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70 of 77 people found the following review helpful:  Myth buster, October 28, 2003
This exceedingly well-documented book lays bare
the false claim that Jewish settlers dispossessed Arab people from their
land in Palestine. The examination of records from 1830 onward will shock
most readers.
In the first place, the book shows that Palestine's population barely
grew for 250 years--rising from 205,000 Moslems, Christians and Jews in
1554 to only 275,000 in 1800. In the second, records from 1830, 1863, 1878
and 1893 and 1917, among others, demonstrate that when the heaviest Jewish
immigration began in 1880, a large proportion of the 425,000 to 440,000
Arabs in Palestine were themselves recent immigrants.
The book also carefully documents the origins of those immigrants. Many
came from Egypt: The 1831 invasion by the Egyptian Khedive, Ibrahim Pasha,
forced Palestine fellaheen, urban dwellers and Bedouin to permanently flee
Ottoman military drafts and taxes. The 1837 Great Earthquake and epidemics
that followed further cut their numbers. In their wake came Ibrahim
Pasha's Egyptian Arabs, who settled the empty land. In 1831 alone, 6,000
Egyptian Arabs settled in Akko. The Egyptian Arab-Hinadi, Ghawarna tribes
settled in the Beit Shean and Hula Valleys and in the Jordan Valley towns
of Ubeidiya, Delhamiya and Kafer-Miser. In the Hula Valley, the Egyptian
ez-Zubeids later sold their land to Jewish settlers from
Yessud-Hama'ala. According to an 1893 British Palestine Exploration
Fund report, Egyptians made up most of the population in Jaffa.
Additionally, Avneri shows, Arab and Muslim immigrants also came from
Algeria, Damascus, Yemen, Afghanistan, Persia, India, Tripoli, Morocco,
Turkey and Iraq. The French conquest of Algeria, for example, led to the
eventual rebellion and imprisonment of Abd el-Kadar el-Hassani, whose
followers in 1856 fled to Syria and the Lower Galilee towns of Shara,
Ulam, Ma'ader, Kafer-Sabet, Usha (near present-day Ramat-Yohanan),
the Mount Atlas village of Qedesh and villages on Lake Hula and in the
Upper Galilee, where they spoke Berber. In Ramle, immigrants spoke Qebili,
a Mugrabi dialect. Circassian refugees from the Caucasus settled in
Trans-Jordan and as far east as Caesarea.
Arab immigration continued to rise through World War I, as Avneri
documents, despite locusts, the Ottoman draft and more epidemics. Egyptian
laborers, contractors and businessmen flooded the country. By 1922, the
Moslem population had more than doubled to 566,311, including 62,500
Bedouins. The 1931 Mandatory government census counted 693,147 permanent
Moslem residents, including 66,553 Bedouins. It also gave the natural
increase of the population as 132,211--57,125 less than the absolute
increase. Only illegal Arab immigration explains this contradiction,
Avneri shows.
The next census in 1948, as Avneri recounts, followed unprecedented
economic growth, during which illegal Arab immigration continued. From
April 1934 to November 1935, for example, 20,000 Haurani Arabs came to
Palestine. These and thousands of other Arab immigrants worked on farms,
construction projects (building roads, railroads and the Haifa port), and
government and municipal jobs. Syrians and Lebanese Arabs were free to
come with nothing but border passes, and they came along with immigrants
from Somalia, Trans-Jordan, Persia, India, Ethiopia and the Hejaz.
Mandatory government rules required the supervision of immigration, but
Palestine's borders remained porous to all but Jews. In all, Avneri shows
that 35,000 to 40,000 illegal Arab immigrants came from 1931 to 1947--on
top of up to 20,000 other Arab immigrants who arrived from 1935 to 1945.
The book also carefully examines numerous historical descriptions of a
desolate landscape, composed almost entirely of swamps and deserts, and
sold to the Jewish people by absentee Arab landlords, appointed by the
Ottoman government, at enormous profits. Dozens of sales are documented
specifically, including some by the Egyptian el-Husseini family of Yasser
Arafat.
Altogether, this book shatters the Arab claim of dispossession.
--Alyssa A.
Lappen |
