I have seen figures closer to fifty thousand (they were rising slowly throughout the nineteenth century). It was mostly a religious community, in the four "sacred cities" -- Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias -- but it was a community and had been there continuously except when it had been slaughtered by Crusaders.
The figures I have access to are 24,000 in 1884, rising to 85,000 in 1914, against a non-Jewish population of approximately 600,000 to 700,000. While there was a Jewish community, it was small, owned a negligible quantity of land, and was a relatively minor force in public life. Certainly this community never aspired to politically dominate those around them. I have not been able to find figures showing what percentage of this community were European Jews and what percentage were of Middle Eastern origin. It would be very interesting to know this.
Why this is the Jews' fault for buying the land and not the landowner's fault for exploiting their tenants and making a fortune selling their tenants' land, I have yet to figure out. Oh, I forgot, it's always the "colonialists" fault, they have no business buying land from the owners or disturbing the romantic and traditional feudal arrangements. Excuse me, don't real colonialists usually conquer the land with the aid of native princes?
I realize that you have a huge emotional investment in the notion that the ills of Palestine are exclusively the fault of Arabs, but I found that response both inappropriate to what I posted and snotty to a degree unusual on this thread. I did not mention “blame”, or “fault”. Neither do I see any place for either term in this particular discussion, which I was hoping to direct toward a dispassionate analysis of action and consequence. It is difficult to “blame” Jewish settlers for legally buying land. Certainly they had the legal right to evict the tenants once they had bought the land. It is also difficult to fault the landlords for selling: the sums offered were in many cases well above the prevailing land values in the area, making the sale of the estates, many of which were not particularly profitable, easy to justify.
Even if you dismiss the notion of blame, however, you have to admit that these actions had consequences. The most obvious consequence was the migration of the evicted tenants to urban shantytowns. If we are going to absolve the settlers of blame for their land purchases and the sellers of blame for their sales, must we not also absolve the newly landless peasants for the anger they developed toward those who, in their limited view, had displaced them? Shall we blame them for the ease with which they were manipulated by demagogues with political agendas? If you create a population that is ripe for exploitation by demagogues, demagogues will arise to exploit them. Assigning blame in such a case is like blaming night for following day.
The abrupt transition out of feudal agricultural structures has often had disastrous effects on peasant populations cut adrift from the only social system they have ever known. That doesn’t mean that feudalism is “good”, or that the people who dismantled feudal systems were “bad”. It just means that actions have consequences. That doesn’t mean that somebody has to be blamed for those consequences, but it does demands that we face up to the reality of cause and effect. With or without blame, the acquisition of feudal estates by Jewish settlers, and the subsequent eviction of the tenants that had previously worked those estates, created a large and impoverished mass of landless peasants, who, once lodged in urban slums, directed their resentment at the settlers.
I find it an act of hubris to claim that Jews have no cultural or historic roots in Jerusalem or Judea. I should think that that would be one point that was not under dispute (except by Arafat, of course).
The Jewish population that settled in Palestine in the first half of the 20th century was European, not Middle Eastern. Their languages, values, and culture were European. They were as much foreigners in Palestine as the English were. The only sense in which it could be said that they had cultural roots in the area was that they subscribed to a religious faith that originated there. Any Christian could say as much.
Two points: First, Balfour, Weizman, et. al had no intention of moving anybody, they intended to live side by side with the Arabs.
Lip service was indeed paid to the nominal goal of peaceful coexistence, but it was clear from the start that the goal of a Jewish State was not compatible with the goal of living side by side with the Arabs. Herzl certainly knew this. He wrote, in The Jewish State: “An infiltration is bound to end badly. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless based on assured supremacy”.
Weizmann knew it too: “we desired to create in Palestine such conditions, political, economic, and administrative, that as the country is developed, we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English, or America is American… I hope that the Jewish frontiers of Palestine will be as great as Jewish energy for getting Palestine”.
Balfour’s private memorandum to the Cabinet was considerably more candid than his famous declaration: “…in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants… The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that land… so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.”
Most important, the Arabs knew it too. The Haycraft Commission, assembled to inquire into the causes of the riots of 1921, declared that “it is important that it should be realized that what is written on the subject of Zionism by Zionists and their sympathizers in Europe is read and discussed by Palestinian Arabs, not only in the towns but in the country districts….” The commission went on to cite numerous examples of clearly inflammatory passages that were quoted by Arab witnesses as evidence that the Zionists really did aspire to political supremacy over the region, as indeed they did.
Look seriously at what these men were saying: Herzl’s “assured supremacy”, Weizmann’s Palestine, “as Jewish as England is English”, Balfour’s comment that the Zionist imperatives were “of far profounder import” than the interests of the Arab population. Are any of these beliefs even remotely compatible with the nominal objective peaceful coexistence? Clearly they are not.
lots of populations have been moved and peace recovered.
I think you would be hard pressed to find a case in which a foreign population was introduced into a populated region with the express objective of achieving political supremacy over that region without inspiring violent resistance on the part of the native population.
It is important to recognize when looking at this period that the Zionists and their supporters were shaped, like all people of all times, by the prevailing values and beliefs of their societies. In short, they were imperialists and they were racists. I do not mean this in any perjorative sense. The Europe of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was in its imperial heyday; racism and imperialism were intrinsic parts of the prevailing belief system of the day. How can you blame these people for being racists and imperialists when you could have scoured Europe with a fine-toothed comb and not found a man, woman, or child that wasn’t a racist and an imperialist? I don’t hold the Zionists and their supporters at fault for sharing beliefs that were universally accepted by the culture that produced them. I don’t blame them for the fact that the particular collection of Middle Eastern mythology that recounted the ancient and transient tenure of the Jews in Palestine was at that time accepted by many as revealed truth, and that this was widely evoked as a justification for a Jewish return to that land. In fact, I see no point in blaming anybody for actions that, according to the wisdom of the age, made perfect sense.
I also don’t see any point in denying that the consequences of these actions, and the attitudes that drove them, included many that were probably not intended or expected, and have a great deal to do with the ugliness that we face in that sad region today. |
