Palestine was feudal and most of the people were felahin living in mud huts.
Which means, of course, that they needed to be evicted and replaced by progressive Europeans. An interesting definition of “development”.
I believe Churchill (a definite pro-colonial voice) put it well when he said in the thirties that he didn't believe in letting sleeping dogs lie. The Zionists had just electrified Palestine, he said, and the Arabs would not have done it in a hundred years.
By that standard the slaughter of the Native Americans was entirely right and just. Just think how long it would have taken them to install flush toilets.
Would you say that people with access to capital and technology have the inherent right to displace people who lack such access, so that the territory they occupy may be “developed” for the benefit of others?
Most of the land the Zionists bought was wasteland anyway and had to be reclaimed for agriculture.
Completely wrong. According to the 1929 “Report on Conditions in Palestine” issued by the British Colonial Office, the 4% of Palestine that the settlers had acquired by that date represented 14% of the territory’s cultivated land. Despite a few highly publicized instances of reclamation (in the case of the Hadera marshes, funded by European donations and carried out by black laborers imported from Egypt, who “died in scores” from malaria) the emphasis was always on productive agricultural land.
…political unrest was the reaction to Zionism, but it was the third reaction. The first reaction was large-scale Arab immigration into Palestine; the second was internal political unrest as the Mufti consolidated his position with a wave of assassinations; the third was the Arab revolt.
The first large scale violent Arab response to Zionist immigration was the Jaffa riots in 1921, long before the Mufti became a significant part of the picture. Individual incidents of violent reaction to immigration go back long before that. As early as 1909 the Kaimkam of Tiberias authorized the formation of an armed Jewish self defense force, as Arab hostility toward Zionist settlers had reached the point where violent attacks were feared. The pattern of political unrest as a response to Zionism is well documented. It was a major concern for British administrators, who felt that pro-Zionist factions in London had saddled them with an unmanageable problem. The start of that unrest is at best contemporaneous with the start of Arab immigration, and predates the organized rebellion of 1935 by more than two decades, as you already know very well. I really don’t understand why you insist on posting allegations you know to be false. Possibly because you think they might be accepted at face value by those who have not looked into the matter? A common tactic in this debate, but not one for which I can generate much respect.
Arab resistance to Zionist goals was not a product of the Mufti, or any other leader. It was not caused by any Arab State: it started long before there were any Arab states. It was a simple response to the stated intent of the Zionists to declare sovereignty over all of Palestine, and the established precedent for evicting Arabs from any land that came under Zionist control. The Arabs believed, with good reason, that if the Zionists got what they wanted, they would be thrown out of their homes. They resisted. Under the circumstances, who wouldn’t? |
