True. True. Which was violated by the immigrant Zionist Jews from Europe. And that was a mistake because UNGA Resolution 181 was a recommendation requiring mutual consent of the Jewish and non-Jewish People in Palestine and that mutual consent was never provided. The UN Security Council should have immediately ordered a military action to protect the Right of Self-Determinat of the non-Jewish residents and citizens (majority population) of Palestine. It is strange that the UNSC authorized the use of military force just two years later with N Korea (that was comprised of Koreans) "invaded" S Korea to protect the "Right of self-determination" for the S Koreans in 1950 but failed to authorize the use of military force to protect the "right of self-determination" of the "Palestinians" that were violated by immigrant European Jews in 1948.
Resolution 181 was UN General Assembly resolution and not a UN Security Council resolution. The General Assembly can only make "recommendations" and cannot mandate or authorize any actions.
Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo WHAT???????????????????????????? I personally disagree... This land is Jewish Land since the beginning of time, the Fathers and Mothers of this Land are buried there... This Land is peppered with Archeological sites pointing to its ownership by the Israelites, the Hebrew, the Jews... The League of Nations, the Balfour declaration and the United Nations decided differently from what you perceive to be the truth... Historical facts on the Balfour Declaration Historical facts on the Balfour Declaration (precursor) of the Mandate for Palestine The British and French governments concluded the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement on May 16, 1916. This undertaking allowed a postwar creation of Arab states on the Arabian Peninsula and divided the rest of the Ottoman domains in the Fertile Crescent between the two powers. The outbreak of war had effectively prevented any further development of the Zionist settlements in Palestine, and the main efforts of this cause shifted to England, where discussion with Zionists was, seen as having potential value to the pursuit of British war aims. The protracted negotiations with the British foreign office were climaxed on November 2, 1917, by the letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour that became known as the Balfour Declaration. This document declared the British government's "sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations," viewed with favor "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People," and announced an intent to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. Also in November 1917, the Bolshevik government revealed the contents of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Arab consternation at the content was palliated by British and French reassurances, however, and by the fact that allied military operations were progressing favorably. Feisal’s Arabs took Al Aqaba in July 1917, and Jerusalem fell to Field Marshal Edmund Allenby on December 9, 1917. The British subsequently defeated Turkish forces remaining in Syria and Feisal entered Damascus in triumph on October 1, 1918. The armistice with Turkey was concluded on October 31, 1918. Feisal, met with Chaim Weizmann, representing WZO, on January 3,1919 and signed an agreement pledging the two parties to mutual cooperation under the Balfour Declaration concept. An American group known as the King-Crane Commission was appointed in 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson to investigate and report on the problem of disposition of Ottoman territories and the assigning of mandates. From the Paris Peace Conference and the sub-conference of San Remo emerged the League of Nations Covenant and the mandate allocations making Great Britain the mandatory power for Palestine East & West of the Jordan River) and Mesopotamia = Iraq... and granting France the mandate for Syria and Lebanon. The mandate's terms reaffirmed the Balfour Declaration, called upon the mandatory power to "secure establishment of the Jewish national home," and recognized '.'an appropriate Jewish agency" for advice and cooperation to that end. The WZO was specifically recognized as that agency. Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine developed early and continued at an erratically rising tempo throughout the mandate period. Meanwhile, in Damascus Feisal had convened the General Syrian Congress in July 1919 and proclaimed Syria sovereign and independent. In March 1920 this congress reaffirmed the independence of both Syria and Mesopotamia/Iraq, and it declared Feisal king of Syria and Abdullah king of Iraq. In April, however, the San Remo conference carved out the mandates, and soon French troops began moving from Beirut into Syria. The French took Damascus on July 25, 1920 and deposed Feisal who fled to Europe and remained there until installed by the British as king of Mesopotamia/Iraq in 1921. At the time of Feisal's ouster, his brother Abdullah was in what is now Trans-Jordan Jordan today... endeavoring to organize a counter effort against the French. it then became clear to Abdullah and the British that Abdullah was acceptable as ruler to the Bedouin tribes east of the Jordan, including the locally powerful Bani Sakhr. Palestine had not been specifically defined. After the British and French had agreed, under the Sykes Picot guidelines, as to what constituted Lebanon, Syria, and Mesopotamia, what was left over, by elimination, was the Mandate of Palestine. This included, in effect, the territory of pre-June 1967 Jordan and Israel Armistice Line. In March 1921 Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, convened a high- level British policy council in Cairo. As a result of its deliberations, Great Britain surreptitiously divided the Palestine mandate along the Jordan River-Al Akaba line. The eastern portion, or Transjordan, was to have an Arab administration, under British guidance, with Abdullah as Emir. He was recognized as de facto ruler in April 1921. Revisions in the final draft of the mandate were made to give Great Britain much latitude in this area and were approved by the League of Nations Council in July 1922. A British memorandum in September 1922 excluded Transjordan from the zone of the Jewish national home as an Article #25 was conveniently sandwiched between the Articles of the Mandate for Palestine. Even the Bashan/Golan was part and parcel of this Mandate... so in conclusion the Liberation of that part of the Mandate should be considered righting a wrong comitted by the Brits/ Resolution 181 is dead and buried... your futile attempts at injecting life in this cadaver reminds me of the saying 'beating a dead horse'.
since the beginning of time????????? The Earth is billions of years old, bro. You think the land belonged to the Jews back during the age of the dinosaurs??????? lolol!!!!! The land belongs to all who live there, and that included 1.2 million Muslims until the Jews kicked them out in 1948. But they still have rights there.
The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate BOTH made it very clear that the Jews could settle in Palestine to make a national home, as long as the rights of Gentiles wasn't discriminated against.
Then WHY did the Arabs countries and palestinian bedouin attacked them with intension to kill all jews ?
That seems to have of gone up in smoke. Considering how alot of people couldn't access their property after 47-48 civil war.
You wrote that the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate BOTH made it very clear that the Jews could settle in Palestine to make a national home.. Now you are saying that Arabs countries and palestinian bedouin attacked them in 1948 with intension to kill all jews to prevent the unfair and racist Partition Plan from being implemented ??? Pure nonsense. All they wanted was to kill ALL jews in Israel. Arabs killed Jews before 1948 and after 1948 ,whenever they had the chance.
MGB please refer to Art. 6 of the Mandate for Palestine... Here it is in big letters for all to see and read. ARTICLE 6 The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other section of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.
Let's get this straight - the "Balfour declaration " was nothing more than a promissory note from a British Minist minister to a Jewish banker. The inhabitants of mandated PALESTINE - then with an Arab (both Christian+ Muslim ) majority was NOT CONSULTED, for whatever reason it was simply a British ministers hand written letter written on a scrap of hotel notepaper , " A paragraph scrawled on a piece of hotel stationery by a young British civil servant in July 1917 will be sold next month by Sotheby's for hundreds of thousands of dollars. But its value goes far beyond money, as Donald Macintyre explains 26 May 2005 The term "living history" is a cliché that slips as easily from the lips of museum curators as it does from the makers of documentary films. But it may actually help to explain why a single paragraph of roughly abbreviated handwriting scrawled on a piece of a Bloomsbury hotel's stationery by a young British civil servant in the summer of 1917 should attract such attention (*) and such a price-tag. It is easily the most valuable item in a batch of papers estimated by Sotheby's to be worth between $500,000 (£273,000) and $800,000 when it goes on sale at its New York auction house next month. But then it's hard to think of a single document that changed the course of world history as decisively as did the Balfour Declaration. Whatever their perspective, Jews and Arabs would agree on the fundamental importance of the document issued by the government of what was then the world's leading superpower. The Balfour Declaration is in the words of Norman Rose, the British-born Hebrew University professor who is a leading historian of the period, "generally acknowledged to be the first decisive step towards the creation of a Jewish independent state". For Zionists, therefore, a triumphant moment. Equally, anyone who announces himself as a Briton in the West Bank or Gaza won't talk for long with a group of older Palestinians without someone getting round (*) always emphatically, and usually good humouredly (*) to blaming the United Kingdom and Arthur James Balfour in particular for being the root of his people's troubles. Given that its very name still reverberates round the Middle East with much of the same potency that it did nearly 90 years ago, it isn't, perhaps that surprising that a mere (*) and fairly early (*) draft of the letter Balfour, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, eventually sent to Lord Rothschild backing "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" should be sold for such an amount. The lot of private papers on sale next month is from the collection of Leon Simon, an important though relatively little-known figure among the British Zionists of the early 20th century. Much more than Chaim Weizmann, the leading figure among those who persuaded the British government to issue the declaration over a year of negotiation, Simon was a highly assimilated Jew, a fully paid up member, in effect, of the British establishment. Born in Southampton, he went to Manchester Grammar School (*) in the city to which Weizmann's family had migrated from what became Belorussia (*) and read Greats at Oxford, joined the Civil Service and rose up the ranks of the General Post Office, becoming its director before retiring in 1944. But Simon also wrote a biography of his mentor and friend, Ahad Ha'am, a leading but relatively unpolitical "spiritual Zionist" who exercised significant influence over a younger generation of soon-to-be leading British Jews, who included not only Simon but also men from Manchester such as Simon Marks and Israel Sieff, crucial to the subsequent growth of Marks and Spencer. But we also know from a footnote in Leonard Stein's standard history of the Balfour Declaration that Simon was present at the historic drafting meeting of Zionists convened by Naum Sokolow, Weizmann's right-hand man. It may not be too fanciful to imagine that Simon, who no doubt combined his feel for language (*) he translated works by both John Stuart Mill and Plato (from classical Greek) into Hebrew (*) with a British bureaucrat's ability to write a minute, was a signal asset to the drafting process. These were heady times for the young British Zionists ; the negotiations with Prime Minister Lloyd George's war government were in full swing and Weizmann was in sight of his dream. It had been Theodor Herzl who had first promoted the idea of Jewish nationhood and pointed to what the historian Martin Gilbert calls the "precarious nature of Jewish acceptance in otherwise civilised societies". These fears had been brutally intensified within recent memory by the pogroms in Russia in the late 19th century. But Herzl, as Norman Rose pointed out at his home in Jerusalem yesterday, never achieved what Weizmann was on the brink of doing when Simon scrawled his note: a declaration by a leading Western government in favour of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Among British Jewry the efforts to secure a homeland in Palestine were bitterly controversial. Indeed, one of the most prominent opponents was the Jewish cabinet minister Edwin Montagu, like Simon a highly assimilated Jew, but unlike him, one who believed that the idea of the Jewish homeland was a direct threat to the security and acceptance of Jews in Britain and other European countries. At a cabinet meeting in October 1917, Montagu, staging his last stand against the Declaration, asked caustically how he could negotiate as a minister in India if his own colleagues had decided his home was somewhere in "Turkish territory", as Palestine then was. Montagu saw a threat to his own position; but his stance also had a basis in the motives of some of those who were, to use a term coined by Professor Rose, the "gentile Zionists" of the time. On the one hand were those who had an instinctive sympathy with and fellow feeling for Jews (*) notably including Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and one of the first in a long line of those on the British left to identify with the Zionist cause, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C P Scott, who introduced Weizmann to Lloyd George. Professor Rose says one explanation for Lloyd George's sympathy with Zionism "was that he also came from a small oppressed minority". But he adds that steeped in a Welsh non-conformist education in which the Old Testament was an integral part, "Lloyd George was once asked where he envisaged the borders of a Jewish Palestine and he said immediately: 'from Dan to Beersheeba'." But there were others whose attitudes were much more complex (*) including Balfour, who early in the century had introduced the Aliens Act, specifically to restrict the immigration of Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe and in a speech widely denounced as anti-Semitic had described the Jews as a "people apart". There were British Conservatives, too, who believed that the Jews were part of the "Bolshevik revolution" (*) in "some cases" as Professor Rose wryly says, "rightly" given that a majority of the members of the first Soviet politburo were Jews. The co-incidence of the drafting of the Balfour Declaration with the Russian Revolution must have encouraged among such people the idea that Jews would be better out of the way. And there were those who simply believed that getting the Jews to Palestine would ease racial tensions. According to Professor Rose, Harold Nicolson, the diarist and Tory MP who was an enthusiastic "gentile Zionist", said he saw the Jewish homeland "as a way of confining the Jews to a super-Butlins holiday camp, as a way of dealing with a minority problem". At the same time many of these groups had an almost mythical belief in the power of Jews to control financial and many other institutions.[/B As such they were seen as ideal, explains Professor Rose, to acts as a pro-British bulwark on behalf of Britain, not least to help protect the Suez Canal and act as a counterweight in the Middle East against French influence. This wasn't what happened. But the combination of these disparate forces, under Lloyd George as a genuine pro-Zionist, combined to ensure the Declaration was passed. Simon's scrawl is also testimony to the fraughtness of the detailed negotiations. It was the Zionists, who having secured the general promise of the text, who were producing all the drafts at this stage; but it was not all plain sailing. The 17 July text was itself a condensation and a watering down of one produced by the Zionist drafters four days earlier, which called for internal autonomy to the Jewish nationality in Palestine, freedom of immigration of Jews, and the establishment of a "Jewish National Colonising Corporation for the resettlement and economic development of the country". Lord Rothschild, the figurehead of pro-Zionist Anglo Jewry, and by now closely in touch with Balfour and other leading government figures, decided this went too far. As Sokolow explained to his young colleagues, the first draft had been thought to contain "matters of detail which it would be undesirable to raise at the present moment". But after 17 July, the text went through many twists and turns as the ministers in Lloyd George's cabinet took an increasing interest. With Edwin Montagu and Lord Curzon (*) partly on the grounds of the impact on the Arab world (*) as well as on the huge Muslim population in British India (*) leading the charge against the declaration, it was (somewhat) further diluted. Stein records that by the time the War Cabinet met on 4 October to consider formally the Declaration, it realised that at least some lip service would have to be paid to Arab opinion. Lord Milner instructed the then Cabinet Secretary, Leo Amery, to come up with a draft that would "go a reasonable distance to meeting the objections both Jewish and pro-Arab without impairing the substance of the ... Declaration". The Milner-Amery text, as it became known internally was essentially the final version. The new text committed the British government only to "facilitating" and not, as in the Simon text, to "securing" that goal. And it insisted, in words most Palestinians would argue have yet to be fulfilled, on "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country". The Declaration did not, therefore, promise a Jewish state. Indeed it was in some ways, as Professor Rose says, "a very ambiguous document". Source - The Independent - cheers.
So after 339 comments, can WE ALL AGREE that Jordan is the only and best solution to become Palestine ? I sure do !! I mean even the pro Islamists realize that this is the ONLY solution to end conflict. 85% mijority of Palestinians in Jordan will achieve their rights.
Yes unfortunately it does this in the 'West Bank of the River Seine'... Judea and Samaria are Free and clear of this.
Perhaps we call all also agree that there are currently nearly equal numbers of Jews and non-Jews living between the River and the sea, yet a majority of non-Jews are denied the right to vote in Israeli elections for those writing the laws they live under? Jewish state or Democratic state?
If the last hundred years of Zionism has proven anything, it's the Palestinians have much more to fear from their colonizers than vice-versa since only one side has actually wiped the other's territory off the map--and it wasn't the Palestinian side.
What did the palestinian national movement prove to the world BUT hatred and violence ? palestinians do not fear nobody.. it is the Israelis who have much more to fear from their Fifth column arabs inside their borders.
What the Zionist movement has clearly demonstrated over the last 100 years is a genius for creeping annexation, "dunam by dunam",always arousing as little notice as possible. There were over 1000 Arab villages, thriving towns surrounded by abundant citrus and olive groves with irrigation systems when European Jews begin their colonization effort in Palestine. Which side has wiped the other off the map?
Just bunk... Arabs have representatives in the Knesset, I think (4) if I am not mistaken and they vote in their multitude. Now... Whose Right of Possession? ~by HBendor One of the myths related to the Arab Israeli conflict is that Israel and the whole of Mandatory Palestine before it, was stolen from the Arabs as a result of Imperialist Machinations and settled by Alien Jews. Jews are not Aliens to that land, "Jesus the Jewish Prophet according to Islam was born there whilst Judea and Israel (two Jewish kingdoms) where under the yoke of the Roman Empire. The fact is that until the defeat of the Ottoman Turkish Empire [after 400 years Rule] during World War I, there was no geopolitical entity called Palestine, no ARAB NATION lived on this soil, and no National Claim was ever made to the land by any group other than the JEWS! Between the expulsion of the Jews from their LAND by Rome in 70 to 132 CE and the defeat of the Ottoman Turkish Empire by the British and their allies in 1917, Palestine was occupied by FOURTEEN conquerors over thirteen centuries. The following table shows the approximate historical periods of the various rulers of the LAND. 1. Israel Rule (Biblical period) 1447BCE - 587 BCE = 860 Years 2. Babylonian Conquest 587BCE - 540 BCE = 47 3. Israel Autonomy (under Persian and Greco-Syrian suzerainty) 540BCE - 163 BCE = 377 4. Revolt of the Maccabim 163BCE - 143 BCE = 20 5. Rule of the Jewish Hashmoneans & Successors 143BCE - 37 BCE = 106 6. Jewish Autonomy (under Roman and Byzantine suzerainty) 37BCE - 637 CE = 674 Total 2084 Years Less Babylonian Subjugation. - 47 Years Grand Total 2037 Years [Medina Caliphate from Arabia (Foreign) 637 CE - 661 CE = 24 Years] [Omayyad Caliphate from Damascus (Foreign) 661 CE - 750 CE = 89 ] [Abbasid Caliphate from Baghdad (Foreign) 750 CE - 1072 CE = 322 ] 7. Rule of Caliphates, (Successors of Mohammed) 637 CE - 1072 CE = 435 Years in Total 8. Seljuks Rule (Ghuzz Turkoman (Foreign) 1072 CE - 1099 CE = 27 Years [Malik - Shah (1072 -1092)] [Barkiyarok (1094 -1099)] 9. Crusaders (Frankish Rulers appointed by the Pope) 1099 CE - 1291 CE = 192 10.Mameluk Rule (White Slaves, Turks and Circassians) 1291 CE - 1517 CE = 226 11.Ottoman Turk 1517 CE - 1917 CE = 400 12.British Mandate 1918 CE - 1948 CE = 30 Thus during the whole period of recorded history Palestine was never ruled by the Arabs of Palestine. The rules of the various Arab Caliphates, which was a FOREIGN MOSLEM RULE extended for a period 435 years, (see above) the Ottoman Turk Rule extended for a period of 400 years. Jews were masters of their own fate and realm for more than 2000 years. The inhabitants of the region consisted of the conquering soldiers and their slaves, and only during the Arab Conquest of the area in the seventh Century were these diverse ethnic inhabitants compelled to accept Islam and the Arab tongue or be put to the sword. The Jews in fact are the sole survivors of the ancient inhabitants of Palestine who have maintained an uninterrupted link with the land since the dawn of recorded history. Palestine Arab Nationalism to whatever degree it is a conscious ideal today, is a product of recent political currents. Until the 1920s no such National Community had even existed in Palestine. This is why both the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate charged the Jews of the National Home with guaranteeing the civil and religious rights of other inhabitants No mention was made of other National Rights of other inhabitants ! No mention was made of other National rights >> BECAUSE it was recognized that the only National Claim to the area was that made by the Jews.<< But the fiction of Palestine Arab nationality is still being exploited. If the Palestinians were in fact a separate nationality, then their anger over the past 50 years should have been directed as much against Jordan, since this Artificial State is sitting on 77% of Mandatory Palestine.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp This is where the Mandate for Palestine got its legitimacy. Let us examine the legal foundation for mandates as contained in the LoN Covenant: So Mandates were created for the well-being of the people inhabiting the territory. Right? That was the legal basis. Who, at the end of World War 1 was inhabiting Palestine (sensu latu). The part of the Mandate called Trans-Jordan was inhabited by a Bedouin majority. Jordan was created to comply with the Covenant, and correctly so. The remainder, what became Palestine (sensu stricto), was presumably ALSO created for the well-being of the inhabitants. Who were these? 1) The 1887 Ottoman census of the 'sanjaks' which were to become Palestine revealed the following (http://www.mideastweb.org/palpop.htm): 489,000 Muslims, 42,000 Jews, 64,000 (mainly Arab) Christians 2) The 1922 census of Palestine revealed the following 589,177 Muslims, 83,790 Jews, 71,464 Christians, 7,617 "others" Whereas the exact numbers show disconcerting ranges between the various demographic analysts, there is no doubt as to who the majority was at the time 550 000 Arab Palestinians versus between 15 000 and 42 000 Jews. So when we translate the Covenant using these data, there is zero doubt that the Mandate (whether including Trans-Jordan or not) should have been a sacred trust for the Arab Palestinians. And that is why the Mandate for Palestine contains the critical proviso it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine I conclude that from WW1 onwards the Arab Palestinians were shafted and land which belonged to them and which was supposed to be held in sacred trust, was given away piece by piece by Britain mainly to a European people called the Ashkenazim. Can any other logical conclusion be drawn? So we can summarily reject much of what has been postulated in this thread.
Sir Ronald Storrs would likely agree: "In 1917 Storrs became, as he said, 'the first military governor of Jerusalem since Pontius Pilate',[2] for which purpose he was given the army rank of colonel. In 1921 he became Civil Governor of Jerusalem and Judea. In both positions he attempted to support Zionism while protecting the rights of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, and thus earned the hostility of both sides.[3] He devoted much of his time to cultural matters, including town planning, and to Pro-Jerusalem, a cultural organization that he founded..." Whether he had the slightest interest in "protecting the rights of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine" or not, Storrs was a loyal subject of Empire and student of imperial history: "Sir Ronald Storrs, the first Governor of Jerusalem, certainly had no illusions about what a 'Jewish homeland' in Palestine meant for the British Empire: 'It will form for England,' he said, 'a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.'” "Storrs’ analogy was no accident. "Ireland was where the English invented the tactic of divide and conquer, and where the devastating effectiveness of using foreign settlers to drive a wedge between the colonial rulers and the colonized made it a template for worldwide imperial rule." http://fpif.org/divide_and_conquer_as_imperial_rules/
Thanks for the embellishment of the above, you have deliberately omitted/deleted terms to make it appear pro Arab. There is no one in this Forum who pretend he is someone else but you and sceptic . Frankly I am practically sure you are both Arabs masquerading as other nationals. Let me put someone else to answer your defective posts. What is a Palestinian? ~By Joseph Farah WorldNetDaily.com Ever since I wrote a column last October called "Myths of the Middle East," readers from around the world have asked me what is meant by the term "Palestinian." The simple answer is that it means whatever Yasser Arafat wanted it then to mean. Arafat himself was born in Egypt. He later moved to Jerusalem. Indeed, most of the Arabs living within the borders of Israel today have come from some other Arab country at some time in their life. For instance, just since the beginning of the Oslo Accords, more than 400,000 Arabs have entered the West Bank or Gaza. They have come from Jordan, Egypt and, indirectly, from every other Arab country you can name. The Arabs have built 261 settlements in the West Bank since 1967. We don't hear much about those settlements. We hear instead about the number of Jewish settlements that have been created. We hear how destabilizing they are -- how provocative they are. Yet, by comparison, only 144 Jewish settlements have been built since 1967 -- including those surrounding Jerusalem, in the West Bank and in Gaza. The number of Arab settlers is based on statistics collected on the Allenby Bridge and other collection points between Israel and Jordan. It is based on the number of Arab day workers entering but not leaving Israel. The numbers were published by the Israel Central Bureau for Statistics during the administration of Binyamin Netanyahu and subsequently denied as "recording errors" by the Ehud Barak administration. Of course, the Barak administration had incentives for denying the high illegal immigration numbers, given its heavy political reliance on Arab voters. Is this a new phenomenon? Absolutely not. This has always been the case. Arabs have been flocking to Israel ever since it was created and even before, coinciding with the wave of Jewish immigration into Palestine prior to 1948. Winston Churchill said in 1939: "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population." And that raises a question I never hear anyone ask: If Israel's policies make life so intolerable for Arabs, why do they continue to flock to the Jewish state? This is an important question as we see the Palestinian debate now shift to the issue of "the right of return." According to the most liberal claims by Arab sources, some 600,000 to 700,000 Arabs left Israel in and around 1948 when the Jewish state was created. Most were not forced out by Jews, but rather left at the urging of Arab leaders who had declared war on Israel. Yet, there are far more Arabs living in these territories now than ever before. And many of those who left in 1948 and thereafter actually had roots in other Arab nations. This is why it is so difficult to define the term "Palestinian." It always has been. What does it mean? Who is a "Palestinian"? Is it someone who came to work in Palestine because of a bustling economy and job opportunities? Is it someone who lived in the region for two years? Five years? Ten years? Is it someone who once visited the area? Is it any Arab who wants to live in the area? Arabs outnumber Jews in the Middle East by a factor of about 100 to one. But how many of those hundreds of millions of Arabs are actually Palestinians? Not very many. The Arab population of Palestine was historically extremely low -- prior to the Jews' renewed interest in the area beginning in the early 1900s. For instance, a travel guide to Palestine and Syria, published in 1906 by Karl Baedeker, illustrates the fact that, even when the Islamic Ottoman Empire ruled the region, the Muslim population in JERUSALEM was minimal. The book estimates the total population of the city at 60,000, of whom 7,000 were Muslims, 13,000 were Christians and 40,000 were Jews. "The number of Jews has greatly risen in the last few decades, in spite of the fact that they are forbidden to immigrate or to possess landed property," the book states. Even though the Jews were persecuted, still they came to JERUSALEM and represented the overwhelming majority of the population as early as 1906. Why was the Muslim population so low? After all, we're told that JERUSALEM is the third holiest city in Islam. Surely, if this were a widely held belief in 1906, more of the devout would have settled there. The truth is that the Jewish presence in Jerusalem and throughout the Holy Land persisted throughout its bloody history, as is documented in Joan Peters' milestone history on the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict in the region, "From Time Immemorial." It is also true that the Arab population increased following Jewish immigration into the region. The Arabs came because of economic activity. And, believe it or not, they came because there was more freedom and more opportunity in Israel than in their own homelands. What is a Palestinian? If any Arabs have legitimate claims on property in Israel, it must be those who were illegally deprived of their land and homes after 1948. Arafat had no such claim. And few if any of those shooting, bombing and terrorizing Israelis today do either. *Joseph Farah is editor and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily.com and writes a daily column.
