JEWS IN WEST BANK AND GAZA STRIP
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Of the
original 1922 League of Nations
Palestine Mandate to establish the Jewish National Home (120,000 sq km), Israel got only 17% (20,330 sq km), while Arab Jordan got 77% (91,971 sq km). Golan
Heights (1,200 sq km): 1%. The disputed West Bank and Gaza Strip area of 6,220 sq km is matching equivalent to a circle with a radius of 45 km. This is 1/2400 (0.04%!) of the total area of the Arab world & Iran (15.15 million sq km).
Palestine inhabited by a mixed
population History did not begin with the Arab conquest in the seventh century. The people whose nation was destroyed by the Romans were the Jews. There were no Arab Palestinians then -- not until seven hundred years later would an Arab rule prevail, and then briefly. And not by people known as "Palestinians." The short Arab rule would be reigning over Christians and Jews, who had been there to languish under various other foreign conquerors, -- Roman, Byzantine, Persian, to name just three in the centuries between the Roman and Arab conquests. The peoples who conquered under the banner of the invading Arabians from the desert were often hired mercenaries who remained on the land as soldiers -- not Arabians, but others who were enticed by the promise of the booty of conquest. From the time the Arabians, along with their non-Arabian recruits, entered Palestine and Syria, they found and themselves added to what was "ethnologically a chaos of all the possible human combinations to which, when Palestine became a land of pilgrimage, a new admixture was added."1 Among the peoples who have been counted as "indigenous Palestinian Arabs" are Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Germans, Afghans, Circassians, Bosnians, Sudanese, Samaritans, Algerians, Motawila, and Tartars. John of Wurzburg lists for the middle era of the kingdom, Latins, Germans, Hungarians, Scots, Navarese, Bretons, English, Franks, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Georgians, Armenians, Syrians, Persian Nestorians, Indians,Egyptians, Copts, Maronites and natives from the Nile Delta. The list might be much extended, for it was the period of the great self-willed city-states in Europe, and Amalfi, Pisans, Genoese, Venetians, and Marseillais, who had quarters in all the bigger cities, owned villages, and had trading rights, would, in all probability, have submitted to any of the above designations, only under pressure. Besides all these, Norsemen, Danes, Frisians, Tartars, Jews, Arabs, Russians, Nubians, and Samaritans, can be safely added to the greatest human agglomeration drawn together in one small area of the globe."2 Greeks fled the Muslim rule in Greece, and landed in Palestine. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Greeks lived everywhere in the Holy Land--constituting about twenty percent of the population-and their authority dominated the villages.3 Between 1750 and 1766 Jaffa had been rebuilt, and had some five hundred houses. Turks, Arabs, Greeks and Armenians and a solitary Latin monk lived there, to attend to the wants of the thousands of pilgrims who had to be temporarily housed in the port before proceeding to Jerusalem.4 "In some cases villages [in Palestine] are populated wholly by settlers from other portions of the Turkish Empire within the nineteenth century. There are villages of Bosnians, Druzes, Circassians and Egyptians," one historian has reported. 5 Another source, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911 edition (before the "more chauvinist Arab history" began to prevail with the encouragement of the British), finds the "population" of Palestine composed of so "widely differing" a group of "inhabitants" -- whose "ethnological affinities" create "early in the 20th century a list of no less than fifty languages" (see below) -- that "it is therefore no easy task to write concisely ... on the ethnology of Palestine." In addition to the "Assyrian, Persian and Roman" elements of ancient times, "the short-lived Egyptian government introduced into the population an element from that country which still persists in the villages." . . . There are very large contingents from the Mediterranean countries, especially Armenia, Greece and Italy . . . Turkoman settlements ... a number of Persians and a fairly large Afghan colony . . . Motawila ... long settled immigrants from Persia ... tribes of Kurds ... German "Templar" colonies ... a Bosnian colony ... and the Circassian settlements placed in certain centres ... by the Turkish government in order to keep a restraint on the Bedouin ... a large Algerian element in the population ... still maintain(s) [while] the Sudanese have been reduced in numbers since the beginning of the 20th century. In the late eighteenth century, 3,000 Albanians recruited by Russians were settled in Acre. The Encyclopaedia Britannica finds "most interesting all the non-Arab communities in the country . . . the Samaritan sect in Nablus (Shechem); a gradually disappearing body" once "settled by the Assyrians to occupy the land left waste by the captivity of the Kingdom of Israel."6 The disparate peoples recently assumed and purported to be "settled Arab indigenes, for a thousand years" were in fact a "heterogeneous" community 7 With no "Palestinian" identity, and according to an official British historical analysis in 1920, no Arab identity either: "The people west of the Jordan are not Arabs, but only Arabic-speaking. The bulk of the population are fellahin.... In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race." 8
Birthplaces of Inhabitants of Jerusalem. District circa
1931 Hejaz-Nejd Iraq Persia Turkey Central Asiatic
Indian Continent Far Eastern Asia Algeria
Albania
Greece
U.S.S.R.
Australia Other
Mediterranean Abyssinia
Hejaz-Neid
Other Arabian
Persia
Central Asiatic
Indian Continent Far Eastern Asia Algeria
Tripoli Tunis Albania
France
U.S.S.R.
Canada
Australia Poland Rumania
U.S.S.R. Languages In Habitual Use In Palestine circa
1931 Source: Census of Palestine --1931, volume 1, Palestine; Part 1, Report by E. Mills, B.A., O.B.E., Assistant Chief Secretary Superintendent of Census (Alexandria, 1933), p. 147. 1. Richard Hartmann, Palestina unter den Araben, 632-1516 (Leipzig, 1915), cited by de Haas, History, p. 147. 2. De Haas, History, p. 258. John of Wurzburg list from Reinhold Rohricht edition, pp. 41, 69. 3. F. Eugene Roger, La Terre Sainte (Paris, 1637), p. 331, cited by de Haas, History, p. 342. 4. Frederich Hasselquist, Reise nach Palastina, etc., 1749-52 (Rostock, 1762), p. 598, cited by de Haas, History, p. 355. 5. Parkes, Whose Land?, p. 212. See Chapters 13 and 14. 6. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. XX, p. 604. 7. Ibid. 8 .In a handbook, prepared under the direction of the historical section of the Foreign Office, no. 60, entitled "Syria and Palestine" (London, 1920), p. 56. |
