.shtml#10

Q: I've heard that the Palestinians left Israel on their own or under order from Arab leaders in 1948. Is this so?

A: There were between 650,000 and 1.2 million Palestinians who left the area that was to become Israel in 1948. The circumstances of their departure varied. The records of the Hagana (the Jewish militia which later became the Israeli army) show that there were some official plans to empty Palestinian towns and villages. Records also clearly show that there were at least several instances of Palestinian towns suffering massacres at the hands of Israeli soldiers (both sides launched numerous attacks on civilians, especially in the early part of the war). Minutes from meetings of different Jewish leadership groups also indicate that there was definitely a desire to see as much of a Jewish majority in whatever territory would end up being Israel?s as possible. There is also clear evidence that some of the more radical Jewish militias attacked Palestinian towns with the goal of spreading fear in the Arab populace, in the hopes that this would make them flee.

It has often been claimed that the Arab Higher Committee broadcast a call for the Palestinians to flee so that the invading Arab armies could defeat the Zionists and then the Palestinians could return. No such call was ever issued. There were, of course, calls to move women and children out of the path of the fighting, but there was never a call for all civilians to leave. Many of the Palestinians fled in the very early stages of the war, long before any such call would have been issued in any case.

As the fighting intensified, and more villages came under attack, more and more Palestinians fled the war. Organized expulsions also continued. In some areas, especially cities like Haifa and Yaffo, where Arabs and Jews had lived together in relative stability, there were efforts made by Jews to get their neighbors to stay, and these met with some success at times. As today, there was a great variety of views among Jews in Palestine/Israel.

But whatever the circumstances, Israel went beyond its rights in passing laws to prevent the Palestinians from returning after the war. International law requires countries to allow people who flee a war back to their homes when the war ends. Israel was specifically enjoined to do so by the United Nations after the war, but did not comply. This was the beginning of the Palestinian refugee crisis, which remains the most vexing issue between the two peoples to this day. For more information about this, see Benny Morris' book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited." return to top

[oberliner]

5. how many of these posts are there going to be, i wonder?

Maybe there should be a Creation of Israel FAQ?

[QuestionAll...]

6. so far less than Coulter threads... nt

[Emit]

10. Ironic, isn't it, that you would be concerned about the number of posts on

a particular topic of discussion? In your time at DU, how many original posts have you created on one particular topic?

These questions add context to the current discussion, don't you think? Or is this a subject you think shouldn't be discussed here?

[NNN0LHI]

15. I have been catching flak lately about the threads I start too

Seems to be a concerted effort around here.

Don

[SPKrazy]

19. Oh Yes, I'm Sure There Is A Concerted Effort

maybe a whole group of people out to get you?

[oberliner]

17. Could not agree more

That's why I think there should be a FAQ.

Then people can at least have some basic foundation with which to start those discussions.

I've made quite a few posts in a short time regarding the current situation unfolding in Israel and Lebanon.

It is definitely a subject that I think should be discussed and knowing the history of the region brings enormous context to the current discussion.

Are there no basic facts about the creation of Israel that can be included, maybe as a sticky in the I/P forum, for people who want answers to the questions raised in that post?

I shouldn't have been so snippy about it in my original reply.

[QuestionAll...]

7. try this, excerpts from books of the subject.

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/origin.html

[leftofthedial]

8. it was a brit protectorate

so, according to the rules of white colonialism, the brits were free to decide what parts were for wogs and what parts were for the semi-white european jews.

then, they were free to bug out when the wogs got pissed

[Igel]

9. Quick answers.

Did the original rules allow the Israelis to push the Palestinians out of their homes?
No.

Who give the British and other counties the authority to take land away from the people who had lived there for thousands of years?
The Ottoman Empire, the Sick Man of Europe, died at the hands of Europe in WWI and thereafter. Since he died without a will, they divvied up the estate. France got Syria, Turkey was left with Turkey, and the British got most of what was left (Iraq, territory on both sides of the Jordan). If it makes you feel any better, the Austro-Hungarian Empire also died in WWI. And they screwed up when they granted freedom to Europe territories, too. Think "Yugoslavia".

The British got the Ottoman-owned land (i.e., land without any other owner). It was owned by the state; change of state, change of owner. I think, but can't show, that the state-owned land would have become Israel-owned territory or Palestine-owned territory under the plans approved. The private land would have stayed private.

That's very much not how it went, between people fleeing and people being expelled; then there was the great influx of Jews from Arab lands, also not quite planned. Land owned by refugees was later nationalized by Israel after being unused for a while (i.e., owners were refugees elsewhere, not allowed back in), and is held in trust for Jewish citizens, IIRC.

[GDAEx2]

11. Strange that no one mentioned

the burning of Palestinian villages, massacre of Palestinians and other terrorist acts as evidenced by the bombing of the King David Hotel. Israeli "patriots" like Ben-Gurion & Begin set the standard for terrorism in the region in the 1920's and 30's.

[titoresque]

16. A great article by David Icke I read this a.m.

talks of this as well. I think Icke is a forbidden link though at DU. ?

Is a great article I highly recommend!

[papau]

21. WOW - Footballer "son of God" channel for Christ -Jew hater can write!

Thanks for the recommendation - LOL -

:-)

[Lurking Dem]

24. Don't forget the Lizard People!

Icke as a source.....here I thought I'd seen it all!

[JohnLocke]

25. David Icke, the far-right Nazi and anti-Semite?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke

[papau]

18. there were terrorist acts on both sides with Arab terror begining in 1908

The word massacre has been applied to the arab killing of jews in the various riots against the Jews living in Palestine under Ottoman and British rule - I do not know if it was appropiate. Feel free to use Google to determine who "won" the terror most killed body count - Jew or Arab.


http://www.mideastweb.org/zionism.htm

Rashid Khalidi (Palestinian Identity, Columbia, 1997) notes that beginning about 1908 Palestinian newspapers offer extensive evidence of anti-Zionist agitation. Actual conflicts flared up because the Zionists purchased large tracts from landowners and subsequently evicted the tenant farmers. The former tenants, though they had received some compensation, continued to insist that the land was theirs under time honored traditions and tried to take it back by force. A notable case was Al-Fula, where Zionists had purchased a large tract of land from the Sursuq family of Beirut. Local officials took the side of the Arab peasants against the Zionists and against the Ottoman government, which upheld the legality of the sale. 150 Palestinian notables cabled the Ottoman government to protest land sales to Jews in March 1911.

(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, Knopf 1999 Page 62 and 91/99) ... The attempts to retake land and disputes with Jewish guards led to increased violence beginning in the second half of 1911.

Following World War I, Palestine came under British rule. Even before they had conquered Palestine from the Ottoman Turkish Empire, owing to the efforts of Zionists, the British government declared its intentions, in the Balfour declaration, of sponsoring a "national home" for the Jews in Palestine. Britain was given a League of Nations Mandate to develop Palestine as a Jewish National home. The Arabs of Palestine were appalled at the prospect of living in a country dominated by a Jewish majority and feared that they would be dispossessed. Anti-Jewish rioting and violence broke out in 1920 and 1921. By this time, Zionist leaders could no longer ignore the conflict with the Arabs. By 1919, representatives of the Jaffa Muslim-Christian council were saying

"We will push the Zionists into the sea or they will push us into the desert"

Arab opposition to Zionism was not based only on economic and social issues. It was colored by the traditional Muslim vision of the Jews as second class citizens. By the 1920s, it was also motivated by a strong admixture of Western anti-Semitism. In 1920, Musa Kazim El Husseini, deposed as Mayor of Jerusalem because of his part in riots earlier that year, told Winston Churchill: The Jews have been amongst the most active advocates of destruction in many lands... It is well known that the disintegration of Russia was wholly or in great part brought about by the Jews, and a large proportion of the defeat of Germany and Austria must also be put at their door.

(Caplan, Neil, Palestine Jewry and the Palestine Question, 1917-1925, Frank Cass, 1978)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Though the Haganah defensive underground was founded in 1920 by Jabotinsky, it didn't become a major project of the Zionist movement until after the riots of 1929. These riots, and not any intrinsic aspect of Zionist ideology, were the real trigger for the birth of militant Zionism as a political force, as well as the progressively more important role played by self-defense and military prowess in Zionist thought, action and society.

Meanwhile the Arab and Jewish communities grew progressively apart. Arabs refused to participate in a Palestinian local government which gave equal representation to the Jewish minority.

... Beginning with the Husseini clan led by Hajj Amin El Husseini, the Grand Mufti, different factions of Palestinian Arabs, successively allied themselves with Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and, after WW II with communist countries. Arab rhetoric became increasingly colored by European anti-Semitism, and adopted many of the claims and ideas of Holocaust deniers such as Roger Garaudy as well as the anti-Zionist ideology of radical Jewish intellectuals.

The conflict was intensified and complicated by the 1948 war. About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled during the war, and Israel did not allow them to return. Many Palestinian refugees were settled in camps under miserable conditions, where they have remained for several generations. The Israeli point of view had in mind the recent convulsions of World War II, and the exchange of populations that occurred when India and Pakistan were created. Most Israelis believed the Palestinians became refugees through their own fault. Their exile was the result of the war which the Palestinians themselves had started by rejection of the UN partition plan, just as, for example, the Germans of Sudetensland, who helped instigate the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, were eventually banished as the result of their own mischief. For the Arabs of Palestine, their Nakba, or catastrophe, vindicated their fears that the Zionists were bent on dispossessing them.

[papau]

12. The best, most scientific data I've seen is below(650,000 Jews w/620,000 ,

Arabs fleeing the war or being expelled - the 650,000 Jews being a combination of a rather small number of families that trace their continuous residence in Israel to a 1000 years before Christ, plus Jews that migrated back after the Roman expulsion and bought land and settled down in Israel - the majority coming to Israel between 1880 and 1948. A major part of the UNRWA 1950 count appears to be people who were never "Palestinian" but were Arabs who just settled down in the refuge camps, as noted below (yet they want a "right of return? - just my comment and not anything the very balanced and non-political scientists below would ever say :-) ).

http://www.mideastweb.org/palpop.htm

Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by subdistricts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs.

An analysis of population by subdistricts and villages, using the data of the Palestine Remembered Web site, shows that there were about 735,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs in Palestine in 1948. There would not have been more than 620,000 refugees in 1949 if these figures are correct, since the Israeli census showed 156,000 non-Jews living in Palestine in November 1948, of whom about 14,000 were Druze. The number of refugees reported by UNRWA in 1948 was 726,000. It might indicate that an unregistered and illegal population of 100,000 was included in the refugees, or it might be due to serious and systematic undercounting of Arab population by the Mandate authorities. McCarthy suggests that there was such undercounting, yet his figures for the total population of Palestine agree with projections based on official figures for 1945.


There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees by UNRWA. In 1949, UNRWA reported 726,000 refugees. By 1950 they reported 914,000 according to one source (McCarthy), an increase of 26% that could not come either from births or further displacement of refugees, which were negligible.

The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896.

About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled during the war (600,000 based on the analysis of population by subdistricts and villages as noted above), and Israel did not allow them to return. Many Palestinian refugees were settled in camps under miserable conditions, where they have remained for several generations. The Israeli point of view had in mind the recent convulsions of World War II, and the exchange of populations that occurred when India and Pakistan were created. Most Israelis believed the Palestinians became refugees through their own fault. Their exile was the result of the war which the Palestinians themselves had started by rejection of the UN partition plan, just as, for example, the Germans of Sudetensland, who helped instigate the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, were eventually banished as the result of their own mischief. For the Arabs of Palestine, their Nakba, or catastrophe, vindicated their fears that the Zionists were bent on dispossessing them.

[ismnotwasm]

22. I was just cruising that site the other day

I thought it was very informative---I was looking for a relatively unbiased site. Bookmarked it. I'll still have to hit the bookstores though.

[poverlay]

23. So let me get this straight: Because there were more Arabs migrating

into Palestine than originally lived there, there is no right of return? It makes no sense to me that Arabs from outside Palestine would migrate into refugee camps. Why and for what reason would anyone do such a thing? It also seems as if you are saying that the dispossesed have only themselves to blame.
I may be totally missing the point here and I humbly request that you spell things out for me.

[papau]

27. People want to live off of welfare - even in misery - if they're very poor

To spell it out - as you phrase it -the Palestinians that were expelled/left in 48 (and no one is saying this was a good thing to happen to them) numbered about 600,000 - not the over 1 million as is usually claimed. When the UN camps were set up the welfare attracted a few hundred thousand very poor folks who saw them as a better alternative to just starving in the Arab countries they had been and were living in - as they had moved to the camps even though this was "illegal" - and the UN's own census data "proves this" - or at least is consistent with a load of other data that points to this.

The Palestinians that lived west of Jordan numbered only 200,000 living almost all in the West bank, prior to the 1920's and the major land purchases of the Jews and the infertile land becoming productive - the Jews effectively brought an economy that drew folks looking for jobs.

None of this changes the the facts of the killings of Jews - such as the 1929 massacre which began the "militant Zionism" branch of the Israeli public - , or the fact that the "militant Zionism" folks killed Arabs (and Brits as in the King David Hotel) in similar acts of terror against the Arab population. A bit like the IRA/Unionist Irish.

The dispossessed do not "have only themselves to blame" = but these are not the first - or last - dispossessed, and just about every country in the EU (the German background many generation citizen of countries other than Germany had the walk to Germany experience after their expulsion from their native countries after the end of WW2) and around the Med has major dispossessed stories - the difference from prior dispossessing here being the refusal of the countries they went to to help them - because the Palestinians made such great political symbols that helped the dictatorships in those countries to stay in power via the common enemy fear - similar to the Bush approach of fear and hate therefore elect me.

As to the misery in the camps, it was very real. But other dispossessed experienced misery - for example the Armenians having 1.5 million killed in Turkey and later in the "Great Walk" with a million others made slaves in Arab countries (much of the Lebanese Christian population eventually helped these folks who were slaves in Lebanon). Then there was the "Asian Greek exchange of population" of a few million after the end of WW1 and after the Brits preventing the Greeks from conquering the Turks because the Turks were seen by the Brits as better than the Greeks as anti-communist allies against Russia.

The site is very academic - not a fun read - but it is an excellent source for truth.

[Codeblue]

13. Everything I've learned

about the subject tells me that originally, the Brits or Allied powers had promised the Palestinians their own state. This was scrapped because everyone felt so horrible about the atrocities that were committed against Jews during WWII.

That's why you always hear the Palestinians talking about wanting their own state. They were granted one before, but it was taken away from them before it ever got created.

[papau]

20. The madate was for a split of Trans-Jordan, but Palestinians wanted 2

states out of Trans-Jordan - The portion of Trans-Jordan that became Jordan and another state on half the remaining land. The surrounding Arab countries did not want Jews to have a state on that less than 25% of Trans-Jordan.

[Codeblue]

26. Thanks

Thanks for the info. They never go in depth about anything in schools nowadays.