POPULATION of Palestine aka The Land of Israel :
Before the name change to the State
of Israel, "Palestinians" were the people living in the area called Palestine aka the Land of Israel . By the 1940s, the vast majority of Palestinians (Muslims,
Jews, and Christians) were immigrants or descendants of those who immigrated
after 1870, since the land was so VERY sparsely populated in the mid 1800s.
"Truth is stranger than fiction."
[Note the mere 2 year period of
residence for claiming refugee status: Arab Palestine refugees are defined as
“persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine aka the Land of Israel
during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means
of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” Of all the refugees, they are
the ONLY ones to perpetuate the status to all partri-lineal descendants. The
Arab League has instructed its members to deny them citizenship.]
Since the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in year
70 (after 12 CENTURIES of the Children of Israel in the Holy Land ), there have
continuously been some of the Jewish family and communities living in the Holy Land , and whenever
possible this included the heart of the Holy Land , Jerusalem .
Jews had been a constant presence in
the Holy Land , long before there were Zionists; largely poor, they were
largely concentrated, in separate Jewish quarters, in the towns of Jerusalem , Hebron , Safed,
and Tiberius. A few were merchants and shopkeepers, some were petty craftsmen, and
some spent their days praying and studying, living off contributions from
abroad. The newcomers, the Zionists, were to concentrate, not on merely living
(or dying) in the Holy Land , but on making a living, with the distinct idea of re-forming
an autonomous Jewish community in the ancient Jewish homeland.
Overall the Jewish population, like the population in general, had remained fairly stable from the earliest days of Ottoman rule until the 19th century. The introduction of stable Turkish government, and their promoting Jews to return to their homeland and revive its desolation into a producing land; and the Christian influence from outside, and in particular the abolishment of the laws discriminating against non-Muslims, led to a disproportionately larger growth of Jews in the Holy Land. According to Ben-Aryeh, the pre-eminent student of 19th century geography, Jews increased from 18,500 in 1800’s to about 45,000 by 1880, his figures including Jews who were not Ottoman citizens.
Overall the Jewish population, like the population in general, had remained fairly stable from the earliest days of Ottoman rule until the 19th century. The introduction of stable Turkish government, and their promoting Jews to return to their homeland and revive its desolation into a producing land; and the Christian influence from outside, and in particular the abolishment of the laws discriminating against non-Muslims, led to a disproportionately larger growth of Jews in the Holy Land. According to Ben-Aryeh, the pre-eminent student of 19th century geography, Jews increased from 18,500 in 1800’s to about 45,000 by 1880, his figures including Jews who were not Ottoman citizens.
By the mid 1800’s, the land was VERY
sparsely populated.
1857: British consul, James Finn,
reported "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and
therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population."
1859: British Consulate report: The Muslims
of Jerusalem do not exceed a fourth of the entire population.
1867: Charles Wyllys Elliott,
president of Harvard University , wrote: "A beautiful sea lies unbosomed, among the
Galilean hills in the mist of that land once possessed by Zebulon and Naphtali,
Asher and Dan. Life here was one idyllic... now it is a scene of desolation and
misery."
1867: American author Mark Twain
visited the Holy Land, and wrote about it in his book “The Innocents Abroad”:
“…[a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to
weeds -a silent mournful expanse….A desolation is here that not even
imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action….We never saw a human
being on the whole route….There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the
olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost
deserted the country.” "There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin
tents, but not a single permanent habitation." "One may ride ten
miles hereabouts, and not see ten human beings."
1874: Reverend Samuel Manning wrote
in his book, "Those Holy Fields" But where was the inhabitants? This
fertile plain which might support an immense population is almost solitude."
Starting in 1878, enormous waves of
Muslim immigration began arriving in what was essentially an empty territory.
The Ottoman Sultan launched a resettlement policy to bring foreign Muslims,
mainly from Circassia & Algeria.
⇨Unlike
Arabs, when Jews immigrated to the Holy Land ,
it was the indigenous people returning.⇦
1921- : Franklin D. Roosevelt,
president of the United
States , said on May 17, 1939 , "The Arab immigration to Palestine since
1921 was much greater than Jewish immigration." It was the British who
turned a blind eye while hundreds of thousands of Arabs crossed the border in
to Palestine aka the Land of Israel .
1922 – 1947: Arab population
increased the most in cities with large Jewish populations that had created new
economic opportunities. The non-Jewish population increased 290 percent in Haifa , 131
percent in Jerusalem and 158 percent in Jaffa . The
growth in Arab towns was more modest: 42 percent in Nablus , 78
percent in Jenin and 37 percent in Bethlehem .
1934: The governor of the Syrian
district of Hauran, Tewfik Bey El Hurani, admitted in 1934, which in a single
period of only a few months, over 35,000 Syrians from Houran had moved to Palestine aka the Land of Israel .
1939: Winston Churchill, British
Prime Minister and a veteran of the British Mandate in the Holy Land , noted in 1939
the Arab illegal invasion: The Arabs have crowded into the country and
multiplied till their population has increased more than even all worlds Jewry
could lift up the Jewish population.
June 1948: The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500,000 Arabs, in the 12 years in-between 1932-1944, came intoPalestine to take
advantage of living conditions existing in no other Arab state. - Robert F.
Kennedy visited the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948, one month before Israel declared its independence, and reported this for the Boston
Post.
-----
-----
"The Arab Palestinian people have no national identity. I Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict withIsrael ." -Yasser Arafat.
June 1948: The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500,000 Arabs, in the 12 years in-between 1932-1944, came into
-----
-----
"The Arab Palestinian people have no national identity. I Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with
"The Arab Palestinian people do
not exist. The creation of an Arab Palestinian state is only a means for
continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity." –Arab PLO executive committee member,
Zahir Muhsein, 1977.
The late military commander of the Arab
PLO, as well as member of the Arab PLO Executive Council, Zuhair Muhsin. Said
the following to James Dorsey in a 1977 interview in the Dutch newspaper
"Trouw" - There are no differences between Jordanians, Arab Palestinians,
Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political
reasons that we carefully underline our Arab Palestinian identity....yes; the
existence of a separate Arab Palestinian identity serves only tactical
purposes. The founding of an Arab Palestinian state is a new tool in the
continuing battle against Israel .
"It is common knowledge that Palestine is
nothing but southern Syria ."
- Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, to the UN Security Council
- Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, to the UN Security Council
"There is no such country [as Palestine ]! ’Palestine ' is a
term the Zionists invented! There is no Arab Palestine in the Qur’an. Our
country was for century’s part of Syria ."
- Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, a local Arab leader, to the Peel Commission, 1937
- Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, a local Arab leader, to the Peel Commission, 1937
Zuheir Mohsen uniquely both an Arab
PLO leader and an official in the ideologically Pan-Arabism Syrian Ba'ath party
at the same time. As such, he stated that there were no differences between
Jordanians, Arab Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese", though Arab Palestinian
identity would be emphasized for political reasons. This originated in a March
1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw: "Between Jordanians, Arab Palestinians,
Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences. We are all part of ONE people,
the Arab nation. Look, I have family members with Palestinian, Lebanese,
Jordanian and Syrian citizenship. We are ONE people. Just for political reasons
we carefully underwrite our Arab Palestinian identity. Because it is of
national interest for the Arabs to advocate the existence of Arab Palestinians
to balance Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Arab Palestinian identity
exists only for tactical reasons. The establishment of an Arab Palestinian
state is a new tool to continue the fight against Israel and for Arab unity."
"There is no Arab Palestinian nation! There is an Arab
nation, but no Arab Palestinian nation. This was invented by the colonial
powers. When are the Arab Palestinians mentioned in history? Never!" -
Azmi Bishara, Arab Palestinian intellectual and former Arab Knesset member who
fled to Qatar to avoid prosecution for aiding the enemy.
The problem with staking so much on so narrow a focus as past demography is that the data generated by demographers and others since the early nineteenth century are so lacking in precision that, in some matters of dispute concerning demography, "anyone's guess," as the saying goes, "is as good as any other." Or almost so. Of course, people still engaged in this high-stakes game of Palestinian demographic warfare will argue otherwise. With few exceptions, they insist that their own sources are superior, their own estimates more scientific, and their critics more ideological.
There are really two issues—or two battlefronts—associated with estimating Palestinian demography. The first has to do with sheer numbers, i.e., measuring over time the size of Palestine's total and subgroup populations. The second battlefront is considerably more contentious. It is estimating the percentages of population growth among subgroups attributed to natural increase and to immigration.
This immigration factor—or its absence—is paramount. If a significant percent of a population is composed of recent arrivals, then claims of historic tenancy are compromised. This explains why Arab Palestinians and others use the term "intruder" to describe the Jewish population of Palestine. The importance of Jewish immigration to the Jewish population of Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is undisputed. But Jewish claims to territorial inheritance and to national sovereignty lay elsewhere, in history rather than demography.
On the other hand, for Arab Palestinians, the character of their demography is at the heart of their claim to territorial inheritance and national sovereignty. Their contention, seen by them as being beyond dispute, is that Arab Palestinians have deep and timeless roots in that geography and that their own immigration into that geography has at no time been consequential. To challenge that contention, then, is to challenge their self-selected criterion for sovereignty.
That is to say, the character of Arab Palestinian demography is the single most important piece of evidence supporting the Arab Palestinian claim to territorial inheritance and national sovereignty. The Arab Palestinian population—large or small, growing or not—is determined, they insist, strictly by birth and death rates among Arab Palestinians in Palestine, that is, by natural increase alone. This view of their population origin is associated with their still more insular view of "spatial stickiness," that is, their insistence as well that Arabs have not only been disinclined to migrate out of or into Palestine but also that Arab Palestinians have been disinclined to move from one region to another within Palestine.
Before examining these contentions and the competing Arab Palestinian population estimates offered by scholars in a variety of disciplines, e.g., economics, sociology, demography, and history, it may be useful to speculate on what anyone looking at late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Palestinian demography should expect to discover.
Your reasoning—the cause-effect relationship between farm productivity, capital, and technology—is mapped in Exhibit 1. The output curve Q measures the value of corn produced by a farm laborer working with different quantities of capital. The more capital used by the farm laborer, the higher is that laborer's productivity. For example, working with $200 of farm machinery, the farm laborer produces $50 worth of corn, point a. If the capital per laborer ratio increases from $200 to $250—economists call this increase "capital deepening"—the laborer's productivity increases from $50 to $60, point b. The curvature of Q—flattening with capital deepening—is explained by the law of diminishing returns. Beyond some point, the productivity gains generated by capital deepening rapidly approach zero.
But that is not the end of the story. More advanced farm technology can shift the output curve upward from Q to Q'. That is to say, still using $200 of capital but this time in a qualitatively superior form of technology generates not $50 but $70 worth of corn, point c. Some changes in technology can produce very dramatic changes in productivity. Compare, for example, the productivity of a $1,000 computer printer to the productivity generated by $1,000 worth of pen and ink.
The moral is simple enough. The more economies engage in capital deepening and technological change, the more they will experience increasing labor productivity. Higher levels of labor productivity make higher wage rates more affordable and also increase levels of employment. Imagine, then, two adjacent economies, one heavily involved in capital deepening and technological change, the other reluctant or unable to change its technology or levels of capital deepening. The consequences are inevitable. The productivity gap between the two economies widens, creating the incentives for labor mobility.
Of course, not everybody moves. Lack of information as well as physical, legal, political, religious, and social barriers can work to impede movement. The elderly typically respond less to economic incentives than the young, and peoples' levels of energy and personal aspirations can differ markedly. These factors notwithstanding, it requires hardly a stretch of the imagination to argue that the strength of the migratory impulse among populations is highly correlated with differentials in labor productivity and standards of living.
Historical and contemporary evidence supporting migratory impulses, particularly among populations in the developing economies of the world, is overwhelming.[1] While there is every reason to suspect specific estimates—the methodology used in tracking migrants is still fairly crude and in some cases politically motivated—the picture is nonetheless clear. Some migratory routes have become virtual highways. Since the mid-twentieth century, millions of North African and East European migrants have left their native villages, towns, and cities for the more productive and higher-paying jobs in western Europe. The European Commission estimates that approximately one-half million migrants enter the European Union (EU) illegally each year, almost as many as enter legally.[2] Such migration flows are anything but unique. In Asia, the higher-paying employment opportunities in the more industrially advanced economies of Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, and South Korea have attracted an estimated 6.5 million Asian migrants from the less technologically developed economies.[3] Legal and illegal migrant workers in 1998 in Japan alone numbered 1.35 million. The principal countries of origin were China (234,000 legal and 38,000 illegal) and the Philippines (84,000 legal, 43,000 illegal).[4] Or consider the Indonesia-Malaysia connection. In 2001, there were 850,000 Indonesians working legally in Malaysia. An additional 350,000 to 400,000 were unauthorized.[5] That is no surprise when you consider that Indonesian migrants earned $2 per day in Malaysia compared to the $0.28 per day they would have earned in Indonesia.[6]
The migratory impulse is alive and well in the Americas for much the same reasons. The legal and illegal, daily and nightly trek north across the Rio Grande by Mexicans continues to be triggered by the glaring U.S.-Mexican wage disparities. A 1996 survey of 496 undocumented Mexican migrants to the United States showed that they averaged $278 per week compared to the $31 they had earned at their last Mexican job.[7] While there may be reason to question the specific numbers given for the Mexican migratory flows, particularly the illegal estimates, there is little justification to question the economic causes associated with the flow itself.
In 1970s Africa, oil-rich Nigeria absorbed millions of legal and illegal African migrants seeking to escape the drought, famine, and poverty in their native Ghana, Niger, and Chad. The oil-price collapse in the 1980s forced Nigeria to reconsider its open-door immigration policy and by the mid-1980s, approximately 2 million of these migrants—one million from Ghana alone—were obliged to leave.[8]
These references to contemporary migrations are, of course, only the tip of the migratory iceberg. Adding up the world's total migrations generates impressive but not surprising numbers. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the total number of persons living outside of their countries of origin was estimated at over 150 million, of which some 100 million—30 million undocumented—represent migrant workers and their families.[9]
What seems to make sense in explaining migratory flows for the rest of the world should make sense as well for the Middle East. And it does. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), Middle East migrant workers—moving within and beyond the Middle East—make up approximately 9 percent of the world's 100-million total.[10] By 1987, as many as 1.6 million Egyptians had emigrated to other Arab countries. Not surprising, their principal destinations of choice were oil-rich economies. Iraq hosted 43 percent, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, 39 percent.[11] The Kuwait war of 1990-91 brought about a dramatic shift in the hosting economies of Egypt's emigration. Iraq and Kuwait expelled most of their migrant populations during and following that war and by 2000, Saudi Arabia had become the single most important host of Egypt's now 2.7 million emigrants, absorbing as much as 34 percent of the total. Libya rose to second place among Arab-hosting economies with 12 percent and Jordan followed with 8 percent.[12]
Arab Palestinians, it appears, were no less responsive than were Egyptians to the migratory impulse. According to 1998 United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) estimates, there were 275,000 Arab Palestinians in Saudi Arabia, 38,000 in Kuwait (a dramatic drop from the 400,000 recorded before the Kuwait war), 74,000 in Libya, and over 100,000 in other gulf countries.[13] Hundreds of thousands left the Middle East entirely. Why should anyone suspect that Arab Palestinians would behave any differently than Egyptians, or Mexicans, or Ghanaians, or Moroccans, or Indonesians, or any other population facing regional inequalities in technology, productivity, income, and employment? That the pull effect of wage and employment disparities matters to Arab Palestinians is attested to not only by the size of their migratory flows but also by the fact that very few Arab Palestinians living in high-productivity Israel were part of that flow. In fact, an estimated 40,000 Jordanians who entered Israel on tourist visas in 2000 have stayed on after their visas expired to take advantage of the higher-paying employment opportunities afforded them in Israel. [14]
These two events generated a momentum of economic activity that produced in Palestine a standard of living previously unknown in the Middle East. Table 1 logs some of the critical factors contributing to the economic dynamics in Palestine during the 1920s.
Table 1
Selected Indicators of Capital Formation and Infrastructure Development: 1922-1931
Source: R. Szereszewski, Essays on the Structure of the Jewish Economy in Palestine and Israel(Jerusalem: Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel, 1968), pp. 60, 82; and S. Himadeh, Economic Organization of Palestine (Beirut: American University at Beirut, 1938), pp. 282, 565. (a) '000s of real LP measured at 1936 prices; (b) '000s LP, (c) real LP measured at 1936 prices, (d) units of KWH sold, (e) kilometers of local telegraph and telephone lines.
Capital stock grew at an annual rate of 14.1 percent, much of it a result of capital imports. The deepening of capital—capital stock per laborer—accompanied the growth of capital stock. The modernization process in the form of infrastructure development is illustrated by the growth of road construction, electric power, and telephone communications.[15] Table 1 represents the Palestinian version of both movements along the Qt curve of Exhibit 1—capital deepening—and upward shifts in the curve which signal technological change. The results were dramatic. Real net domestic product per capita soared, doubling during 1922-31, from 19.4 LP (Palestine pounds) to 38.2 LP.
The success of these beginnings of modernization could not have been lost on Arab Palestinians nor on Arabs living in adjacent economies.[16] Table 2 contrasts the standards of living enjoyed by Arab Palestinians to the standards in other Middle East economies.
Table 2
Economic Performance and Standards of Living In Middle East Economies: 1932-1936
Source: F. Gottheil, "Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel: 1922-1931," Middle Eastern Studies, Oct. 1973, p. 320. (a) British pound sterling, 1936; (b) in mils, 1933-5; (c) International Units (IU), 1934-6; (d) IU, 1934-6.
Demographer U.O. Schmelz's analysis of the Ottoman registration data for 1905 populations of Jerusalem and Hebron kazas (Ottoman districts), by place of birth, showed that of those Arab Palestinians born outside their localities of residence, approximately half represented intra-Palestine movement—from areas of low-level economic activity to areas of higher-level activity—while the other half represented Arab immigration into Palestine itself, 43 percent originating in Asia, 39 percent in Africa, and 20 percent in Turkey.[18] Schmelz conjectured:
Like U.O. Schmelz, Roberto Bachi expressed some reservation about the virtual non-existence of data and discussion concerning migration into and within Palestine. He writes:
Lacking verifiable evidence did not prevent Bachi from stating the obvious concerning internal migration within Palestine:
Reference to Arab immigration into Palestine during the 1920s is made as well in the British mandatory government's annual compilation of statistical data on population. The Palestine Blue Book, 1937, for example, provides time series demographic statistics whose annual estimates are based on extrapolations from its 1922 census.[24] The footnote accompanying the table on population of Palestine reads:
Historian Gad Gilbar's observation on Ruth Kark's contribution to his edited volume Ottoman Palestine, 1800-1914, touches on the issue of Arab immigration into and within Palestine. He relates her ideas in "The Rise and Decline of Coastal Towns in Palestine" to Charles Issawi's thesis concerning the role of minority groups and foreigners in the development of Middle Eastern towns. Explaining why no other Palestinian cities grew as rapidly as Jaffa and Haifa did during the final three decades of the Ottoman rule, Gilbar writes: "Both attracted population from the rural and urban surroundings and immigrants from outside Palestine."[27]
Each piece of the demographic puzzle by itself may reveal no identifiable picture. But given a multiplicity of such pieces, an image does begin to appear. The Royal Institute for International Affairs adds another piece. Commenting on the growth of the Palestinian population during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s it reports: "The number of Arabs who have entered Palestine illegally from Syria and Transjordan is unknown. But probably considerable."[28] And C.S. Jarvis, governor of the Sinai from 1923-36, adds yet another:
The value of the model depends, of course, on the reliability of the estimates given for initial population stocks and for the rates associated with natural increase. Therein lies the problem with estimating Arab immigration into Palestine. The model itself may be simple and applicable, but its usefulness—as with all estimating models—is contingent upon the quality of the data inputs. That quality in the case of Palestinian migration is compromised by the explicit neglect of illegal entrants. If illegal migrants and subsequently illegal residents escaped the census taker, how could the census account for them? It couldn't and didn't.
It is not surprising then that the British census data produce an Arab Palestinian population growth for 1922-31 that turns out to be generated by natural increase and legal migrations alone. Applying a 2.5 per annum growth rate[30] to a population stock of 589,177 for 1922 generates a 1931 population estimate of 735,799 or 97.6 percent of the 753,822 recorded in the 1931 census. Does the imputation model then "prove" that illegal immigration into Palestine was inconsequential during 1922-31? Not at all. A footnote accompanying the census's population time series acknowledges the presence in Palestine of illegal Arab immigration. But because it could not be recorded, no estimate of its numbers was included in the census count.[31] Ignoring illegal migrants does not mean they don't exist.
Setting illegal immigration into Palestine aside, the imputation model does generate substantial migrations of Arab Palestinians within Palestine itself and confirms what many demographers, historians, government administrators, and economists have alluded to: the migration of Arab Palestinians from villages, towns, and cities of low economic opportunity to villages, towns, and cities of higher economic opportunity.
Which towns, villages, and cities offered the higher economic opportunity? Analyzing the 1922 and 1931 demographic data by sub-district and separating those sub-districts of Palestine that eventually became 1948 Israel—that is, sub-districts that had relatively large Jewish populations (with accompanying Jewish capital and modern technology)—from those that were not designated as part of 1948 Israel, identified not only the direction of Arab Palestinian migration within Palestine but its magnitude as well.[32]
The Arab Palestinian populations within those sub-districts that eventually became Israel increased from 321,866 in 1922 to 463,288 in 1931 or by 141,422. Applying the 2.5 per annum natural rate of population growth to the 1922 Arab Palestinian population generates an expected population size for 1931 of 398,498 or 64,790 less than the actual population recorded in the British census. By imputation, this unaccounted population increase must have been either illegal immigration not accounted for in the British census and/or registered Arab Palestinians moving from outside the Jewish-identified sub-districts to those sub-districts so identified. This 1922-31 Arab migration into the Jewish sub-districts represented 11.8 percent of the total 1931 Arab population residing in those sub-districts and as much as 36.8 percent of its 1922-31 growth.
That over 10 percent of the 1931 Arab Palestinian population in those sub-districts that eventually became Israel had immigrated to those sub-districts within the 1922-31 years is a datum of considerable significance. It is consistent with the fragmentary evidence of illegal migration to and within Palestine; it supports the idea of linkage between economic disparities and migratory impulses—a linkage universally accepted; it undercuts the thesis of "spatial stickiness" attributed by some scholars to the Arab Palestinian population of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and it provides strong circumstantial evidence that the illegal Arab immigration into Palestine, like that within Palestine, was of consequence as well.
Consider first McCarthy's analysis of Arab immigration during the Ottoman period. That he finds no illegal immigration of consequence is not surprising because McCarthy uses official Ottoman registration lists that, by the nature of its classifications, take no account of the unreported, illegal immigration. That is to say, if you look in a haystack for a needle that wasn't put there, the probability is high you won't find it. It is strange that that idea had not occurred to McCarthy. Choosing to focus on the official registration lists allows him to write:
McCarthy's treatment of the linkage between economic disparities and migration impulses appears to be even more disingenuous. He writes: "The question of the relative economic development of Palestine in Ottoman times is not a matter to be discussed here."[36] Nor is it considered anywhere else in his book. That is to say, McCarthy does not contest the linkage so much as ignore its relevance to the Palestinian situation.[37]
His dismissal of Arab immigration into Palestine during the mandate period is based on a set of assumptions concerning illegal immigration that is both restrictive and unsubstantiated. He contends that even if the illegal immigrants were unreported on entry, their deaths in Palestine would have been registered. So too, he argues, would their children born in Palestine. Deriving estimates based on such registrations, he arrives at this conclusion: immigration was minimal.[38] But he provides no evidence to show that these supposed registrations of births and deaths were actually made. Had McCarthy considered the fact that detection of illegal immigration during the mandate period resulted in imprisonment and deportation and that immigrants, aware of this, may have avoided any formal registration of deaths and births, he would have had to revise his assessment of illegal immigration.
Perhaps the more serious charge against McCarthy's analysis of Arab immigration is his use of Roberto Bachi's estimates. McCarthy's numbers are based, in part, on Bachi's reporting of 900 illegal Arab immigrants per year over the period 1931-45.[39] But McCarthy misrepresents what Bachi's estimate is meant to show. Bachi is careful to identify his 900-per-year illegal Arab immigration estimate as only those discovered by the mandatory authorities. Illegal Arab immigration that went undetected and unreported is not included. He writes:
Such a cautionary comment finds no place in McCarthy's analysis or conclusions. Using Bachi's estimates inappropriately, deriving estimates based solely on registration lists, and ignoring completely the linkages between regional economic disparities and migratory impulses, McCarthy confidently concludes,
The precise magnitude of Arab immigration into and within Palestine is, as Bachi noted, unknown. Lack of completeness in Ottoman registration lists and British Mandatory censuses, and the immeasurable illegal, unreported, and undetected immigration during both periods make any estimate a bold venture into creative analysis. In most cases, those venturing into the realm of Palestinian demography—or other demographic analyses based on very crude data—acknowledge its limitations and the tentativeness of the conclusions that may be drawn.
[2] Reuters, June 18, 2002.
[3] The Jakarta Post, Mar. 3, 2000.
[4] Peter Stalker, Growing Global Migration and Its Implications for the United States(Washington: National Intelligence Council, Mar. 2001), p. 38, table 3, athttp://www.cia.gov/nic/graphics/migration.pdf.
[5] Migration News, Oct. 2001, p. 2., at http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/archive_mn/oct_2001-16mn.html.
[6] The Jakarta Post, Mar. 3, 2000.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Nicholas Van Hear, Consequences of the Forced Mass Repatriation of Migrant Communities: Recent Cases from West Africa and the Middle East (Geneva: U.N. Research Institute for Social Development, 1992), p. 1.
[9] Patrick Taran and David Nii Addy, "Global Overview Trends in Labour Migration, Standards and Policies with Reference to West Africa," ILO International Migration Policy Seminar for West Africa, Dakar, Senegal, Dec. 18-21, 2001, at http://www.december18.net/paper35Dakar.htm.
[10] Ibid.
[11] The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, Cairo, provides these statistics athttp://www.frcu.eun.eg/www/homepage/popin/eeea.htm.
[12] ILO Migration Data Base, Egypt: Table 11, "Nationals Abroad by Sex and by Host Country, Absolute Numbers, 1986-2001." See also "Egyptian Guest Workers in the Gulf," Migration News, July 1995, at http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/archive_mn/jul_1995-22mn.html.
[13] Ahmad Sidqi al Dajani, The Future of the Exiled Palestinians in the Settlements Agreement(London: Palestinian Return Center, Oct. 2000), at http://www.prc.org.uk/english/ext-pals-eng.htm.
[14] The Jerusalem Post, July 4, 2001.
[15] Roberto Bachi, The Population of Israel (Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, 1974), p. 45.
[16] Ibid., p. 46
[17] A second issue contributing to the dearth of Arab migration data and analysis was that scholarly research and interest in the region focused on the more legal and documented, more prevalent, and more politically significant Jewish immigration. While Arab immigration may have been obvious and even predictable, it would have been less noteworthy at the time.
[18] U.O. Schmelz, "Population Characteristics of Jerusalem and Hebron Regions According to Ottoman Census of 1905," in Gar G. Gilbar, ed., Ottoman Palestine: 1800-1914 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), p. 42.
[19] Ibid., pp. 32-3. Emphasis added.
[20] Ibid., p. 61. Emphasis added. Elsewhere, he grants that "the censuses were taken by teams of local mukhtars and other functionaries" and "that may have created conflicts of motive when the authorities, by threat of penalty, exacted reports from local dignitaries (the mukhtars) which the population may have had an interest in evading." (pp. 18-9).
[21] Bachi, Population of Israel, pp. 34-5. Emphasis added.
[22] Ibid., p. 51. Emphasis added.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Palestine Blue Book, 1937 (Jerusalem: British Mandatory Government Printer, 1938), p. 140.
[25] Ibid. Emphasis added. The Palestine Blue Book, 1928 actually offers an estimate. It says: "The total population 816,064 is probably understated by 20,000-25,000 due to unrecorded immigration." (p. 143.) Three years later, the Palestine Blue Book, 1931 uses the same estimate and the same wording but for a different size population: "The total population 946,463 is probably understated by 20,000-25,000 due to unrecorded immigration." (p. 146.) By 1937, the estimate was dropped in favor of "no estimate of its volume is possible."
[26] Report by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the Year 1935 (London: His Majesty's Stationary Office, n.d.), p. 14.
[27] Gar G. Gilbar, "Economy and Society in Palestine at the Close of the Ottoman Period: A Diversity of Change," in Ottoman Palestine, 1800-1914, p. 3.
[28] Great Britain and Palestine, 1915-1945, Information Paper no. 20, 3d ed. (London: Royal Institute for International Affairs, 1946), p. 64.
[29] C.S. Jarvis, "Palestine," United Empire (London), 28 (1937): 633.
[30] The 2.5 growth rate is derived from the following table for annual rates of natural increase of Muslim population.
[31] Palestine Blue Book, 1937, p. 140.
[32] For a sub-district by sub-district count of population and for the methodology used to separate subdivisions that became 1948 Israel and those that did not, see Fred M. Gottheil, "Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel: 1922-1931," Middle Eastern Studies, 9 (1973): 315-24. The analysis here is a summary version of this article.
[33] Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 16-7, 33-4.
[34] Ibid., p. 16. Emphasis added.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid.
[37] The closest McCarthy gets to a linkage discussion is his insistence that the increase in Muslim population had little or nothing to do with Jewish immigration. His findings contradict those of Ruth Kark, Charles Issawi, Roberto Bachi, U.O. Schmelz, Fred M. Gottheil, and Moshe Braver, among others. McCarthy chooses not to address their evidence and competing findings although he refers liberally to both Schmelz's and Bachi's research on other demographic issues.
[38] McCarthy, Population of Palestine, p. 33.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Bachi, Population of Israel, p. 133. Emphasis added.
[41] Ibid., p. 389.
[42] Ibid., p. 390. Emphasis added.
[43] McCarthy, Population of Palestine, p. 34. Emphasis added.
The Smoking Gun: Arab Immigration into Palestine, 1922-1931
by Fred M. Gottheil
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2003, pp. 53-64
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2003, pp. 53-64
In deep antiquity, particularly in Egypt, the early civilization where the arts were most strongly developed, the visualization was aspective: that is the artist, working in paint or low-relief sculpture, conveyed to his two-dimensional surface not so much what he saw as what he knew was there.Palestinian demography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has never been just a matter of numbers. It has always been—and consciously so—a front-line weapon used in a life-and-death struggle for nationhood among two peoples living in what used to be known as Palestine, each having competing ideologies and competing claims to territorial inheritance and rights to national sovereignty.
- Paul Johnson, The Renaissance
The problem with staking so much on so narrow a focus as past demography is that the data generated by demographers and others since the early nineteenth century are so lacking in precision that, in some matters of dispute concerning demography, "anyone's guess," as the saying goes, "is as good as any other." Or almost so. Of course, people still engaged in this high-stakes game of Palestinian demographic warfare will argue otherwise. With few exceptions, they insist that their own sources are superior, their own estimates more scientific, and their critics more ideological.
There are really two issues—or two battlefronts—associated with estimating Palestinian demography. The first has to do with sheer numbers, i.e., measuring over time the size of Palestine's total and subgroup populations. The second battlefront is considerably more contentious. It is estimating the percentages of population growth among subgroups attributed to natural increase and to immigration.
This immigration factor—or its absence—is paramount. If a significant percent of a population is composed of recent arrivals, then claims of historic tenancy are compromised. This explains why Arab Palestinians and others use the term "intruder" to describe the Jewish population of Palestine. The importance of Jewish immigration to the Jewish population of Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is undisputed. But Jewish claims to territorial inheritance and to national sovereignty lay elsewhere, in history rather than demography.
On the other hand, for Arab Palestinians, the character of their demography is at the heart of their claim to territorial inheritance and national sovereignty. Their contention, seen by them as being beyond dispute, is that Arab Palestinians have deep and timeless roots in that geography and that their own immigration into that geography has at no time been consequential. To challenge that contention, then, is to challenge their self-selected criterion for sovereignty.
That is to say, the character of Arab Palestinian demography is the single most important piece of evidence supporting the Arab Palestinian claim to territorial inheritance and national sovereignty. The Arab Palestinian population—large or small, growing or not—is determined, they insist, strictly by birth and death rates among Arab Palestinians in Palestine, that is, by natural increase alone. This view of their population origin is associated with their still more insular view of "spatial stickiness," that is, their insistence as well that Arabs have not only been disinclined to migrate out of or into Palestine but also that Arab Palestinians have been disinclined to move from one region to another within Palestine.
Before examining these contentions and the competing Arab Palestinian population estimates offered by scholars in a variety of disciplines, e.g., economics, sociology, demography, and history, it may be useful to speculate on what anyone looking at late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Palestinian demography should expect to discover.
Disparities and Migration
If you were asked to guess which of two corn farmers—a typical Iowa farm laborer or a typical Egyptian farm laborer—produced more corn per acre, the probability is high that you would choose the Iowa farmer. And the probability is just as high that you would be right—and for the right reasons. Among the reasons you would offer to explain your choice are two: 1) the Iowa farmer has access to more capital, and 2) the level of technology used on the Iowa farm is considerably more advanced. This imposing combination of more capital and higher levels of technology makes it no contest at all.Your reasoning—the cause-effect relationship between farm productivity, capital, and technology—is mapped in Exhibit 1. The output curve Q measures the value of corn produced by a farm laborer working with different quantities of capital. The more capital used by the farm laborer, the higher is that laborer's productivity. For example, working with $200 of farm machinery, the farm laborer produces $50 worth of corn, point a. If the capital per laborer ratio increases from $200 to $250—economists call this increase "capital deepening"—the laborer's productivity increases from $50 to $60, point b. The curvature of Q—flattening with capital deepening—is explained by the law of diminishing returns. Beyond some point, the productivity gains generated by capital deepening rapidly approach zero.
Exhibit 1
But that is not the end of the story. More advanced farm technology can shift the output curve upward from Q to Q'. That is to say, still using $200 of capital but this time in a qualitatively superior form of technology generates not $50 but $70 worth of corn, point c. Some changes in technology can produce very dramatic changes in productivity. Compare, for example, the productivity of a $1,000 computer printer to the productivity generated by $1,000 worth of pen and ink.
The moral is simple enough. The more economies engage in capital deepening and technological change, the more they will experience increasing labor productivity. Higher levels of labor productivity make higher wage rates more affordable and also increase levels of employment. Imagine, then, two adjacent economies, one heavily involved in capital deepening and technological change, the other reluctant or unable to change its technology or levels of capital deepening. The consequences are inevitable. The productivity gap between the two economies widens, creating the incentives for labor mobility.
Migratory Impulses
When dog bites man, it's not news. When man bites dog, it's news. Similarly, when considerable regional disparities in labor productivity, wage rates, and employment opportunities fail to generate labor mobility—particularly among regions in close proximity—it is newsworthy. That is to say, what really has to be explained is not why people move from less attractive economies to more attractive economies, but why they don't.Of course, not everybody moves. Lack of information as well as physical, legal, political, religious, and social barriers can work to impede movement. The elderly typically respond less to economic incentives than the young, and peoples' levels of energy and personal aspirations can differ markedly. These factors notwithstanding, it requires hardly a stretch of the imagination to argue that the strength of the migratory impulse among populations is highly correlated with differentials in labor productivity and standards of living.
Historical and contemporary evidence supporting migratory impulses, particularly among populations in the developing economies of the world, is overwhelming.[1] While there is every reason to suspect specific estimates—the methodology used in tracking migrants is still fairly crude and in some cases politically motivated—the picture is nonetheless clear. Some migratory routes have become virtual highways. Since the mid-twentieth century, millions of North African and East European migrants have left their native villages, towns, and cities for the more productive and higher-paying jobs in western Europe. The European Commission estimates that approximately one-half million migrants enter the European Union (EU) illegally each year, almost as many as enter legally.[2] Such migration flows are anything but unique. In Asia, the higher-paying employment opportunities in the more industrially advanced economies of Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, and South Korea have attracted an estimated 6.5 million Asian migrants from the less technologically developed economies.[3] Legal and illegal migrant workers in 1998 in Japan alone numbered 1.35 million. The principal countries of origin were China (234,000 legal and 38,000 illegal) and the Philippines (84,000 legal, 43,000 illegal).[4] Or consider the Indonesia-Malaysia connection. In 2001, there were 850,000 Indonesians working legally in Malaysia. An additional 350,000 to 400,000 were unauthorized.[5] That is no surprise when you consider that Indonesian migrants earned $2 per day in Malaysia compared to the $0.28 per day they would have earned in Indonesia.[6]
The migratory impulse is alive and well in the Americas for much the same reasons. The legal and illegal, daily and nightly trek north across the Rio Grande by Mexicans continues to be triggered by the glaring U.S.-Mexican wage disparities. A 1996 survey of 496 undocumented Mexican migrants to the United States showed that they averaged $278 per week compared to the $31 they had earned at their last Mexican job.[7] While there may be reason to question the specific numbers given for the Mexican migratory flows, particularly the illegal estimates, there is little justification to question the economic causes associated with the flow itself.
In 1970s Africa, oil-rich Nigeria absorbed millions of legal and illegal African migrants seeking to escape the drought, famine, and poverty in their native Ghana, Niger, and Chad. The oil-price collapse in the 1980s forced Nigeria to reconsider its open-door immigration policy and by the mid-1980s, approximately 2 million of these migrants—one million from Ghana alone—were obliged to leave.[8]
These references to contemporary migrations are, of course, only the tip of the migratory iceberg. Adding up the world's total migrations generates impressive but not surprising numbers. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the total number of persons living outside of their countries of origin was estimated at over 150 million, of which some 100 million—30 million undocumented—represent migrant workers and their families.[9]
What seems to make sense in explaining migratory flows for the rest of the world should make sense as well for the Middle East. And it does. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), Middle East migrant workers—moving within and beyond the Middle East—make up approximately 9 percent of the world's 100-million total.[10] By 1987, as many as 1.6 million Egyptians had emigrated to other Arab countries. Not surprising, their principal destinations of choice were oil-rich economies. Iraq hosted 43 percent, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, 39 percent.[11] The Kuwait war of 1990-91 brought about a dramatic shift in the hosting economies of Egypt's emigration. Iraq and Kuwait expelled most of their migrant populations during and following that war and by 2000, Saudi Arabia had become the single most important host of Egypt's now 2.7 million emigrants, absorbing as much as 34 percent of the total. Libya rose to second place among Arab-hosting economies with 12 percent and Jordan followed with 8 percent.[12]
Arab Palestinians, it appears, were no less responsive than were Egyptians to the migratory impulse. According to 1998 United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) estimates, there were 275,000 Arab Palestinians in Saudi Arabia, 38,000 in Kuwait (a dramatic drop from the 400,000 recorded before the Kuwait war), 74,000 in Libya, and over 100,000 in other gulf countries.[13] Hundreds of thousands left the Middle East entirely. Why should anyone suspect that Arab Palestinians would behave any differently than Egyptians, or Mexicans, or Ghanaians, or Moroccans, or Indonesians, or any other population facing regional inequalities in technology, productivity, income, and employment? That the pull effect of wage and employment disparities matters to Arab Palestinians is attested to not only by the size of their migratory flows but also by the fact that very few Arab Palestinians living in high-productivity Israel were part of that flow. In fact, an estimated 40,000 Jordanians who entered Israel on tourist visas in 2000 have stayed on after their visas expired to take advantage of the higher-paying employment opportunities afforded them in Israel. [14]
Economic Growth, 1922-1931
It would seem reasonable to suppose that for the same reasons Arab Palestinians and other Middle East populations migrated from the less to the more attractive economies at the end of the twentieth century, they would have done the same during the early decades of the twentieth century. Two events distinguished the early years of twentieth-century Palestine from its Middle Eastern neighbors: 1) the immigration into Palestine of European Jews, accompanied by European capital and European technology, and 2) the creation of the British Mandatory Government in Palestine whose responsibilities included the economic development of Palestine. As a result of the mandate conferred by the League of Nations, British capital and British technology followed the British flag.These two events generated a momentum of economic activity that produced in Palestine a standard of living previously unknown in the Middle East. Table 1 logs some of the critical factors contributing to the economic dynamics in Palestine during the 1920s.
Table 1
Selected Indicators of Capital Formation and Infrastructure Development: 1922-1931
Capital Stocka | Capital Importsb | Capital Deepeningc | Consumption of Electricityd | Telephone Linese | Kilometers of Metalled Roads | |
1922 | 5,056 | 3,821 | 84.2 | 450 | ||
1924 | 6.541 | 5,522 | 90.3 | 3,526 | 580 | |
1926 | 9,603 | 5,013 | 90.8 | 2,344 | 5,611 | 631 |
1928 | 12,022 | 2,891 | 98.6 | 2,974 | 8,780 | 706 |
1931 | 16,539 | 3,225 | 95.2 | 9,546 | 14,557 | 922 |
Capital stock grew at an annual rate of 14.1 percent, much of it a result of capital imports. The deepening of capital—capital stock per laborer—accompanied the growth of capital stock. The modernization process in the form of infrastructure development is illustrated by the growth of road construction, electric power, and telephone communications.[15] Table 1 represents the Palestinian version of both movements along the Qt curve of Exhibit 1—capital deepening—and upward shifts in the curve which signal technological change. The results were dramatic. Real net domestic product per capita soared, doubling during 1922-31, from 19.4 LP (Palestine pounds) to 38.2 LP.
The success of these beginnings of modernization could not have been lost on Arab Palestinians nor on Arabs living in adjacent economies.[16] Table 2 contrasts the standards of living enjoyed by Arab Palestinians to the standards in other Middle East economies.
Table 2
Economic Performance and Standards of Living In Middle East Economies: 1932-1936
Per Capita Incomea | Industrial Daily Wagesb | Per Capita Consumption of Foodstuffc | Net Productivity Per Agricultural Workerd | |
Egypt | 12 | NA | 16.0 | 90.1 |
Syria | 13 | 50-310 | 19.0 | 97.6 |
Iraq | 10 | 40-60 | 13.8 | 93.2 |
Transjordan | NA | NA | NA | 90.1 |
Arab Palestinians | 19 | 70-500 | 22.9 | 186.3 |
Evidence for Arab Migration
There are several problems associated with estimating Arab immigration into Palestine during the 1920s, the principal one being that Arab migration flows were, in the main, illegal, and therefore unreported and unrecorded.[17] But they were not entirely unnoticed.Demographer U.O. Schmelz's analysis of the Ottoman registration data for 1905 populations of Jerusalem and Hebron kazas (Ottoman districts), by place of birth, showed that of those Arab Palestinians born outside their localities of residence, approximately half represented intra-Palestine movement—from areas of low-level economic activity to areas of higher-level activity—while the other half represented Arab immigration into Palestine itself, 43 percent originating in Asia, 39 percent in Africa, and 20 percent in Turkey.[18] Schmelz conjectured:
The above-average population growth of the Arab villages around the city of Jerusalem, with its Jewish majority, continued until the end of the mandatory period. This must have been due—as elsewhere in Palestine under similar conditions—to in-migrants attracted by economic opportunities, and to the beneficial effects of improved health services in reducing mortality—just as happened in other parts of Palestine around cities with a large Jewish population sector.[19]While Schmelz restricted his research of the 1905 Palestinian census to the official Ottoman registrations and used these registrations with only minor critical comment, he did acknowledge that "stable population models assume the absence of external migrations, a condition which was obviously not met by all the subpopulations" that Schmelz enumerated.[20]
Like U.O. Schmelz, Roberto Bachi expressed some reservation about the virtual non-existence of data and discussion concerning migration into and within Palestine. He writes:
Between 1800 and 1914, the Muslim population had a yearly average increase in the order of magnitude of roughly 6-7 per thousand. This can be compared to the very crude estimate of about 4 per thousand for the "less developed countries" of the world (in Asia, Africa, and Latin America) between 1800 and 1910. It is possible that part of the growth of the Muslim population was due to immigration.[21]Although Bachi did not pursue the linkage between undocumented immigration into Palestine and the 6 (or 7) to 4 per thousand differential in growth rates between Palestine and the other less developed countries (LDCs), the idea that at least one-third of Palestine's population growth may be attributed to immigration is—using Bachi's own growth rate differentials—not an entirely unreasonable one.
Lacking verifiable evidence did not prevent Bachi from stating the obvious concerning internal migration within Palestine:
The great economic development of the coastal plains—largely due to Jewish immigration—was accompanied both in 1922-1931 and in 1931-1944 by a much stronger increase of the Muslim and Christian populations in this region than that registered in other regions. This was probably due to two reasons: stronger decrease in mortality of the non-Jewish population in the neighborhood of Jewish areas and internal migration toward the more developed zones.[22]In the footnote accompanying this quote, Bachi writes: "As no statistics are available for internal migration, this conclusion has been obtained from indirect evidence."[23] Bachi's footnote is instructive. The "indirect evidence" he referred to no doubt included his understanding of the important role economics plays in explaining demographic movements. While appreciating the value of Ottoman registrations and British mandatory government censuses in providing estimates of Palestinian demography, they were, in his judgment, still crude and incomplete.
Reference to Arab immigration into Palestine during the 1920s is made as well in the British mandatory government's annual compilation of statistical data on population. The Palestine Blue Book, 1937, for example, provides time series demographic statistics whose annual estimates are based on extrapolations from its 1922 census.[24] The footnote accompanying the table on population of Palestine reads:
There has been unrecorded illegal immigration of both Jews and Arabs in the period since the census of 1931, but it is clear that, since it cannot be recorded, no estimate of its volume is possible.[25]The 1935 British report to the League of Nations noted that:
One thousand five hundred and fifty-seven persons (including 565 Jews) who, having made their way into the country surreptitiously, were later detected, were sentenced to imprisonment for their offence and recommended for deportation.[26]The number who "made their way into the country surreptitiously" and undetected was neither estimated nor mentioned.
Historian Gad Gilbar's observation on Ruth Kark's contribution to his edited volume Ottoman Palestine, 1800-1914, touches on the issue of Arab immigration into and within Palestine. He relates her ideas in "The Rise and Decline of Coastal Towns in Palestine" to Charles Issawi's thesis concerning the role of minority groups and foreigners in the development of Middle Eastern towns. Explaining why no other Palestinian cities grew as rapidly as Jaffa and Haifa did during the final three decades of the Ottoman rule, Gilbar writes: "Both attracted population from the rural and urban surroundings and immigrants from outside Palestine."[27]
Each piece of the demographic puzzle by itself may reveal no identifiable picture. But given a multiplicity of such pieces, an image does begin to appear. The Royal Institute for International Affairs adds another piece. Commenting on the growth of the Palestinian population during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s it reports: "The number of Arabs who have entered Palestine illegally from Syria and Transjordan is unknown. But probably considerable."[28] And C.S. Jarvis, governor of the Sinai from 1923-36, adds yet another:
This illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Trans-Jordan 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.[29]
Estimating Real Numbers
The derivation of Palestine migration estimates in this section is based on an uncomplicated imputation theory. Migration becomes a residual claimant for numbers not explained by a population-estimating model based on known initial population stocks and known sets of birth and death rates for that population. In this way, expected population stocks can be derived for any set of subsequent years.The value of the model depends, of course, on the reliability of the estimates given for initial population stocks and for the rates associated with natural increase. Therein lies the problem with estimating Arab immigration into Palestine. The model itself may be simple and applicable, but its usefulness—as with all estimating models—is contingent upon the quality of the data inputs. That quality in the case of Palestinian migration is compromised by the explicit neglect of illegal entrants. If illegal migrants and subsequently illegal residents escaped the census taker, how could the census account for them? It couldn't and didn't.
It is not surprising then that the British census data produce an Arab Palestinian population growth for 1922-31 that turns out to be generated by natural increase and legal migrations alone. Applying a 2.5 per annum growth rate[30] to a population stock of 589,177 for 1922 generates a 1931 population estimate of 735,799 or 97.6 percent of the 753,822 recorded in the 1931 census. Does the imputation model then "prove" that illegal immigration into Palestine was inconsequential during 1922-31? Not at all. A footnote accompanying the census's population time series acknowledges the presence in Palestine of illegal Arab immigration. But because it could not be recorded, no estimate of its numbers was included in the census count.[31] Ignoring illegal migrants does not mean they don't exist.
Setting illegal immigration into Palestine aside, the imputation model does generate substantial migrations of Arab Palestinians within Palestine itself and confirms what many demographers, historians, government administrators, and economists have alluded to: the migration of Arab Palestinians from villages, towns, and cities of low economic opportunity to villages, towns, and cities of higher economic opportunity.
Which towns, villages, and cities offered the higher economic opportunity? Analyzing the 1922 and 1931 demographic data by sub-district and separating those sub-districts of Palestine that eventually became 1948 Israel—that is, sub-districts that had relatively large Jewish populations (with accompanying Jewish capital and modern technology)—from those that were not designated as part of 1948 Israel, identified not only the direction of Arab Palestinian migration within Palestine but its magnitude as well.[32]
The Arab Palestinian populations within those sub-districts that eventually became Israel increased from 321,866 in 1922 to 463,288 in 1931 or by 141,422. Applying the 2.5 per annum natural rate of population growth to the 1922 Arab Palestinian population generates an expected population size for 1931 of 398,498 or 64,790 less than the actual population recorded in the British census. By imputation, this unaccounted population increase must have been either illegal immigration not accounted for in the British census and/or registered Arab Palestinians moving from outside the Jewish-identified sub-districts to those sub-districts so identified. This 1922-31 Arab migration into the Jewish sub-districts represented 11.8 percent of the total 1931 Arab population residing in those sub-districts and as much as 36.8 percent of its 1922-31 growth.
That over 10 percent of the 1931 Arab Palestinian population in those sub-districts that eventually became Israel had immigrated to those sub-districts within the 1922-31 years is a datum of considerable significance. It is consistent with the fragmentary evidence of illegal migration to and within Palestine; it supports the idea of linkage between economic disparities and migratory impulses—a linkage universally accepted; it undercuts the thesis of "spatial stickiness" attributed by some scholars to the Arab Palestinian population of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and it provides strong circumstantial evidence that the illegal Arab immigration into Palestine, like that within Palestine, was of consequence as well.
Denying the Evidence
As compelling as the arguments and evidence supporting consequential illegal immigration may be to some scholars, they are clearly unconvincing to others. The single most cited contemporary publication on Palestinian demography is Justin McCarthy's 1990 The Population of Palestine. Of McCarthy's 43 pages of descriptive analysis—supplemented by 188 pages of demographic tables copied directly from Ottoman, European, and Jewish source materials—slightly more than one and a half pages are devoted to Arab immigration into and within Palestine during the Ottoman period, and a similar one and a half pages are devoted to Arab immigration during the succeeding mandate period.[33] According to McCarthy, these few pages offer enough critical analysis to close the lid on the "infamous" immigration thesis.Consider first McCarthy's analysis of Arab immigration during the Ottoman period. That he finds no illegal immigration of consequence is not surprising because McCarthy uses official Ottoman registration lists that, by the nature of its classifications, take no account of the unreported, illegal immigration. That is to say, if you look in a haystack for a needle that wasn't put there, the probability is high you won't find it. It is strange that that idea had not occurred to McCarthy. Choosing to focus on the official registration lists allows him to write:
From the analysis of rates of increase of the Muslim population of the three Palestiniansanjaks [Ottoman sub-provinces], one can say with certainty that Muslim immigration after 1870 was small.[34]Reflecting elsewhere on the possibility that the immigration may have occurred over an extended period of time, McCarthy writes: "To postulate such an immigration … stretches the limits of credulity."[35]
McCarthy's treatment of the linkage between economic disparities and migration impulses appears to be even more disingenuous. He writes: "The question of the relative economic development of Palestine in Ottoman times is not a matter to be discussed here."[36] Nor is it considered anywhere else in his book. That is to say, McCarthy does not contest the linkage so much as ignore its relevance to the Palestinian situation.[37]
His dismissal of Arab immigration into Palestine during the mandate period is based on a set of assumptions concerning illegal immigration that is both restrictive and unsubstantiated. He contends that even if the illegal immigrants were unreported on entry, their deaths in Palestine would have been registered. So too, he argues, would their children born in Palestine. Deriving estimates based on such registrations, he arrives at this conclusion: immigration was minimal.[38] But he provides no evidence to show that these supposed registrations of births and deaths were actually made. Had McCarthy considered the fact that detection of illegal immigration during the mandate period resulted in imprisonment and deportation and that immigrants, aware of this, may have avoided any formal registration of deaths and births, he would have had to revise his assessment of illegal immigration.
Perhaps the more serious charge against McCarthy's analysis of Arab immigration is his use of Roberto Bachi's estimates. McCarthy's numbers are based, in part, on Bachi's reporting of 900 illegal Arab immigrants per year over the period 1931-45.[39] But McCarthy misrepresents what Bachi's estimate is meant to show. Bachi is careful to identify his 900-per-year illegal Arab immigration estimate as only those discovered by the mandatory authorities. Illegal Arab immigration that went undetected and unreported is not included. He writes:
A detailed analysis presented in Appendix 6.5B on the basis of the registration of part of the illegal migratory traffic, discovered by the Palestine police, shows that legal movements (as reflected in Tables 9.4-9.7) constituted only a small fraction of total Muslim immigration.[40]To emphasize this point, Bachi writes: "It is hardly credible that illegal movements which were actually discovered included all the illegal entrances which actually occurred, or even the majority of them."[41] As a result, Bachi can only conclude that "in the present state of knowledge, we have beenunable to even guess the size of total immigration."[42]
Such a cautionary comment finds no place in McCarthy's analysis or conclusions. Using Bachi's estimates inappropriately, deriving estimates based solely on registration lists, and ignoring completely the linkages between regional economic disparities and migratory impulses, McCarthy confidently concludes,
the vast majority of the Palestinians resident in 1947 were the sons and daughters who were living in Palestine before modern Jewish immigration began. There is no reason to believe that they were not the sons and daughters of Arabs who had been in Palestine for many centuries.[43]
Every Reason to Believe
Therein lies the ideological warfare concerning claims to territorial inheritance and national sovereignty. Contrary to McCarthy's findings or wishes, there is every reason to believe that consequential immigration of Arabs into and within Palestine occurred during the Ottoman and British mandatory periods. Among the most compelling arguments in support of such immigration is the universally acknowledged and practiced linkage between regional economic disparities and migratory impulses.The precise magnitude of Arab immigration into and within Palestine is, as Bachi noted, unknown. Lack of completeness in Ottoman registration lists and British Mandatory censuses, and the immeasurable illegal, unreported, and undetected immigration during both periods make any estimate a bold venture into creative analysis. In most cases, those venturing into the realm of Palestinian demography—or other demographic analyses based on very crude data—acknowledge its limitations and the tentativeness of the conclusions that may be drawn.
Fred M. Gottheil is a professor in the department of economics, University of Illinois.[1] On June 20, 2002, there were 2,840,000 "migration" entries on the Internet (Google); 319,000 for Asian migration alone, 282,000 for African migration, 291,000 for Middle Eastern migration, 78,000 for Arab migration, and 69,000 for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development migration. The International Labor Organization (ILO) and the United Nations have published extensively on the subject.
[2] Reuters, June 18, 2002.
[3] The Jakarta Post, Mar. 3, 2000.
[4] Peter Stalker, Growing Global Migration and Its Implications for the United States(Washington: National Intelligence Council, Mar. 2001), p. 38, table 3, athttp://www.cia.gov/nic/graphics/migration.pdf.
[5] Migration News, Oct. 2001, p. 2., at http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/archive_mn/oct_2001-16mn.html.
[6] The Jakarta Post, Mar. 3, 2000.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Nicholas Van Hear, Consequences of the Forced Mass Repatriation of Migrant Communities: Recent Cases from West Africa and the Middle East (Geneva: U.N. Research Institute for Social Development, 1992), p. 1.
[9] Patrick Taran and David Nii Addy, "Global Overview Trends in Labour Migration, Standards and Policies with Reference to West Africa," ILO International Migration Policy Seminar for West Africa, Dakar, Senegal, Dec. 18-21, 2001, at http://www.december18.net/paper35Dakar.htm.
[10] Ibid.
[11] The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, Cairo, provides these statistics athttp://www.frcu.eun.eg/www/homepage/popin/eeea.htm.
[12] ILO Migration Data Base, Egypt: Table 11, "Nationals Abroad by Sex and by Host Country, Absolute Numbers, 1986-2001." See also "Egyptian Guest Workers in the Gulf," Migration News, July 1995, at http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/archive_mn/jul_1995-22mn.html.
[13] Ahmad Sidqi al Dajani, The Future of the Exiled Palestinians in the Settlements Agreement(London: Palestinian Return Center, Oct. 2000), at http://www.prc.org.uk/english/ext-pals-eng.htm.
[14] The Jerusalem Post, July 4, 2001.
[15] Roberto Bachi, The Population of Israel (Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, 1974), p. 45.
[16] Ibid., p. 46
[17] A second issue contributing to the dearth of Arab migration data and analysis was that scholarly research and interest in the region focused on the more legal and documented, more prevalent, and more politically significant Jewish immigration. While Arab immigration may have been obvious and even predictable, it would have been less noteworthy at the time.
[18] U.O. Schmelz, "Population Characteristics of Jerusalem and Hebron Regions According to Ottoman Census of 1905," in Gar G. Gilbar, ed., Ottoman Palestine: 1800-1914 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), p. 42.
[19] Ibid., pp. 32-3. Emphasis added.
[20] Ibid., p. 61. Emphasis added. Elsewhere, he grants that "the censuses were taken by teams of local mukhtars and other functionaries" and "that may have created conflicts of motive when the authorities, by threat of penalty, exacted reports from local dignitaries (the mukhtars) which the population may have had an interest in evading." (pp. 18-9).
[21] Bachi, Population of Israel, pp. 34-5. Emphasis added.
[22] Ibid., p. 51. Emphasis added.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Palestine Blue Book, 1937 (Jerusalem: British Mandatory Government Printer, 1938), p. 140.
[25] Ibid. Emphasis added. The Palestine Blue Book, 1928 actually offers an estimate. It says: "The total population 816,064 is probably understated by 20,000-25,000 due to unrecorded immigration." (p. 143.) Three years later, the Palestine Blue Book, 1931 uses the same estimate and the same wording but for a different size population: "The total population 946,463 is probably understated by 20,000-25,000 due to unrecorded immigration." (p. 146.) By 1937, the estimate was dropped in favor of "no estimate of its volume is possible."
[26] Report by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the Year 1935 (London: His Majesty's Stationary Office, n.d.), p. 14.
[27] Gar G. Gilbar, "Economy and Society in Palestine at the Close of the Ottoman Period: A Diversity of Change," in Ottoman Palestine, 1800-1914, p. 3.
[28] Great Britain and Palestine, 1915-1945, Information Paper no. 20, 3d ed. (London: Royal Institute for International Affairs, 1946), p. 64.
[29] C.S. Jarvis, "Palestine," United Empire (London), 28 (1937): 633.
[30] The 2.5 growth rate is derived from the following table for annual rates of natural increase of Muslim population.
1922 | 2.49 | 1927 | 2.10 | |
1923 | 2.15 | 1928 | 2.34 | |
1924 | 2.47 | 1929 | 2.35 | |
1925 | 2.18 | 1930 | 2.81 | |
1926 | 2.90 | 1931 | 2.74 |
[32] For a sub-district by sub-district count of population and for the methodology used to separate subdivisions that became 1948 Israel and those that did not, see Fred M. Gottheil, "Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel: 1922-1931," Middle Eastern Studies, 9 (1973): 315-24. The analysis here is a summary version of this article.
[33] Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 16-7, 33-4.
[34] Ibid., p. 16. Emphasis added.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid.
[37] The closest McCarthy gets to a linkage discussion is his insistence that the increase in Muslim population had little or nothing to do with Jewish immigration. His findings contradict those of Ruth Kark, Charles Issawi, Roberto Bachi, U.O. Schmelz, Fred M. Gottheil, and Moshe Braver, among others. McCarthy chooses not to address their evidence and competing findings although he refers liberally to both Schmelz's and Bachi's research on other demographic issues.
[38] McCarthy, Population of Palestine, p. 33.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Bachi, Population of Israel, p. 133. Emphasis added.
[41] Ibid., p. 389.
[42] Ibid., p. 390. Emphasis added.
[43] McCarthy, Population of Palestine, p. 34. Emphasis added.
Jews had been a constant presence in the Holy Land, long before there were Zionists; largely poor, they were largely concentrated, in separate Jewish quarters, in the towns of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. A few were merchants and shopkeepers, some were petty craftsmen, but some spent their days praying and studying, living off contributions from abroad. The newcomers, the Zionists, were to concentrate, not on merely living (or dying) in the Holy Land, but on making a living, with the distinct idea of forming an autonomous Jewish community in the ancient Jewish homeland.
ReplyDeleteOverall the Jewish population, like the population in general, had remained fairly stable from the earliest days of Ottoman rule until the 19th century. The introduction of a stable government, which promoted the return of the Jews to revive the land and the Christian influence from outside, and in particular the abolishment of the laws discriminating against non-Moslems, led to a disproportionately larger growth of Jews in the Holy Land. According to Ben-Aryeh, the pre-eminent student of 19th century geography, Jews increased from 16,500 in 1800 to about 50,000 by 1880, his figures including Jews who were not Ottoman citizens.
You are mistaken thinking Israel is Arab Palestine. It never was the country of the Arab/Palestinian People. And the Arab people were implicitly denied their claim to Palestine, although they did get 99% of the territory they wanted in Syria, Lebanon and Mesopotamia (Iraq) at the same time Palestine, because of the long association of the Jewish People with it, was recognized as belonging to the Jews. Those Arabs residing in the Land of Israel aka Palestine never had their own nation with a capital in the Land of Israel aka Palestine. Prior to the Mandate for Palestine to reconstitute the Jewish state, they lived for 400 years as tribes in provinces of the Ottoman Empire that exercised undisputed sovereignty. The Ottoman Empire ceded its sovereignty to the Supreme Allied Powers implemented by the League of Nations Mandatory power in Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres. When that treaty was, for other reasons not ratified, they confirmed their position by relinquishing their claim to the Land of Israel aka Palestine and other territory. The Palestine People were not even a vassal or tributary state with the Ottoman Empire as suzerain. Compare that with the Jewish People that had their own sovereign nation in the Land of Israel aka Palestine for about 1,000 years and were a vassal or tributary state with several suzerains such as Assyria, Greece, Rome, etc. for another 2,000 years.
ReplyDeleteThe Arab Palestine People were invented in 1964 when the PLO Charter was drafted in Moscow and appear first in the preamble of that Charter, corroborated only by the first 422 members of the Arab Palestine National Council, each hand picked by the KGB. At the same time, the Soviet diplomats were at the UN illegally pushing conventions which elevated the status of any "people" to have political self-determination such as the ICCPR, the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. This would mean that any group calling itself a "people" could empower the UN illegally to redraw the boundaries of a sovereign state when such boundaries have been the basis of world order since the Peace of Westphalia; the UN has no such authority it is an advisory organization and can only recommend and not dictate. This bit of history is the report of Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking defector from the Communist bloc during the Cold War. The invention also gave the Arabs the advantage of reframing the conflict so it was one between the few Arab residents of the Land of Israel aka Palestine against the larger number of Jews in the Land of Israel aka Palestine when it had earlier been, and still in reality was, the small number of Jews in the Land of Israel aka Palestine against the very much larger number of Arabs in the region. David became Goliath, and Goliath, after the invention of the Arab Palestine People became David.
Your numbers are wrong according to studies recently made that show patent errors. These have been discussed at length in articles of Ambassador Yoram Ettinger. *In October 2015, the documented number of Arabs in Judea and Samaria is 1.7mn – 1.1mn less than the number claimed by the Arab statistics. If they were to be annexed, the Jews would still have a 66% population majority. The voting eligible majority could be a lot higher because it is reasonable to expect a citizen to 1. Pay taxes to support the government, and 2. To defend the government in time of war.
ReplyDeleteIt would not be unreasonable to deprive anyone of citizenship who failed these obligations. But before any action is taken with respect to Arabs in the Jewish People's state, it would be best to establish Jewish Sovereignty over the Land of Israel aka Palestine west of the Jordan River under international law instead of the poetic deceptive truth that many believe, including the left wing Israelis and Jewish Americans, that Arabs own it.
Peace might be valid if the so-called fictitious Arab/Palestinians wanted to live in peace. They state clearly by statement and action that their goal is to drive the Jewish people out and take all of Israel. Their method is killing, destruction and hate. They perpetuate this strategy by lying to their people and indoctrinating their children with hate. They are a pathetically unproductive people that beg and accept millions in support but spend it on weapons and hate. Would you want to share a small country with these primitive barbaric people?
ReplyDeleteNeville Marzwell Yj Draiman • a day ago
ReplyDeleteI am one of those Jews from Egypt. Our properties were confiscated, the government ordered that Jews could never be hired under penalty of jail; they were called "Stateless" in spite that they were in Egypt before Islam. Jewish people were killed and hanged to scare the remaining Jewish people into leaving with their skin. THIS FACT AND PART OF HISTORY SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN. The free world was blind and is still blind talking about only about one half of the problem; so called the Arab Palestinians refugees......What about the Jewish refugees?????????
Anyone who thinks there was an Arab country named Palestine is gravely mistaken. It never was the country of the Arab/Palestinian People and the British are the ones who used the Name Palestine, The Ottoman Empire considered it as part of their Syrian conquest. And the Arab people were implicitly and rightfully denied their claim to the area the British called Palestine, although they did get 99% of the territory they wanted in Syria, Lebanon and Mesopotamia (Iraq) at the same time the Land of Israel aka Palestine, because of the over 35 centuries long habitation and association of the Jewish People with it, was recognized as belonging to the Jewish peoples. Those Arabs residing in the Land of Israel aka Palestine never had their own nation with a capital in the Land of Israel aka Palestine. Prior to the Mandate for Palestine to reconstitute the National home of the Jewish people in their historical land, the Arabs lived for 400 years as tribes in provinces of the Ottoman Empire that exercised undisputed sovereignty. The Ottoman Empire ceded its sovereignty to the Supreme Allied Powers and implemented by the League of Nations Mandatory power in Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres, which all the Supreme Allied Powers signed. When that treaty was, for other reasons not ratified, they confirmed their position by relinquishing their claim to Palestine aka the Land of Israel and other territory. There was also the Faisal Weizmann Agreement of January 1919. The Arab/Palestine People were not even a vassal or tributary state with the Ottoman Empire as suzerain. Compare that with the Jewish People that had their own sovereign nation in Palestine aka the Land of Israel for about 1,000 years and were a vassal or tributary state with several suzerains such as Assyria, Greece, Rome, etc. for another 2,000 years.
ReplyDeleteThe Arab Palestine People were invented in 1964 when the Arab PLO Charter was drafted in Moscow and appear first in the preamble of that Charter, corroborated only by the first 422 members of the Arab/Palestine National Council, each hand picked by the KGB. At the same time, the Soviet diplomats were at the UN illegally pushing conventions which elevated the status of any "people" to have political self-determination such as the ICCPR, the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. This would mean that any group calling itself a "people" could supposedly empower the UN to redraw the boundaries of a sovereign state when such boundaries have been the basis of world order since the Peace of Westphalia, but the UN has no such authority, it can only recommend and not dictate, it is an advisory organization only. This bit of history is the report of Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking defector from the Communist bloc during the Cold War. The invention also gave the Arabs the advantage of reframing the conflict so it was one between the few Arab residents of The Land of Israel aka Palestine against the larger number of Jews in the Land of Israel aka Palestine when it had earlier been, and still in reality was, the small number of Jews in the Land of Israel aka Palestine against the very much larger number of Arabs in the region. David became Goliath, and Goliath, after the invention of the fictitious Arab/Palestine People became David.
The non-Jewish communities in Israel aka Palestine were guaranteed individual political rights in the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Resolution and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. The Jews have scrupulously observed their civil rights that are in the savings clause. These include the right to own property, the right to vote, and any other rights that Jewish Israeli citizens have. Don't accept the lying conclusions circulated by the Arab taqqyya. Read, e.g. Karsh, "What Occupation" and also "Israeli Arabs, Deprived or Radicalized?" Look at the facts, not alleged conclusions repeated endlessly so they have become a poetic truth and can't be dented by facts, reason or logic. But if you go to the other 22 Arab states that have Islamic collective rights, you will find that many of them have infringed on the rights of Jewish families that have lived in these states from before Islam was invented.
ReplyDeleteAnother two-state solution? Solution to what problem?
ReplyDeleteThe first two-state solution, taking the 3/4 of the Mandate east of the Jordan River while violating international law, to create another Jew-free Arab state name Jordan, didn't solve the problem of violent Arab rejection of an infidel state on supposed Islamic land. The second two-state solution to the problem the Arabs' genocidal attempts to kill every Jews living on another supposed Islamic land, turning complete domestic control to the Arabs in a Jew-free Gaza, brought no peace either. It only brought terror and violence with rockets raining on Israeli communities.
What suggests that another two-state solution will fair any better when the Arabs consider every part of the Jewish state to be illegal settlements?
Here is some information that you need to know about the Arab/Palestinians.
ReplyDeleteThere never has been, there is not now and there never will be a country called “Palestine.”
The Arab/Palestinians/Muslims squatting on Jewish land in and around Israel are overwhelmingly either descendants of invaders, illegal immigrants or trespassers.
The term “Palestinian” was popularized after the Six Day War in ’67 in an attempt to delegitimize Israel.
There are already 21 Arab/Muslim dominated countries with over spread out over five millions square miles of territory, including most of Jordan which was part of the Jewish allocated land under international law and treaties and the League of Nations in 1922. It also stated that the Jewish people are to set up their own government and none other. The Arabs also terrorized and expelled over a million Jewish families and their children from their countries and confiscated their homes and assets including 75,000 sq. mi. of Jewish owned land, thousands of Jewish people died while forced expulsion and leaving the Arab countries, these million expelled Jewish people from Arab countries now reside in Israel.
The Arab/Muslims are not interested in creating a 22nd Arab controlled country.
Their only desire is to annihilate the one and only Jewish state. The Muslim Quran states:
“And We said thereafter to the Children of Israel “Dwell securely in the land (of … (Holy Quran 17:104).
(Surah Al-Ma’ida, verse 21), and the other (Surah Al-Shara’a, verse 59) says that the land was bequeathed to the Jews.
Under International Law and Treaties – An Arab/Palestinian State cannot be established in Israel on Jewish land allocated to the Jewish people under the San Remo agreement of 1920, adopted and ratified and implemented by the League of Nations and signed by 51 member states. There was also the 1919 Faisal Weizmann Agreement.
Jordan is the Palestinian State – The land originally allocated to the Jewish people under international law and treaties.
The British violated the international law and the treaties and gave it to the Arabs as the new Arab State of Jordan.
YJ Draiman
Tova
ReplyDeleteAll the Arabs basically who were rejected from theirs countries flooded to Israel under the British rule. They under crime committed and some to work for the Jewish farms that lived & existed in the Land of Israel aka Palestine, as not all of us were expelled by Jalousie Rome.
The Brits had no right to let them in especially when Arabs slaughtered Jews inside theirs home in Jerusalem Hevron Safed best time was Shabbat when the families were all rounded up. The British turned the blind eye to the horrors inside the homes they would not even check the heads of the rabbis on the floors the kids limps throne everywhere the women's breasts cut off .The British were policing at the time, the British wanted the elimination of the Jews living in Israel for centuries as these Jews never left Israel at the same time; The Brits would not let the Jewish immigration come in from overseas to their homeland. When the terms of the mandate for Palestine was implemented in 1922 and signed by all the U.N. members. The Mandate terms are valid as legal document for eternity. In the mandate description anyone can read this Google it " The Jewish borders from the sea to the river with its capital Jerusalem ", so the Arabs walked in illegally, slaughters the Jews and CLAIM it as our land they kept on repeating THE deceptive SLOGAN until the whole world believes it is theirs .Please people go and read the history, it will educate you.
I state that the Arabs have not changed their ways with continued violence, I demand get the hell out of my/our land. I do not have to give you nothing not an inch you know it and I know it I am the OWNER you the Arab are the OCCUPIER.
I leave you with this note the land was called the Land of ISRAEL the Romans wanted the Jews to disconnect from ISRAEL and changed the name to Palestine so they won't come back. But many stayed.
Golda Meir the PM of Israel, asked Arabs to come and get a Palestine passport the Arabs said "NO WE ARE NOT PALESTINIANS"
so who the hell are theses Arab thugs? Get away from us; go back to the Arab countries.
Islamic disinformation, deception and intentional lies are permitted and in fact promoted under the Muslim Qur’an and Sharia law.
ReplyDeleteTherefore, we should be suspect of any and all information coming out of any Arab-Muslim sources. All statements by Arab-Muslims must be held suspect until thoroughly verified.
Deception, fraud and gross exaggeration are a way of life for the Muslims. Promises are not kept. Terror and violence is a fundamental premise. Their leaders subjugate the masses by inciting them against non-Muslims, and even against their own Muslim people.
In the past 1500 years the Muslims have eliminated over a half a billion people and the death toll is increasing daily. Muslim promoting, financing and supporting terrorism is endangering the safety and security of the entire world. Muslims at large bring instability and insecurity to the non-Muslim people in the world. Over 90% of world conflicts today involve Muslims.
The Muslims promote death and destruction and destroy any remnants of previous history which factually disproves their false teachings, and which contradicts their beliefs and agenda.
When will the world-at-large wake-up and realize that all non-Muslims are in danger of losing life and liberty if we do not take immediate, proactive action to stem, and eliminate the growing terror and violence?
A unified world with allied forces implementing full intelligence gathering and sharing, and security cooperation must be set-up to confront and end the unbridled Muslim terror and violent, genocidal Muslim activities.
If the silent Muslim majority does not act to curb the extreme, radical Muslim agenda, they must be considered as complicit in all of the extreme Muslim activities; and thus, be held accountable. Fundamental “Common Law” dictates such “complicity” as guilt.
The Media, which is always looking for sensationalism is only adding fuel to the fire, and is in fact accelerating the increase of terror and violence. Any media found guilty of such incitement should be held accountable.
Muslim extremism has constantly made known its’ intent to kill, and subjugate all “non-believers”. World domination is the goal of Muslim extremism. As such, it is time for the world to unite, and finally put an end to this insidious nemesis once and for all. To do otherwise is to simply kneel and wait for the Muslim sword to fall and to behead us all.
YJ Draiman
THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER PALESTINE and its violations r1
ReplyDeleteAs stated above, the 1920 San Remo Conference decided to place Palestine under British Mandatory rule making Britain responsible for giving effect to the 1917 Balfour declaration that had been adopted by the other Allied Powers and ratified under International treaty as International law.. The resulting “Mandate for Palestine,” was an historical League of Nations document that laid down the Jewish legal right to settle anywhere in Palestine and the San Remo Resolution incorporated the 1917 Balfour Declaration, this validated it as part of international law, which was confirmed by the Treaty of Sevres and Lausanne, together with Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations became the basic documents on which the Mandate for Palestine was established. The Mandate’s declaration of July 24, 1922 states unambiguously that Britain became responsible for putting the Balfour Declaration, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, into effect and it confirmed that recognition had 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. It is highly relevant that at that time the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and parts of what today is Jordan were included as a Jewish Homeland. However, on September 16, 1922, the British in violation of the Treaty divided the Mandate territory of Palestine, west of the Jordan became Transjordan, east of the Jordan River was for the Jewish State, in accordance with the McMahon Correspondence of 1915 which was not approved by the British Parliament. Transjordan became illegally exempt from the Mandate provisions concerning the Jewish National Home, effectively removing about 78% of the original territory of the area in which a Jewish National home was to be established in terms of the Balfour Declaration and the San Remo resolution as well as the British Mandate.
This action violated not only Article 5 of the Mandate which required the Mandatory to 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 but also article 20 of the Covenant of the League of Nations in which the Members of the League solemnly undertook that they would not enter into any engagements inconsistent with the terms thereof.
Article 6 of the Mandate stated that 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. Political rights were exclusively granted only to the Jewish people.
Nevertheless in blatant violation of article 6, in a 1939 White Paper Britain changed its position so as to limit Jewish immigration from Europe, a move that was blatant violation by Zionists as betrayal of the terms of the mandate, and the British became complicit in the extermination of the Jews in Europe, especially in light of the increasing persecution of Jews in Europe. This caused the death of millions of Jews trying to escape Nazi extermination. In response, Zionists organized Aliyah Bet, a program of illegal immigration into Palestine under British rules but not under international Treaties.
CONCLUSION
ReplyDeleteThe frequently voiced complaint that the state being offered to the Arab-Palestinians comprises only 22 percent of Palestine is obviously invalid. The truth is exactly the reverse. From the above history and international treaties, it is obvious that the territory on both sides of the Jordan was legally designated for the Jewish homeland by the 1920 San Remo Conference, mandated to Britain as trustee, confirmed by the 1920 Treaty of Sevres and Lausanne and endorsed by the League of Nations in 1922, affirmed in the Anglo-American Convention on Palestine in 1925 and confirmed in 1945 by article 80 of the UN. Yet, approximately 80% of this territory was illegally excised from the territory in May 1923 when, in violation of the mandate and the San Remo resolution, Britain gave autonomy to Transjordan (now known as Jordan) under as-Sharif Abdullah bin al-Husayn. Further-more, as the San Remo resolution has never been abrogated, it was and continues to be legally binding between the several parties who signed it. It is therefore obvious that the legitimacy of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and a Jewish state in Palestine all derive from the same international agreement at San Remo.
During WWII the British as trustee for the Jewish people in the Mandate for Palestine, violated the International treaty by restricting Jewish immigration and turned back Jewish refugee ships who were escaping from German extermination camps, thereby sending many Jews back to be exterminated. The British went as far as blowing-up Jewish refugee ships destined for Palestine-Israel under "Operation Embarrass". The British are responsible for the death of millions of Jews.
In essence, when Israel entered and liberated the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Jerusalem in 1967 it did not occupy territory to which any other party had title. While Jerusalem and the West Bank, (Judea and Samaria), were illegally occupied by Jordan in 1948 they remained in effect part of the Jewish National Home that had been created at 1920 San Remo and confirmed by the 1920 Treaty of Sevres and Lausanne, thus, in the 1967 6-Day War Israel, in effect, recovered and liberated territory that legally belonged to Israel, when you are liberating your own land and territory, no annexation is required.
To quote Judge Schwebel, a former President of the ICJ (International Court of Justice), “As between Israel, acting defensively in 1948 and 1967, on the one hand, and her Arab neighbors, acting aggressively, in 1948 and 1967, on the other, Israel has the better absolute title in the territory of what was Palestine, including the whole of Jerusalem. Any resolutions past by the U.N. are only a recommendation and cannot supersede international treaties.
The Arabs have Jordan, which was Jewish territory. The Arabs persecuted and expelled over a million Jewish families who lived there for over 2500 years, from their countries and confiscated all their assets, businesses, homes and Real estate property 6 times the size of Israel - 120,440 sq. km. and valued in the trillions of dollars. Most of the expelled Jewish families from Arab countries were resettled in Israel, today over half the population in Israel are the families of the million Jewish families expelled from Arab countries. Let the Arab-Palestinians relocate to those lands and solve the Arab Israel conflict and the Arab-Palestinian refugee problem.
YJ Draiman
NO JEW HAS THE RIGHT TO GIVE UP (Eretz Yisrael) THE LAND OF ISRAEL
ReplyDeleteBy David Ben Gurion
"No Jew has the right to yield the rights of the Jewish People in Israel. No Jew has the authority to do so. No Jewish body has the authority to do so. Not even the entire Jewish People alive today has the right to yield any part of Israel.
It is the right of the Jewish People over the generations, a right that under no conditions can be cancelled. Even if Jews during a specific period proclaim they are relinquishing this right, they have neither the power nor the authority to deny it to future generations. No concession of this type is binding or obligates the Jewish People.
Our right to the country - the entire country - exists as an eternal right, and we shall not yield this historic right until its full and complete redemption is realized."
This quotation of David Ben Gurion made at the Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1937, more than 78 years ago.
Moral and ethical bankruptcy
ReplyDeleteAmericans are finding a grotesque echo in the moral – ethical bankruptcy and worse of a substantial sector of American society.
The "moral depravity" of "the Arabs/Muslims" who kill innocent civilians. It is more than moral depravity. It is a culture that teaches, educates and breeds hate toward other societies that are not like them as they say "infidels" or “dhimmis”.
There is no way this situation should be handled with kid gloves – when a poison strikes your body, you remove it and destroy it completely, leaving no trace of such poison. If you are inflicted with cancer you remove it totally with no remnants left behind, or it comes back.
History has shown that these types of atrocities and acts of barbarism have increased in the past half a century and getting worse by the day.
With today's advancement in technology and telecommunications, the world has shrunk, events on the other side of the world affect everybody (like the Japanese Nuclear reactor fallout etc.) it affects our health our economy, brings fear and uncertainty to our lives.
The financial crisis we are facing today is the price we pay for years of neglect and government abuse of power.
Is today's society heading toward annihilation, you be the judge?
YJ Draiman
The Qur'an 17:104 - states the land belongs to the Jewish people
The Oslo accord is null and void! - A scathing indictment of the world nations at large! r11
ReplyDeleteThe Arab-Palestinians Charter explicitly states that they want the State of Israel for themselves and the Jewish people destroyed.
The Arab-Palestinians actions to date have proven that they do not want peace.
Why the liberal left and many of the world nations is are fantasizing and
deluding themselves that the Arabs want peace.
People of the world wake up and realize what their ultimate mission is to eliminate the unbelievers.
The Arabs promote and indoctrinate the children to commit terror and violence.
The Arabs never intended to abide by the Accord, or any other agreements with Israel for that matter. It was only a means to take control of territory and eventually take over all of Israel and expel and kill the Jews again, and they do not hide their intentions.
No Democratic country in the world would tolerate the terror violence and mayhem being committed in Israel by the Arabs. Any country that does not take extreme actions to stop this terror and violence is shirking its responsibility and obligation to its citizens and should be replaced.
Just like the terrorist ant convicted murderer, Abbas statement at the U.N. It is time for formally announcing that the Oslo Accord is null and void and institute a population exchange. Moving the Arabs to Jordan and or the homes and the 120,000 sq. km. the Arab countries confiscated from the terrorized and expelled million Jewish families.
Thus, take back complete control of Judea and Samaria and everything west of the Jordan River as decreed by post WWI international law and treaties, including the January 1919 Faisal Weitzman Agreement.
If the world at large does not wake up now they will be next. It already has
started, take off the blinders, open you eyes and look around. The current
refugee problem from Syria and others are flooding Europe and changing the nature and face of Europe and others forever.
They are taking over Europe without a battle and without shooting.
No entity in the world will force a solution on Israel.
They forced or were complicit to the Final solution in WWII with the Holocaust
and the extermination of over 6 million Jewish people, men women and children.
Where were the world’s nation’s outcry, threats and objection when millions of
Jewish people were being exterminated, men women and children? They were
silent.
The Arab world received over 5 million square miles of territory after WWI and they begrudge the 75,000 sq. miles Israel was suppose to get and took 78% of it for Jordan and now they want more, until there is no Israel at all. That is their goal.
Where was the world nations when the Arab countries persecuted, terrorized and
expelled over a million Jewish families and their children from their countries
many who lived there for over 2,500 years, (and that includes the original
Jewish City of Medina and the Jewish community in Mecca, which predates Islam by a thousand years), the Arabs confiscated all their assets, business, homes and land 6 times the size of Israel (120,440 sq. km. or 75,000 sq. miles), valued in the trillions of dollars?
Most of the expelled Jewish families re-settled in Israel and now comprise over half the population.
Where are the world nations today? Why do they ignore when thousands are
ReplyDeleteslaughtered by Muslims throughout the world. (Where are the compassionate Arab countries taking in the current Arab refugees, they have a vast expanse of
vacant lands). The Muslims have killed over a half a billion people since the
Muslim religion was initiated.
Israel; since its independence, in 1948 and continuing thru today. Israel is being threatened with annihilation and when Israel defends itself from destruction, terror, suicide bombers, thousands of missiles and rockets, violence, etc, by the Arabs, every country has something to say, threaten Israel and meddle in its internal business.
This is the time when nations of the world must mind their own business and
stay out of Israel’s internal affairs. Only then there will be a possibility of peace.
NEVER AGAIN!!!
YJ Draiman