THE TRUTH ABOUT THE LAND IN PALESTINE:

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE LAND IN PALESTINE:

The truth and fact is from the beginning of World War I, some of Palestine's land was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut. About 85 percent of the Palestinian Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi nomads and Bedouins. In 1946, the British Mandate Government surveyed the land, ownership was as follows: 80% owned by the British government, in trust for the Jewish National Homeland transferred by international law to Israel 9.8% owned by Jews 3.3% owned by resident Arabs 6.2% owned by non-resident Arabs When Jews started to buy Arab lands, Jews actually went out of their way to avoid purchasing land in areas where Arabs might be displaced. They sought land that was largely uncultivated, swampy, cheap and, most important, without tenants.

In 1920, Labor Zionist leader David BenGurion expressed his concern about the Arab fellahin, whom he viewed as "the most important asset of the native population.". Ben Gurion said "under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them as leaseholders." He advocated helping liberate them from their oppressors. "Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement," Ben Gurion added, "should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price." When John Hope Simpson arrived in Palestine in May 1930, he observed: "They [Jews] paid high prices for the land, and in addition they paid to certain of the occupants of those lands a considerable amount of money which they were not legally bound to pay.".

In 1931, Lewis French conducted a survey of landlessness and eventually offered new plots to any Arabs who had been "dispossessed." British officials received more than 3,000 applications, of which 80 percent were ruled invalid by the Government's legal adviser because the applicants were not landless Arabs. This left only about 600 landless Arabs, 100 of whom accepted the Government land offer.

In April 1936, a new outbreak of Arab attacks on Jews was instigated by a Syrian guerrilla named Fawzi alQawukji, the commander of the Arab Liberation Army. By November, when the British finally sent a new commission headed by Lord Peel to investigate, 89 Jews had been killed and more than 300 wounded. The Peel Commission's report found that Arab complaints about Jewish land acquisition were baseless. It pointed out that "much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased....there was at the time of the earlier sales little evidence that the owners possessed either the resources or training needed to develop the land.". Moreover, the Commission found the shortage was "due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population." The report concluded that the presence of Jews in Palestine, along with the work of the British Administration, had resulted in higher wages, an improved standard of living and ample employment opportunities.

In his memoirs, Jordan's King Abdullah wrote: "It is made quite clear to all, both by the map drawn up by the Simpson Commission and by another compiled by the Peel Commission, that the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping ."Even at the height of the Arab revolt in 1938, the British High Commissioner to Palestine believed the Arab landowners were complaining about sales to Jews to drive up prices for lands they wished to sell.

Many Arab landowners had been so terrorized by Arab rebels they decided to leave Palestine and sell their property to the Jews. The Jews were paying exorbitant prices to wealthy landowners for small tracts of arid land. "In 1944, Jews paid between $1,000 and $1,100 per acre in Palestine, mostly for arid or semiarid land; in the same year, rich black soil in Iowa was selling for about $110 per acre."By 1947, Jewish holdings in Palestine amounted to about 463,000 acres. Approximately 45,000 of these acres were acquired from the Mandatory Government; 30,000 were bought from various churches and 387,500 were purchased from Arabs. Analyses of land purchases from 1880 to 1948 show that 73 percent of Jewish plots were purchased from large landowners, not poor fellahin. Those who sold land included the mayors of Gaza, Jerusalem and Jaffa. As'ad elShuqeiri, a Muslim religious scholar and father of PLO chairman Ahmed Shuqeiri, took Jewish money for his land. Even King Abdullah leased land to the Jews. In fact, many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including members of the Muslim Supreme Council, sold land to Jews. The weekly Fasl al-Maqal, owned by Arab- Israeli parliament deputy Azmi Beshara and based in the predominantly Arab city of Nazareth in north Israel, ran a list of 54 leading Palestinians who sold land to Jews from 1918-1945. The paper reported that Palestinian nationalist leaders, including the grandfather of the PLO's current top official in Jerusalem, sold land to Jews in the years before Israel's founding. The paper ran a story titled "Our Fathers On The Take," takes the issue back to the era of the British mandate before Israel's founding in 1948, when the Zionist movement was seeking land in Palestine to create a Jewish state. The paper reports that some of those highest up in the Palestinian nationalist movement which opposed the Jewish state were at the same time selling land to the Jewish Agency, the body spearheading the Zionist drive. The weekly's editor-in-chief, Awad Abdel Fatah reports that the names came from an official document dating back to the British mandate in Palestine, which the paper received from official sources in Jordan. He said, "We published only a partial list from the document, showing the role of the Palestinian leadership in the flow of lands to the Jewish Agency before the disaster of 1948," he said. The names are embarrassing to the Arab PA as one is a relative of Yasir Arafat and he is one of the most prominent names on the list. His name is Mohammed Taher al-Husseni, father of al-Hajj Amin al-Husseni, the mufti of Jerusalem and supreme head of the Palestinian nationalist movement. Another was Kazem al-Husseni, grandfather on the mother's side of Faisal Husseni, the top PLO official in Jerusalem. Kazem sold lands in Jerusalem, where he was mayor from 1918-1920. The list includes five other members of the Husseni family, one of the most prominent clans in pre-1948 Palestine and today. Other members of leading Palestinian families also showed up on the list, as did members of the High Arab Committee, the High Islamic Council and the Arab Executive Committee, the main bodies which led the nascent Palestinian nationalist movement against Zionism. Mussa al-Alami, who headed the Palestinian delegation to the London Conference of 1939 convened to discuss the future of the mandate Palestine, sold 90 hectares (222 acres) to Jews in Bisan, now the north Israeli city of Beit Shean, according to the list. Ragheb al-Nashashibi, mayor of Jerusalem from 1920-1934 and head of the National Defense Party, sold over 120 hectares (296 acres) of land in Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv. Nashashibi also sold land in east Jerusalem upon which Hebrew University was later built. Yaakub al-Ghussein, who headed the Arab Fund created to gather money to support the Palestinian cause, sold land to Jews in Jaffa and what is now the Gaza Strip for 4,000 Palestinian pounds, equivalent to British pound sterling at that era. And the other elite Muslim and Christian families of Palestine, including the Abdel Hadi, Bseiso, and Fahum clans, were represented on the list.

The Jews before the wars were already living as peasants, bought lands, cultivated them after years of neglect. The Jews restored the land and made it what it is today having an economy ten times the size of that of Egypt, Jordan and Syria combined, while the Arabs have been plotting wars against her since the 1920’s and instead of wiping out every Jew in the area, it has resulted in the displacement of almost 1/2 the Palestinians since 1948.