[Islam had a golden age during the Arab Crusades of Conquest. Back during the 8th-13th century Muslim artists, engineers, scholars, poets, philosophers, geographers and traders contributed directly and greatly to agriculture, the arts, economics, industry, law, literature, navigation, philosophy, sciences, sociology, and technology, both by preserving earlier traditions and by adding inventions and innovations of their own. At one point they were innovators, but that was a long time ago!
Pathetic that you need to go back to the 8th century to find a highpoint of Islam. Muslims are mostly associated with terrorism since then. Too bad Muslims persecuted and slaughtered Jews and Christians back then, right?
In 1615 the English traveler George Sandys described Palestine as "a land that flows with milk and honey; in the midst as it were of the habitable world, and under a temperate clime; adorned with beautiful mountains and luxurious valleys; the rocks producing excellent waters; and no part empty of delight or profit."(4)
A British missionary who lived in Beirut and visited Palestine in 1859 described the southern coastal area as "a very ocean of wheat," and the British Consul in Jerusalem, James Finn, reported that "the fields would do credit to British farming."(5)
The German geographer Alexander Scholch concluded that between 1856 and 1882 "Palestine produced a relatively large agricultural surplus which was marketed in neighboring countries, such as Egypt and Lebanon, and increasingly exported to Europe. These exports included wheat, barley, dura, maise, sesame, olive oil, soap, oranges, vegetables and cotton. Among the European importers of Palestinian produce were France, England, Turkey, Greece, Italy and Malta."(6)
Lawrence Oliphant, who visited Palestine in 1887, wrote that Palestine's Valley of Esdraelon was "a huge green lake of waving wheat, with its village-crowned mounds rising from it like islands; and it presents one of the most striking pictures of luxuriant fertility which it is possible to conceive."(7) This Palestinian wheat had historically played an important part in international commerce. According to Paul Masson, a French economic historian, "wheat shipments from the Palestinian port of Acre had helped to save southern France from famine on numerous occasions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."(8)
Agricultural techniques in Palestine, especially in citriculture, were among the most advanced in the world long before the first Zionist settlers came to its shores. In 1856, the American consul in Jerusalem, Henry Gillman, "outlined reasons why orange growers in Florida would find it advantageous to adopt Palestinian techniques of grafting directly onto lemon trees."^ In 1893, the British Consul advised his government of the value of importing "young trees procured from Jaffa" to improve production in Australia and South Africa.(10)
All of this historical evidence from unimpeachable eyewitnesses destroys Israel's contention that it developed Palestine through its colonization. The legend that the Zionists have created, that they made "the desert bloom with roses," is totally without foundation. It is a ploy to gain donations from naive Jews throughout the world and to help extort economic aid from the American Congress. The economic achievements of Israel today are built totally on the capital base of lands, property and possessions usurped from the Palestinian Arabs.
Chapter 2: Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem
