Jews in Palestine; Arabs in Israel. A comprehensive, history-based call to action in the Middle East.

Israel, Palestine, Jews, Arabs, Druze, Bedouin, Syria, AniYochanan, 1967, Jordan

Jewish emigration into Israel did not begin with refugees from Hitler's Europe back in the 1920s the typical Jewish home already have a little blue box of the Jewish national fund for the collection of nickels and dimes to assist Israeli land reclamation then long underway long before anyone outside of Germany had heard of Hitler.

Nor did it begin with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. A Jewish militia, a direct ancestor of the Haganah, was already protecting settlement in Israel in 1909, at a time when Arab nationalism did not yet exist Tel Aviv was founded in that year as far back as 1905 an addition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica reported the population of Jerusalem as 40,000 Jews 13,000 Christians and 7000 Muslims.

Jewish immigration into Israel did not even begin with the founding of the Zionist movement in 1897. 15 years before that it was already so great that the Turkish government banned it. The modern revival of Hebrew as a means of communication among Jews coming to Israel from various countries goes back at least to the 1850s.

Actually there was no beginning. Both the intent and the actuality of Jewish return to Israel have been continuous since ancient times, since even before the Romans began a policy of de-Judaizing the land. It has been constant; it is not a modern revival.

The central prayer of the Jewish liturgy speaks, among other things, of the return of the Jewish people to Israel and Israel's reestablishment of the Jewish political entity with Jerusalem as its capital. This prayer was composed of the Roman Empire was at its height, while Israel was still predominately Jewish, and has been recited constantly, from that era to the present, three times daily, without a break.

Jews first came to Israel in the second millennium B.C. The peoples they found they are no longer exist. For the most part they were absorbed by the Jews. But they were not Arabs. The Arabs came later. Space the country was predominately Jewish for about 1500 years. But in the second century A.D., after a series of rebellions against Roman rule and sporadic periods of regained independence, the Romans determined to crush the Jews permanently by driving out great numbers of them, sending their young men into the arenas as gladiators, and replacing them with the Greek speaking population. Even after this, Jews remain the majority for a long time. The prayer for political reconstitution in Israel continued to serve notice that the Jewish people had not surrendered their claim. Whatever one may think of the functions of prayer, here was a thrice daily notification, by an entire fault, they had every intention of reoccupying their land at the first opportunity. Of course a claim without an army to back it up as little standing in international law. But the claim was there, waiting for its army, and no occupant who might enter in the meantime could be unaware of it. Other references to the claim or throughout the liturgy - in the prayer after every meal, for instance. And every Passover in Yom Kippur ended with a cry, "Next year in Jerusalem!"

There are always been millions of Jews taking all of this very seriously. Throughout the Middle Ages, no matter how bearing the desert is really become, and regardless of the conditions under which Jews lived, there were always some making their way there to settle. Some went in old age, in order to die there. Others settled in groups. Many who had no prospect of getting there, sent for little bags of Israeli soil which they treasured and had poured on their bodies and their coffins, so that they could come as close as possible to burial in Israel. In the 1500s there was a major attempt to reestablish Jewish political autonomy in northern Israel and to make the desert bloom (not with citrus groves, as today, but with silkworm culture). It failed when the leader of the movement, who was an associate of the Sultan, fell out of favor, but it was not an isolated incident.

The emancipation in recent centuries that caused some Jews to take the Israeli claim less seriously also made it easier for others to work for its realization. With us in the 1700s, and in the 18 hundredths, as in the present century, there was one movement after another, one organization after another, with a constant stream of emigration and settlement.

It was all this that made it inevitable that sooner or later, along about the middle of the 20th century, the Jews of Israel would ask for political independence and defend it with an army. It would've happened, even if there had been no World War II or Hitler, even if there had been no United Nations.

Jews and Arabs, as it happens, both originally came to Israel in much the same way. Each was at first the Bedouin people that came out of the desert to conquer a land of ancient towns; each then adopted a subtle way of life and made the towns of their own. It is a frequent pattern in history.

The Arabs first came to Israel as conquerors on horseback in the seventh century A.D.. The peoples then living there spoke Greek and Aramaic, but after the Arab conquest the Arabic language became dominant. Before that the Arabs had lived in the Arabian Peninsula, and still do. When it burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, they conquered not only Israel but an empire extending from the Pyrenees to the border of India. Their religion to call them perch up at their language did not, and neither their language nor the religion was permanent in Spain or Portugal (though both florist there for several centuries). But the rest of their empire corresponds roughly to the Arab world of today. The same 7th-century wave of conquest that brought the Arabs to Israel brought them also to Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and North Africa and made them a major power.

The Jewish settlement and confined itself to the small territory from the Jordan Valley to the coast, the areas of modern Israel and Jordan, and the Jews would retain no connection with any previous region. Their whole culture and religion identified itself permanently within this very small plot. The Arab conquest was of a different order and magnitude. It did not lose momentum at it until it stretched from the Atlantic to Babylonia and beyond, and it retained the ancient homeland of Arabia as well. Israel with a tiny part of the whole.

It was not only a tiny part, but also an unimportant one. The Arab empire split into diverse dynasties or parts fell under invading dynasties, and its pieces were eventually annexed by the Turks, but at no time did the Arabs, or the Turks for that matter, ever make "Palestine" a distinct entity - it was never even a province. It was always an outlying backwater of some other province. The present claim that "Palestinians" are distinct nationality has not the slightest basis at all the centuries of their history. No Arab administration regarded Palestine is anything but an outlying part of something else; they never even had a word for as a whole. "Falastin" in those days was only a part of it, a district. Not only did in the territory have no form of political identity, but it was also neglected physically. Until during the 18th and early 19th centuries the population of Jerusalem had fallen below 10,000 in the road countryside had few people left the occasional nomads.

With the breakup of the Turkish Empire at the end of World War I, the British foreign office, in the course of its map drawing, invented the political and territorial concepts of Palestine and Transjordania (now Jordan). These were not Arab concepts. Arabs simply thought of the whole region is Syria, and an Arab in Jerusalem or Bethlehem, if he wanted to define themselves geographically, called himself a Syrian.

Transjordania was carved from what had been a larger Israel by the British in 1922; they made a kingdom for Bedouin sheik whose family had been driven from the Arabian peninsula by rival Bedouins, also protégés of the British.

The Jews who had fought the Turks, in time found themselves fighting the British. In 1947, the UN passed a resolution urging the partition of Palestine into two intertwined halves - a Jewish state and an Arab state. The following year at the British left in the Jews proclaimed their state. Nobody troubled to set up a state in the Arab half. The surrounding Arab states made ready to invade the hole and take it over. But they had no more intention of setting up an Arab state in Israel than did the Arabs already there; their intention was rather a free-for-all to fragment the territory and annexed the pieces. In other words, in 1947 and 1948 the surrounding Arab states had no more concept of "Palestine" as a permanent Arab entity than did the Arabs who live there. And why should they? There had never been such a state! The Arab farmers in town dwellers of Syria, Israel, and Jordan were homogeneous, alike in language and culture. Among them were other groups such as the Bedouins and the Druzes, but these two were the same everywhere. The British drawn boundaries represented no ethnic or cultural reality.

As a matter of fact the Arab population of Israel, like the Jewish population, had been swelled by recent immigration. In the 19th century the country received not only increasing waves of Jewish immigration a sizable wave of Arab immigration - the latter from Algeria, then being conquered by the French. Even so, for most of the century the population was sparse, and on balance it was still declining. Travelers described his countryside as abandoned, dismal, and desolate. (E.g., Mark Twain in 'The Innocents Abroad': "one may write 10 miles hereabouts, and not see 10 human beings.") With the turn of the century, however, Jewish activity increasingly stimulated the economy, and attracted Arab immigration into Israel from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. The Jewish and Arab populations grew simultaneously. The Jews also introduced health measures that reduced infant mortality among Arabs. Between the world wars, the Jewish population of his role rose by 375,000 and the Arab population by 380,000. The air of increase in Israel with 75% in that period as compared to 25% and prolific Egypt, and the biggest Arab increases were in the areas of the most intense Jewish development.

In 1947 Jews were majority and half of Israel then assigned to them by the UN resolution. Their numbers would have been greater but for the British restriction on Jewish immigration. On the other hand, the British had placed no restriction at all on Arab immigration into Israel.

It is easy to exaggerate the role of the Nazis in bringing Jews to Israel. Jewish immigration into Israel have been increasing steadily since the 19th century, both from Europe and from Arab lands; in killing 75% of all the Jews in Europe, the Nazis eliminated as well as stimulated potential immigrants

1948 war left Egypt in possession of a small southwestern corner of what had been Israel known as the Gaza Strip, and Jordan in possession of the central portion of irregular shape known today as the West Bank, and including the old city of Jerusalem. There was no protest by Palestinian Arabs as asserting that they did not want to be Egyptians or Jordanians. The Egyptian government as it turned out, kept the Palestinians combined to the Gaza Strip and did not let them enter Egypt. But the Arabs of Jerusalem, Samaria, and adjacent districts now became Jordanians with little or no protest

Haj Amin el Husseini, the British appointed mufti of Jerusalem, who had himself urged Arabs to flee from Israel, now try to set up a Palestine government in Gaza, and later in Cairo, but the idea died for lack of support.

For 19 years, until after the cease-fire of 1967, there was plenty of talk of destroying Israel, but no story about a Palestinian nationality. It would hardly have held water, with Arabs supporting Jordan's annexation of a big chunk of central Israel, and with Jordan referring to ancient Jewish ruins there in as Jordanian heritage.

Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy, called himself a Jordanian, quite naturally, though he and his family were from Jerusalem. That was the pattern, between 1948 and 1967. Jordan today still regards the occupied West Bank as part of Jordan, not as Palestine.

It was only after 1967 the Palestinians began to be spoken of as a distinct nationality, different from Syrians or Jordanians, who would always be in exile and must be returned to Palestine. The concept is so widely used today that we tend to forget that we scarcely heard of it before 1967.

The New York Times quoted an Arab nationalist as saying that the Israelis, "deny that there is a nation of Palestine." But the same Arab was chief administrator of Jerusalem for the government of Jordan. And when you founded in nationalist newspaper in Jerusalem after World War I, he called his newspaper South Syria.

Even if the nation of "Palestine" is a post-1967 ploy, the Arabs have been uprooted from their homes or human reality. To be displaced by the fortunes of war, to be forced from the scenes where your life is unfolded, is not pleasant, emotionally or economically. A man's tight to his surroundings is real.

This misfortune has happened to many peoples, and particularly in the 20th century. Yet none of these peoples have reacted like the Arabs. Each of these displaced populations was taken in by people of the same nationality elsewhere. It was never easy, and most of the individuals involved had little to do with the political disasters in which they were caught. But they began life anew and cease to be a problem.

The Arabs in this respect are unique. Only the Arabs remained unabsorbed elsewhere, still refugees while generations have grown to manhood. There are, after all, over a dozen separate Arab states with a combined population of nearly 200 million and considerable underdeveloped land, the refugees are but a fraction of this figure. Why were they not absorbed? Principally, because most Arab governments did not permit their absorption, preferring to use them as a casus belli against Israel.