EngineNr9
Too chicken to post the link where you got that 'information'?
History versus Arab claims to ?homeland?
By Dr. M.E RITCHIE
(E. M. O?CONNOR- NOM DE PLUME)
When Yasser Arafat appeared with his gun at the General Assembly of the United Nations on Nov. 13, 1973, he demanded that Israel be destroyed.
He claimed that Israel was the "nation homeland" of the "Palestinian people" from which the majority had been driven by "Zionist invaders" who "usurped the properties of Palestinian Arabs" by coming to Palestine since 1881.
When one searches for proof that a "Palestinian people" lived in a separate state called Palestine in 1881, one finds that in 1881 Palestine was only part of Turkey and had no separate existence at all.
The Encyclopedia Britannica (1972) notes that Palestine was under Turkish domination for 400 years between August 24, 1516 and its capture by British forces between December 1917 and October 1918. It never existed as a separate state ruled by its own people, except when the people were Jewish.
Are Arafat?s other statements also wrong?
What about Arafat?s repeated denunciations of Jewish immigrants since 1881 as having "usurped the properties of Palestine Arabs" by their immigration since 1881, and having contributed nothing to the country? Arafat claimed:
"The Jewish invasion of Palestine began in 1881?Palestine was then a verdant area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building up its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture."
The "invasion" is the excuse Arafat uses for bombings, skyjackings and murder almost a hundred years later.
But what was this part of Turkey like when Jewish immigrants came there in 1881?
Not the way Arafat describes it.
Palestine was described by travelers as a desolate empty, ruined land. Thomas Shaw (1738), Volney (1783, 1784, 1785), James Finn (1878), Alphonse de Lamartine (1835) and Mark Twain (1867) all wrote about it with horror.
Volney described the "ruined" and desolate" country and estimated the total population of the much larger area he saw as no more than 50,000 to 100,000.
Lamartine wrote:
"Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw Indeed no living object, heard no living object, heard no living sound, we found the same void the same silence?as we should have expected before the entombed gates of Pompeli or Herculaneam?a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways in the country?the tomb of a whole people."(Recollections of the East, vol. 1, pp. 268, 308, London, 1815).
Mark Twain, in his book "The Innocents Abroad," after a trip in 1867, described
Palestine as:
"Desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds?a silent mournful expanse?A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely?We never saw a human being on the whole route?
"There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country?
"Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Palestine is desolate and unlovely."
George Adam Smith, a geographer who visited Palestine in 1830 before the changes made by European Immigrants, described the country as a mixture of barren, treeless land, and malarial weed-grown swamps.
Jews who bought this worthless land were called "children of death" because many of them did not survive. Now, almost a hundred years later, Arafat labels these immigrants "invaders" and demands the right to take over their land.
Did these immigrants destroy the "indigenous culture" Arafat described as existing until European Jews came as immigrants? Or did they improve matters?
The old travelers and geographers found no indigenous culture. They told of isolated villages, each an enemy of the next, of Arab marauders, of incredible poverty, disease and beggars.
Mark Twain described mudhouses five to seven feet high, covered with discs of camel dung for fuel because there was no timber of any consequence in Palestine. Tiberias was described in appalling terms by Twain.
Smith called it a "poor fevered place of less than 5,000 inhabitants." Cunningham Geikie wrote of Galilee that "Tiberias and the wretched Magdala are the only inhabited places on the whole lake, although in the day of our Lord nine towns and many villages, all populous were found on its shores or on the hillsides behind."
Jerusalem was described by Mark Twain as having "rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt?. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently?the eternal "bucksheesh."
All travelers described Arabs and Jews living in these dreadful conditions. None saw a people called "Palestinians" who are said by Arafat to have lived in a verdant Palestine with an ancient culture.
Records such as the 1920 British Foreign Office Peace Handbooks (Mohammedan History) show that Arabs as well as Jews benefited from immigration of these European Jews to that desolate land.
All travelers made clear that Jews continued to live in the land. There is no suggestion that Jews ever abandoned their claim to it. It was this continuity of Jewish presence in their land that Reverend James Parkes, writing in "Whose Land?" considered to be the real title deeds of Jews to their land.
For Canada, however, the role of immigrants is doubly important. Like Israel, Canada was built by the work of immigrants. Unlike Israel, immigrants to Canada did not belong to the original inhabitants. If immigrants acquire no rights from work in a land, then 20 million Canadians are in danger. If Israel is threatened, Canada is even more in danger.