Posted on 06/05/2002 2:14:21 PM PDT by lucy1
As the most visible Arab-American critic of Yasser Arafat and the phony "Palestinian" agenda, I get a lot of hate mail.
I've even received more than my share of death threats.
Most of those who attack me – at least those who bother to get beyond the four-letter words and insults – say I just don't understand or have sympathy for these poor Arabs who were displaced, chased out of their homes and turned into refugees by the Israelis.
Let me state this plainly and clearly: The Jews in Israel took no one's land.
When Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in the 19th century, he was greatly disappointed. He didn't see any people. He referred to it as a vast wasteland. The land we now know as Israel was practically deserted.
By the beginning of the 20th century, that began to change. Jews from all over the world began to return to their ancestral homeland – the Promised Land Moses and Joshua had conquered millennia earlier, Christians and Jews believe, on the direct orders of God.
That's not to say there wasn't always a strong Jewish presence in the land – particularly in and around Jerusalem. In 1854, according to a report in the New York Tribune, Jews constituted two-thirds of the population of that holy city. The source for that statistic? A journalist on assignment in the Middle East that year for the Tribune. His name was Karl Marx. Yes, that Karl Marx.
A travel guide to Palestine and Syria, published in 1906 by Karl Baedeker, illustrates the fact that, even when the Islamic Ottoman Empire ruled the region, the Muslim population in Jerusalem was minimal. The book estimates the total population of the city at 60,000, of whom 7,000 were Muslims, 13,000 were Christians and 40,000 were Jews.
"The number of Jews has greatly risen in the last few decades, in spite of the fact that they are forbidden to immigrate or to possess landed property," the book states.Even though the Jews were persecuted, still they came to Jerusalem and represented the overwhelming majority of the population as early as 1906. And even though Muslims today claim Jerusalem as the third holiest site in Islam, when the city was under Islamic rule, they had little interest in it.
As the Jews came, drained the swamps and made the deserts bloom, something interesting began to happen. Arabs followed. I don't blame them. They had good reason to come. They came for jobs. They came for prosperity. They came for freedom. And they came in large numbers.
Winston Churchill observed in 1939: "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population."
Then came 1948 and the great partition. The United Nations proposed the creation of two states in the region – one Jewish, one Arab. The Jews accepted it gratefully. The Arabs rejected it with a vengeance and declared war.
Arab leaders urged Arabs to leave the area so they would not be caught in the crossfire. They could return to their homes, they were told, after Israel was crushed and the Jews destroyed. It didn't work out that way. By most counts, several hundred thousand Arabs were displaced by this war – not by Israeli aggression, not by some Jewish real-estate grab, not by Israeli expansionism.
In fact, there are many historical records showing the Jews urged the Arabs to stay and live with them in peace. But, tragically, they chose to leave.
Fifty-four years later, the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of those refugees are all-too-often still living in refugee camps – not because of Israeli intransigence, but because they are misused as a political tool of the Arab powers.
Those poor unfortunates could be settled in a week by the rich Arab oil states that control 99.9 percent of the Middle East landmass, but they are kept as virtual prisoners, filled with misplaced hatred for Jews and armed as suicide martyrs by the Arab power brokers.
This is the modern real history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. At no time did the Jews uproot Arab families from their homes. When there were title deeds to be purchased, they bought them at inflated prices. When there were not, they worked the land so they could have a place to live without the persecution they faced throughout the world.
It's a great big lie that the Israelis displaced anyone – one of a series of lies and myths that have the world on the verge of committing yet another great injustice to the Jews.
Its why facts as these are never reported and the Jewish American community has chosen to be liberals first and Jews second. Thats why one does not hear it from them.
Its pretty sad, that Israel has to relly on an Arab-American (Farah) and Conservative Christians for support.
I'm glad you posted it.
On April 9, 1948 the combined forces of the Stern Gang and the Irgun (military arm of the Revisionist party, commanded by Menachem Begin, later Prime Minister) carried out reprisals in the Arab village of Deir Yassin.
Twenty-three men were led off to a quarry and executed in cold blood, and between 90 and 230 others were shot down in the village.
Menachim Begin's statement afterwards:
"Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest...."
"A SPLENDID ACT OF CONQUEST".
Farah is lying, and stupidly, because it's easy enough to see what Twain wrote:
The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants. One hundred of the latter sect are all that dwell now in this birthplace of Christianity. The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem.
From The Innocents Abroad, Chapter 53
And oh yes - Twain repeatedly refers to the country as "Palestine".
Er, I hate to break it to you, but the Mexicans won the battle at the Alamo.
Oops -- maybe you should have left out this part, as it destroys your argument (a land where the Big City[tm] has a population of 14,000 is rather empty, even by mid-19th century standards).
That's because the Jews referred to themselves as Palestinians. Note that Twain referred to what you call "Palestinians" as Moslems. They called themselves either Moslems or Arabs until after 1948, when they decided that they were really Palestinians. Their new "Palestinian" name didn't really catch on until the 1960s.
Did you know that the Jerusalem Post (founded and operated by Jews) used to be named the Palestine Post? Note this historic page from the Palestine Post. Also, what is now the Israeli Philharmonic was originally the Palestine Philharmonic, and today's Israel Electric Company was originally the Palestine Electric Company. You could learn something by reading Joe Farah.
The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants. One hundred of the latter sect are all that dwell now in this birthplace of Christianity. The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently -- the eternal "bucksheesh." To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.
Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, Chapter 53
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