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he's also ignoring the fact that these people are returning to their native land vs colonizing like the Arab Muslims
No, the Jews that colonized Palestine were from Europe. It was not the European's native land. The Muslims and Christian Palestinians are the native people of Palestine. That they converted to Islam or Christianity and adopted Arabic as their language does not change the DNA of the native people.
No, the Jews that colonized Palestine were from Europe. It was not the European's native land. The Muslims and Christian Palestinians are the native people of Palestine. That they converted to Islam or Christianity and adopted Arabic as their language does not change the DNA of the native people.
That the Jewish people were forced into a diaspora and did not convert, but remained Jewish, doesn't change our DNA as the native people either.
...there was no such thing as a "Jewish people" as an ethnic group/race until the 19th century.
The Jews were not the first people in the holy land nor were they ever the only people there.Challenged is just angry because she hasn't the debating skills or the position to engage in an informed discussion. There's really no debate when it comes to who the indigenous people of Judea are; the evidence goes literally back to the stone age. The Judaic people and even the protojudaic people left more than sufficient evidence in the Canaan valley area. The Arab Muslims, none; no evidence for Arab Muslim culture exists anywhere in the middle east prior to sometime around 650 CE. None exists outside the Arabian peninsula prior to about 720 CE and almost none appears in Judea until about 900 CE well into the Arab Muslim colonial period.
The facts are obvious, clear, and definitive. The Arab Muslims developed their culture OUTSIDE of the Canaan area, specifically on the Arabian Peninsula. Ergo, the Arab Muslims cannot be the indigenous people of Judea.
Her ludicrous claim that there was no culture or people known as Judaic prior to the early 20th century is just another blatant lie in a long list of lies which she must accept in order to maintain her condition known as cognitive dissonance.
The Jews were not the first people in the holy land nor were they ever the only people there.
There is no historic precedence for an exclusive Jewish state.
Tell that crap to the refugees.The Jews were not the first people in the holy land nor were they ever the only people there.
There is no historic precedence for an exclusive Jewish state.
The Jewish people are the oldest, surviving, historical culture associated with that land.
And the Jewish state is INCLUSIVE not exclusive.
Tell that crap to the refugees.
And the Jewish state is INCLUSIVE not exclusive.
Okay, I'll bite: what happened in the 19th century which suddenly created a Jewish people?
And the Jewish state is INCLUSIVE not exclusive.
Tell that to any non-Jewish person who has ever applied for citizenship.
I thought it would be best to respond to this post here:You are right that the two arguments I made are inconsistent, but they are not incompatible. To start with, today's belief, expressed in the UN Charter and elsewhere, is that the government of a people must rest on the will of the people. This is the essential claim of our Declaration of Independence for example, and it is a principle flouted by the establishment of Israel and in breach of that principle in Palestine to this day.Although the Sioux people may find the idea of returning to an ancestral homeland appealing, modern government doesn't work that way. The Ashkenazi Zionists who created modern Israel based their activity on Bible stories Lord Balfour learned in Sunday School.
Even if historically accurate, the Torah is no basis for displacement of millions of non-Jewish residents. Add to that the fact that the "history" of Old Testament has been shown to be myth, not fact and the injustice done by European Jews to Palestinians is even more cruel and absurd.
History is filled with injustice, just ask the Sioux people. The big difference between the West Bank and the Great Sious Reservation is that the West Bank is surrounded by 400,000,000 Muslims rich with oil money and armed to the teeth with American weapons.
Nebuchadnezzar booted out the Jews 2,500 years ago. Titus did it again 500 years later. This third attempt to set up a Jewish state in Palestine isn't going to work any better than the last two. God gave the Jews a land of milk and honey in exchange for keeping the Covenant. When the Jews abandoned the Covenant, God cancelled their deed to Palestine. No human power can reverse the Will of God.
On the one hand, you say the Old Testament is myth, and on the other hand you say that Gd cancelled the Jews' deed to "Palestine" because they abandoned the Covenant. So which is it? If it's myth, that really doesn't matter because the Jews have suffered persecution for 2000 years, and they want a land of their own, regardless of the Torah. If you ARE going by the Bible, then it says that Gd will one day gather the Jews from the four corners of the world, and restore them to their homeland.
How people reach their conclusion as to what government they want for themsleves varies enormously. Myth (and all religions rest on myth) remains popular in many parts of the globe, social and economic theories have their advocates as well. The universal principle isn't about how people decide, it is that the people, We, the People, get to decide for themselves.
Now, it is an historical fact that in 1948, the majority of people living in Palestine were Arab Muslims. The people who created Israel were British and American Christians. The population which flooded into the new state were Ashkenazi Jews from Germany, Poland and Russia. The motives and beliefs of the creators of the new state were quite disparate; more important the wishes of the millions of Arab Muslims already living in Palestine were simply ignored and overriden by armed force. This was the last gasp of the European colonialism which had been tearing up Arabia since the days of Napoleon.
Both the Christians who raised the possibility of a Zionist homeland with the Balfour Declaration and the Jews who used that document to create the state of Israel envisioned a secular government with religious freedom and equality for all religious groups. The move toward a theocratic state was a subsequent development which, since the rise to power of the Orthodox right Likud has pushed Israel outside its founding territory and beliefs with a series of brutal military operations which have been condemned as illegal by the USA, the UN and most of the world's nations. America's Jews think they can make this situation stick by constiant infusion of lawyers, guns and money. I think they are making a tragic mistake.
The Smoking Gun: Arab Immigration into Palestine, 1922-1931
by Fred M. Gottheil
Middle East Quarterly[/indent]
Winter 2003, pp. 53-64
['........]
Evidence for Arab Migration
There are several problems associated with estimating Arab immigration into Palestine during the 1920s, the principal one being that Arab migration flows were, in the main, illegal, and therefore unreported and unrecorded.[17] But they were not entirely unnoticed.
Demographer U.O. Schmelz's analysis of the Ottoman registration data for 1905 populations of Jerusalem and Hebron kazas (Ottoman districts), by place of birth, showed that of those Arab Palestinians born outside their localities of residence, approximately HALF represented intra-Palestine movement—from areas of low-level economic activity to areas of higher-level activity—while the other half represented Arab immigration into Palestine itself, 43% originating in Asia, 39% in Africa, and 20% in Turkey.[18] Schmelz conjectured:
The above-average population growth of the Arab villages around the city of Jerusalem, with its Jewish majority, continued until the end of the mandatory period. This must have been due—as elsewhere in Palestine under similar conditions—to in-migrants attracted by economic opportunities, and to the beneficial effects of improved health services in reducing mortality—just as happened in other parts of Palestine around cities with a large Jewish population sector.[19]
While Schmelz restricted his research of the 1905 Palestinian census to the official Ottoman registrations and used these registrations with only minor critical comment, he did acknowledge that "stable population models assume the absence of external migrations, a condition which was obviously not met by all the subpopulations" that Schmelz enumerated.[20]
Like U.O. Schmelz, Roberto Bachi expressed some reservation about the virtual non-existence of data and discussion concerning migration into and within Palestine. He writes:
Between 1800 and 1914, the Muslim population had a yearly average increase in the order of magnitude of roughly 6-7 per thousand. This can be compared to the very crude estimate of about 4 per thousand for the "less developed countries" of the world (in Asia, Africa, and Latin America) between 1800 and 1910. It is possible that part of the growth of the Muslim population was due to Immigration.[21]
Although Bachi did not pursue the linkage between undocumented immigration into Palestine and the 6 (or 7) to 4 per thousand differential in growth rates between Palestine and the other less developed countries (LDCs), the idea that at least one-third of Palestine's population growth may be attributed to immigration is—using Bachi's own growth rate differentials—not an entirely unreasonable one.
Lacking verifiable evidence did not prevent Bachi from stating the obvious concerning internal migration within Palestine:
The great economic development of the coastal plains—largely due to Jewish immigration—was accompanied both in 1922-1931 and in 1931-1944 by a much stronger increase of the Muslim and Christian populations in this region than that registered in other regions. This was probably due to two reasons: stronger decrease in mortality of the non-Jewish population in the neighborhood of Jewish areas and Internal migration toward the more developed zones.[22][/B]
In the footnote accompanying this quote, Bachi writes: "As no statistics are available for internal migration, this conclusion has been obtained from indirect evidence."[23] Bachi's footnote is instructive. The "indirect evidence" he referred to no doubt included his understanding of the important role economics plays in explaining demographic movements. While appreciating the value of Ottoman registrations and British mandatory government censuses in providing estimates of Palestinian demography, they were, in his judgment, still crude and incomplete.
Reference to Arab immigration into Palestine during the 1920s is made as well in the British mandatory government's annual compilation of statistical data on population. The Palestine Blue Book, 1937, for example, provides time series demographic statistics whose annual estimates are based on extrapolations from its 1922 census.[24] The footnote accompanying the table on population of Palestine reads:
There has been unrecorded illegal immigration of both Jews and Arabs in the period since the census of 1931, but it is clear that, since it cannot be recorded, no estimate of its volume is possible.[25]The 1935 British report to the League of Nations noted that:
One thousand five hundred and fifty-seven persons (including 565 Jews) who, having made their way into the country surreptitiously, were later detected, were sentenced to imprisonment for their offence and recommended for deportation.[26]The number who "made their way into the country surreptitiously" and undetected was neither estimated nor mentioned.
Historian Gad Gilbar's observation on Ruth Kark's contribution to his edited volume Ottoman Palestine, 1800-1914, touches on the issue of Arab immigration into and within Palestine. He relates her ideas in "The Rise and Decline of Coastal Towns in Palestine" to Charles Issawi's thesis concerning the role of minority groups and foreigners in the development of Middle Eastern towns. Explaining why NO other Palestinian cities grew as rapidly as Jaffa and Haifa did during the final three decades of the Ottoman rule, Gilbar writes: "Both attracted population from the rural and urban surroundings and immigrants from outside Palestine."[27]
Each piece of the demographic puzzle by itself may reveal no identifiable picture. But given a multiplicity of such pieces, an image does begin to appear. The Royal Institute for International Affairs adds another piece. Commenting on the growth of the Palestinian population during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s it reports: "The number of Arabs who have entered Palestine illegally from Syria and Transjordan is unknown. But probably considerable."[28] And C.S. Jarvis, governor of the Sinai from 1923-36, adds yet another:
This illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Trans-Jordan and Syria, and it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery.[29]Estimating Real Numbers
The derivation of Palestine migration estimates in this section is based on an uncomplicated imputation theory. Migration becomes a residual claimant for numbers not explained by a population-estimating model based on known initial population stocks and known sets of birth and death rates for that population. In this way, expected population stocks can be derived for any set of subsequent years.
The value of the model depends, of course, on the reliability of the estimates given for initial population stocks and for the rates associated with natural increase. Therein lies the problem with estimating Arab immigration into Palestine. The model itself may be simple and applicable, but its usefulness—as with all estimating models—is contingent upon the quality of the data inputs. That quality in the case of Palestinian migration is compromised by the explicit neglect of illegal entrants. If illegal migrants and subsequently illegal residents escaped the census taker, how could the census account for them? It couldn't and didn't.
It is not surprising then that the British census data produce an Arab Palestinian population growth for 1922-31 that turns out to be generated by natural increase and legal migrations alone. Applying a 2.5 per annum growth rate[30] to a population stock of 589,177 for 1922 generates a 1931 population estimate of 735,799 or 97.6% of the 753,822 recorded in the 1931 census. Does the imputation model then "prove" that illegal immigration into Palestine was inconsequential during 1922-31? Not at all. A footnote accompanying the census's population time series acknowledges the presence in Palestine of illegal Arab immigration. But because it could not be recorded, no estimate of its numbers was included in the census count.[31] Ignoring illegal migrants does not mean they don't exist.
Setting illegal immigration into Palestine aside, the imputation model does generate substantial migrations of Arab Palestinians within Palestine itself and confirms what many demographers, historians, government administrators, and economists have alluded to: the migration of Arab Palestinians from villages, towns, and cities of low economic opportunity to villages, towns, and cities of higher economic opportunity.
Which towns, villages, and cities offered the higher economic opportunity? Analyzing the 1922 and 1931 demographic data by sub-district and separating those sub-districts of Palestine that eventually became 1948 Israel—that is, sub-districts that had relatively large Jewish populations (with accompanying Jewish capital and modern technology)—from those that were not designated as part of 1948 Israel, identified not only the direction of Arab Palestinian migration within Palestine but its magnitude as well.[32]
The Arab Palestinian populations within those sub-districts that eventually became Israel increased from 321,866 in 1922 to 463,288 in 1931 or by 141,422. Applying the 2.5 per annum natural rate of population growth to the 1922 Arab Palestinian population generates an expected population size for 1931 of 398,498 or 64,790 less than the actual population recorded in the British census. By imputation, this unaccounted population increase must have been either illegal immigration not accounted for in the British census and/or registered Arab Palestinians moving from outside the Jewish-identified sub-districts to those sub-districts so identified. This 1922-31 Arab migration into the Jewish sub-districts represented 11.8% of the total 1931 Arab population residing in those sub-districts and as much as 36.8% of its 1922-31 growth.
That over 10% of the 1931 Arab Palestinian population in those sub-districts that eventually became Israel had immigrated to those sub-districts within the 1922-31 years is a datum of considerable significance. It is consistent with the fragmentary evidence of illegal migration to and within Palestine; it supports the idea of linkage between economic disparities and migratory impulses—a linkage universally accepted; it undercuts the thesis of "spatial stickiness" attributed by some scholars to the Arab Palestinian population of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and it provides strong circumstantial evidence that the illegal Arab immigration into Palestine, like that within Palestine, was of consequence as well.
Denying the Evidence
As compelling as the arguments and evidence supporting consequential illegal immigration may be to some scholars, they are clearly unconvincing to others. The single most cited contemporary publication on Palestinian demography is Justin McCarthy's 1990 The Population of Palestine. Of McCarthy's 43 pages of descriptive analysis—supplemented by 188 pages of demographic tables copied directly from Ottoman, European, and Jewish source materials—slightly more than one and a half pages are devoted to Arab immigration into and within Palestine during the Ottoman period, and a similar one and a half pages are devoted to Arab immigration during the succeeding mandate period.[33] According to McCarthy, these few pages offer enough critical analysis to close the lid on the "infamous" immigration thesis.
Consider first McCarthy's analysis of Arab immigration during the Ottoman period. That he finds no illegal immigration of consequence is not surprising because McCarthy uses official Ottoman registration lists that, by the nature of its classifications, take no account of the unreported, illegal immigration. That is to say, if you look in a haystack for a needle that wasn't put there, the probability is high you won't find it. It is strange that that idea had not occurred to McCarthy. Choosing to focus on the official registration lists allows him to write:
From the analysis of rates of increase of the Muslim population of the three Palestiniansanjaks [Ottoman sub-provinces], one can say with certainty that Muslim immigration after 1870 was small.[34]Reflecting elsewhere on the possibility that the immigration may have occurred over an extended period of time, McCarthy writes: "To postulate such an immigration … stretches the limits of credulity."[35]
McCarthy's treatment of the linkage between economic disparities and migration impulses appears to be even more disingenuous. He writes: "The question of the relative economic development of Palestine in Ottoman times is not a matter to be discussed here."[36] Nor is it considered anywhere else in his book. That is to say, McCarthy does not contest the linkage so much as ignore its relevance to the Palestinian situation.[37]
His dismissal of Arab immigration into Palestine during the mandate period is based on a set of assumptions concerning illegal immigration that is both restrictive and unsubstantiated. He contends that even if the illegal immigrants were unreported on entry, their deaths in Palestine would have been registered. So too, he argues, would their children born in Palestine. Deriving estimates based on such registrations, he arrives at this conclusion: immigration was minimal.[38] But he provides no evidence to show that these supposed registrations of births and deaths were actually made. Had McCarthy considered the fact that detection of illegal immigration during the mandate period resulted in imprisonment and deportation and that immigrants, aware of this, may have avoided any formal registration of deaths and births, he would have had to revise his assessment of illegal immigration.
Perhaps the more serious charge against McCarthy's analysis of Arab immigration is his use of Roberto Bachi's estimates. McCarthy's numbers are based, in part, on Bachi's reporting of 900 illegal Arab immigrants per year over the period 1931-45.[39] But McCarthy misrepresents what Bachi's estimate is meant to show. Bachi is careful to identify his 900-per-year illegal Arab immigration estimate as only those discovered by the mandatory authorities. Illegal Arab immigration that went undetected and unreported is not included. He writes:
A detailed analysis presented in Appendix 6.5B on the basis of the registration of part of the illegal migratory traffic, discovered by the Palestine police, shows that legal movements (as reflected in Tables 9.4-9.7) constituted only a small fraction of total Muslim immigration.[40]To emphasize this point, Bachi writes: "It is hardly credible that illegal movements which were actually discovered included all the illegal entrances which actually occurred, or even the majority of them."[41] As a result, Bachi can only conclude that "in the present state of knowledge, we have beenunable to even guess the size of total immigration."[42]
Such a cautionary comment finds no place in McCarthy's analysis or conclusions. Using Bachi's estimates inappropriately, deriving estimates based solely on registration lists, and ignoring completely the linkages between regional economic disparities and migratory impulses, McCarthy confidently concludes,
the vast majority of the Palestinians resident in 1947 were the sons and daughters who were living in Palestine before modern Jewish immigration began. There is no reason to believe that they were not the sons and daughters of Arabs who had been in Palestine for many centuries.[43]Every Reason to Believe
Therein lies the ideological warfare concerning claims to territorial inheritance and national sovereignty. Contrary to McCarthy's findings or wishes, there is every reason to believe that consequential immigration of Arabs into and within Palestine occurred during the Ottoman and British mandatory periods. Among the most compelling arguments in support of such immigration is the universally acknowledged and practiced linkage between regional economic disparities and migratory impulses.
The precise magnitude of Arab immigration into and within Palestine is, as Bachi noted, unknown. Lack of completeness in Ottoman registration lists and British Mandatory censuses, and the immeasurable illegal, unreported, and undetected immigration during both periods make any estimate a bold venture into creative analysis. In most cases, those venturing into the realm of Palestinian demography—or other demographic analyses based on very crude data—acknowledge its limitations and the tentativeness of the conclusions that may be drawn.
Fred M. Gottheil is a professor in the department of economics, University of Illinois.
Forgot Link:It is really just common sense -- a trait so lacking in Judeophobes -- but it doesn't take a rocket science to realize populations follow economic opportunity. The very same factors that drive the current immigration of Mexicans into the United states now drove a similar migration into the Mandate of Palestine as a result of the economic growth fueled by Zionist businesses.
Oh, the usual Zionist false propaganda. Now the facts from source documents:
UNITED
NATIONS
A
General Assembly
A/364
3 September 1947
OFFICIAL RECORDS OF THE SECOND SESSION OF
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
SUPPLEMENT No. 11
UNITED NATIONS
SPECIAL COMMITTEE
ON PALESTINE
REPORT TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
VOLUME 1
Lake Success
New York
1947
4. It will have been noticed that not only has there been a remarkably rapid increase in the total population of Palestine but also the proportion of Jews in the total has greatly increased, from 12.91 -per cent in 1922 to 32.96 per cent in 1946. Conversely, of course, the Arab proportion has fallen since 1922. The Moslem proportion of the population (almost entirely Arab) has fallen from about 75 per cent of the total to 60 per cent, and the Christian proportion (very largely Arab) from 11 per cent to 8 per cent. Thus, at the present time about one-third of the total settled population is Jewish.
(b)IMMIGRATION AND NATURAL INCREASE
15. These changes in the population have been brought about by two forces: natural increase and immigration. The great increase in the Jewish population is due in the main to immigration. From 1920 to 1946, the total number of recorded Jewish immigrants into Palestine was about 376,000, or an average of over 8,000 per year. The flow has not been regular, however, being fairly high in 1924 to 1926, falling in the next few years (there was a net emigration in 1927) and rising to even higher levels between 1933 and 1936 as a result of the Nazi persecution in Europe. Between the census year of 1931 and the year 1936, the proportion of Jews to the total population rose from 18 per cent to nearly 30 per cent.
16. The Arab population has increased almost entirely as a result of an excess of births over deaths.
He will find out the hard way; you know...by living the reality instead of the anti-Israel web-sites.I might vote for him except that he just can't get it through his head that the UN general assembly has no authority.
