PALESTINE - AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

I) INTRODUCTION

[Dave Hunt, 'The Battle For Jerusalem, Chapter 6 of 'The Gathering Storm', Mal Couch Gen Ed, 21st Century Press, Springfield, MO, 2005, p. 129]:

"Events transpiring in the Middle East relative to Israel and making today's headlines are not chance occurrences but precise fulfillments of what God through His Hebrew prophets foretold for these 'last days.' Each day's news adds fresh proof that the biblical God is the one true God and that the Bible alone is His inspired Word to mankind. We see unfolding before us precisely what God said He would cause Israel and the nations around her to experience.

In one of the most awesome and frightening prophecies for the future, God declares, 'I will gather all the nations [and He means all] against Jerusalem to battle, and the city will be captured... Then the LORD will go forth and fight against those nations...' (Zech 14:1-3). When this will occur we do not know - but as events in the Middle East come to a climax, we may be certain that ultimately a world that is in defiance of God in so many ways, not the least of which is its attitude toward Israel, is headed for the fulfillment of this prophecy.

A) THE GOD OF THE BIBLE DECLARES THAT AS THE END OF TIME DREW NEAR ALL NATIONS WOULD BE UNITED AGAINST ISRAEL

[Hunt, cont.]:

"God declared that as the end drew near He would make Jerusalem 'a cup that causes reeling to all the peoples around,' and that they would all be united against Israel (Zech 12:2-3). And so it is. Ancient Israel had many independent enemies at various times, but ever since Israel's rebirth in 1948, for the first time in history, all the countries surrounding her are united to destroy her.

It is Islam - not in existence until 1,200 years after this prophecy and 2,000 years after the birth of Israel - that unites these nations (who otherwise would be fighting one another) in the common goal of annihilating Israel. In obedience to Islam, Muslims have pursued that passion fiercely for nearly 60 years.

The dispute is over ownership of Jerusalem and the 'promised land' God gave to Abraham and his heirs. The Israelites are Abraham's heirs by descent from him through Isaac and Jacob, whose name God changed to Israel. In opposition, Arabs who call themselves 'Palestinians' make the impossible claim of descent both from Abraham through Ishmael and also from the original 'Palestinian' inhabitants of that land. But Abraham was from Ur of the Chaldees and Hagar, Ishmael's mother (Sarah's maid), was an Egyptian. Certainly neither Ishmael's mother nor father was a descendant of the 'original inhabitants' of Canaan.

In fact, there never was a Palestinian people, nation, government, language, religion, culture, economy or history! This claim by Semitic Arabs of being descendants of a non-Semitic people who allegedly lived for thousands of years in a land called Palestine is a blatant hoax intended to delegitimize the Israelis and claim the land of Israel for themselves. Yet the world accepts this fraud, and all of the peace plans for the Middle East are founded upon it!

Both sides agree that God gave the land of Canaan (which became Israel) to Abraham and to his heirs forever [and it was never rescinded ever!]; and that Ishmael was Abraham's firstborn son, whereas Isaac was the second [but the firstborn of Sarah and of the promise]. The custom in Abraham's day, acknowledged in the Torah, gave the firstborn prior claim to the inheritance. The Torah also records the fact that Abraham was satisfied with Ishmael as his sole heir, considered him to be the son God had promised, and didn't even want God to give him another son (Gen 17:18).

From those facts, the Arab descendants of Ishmael sound like the legitimate heirs. However, there was no such land as 'Palestine' in Abraham's day and thus no such people as 'Palestinians' from whom any of today's Arabs could claim descent. In fact, Ishmael's descendants settled in the Arabian Peninsula hundreds of miles from the land God gave Abraham.

God brought Abraham into the 'land of Canaan...and the Canaanite [not the 'Palestinian'] was then in the land' (Gen 12:5-6). God gave that land by an everlasting covenant to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - not to Ishmael. In obedience to God, Abraham 'settled in the land of Canaan' (Gen 13:12). It was then inhabited by Canaanites, Kenites, Kenizites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaims, Amorites, Girgashites and Jebusites' (Gen 12:6; 13:7; 15:18-21; 23:10; etc.). If today's 'Palestinian' Arabs are descended from the original inhabitants of the land of Canaan, which ones of those listed above would it be? In fact, no descendants of the original inhabitants of Canaan have survived to this day.

B) WHAT DOES THE NAME PALESTINE MEAN?

The word 'Palestinian' is never found in Scripture. The term 'Palestine' is used four times in the King James Version (Exodus 15:14); Isaiah 14:29, 31; Joel 3:4) but never as synonymous with either the land of Canaan or the land of Israel. The Hebrew word is pelensheth and referred to a small region also known as Philistia (Psalms 60:8, 87:4, 108:9), the land of the Pelishtee, or Philistines. It was in the area of the Gaza Strip of today, so named after the Philistine city of Gaza. Their other cities were Ashdod, Gath (home of Goliath), Gerar and Ekron.

Those who currently claim to be Palestinians are Arabs who moved in from surrounding countries to feed off the prosperity of the returning Jews, who had turned desert and malaria-infested swamps (at the cost of many lives) into prosperous farms. Even today the 'Palestinians' mostly look to Israel for employment.

Nor can any descendants of Ishmael claim that land. God rejected Abraham's desire for Ishmael to be the son of promise. Rather, he was the product of Sarah's and Abraham's unbelief and conniving. God insisted upon giving a son called Isaac to Abraham by his wife, Sarah - and He did so, naming him as the sole heir, a fact that the Bible makes very clear (Gen 17:19, 21). Thereafter, God referred to Isaac as Abraham's 'only son' (Gen 22:2).

Biblically, there is no question that God selected Isaac to be the heir to the Promised Land. That fact is stated not only in Genesis 17 but repeated throughout both Old and New Testaments. Twelve times the God of the Bible is called 'the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob [Israel]'; more than 200 times He calls Himself, or is called, 'the God of Israel.' Never is He called 'the God of Ishmael,' much less is He ever called the God of the Arabs or of anyone else. Hear the Word of the Lord: 'Remember His covenant forever, the word which He commanded to a thousand generations... which he made with Abraham, and His oath to Isaac... also confirmed it to Jacob for a statute, to Israel as an everlasting covenant... to you I will give the land of Canaan [for] your inheritance..' (1 Chron. 16:15-18).

Furthermore, God clearly tells Abraham (Gen 15:13-16) that his heirs to whom the land will be given will be afflicted by another nation for 400 years and only then will they be brought into the Promised Land. It is indisputable history that this slavery happened to the Jews in Egypt, not to the Arabs. There were two reasons for Israel's lengthy enslavement:

(1) At the time of God's promise to Abraham, the wickedness of the Canaanites was not yet so great as to justify destroying them - but in 400 years it would be.

(2) Isolated in Egypt, the Israelites, as despised slaves, did not intermarry with the Egyptians but became an established ethnic group to be led en masse into the Promised Land - and we know who they are today.

In contrast, the descendants of Ishmael were a nomadic people prone to intermarry with those with whom they traded. The Bible records at least three groups with whom Ishmael's descendants intermarried: the Midianites, to the extent that sometimes the Midianites are called Ishmaelites and sometimes the Ishmaelites are called Midianites (Judg. 8:1, 22, 12, 24); and Esau's Edomite descendants (Gen 28:9), who had already intermarried with the Hittities (26:34-35). Far from being taken by God into Canaan, they settled in the Arabian Peninsula, where they became known as Arabs.

C) THE QUR'AN STIPULATES THAT JERUSALEM BELONGS TO THE ISRAELITES

Although 'Jerusalem' is found 811 times in the Bible, it is never mentioned once in the Qur'an, nor are the words 'Palestine' or 'Canaan.' Moreover, the Qur'an agrees with the Bible that the land was given to Israel and possessed by these 'chosen people' after their deliverance from Pharaoh at the Red Sea:

'We made a covenant of old with the Children of Israel (Surah 5:70); We brought the Children of Israel across the [Red] sea, and Pharaoh with his hosts pursued them...and we verily did allot unto the Children of Israel a fixed abode (10:91, 94); we favored them above all peoples (45:16); [Pharaoh] wished to scare them from the land, but we drowned him and those with him [in the Red Sea] all together. And we said unto the Children of Israel... dwell in the land [and] hereafter we shall bring you... out of various nations' (17:103-104); we delivered the Children of Israel... from Pharaoh... We chose them, purposely, above all creatures (44:30-32); Remember Allah's favor to you... He... gave you what he gave no other of his creatures. O my people, go into the Holy Land which Allah hath ordained for you (95:20-21); etc.

Yet in spite of these clear declarations in the Qur'an, Muslims insist that this land belongs not to the Jews as descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but to the Arabs as descendants of Abraham and Ishmael. Therefore, Israel's very existence and, above all, its 'occupation' of Jerusalem, are intolerable insults to Islam. Only by driving the Jews from what the world erroneously calls 'Palestine' can Arab/Muslim honor be restored.

D) HOW DID THE WORD PALESTINIAN ORIGINATE?

In A.D. 130, the Romans, who had destroyed Jerusalem 60 years before, rebuilt it as a pagan city with a temple to Jupiter on temple mount. An uprising of the Jews in protest was finally quelled in A.D. 135 at the cost of about 500,000 Jewish lives, with thousands sold into slavery and many thousands driven into exile. To spite the Jews, the Roman conquerors angrily renamed Israel, 'Provincia Syria-Palaestina' after the Philistines. From the time, those living there were known as 'Palestinians.' Who lived there? Jews! It is they who became known as 'Palestinians.' Yet Bibles by major publishers have maps with such labels as 'Palestine Under the Maccabees,' or 'Palestine in the Time of Christ.' Such maps promote a grave error.

In World War II, the British Army had a volunteer brigade called 'The Palestinian Brigade.' It was made up of Jews; the Arabs were fighting on Hitler's side. There was the Palestinian Post, a Jewish newspaper, and the Palestinian Symphony Orchestra, a Jewish orchestra. In fact, Arabs refused to be called 'Palestinians.' For example, to the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Arab historian Philip Hitti declared, 'There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not...'

E) WHO IS TO BLAME?

In 1956, Ahmed Shukairy testified to the UN Security Council, 'It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.' Eight years later, in 1964, Shukairy, an Egyptian, became the first leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization later headed by Arafat. He is also not a 'Palestinian' but was born in Cairo on August 4, 1929. What was the PLO going to 'liberate' in 1964? East Jerusalem and the West Bank were held by Jordan, while Egypt held the Gaza Strip. In fact, the PLO was not formed to liberate 'Palestinians' but to destroy Israel - and without any of the fundamental causes it now claims.

Always the problems between Israel and 'Palestinians' are blamed upon Israel. That despised country alone is castigated - basically for defending itself - while those who make no secret of their determination to destroy her are justified in their terrorism and unprovoked aggression. This is true at the UN, in world media, and even at various religious 'peace' conferences.

The 'Fifth International Conference of the Sabeel Ecumenical Palestinian Liberation Theology Center,' held at Jerusalem, April 14-18, 2004, was typical. It drew more than 600 participants from over 30 countries. Speakers such as Archimandrite Attallah Hanna of the Greek Orthodox Church (outspoken supporter of suicide bombers) trashed the Scriptures, rejecting all of God's promises to Israel. Roman Catholic theologian Michael Prior described the Book of Exodus as 'a con job' and Joshua as 'the patron saint of ethnic cleansers.' The Dean of Te Rau Kahikatea Anglican Theological College in New Zealand, Convener of the Global Anglican Peace and Justice Network, described Christian Zionism (the belief that the land of Israel, as promised by God, belongs to the Jews) as 'a manifest evil [an] insidious presence.'

Israel is presented at such conferences, as it is at the United Nations and in world media, as the aggressor, a land grabber illegally occupying 'Palestinian' land taken from its rightful owners by brute force. As we have seen, those who call themselves 'Palestinians' (a name taken from the Philistines, Israel's ancient enemy, a heritage claimed by Arafat), claim to be descended from the original inhabitants of 'Palestine.' This bold scam, honored as truth, is foundational to world opinion about the Middle East. The Philistines were not a Semitic people. They invaded Canaan across the Mediterranean from Crete and Asia Minor and displaced certain Canaanites, just as they were eventually displaced by Israel under God's judgment. The 'Palestinians' of today are Arab Semites and have no ethnic, linguistic or historical relationship to the Philistines.

The truth is suppressed that UN Declaration 181, November 29, 1947, gave Israel only about 18 percent of the land that the League of Nations in its 1922 Declaration of Principles set aside for a Jewish homeland. Unhappy with being given only 82 percent of what didn't belong to them, and demanding it all, six Arab nations attacked the new state of Israel with their regular armies. The invading Arab military high command warned all Arabs and Muslims to get out while they quickly slaughtered the Israeli settlers - then the Arabs who had fled could return to their possessions and take over everything.

To the world's astonishment, the united Arab armies were soundly defeated by poorly armed Jewish settlers, and most of those who heeded the warning and fled were never able to return. War is like that - and it was a war the Arabs started. Arabs who did not flee, but honored Israeli pleas to remain, have, with their descendants, full rights as citizens and comprise about 16 percent of Israeli voters. Some are even members of the Knesset. In contrast, no Jew can set foot in Saudi Arabia or be a citizen even in those Muslim countries that will admit them. Had the Arabs not attacked Israel, they could have been living in peace since 1948 in their 'Palestinian' state.

In that 1948-49 war, Jordan took and held East Jerusalem and the so-called West Bank, while Egypt got the Gaza Strip. During the 19 years that they held these territories and used them as launching pads for terrorism, there was never a word from the Arab/Muslim world about a 'Palestinian' state. Instead, they put the refugees in camps and have kept them in squalid conditions, refusing to absorb them into normal society. In contrast, tiny Israel integrated about twice as many Jewish refugees (nearly 800,000) who fled at the same time from Muslim countries where, for 1,300 years since the inception of Islam, they had been brutalized and murdered by the thousands in periodic pogroms. With the establishment of a national Jewish homeland, they could flee at last. But in all the sympathy poured out for refugees, it is always the 'Palestinians,' with no mention of the Jewish refugees, who had to abandon everything and escape with only their lives.

Zechariah's prophecy and its precise fulfillment are all the more remarkable when one considers that the Arab/Muslim nations surrounding Israel have 650 times the land mass (rich in minerals and oil, of which Israel has almost none), 50 times the population, armed forces far outnumbering Israel in men and equipment and the backing of huge oil revenues. Yet in spite of these impossible odds, that miniscule nation has been exactly what God said it would be: '...a torch of fire in a sheaf [to] devour all the people round about...' (12:6). Israel has won every war, against impossible odds.

Zechariah also said that God would make Jerusalem a burdensome stone around the necks of 'all the people of the earth.' And once again, so it is. Jerusalem is the number-one problem confronting the world. It is no secret that mankind faces the prospect of a nuclear holocaust if this dispute over Jerusalem is not solved peacefully. The united enemies surrounding Israel are feverishly arming themselves to effect at last Hitler's 'final solution to the Jewish problem.' Israel can deliver from submarines missiles with multiple nuclear warheads and will not allow its citizens to be massacred without using its ultimate weapons. As one more fulfillment of this amazing prophecy, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are the best in the world. Were that not the case, tiny Israel could easily be pushed around and would be a burden to no one, much less to the entire world.

How heavy is this 'burdensome stone?' The United Nations has consumed one-third of its time deliberating over Jerusalem and Israel, a small, despised nation with one-thousandth of the earth's population. From 1967 through 1989, out of 865 resolutions in the Security Council and General Assembly, 526 were against Israel. The last anti-Arab vote was 57 years ago in 1947. More than 60,000 individual votes have been cast in the UN condemning Israel.

Yet not once has the UN reprimanded those who have without provocation waged four wars against Israel with the declared intention of annihilating her. Nor have the terrorists ever been condemned by the UN. In November 2003, Israel introduced its first request for a resolution since 1976, asking for a prohibition against Arab terrorists who deliberately target Israeli women and children. Its request was rejected and, instead, the UN adopted a resolution demanding protection of Palestinian children from Israeli aggression. The UN's adamant opposition to Israel and everything it does is in defiance of the God of Israel and His pledge to restore His people to their promised land.

On March 25, 2004, the United States blocked a proposed UN Security Council condemnation of Israel's targeted killing of Hamas founder and leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, because the Council refused to include a condemnation of Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. The next month, an Israeli missile also killed Yassin's successor, Abdul-Aziz Rantisi. Again, there was a worldwide denunciation of the execution of a mass murderer terrorist leader, but no condemnation for the hundreds of suicide bombers Hamas has trained, equipped and sent into Israel deliberately to kill civilians.

The frequent condemnations of Israel for defending herself, and the refusal to condemn the murderers and their backers who attack her, is a further fulfillment of numerous prophecies foretelling worldwide anti-Semitism. It did not end with Hitler's holocaust. Satan has been attempting to wipe out all Jews since the beginning. If he could have done so before Christ came, he would have won his battle with God by preventing the prophesied Messiah from being born. Even after Christ defeated Satan on the cross, if the Jews could be exterminated today (as Islam requires Muslims to do), there could be no Second Coming of Christ to rule over Israel on the throne of His father David in Jerusalem, God would be proved a liar because of His many promises to preserve Israel, and Satan would have won this world as his own.

Satanic hatred of Jews did not end with Hitler but is growing in intensity, not only in the Muslim world but also in Europe and in America and elsewhere today. However, nowhere is anti-Semitism more clearly and vehemently manifest than in Islam. Every child in the Palestinian Authority's schools reads the textbook, Our Country Palestine. Its title page declares, 'There is no alternative to destroying Israel!'

Muhammad said, 'The last day will not come until the Muslims confront the Jews, and the Muslims destroy them. In that day Allah will give a voice to the rocks and the trees and they will cry out, 'Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!' No clearer declaration of Satan's passion could be made. Here we see the true face of Islam, the religion of 'peace'!

Immediately after signing the Oslo Accords in 1993, Arafat began to tell Muslim audiences around the world not to accuse him of betraying their sacred cause by making real peace with Israel, but to realize that he was following the example of their prophet, Muhammad. Otherwise, he would have suffered the same fate as Egyptian president Anwar Sadat who visited Jerusalem, signed a peace treaty with Israel, and for that betrayal of Islam was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

In A.D. 628, Muhammad had signed, with the Quraish of Mecca, a 10-year ceasefire known as the Treaty of Hudaybiyah. Such a hudna is a pretense entered into when Islamic forces are not strong enough to engage the enemy - and exists only to gain a strategic advantage for destroying the enemy. This is the law of war and peace in Islam, which no Muslim leader can abrogate.

Muhammad declared, 'Allah has commanded me to fight against all people until all acknowledge there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger. ' The entire world is divided into Dar al-Islam (the house of peace) and Dar al-Harb (the house of war) and there is a perpetual Jihad until all mankind are in submission to Islam and Allah. No Muslim leader has the authority to bring an end to the Jihad (holy war) between Islam and the rest of the world. Thus, when Arafat and other Arab leaders speak of 'peace,' they actually mean a hudna.

President Jimmy Carter persuaded Israel to 'give back' the Sinai (though it never belonged to Egypt) and brought Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin together at the White House to sign a peace treaty between their two countries. Carter, an ecumenist for whom the Book of Mormon or Qur'an is a valid as the Bible, wanted to quote one verse each from the Bible and Qur'an. There are more than 400 such references in the Bible, but Carter's speechwriters searched long and hard in order to find in the Qur'an (which has more than 100 verses about fighting and killing to take over the world for Allah) one verse about 'peace.' They finally found it: Surah 8:61.

Each of the 114 Surahs (chapters) has a heading. The title of Surah 8 is 'Spoils of War.' The chapter is about fighting, slaughter, and plunder in the cause of Islam: 'Fight them until... all religion is for Allah... O Prophet! Exhort the believers to fight... It is not for any prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land' (8:39, 65, 67), etc. With great enthusiasm , Carter quoted the lone 'peace' verse in the Qur'an, 'But if the enemy incline towards peace [i.e., surrenders], do thou also incline towards peace' (8:61).

Each of the 114 Surahs (chapters) has a heading. The title of Surah 8 is 'Spoils of War.' The chapter is about fighting, slaughter, and plunder in the cause if Oslam: 'Fight them until ... all religion is for Allah ... O Prophet! Exhort the believers to fight ... It is not for any prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land' (8:39, 65, 67), etc. With great enthusiasm, Carter quoted the lone 'peace' verse in the Qur'an, 'But if the enemy incline towards peace [i.e., surrenders], do thou also incline towards peace' (8:61). He should have known that the Muslim has an entirely different idea of 'peace' from the rest of the world. As Arafat has bluntly said, 'Peace for us is the destruction of Israel.'

What naivete could cause Carter to imagine 'peace' between Islam and Israel? He surely knew of the literally hundreds of pronouncements of destruction upon Israel both in the Qur'an itself and by Muslim leaders. Over BBC radio, May 15, 1948, the day after Israel declared its independence, Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, had declared, 'This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres...' May 20, 1967, Hafez Assad (at the time Syrian Defense Minister) declared, 'The Syrian Army with its finger on the trigger is united.... The time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.' A week later, President Nasser of Egypt thundered, 'Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel... We will not accept any coexistence with Israel.' On May 30, he announced, 'The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel... while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation... the critical hour has arrived.' Iraq's president thundered, 'The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified... Our goal is clear - to wipe Israel off the map!'

Israel has had to defend itself in four wars (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973) and, after winning each one at great cost in lives, has given back most of the land it has taken in self-defense from an enemy that has sworn never to give up until it has obliterated Israel. Egyptian Foreign Minister Muhammad Sala al-Din declared, 'The Arab people will not be embarrassed to declare: We shall not be satisfied except by the final obliteration of Israel.' Nasser said, 'We demand vengeance, and vengeance is Israel's death.' Such pronouncements have continued unabated in spite of Israel's sincere attempts and those of Western leaders to bring 'peace' to the Middle East.

Yet the United Nations, European Union, and the Western leaders persist in pressuring Israel to make 'peace' with an enemy that has sworn to destroy her. A few days after Yasser Arafat's June 8, 2001 'cease-fire' declaration, Sheikh Ibrahim Mahdi declared on Palestinian TV, 'Allah willing, this unjust state [of] Israel will be erased... the United States will be erased ... Britain will be erased... Blessings to whoever waged jihad for the sake of Allah. Blessings to whoever put a belt of explosive on his body or his son's and plunged into the midst of the Jews!'

In spite of such public declarations, which could be cited by the hundreds, the UN (a veritable center for anti-Semitism and anti-Israel propaganda and action) continues to rebuke Israel for defending itself and opposing 'peace.' Of its members, 21 are Arab nations and 52 Islamic. Israel is not allowed to be a member of UN Commissions, such as The Commission on Human Rights (which always includes terrorist and oppressive governments that deny basic rights to their citizens), etc. Of the UN's 189 members, 188 (including every terrorist member) may take their rotation terms on the Security Council. One nation, Israel, is not allowed to do so, in spite of the fact that it has been a UN member for over 50 years and is the only democracy in the Middle East.

Jerusalem would not be a problem if Israel itself and the nations of the world would acknowledge that the one true God is 'the God of Israel' and would submit to His plans for His chosen people. Instead, world political and religious leaders continue to defy God, determined to force their agenda upon Israel. That policy can only lead ultimately to Armageddon and God's judgment upon this world - and it will.

The latest proposal to end the dispute over Jerusalem and the Promised Land is called the 'Road Map to Peace.' It was first proposed by U.S. President Bush in his June 24, 2002 speech and endorsed by Russian President Putin, the United Nations and European Union. The so-called road to peace, so long in process, and paved with one Arab betrayal after another, would be a joke had it not cost so many lives. Hope is always renewed by another dream, only to be shattered as must be the case when dealing with Islam.

Arafat has never kept one provision of any agreement. Anything he signs is not worth the ink in his signature. In the 10 years before the Oslo Accords, about 200 Israelis were murdered by terrorists; in the 10 years since, more than 1,200 have been killed and some 5,000 wounded. The road map calls for an end to terrorism, and the establishment of an independent 'Palestinian' state with recognition of Israel's right to exist, something to which no Muslim can agree without denouncing Islam. The real stickler is Jerusalem, for which the road map offers no solution. No matter what the plan, the world is defying the God of Israel and will be judged accordingly.

F) FINALLY....

God said, 'The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is mine' (Leviticus 25:23). But in exchange for 'peace' with an enemy that has sworn its extermination, Israel is continually forced by Western powers to give away ever more of God's land, which He promised to her alone. Israel's actions have not been perfect - and in unbelief she has been willing to give up God's land in exchange for men's promises.

As a people worldwide, the Jews have forsaken God and have been under His judgment. Nevertheless, Scripture says of Israel, 'he who touches you, touches the apple of His [God's] eye' (Zech 2:8).

It is astonishing that anyone would dare to defy the Creator of the Universe, but this is what those who interfere with His plans for Israel have done. Even Christians are rejecting the hundreds of promises God has made to Israel and are trying to apply them to the church. We dare not tamper with God's Word!

God warns the world: 'I will gather all the nations... to the valley of Jehoshaphat, then I will enter into judgment with them there on behalf of My people and My inheritance, Israel... [for] they have ... divided up My land' (Joel 3:2). The whole basis of the road map (and every other 'peace' plan proposed) is to take from Israel the land God gave her. Bush, Putin, the UN and EU ought to tremble! And Christians ought to pray."

II) ISRAEL DISPERSED

[Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return, The Struggle for a Jewish Homeland, J. B. Lippincott Co, Phila & NY, 1978, pp. 3-12]:

"The Jews were living in Cannan three thousand years ago. They were first parted from their land in 722 BC with the Assyrian conquest of the northern Jewish kingdom of Samaria, and the deportation of thousands of Israelites eastwards to Mesopotamia....

Less than 150 years later the Babylonians conquered the southern Jewish kingdom of Judaea, together with its capital, Jerusalem. The Temple of Solomon, the holiest site of Judaism, was destroyed, and the Jews were once more taken eastwards, as slaves and captives. to the river Euphrates....

From that moment, Jewish existence was threatened in every decade, both for those who continued to live in the Land of Israel, and for those in exile who sought a secure haven in the ever-increasing circles of dispersion.....

From the towns and villages of these first dispersions, the Jews traveled throughout the known world. From the Land of Israel, too, they ventured in search of a livelihood to all the ports and market towns of the civilized world, first to those of Egypt and of the Persian Empire, then to Alexander's Macedonian domains, then to the scattered City States of ancient Greece, and to the maritime emporia of ancient Carthage....

In Jerusalem itself, the Temple had been rebuilt by a growing Jewish community....

In 40 AD the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, noted: 'Countless multitudes from countless cities come to the Temple at every festival, some by land, and others by sea, from east and west and north and south.' Twenty-six years later the Jewish historian Josephus recorded that, when the Roman Governor of Syria entered the town of Lydda, he had found it deserted, 'for the whole multitude were gone up to Jerusalem for the feast of the Tabernacles'....

Following the eclipse of Egypt, Greece and Carthage, the Syrian armies conquered the Land of Israel, but in 168 BC were driven out by a Jewish revolt led by Judah Maccabee, and for a hundred years the Jews were again independent. But in 63 BC their land was conquered again, this time by Roman troops, and the Jewish homeland was once again ruled by strangers...

Despite the military power of Rome, Jewish independence was not easily destroyed. In 66 AD the Jews of Judaea rose in revolt, holding out in several towns and fortresses for more than four years. But, the power of Rome was formidable, and in 70 AD the Temple was destroyed. Three years later, in 73 AD the defenders of the fortress of Masada, the last stronghold to hold out, chose suicide rather than surrender....

The Roman vengeance was indeed terrible. Tens of thousands of Jews were killed, many villages razed to the ground, and thousands of Jews sold into slavery, some even pitted against wild animals in the arena, as 'sport' for their captors. The destruction of the Temple was to remain a traumatic memory for succeeding generations of Jews, who looked back on it with fear and trepidation.

In 115 AD it was the Jews of the Diaspora who rose in revolt... the Jews of Judaea also took part in it... within two years it had been crushed.... in 132 AD the Jews of Judaea, Samaria and the Galilee rose in revolt once more.... the suppression of [this] revolt was completed by 135 AD.... The Romans even changed the name of Judaea, hoping to eliminate all Jewish memories and links: henceforth it was known as Syria Palaestina: thus 'Palestine' came into being.

By 150 AD, despite the ferocity of Roman persecution, the Jews were living scattered, but with their faith intact, in a vast region stretching from the Straits of Gibralter to the borders of India; from the Black Sea to the Red Sea; from the river Loire to the river Indus. Those who were allowed by the Romans to remain in the Land of Israel, although refused entry to Jerusalem, set up communities both in the coastal plain and in the Galilee; at Jabneh, on the coastal plain south of Jaffa, scholars and rabbis gathered after the fall of Jerusalem, and for nearly a century Jabneh remained a centre of rabbinical scholarship.

Numbering at least three millions, the Jews of the Roman Empire constituted more than 5 per cent of the Empire's population, and followed a wide variety of occupations...

In Palestine itself, the archaeological evidence from biblical times shows much rebuilding of synagogues, at Bet Alfa in the Jezreel valley, at Hammat-Gader in the shadow of the Golan heights, at Jericho in the Jordan valley, and on the Mediterranean at both Ashkelon and Gaza.

With the sudden and whirlwind conquest by Islam in the seventh and eight centuries, those Jews who lived in a wide arc of lands from Spain to India found once more a new master. In places the Jews welcomed Muslim rule. Having been cruelly persecuted by the Christians, both the Jews of Caesarea, in Palestine, and the Jews of Toledo in Spain, opened the gates of their cities to the Muslim invader.

With the Arab conquest of Palestine between 636 and 641 AD, the Jews of Palestine recovered from the hardships imposed by Byzantine rule, and were active as weavers, growers of cereal, and fishermen. Not only were there active Jewish communities in the Galilee, at Jerusalem, in the Jordan valley on both sides of the river, and in the Gulf of Elath on the Red Sea; but many Jews returned to Palestine from other lands under Muslim rule....

Within the Muslim world, at certain times, the Jews found positions of authority, and the chance of prosperity....

Yet even under Islam, the scale of tolerance could quickly turn, and with grim results. To the Muslim, the Jew was always a 'dhimmi', or second-class citizen, and anti-Jewish violence could have terrible results, particularly when one of the more fanatical Muslim sects was in the ascendant....

Even under more tolerant Muslim rule, the Jews in every town and village of the Muslim world, including Palestine, had to take second place under the Muslims. Yet in many such towns their ancestors had been living there for many centuries before Islam's conquests...

The religious bigotry of the eleventh century expressed itself in violence and slaughter. Within the course of a few years it left thousands of Jews dead, and drove thousands more eastwards...

Uprooted by Crusader persecutions, the Jews of Ashkenaz [Jews of Germany] traveled from town to town, first eastwards, some westwards again, some to the Baltic, some to the Danube.... The map of Europe was criss-crossed by the expulsion of Jews from country after country: from the Crimea in the eleventh century, from Silesia in the twelfth, from England in the thirteenth, from France and Hungary in the fourteenth, from Austria, Bavaris, Saxony and Lithuania in the fifteenth....

Throughout the Middle Ages the homeless wandering Jew was a feature of Christian Europe....

The Crusader conquests in the eastern Mediterranean posed a grave threat to the Jews of that whole area. Reaching Beirut, the Crusaders showed what would be the fate of the Jews of Palestine when all thirty-five Jewish families living in the city were massacred.... thousands of Jews were murdered in the Galilee, on the coastal plain, in Samaria, and Judaea... Many of those who were not murdered were either sold into slavery in Europe, or ransomed to the Jewish community in Egypt...

From 1099 to 1187 the Crusaders were sovereign in Jerusalem. They drove the Jews from the Jewish quarter of the city, and brought in Christian Arab tribes from east of the river Jordan to settle in the Jewish homes and alleyways which they had so brutally cleared out....

After [that] a further tragedy, the Tartar invasion from central Asia, in which thousands of Jews and Christians had been murdered , and Jerusalem devastated once more....

III) MEDIEVAL PERSECUTIONS, FLIGHT AND HOPE

[Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return, The Struggle for a Jewish Homeland, J. B. Lippincott Co, Phila & NY, 1978, pp. 13-25]:

During the thirteenth century the Jews were ferociously persecuted in Morocco and Tunisia.... In the fourteenth century they were likewise persecuted throughout Christian Europe, where they were blamed, totally without cause, for the spread of the Black Death [Bubonic plague].....

Following the Black Death riots, even more Jews fled eastwards [Poland, Lithuania, Eastern Europe], joining those who had fled across the Oder at the time of the Crusader massacres three hundred years before...

To the west, another tragedy was looming. For the Jews of Spain and Portugal, the mild rule of Islam had been replaced by the harsh rule of Christian kings... In 1355 more than 12,000 Jews were massacred by the mob in Toledo... As the anti-Jewish violence spread throughout Spain, 50,000 Jews were massacred on the island of Majorca alone, and 1391 was remembered as 'the year of persecutions and oppression'.... an ominous hint of what was to come: the complete expulsion of the Jews from Portugal and Spain... More than 160,000 Jews were forced to leave Spain and Portugal altogether.... the largest single group, 90,000 in all, went to the thriving cities and towns of the Ottoman Empire: to Algiers, to Alexandria, to Damascus, to Smyrna, to Salonica, to Constantinople, and to the urban and rural centres of Palestine. Many of those who went to Palestine settled in the Galilee...

The Jews of Spain who reached Palestine found there a small but vigorous Jewish community, which had maintained itself, despite many difficulties, since the defeat of the Crusaders and the Muslim reconquest.... It was under the tolerant rule of the Mamluk sultans of Egypt that the return of the Jews had gathered momentum...

The fifteenth century had seen no diminution of the Jewish presence in Palestine. Jews continued to return... But Muslim rule had become harsh and intolerant...

For Christian Europe, the sixteenth century was one of religious ferment, with the 'theses' of Martin Luther setting the course for the Protestant reformation. In 1543 Luther published a pamphlet entitled Of the Jews and Their Lies. Its tone gives a clear flavour of the antisemitic literature that circulated in Christian religious circles at that time. [Luther's pamphlet goes on to tell others to burn synagogues, destroy the homes of Jews, force them to do manual/ menial labor etc., etc.]

Less than twenty years after Luther's anti-Jewish diatribe, a Turkish Sultan, Suleiman I, made it possible for a large number of Jews to return to the Holy Land, under the benevolent Muslim rule of the Ottomans. In 1561 Suleiman gave Tiberias, one of the four Jewish holy cities, to a former 'secret' Jew from Portugal, Don Joseph Nasi, who rebuilt the city and the villages around it. Jews from Italy, and from elsewhere in the Mediterranean area, came to settle there... When, a hundred years later, the city fell into ruins, many Jews remained in the nearby villages of the Galilee, farming, fishing and trading. Elsewhere in the Holy Land in the sixteenth century, the tolerance of Turkish rule enabled several Jewish communities to maintain their cultural and spiritual unity: in Jerusalem, in Hebron, and in Gaza, Jewish life was also upheld with vigour.

Ottoman rule gave the Jews a chance of a relatively unmolested existence throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries....

Throughout the seventeenth century also, one Christian power enabled the Jews to flourish, trade and live at peace with their neighbours; this was Holland.... But, as happened so often in the history of the Jewish dispersal, no golden age in one part of the world seemed possible without a black age elsewhere. In 1648, while the Jews of Holland were at their most successful and most peaceful, the Jews of Poland, Lithuania, White Russia and the Ukraine - those who had found safety there more than three hundred years before from the Christian persecutions of Germany and Central Europe - were assailed by a violence and a hatred without parallel since Roman times.... [Many] found safety by distant flight, to Holland, to the Balkans, and even back to the Germany from which their forebears had fled only a few centuries before...

Hassidism was a religious movement that appealed to the Jewish masses. It embodied a belief in the need to rejoice in religion, and to do so with song and dance, with zeal and study....

Love of the Land of Israel played a major part in the Hassidic philosophy, so much so that in 1777 a group of several hundred Hassids, old and young, set off from Russia for Palestine, then under Turkish rule.... The Hassids settled in the Galilee, joining the thriving Jewish community of those whose ancestors had come from Spain and Portugal more than 250 years before....

IV) SIXTY YEARS OF FERMENT 1815-1875

[Ibid., pp. 26-34 ]:

"It was therefore the Jews of Greece, protected for more than 350 years by the Ottoman Turks, should have shown loyalty to their Ottoman rulers during the Greek revolt of 1821. Their loyalty certainly cost them a great deal.... Jews were murdered [by Greeks] with savage zeal...

Even under Muslim rule, the Jewish condition worsened as the nineteenth century progressed. In the Persian town of Meshed, in March 1839, a fanatical Muslim mob, incited by a false rumour, burst in to the century-old Jewish quarter, burned the synagogue and destroyed the scrolls of the Law. A massacre seemed imminent, and was only averted by the revival of one of the curses of medieval society, the forcible conversion of the whole Jewish community to Islam.... In secret, they managed to preserve their Judaism.... Slowly, small groups of 'secret' Jews from Meshed migrated to central Asia, to India, to Britain, and to Palestine....

Throughout the 1860s the Jews of Libya were subjected to punitive taxation. In 1864, in the Moroccan cities of Marrakesh and Fez, as many as five hundred Jews were killed by the Muslim mob, and a further eighteen were killed in Tunis in 1869. These torments drove the Jews of Arab lands to seek havens elsewhere. Some chose Palestine, and the more benevolent rule of the Turkish Sultan...

A British Jew, Moses Montefiore... had come to devote his life to the cause of his persecuted fellow-Jews wherever they might be. On 11 June 1842, a grandson of the Duke of Marlborough, Colonel Charles Churchill, wrote to Montefiore that, in his view, the Jews ought to promote the regeneration of Palestine and the eastern Mediterranean region. Were they to do so, they would, Churchill believed, 'end by obtaining the sovereignty of at least Palestine.'

Charles Churchill felt strongly that the Jews should resume what he described to Montefiore as their 'existence as a people'. Four years after his letter, in 1845, a fellow Englishman, George Gawler, published a pamphlet urging the establishment of Jewish colonies in Palestine...

The efforts of Sir Moses Montefiore to encourage Jewish villages in Palestine were rewarded with success in 1856, when he received an edict from the Sultan allowing the Jews to buy land there....

In 1819... a virulent outbreak of mob violence, the 'Heb! Heb!' riots, had shown the depth of popular German anti-semitism. Throughout Germany, Jews were made the scapegoats for the economic distress that had followed in the wake of the Napoleonic wars....

The cry of 'Heb! Heb!' was heard again in Germany eleven years later, during the 1830 revolution, with the result that tens of thousands of German Jews decided to seek a new life from fear, in the distant United States...

As the Jews succeeded in more and more professions, German anti-semitism grew....

In May 1867... the Rumanians had turned [against Jews] with savage persecution....

After 1880... [there was] ill-treatment of Russian Jews...

V) THE RUSSIAN CAULDRON 1875-1891

[Ibid., pp. 35-43]:

"Emancipation brought to European Jewry, for the first time in more than a thousand years, the myriad opportunities of equal rights and full citizenship. It made the Jew feel less of an alien, encouraging his participation, and even his assimilation, into the societies of the west. Many Jewish families abandoned their Jewish identity entirely and, by intermarriage, brought their Jewish heritage to an end. No such temptation presented itself to the vast mass of Russian Jewry. For them, each decade of the nineteenth century brought further hardship, conjuring up the image of past troubles rather than the hope of any future easement.

With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, more than five million Jews had found themselves within the newly enlarged frontiers of Tsarist Russia, and their numbers grew rapidly. Yet year by year their legal and economic situation had worsened....

In 1845 Tsar Nicholas conceived the idea of dividing the Jews into two categories, the 'useful' and the 'non-useful'. In the 'useful' category were to be wealthy merchants, craftsmen and farmers, whose rights would be respected. The 'non-useful' would include the small tradesmen, the poor, the pedlars and the unemployed, on whom military service would be imposed....

In March 1881 Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by socialist revolutionaries, who called on the people of Russia to overthrow the Tsarist regime. The Government struggled to maintain law and order. Quickly, the Jews were singled out as a scapegoat..... by the end of 1881 more than two hundred Jewish communities had suffered..... In the wake of these persecutions, small groups of Russian Jews gathered together to discuss what was to be done. Some argued in favour of emigration to the United States of America.... Others argued in favour of Jewish settlement in Palestine. This latter possibility was also much discussed by the quarter of a million Jews of Rumania, whose persecution had continued.... It was finally decided [by the representatives of thirty-two local Rumanian groups] that as a first step, a hundred families should leave for Palestine in the following year. Thus was born the first positive action of what was to become a great movement of Jews from both Rumania and Russia [to Palestine]...

By the end of 1882 Lovers of Zion groups had sprung up all over southern Russia and Rumania, determined to join, or to support, further groups of would-be settlers in the Land of Israel....

In 1882 [Leon] Pinsker... wrote his book, Auto-Emancipation, in which he argued that anti-semitism was inevitable wherever the Jews were a minority; that they could only be a majority if they had a homeland of their own.... The impact of Pinsker's book was immediate.... The Russian-born writer and journalist, Nahum Sokolow, put forward specific proposals for industrial development in Palestine. A British Jew, Zerah Barnett... help found the Mea Sheareim quarter outside the walls of Jerusalem.. and the Jewish village of Petah Tikvah.... The Kattowitz Conference allocated money for two projects already existing in Palestine... Baron Edmond de Rothschild... had been drawn actively into the task of giving financial help to all the struggling settlements in Palestine...

By 1890, the number of Russian-born Jews who had settled in Palestine reached 50,000. In Jerusalem alone the Jews numbered more than 25,000, out of a total population in the city of only 40,000. The Arabs, a majority in the sparsely populated countryside, watched with alarm this influx of newcomers from Russia, and on 24 June 1891 the leading Muslims of Jerusalem telegraphed to the Turkish authorities in Constantinople 'praying they the entry of such Jews should be prohibited, as, not only was the labour marked over-stocked, but also the Muslims themselves would be greatly the sufferers, as, the European Jews being skilled in all different kinds of trades, the Muslims could not compete against them.'

As a result of this protest all Jewish immigration was forbidden by the Turks in July 1891, but, after a short while, the ban was not enforced."

VI) A GREAT AND BEAUTIFUL CAUSE

[Ibid., pp. 44-51]:

"Between 1881 and 1914 more than two million Russian Jews left Russia in search of a secure home, an unmolested daily life, and the chance of education and self-advancement. More than half a million of these refugees went to Britain, France and western Europe. Eighty thousand went to Palestine. But the vast mass, more than two million, crossed the Atlantic to the Argentine, to Canada, and to what they called in Yiddish, the goldene medina - the 'golden realm' - the United States...

In western Europe there was an equally remarkable flowering of the Jewish genius in the years before the First World War, when Jewish self-help, Jewish community organization, and Jewish participation in national, political, cultural and scientific life reached new dimensions of activity and success....

[In Russia on the other hand, there were official 'pograms' and secret groups of individuals dedicated to limiting Jewish success, even fostering anti-semitism, in spite of increasing emigration - these efforts broke out in violence and death for many Jews in 1905. Hence the conclusion of Zionists was constantly reinforced throughout the world: Jews needed a homeland they could call their own]

VII) JERUSALEM MUST BE THE ONLY ULTIMATE GOAL

1906-1914

[Ibid., pp. 66-76]

"During 1906 there were yet more pogroms in Russia, for the fifth consecutive year....

In the same 10 years, more than a million Jews reached the United States from Russia alone. Yet despite the continuing appeal of the United States, the materially more difficult choice, Palestine, still excited those for whom it was not simply a question of somewhere to go, but of a return to the historic home of the Jewish people... In Jerusalem the Jewish population had reached 40,000 by 1905, and constituted more than two-thirds of the city's total population....

In February 1908 the eighteen year old Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna from provincial Austria. For five years Hitler observed the Jews of the city with a growing hatred which he was later to describe in his book Mein Kampf. Hitler's hatred soon turned towards the 175,000 Jews of Vienna... While Hitler was nurturing his anti-semitic fantasies in Vienna, the Jews themselves were continuing to seek, in Palestine, a new life and new opportunities denied them in so many other lands..."

VIII) ZIONISM AND THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF WAR

1914-1916

[Ibid., pp. 79-91]:

"With the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914, the five million Jews of Tsarist Russia found themselves 'allied' to the more liberal governments of Britain and France... It was another Russian-born Jew, the electrical engineer Pinhas Rutenberg, who, early in September 1914, believing that Britain would be victorious; was convinced that, if a Jewish force could be raised to fight with the allied armies, there would be a better chance of the Jews being given a choice at the post-war Peace Conference, and might lead to the restoration of a Jewish State in Palestine....

The British conquest of Turkey [was] an opportunity for the partition of the Ottoman Empire.... in which [was] pressed for some form of British protectorate over Palestine, in the interest of future Jewish settlement....

IX) THE EVOLUTION OF THE BALFOUR DECLARATION

1917

[Ibid., pp. 92-108]:

"The anguish of the Jews when confronted by Christian or Muslim persecution; their own efforts to rebuild and revitalize Jewish life in Palestine; and their realization that a British victory over the Turks could lead to a British sponsored Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, produced, during 1917, the conditions needed to advance the Zionist cause. For Jews all over the world, the prospect of British troops entering Jerusalem brought with it the chance of the first Jewish self-government since before Roman times....

On March 21 the War Cabinet [of Britain] discussed the coming British military advance into Palestine. Both [Prime Minister] Lloyd George and [Lord] Balfour raised, sympathetically, the question of Zionist aims... It was now widely known that one result of a British victory [over the Turks in Palestine] would be the furthering of Zionist policies... While Jews and Zionists in both Russia and Britain were helping the Allied cause, in Palestine, itself, the Jewish population was increasingly the victim of Turkish persecution....

The Russian revolution of March 1917, with its call for liberty, 'far from weakening Jewish nationalism, did but deepen and intensify the national aspirations.'...

The official War Cabinet minutes recorded Balfour's words as follows:

'The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs stated that he gathered that everyone was now agreed that, from a purely diplomatic and political point of view, it was desirable that some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should now be made. The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as, indeed, all over the world, now appeared to be favourable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.

He gathered that the main arguments still put forward against Zionism were twofold:

(a) That Palestine was inadequate to form a home for either the Jewish or any other people.

(b) The difficulty felt with regard to the future position of Jews in Western countries.'

Balfour's exposition continued:

'With regard to the first, he understood that there were considerable differences of opinion among experts regarding the possibility of the settlement of any large population in Palestine, but he was informed that, if Palestine were scientifically developed, a very much larger population could be sustained than had existed during the period of Turkish misrule.

As to the meaning of the words' national home', to which the Zionists attach so much importance, he understood it to mean some form of British, American, or other protectorate, under which full facilities would be given to the Jews to work out their own salvation and to build up, by means of education, agriculture, and industry, a real centre of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution.'

The War Cabinet's acceptance of what was to become known as the 'Balfour Declaration', made it clear that two pressing and potentially conflicting interests were now in harmony: the long-term needs and aspirations of Zionism, and the immediate, harsh dictates of war.

X) HOPES AND PROMISES

[Ibid., pp. 109-118]:

"The Balfour Declaration achieved one of the main aims of the Zionists: the return of the Jews to Palestine had been recognized as a legitimate aspiration for world Jewry. But one imponderable condition remained: the Balfour Declaration, although approved by the United States, France and Italy, had been granted by Britain alone, and it would depend on Britain as to how it would be implemented. The Jews did not become masters of their own destiny in Palestine on 2 November 1917; that destiny still depended upon British rules and interpretations. It needed, also, further immigration, land purchase, investment, agricultural and industrial development, dedication, fair-dealing and the continual thrust of faith in the Jewish future, and idealism....

Britain's military conquest of Palestine was no longer in doubt. Following the conquest of Beersheba on the evening of October 31, the Turks sought in vain to hold Gaza, or to protect the approaches to Jerusalem. Gaza fell to the British on November 6, and the British troops, pressing forwards towards Jerusalem, liberated both Arab and villages in their daily advances....

Yet on November 6, the day of the fall of Gaza.... all Lord Harding's hopes for the 'skillful management' of the Jews of Russia were dashed by events in Russia itself: that evening the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, entered the capital, and within forty-eight hours the Provisional Government had been overthrown. By nightfall on November 8 the new Bolshevik regime had destroyed the Russian war-effort by declaring an immediate end to the war. At the same time, by handing over the estates to the peasants, they ensured that hundreds of thousands of peasants would at once leave the army units for their promised farms, thus effectively demobilizing what was left of the Russian fighting forces.

Lenin's anti-war declaration destroyed the immediate aim of the Balfour Declaration [in Russia]... In the confusion of war, news of the Balfour Declaration did not reach Petrograd until November 29....

British support for 'a national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine depended, in the first instance, upon driving the Turks out of Palestine. A further, major step forward towards this took place on December 9, when General Allenby's forces received the surrender of Jerusalem...

Scarcely two months after the Balfour Declaration was issued, the question began to be discussed in London as to how the existing Arab majority in Palestine could be reconciled to any special privileges that might be given to the Jews. While the Balfour Declaration envisaged at least the possibility of an eventual Jewish majority, it was clear that it would be many years before such a majority would exist.....

Arab unease arose largely due to a misunderstanding of Zionist aims and intentions.... [for example] ... the Arab belief that Zionism 'involved the expropriation of Arab proprietors and the handing over to future Jewish tutelage of Christian and Moslem sites'. Both these objections, [it was] pointed out, 'had been clearly and emphatically disavowed by the responsible leaders of Zionism.'...

At its meeting on January 19, the Middle East Committee decided to send out to Palestine a Zionist Commission, led by Weizmann, to help 'in establishing friendly relations between the Jews on the one hand, and the Arabs and other non-Jewish communities on the other'....

Not only did the Zionist Commission carry out its work in respect of future Jewish developments in Palestine; Weizmann also made a strenuous effort to reach agreement with Emir Feisal, a son of King Hussein, and commander of the Arab forces which were about to declare themselves at war with the Turks....

On October 30... the Turks surrendered to the Allies. Palestine was firmly under British military control, less than a year after the issue of the Balfour Declaration....

A)THE WEIZMANN-FEISAL AGREEMENT

Meeting in London in December 1918, Weizmann and Feisal continued to try to find some common ground between the Zionist and Arab positions... This 'Weizmann-Feisal Agreement', as it came to be known, was completed on 3 January 1919; Article Four declared that all 'necessary measures' should be taken 'to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale, and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil'. In taking such measures, the agreement went on, 'the Arab peasant and tenant farmers shall be protected in their rights, and shall be assisted in forwarding their economic development.'

Weizmann and Feisal agreed that the boundary between 'the Arab State and Palestine' would be determined by a commission agreed upon by them both; in Palestine, the Muslim Holy Places would be under Muslim control; no law would be made to interfere 'in any way with the free exercise of religion.' In addition, the Zionist Organization would use 'its best efforts' to assist the Arab State 'in providing the means for developing the natural resources and economic possibilities thereof'....

[It was reported by Weizmann that] 'The Zionist Organisation did not want an autonomous Jewish Government, but merely to establish in Palestine, under a Mandatory Power, and administration, not necessarily Jewish, which would render it possible to send into Palestine 70,000 to 80,000 Jews annually. The Organisation would require to have permission at the same time to build Jewish schools, where Hebrew would be taught, and to develop institutions of every kind. Thus it would build up gradually a nationality....

How did the Arab delegation at Paris react to these submissions? Three weeks earlier, on February 6, the head of the Arab delegation, the Emir Feisal himself, has already told the Supreme Council that because of Palestine's 'universal character', he accepted that it should be 'left on one side for the consideration of all countries interested'. On March 1 he expressed himself clearly and firmly in favour of the Zionist position, in a long letter to one of the American Zionist leaders, Felix Frankfurter. 'We Arabs,' Feisal wrote, 'especially the educated among us, look with deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.' Feisal's letter continued:

'Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

With the chiefs of your movement, specially with Dr Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.....

Neither Feisal's letter to Frankfurter, nor the earlier agreement between Weizmann and Feisal, could provide a guarantee of future Jewish-Arab amity: indeed, in a handwritten note which he added to the agreement itself, Feisal had stressed that he would only 'carry out what is written in this agreement' on condition that 'the Arabs obtain their independence' in Syria. By July 1920 the French had deposed Feisal from the throne of Syria; two years later, however, with British support, Feisal did become king of an Arab state, Iraq, which gained complete independence in 1932.

XI) A NATIONAL IDEA OF A COMMANDING CHARACTER

1919-1921

[Ibid., pp. 119-134]:

"For the thirty years beginning in 1918, the status of the Jews already in Palestine, and the future of those who wished to go there, was dependent upon British policy. Although a Jewish 'National Home' had come into existence in 1918, or was at least promised, the Jews themselves had to rely upon British goodwill, and British-controlled legislation, to secure or strengthen their legal and physical position there.

There was certainly no unanimity of pro-Zionist feeling among the British policy-makers during 1919 and 1920; sometimes the attitude was much more that of actual hostility....

On 2 July 1919 the Syrian General Congress, meeting in Damascus, challenged the Emir Feisal's acceptance of Zionism, and, in a strongly worded memorandum, demanded the union of Palestine with Syria, and an immediate end to all Jewish immigration...

The British Government, however, felt itself firmly committed to a pro-Zionist policy. On June 19 General Clayton had telegraphed to the Foreign Office from Cairo for approval of a Palestine ordinance to re-open land purchase 'under official control'. Balfour... replied... that land purchase could indeed be continued 'provided that, as far as possible, preferential treatment is given to Zionists interests'....

The anti-Zionist group [in Britain] spanned both political parties....

On August 1919 an American Commission of Enquiry, known as the King-Crane Commission... criticized Zionist ambitions, and recommended what it called 'serious modification of the extremist Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish State'...

During 1919, anti-semitism became more widespread, and was not confined to Russians or eastern Europeans.... On October 16... a public event took place in a Munich beer cellar... a speech by Adolf Hitler, then aged thirty... his denunciations of the Jews held his audience spellbound for half an hour....

Evidence of the Jewish role in Bolshevik Russia created, throughout 1919 and 1920, a hostile attitude towards the Jews...

By the end of 1919, more than 100,000 Jews had been murdered in the Ukraine and Poland....

Writing in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on 8 February 1920, another non-Jew, the British Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, encapsulated the main contemporary attitudes towards both Zionism and the Jews. 'Some people like Jews and some do not.' he wrote, 'but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all doubt the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.'...

Churchill then appealed to world Jewry to abandon Bolshevism, and to turn instead to Zionism...

Zionism, Churchill believed, offered to the Jews 'a national idea of a commanding character'. Palestine would provide 'the Jewish race all over the world with, as he put it, 'a home and a centre of national life'...

The Prime Minister remained a staunch supporter of the Jewish people...

The year 1920 was a fateful one for the Jews, for it saw not only Lloyd George's determination to accept the Palestine Mandate for Britain, but also in Germany, the evolution of Adolf Hitler's crude anti-semitic views from the obscurity of individual prejudice to the publicity of the popular mob....

In Palestine.... Haj Amin el-Husseini, a member of one of the leading Arab families... [had] been sentenced... to ten years imprisonment [for incitement to violence]... fled across Jordan... Only six months later, on 8 May 1921... was appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, and later... President of the newly created Supreme Moslem Council... This.. made him effective head of the Muslim community in Palestine.... Henceforth, he was to be a leading instigator of a sequence of protests, of riots, and after 1936, of murder - against Jews, against British soldiers and civilians, and against several hundred moderate Arabs who opposed his extreme activities...

In pursuance of his aim to see a Jewish National Home established in Palestine, Lloyd George entrusted Winston Churchill, who became Colonial Secretary in January 1920, to supervise the details of the emergence of the formal League of Nations Mandate.

A) FEISAL AGREES TO ABANDON ALL CLAIMS OF HIS FATHER TO PALESTINE

Almost the first letter which Churchill received in his new Cabinet post was one from T. E. Lawrence, who, on 17 January 1921, reported on his discussions with the Emir Feisal, who had, Lawrence wrote, 'agreed to abandon all claims of his father to Palestine'. In return, Feisal wanted both Mesopotamia and Transjordan to become Arab States. This was accomplished within two years, when Feisal himself became ruler of Mesopotamia, and his brother, Abdulah, ruler of Transjordan. Mesopotamia, as Iraq, became independent in 1932, Transjordan in 1946. As part of Britain's policy towards Transjordan, all the Jewish National Home provisions of the Palestine Mandate were specifically excluded from the whole of Transjordan."

B) WINSTON CHURCHILL MAKES HIS CASE FOR A JEWISH NATIONAL HOME IN PALESTINE

"Churchill visited Palestine in March 1921, where he was greeted by a petition from the Haifa Congress of Palestinian Arabs, dated 14 March 1921. It read:

'1. We refuse the Jewish Immigration to Palestine.

2. We energetically protest against the Balfour Declaration to the effect that our Country should be made the Jewish National Home.'

In his reply, Churchill stated the case for the Zionists in a powerful manner. 'It is manifestly right', he told the Palestinian Arab leaders on March 28,

...that the Jews, who are scattered all over the world, should have a national centre and a National Home where some of them may be reunited. And where else could that be but in the land of Palestine, with which for more for more than 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? We think it would be good for the world, good for the Jews, and good for the British Empire."

The Arab protest continued, and the violence that followed Churchill's visit was severe. Arab violence in Jaffa on May 1 led to the British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, ordering an immediate temporary suspension of Jewish immigration. Ten days later the Senior Naval Officer in the Eastern Mediterranean, Captain Seymour, sent to the Admiralty his report on the riots, in which he wrote: 'Further immigration of foreign Jews into Palestine has been prohibited as a temporary measure and this has given satisfaction to the Arabs'.

The suspension of immigration, made on the authority of Sir Herbert Samuel, did not entirely impress the Colonial Office, and a telegram was drafted for Churchill by one of his senior advisers, Major Young, which was dispatched to Samuel on 14 May 1921. 'The present agitation', the telegram read, 'is doubtless engineered in the hope of frightening us out of our Zionist policy... We must firmly maintain law and order and make concessions on their merits and not under duress.'

Although the total prohibition of Jewish immigration, which the Arabs continued to demand, was never acceptable to Churchill, the idea of some limit to Jewish immigration was discussed between Samuel and the Colonial Office, and it was decided to set up a limit based on what was described by Samuel as 'the economic absorptive capacity of Palestine'. This idea of some limit took rapid shape, and within two years it had become government policy, to the dismay of the Zionist leaders, who saw it as an erosion of what they believed was the principle of freedom of immigration implied in the 'National Home' phraseology of the Balfour Declaration.

For good or ill, the future of Zionism was not linked to British policy and British prejudice. But it was still up to the Zionists to take the initiative, if their numbers were to grow and their efforts to flourish. On June 4 Arthur Ruppin wrote in his diary: 'It is absolutely clear to me that Zionism will perish altogether if we do not soon make a start developing Palestine agriculturally.'...

XII) THE PALESTINE MANDATE SECURED

1921-1922

[Ibid., pp. 135-148]:

"On June 22 Churchill explained the British position on Zionism to the Dominion Prime Ministers, at a meeting of the Imperial Cabinet. Among those present were the New Zealand Prime Minister, William Massey, and the Canadian Prime Minister, Arthur Meighen. 'The Zionist ideal', Churchill told them, 'is a very great ideal, and I confess, for myself, it is one that claims my keen personal sympathy.' But the Balfour Declaration, he added, was more than an ideal. It was also an obligation, made in wartime, 'to enlist the aid of Jews all over the world', and Britain must be 'very careful and punctilious', he explained, 'to discharge our obligations....'

On July 5 Dr. Weizmann, who had just returned from the United States, told Colonel Meinertzhagen that he feared for the future of Zionism. 'He says the British Government is whittling down the Balfour Declaration,' Meinertzhagen recorded in his diary, 'that immigration has practically stopped, that the bulk of the British Officers in Palestine are not in sympathy with the movement and that the Zionists are not getting those concessions which are necessary for the establishment of the Home of the Jews in Palestine'...

Lloyd George and Balfour both agreed 'that by the [Balfour] Declaration they had always meant an eventual Jewish State'....

One of the principal Middle East advisers at the Colonial Office, Major Young ....himself favoured a policy which, he had written to Churchill on August 1, involved 'the gradual immigration of Jews into Palestine until that country becomes a predominantly Jewish state', and he went on to argue that the phrase 'National Home' as used in the Balfour Declaration implied no less than full statehood for the Jews of Palestine....

The Cabinet decided to retain the Mandate, for, as the official minutes recorded, 'stress was laid on the following consideration, the honour of the government was involved in the Declaration made by Mr. Balfour, and to go back on our pledge would seriously reduce the prestige of this country in the eyes of the Jews throughout the world'. Nevertheless, also contained in the Cabinet's conclusion was the warning that, 'It was not expected that the problem could be easily or quickly solved, especially in view of the growing power of the Arabs in the territories bordering on Palestine.'...

Churchill told the Arabs: 'You are not addressing your minds to the real facts of the case,' and he went to say that he had no power, or desire, to repudiate the Balfour Declaration. Nor did he believe that the Jews were in any way a threat to the Arabs:

'I have told you again and again that the Jews will not be allowed to come into the country except in so far as they build up the means for their livelihood according to the law. They cannot take any man's lands. They cannot dispossess any man of his rights or his property or interfere with him in any way.

If they like to buy people's land, and people like to sell it to them, and if they like to develop and cultivate regions now barren and make them fertile, then they have the right, and we are obliged to secure their right to come into the country and to settle.'

Later in the discussion, Churchill stated unequivocably that Britain could not grant representative government to Palestine, because, as he said, 'we are trustees, not only for the interests of the Arabs but also for the interests of the Jews. We have a double duty to discharge.' The Arabs could not have representative Government, he said, because that would given them the power to halt Jewish immigration. The British Government, he added, 'wants to see Jews developing and fertilising the country and increasing the population of Palestine'. It was 'a great pity', he continued, that there were so few people in Palestine, which had once been 'three or four times' more populous. He wanted to see more wealth in Palestine, 'instead of it being occupied by a few people who were not making any great use of it'. It was Britain's intention, Churchill declared, 'to bring more Jews in. We do not intend you to be allowed to stop more from coming in. You must look at the facts.'...

...During his final speech, he [Churchill] declared:

'The Jews are a very numerous people, and they are scattered all over the world. This is a country where they have great historic traditions, and you cannot brush that aside as though it were absolutely nothing. They were there many hundreds of years ago. They have always tried to be there. They have done a great deal for the country. They have started many thriving colonies, and many of them wish to go and live there. It is to them a sacred place. Many of them go there to be buried in the city which they regard as sacred - as you regard it as sacred.

Why cannot you live together in amity and develop the country peacefully? There is room for all as long as they are not brought in in great numbers before there are means of livelihood for them; before the electrical and other means of power are created which will make waste places fertile; before the hills have had terraces made upon them; before irrigation and proper agricultural development. Of course, if they were brought in before these things were done, you would have reason to complain....

The Jews have a far more difficult task than you. You only have to enjoy your own possession; but they have to try to create out of the wilderness, out of the barren places, a livelihood for the people they bring in. They have to bring them in under conditions which make for the general good of the population, and which supplant no one, and deprive no one of their rights and liberties....

A) THE RUTENBERG SCHEME

Before the Mandate was itself finalized, the British Government made a major contribution to the development of the Jewish National Home. This took the form of granting the Zionists a monopoly control over the development of the electrical resources of Palestine, according to a scheme which had been drawn up by the Russian-born Jewish engineer, Pinhas Rutenberg, to harness the waters of Palestine.

The Rutenberg scheme was accepted by the British Government as an integral part of its Mandate commitment to the Jews....

On May 24 John Shuckburgh sent Churchill the final draft of Sir Herbert Samuel's memorandum on the future of Palestine. In it, Samuel described as 'impracticable' Weizmann's much quoted remark of 1919 that Palestine would become 'as Jewish as England is English'. The British Government, Samuel insisted, 'have no such aim in view'. Nor did they wish to see 'the disappearance or the subordination of the Arab population, language or culture in Palestine'. Samuel also stressed that the Balfour Declaration did not contemplate 'that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine'.

Samuel's memorandum went on to state once again that further Jewish immigration could not be permitted to exceed 'whatever may be the economic capacity of the country at any given time to absorb new arrivals'.

B) THE PALESTINE WHITE PAPER

Samuel's statement was accepted by the Colonial Office as a guideline for future British policy, and was published as part of the Palestine White Paper of 30 June 1922. The Zionists themselves formally accepted the White Paper. But they were unhappy about fixing so specific an economic condition on future immigration, fearing that unsympathetic, and even anti-Zionist High Commissioners in the future, would abuse the concept of an economic absorptive capacity in order to halt future immigration.

C) CHURCHILL'S DEFENSE AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS OVERWHELMINGLY APPROVES OF THE PALESTINE MANDATE

Churchill spoke in defense of the Zionists on July 4, telling the House of Commons:

'...anyone who has visited Palestine recently must have seen how parts of the desert have been converted into gardens, and how material improvement has been effected in every respect by the Arab population dwelling around. On the sides of the hills there are enormous systems of terraces, and they are now the abode of an active cultivating population; whereas before, under centuries of Turkish and Arab rule, they had relapsed into a wilderness.

There is no doubt whatever that in that country there is room for still further energy and development if capital and other forces be allowed to play their part.

There is no doubt that there is room for a far larger number of people, and this far larger number of people will be able to lead far more decent and prosperous lives.

Apart from this agricultural work - this reclamation work - there are services which science, assisted by outside capital, can render, and of all the enterprises of importance which would have the effect of greatly enriching the land none was greater than the scientific storage and regulation of the waters of the Jordan for the provision of cheap power and light needed for the industry of Palestine, as well as water for the irrigation of newlands now desolate.'

The granting of the Rutenberg concession did not involve, Churchill said, 'injustice to a single individual'; it did not take away 'one scrap of what was there before', and it offered to all the inhabitants of Palestine 'the assurance of a greater prosperity and the means of a higher economic and social life'....

Critics of the Rutenberg concession had insisted that it was for the Arab majority to develop the economic wealth of Palestine. Churchill sought to rebut this argument:

'I am told that the Arabs would have done it themselves. Who is going to believe that? Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps towards the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell - a handful of philosophic people - in the wasted sun-scorched plains, letting the waters of the Jordan continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea....

The House divided at the end of Churchill's speech. His appeal was successful. Only thirty-five votes were cast against the Government's Palestine policy, and 292 in favour.

D) THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS APPROVES THE PALESTINE MANDATE

The success of the Rutenberg Debate effectively freed the Colonial Office from the pressure of the anti-Zionists, and left the way clear for presenting the final terms of the Mandate to the League of Nations....

On July 22 the League of Nations approved the Palestine Mandate. Henceforth, the anti-Zionists, however strongly they expressed their criticisms, could not uproot the Jewish National Home....

XIII) PERSECUTIONS, RIOTS AND REFUGEES

1923-1933

[Ibid., 149-159]:

"The granting of the Palestine Mandate to Britain provided a major stimulus to Zionist enterprise and development. But it neither lessened Arab opposition to Zionism, nor improved the lot of Jews elsewhere....

...Even Jewish settlement in Palestine was subject to increasing difficulties, both economic and political...

A) [Palestinian Arab Congress, 6 October 1924]:

'The daily slight frictions between Arab and Jew, whose ideas, principles, customs and modes of life take dramatically divergent lines cultivate and solidify hatred between both communities, and there must come a time when it will accumulate to such a degree as to defy all moral or political restraints.

It is a gross error to believe that Arab and Jew may come to an understanding if only each of them exchanges his coat of extremism for another of moderation. When the principles underlying two movements do clash, it is futile to expect their meeting halfway.'...

Both Leopold Amery - then Colonial Secretary - and Winston Churchill - then Chancellor of the Exchequer - supported the proposed Zionist loan ['for the sole purpose of promoting and expediting close settlement by Jews on the land']. But the Cabinet rejected it; and, in doing so, marked a step away from what had earlier been regarded as one of Britain's obligations under the National Home provisions of the Mandate...

Arab attacks on Jews spread throughout Palestine....

When the attacks ended at nightfall on August 29, 133 Jews had been killed. Eighty-seven Arabs had also died, mostly shot by British troops and police seeking to halt the violence....

Two weeks later, on September 29, the new [British] High Commissioner [of British troops in Palestine], Sir John Chancellor, telegraphed to the Colonial Office:

'...the latent deep-seated hatred of the Arabs for the Jews has now come to the surface in all parts of the country. Threats of renewed attacks upon the Jews are being freely made and are only being prevented by visible presence of considerable military force.'

That same day, September 29, the President of the Arab Executive in Palestine, Musa Kazim Pasha, warned a senior British official in Palestine that unless the Jewish National Home policy was changed, 'there would be an armed uprising'. Musa Kazim Pasha added that such an uprising would involve, not only the Arabs of Palestine but 'participation of Moslems from Syria, Transjordan and perhaps Iraq'.....

In March 1930, the Shaw Report [head of the Commission of Enquiry to examine the causes of Arab unrest] made it clear that British opinion was swinging slowly but definitely against the Zionists....

Based on [a second official report by Sir John Hope-Simpson, Oct 1930] the [British] Government issued a White Paper intimating that future Jewish immigration might have to be curtailed even more rigorously than in the past....

Following Weizmann's protests, Ramsay MacDonald agreed to abandon the immigration [limiting] clauses of the 1930 White Paper....

On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor, and anti-semitism took on an open, official, and hysterical tone....

Hitler predicted with what he called 'absolute certainty', his name would be honoured in all lands 'as the man who once and for all exterminated the Jewish pest from the world'....

The new German persecutions, combined with the continuing anti-Jewish feelings in Poland and Rumania, did lead, however, to a great influx of Jews into Palestine.... The Jewish population now stood at more than 230,000, nearly 20 per cent of the total....

XIV) FORMIDABLE IN ACTION... STRONG IN RESTRAINT

1933-1937

[Ibid., pp. 160-177]

Immediately following the Nazi victory in Germany, Arab protests against Jewish immigration to Palestine were renewed....

The Jews did not allow themselves to be intimidated or deterred, but began to augment the arms supplies which, since the riots of 1929, they had been building up for their own defense....

In the resulting violence.... the Arabs had decided to challenge both the British and the Jews.....

In 1934 a further 42,000 Jews entered Palestine, in 1935 more than 61,000..... Two years later the Palestine Royal Commission headed by Lord Peel commented:

'So far from reducing economic absorptive capacity, immigration increased it. The more immigrants came in, the more work they created for local industries to meet their needs, especially in building: and more work meant more room for immigrants under the '''labour schedule'''. Unless, therefore, the Government adopted a more restrictive policy, or unless there were come economic or financial set-back, there seemed no reason why the rate of immigration should not go on climbing up and up...

The Jews were caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, fearing a repetition of the Hebron, Safed and Motza massacres, they armed themselves, and, anxious to build a Jewish entity, and to increase the possibilities for Jewish immigration, they employed only Jews in the major Zionist enterprises. On the other hand, desirous of improving relations with the Arabs, in the autumn of 1935 they added 50 per cent to the land reserved for Arabs in the Hulch basin: land allocated to a Jewish group by the Administration. It was, above all, events in Germany which dominated Jewish thinking, making Palestine seem more than ever an essential focus of Jewish hopes....

The British government still maintained its attitude that Palestine was not a suitable place for any substantial additional number of Jewish refugees. But the Palestinian Arabs made it clear that they were bitterly opposed to the idea of Palestine being made a haven for any more European refugees whatsoever: they regarded even the existing number as too large, pointing out that since 1933 the Jewish population of Palestine had increased from 230,000 to 400,000, reaching by 1936 one third of the total population of Palestine. In protest against any further Jewish immigration, the Arabs began a general strike on 15 April 1936, and on May 7 the Arab leaders, meeting in Jerusalem, demanded an immediate end to all Jewish immigration, a ban on any further Jewish land purchase, and an Arab majority Government. Jewish farms were attacked all over Palestine: Jewish houses were burnt, shops looted, and whole orchards destroyed. Attacks on individual Jews led, within a month, to the deaths of twenty-one Jews, several of them women and children.....

The British responded to this Arab violence.... The Jewish Agency urged the Jews to exercise restraint, and while Jews continued to be killed throughout Palestine.... no Jewish reprisals took place. British troops, however, killed more than 140 Arabs, and thirty-three British soldiers were killed....

For the Jews, it was galling to see what little effect the British protection could have....

On November 18, at the [British Royal] Commission's [to investigate the cause of unrest in Palestine] first public session, Eric Mills... informed the Commissioners that on his estimate there were, in mid-1936, 940,000 Arab and 370,000 Jews living in Palestine, and that 134,000 of the Jews had arrived since Hitler had come to power in Germany three and a half years before....

On November 24, Lewis Andrews, the acting Director of the Department of Development for the Galilee District, told the Commissioners that although he and his officials had made every effort to collect evidence of the Arab charge that Arab farmers had been displaced by Jews, little evidence had been forthcoming.....

A) WEIZMANN GIVES THE COMMISION A SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF JEWISH PERSECUTION AND OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE

Wiezmann went on to explain to the Commissioners the appeal of Palestine. 'We are a stiff-necked people and a people of long memory,' he said. 'We never forget.' And he went on: Whether it is our misfortune or whether it is our good fortune, we have never forgotten Palestine, and this steadfastness, which has preserved the Jew through the ages and through a career which is almost one long chain of inhuman suffering, is primarily due to some physiological or pathological attachment to Palestine.

We have never forgotten it; we have never given it up. We have survived the Babylonian destruction. We have survived the Roman destruction. The Jews put up a fairly severe fight and the Roman invasion, which destroyed half of the civilised world, did not destroy small Judea; and whenever they once got a chance, the slightest chance, there they returned, there they created their literature, their colonies, towns and communities, and if the Commission would take the trouble to study the post-Roman period of the Jews, and the life of the Jews in Palestine, they would find that there was not a single century in the nineteen centuries which have passed since the destruction of Palestine as a Jewish political entity, not one single century in which the Jews did not attempt to come back..."

On November 30 the Commission examined Moshe Shertok, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency.....

Shertok replied: 'you might call the whole process of settlement of Palestine a snowball process. Naturally every wave of immigrants creates possibilities of salvation not only for themselves but for those coming after them....

There were cases 'where an Arab peasant takes on a Haurani [illegal Arab immigrant] as a farm hand, leaving him in charge of the farm, while he himself goes to a Jewish colony to be employed by a Jewish orange grower, in view of the difference between the wage he gets from the Jewish orange grower and the wage paid to the Haurani.'...

Arabs gained by Jewish enterprise. They had found in the Jews and expanding and profitable market for their produce, they had learnt from the Jews innumerable techniques of building and irrigation....

B) PARTITION OF PALESTINE IS PROPOSED

On December 26 Professor Coupland, one of the members of the Peel Commission, went to Rehovot to see Dr. Weizmann. Coupland had begun to see a means of reconciling Arab and Jewish aspirations. He believed that part of Palestine could be given to the Jews, and part to the Arabs; a partition not only of land, but of sovereignty....

Coupland's historical research had convinced him that two peoples, each with a separate sense of national identity, could not live together as equal partners in a single state. In this way, a Jewish 'mini-State' would come into being, and the Balfour Declaration be superseded and annulled....

C) CHURCHILL ONCE MORE DEFENDS PALESTINE AS A JEWISH NATIONAL HOME

On March 12 Winston Churchill was called before the Commissioners. In answer to a question from Lord Peel, he declared that the Jewish right to immigration ought not to be curtailed by the 'economic absorptive capacity of Palestine, and he spoke of 'the good faith of England to the Jews'. The British Government had certainly committed itself....

Rumbold took up the questioning [of Churchill]. Was there not, he asked,' harsh injustice' to the Arabs if Palestine attracted too many Jews from outside? Churchill replied that even when the Jewish Home 'will become all Palestine', and it eventually would, there was no injustice. 'Why', he asked, 'is there harsh injustice done if people come in and make a livelihood for more, and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves? Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everybody? There is no injustice. The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be desert for thousands of years'. ....

The Arabs he [Churchill] said, had come in after the Jews. It was the 'great hordes of Islam' who 'smashed' Palestine up. 'You have seen the terraces on the hills which used to be cultivated,' he told the Commissioners, 'which under Arab rule have remained a desert.'...

XV) JEWISH HOPES AND ARAB PRESSURES

1937

[Ibid., pp. 178-194]:

A) THE PEEL COMMISSION REPORT ON PARTITION IS PRESENTED

"Even before the Peel Commissioners had reached any final conclusion, the pressures from Arab Governments, and Muslim leaders outside Palestine became acute, as Weizmann, himself had feared....

Within the Foreign Office, opinion had hardened against the Jews...

During April, the Government prepared to announce the decision of the Peel Commission for the establishment of two separate States in Palestine, one Jewish, the other Arab, and with Jerusalem and a corridor to the coast excluded from both...

The Arabs outside Palestine quickly made their opposition felt towards any form of partition, or 'mini-State' for the Jews....

The Peel Commission Report... [was presented] on June 25...

The Jews... were likely 'to turn every political stone to undermine Report but unlikely to use force'...

The Peel Commission report was debated in the British Parliament on July 21....

On July 30... William Ormsby Gore explained the change in British policy to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, at Geneva.... Gore stressed the extent to which the Jewish fate in Palestine was now bound up - in Britain's view - with the attitude, not of the Arabs of Palestine alone, but of the whole Arab world, and indeed of the Muslim world as well...

The Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky pointed out that 'such a Jewish State would be destined to be eventually captured by the neighbouring Arab States, the conquest being probably accompanied by destruction and massacre'....

B) THE ARABS IN PALESTINE DID NOT REGARD THEMSELVES AS PALESTINIANS BUT AS PART OF SYRIA AS A WHOLE, AS PART OF THE ARAB WORLD

Ormsby Gore argued, the Arabs in Palestine 'had not hitherto regarded themselves as 'Palestinians', but as part of Syria as a whole, as part of the Arab world'. They could [Ormsby proposed as part of the Peel Commission plan of partition], therefore, be transferred out of many areas allocated to a Jewish sovereign state. 'They would', Ormsby Gore declared, 'be going only a comparatively few miles away to a people with the same languages, the same civilisation, the same religion...'

C) BRITAIN FACED THE ENTIRE WORLD OF ARAB AND MUSLIM NATIONS RE: HER PALESTINIAN POLICY

In September, in Damascus, four hundred Arabs, representing all the Arab States as well as Palestine itself, resolved that Palestine was 'an integral party of the Arabian homeland', and insisted that Britain had to choose 'between our friendship and the Jews'. By the end of the year violence had broken out again.....

British troops began an intensive military campaign against Arab terrorists....

The stage was clearly set for a radical change in British policy, and for the beginning of the end of the plan of partition. Neither the continuing flow of refugees from the persecutions in Germany, nor the reviving anti-semitism in Poland, affecting as it did more than three million Jews, could weigh against the threats and pressures of the Arab world. On Octover 27, in a Foreign Office memorandum entitled 'Palestine. Immediate Problem', Rendel gave the reasons for a new policy. Firstly, he wrote, 'bands of Arabs from neighbouring countries are waiting to take the first opportunity to cross into Palestine to assist in the guerilla warfare which is being proposed against the Mandatory Powers'; they were doing so because they regarded the partition policy 'as involving their ultimate extinction'; inevitably, the Arab rulers themselves would given the Palestinian Arabs 'an increasing degree of sympathy and support'. Nor was the strength of the Arabs confined to their influence within the Arab world, for, as Rendel wrote:

...we have many enemies in Europe, and there are clear signs that the Arabs are already turning to them for help against us....

Not only had a British District Commissioner, Lewis Andrews, been murdered at the end of September, but each week moderate Arabs were being killed by Arab extremists....

The whole history of the last 20 years in Palestine have made it abundantly clear that by no other means than terrorism could the Arabs hope to get what they consider a square deal....

Rendel was now ready to put forward his solution: the scrapping of partition, and the imposition on the Jews of Palestine of permanent minority status....

What possible chance had the hopes of Palestinian Jewry, or the needs of European Jewry, against such arguments, in which the possibility of the Jews being masters of their own destiny was pitted against Britain's strategic aims from the Suez Canal to the Straits of Bab el Mandeb; and against Britain's future relations with four separate existing Arab sovereign States, including two, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, whose oil was already referred to in the documents as a vital British need....

XVI) JEWISH HOPES AND BRITISH APPEASEMENT

1938

[Ibid., pp. 195-215]:

"From the beginning of 1938, British policy focused increasingly on the very solution which the Jews feared most: the fixing of permanent minority status on Palestinian Jewry, by means of a severe cut-back, and eventual ban, on Jewish immigration.....

The pressures which had come from the India Muslims in 1937 continued into 1938...

In Palestine, the Jews had been confronted since the beginning of 1938 with an increase in Arab violence, including the murder of Jewish farmers, and sniping at Jewish buses and trucks....

For the Jews of Europe, already the victims of hatreds beyond their control, March 1938 saw a further deterioration in their hopes of a normal life, for on March 15 Hitler entered Vienna, and direct Nazi rule was at once extended to Austria....

Leopold Amery... wrote to Malcolm MacDonald, the new Colonial Secretary, on 30 May 1938: 'There is no real comparison between the quite natural resentment of the Arabs at seeing the character of their country changed, though with material advantage to themselves, [emphasis mine] and the agony of the Jews of Central Europe, for whom there was no serious alternative city of refuge'....

The situation of the Jews was becoming desperate. In Germany and Austria their thousand year old communities were rapidly being destroyed. In Poland and Rumania anti-semitism had again become open, vociferous and violent. Throughout Europe, the possibility of Nazi rule, or pro-Nazi regimes, encouraged and stimulated anti-Jewish feeling. In the Soviet Union, any attempt to express a specifically Jewish culture was suppressed, and all Zionist activity stamped out: indeed, several hundred thousand of the more active Jewish citizens, including all the Jewish Bolshevik leaders who had roused British hostility in the 1920s, had been wiped out in the Stalinist purges, then at their height. In Palestine, Arab attacks on Jews continued with terrible effect... Above all, the continuing restrictions on Jewish immigration from Europe were a constant source of distress for all Palestinian Jewry....

MacDonald... warned of the danger of any policy that might 'arouse hostility amongst Moslems in India', at a time when Britain was trying to evolve a scheme of Federation in which Hindus and Muslims would both participate. Above all, MacDonald argued, the Arab rebellion in Palestine tied down 'considerable armed forces, thus immobilising them for action anywhere else.'...

On July 6... an international conference opened in France, at the town of Evian... The United States decision to maintain its strict quotas served as a guideline for other States.... Only the Dutch, the Danes, and the Republic of Santo Domingo agreed to let in refugees without restriction....

A resolution was passed which stated that 'the countries of asylum' - such as they were - 'are not willing to undertake any obligation towards financing involuntary emigration.'...

Since February 1938, with the resignation of Anthony Eden and his replacement by Lord Halifax as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the policy of appeasement [of the Arabs] had been actively pursued.... During the summer of 1938, the British Government moved steadily away from Partition....

In Palestine itself, the violence continued....

The Report [of the Government of Palestine, 1937] noted that since 1922 the Arab population... increased by 261,000, compared with a Jewish increase of 245,000... the Arab population, by both its own immigration and a higher birthrate, had grown by a larger absolute number than the Jewish population. The Report also referred to those Arabs who were dispossessed of their land as a result of Jewish land purchase, noting that for the whole of 1937 only six Arab families had claimed to have been dispossessed: and that each had then been settled on Government land as compensation.....

On August 12, in a secret note to his Cabinet colleagues, enclosing transcripts of his London and Jerusalem conversations, MacDonald noted:

'Great harm had already been done in Palestine by rumours that the wisdom of Partition had been questioned in the Cabinet, which have encouraged the Arab terrorists and those behind them to believe that if only they persist in their campaign they will force us to abandon this policy.'

The extremists were so powerful, MacDonald added, 'that they virtually dictate Arab policy'....

As 1938 progressed, more and more boats, many of them organized by the Revisionists, brought Jews from Poland, Germany and central Europe across the Black Sea, through the Aegean Sea, and on to Palestine. These 'illegal' immigrants were determined not to remain in a Europe where their future was clearly bleak. The British Government responded to this traffic by putting pressure on all the Governments between Poland and Palestine, not to allow the refugees, or the ships, to pass.....

Unprovoked and savage Arab attacks on Jewish civilian settlements continued unabated.....

Between 1933 and 1939 more than 65,000 German and Austrian Jews, including many doctors, lawyers and other professional men, found asylum in Britain. But tens of thousands more were refused permission to enter, and those who were able to gain entry into Palestine were an even smaller portion of those who sought to enter....

At the end of September 1938 the British Government put pressure on Czechoslovakia to accede to Hitler's demands....

Leopold Amery... writing... Britain's Palestine policy 'is a replica on a small scale of the European situation: absence of policy and fear of irritating those who mean mischief in any case'.....

Sir Alison Russell.... stated...

'It has been alleged that the Jews have acquired the best land in Palestine. It does not appear to me a fair statement. That much of the land now in possession of Jews has become the best land is a true statement....'

Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, stated bluntly that as 'Palestine had become a Pan Arab question' any discussion of its future had to include not only the Arabs of Palestine but also those whom he called the 'Arab Princes' from the neighbouring Arab States, including Saudi Arabia, Transjordan and the Yemen. In its conclusion, the Cabinet's Palestine Committee of October 24 decided that the proposals of the Peel Commission should be abandoned, and that a public announcement should be made to the effect that 'the setting up of independent Arab and Jewish States, is impracticable'.....

On 28 October 1938 the German Government began the deportation of all Polish-born Jews....

Malcolm MacDonald [British Cabinet]...

'The [British] government had to choose between its commitments to the world of Jewry and its commitments to the world of Islam. In spite of the adversities which it was now suffering, the world of Jewry remained extremely influential. For example, there were said to be 3 million Jews in the United States. On the other hand, the British Empire itself was to a very considerable extent a Moslem Empire, some 80 millions of our fellow subjects in India were Moslems. From the defense point of view it was literally out of the question that we should antagonise either the Moslems within the Empire or the Arab kingdoms of the near East.'

XVII) 'THE VIOLATION OF THE PLEDGE'

January-June 1939

[Ibid., pp. 216-235]:

"The crux of the new [British] policy in a secret Cabinet memorandum on January 18. As the MacDonald memorandum explained:

'We cannot accept the contention that all Jews as such have a right to enter Palestine....

We cannot avoid an eventual clash, if we continue to carry out the Balfour Declaration, between the forces of persecuted, desperate, brilliant, constructive Jewry in Palestine and the widespread pan-Arab movement which is rallying to the defense of its weakest brethren the Arabs of Palestine.

Arab detestation of the Jewish invasion into Palestine being what it is, it would be wholly wrong to suggest that this large Arab population should one day in their own native land and against their will come under the rule of the newly arrived Jews....'

These paragraphs became the basis of the [British] government's policy. At the same time, attempts were made to seek the opinions of various Colonial Governors as to the possibility of at least some small Jewish immigration elsewhere..... even... to the Soviet Union...

The Zionists adhered to that very Jewish 'right' to enter Palestine which was established in the 'Churchill' White Paper of 1922....

The Government now made an attempt to persuade Weizmann to abandon all Jewish rights in Palestine.....

It was during the Cabinet meeting of January 27, that Malcolm MacDonald reinterpreted the Churchill White Paper statement of 1922, that the Jews were in Palestine 'as of right, and not on suffrance'..... [which] referred only to those Jews who were already living in Palestine in 1922, and not to those who reached Palestine later, or might do so in the future....

[Clearly this was not the message of Churchill's White Paper]

During February and March 1939 new decisions were made by the Cabinet with regard to Palestine. Each of these decisions proved fatal to Palestine being kept open to refugees...

The British Government were taking active steps to check, and if possible to halt, the continuing flow of 'illegal' Jewish immigrants fleeing from central Europe...... to Palestine...

Neville Chamberlain declared... that it was of 'immense importance' from the point of view of strategy, 'to have the Moslem world with us', and he added: 'If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.'.....

A) THE 1939 PALESTINE [MACDONALD] WHITE PAPER VIOLATES THE BALFOUR DOCTRINE AND ENCOURAGES ARABS TO FIGHT JEWISH SETTLEMENT ALL THE MORE BY VIOLENT MEANS

By the end of April 1939, the Palestine White Paper was finalized, imposing upon Palestine severe restrictions which would fix an upper limit of 100,000 on the number of Jewish immigrants to be admitted over the following five years, after which the Arabs would have an effective veto on any further Jewish immigration.....

MacDonald... told his Cabinet colleagues on May 1... certain points had been inserted to meet Arab pressure and which, perhaps, would have been omitted if the matter were looked at on strict merits.'.....

The House of Commons debated the new White Paper, against which Leopold Amery spoke with much force, telling the House that the Government's watchword had now become 'appease the Arabs', and to do so 'by breaking faith with the Jews'. Amery went on:

'The [MacDonald] White Paper is a direct invitation to the Arabs to continue to make trouble. As for the Jews, they are now told that all the hopes that they have been encouraged to hold for 20 years are to be dashed to the ground..... all the pledges and promises.. broken...

They [the Palestinian Jews] are a formidable body of people. They are composed largely of younger men who have undergone military training and are quite capable of defending themselves.... if only we allowed them....'

Winston Churchill spoke with force and bitterness against what he believed was both a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration, and a shameful act of appeasement....

Churchill drew attention to... the large Arab as well as Jewish immigration into Palestine since the beginning of the Mandate.... Not only Jewish immigrants, but Arab immigrants had been drawn to Palestine by its new-found prosperity, and the Arabs like the Jews had been drawn from a wide geographic area....

The MacDonald White Paper - known henceforth to the Jews as the 'Black Paper' - led not only to widespread distress among world Jewry, and strong protests throughout the Jewish community in Palestine, but also to a widespread feeling among the majority of Jews both in Palestine and beyond that henceforth the future, not only of Jewish immigration into Palestine, but of the whole nature of a future Jewish entity there, depended first and foremost, not upon the British with whom power lay, but upon the renewed efforts, struggles and perseverance of the Jews themselves. By making the possibility of Jewish statehood more remote, and even impossible... the MacDonald White paper... had the reverse effect to their intentions, by stimulating and sharpening the Jewish goal of statehood and full independence....

XVIII) TOWARDS THE ABYSS

JULY-DECEMBER 1939

[Ibid., pp. 236-251]:

"During the summer of 1939 the number of Jewish 'illegal' immigrants seeking to reach Palestine grew considerably. In response, the British Government continued, with mounting vigour, to seek to stop the ships reaching Palestine...

During the autumn of 1939 the British Government made several attempts to influence United States opinion against the 'illegal' immigration...

In his article [NT Times writer] Levy wrote...

'Under normal conditions illegal immigrants constitute the best constructive elements for the country, since those whose entry is effected with the approval of national Jewish organisations are previously trained for Palestine life and labor conditions.

But groups organised by the Revisionists are based on the wider assumption that any Jew willing to go to Palestine is acceptable.

It is no secret that the Jewish population of Palestine is sympathetic and helpful to all organisations now taking the latter wider view.

It is interesting to note that even the Palestine Arabs in general are not antagonistic toward these illegal immigrants. Many of the latter recount instances of Arab charity when they wandered unknowingly into Arab villages. While some of the Fellaheen ran to report them to the police, the refugees report, others sheltered the newcomers, sharing their bread and olives.'

...To show its displeasure at the continuation of 'illegal' immigration, the Government had decided 'a short while ago' to suspend all legal immigration... At the same time, 'illegal' immigrant ships would still be intercepted and turned back...

Jewish refugees were being denied entry into more and more countries... [many other countries] were tightening their entry regulations and frontier controls....

On September 1 [1939] the Germans invaded Poland... [In view of severe persecutions vs. Jews in Poland] relaxation of British Colonial restrictions met with a negative response.... With the coming of war, the British Government had not only continued, but even intensified, its attempts to halt the flow of 'illegal' Jewish refugees... Throughout the winter months of 1939 and 1940, while the British were thus fighting the 'illegal' Jewish immigration, the Germans were imposing their evil rule upon Poland...

For the Jews of Palestine, war had brought a new spirit of determination... Recruitment and a desire to serve the Allied cause went parallel with the hope of bringing in, legally or 'illegally', as many European Jews as could escape the torment of Nazi rule....

[Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty urged Parliament to form a Jewish army in Palestine to aid in the war effort]:

'It might have been thought a matter for satisfaction that the Jews in Palestine should possess arms, and be capable of providing for their own defense. They were the only trustworthy friends we had in that country, and they were much more under our control than the scattered Arab population... to replace the eleven infantry battalions hitherto locked up in Palestine...'

Churchill was not successful.... [There was fear of] repercussions throughout the Muslim world... This same War Cabinet of 12 February 1940 discussed the 1939 White Paper decision to limit Jewish land purchase in Palestine... the land purchase regulations were put into force...

Despite this setback to their position in Palestine, the Jews now pressed for the creation of a specifically Jewish military force... which could fight the Germans... But both the Foreign Office and the War Office opposed it....

Early in November 1940 two ships.... reached Haifa with 1,771 'illegal' immigrants. The High Commissioner... refused to allow them to land, and they were transferred to a French liner.... to deport them to the Indian Ocean island of Maritius....

[But Churchill raised an objection]:

"Churchill's telegram was decisive... the Patria deportees were allowed to remain in Palestine, first in the internment camp at Athlit, and within a year, at liberty....

[But in response to this] the British Government suspended the quota for legal immigration for three months... Subsequently, the quota for April to September 1941 was also suspended...

[and there were punitive measures for those Jewish immigrants on the Patria]:

...conditions of the detention of the deportees 'should be sufficiently punitive to continue to act as a deterrent to other Jews in Eastern Europe'...

As the war continued, the Zionists were appalled by the mounting campaign of terror against the Jews of Poland, and by the continuing refusal of the British Government to modify in any way the immigration of land purchase restrictions of the 1939 White Paper....

XIX) BEYOND THE ABYSS

1939-1942

[Ibid., pp. 252-257]:

"From the moment that the Germans marched into Poland in September 1939, Nazi sadism found horrific outlets on Polish Jewry....

Only a tiny remnant of the Jews of German-occupied Russia survived the Nazi executions...

XX) HOLOCAUST, RESISTANCE AND FLIGHT

[Ibid., pp. 258-271]:

"Following the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, the Nazis began the systematic deportation and murder of Jews from all over Europe. Their destination was the death camps, most of which had been set up on Polish soil....

By the time of Germany's surrender in May 1945, six million Jews had been murdered.... Many others... at [forced labor] camps.... Others had been shot dead while on the march , or left to die of hunger at the roadside.... Others starved to death, without even water, in the sealed railway trucks.... Some... at the hands of doctors sadistically experimenting...

Haj Amin, the Mufti, had gone to Berlin, where, on April 8, he expressed publicly the sympathy of the 'Arab nation' for Germany, and offered Hitler the active support of the Arabs...

Sir Harold Macmichael, rejected [Iraqi Jewish immigration in view of persecution in Iraq] on the grounds... that there was no work for them to do.... This in spite of the Jewish Agency's assertion the previous April... that there was a shortage of more than 4,000 agricultural workers on Jewish farms and settlements....

Under a previous War Cabinet decision of 27 November 1940, all 'illegal' immigrants who had been detained would have to be deported to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius... and held there until the end of the war, when they would be released, on condition that they then went elsewhere than Palestine....

A) THE BILTMORE PROGRAMME

On 6 May 1942 an Extraordinary Zionist Conference... in New York... its theme... Jews could no longer depend upon Britain to establish a National Home in Palestine.... a majority of the delegates were committed to the establishment of Palestine as a 'Jewish Commonwealth', as well as an end to all immigration restrictions....

[B) CHURCHILL'S MEMORANDUM]:

'We have certainly treated the Arabs very well, having installed King Feisal and his descendants upon the Throne of Iraq and maintained them there; having maintained the Emir Abdullah in Transjordania and having asserted the rights of self-government for the Arabs and other inhabitants of Syria.

With the exception of Ibn Saud and the Emir Abdullah, both of whom have been good and faithful followers, the Arabs have been virtually of no use to us in the present war. They have taken no part in the fighting, except in so far as they were involved in the Iraq rebellion against us. They have created no new claims upon the Allies, should we be victorious.'...

In the British House of Commons, pressure continued to try to create an Allied open door for those refugees who did manage to escape.....

Despite his pre-occupations with the conduct of the war, Churchill had continued to support the idea of an eventual Jewish National Home in Palestine with a Jewish majority.... But as the war progressed he had begun to accept the arguments which the Peel commission had put forward before the war, and which many Jews had also accepted, albeit reluctantly, in favour of two separate States in Palestine, one Arab and one Jewish....

C) THE IRGUN JEWISH TERRORISM ORGANIZATION IS FORMED

Inside Palestine, a tiny group of desperate Jews felt unable either to trust Britain's word, or to wait until the war was over. Calling themselves the Irgun Zvai Leumi - the 'National Military Organization' - and holding Jabotinsky as their inspiration, in January 1944 they called upon the Jews of Palestine to revolt. Their demand was 'Immediate transfer of power in Eretz Israel to a Provisional Hebrew Government'. Their method, expressed succintly by their leader, Menachem Begin in his memoirs The Revolt, was: 'A prolonged campaign of destruction...'

Jewish terrorism... had broken out against the British in Palestine.... Lord Moyne was assassinated in Cairo by two young Jews...

[On the other hand] The deliberate murder of Europe's Jews was reaching its terrible climax, with more than five million Jews having already perished, and hundreds of thousands more being murdered each month. For the British policymakers, however, the overriding concern still seemed to remain that of the Jewish refugees seeking to reach Palestine...

From Palestine itself, despite the intense bitterness created by the antirefugee policy, 33,000 Jews enlisted in the British Army....

....compared with the total of 9,000 Arabs.... long before the end of the war, this total was reduced by at least one-half through desertions and discharges...

The Jewish death toll will never be fully known. Among the million and a half children who were murdered were many whose names were never recorded. Hundreds of thousands of individuals, whose names are found before the war in lists of doctors, nurses or teachers, students or lawyers, writers or poets, disappeared without trace.

In the Nazi lists of those deported by train to the concentration camps, tens of thousands from as far away as France, Belgium, Italy or Greece, are many whose exact fate is unknown. That they were murdered is certain.... Six million is the million figure of those who perished....

XXI) CLOSING THE DOOR, 'JUSTICE' AND REVOLT

1945-1946

[Ibid, pp. 272-298]:

"With the end of the war in Europe on 8 May 1945, Jews all over the world hoped, and expected, that the doors of Palestine would be opened for the survivors of the holocaust...

On 22 May 1945, two weeks after the German surrender, Dr. Weizmann wrote direct to Churchill, to ask that Jewish immigration be resumed. But in his reply on June 8, Churchill informed Weizmann that there could be 'no possibility of the question being effectively considered' until the proposed Peace Conference. Weizmann was appalled by this decision to delay what was, for the survivors of the holocaust, a matter of urgency. On June 13 he replied to Churchill that the contents of Churchill's letter had come 'as a great shock' to him....

President Truman's wish that the survivors of the concentration camps should be allowed into Palestine had.... already led to protests not only from the Arab States, but also from 'the Congress in India'.....

Palestine [was] so effectively barred to Jewish refugees, and the American quota system [was] still rigidly enforced....

The exodus of Polish Jews did not end at Berlin. All over Europe, Zionist emissaries were organizing 'escape' routes to Palestine....

A struggle now began, in Palestine and in Europe, between the British Government and the Jews: a struggle marked by increasing bitterness and extremism on both sides. The British, determined to halt the now swelling tide of 'illegal' immigration from liberated Europe to Mandatory Palestine, went so far as to return captured immigrants from the waters of the eastern Mediterranean to which they had sailed, to the displaced camps in Germany from which they had fled. In Europe itself, at the frontier crossings between Austria and Italy, British troops halted concentration camp survivors who were on their way to the Adriatic, and to Palestine, and held them in former prisoner-of-war camps.

Inside Palestine, the Irgun, [Jewish terrorist organization headed by Menachem Begin] reacted by attacking British military installations, and, as death sentences and reprisals increased the tension, acts of increasing desperation marked their efforts.... Force alone, the Irgun believed, could bring an end to the White Paper, open Palestine to unimpeded Jewish immigration, and make possible a Jewish majority, and Jewish statehood....

Since the beginning of 1945, the newspaper [Manchester Guardian] reported, some 353 Jews had been murdered by Polish thugs. 'Unfortunately,' it added, 'anti' Semitism is still prevalent....

large numbers of Polish Jews are in fact succeeding in leaving Poland, their objective being the British and American Zones in Germany and Austria en route for Italy and thence by illegal means to Palestine...

The great majority of the Jews wanted to leave Poland: they looked upon Palestine as their traditional home, the cradle of their race and the centre of their faith....

Despite British efforts to prevent the Polish Jews from setting out on the hazardous road to Palestine, the situation inside Poland itself made flight inevitable....

Nine months had passed since V-E day and their [the Jews'] British and American liberators had made no move to accept them in their own countries. They had gathered them into centres in Germany, fed them and clothed them, and then apparently believed that their Christian duty had been accomplished.... They [the Jews] knew that far away in Palestine there was a national home willing and eager to receive them and to give them a chance of rebuilding their lives, not as aliens in a foreign state but as Hebrews in their own country...

The hunger strike [by Jews on two ships] was, in fact, successful, and on May 8, the Dov Hos and the Eliahu Golomb sailed for Palestine, their 1,014 passengers having been granted immigration certificates from the month's quota....

A) THE ANGLO-AMERICAN COMMITTEE REPORT

The Anglo-American Committee published its Report on 1 May 1946. Among its recommendations were the end to the land purchase restrictions of the 1939 White Paper, and the immediate grant of 100,000 immigration certificates to the Jewish survivors. The Jews of Palestine were bitterly disappointed that their hope of statehood was not endorsed by the Committee, which recommended a continuation of the Mandate...

Frustration now overcame, and indeed almost overwhelmed, the Jews of Palestine. On June 16 the military arm of the Jewish Agency, the Haganah, blew up nine bridges, and damaged the Haifa Railway workshops...

On June 29 the British retaliated... sealing... buildings.... arresting three thousand Jews.... including most of the senior members of the Zionist Executive...

Meanwhile, the pogroms in Poland continued.... In Poland... forty-two Jews were killed.... Within twenty-four hours of the Kielce pogrom, more than five thousand Jews fled from all over Poland... they were harassed wherever they went.... These new refugees also turned towards Palestine....

In Palestine itself the arrest of the Zionist leaders had created a ferment of discontent... Within three weeks that despair reached a climax with, on July 22, the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by members of the Irgun. Ninety-one people were killed: British administrators working in the hotel, Arabs and Jews....

B) WINSTON CHURCH REVERSES HIS SUPPORT FOR THE JEWS SETTLEMENT IN PALESTINE EN MASSE

"Britain, said Churchill, should not be 'in too great a hurry' to give up the idea that European Jews 'may live in the countries where they belong' and he continued:

'I must say that I had no idea, when the war came to an end, of the horrible massacres which had occurred; the millions and millions that have been slaughtered. That dawned on us gradually after the struggle was over. But if all these immense millions have been killed and slaughtered, there must be a certain amount of living room for the survivors, and there must be inheritance and properties to which they can lay claim.

Are we not to hope that some tolerance will be established in racial matters in Europe, and that there will be some law reigning by which, at any rate, a portion of the property of these great numbers will not be taken away from them? It is quite clear, however, that this crude idea of letting all the Jews of Europe go into Palestine has no relation either to the problem of Europe or to the problem which arises in Palestine."

Churchill then referred to the King David explosion. 'It is perfectly clear', he told the Commons, 'that Jewish warfare directed against the British in Palestine will, if protracted, automatically release us from all obligations to persevere, as well as destroy the inclination to make further efforts in British hearts.' And yet, Churchill added, 'we must not be in a hurry to turn aside from large causes which we have carried far'.

For many Jews, Churchill's speech, and in particular his remark about the absurdity of allowing the holocaust survivors to go to Palestine, was a bitter disappointment....

The history of British hesitations with regard to the war crimes trials reveals the extent to which the Jews, despite the enormity of their sufferings, were not considered either a nation, or a people who, having suffered as such, deserved the support of the existing Allied states....

In October 1946 eleven new Jewish settlements were established in the Negev in a single night, aimed at ensuring that the Negev would be included within the boundaries of the State. Two weeks earlier, on October 1, Weizmann had gone to see Bevin at the Foreign Office, to ask Bevin to agree to some form of partition, as first put forward ten years earlier by the Peel Commissioners. But Bevin replied: 'The Arabs would not accept partition. Was he to force it on them with British bayonets?' Bevin also spoke of the growing anti-semitic under the skin as there exists now'.

C) THE 22ND ZIONIST CONGRESS MOVES TOWARD JUSTIFYING ARMED RESISTENCE IN PALESTINE

The 22nd Zionist Congress opened in Basle on 9 December 1946. The new Negev settlements, Weizmann told the delegates, 'have, in my deepest conviction, a far greater weight than a hundred speeches about resistance - especially when the speeches are made in New York, while the proposed resistance is to be made in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem'. Weizmann did not minimize the cause of Jewish bitterness. Indeed, his speech contained a powerful reproach of Britain's White Paper policy, for, as he told the delegates, in bitter tones:

'Whenever a new country was about to come under Gestapo rule, we asked that the gates of the National Home be opened for saving as many as possible of our people from the gas-chambers. Our entreaties fell on deaf ears; it seemed that the White Paper was more sacred for some people than life itself.

Sometimes we were told that our exclusion from Palestine was necessary in order to do justice to a nation endowed with seven independent territories, covering a million square miles; at other times we were informed that the admission of our refugees might endanger military security during the war.

It was easier to doom the Jews of Europe to a certain death than to evolve a technique for overcoming such difficulties. When human need, the instinct of self-preservation, collided with the White Paper, the result was the 'Struma', the 'Patria' and Mauritius.'

These were stern words, describing a situation which many of the delegates regarded as a justification for armed resistance....

XXII) EPILOGUE: THE COMING OF JEWISH STATEHOOD

1947-1948

[Ibid, pp. 297-309]:

"For six years, from 1939 to 1945, the Jews had been caught between the evil designs of those who sought to destroy them, and the indifference of those who had no special desire to help them. Six million had been murdered; not only Jewish lives, but Jewish life, had been blotted out. Traditions, possessions, culture, the natural evolution of future generations of many more millions: all had been destroyed, more than one third of the whole of world Jewry. No longer could the Jews entrust their fate to others; the Holocaust was a bitter, final culmination of two thousand years of persecution. By the winter of 1946 the arguments in favour of Jewish statehood were, for the Jews, of overwhelming clarity.

In Palestine itself, the British remained vigilant in their search for hidden Jewish arms. Jews caught in possession of arms were arrested, imprisoned, and even flogged. Following one such flogging, on 29 December 1946 the Irgun seized a British major and three sergeants, and flogged them in retaliation. With the opening weeks of 1947 the violence increased: on January 1 an Irgun group, in attacking a British police post, killed a policemen. The British Press began to urge partition, and a British withdrawal.

The British Government was coming close to the end of both its patience and its self-confidence. On 1 January 1947, at a meeting of the Cabinet's Defense Committee, it was agreed 'that to continue this policy in Palestine in present circumstances placed the Armed Forces in an impossible position'. Three days later the Secretary-General of the Arab League, General Azzam Pasha, announced that the Arabs would vote against any partition scheme that might be put forward, and they would continue to oppose any further Jewish immigration.

Such Arab hostility was well known. But on the morning of January 7 a new factor was introduced into the Middle East discussion, which made Arab goodwill even more essential. For on that day a 'top Secret' memorandum.. was circulated.... The Middle East, [it] stressed, was likely to provide 'a greater proportion of the total world increase of production than any other oil-bearing region'....

.... went on to warn of the grave risks involved in offending the Arabs 'by appearing to encourage Jewish settlement and to endorse the Jewish aspiration for a separate State'....

The certainty of Arab hostility to partition is so clear...

A) THE UNITED NATIONS IS INVOLVED - BRITAIN TURNS THE PROBLEM OF PALESTINE OVER TO UNSCOP

The Cabinet now came to a decision which marked a turning point in the history of the British Mandate. Failing 'an agreed settlement' between Jews and Arabs, the Cabinet minuteS recorded, 'any solution of this problem would have to come before the United Nations.'...

On February 14... Bevin announced that Britain would hand over the whole problem to the United Nations....

On May 15 the United Nations set up a Special Committee on Palestine, known popularly by its initials as UNSCOP...

Four of the eleven [UNSCOP] committee members [went] to Haifa to see for themselves what was happening. There, Eban wrote in his autobiography....

B) THE EXODUS 1947 SAGA

The Jewish refugees [coming from Germany aboard the ship Exodus which were transferred to the ship Empire Rival to be returned] had decided not to accept banishment [back to Europe [to face continued and deadly persecution] with docility. If any one had wanted to know what Churchill meant by a 'squalid war', he would have found out by watching British soldiers using rifle butts, hose pipes and tear gas against the survivors of the death camps. Men, women and children were forcibly taken off the prison ships, locked in cages below decks and sent out of Palestine waters.'

When the four members of UNSCOP came back to Jerusalem, Eban recalled, 'they were pale with shock', and he added: 'I could see that they were preoccupied with one point alone: if this was the only way that the British Mandate could continue, it would be better not to continue it at all.'...

The Empire Rival was sent [to Europe with the refugees]... Forced by British troops to disembark on the hated German soil from which they had already fled, these 'illegals' were sent to a Displaced Persons Camp at Poppendorf.....

On July 4 David Ben Gurion appeared before UNSCOP....

'An unbroken tie between our people and our land has persisted through all these centuries in full force,'...

The homelessness and minority position make the Jews always dependent on the mercy of others... they are never masters of their own destiny; the are entirely defenseless when the majority of people turn against them.

What happened to our people in this war is merely a climax to the uninterrupted persecution to which we have been subjected for centuries by almost all the Christian and Moslem peoples in the old world..

The Jews do not want to stay where they are. They want to regain their human dignity, their homeland, they want a reunion with their kin in Palestine after having lost their dearest relations. To them, the countries of their birth are a graveyard of their people. They do not wish to return there and they cannot....

Moses... acted from divine inspiration. He might have brought us to the United States, and instead of the Jordan we might have had the Mississippi... We are an ancient people with an old history, and you cannot deny your history and begin afresh...'

For the establishment of the Jewish National Home, Weizmann told the Committee... the time had come for the 'home' to evolve. Partition would, he believed, be the best evolution in the current circumstances...

The UNSCOP deliberations continued to a background of violence.... [between the British and the Irgun and Stern gangs ]...

Bitterness poisoned all hope of a return to any form of normal relations while British rule continued.

C) UNSCOP DECIDES UPON PARTITION

UNSCOP held its last meeting on August 31. Its majority report... proposed the creation of two separate and independent States, one Arab and one Jewish, with the city of Jerusalem under international trusteeship....

The Arab Higher Committe rejected [it]... The Jewish Agency accepted....

On 29 November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted on the UNSCOP proposals, which were accepted by thirty-three votes to thirteen, with ten abstentions.... Britain was among those States which abstained. All six independent arab States voted against the plan...

From the moment of the United Nations vote, Arab terrorists and armed bands attacked Jewish men, women and children all over the country.... [and all over the world]..

Arab attacks rose in viciousness during the first four months of 1948, as Jewish Jerusalem was besieged and its water supply cut off...

D) ISRAEL GAINS STATEHOOD AFTER BRITAIN WITHDRAWS

The British announced that they would withdraw from Palestine altogether on May 15...

Many of the Arabs involved in these military acts, and in the sniping and killing of Jewish civilians, were regular soldiers from outside Palestine, from Syria, and even from Iraq...

During April and early May, every isolated Jewish village was subjected to a massive attack..

Despite the Arab attacks, the Jews were determined not to be driven out of their promised 'mini' State. In the full scale battles that developed during April between the Arab and Jewish armed forces, Tiberias, Haifa, Acre, Safed and Jaffa were occupied by Jewish forces between April19 and May 14, while in Jerusalem, Arab troops were driven from several suburbs. Between November 1947 and May 1948, more than 4,000 Jewish soldiers and 2,000 Jewish civilians had been killed, nearly 1 per cent of the total Jewish population....

As May 15, the day of the British withdrawal, drew near... four well armed Arab armies, those of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and the Lebanon were massing on the southern, western and northern borders, preparing to invade at the very moment of the British withdrawal...

On the morning of May 14 the last British High Commissioner left Jerusalem. Britain's thirty year rule was at an end. That same afternoon, in Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion declared the independence of the Jewish State, to be called 'the State of Israel.'

The coming into existence of the State of Israel was opposed by every Arab State, and in the war that followed, the Jews - Israelis now - suffered considerable losses. But their State survived, forming a small but viable entity on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. More than 550,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled from the area which became Israel; more than two-thirds of them fled to other areas of Palestine - the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - which had been allocated under the United Nations Partition Plan to Arab sovereignty, areas which were at once occupied by Transjordan and Egypt respectively...

Between 1948 and 1952, more than half a million Jews from Arab lands as far apart as Morocco and the Yeman, flocked to Israel, and rebuilt their lives without the stigma of second-class citizenship... more than 120,000 Jews... in the decade after 1967, reached Israel from the Soviet Union.