From Newsgroup: soc.history.war.misc

from Quora

Why didnrCOt the Zionists simply buy the land from the Palestinians?
They did buy the land.

Legally, with cash and proper paperwork to prove it.

But when Zionist immigrants started arriving in what is now Israel in
the 1880rCOs, the land they bought wasnrCOt owned by rCLPalestiniansrCY (aka local Arabs). The region was actually very sparsely populated, and there werenrCOt many local Arabs to begin with. The land was part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire at the time, and almost all of the land that was for
sale was owned by absentee landowners who lived in Damascus or Istanbul
or other parts of the Ottoman Empire. And most of the land the Jews
bought, sight-unseen, turned out to be uninhabited swampland or desert,
which would require years of backbreaking labor to turn it into arable farmland.

Sometimes there were local Arabs already living on the land that the
Jews had bought rCo tenants or squatters rCo and those Arabs would have to
be paid off to get them to move off. Some of those people had probably
been living there for years and were understandably unhappy about having
to move, but it was all entirely legal.

But as more Jewish immigrants bought parcels of land and began
developing it, it created a demand for labor, and soon Arabs and other
Muslims began arriving in the area from other parts of the Ottoman
Empire looking for employment.

So today, most of the people who now call themselves rCLPalestiniansrCY and claim to have lived on the land for millennia are actually the
descendants of Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians or Iraqis, or
even Bosnians from the Balkans, who only came to Israel around the same
time that the first Zionist immigrants did. And they never owned the land.

--------------
Brook Wimbury
-+ 1y
Jews did purchase land pre 1948, post 1948 many Arabs simply ran
away(orders from the Arab league to leave), who planned on killing all
Jews or driving them into the sea).The Arabs got that wrong-the
winner(Israel) takes it all.

Profile photo for Rachel Streich
Profile photo for Joe Mandt
Joe Mandt
-+ Sep 17
Even so, what percentage of those who ran away actually owned the land
they lived on? How many of them, by running away to the West Bank,
occupied land that didnrCOt belong to them?

Profile photo for Phil
Phil
-+ Sep 27
None. The land was owned by wealth Ottoman rCLTurkrCOsrCY who lived in Damascus. The Ottomans controlled most of the Levant, greater Syria and greater Turkey, etc for several hundred years.

No, the sharecropper's and shepherd's used the land for a fee. None
owned it m

Profile photo for Joe Mandt
Joe Mandt
-+ Sep 27
At the end of World War I, the Ottomans released all of the Arabs that
they had interned Before the Jews were released. The Ottomans told the
Arabs that they could have whatever private land they put a flag in.
Even after that, they only owned about 1/3 of the private land, which wouldrCOve been about 8% of the total area of the mandate west of the
Jordan. The Jew owned a similar amount and those absentee landlords of
which you speak owned the other 8%. 76% of the land was owned by the government. Remember that a considerable portion of Israel is the Negev.
The Palestinian defenders will talk about how much more land the Jews
got, but ignore the fact that most of it was desert, and that you
werenrCOt counting the land that have been given to Jordan. Right out of
the gate, the only benefit that Israel received from that land was the
port of Eilat.


Profile photo for Joe Mandt
Joe Mandt
-+ Oct 21
Actually, the local Arabs owned about a third of the privately owned
land in 1948. The question is how many of them acquired that ownership
when the Ottomans, knowing that the war was lost, told them that they
could stick a flag in the thing they wanted and it would be theirs. Even
then, some supposedly didnrCOt because of their long aversion to being
known to the government so that they could be taxed and drafted into the
army.

Profile photo for W W Hall
W W Hall
-+ Oct 21
The West Bank Land was taken after the 1969 Arab Attacks on Israel aka
The Six Day War. More of a consequence of War after the attacking group
loses.

Ben Sloane
1967 (other than that, solid point)
Profile photo for Tarek ElGohari
Tarek ElGohari
-+ Sep 24
Orders from the Arab League to leaverCa

What a load of BS. The Dalet plan to expel Arabs was 100pct Zionist.

The Arabs were deliberately expelled by the Zionist terrorist gangs (as labelled by the British) even from Jaffa which was allocated to Arabs by
the UN partition plan.

Profile photo for Phil
Phil
-+ Sep 27
Nice rant. Not factual but I hope it made you feel better.

The Arab leaders were confident that their armies, many trained by the
British Africa core had tanks and some artillery, which did them no
good, would steamroll the Jewish Farmers and home guard. They
underestimated the Palmach, Irgun and Stern Gang who like you,
considered them thugs and criminal gange. What they didn't know was that
the various Jewish groups understood the gravity of the situation and
were working together. Many of the rCLillegalrCY DP's had military
experience. Some of the British soldiers were on the Jews side in
contrast of their rCLupper classrCY officers. With exceptions like colonel Oliver Wingate who trained Palmach Fighters on how to take down tanks,
and drilled the Jewish officers and leaders on proper Military tactics
so that the Jews living would stand a chance when the Arab League
attacked them.

So, despite what on paper looked like as an easy Arab victory, was in
fact, a grossly overconfident poorly motivated force. Officers didn't
get along with each other. Orders issued by Egyptian officer's were
ignored by Syrian forces who had their own motivations.

So in the end, the advances made in the first day and a half were turned
back. The Arabs civilians were salavating over the thought of getting
all the spoils after their armies destroyed the Jewish homes, businesses
and fields, were emotionally destroyed along with their armies. Rather
than steal the Jews property, they found themselves in UN tents, all of
their property gone, their homes destroyed by the fighting.

Unlike in golf, there are no do overs. But to the average Arab sitting
in their own dung, it wasn't fair, they were supposed to win. No matter
how many times they fought the Israelis, they lost more land. Which
brings us to today where they sit in the UN, trying to get all their
allies to unseat the Jews, the US stands behind Israel .

-----------

Profile photo for George Zouros
George Zouros
-+ Oct 15
On demographics: The claim that Palestine was "very sparsely populated"
with "not many local Arabs" contradicts Ottoman and British census data.
The 1878 Ottoman census showed ~350,000-400,000 inhabitants (85% Muslim Arabs), growing to ~500,000 by 1890 and 757,000 by the 1922 British
census (78% Arab). This wasn't sparserCoit was a substantial indigenous population.

On "recent immigrants": The claim that "most" Palestinians descend from immigrants who arrived around the same time as Zionist settlers comes
directly from Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial (1984), which was
thoroughly debunked by demographic historians across the political
spectrum. Ottoman registration records show 93% of Muslims in 1905 were
born in their locality, and Justin McCarthy's authoritative demographic analysis found "evidence for Muslim immigration into Palestine is
minimal" and "statistically untenable" as an explanation for population growth.

The critical omission: Even accepting that land purchases were legal, by
1945 Jews owned approximately 5.23% of Mandatory Palestine's total land
area (1,393,531 dunams out of 26,625,600). The question isn't whether purchases were legalrCoit's whether legal purchase of 6% of the land
creates sovereignty over 100% of the territory and justifies
displacement of the 95% who lived there.

This framingrCoemphasizing legality of purchases while overstating Arab immigration and understating Arab presencerCocould give the impression
that the goal is to suggest Palestinians lack legitimate claims to the
land. Whether intended or not, it risks conflating property purchase
with territorial sovereignty, which are entirely different concepts in
both law and ethics.
----------------------------


Profile photo for Mattika (Bensouas) drCOSabetai-Rosenthal
Mattika (Bensouas) drCOSabetai-Rosenthal
-+ Nov 8
Did you know that during World War I the Ottomans had TURKISH SOLDIERS
IN OTTOMAN CONTROLLED LAND? My fatherrCys grandfather was one of those
Turkish soldiers, and you know how he got there? To fight a war, that
Turkey lost.

Did you know that the Turkish soldiers were abandoned there at the end
of the war? Did you know that they stranded Turkish soldiers at the end
of the war? And the Turkish soldiers consisted of both Jews and Muslims,
and that they were abandoned there with only the uniforms on their
backs? So thatrCOs how the first Jewish relative of ours got to Israel,
and they decided to stay. Abandoned them there with nothing. They
approached the Jewish Zionists to work in exchange for food. And the
Zionists fought them, because they were wearing Turkish uniforms, they
had to prove to them that they were Jews, and they did that by picking
up SIDDURS and reading them in Hebrew. And the Zionists were astonished!Efy>

Profile photo for Harry Shamir
Harry Shamir
-+ Nov 8
Thank you for this input. It is interesting. Would you know how many
such abandoned Jewish soldiers there were?


Profile photo for Eli Elyzium
Eli Elyzium
-+ Oct 25
A few hundred K in a land the size of New Jerseys is a sparsely
populated region. And a larger number of Arabs there do not override a
smaller group of people with cohesion that actually owned their lands
legally. So your calculus is riding on a premise of simplistic false equivalences.

Profile photo for Joe Mandt
Joe Mandt
-+ Oct 21
The population of 1800 was about half of what it was in 1878. Prior to
the changes in immigration laws and the arrival of Europeans, the
population of the region was stagnant. The post plague population of the
1300s is about 150,000 people. It had only gotten up to about 275,000
some years later in 1800.


--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2