Hello Prisca,
thanks for the interesting and I must add ...fascinating subject.
I doi believe that IslandWoman would appreciate some informations
on this matter.
Let's begin:
from : http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/5606/FM/E17.htm#ZIONISM
ZIONISM TO PROSPER
17:22. Thus saith the Lord God: I will also take of the highest branch of the high cedar, and will set it; I will crop off from the top of his young twigs a tender one, and will plant it upon a high mountain and eminent .— Thus says the Lord God: One of the highest branches of ecclesiasticism is Judaism. I will establish Judaism. I will take, in Judaism, one of its young and tender aspirations— Zionism— and will plant it, establish it at the very pinnacle of the coming Kingdom of God— the Jews ruling, through the resurrected Ancient Worthies— Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc.— over the earthly phase of that Kingdom.— Psa. 45:16; Heb. 11:40.
17:23. In the mountains of the height of Israel will I plant it; and it shall bring forth boughs, and bear fruit, and be a goodly cedar; and under it shall dwell all fowl of every wing; in the shadow of the branches thereof shall they dwell .— It shall branch above all nations (boughs) and bear character fruit unto life eternal. (John 4:36.) It shall be the desire of all nations (Hag. 2:7) (a goodly cedar). Under it shall dwell in peace all the truly wise ones of earth.
17:24. And all the trees of the field shall know that I the Lord have brought down the high tree, have exalted the low tree, have dried up the green tree, and have made the dry tree to flourish: I the Lord have spoken and have done it .— All the people (trees) of the world (field) shall know that the Lord has brought down nominal ecclesiasticism and exalted the Ancient Worthies, has dried up "Christianity" and given vitality to Zionism and Judaism.
*** Baron Benjamin (Edmond James) de Rothschild, the Jews and Palestine J
from: http://westy.jtwn.k12.pa.us/users/mjr/me3.html
Middle Ages to the Holocaust
During the Middle Ages, the signs of anti-Semitism were many and obvious. Jews were forced to live in restricted areas and excluded from commerce and some professions. Their rights were limited and often they were overtaxed. Tormented by ridicule and accused of such monstrous crimes as slaughtering children for ritual purposes, they were driven from place after place and butchered by mobs. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1395. In the German States, the Black Plague was attributed to the poisoning of wells by Jews. In March of 1492, Jews were ordered, on pain of death, to leave Spain within four months. From 1500 to the nineteenth century, a gradual improvement in the status of Jews was observed although the feeling of anti-Semitism was never far from the surface. The reestablishment of Jews in England began in 1723 when a considerable number of Jews who had returned were recognized as British subjects. Jews were given full religious equality in Switzerland in 1874. When Italy was united in 1870, the Italian Jews won full civil rights.
Although Jews had made pilgrimages to Palestine since the tenth century, the mass number of Jews had remained in Europe since the Diaspora. A revival of anti-Semitism toward the end of the nineteenth century gave rise to the Zionist movement whose aim was to restore Palestine to the Jews where they would be free from persecution. However, the "Dreyfus Affair" gave rise to the feeling that the time for "a Jewish State" had arrived.
In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, one of the few Jewish army officers in the French army, was unjustly accused of treason during a wave of anti- Jewish feeling in France. Dreyfus was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Although he was eventually cleared, the Dreyfus case showed Jewish leaders that even in "enlightened" France, Jews could not be guaranteed justice. One of these leaders,
a writer and journalist (pictured) from Vienna, Theodor Herzl, founded the Zionist Movement in 1897. In his book, THE JEWISH STATE, Herzl detailed the notion that Jews must return to their traditional homeland in Zion - Israel. Therefore, The Zionists had one goal: work for a Jewish home in "Eretz Israel" - the land of Israel. This same land is known to people in the West as Palestine. Historically, it should be noted that some Jews had never left Israel. While only few in number, Israel was never officially without Israelis. However, large number of European Jews actually began to settle there in the late 1800s.
Donations for the Jewish National Fund were collected in "Blue Boxes" like this one. The fund, established in 1901, is active in purchasing land in Israel. Money for land in Israel came not only from small donations, from large contributions from wealthy philanthropists like Baron de Rothschild of Paris who initiated pioneer colonies in Palestine between 1883 and 1900. Some of these settlements are still active today. For example, Zikhron is one of Rothschild's settlements. The name "Zikhron-Yaakov" means "In memory of Yaakov (Jakob) who was the father of Baron de Rothschild. Initially, the land in Israel (Palestine) was purchased from absentee landowners who lived in the cities and were happy to make a good profit by selling the land. Unfortunately, Arabs who worked the land as tenant farmers were suddenly forced to leave. Many migrated to the cities, but faced severe hardship because they had neither education nor money. Between 1881 and 1914, 60,000 Jews had emigrated to Palestine. And, by 1914, almost 100,000 acres of Palestinian land had been purchased by the Jews. Despite the increasing tension between these new immigrants and the Palestinian Arabs who continued to live in Palestine, Britain supported the Jewish settlers by issuing a 1917 "White Paper" known as the Balfour Declaration. It declared that "His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People...it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine..."
The Balfour Declaration would not have had a significant impact except that the British were given a mandate over Palestine following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I
The British were now in the position to make policy and determine what land would belong to whom. It was understandable that some Jews should want to go to Palestine, since their ancestors had lived there some 2,000 years ago. On the other hand, the Arabs replied that 2,000 years is a long time, and during that time they occupied Palestine and made it their home. To that extent, historians often refer to this as a "right-right proposition."
The rise of Adolph Hitler hastened the emigration of Jews to Palestine. By 1937, the Jews constituted almost one-third of the total population of Palestine. Between 1928 and 1937, their number had risen from 150,000 to 400,000. The influx of Zionist settlers aroused angry resentment among Arabs and the resultant clashes were bitter. Britain decided, in 1939, to sharply curtail further Jewish immigration leading to a militant reactio n on the part of the Jews. It was no longer a question of land purchased by individual settlers, but the threat of an alien state in a land that had been inhabited by Arabs for over 1,000 years. However, the times were desperate for the Jews; the Holocaust had begun. By 1945, 6,000,000 Jews had been killed by a killing machine that is unparalled in modern history.
5 Questions about the Holocaust
1. What was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. In 1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during World War II. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed. Jews were the primary victims -- six million were murdered; Roma (Gypsies), the handicapped and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic or national reasons. Millions more, including Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.
2. Who were the Nazis?
"Nazi" is a short term for the National Socialist German Workers Party, a right-wing political party formed in 1919 primarily by unemployed German veterans of World War I. Adolf Hitler became head of the party in 1921, and under his leadership the party eventually became a powerful political force in German elections by the early 1930's. The Nazi party ideology was strongly anti-Communist, antisemitic, racist, nationalistic, imperialistic and militaristic. In 1933, the Nazi Party assumed power in Germany and Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. He ended German democracy and severely restricted basic rights, such as freedom of speech, press and assembly. He established a brutal dictatorship through a reign of terror. This created an atmosphere of fear, distrust and suspicion in which people betrayed their neighbors and which helped the Nazis to obtain the acquiescence of social institutions such as the civil service, the educational system, churches, the judiciary, industry, business and other professions.
3. Why did the Nazis want to kill large numbers of innocent people?
The Nazis believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that there was a struggle for survival between them and "inferior races." Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and the handicapped were seen as a serious biological threat to the purity of the "German (Aryan) Race" and therefore had to be "exterminated." The Nazis blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I, for its economic problems and for the spread of Communist parties throughout Europe. Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians and others) were also considered "inferior" and destined to serve as slave labor for their German masters. Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and Free Masons were persecuted, imprisoned and often killed on political and behavioral (rather than racial) grounds . Sometimes the distinction was not very clear. Millions of Soviet Prisoners of War perished from starvation, disease and forced labor or were killed for racial political reasons.
4. How did the Nazis carry out their policy of genocide?
In the late 1930's the Nazis killed thousands of handicapped Germans by lethal injection and poisonous gas. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units following in the wake of the German Army began shooting massive numbers of Jews and Roma (Gypsies) in open fields and ravines on the outskirts of conquered cities and towns. Eventually the Nazis created a more secluded and organized method of killing enormous numbers of civilians -- six extermination centers were established in occupied Poland where large-scale murder by gas and body disposal through cremation were conducted systematically. Victims were deported to these centers from Western Europe and from the ghettos in Eastern Europe which the Nazis had established. In addition, millions died in the ghettos and concentration camps as a result of forced labor, starvation, exposure, brutality, disease and execution.
5. How did the world respond to the Holocaust?
The United States and Great Britain as well as other nations outside Nazi Europe received numerous press reports in the 1930s about the persecution of Jews. By 1942 the governments of the United States and Great Britain had confirmed reports about "the Final Solution" -- Germany's intent to kill all the Jews of the Europe. However, influenced by antisemitism and fear of a massive influx of refugees, neither country modified their refugee policies. Their stated intention to defeat Germany militarily took precedence over rescue efforts, and therefore no specific attempts to stop or slow the genocide were made until mounting pressure eventually forced the United States to undertake limited rescue efforts in 1944. In Europe, rampant antisemitism incited citizens of many German occupied countries to collaborate with the Nazis in their genocidal policies. There were, however, individuals and groups in every occupied nation who, at great personal risk, helped hide those targeted by the Nazis. One nation, Denmark, saved most of its Jews in a night time rescue operation in 1943 in which Jews were ferried in fishing boats to safety in neutral Sweden.
SOURCE: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum http://www.ushmm.org/misc-bin/add_goback/education/5quest.html
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from:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Zionism
Timeline of Zionism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Timeline of Zionism in the modern era:
· 1861 - The Zion Society is formed in Frankfurt, Germany .
· 1870 - 1890 - Russian group Chovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion) sets up 30 Jewish farming colonies in Palestine , financially aided by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. They were populated by European Jews with no common language; Eliezer ben Yehuda labored to revive Hebrew as a common spoken language. ( [1] )
· 1881 - 1884 - Russian pogroms kill tens of thousands of Jews. Hundreds of thousands of Jews flee.
· 1880 - 1920 - Two million Russian Jews migrate to the US.
· 1882 - 1903 - The first major wave of Jewish immigration ( aliyah ) to Palestine .
· 1894 - The Dreyfus affair radicalizes Theodore Herzl
· 1896 - Herzl writes Der Judenstaat (The State of Jews) advocating the creation of a Jewish state.
· 1896 - 1904 Herzl unsuccessfully approaches world leaders for assistance in the creation of a Jewish National Home.
· 1897 - The First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland , urges "a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine" for Jews and establishes the World Zionist Organization (WZO).
· 1901 - Fifth Zionist Congress establishes the Jewish National Fund .
· 1902 - Herzl publishes the novel Altneuland (Old-New Land), which takes place in Palestine.
· 1903 - 1906 - More pogroms in Russia
· 1903 - Controversial Uganda Proposal for settlement in East Africa splits the 6th Zionist Congress. A committee is created to look into it.
· 1904 - 1914 - Second aliyah.
· 1917 - The British gain control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire during World War I .
· 1917 - The British issue the Balfour Declaration , lending support for "the establishment in Palestine for a national home for the Jewish people".
· 1918 - 1920 - More pogroms in Russia
· 1919 - 1923 - Third aliyah.
· 1920 - The San Remo conference in Italy establishes the British Mandate of Palestine .
· 1920 - Histadrut founded.
· 1920 - Haganah founded.
· 1921 - Chaim Weizmann becomes new President of the WZO at the 12th Zionist Congress (the first since World War I).
· 1921 - Autonomy is given to Transjordan under Crown Prince Abdullah . Jewish settlement is outlawed there.
· 1922 - The text from the San Remo Conference is confirmed by the League of Nations .
· 1923 - Britain gives the Golan Heights to the French mandate of Syria.
· 1924 - 1928 - Fourth aliyah.
· 1932 - 1939 - Fifth aliyah.
· 1933 - 1945 Jews flee Germany because of persecution under the Nazi government. Jews are turned away because of the British limit on immigrants.
· 1936 - The British propose a partition between Jewish and Arab areas. It is accepted by the Zionists, but rejected by the Arab parties (See [2] ).
· 1936 - 1939 - Great Uprising by Arabs against British rule and Jewish immigration.
· 1939 - The British government issues the 'White Paper' setting a limit of 75,000 on future Jewish immigration to Palestine (See [3] ).
· 1947 - On November 29, the United Nations approves partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. It is accepted by the Jews, but rejected by the Arabs (See [4] [5] .
· 1947 - November 30, guerrilla war starts between Jewish forces, centered around the Haganah and Palestinian Arab forces.
· 1948 - May 14. The State of Israel declares itself as an independent nation.
· 1948 - May 15. Neighboring Arab countries invade, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war ensues.
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from: http://www.angelfire.com/pa/waraqa/palhis.html
B.C.
600,000 - 10,000
Paleolithic and Mesolithic period. Earliest human remains in
the area(found south of the Lake of Tabariyya), date back to
ca. 600,000 BC.
10,000 - 5,000
Neolithic period. Establishment of settled agricultural
communities.
5,000 - 3,000
Chalcolithic period. Copper and stone tools and artifacts from
this period found near Jericho, Bi'r As-Sabi' and the Dead
Sea.
3,000 - 2,000
Early Bronze Age.Arrival and settlement of the Arab Canaanites
(3,000 - 2,500 BC)
ca. 1,250?
Israelite conquest of Canaan.
965? - 928?
King Solomon (Sulayman), construction of the temple in Jerusalem.
928?
Division of the Israelite state into the kingdom of
Israel and Judah.
721
Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Israel.
586
Judah defeated by Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar,
deportation of its population to Babylon and destruction of the
temple.
539
Persians conquer Babylonia, allowance of deportees to return
and construction of a new temple.
333
Alexander the Great conquers Persia and Palestine comes
under the Greek rule.
323
Alexander the Great dies, alternate rule by Ptolemies of
Egypt and Seleucids of Syria.
165
Maccabees revolt against the Seleucid ruler (Antiochus
Epiphanes) and establish an independent state.
63
Incorporation of Palestine into the Roman Empire.
A.D.
70
Destruction of the second temple by the Roman
Emperor Titus.
132-135
Suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Jews barred from
Jerusalem and Emperor Hadrian builds a pagan city on its ruins.
330-638
Palestine under Byzantine occupation, Christianity spreads.
638
Muslim Khalifa Omar ibn al-Khattaab liberates Jerusalem and
ends the Byzantine occupation.
661-750
Palestine administered by the Umayyad muslim chaliphs from
Damascus and construct the Dome of the Rock ('Abd al-Malik,
685-705) and Al-Aqsa in its current shape (al-Walid, 705-715).
750-1258
Palestine administered from Baghdad by the'Abbasid muslim caliphs.
969
Palestine administered by the Fatimids.
1071
Muslim Saljuqs (originally from Isfahan) rule Jerusalem and parts of
Palestine (officially still under the 'Abbasids).
1099-1187
The Crusaders occupation and establishment of the "Latin Kingdom of
Jerusalem".
1187
Great muslim leader Salah al-Diin al-Ayyoubi (from Kurdistan)
conquers the crusaders in the battle of Hittin, kicks
them back to Europe and frees Jerusalem. Plaestine
administered from Cairo.
1260
The Mamluks succeed the Ayyubis, continue to administer Palestine
from Cairo and kick the Mongols in the battle of 'Ayn Jaluut near
An-Nasira.
1291
The Mamluks (Khalil bin Qalawuun) conquer the last crusader
stronghold in Akka and Qisariya.
1516-1917
Palestine incorporated into the Ottoman state and administered from
Istanbul.
1832-1840
Moh'd Ali Pasha (Egypt) rules Palestine, Ottomans take over
afterwards.
1876-1877
First Palestinian deputies from Jerusalem attend the first Ottoman
parliament.
1878
First Zionist settlement (Petach Tiqva) established under the
guise of agricultural community.
1882-1903
First wave of Zionists (25000 strong) enters Palestine as illegal
immigrants
from Eastern Europe.
1882
French Baron E. de Rothschild starts backing Zionists activities
in Palestine financially.
1887-1888
Ottomans divide Palestine into three districts: Jerusalem (follows
Istanbul), Akka and Nablus (follow the 'wilaya' of Beirut).
1895 - 1917
1895
The total population of Palestine was 500,000 of whom
47,000 were Jews who owned 0.5% of the land.
1896
Following the appearance of anti-Semitism in Europe,
Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism tried to find a political
solution for the problem in his book, 'The Jewish State'. He
advocated the creation of a Jewish state in Argentina or Palestine.
1897
The first Zionist Congress was held in Switzerland,
which issued the Basle programme
on the colonization of Palestine and the establishment
of the World Zionist Organization (WZO).
1904
Fourth Zionist Congress decided to
establish a national home for Jews in Argentina.
1906
The Zionist congress decided the Jewish
homeland should be Palestine.
1914
With the outbreak of World War I, Britain
promised the independence of Arab lands under Ottoman rule,
including Palestine, in return for Arab support against
Turkey which had entered the war on the side of Germany.
1916
Britain and France signed the Sykes-Picot
Agreement, which divided the Arab region into zones of influence.
Lebanon and Syria were assigned to France, Jordan and Iraq to
Britain and Palestine was to be internationalized.
1917
Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary sent a
letter to the Zionist leader Lord Rothschild which later became
known as "TheBalfour declaration
". He stated that Britain would use its best endeavors
to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people. At that time the population of
Palestine was 700,000 of which 574,000 were Muslims,
74,000 were Christian, and 56,000 were Jews.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1919 - 1967
1919
The Palestinians convened their first National
Conference and expressed their opposition to the Balfour
Declaration.
1920
The San Remo Conference granted Britain a
mandate over Palestine and two years later Palestine was
effectively under British administration,and Sir Herbert
Samuel, a declared Zionist, was sent as Britain's first
High Commissioner to Palestine.
1922
The Council of the League of Nations issued
a Mandate for Palestine. The Mandate was in favor of the
establishment for the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine.
1929
The outbreak of Al-Boraq uprising .
1935/11/20
The muslim syrian leader Izz-aldeen Alqasam
killed in Palestine by british occupation(a biginning to 1936 strike)
1936-1939
The Great revolution;
Palestinians held a six-month General Strike(longest strike
in history )to protest against killing of Izz-aldeen Alqasam & the
confiscation of land and Jewish immigration.
But the strike was stopped by arab leaders thinking that Britain
will give palestinians thier rights.But revolution continues:
-146 palestinians excuted;
-50,000 palestinians arrested for miscellanuous periods;
-2,000 palestinians centanced for long periods;
-5,000 houses detroyed;
-leaders of revolution expeld.
1939
Timing with the outbreak of WW2 British
government published a new White Paper restricting Jewish
immigration and offering independence for Palestine within
ten years.This was rejected by the Zionists, who then
organized terrorist groups and launched a bloody campaign against the
British and the Palestinians.The aim was to drive them both out of
Palestine and to pave the way for the establishment of the Zionist
state.(The white paper was banded by Britain after war)
1947
The United Nations approved the partition under which
the Palestinian Arabs, who accounted for 70% of the population and
owned 92% of the land, were allocated 47% of the country.& for zionist
who stole 5% allocated 50%of palestine & the rest is international
zone(UN resolution 181)
1948
British forces withdrew from Palestine in
May (leaving weapons for zionists)and the Zionists proclaimed
the state of Israel without defining its borders.Unprepared
Arab armies moved to defend the Palestinians.Corruption in
arab armies leads to a defeat for arab armies.Angry arab
military officcers staged coup d'etat in thier contries
against thier leaders (e.g Qasim in Iraq ,Zaiem in Syria&
Naser & Muslim brotherhode in Egypt)
1949
A cease fire was finally agreed. The
Zionists controlled 77% of Palestinian land and over
1 million Palestinians were forced to leave their
country. The West Bank was put under Jordanian control and
the Gaza Strip under Egyptian control.
1964
The Palestine Liberation Organization
was established.
1967
Israel launched a new war against the
Arabs and seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the
Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian
Sinai peninsula.UN issues resolution
number 242
1973 - 1988
1973
The October War between Israel and the Arab states
broke out.UN issues resolution number 338
1974
The Arab Summit in Rabat recognized the PLO as the
sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. At the
United Nations General Assembly, the UN reaffirmed its commitment to
an independent sovereign state in Palestine and gave the PLO observer
status at the United Nations.
Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO, addressed the General Assembly
of the United Nations.
1978
Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David
Agreement under the auspices of the United States.
1982
Israel invaded Lebanon with the aim of
destroying the PLO. Tens of thousands were killed and made
homeless in the wake of the invasion which culminated in
the massacres of Sabra and Shatilla.
1983
The United Nations called for the
convening of a Peace Conference with the participation
of the PLO on an equal footing with the other delegates
as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
1987
In December the
Intifada-the Palestine Uprising - in the Occupied
Territories began.
1988
Abu Jihad, Palestinian leader,
was gunned down in his home in Tunis on 14April by
the Israeli Mossad.
July 31
Jordanian disengagement - King Hussein
of Jordan said he no longer considered the West Bank as
part of his kingdom.
November 15
The PNC meeting in Algiers declared
the State of Palestine
as outlined in the UN Partition Plan 181.
Following the US government refusing
Arafat a visa to enter the US, the UN General Assembly
held a special session on the question of Palestine in
Geneva.
US/PLO dialogue began
1989 - 1996
1989
June 28: EEC Madrid Conference issued a
new declaration calling for the PLO to be involved in any
peace negotiations.
August 3: Fateh, the mainstream PLO
organization, at their 5th Conference endorsed the PLO
strategy adopted at the PNC in Algiers in November 1988.
1990
May 20: Seven Palestinian workers from Gaza
were massacred by an Israeli gunman near Tel Aviv.
Yasser Arafat addressed the UN
Security Council In Geneva after the massacre in
which he called for the deployment of a UN emergency
force to provide international protection for the
Palestinian people to safeguard their lives, properties and holy
places.
The US vetoed a motion which called for the
Security Council to send a fact finding mission to the area.
At the end of their hunger strike, Palestinian leaders in the
Occupied Territories decided to boycott the US.
The Arab Summit in Baghdad strongly denounced
the settlement of Soviet Jews with in the Occupied Territories.
June 20: The US suspended its dialogue with
the PLO after the PLO refused to denounce a military operation
in the sea by the PLF.
June 26: The EEC in Dublin issued a new
declaration on the Middle East which condemned Israeli human
rights violations and the settlement of Soviet Jews in the
Occupied Territories. It also doubled its economic aid programme
to the Occupied Territories.
August 2: The Gulf Crisis erupted.
December 20: UN Security Council adopted
Resolution 681.
1991
January 16: War in the Gulf started.
February 17: Cease fire agreed in War in the
Gulf. - 23 September: The PNC met in Algiers and paved the way
for the Palestinian delegation to participate in the Middle East
Peace Conference.
October 30: The Middle East Peace Conference
convened in Madrid.
December 3: The bi-lateral talks between Israel
and the Palestinians, Syrians, Jordanians and Lebanese started in
Washington.
1992
June 23: Israeli Labor Party won the election
in Israel and formed a Labor coalition government.
August 24: The sixth round of the bi-lateral talks ,W.
1993
September 9-10: PLO Israeli recognition
September 13: Palestinian-Israeli Declaration of Principle
1994
May 4: Gaza strip and Jericho Agreement in Cairo
August 29: Transfer of the power Agreement.
1995
September 28: Palestinian Israeli Interim Agreement signed
in Washington.
1996
January: Election in Palestine
Israeli soldiers re deployed from major cities in the
West Bank, yet Hebron is still controlled by the Israeli soldiers
1997
January: Agreement of the redeployment from Hebron
February: Release of the women prisoners.
March: The construction of the new Israeli settlement
of Jabal Abu Ghneim (Har Homa) started.
March: Cease of the peace talks because of the continuous
of the settlements policy of the Netanyahu Government.
from: http://world.std.com/~camera/docs/cmr61/golan.html
Fall 1995
Volume 6, No. 1
History of the Golan
BCE
Early Biblical Period: Before 953
Modern-day Ramat ha Golan (Golan Heights) is the western section of the Biblical region of Bashan.
Moses defeats the local ruler and allots the land to the half-tribe of Manasseh.
The city of Golan, one of about 60 fortified cities in Bashan, is set aside as a city of refuge to which alleged murderers flee as they await trial. The city's name may be derived from the word "golah" meaning exile.
Golan is a Levitical city of the family of Gershon.
First Temple Period: 953-586
Damascus (The Aramean Kingdom) attacks Bashan and seizes areas from Jewish rule.
800-784 King Joash of Israel recovers the Golan from Damascus.
743-733 Rezin, king of Damascus, restores the Golan to his dynasty.
732 Assyrian Emperor Tiglath-Pileser II conquers Bashan and establishes two Assyrian provinces, Karnini and Hawrina. He exiles the Jews and populates the region with immigrants from other parts of his empire. Jews gradually return to the area.
Second Temple Period: After 586
Jews exiled by the Babylonians return to their homes in Bashan and live alongside the non-Jewish inhabitants.
Hellinistic Period
164 Judah Maccabee and his army defeat attacking marauders who had persecuted the Jews of Bashan.
85 Hasmonean King Alexander Yannai competes for control of the Golan with the Nabateans, and successfully secures the region as part of his kingdom.
Roman Period
65 Pompey conquers the Golan.
30-20 King Herod gradually acquires all of Bashan from Emperor Augustus. Jews from Palestine and Babylonia settle in Bashan and again declare the area a part of the Land of Israel. During Roman times and through the Byzantine period, the Bashan area enjoys flourishing cultural and religious centers.
CE
67 Great Jewish Revolt. Josephus commands Jewish army in the region. Gamla, the chief city in the Golan, is the last stronghold against the Roman Legions. Jewish settlement, however, continues and even thrives following the failed revolt.
70 Agrippa II rules the Golan for Rome. He builds a medical center/recreation complex on the site of the Banyas natural springs.
Talmudic Period
300 Modern archeological finds dating from this period include remnants of 25 synagogues and Jewish artifacts from more than 100 sites in the region.
324 The Byzantine al-Jafna dynasty rules throughout Bashan.
614 Chosroes II, king of Persia, defeats the Byzantines near the city of Edrei.
Islamic Conquest
636 After the Battle of the Yarmuk the Golan comes under the control of the Caliph Omar. The region flourishes during the rule of the Umayyad dynasty, but then deteriorates. Permanent Jewish settlements, including towns from the Talmudic period, Nob, Hissafiya and Kfar Harub, disappear.
1400-1500 Druze settle in the Golan and establish authority over much of it.
Ottoman Empire
1831-40 Egyptians seize the Golan.
1840 Turks regain power.
1880-84 Turkish government settles Muslim Circassian refugees in the Golan to ward off Bedouin robbers. Other settlers in the area include Sudanese, Algerians, Kurds, Turkomans, and Arabs from Samaria.
1886 First modern Jewish settlement is established when Jews from Tiberias and Safed purchase land from the Ramtaniya village and found Golan BeBashan east of the Sea of Galilee.
1887 Jews from Tiberias and Safed purchase land from Bedouin town of Bir Ashkum.
1891 Baron Edmund de Rothschild purchases 18,000 acres of land to found a Jewish settlement. Not until the end of the French Mandate are the Jews stripped of official title to land in the Golan.
1899 The Pasha of Damascus expels the Jews from Rothschild's settlement, but even after the 1923 Anglo-French Accord the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association administers the Baron's property.
1908 Jews settle in the Bet-Zayyada Valley.
British Mandate: 1917-1944
1917 The British conquer Palestine and drive out the Turks.
1919 The map of the Land of Israel submitted by the Zionist delegation to the Paris Peace Conference includes Ramat ha Golan. The Syrian National Congress demands the unification of Syria and installs Faisal as king.
1920 The Jews are forced out of Golan in the face of Arab rioting. Britain and France divide up the former Ottoman Empire giving France a mandate over Syria. The French order Faisal to leave Syria.
1923 Having discovered the Golan lacks oil but that the Mosul area in northern Syria is rich in oil, the British cede the Golan to France in return for Mosul. Traditionally Mosul was part of Syria while the Golan was part of the Galilee. In return for the Golan, France relinquishes any claim to Palestine.
1944 The Golan becomes part of the Republic of Syria. Sunni Muslims, Circassians, Druze, Alawites, a small Christian minority and other small groups live in the region. With the end of the French Mandate, all Jewish land ownership on the Golan is nullified.
Israel and Syria: 1948-1995
1949 Armistice agreement between Israel and Syria after three months of negotiations.
1948-67 Syria uses the Golan Heights as a military stronghold from which to attack Jewish communities in the Hula Valley.
1951 Syria moves forces into the Banyas area in the Golan, which is supposed to remain a demilitarized zone.
1967 Six Day War. Under attack, Israel moves against Syrian forces in the Golan gaining control of the plateau. Kibbutz Meron Golan is founded.
1967-73 Jews establish communities in the Golan and create nature reserves and agricultural, industrial and tourist enterprises.
1973 Yom Kippur War. After repulsing a surprise attack by the Syrians, Israel establishes a new defense line 20 miles from Damascus.
1974 Under the Syrian-Israeli Disengagement Agreement, Israel withdraws from all territory taken in the Yom Kippur War as well as from Kuneitra, acquired in 1967.
1981 Israel enacts the Law of Ramat haGolan stating that "The law and jurisdiction and administration of the State will apply to the Golan." Israel thereby replaces military with civilian rule.
1995 There are 32 Jewish communities, including the city of Qazrin, four Druze villages, one Sunni village and one Alawite village on the Golan.
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from: http://www.mideastweb.org/mebalfour.htm
THE BALFOUR DECLARATION
November 2, 1917
Introduction
There are different theories about why the British agreed to issue the Balfour declaration. One possibility is that the declaration was deliberately contrived to allow the British to renege on earlier promises to France and the Arabs regarding Palestine. Another, that it was done to curry favor with the Jews, so that the Jews in the United States and Russia would influence their governments to support the British cause in the war.
The Zionist leader Haim Weizmann settled in England in 1904 to pursue his career in chemistry. In 1906 his employer introduced him to Lord Balfour, who was anxious to convince Weizmann that the Zionist movement should accept Uganda, rather than Palestine, as a national home. Instead, Weizmann began the process of convincing Balfour that Palestine ought to be the Jewish national home. The British Zionist movement began actively lobbying the British government in their cause, and during the early years of the war found a sympathetic advocate in Mark Sykes, who professed an interest to liberate the 'downtrodden people of the world' including the Armenians, Arabs and Jews. During World War I, Weizmann's influence with the British government was increased by the fact that he lent his talents to producing the solvent acetone, needed for the war effort, by a fermentation process. Weizmann began drafting a proposal for a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, under British suzerainty. In the context of British designs in the Middle East, this improbable idea, similar to ideas proposed to the Turks and Germans previously, became a possibility. It was supported by several factions in the British government. It received some support because the British envisioned Palestine as an effective post for guarding the Suez canal. It received support for sentimental reasons, because beginning in the 19th century a number of leading figures in Britain had become interested in the idea of restoring the Jews to Palestine. Paradoxically, the idea of a Jewish state was also supported for anti-semitic reasons. Several members of the foreign service were convinced that the Jews had enormous influence on world affairs, and could use that influence to help either the allies or Germany. A rumor that the the Germans were about to grant a similar document to the Jews hastened the issuance of the Balfour declaration.
The British were busy making promises. Henry McMahon had exchanged letters with Hussein ibn Ali, Sheriff of Mecca in 1915, in which he had promised the Arabs control of the Arab lands, exclusive of the Mediterranean coast. The extent of the coastal exclusion is not clear. Hussein protested that the Arabs of Beirut would greatly oppose isolation from the Arab state or states, but did not it seems, bring up the matter of the area Jerusalem, which included a good part of Palestine. This suggests either that the area of Jerusalem and Palestine was not part of the inclusion and was promised to the Arabs, as shown in some maps , and is believed by pro-Arab historians, or that Palestine was included, but that Hussein did not protest. The latter version is supported by Dr. Haim Weizmann in his autobiographical book Trial and Error, and that interpretation was convenient to the British also, and supported explicitly by the British government in the White Paper of 1922.
In 1916, Mark Sykes had concluded a secret treaty with France which made a contradictory division of the lands to be won from Turkey. Now, the British government was to make a third contradictory declaration to the leading Zionists of Great Britain. During the negotiations with the Zionists, Sykes gave great support to the idea of a Jewish state and never mentioned the existence of the contradictory Sykes-Picot agreement with the French. Likewise, the Zionist leaders met George Picot, and he did not raise any objections based on that agreement, which gave the French control of much of Palestine.
As the proposal took shape and began to be known, it invited intense opposition from a small group of rich and influential assimilated Jews, who felt threatened by the possible implications of double loyalty. In particular, the idea was opposed by Edwin Montagu, who made a bitter attack against the declaration. The original text of the declaration had read "Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people." After Montagu's attack, the text was changed to read "the establishment in Palestine of a Home for the Jewish people." A clause was also added protecting the rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine and more curiously, a clause was added protecting the rights of Jewish communities outside Palestine. The final decision of the cabinet was made known in the form of a letter by Arthur James Lord Balfour to Lord Rothschild. It was believed that the Arab nationalists would not oppose Jewish aims in Palestine, provided that the Jews helped the Arabs to achieve their own aims. This hope was born out to an extent, in Feisal's letters to Weizmann. However, as it became apparent that the British would not honor all their commitments to the Arabs, bitterness grew that the Balfour declaration had been made over the heads of the residents of Palestine, and that the League of Nations Mandate which grew out of it, was the only mandate that ignored the right of the "native" population to self-government.
By the time of the declaration, there had been a considerable history of Zionist settlement in Palestine under the Ottoman Turkish Empire, but the Jews were still only a small minority. In 1915, the population of Palestine was approximately 780,000, of whom about 80,000 to 100,000 were Jews.
Ami Isseroff
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The Balfour Declaration
Foreign Office
November 2nd, 1917
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur James Balfour
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From: http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_early_palestine_zionists_land.php
How did the Zionists acquire land in Palestine?
Note: Land in Israel is often measured in hectares (1 acre = approx. 0.4 hectare, 1 hectare = approx. 2.5 acres) or dunams (dunam = approx. .25 acre, acre = approx. 4 dunams). There are 640 acres in a square mile. See Conversion for more information.
Redemption of land in Eretz Israel, much of which had fallen into neglect under foreign rule, began in the mid-1850s with the first attempts to enable Jews to live productively in Ottoman Palestine without reliance on the "old yishuv" model of overseas support. Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) made the first known land purchase by someone from outside the region in 1855: 10 hectares (250 acres) of orange groves in Jaffa, under a newly-made arrangement with the Sultan allowing these first-ever purchases. Other private acquisitions followed, and by 1882, some 2,200 hectares had been purchased by Jews. Although several of the first Zionist villages (moshavot) were built on this land, the areas were not contiguous and the idea of using land purchase to prepare for Jewish sovereignty was far in the future. Each purchase entailed a cumbersome bureaucratic procedure vis-à-vis the local Turkish authorities, which, in the final declining phase of the Ottoman Empire, were either hostile to or uninterested in Jewish holdings in the sparsely populated backwater province that Palestine had become. Nearly all land was owned by the state (and was passed on to subsequent sovereigns) or by private and public entities through title or leasing arrangements. This state of affairs, coupled with the frequent need to resort to bribery in official dealings, gave the Jewish purchases a clandestine complexion that would recur in subsequent years.
Although the creation of the Jewish National Fund was originally proposed by Judah Alkalai in 1847 it had to wait until the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1901 to become a reality. The Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemeth LeYisrael) was established to buy land in Palestine for reclamation and Jewish settlement. In its first decade, the JNF built a worldwide fundraising organization based on sale of stamps, collection "Blue Boxes" in homes and schools and solicitation of donations. In the spring of 1903, JNF acquired its first parcel of land: 800 acres in Hadera. Other modest purchases were made in 1904 and 1908 in Lower Galilee, Judea, and the Lake Kinneret region, and two forms of settlement that would prove crucial in the land-acquisition enterprise were pioneered there: the cooperative (moshav) and the collective (kevutsa, later kibbutz).
From the start, the organization focused on greening the land through the planting of trees. JNF got involved in tree planting for many reasons, including as a way to fulfill the Biblical commandment. In order to solidify ownership of land purchased by JNF on behalf of the Jewish community, and in accordance with prevailing laws of the day, trees were planted whenever a new piece of land was purchased. In 1908, the first JNF trees were planted at Hulda: olive trees in memory of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism. In 1920, JNF expanded its role to help reclaim the swamps of Palestine. There quickly followed afforestation efforts. Since 1920, millions of trees have been planted in Israel by the Jewish National Fund.
Baron Benjamin (Edmond James) de Rothschild (1845-1934) enlisted in this cause after being petitioned by the leaders of Rishon Lezion, one of the First Aliya villages. His patronage embraced 12 settlements at all three levels of land redemption: purchase, reclamation and economically viable settlement. To make these possible, he established an administration that, although staffed in part by condescending officials who evoked the independent-minded settlers' resentment, institutionalized all three aspects of land redemption. The best-known settlements sponsored by Rothschild are Metulla, Zikhron Ya'akov, Rishon Lezion, and Rosh Pina. Metulla (est. 1896) is an example of a purchase that had the further advantages of controlling water sources and establishing the northern limit of Jewish settlement. In 1900, Rothschild transferred the settlements, their agricultural enterprises, and 25,000 hectares of land to the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA, est. 1891), which he continued to support in various ways.
In a military biography of Moshe Dayan, the early Zionist activity is described this way:
· "Using Rothschild's money, these Jews purchased land from absentee Turkish landlords. To the Arab tenant farmers, the transfer of land from Turkish to Jewish ownership was of little consequence since the Jews rehired them as agricultural workers."
By the time Israel became a state in 1948, JNF owned 12.5 percent of all the land of Israel on which 80 percent of Israel's population now lives. With this ownership came the responsibility of transforming the land into a beautiful and fertile area that would be a suitable home for the new state.
Personal experiences with the difficulties and triumphs of land acquisition in the Emek Jezreel valley of Israel in the period from 1891 to the 1920s are documented in great detail in this memoir published in 1929 . Interesting passages include:
· "It was not only the fertility of these plains [Emek Jezreel] that attracted the [sic], but also the fact that these were the only regions where it was possible to purchase a large stretch of land from a single owner, while the remainder of Palestine was broken up into small parcels belonging to many individuals..."
· "[It was not easy for Hankin] to reach this agreement to a low price, for even then [1891] speculators of all kinds were surrounding the land owners and attempting to frustrate his efforts by offering a higher price. But Hankin enjoyed the confidence of the Arabs, so that he succeeded in overcoming the competition of the speculators."
· "...The Turkish Government refused to authorize the sale, even though official permission was applied for ... by a Jew, Efraim Krause, who was a Turkish citizen."
· "In 1921 it was impossible to find a Jewish purchaser for one of the finest and best situated orange plantations in Palestine (although it was offered at an exceedingly low price), so that it had to be sold to an Arab."
Shlomo Gravetz of the Jewish National Fund says: "Throughout the history of land reclamation by Jews in Eretz Yisrael, the Arabs have always claimed that the Jews were throwing them off their land. In 1932 the High Commissioner appointed the Bentwich Committee to investigate these claims, and out of 700 purchases of Arab property, the committee did not find one case in which the Jews had acted immorally."
Sources and additional reading on this topic:
· Jewish National Fund History
· Jerusalem Archives
· Buying the Emek
· The Late Ottoman Period: Redemption Begins and Consolidates
· Jerusalem Post: The Home Front (Sept. 1, 1998)
· Foundations Of Excellence: Moshe Dayan And Israel's Military Tradition (1880 To 1950)
· The History of the Land of Israel and the "Land of Palestine."
· Foundations of the State of Israel
· The Jewish National Fund: Land Purchase Methods and Priorities, 1924 - 1939
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from:
http://en.falastiny.net/books/cjr/donation.htm
Critique Of The Jewish Religion: Donation the Jews Palestine For Ever
Preface:
ö A- It came in the Genesis, chapter(17:7) that god spoke to Abraham:
" And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee". (Gn:17:8) " And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God".
And also in( Gn:15:18):
" In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates".
B - And it came in the Balfour Declaration Nov2, 1917 the following:
"The establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object"!
[That was from Balfour’s letter, the British foreign secretary, to 2nd Baron Rothschild].
C - " Then the embodied Zionist in Israel is not the daughter of Balfour’s declaration, as the most of the studiers allege unfortunately, but it is the daughter of the god’s first promise to Abraham circa the nineteenth century before Christ.
And it is not made Hertzel the prophet of the Zionism in the last of nineteenth century, but it is made Moses, the first Zionism prophet".
( The Zionist’s document in the Old Testament: by. D. Georgi Canaan:P.21).(A.E).
In this chapter we can not separate the religion criticism, from the policy, because the subject with its nature, is political in the first grade!
* * *
The Jews in their Old Testament had been inventing the promised land matter, when they were in the Babylonian capture (if the tale was correct). And attributed the fabricated promise to the god, or let us say to the tribal Jehovah.
Jehovah had promised Israelis of Palestine land as motherland, and ignoring Palestinian nation, where, there is no value to its existence in his viewpoint!!
Jehovah - not God- in the Old Testament granted Canaan land - Palestine - to the Israelis, and they are strangers about it.
The reader to the Old Testament, with objectivity, and far from the artificial religious illusion, and far from the symbolic explanation, and the wrong interpretation, and far from the apparent and the interior, discovers the fact of that testament, and that Torah!
Jehovah orders Abram departure his folks' s land to the new land that had written to him:
" Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee". "And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing". " And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed".(Gn:12:1-3).
And Abram heads towards a land of Canaan:
" And Abram passed through the land unto the place of Sichem, unto the plain of Moreh. And the Canaanite was then in the land ". " And the Lord appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land: and there builded he an altar unto the Lord, who appeared unto him". (Gn:6-7).
And after Lot leaves Abram and they separate about them, the god addresses Abram:
" And the Lord said unto Abram, after that Lot was separated from him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward."(1). " For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever".(Gn:13:14-15).
And the god follows up:
"Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee".(Gn:13:17).
the god addresses Abram also:
" And he said unto him, I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it".(Gn:15:7).
And the god made a covenant with Abram:
" In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates".(Gn:15:18).
These are god promises to öAbram. And they are, as we see, clear indication…And he repeated his promise with Abram’s offspring.
The god addresses Isaac:
" Sojourn in this land, and I will be with thee, and will bless thee; for unto thee, and unto thy seed, I will give all these countries, and I will perform the oath which I sware unto Abraham thy father " . " And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed".(Gn:26:3-4).
And Jacob goes to Harran for marriage from the fathers’ tribe \ and they are idolaters \ as his father Isaac advised him. In the way he tires and sleeps, to him the Lord appears and addresses him:
" And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed". " And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed " . " And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of".( Gn:28:13-15).
As the Lord appears to Jacob when he came back from Padanaram and blest him, and said to him:
" And God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name: and he called his name Israel ". "And God said unto him, I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins " . " And the land which I gave Abraham and Isaac, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed after thee will I give the land".(Gn:35:10-12).
And the promise continues through Moses also, then the Lord misses the Israelites, and what happen with them in Egypt, then addresses Moses:
" And I have said, I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt unto the land of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, unto a land flowing with milk and honey".(Ex:3:17).
As Lord speaks to Moses:
"And I have also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers".(Ex:6:4 ).
And also:
" And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians". "And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it you for an heritage: I am the Lord".(Ex:6:7-8).
And Lord told Moses that he would send an angel to walk in front of Moses and his nation towards Canaan:
" For mine Angel shall go before thee, and bring thee in unto the Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites: and I will cut them off".(Ex:23:23).
And also:
" By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land." . " And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee".(Ex:23:30-31).
And Moses's god teaches him the espionage on land that he will give to the Israelites. god spoke to Moses saying:
" Send thou men, that they may search the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a ruler among them".(Nm:13:2).
And Lord requests Moses and his tribe, entrance the land of Canaan for possessing:
"Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them".(Dt:1:8).
And the god tempts them to steal the good rich land:
" For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills." ." A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey"." A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass"." When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which he hath given thee".(Dt:8:7-10).
And the god will express in front of the Israelites as a fire destroy their enemies:
" Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and fenced up to heaven"." A people great and tall, the children of the Anakims, whom thou knowest, and of whom thou hast heard say, Who can stand before the children of Anak!"." Understand therefore this day, that the Lord thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them, and he shall bring them down before thy face: so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the Lord hath said unto thee".(Dt:9:1-3).
And the master is the whole partnership to them in this matter, and donation to them the land, it is a result the nations’ sin, and as a result of the promise that abided by them:
" Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob". (Dt:9:5).
And Jehovah repeats his support to them in their occupation, and their terrorism, and he spreads the terror into the hearts of the people of this land:
" Then will the Lord drive out all these nations from before you, and ye shall possess greater nations and mightier than yourselves."." Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours: from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates, even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be"." There shall no man be able to stand before you: for the Lord your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon, as he hath said unto you".( Dt:11:23-25 ).
These verses are not only about the land donation to the Israelites, then there are so many. And in the Babylonian capture there is the lamentation and the elegies…But these verses give a clear form about the case...
Then the Israelites are strangers about Palestine, and in Palestine there are greater nations and the more number from the Israelites. But so Jehovah wanted to give those the good land that won't need any thing in it. And he requests them genocide of people, because he is sinful. and Jehovah will contribute with them in the war of extermination, and will throw the terror and the fear into the hearts of their enemies!
And to them, the master also draws the country borders, that is not only Palestine, but from The river Nile to The Euphrates...(1)
The texts of the Torah are clear indication, and not symbols as some believers allege.. Then it is far away from symbolic, and needs the latent explanation or the interpretation, and not likening figures of speech and metaphors, then is a clear literalism... Thus, those promises prove that Jehovah was not marked by the justice and the equity.
And he "Jehovah" and his frequent promises typify a goal of the Jews, that they seek, under the burden of the capture in Babel \ if the event was real\ under the burden of the slavery. And the promise represents the racism of the Zionism, that means; Donation the Jews a land, that is not to them, and by the text confession of the Old Testament!
There is a tale explain a fact of the Jewish religion, and likes the verses(Dt:8:7-10).
It came in( Jgs:18:1- 30):
" In those days there was no king in Israel: and in those days the tribe of the Danites sought them an inheritance to dwell in; for unto that day all their inheritance had not fallen unto them among the tribes of Israel.
And the children of Dan sent their family five men from their coasts, men of valour, from Zorah, and from Eshtaol, to spy out the land, and to search it; and they said unto them, Go, search the land: who when they came to mount Ephraim, to the house of Micah, they lodged there.
When they were by the house of Micah, they knew the voice of the young man the Levite: and they turned in thither, and said unto him, Who brought thee hither? and what makest thou in this place? and what hast thou here? And he said unto them, Thus and thus dealeth Micah with me, and hath hired me, and I am his priest. And they said unto him, Ask counsel, we pray thee, of God, that we may know whether our way which we go shall be prosperous. And the priest said unto them, Go in peace: before the Lord is your way wherein ye go. Then the five men departed, and came to Laish, and saw the people that were therein, how they dwelt careless, after the manner of the Zidonians, quiet and secure; and there was no magistrate in the land, that might put them to shame in any thing; and they were far from the Zidonians, and had no business with any man.
And they came unto their brethren to Zorah and Eshtaol: and their brethren said unto them, What say ye? And they said, Arise, that we may go up against them: for we have seen the land, and, behold, it is very good: and are ye still? be not slothful to go, and to enter to possess the land. When ye go, ye shall come unto a people secure, and to a large land: for God hath given it into your hands; a place where there is no want of any thing that is in the earth. And there went from thence of the family of the Danites, out of Zorah and out of Eshtaol, six hundred men appointed with weapons of war. And they went up, and pitched in Kirjathjearim, in Judah: wherefore they called that place Mahanehdan unto this day: behold, it is behind Kirjathjearim. And they passed thence unto mount Ephraim, and came unto the house of Micah. Then answered the five men that went to spy out the country of Laish, and said unto their brethren, Do ye know that there is in these houses an ephod, and teraphim, and a graven image, and a molten image? now therefore consider what ye have to do.
And they turned thitherward, and came to the house of the young man the Levite, even unto the house of Micah, and saluted him. And the six hundred men appointed with their weapons of war, which were of the children of Dan, stood by the entering of the gate. And the five men that went to spy out the land went up, and came in thither, and took the graven image, and the ephod, and the teraphim, and the molten image: and the priest stood in the entering of the gate with the six hundred men that were appointed with weapons of war. And these went into Micah's house, and fetched the carved image, the ephod, and the teraphim, and the molten image. Then said the priest unto them, What do ye? And they said unto him, Hold thy peace, lay thine hand upon thy mouth, and go with us, and be to us a father and a priest: is it better for thee to be a priest unto the house of one man, or that thou be a priest unto a tribe and a family in Israel? And the priest's heart was glad, and he took the ephod, and the teraphim, and the graven image, and went in the midst of the people.
So they turned and departed, and put the little ones and the cattle and the carriage before them. And when they were a good way from the house of Micah, the men that were in the houses near to Micah's house were gathered together, and overtook the children of Dan. And they cried unto the children of Dan. And they turned their faces, and said unto Micah, What aileth thee, that thou comest with such a company? And he said, Ye have taken away my gods which I made, and the priest, and ye are gone away: and what have I more? and what is this that ye say unto me, What aileth thee? And the children of Dan said unto him, Let not thy voice be heard among us, lest angry fellows run upon thee, and thou lose thy life, with the lives of thy household. And the children of Dan went their way: and when Micah saw that they were too strong for him, he turned and went back unto his house. And they took the things which Micah had made, and the priest which he had, and came unto Laish, unto a people that were at quiet and secure: and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and burnt the city with fire. And there was no deliverer, because it was far from Zidon, and they had no business with any man; and it was in the valley that lieth by Bethrehob. And they built a city, and dwelt therein.
And they called the name of the city Dan, after the name of Dan their father, who was born unto Israel: howbeit the name of the city was Laish at the first. And the children of Dan set up the graven image: and Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh, he and his sons were priests to the tribe of Dan until the day of the captivity of the land".
That tale is very clear, and it discloses many matters :
1- No stability to Israelis in Canaan land, as the text alleged, and that is not the historical fact, which denies all their existence.
2- The paganism is the main feature of Israelis since Moses. And the changes between Jehovah and others idols, prove that, and idols joint Jehovah.
3- The Israelis are unemployed about the job, seriousness, and the fatigue: " and you are pensioner".
Then intruders began living as gangs on the other benefit .
As for a Layish nation, they are safe, reassuring, and have fertility land. And they did hard, and had secured for themselves the good life.
4- What are the difference between Moses’ s, Joshua, and those!? The photo itself, but the tale is a minimized.
The motives are the same, and the goals are the same. And the axis is a generous land and ready !!
5- Ezra’s trinity appears very clear: The idolater god, the eager nation to the theft and the plunder, because they depend on the others.
The fertility land is not a temperamental donation from the deity, but it is a selection, identification, and viewing from the parasitic gang, then it was fell on the idolatrous deity .
And an existence is undeveloped, lazy, and a poverty, they grant themselves the right in the land, while Canaan; The struggler, diligent, active, and legal is, his blood is permissible, and his land .
And if we returned to Nouh tale and Canaan, who became a slave to his brothers ( as Torah had wanted), then we find the fact clear. Canaan must prepare the land and cultivate it, for the thieves that would take his fatigue's results!!
Such, this tale summarizes the whole essence of Jewish religion. The end justifies the means!!
D. Georgi Canaan says:
" The Zionism is not the nineteenth century as a result of the persecution that the Jews suffered as the historians wish, but its deep-rooted are in the Torah land, and the Babylonian capture has grown it in the sixth century before Christ, when the capture sons were staring by their sights towards Zion, mourn the transient glory and sing by the following glory:
" By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy." (psalm: 137: 1-5-6 ).
Then these words typify the seeds of the Zionism idea"(2).
And he sees that the Jewish religion and the Zionism and racist national are one thing:
" The Judaism includes all Zionism principles, and the Zionism is consolidated in the Judaism and no existence to borders separator between the law of the Jewish religious and between the factors of their nationalism, because the Jewish law summarized in the glorification of their race and the sanctification of their ethnic."(3).
Abraham counted himself a stranger in Palestine, and his hope on the land of the reality is a space grave to his wife Sara:
" I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a burying place with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight") Gn:23:4).
And Palestinians had give him the better place:
" And Abraham stood up, and bowed himself to the people of the land, even to the children of Heth". (Gn:23:7) (4).
Ephron said to Abraham:
" Nay, my lord, hear me: the field give I thee, and the cave that is therein, I give it thee; in the presence of the sons of my people give I it thee: bury thy dead".( Gn:23:11).
And the place became a cemetery to him and his family. Until Joseph’s bones, were brought from Egypt to the family cemetery as Torah had told!
And with Moses and the leaving - as Torah recollected- the invasion begins to Canaan land\ Palestine\ and Moses had fail, then cursed Canaan, and remains forty year in the wild!!
Al-Yazigi talks about Moses and his failure, and justifies the failure cause, and cursing Canaan, saying:
" As for the reality that Moses was a temporal leader drove his nation under the motto of a deity. As for the matter of labyrinth in the desert, is Moses’s inability, and his nation to opening Palestine land. And the nation did not do well the war so they did not triumph over Palestine nation and countries of Canaan, then he must wait for second generation arrival; a youthful generation fights and resists.
And Moses rage at Canaan: Canaan is the peace-loving and worships a true God. Moses curses him cause he did not surrender and curses sons of Nouh together. And makes them servants to Shem" (5).
Then the serial of rushing into Canaan land, started in Joshua’s era, and the Israelites crimes started with him in Palestine. And the Jewish religion has still talked in the Old Testament about those crimes without a shyness!!
These are the promises of Torah and the Old Testament to the Israelites for country establishment in Palestine, but a country from the Nile to Euphrates...
The opinions became numerous round the fact of Israelites kingdom and the promise and the motives, and we can analyze many round that, but the main case remains; Some studies had still started from the Old Testament as real fact!
But that needs a scientific proof, because the religion text is not a proof on any thing. for all are not confidence and not be the truth. And the scientific analysis is after the right postulates. Consequently, the deduction is: we can not analyze the history, and study it by the leaning on the Old Testament, before, it proofs its correctness on the reality land!
The promise is a forgery and contradicts the absolute perfection, and it is from the production the Jewish’s brain, and it fastened it on the god, Jehovah. Then God is the truth and the justice, and those trivialities did not emanate from him, and this means; The text is invalid, and Jehovah itself is invalid too!!
Is the justice, to give a land the peace-loving nation, who lives in it, to another nation!? And is the justice to encourage a barbaric aggression on the peaceful man, and killing him and taking his properties, house, land, and the enjoyment by what possesses!?
and making his wife and boys slaves to the terrorist thief!?
What the Old Testament claims, contradicts the justice, moral, sense, freedom, democratic, and the human dignity!!
And the pretension completed under the guise of illusion, secretes the people to believers must have every thing, and idolaters must forbid every things!
The exciting to the laugh that öAbraham advises his son Isaac to marry from his tribe, because the Canaan’s girls are pagans. But Torah said about his tribe, that were pagans!
Also Isaac advises Jacob!!
And Joseph married an Egyptian pagan girl, and Ishmael too, and Solomon married many pagan women!!
Therefore, the matter is not the case of belief and a paganism!
And the Old Testament had said to us: Canaanites were more monotheism than the Israelites themselves!
Then the case is not in the belief and the paganism, it is in a parasitical aim situation to a scum that, dependant in lives, on the other first, and then theft the land plunder and the robbery of its tenants and their rights. Then it is the justifications that permit that second. In Torah the justifications were the belief and the paganism!
So we say: every Jew is a believer in his Torah, he is Zionist, because he believes in the racism of the superior ethnic, and promised land\ Palestine\ . Then every Jew is a Zionist necessarily , except if he ignored and refuse those ideas.
And every one who is not Jewish but, he believes in the ethnic racism and the promise, he is Zionist necessarily. And how large number Zionists are, without the Jews!(6). They made a country to the Jews, and they were ardent to it more than the Jews!
And whether Palestine was the promised land, or any other land, then this does not cancel the racism essence that, depended on the chosen few people, and the monopolistic god, and the promised land ... (7)
The following the promised effects, and its responsibilities through the history, sees the deception of the religious ideology about the land case!
Then the promise, affected with a painful form on Palestine, in many stages. We will mention the most important:
The first stage: Represents ( Abraham and his sons ) then Moses later. And arrived at its top\ as the Old Testament alleges\ by David’s kingdom establishment...
The second stage: was on Cyrus’s hand, who thought to establish a protectorate\ colony\ for Jews in Palestine.
The third stage: appeared in the empire Khazar.
Kostlr says:
" In the twelfth century after Christ, a movement in Khazaria became for the salvation and was a primitive attempt that painted by the Jewish crusader. And it aimed recovery of Palestine by the weapon, and its founder was Jew a Khzria was named Solomon" (8).
And he mentions that his son Manahim\Savior\ collected an army. His feverish attack was nearer to the fantasy, and he was assassinated (9).
The fourth stage: Napoleon Bonabrt thought to establish a homeland to the Jews in Palestine, for service of his greed, he exploited the promised land idea. And so the others thought in Europe, as the German for the same aim.
The fifth stage: The Zionism that appeared in Europe (10). It is known that the European Jews are from Khazar origins, and do not relate to the Jews who lived in Palestine, as the historians say and they believe in old existence of Jews in Palestine.
Then the Jews divide into Sephardi and Ashkenazic:
It came in Britannica Encyclopedia:
The Sephardim:
" Who lived in Spain and Portugal from the Middle Ages until their persecution and mass expulsion from those countries in the last decades of the 15th century. The Sephardim initially fled to North Africa and other parts of the Ottoman Empire, and many of these eventually settled in such countries as France, Holland, England, Italy, and the Balkans. Salonika (Thessaloníki) in Macedonia and the city of Amsterdam became major sites of Sephardic settlement. The transplanted Sephardim largely retained their native".
The Ashkenazi:
" From Hebrew Ashkenaz, "Germany"), plural Ashkenazim, any of the Jews who lived in the Rhineland valley and in neighbouring France before their migration eastward to Slavic lands (e.g., Poland, Lithuania, Russia) after the Crusades (11th-13th century). After the 17th-century persecutions in eastern Europe, large numbers of these Jews resettled in western Europe, where they assimilated, as they had done in eastern Europe".
The origin of Ashkenazim:
" But the most striking characteristic of the Khazars was the apparent adoption of Judaism by the khagan and the greater part of the ruling class in about 740. The circumstances of the conversion remain obscure, the depth of their adoption of Judaism difficult to assess; but the fact itself is undisputed and unparalleled in central Eurasian history. A few scholars have even asserted that the Judaized Khazars were the remote ancestors of many eastern European and Russian Jews. Whatever the case may be, religious tolerance was practiced in the Khazar empire, and paganism continued to flourish among the population".
" Today Ashkenazim constitute more than 80 percent of all the Jews in the world, vastly outnumbering Sephardic Jews. In the late 20th century, Ashkenazic Jews numbered more than 11,000,000".
But it came in Encarta Encyclopedia:
" Today, about 85 percent of all Jews are Ashkenazim".
And:
" The Ashkenazim and Sephardim differ in their laws, customs, liturgy, and language. Yiddish (Judeo-German) is the traditional vernacular of the Ashkenazim; that of the Sephardim is Ladino (Judeo-Castilian)".
And more half of them has still lived in U.S. 5,800,000 (11).
And as a result of the Torah promise, the Jews are clinging to - forgeable - Palestine.
Then Jewish and believer in his religion \ though his nationality is from the end of land \ he believes in Palestine a motherland\ pragmatically\ , and that the god granted them for ever.
So we discuss the matter as the religion criticism, and this is the religion view, and how many mistakes it had left!
We did not discuss the Zionism as a political, social, and economic project!
But we ask: what is the relation of the European Jews to Palestine!? or what is the relation of Jews \ from any continent \ to Palestine!? But what is the relation of the European Christian to the Jews, to support them in stealing Palestine!?
Does not the believing in the religion as pragmatical ideology, created these difficult problems through the history?!
If Ezra and the Jewish writers did not ascribe the promise to the god, Jehovah, there is never the case of " The state of the Israeli entity"!
But we see that the case did not start with a Jehovah’s promise only, because the first harbingers started with:
First: When Jehovah accepted Abel’s offering, and refused Cain, that means the following:
Abel was shepherd and Jews were shepherds, then Abel is Jew!!
But Cain was peasant and Canaanites were peasants, then Cain is Canaan!!
And this is very clear: Jehovah had wanted and loved Abel (Jew), and hated Cain (Canaan )!! And as a result of favoritism Ezra disclosed his avid in Palestine!
Second: the curse Noah to Canaan.
Then the curse means, a dismissal of Canaan from the Jehovah mercy, and dismissal Canaanites\ nation, ethnic…\ Who are the owners’ land, from their land.
And the stabilization the Noah' s sons on land, without Canaan, who is the only criminal in this universe!!
And if we returned to the Genesis, we find that the god punishes Adam the humanity first father, when he committed the sin, by the driving out the heaven, and seeing to his naked body.
And Noah\ the humanity second father after the flood\ made the eternal curse on Canaan! Because his father Ham saw his loins\ loins of Noah grandfather\ and he told his two brothers. Then the loins sight with Adam, is a part of the punishment. And with Noah; the loins sight became a cause to the eternal punishment!
There is difference between the ego sight to the loins, as an embodiment to the feeling of the sin, and the other sight to it, as an introduction to the punishment.
Then Ham's son\ Canaan\ is himself and his posterity, must pay the price of the first sin for ever. And as a second result to the punishment; Adam was gone from the heaven, and similar Canaan must go from the land of milk and honey, that must become to Jews!
The final analysis is the result: The land( the heaven that overflows milk and honey), is to the Jews!
Every thing is formed, by the conscious\ sensation\ or the unconscious, for serves the promised land case. The end justifies the means. It is the Machiavellian law. Then the Torah teaches the Machiavellianism and pragmatism!!
And if the religious forgery was not, who had returned to Torah, and no one took heed to the information that is founded by the theft and the lying (12)!
These stages are not all, but they gave a photo about the religious floor that, the carriers of the promised land leaned on it, so to mislead the others!
The case of the historical origins to the Jews in old Palestine, is not scientific case. And the same if they were in Palestine or not, the result is one!
Because the old nations were in a continuous movement, and the mixing was a natural matter.
The essential matter is; the Jews pretension that Palestine is to them, and by a divine promise, at the expense of its nation!
And every one believes in the racist thinking, no place to him in Palestine, even if he got the international legality, because Palestine nation was in it, before Abraham and after him without any disconnection, as the text had confessed. Then after the disconnection of Abraham’s offspring more 400 years( from Joseph to Moses), Canaan remained in it.
Then after Moses’s arrival, and the entrance of his successor Joshua to the Palestinian land, and although the terroristic, savage continuous wars, Palestine nation remained in their land… And all those are from the text of the Old Testament, namely the confession of the religion itself!
So the religious right is immoral, and the historical right - according to the text – immoral too. And this means the falsification of Zionistic ideology and its pretensions.
And what after the fallen Judaism!
The Israelis become colonial, they have no right in Palestine, even their colonization lengthened. even tens of generations over Palestine are borne, then this never changes the fact.
Then the Jewish newborn in Palestine, and does not know a motherland except Palestine, he will not get a legal right, because the existence of his father and grandfather was colonial existence, not lawful, and so long as he is stick to his religion, that agrees with him, the illegal theft!
Those who talk about the newborn Jewish in Palestine, and don't know another motherland, they must talk about the Palestinian newborn outside of Palestine, and does not know any homeland except Palestine!! As if they folded a Palestinian’s right, and affirm the Jewish right! As that they approve the colonization wording, and the religious nationalism, and the immoral realpolitik, the terrorism, and the power politics!!
And who talks about the acquired right Jew ( by United Nations as Kostlr, and others, who are echo to the colonial horn, or by the generations that were borne in Palestine), they must talk about the plundered Palestinian right. And the progressive and the human are a disclosure the Zionism fact and the Judaism. And they disclose the crimes of the Zionist movement gangs, that have just colonized Palestine, and have still expelled Palestinian people.
And who claims the Jew right in the return to Palestine according to Torah, we remind him; the right of the vagrant Palestinian, from his home, since more than fifty year, and before that, he did not leave Palestine since more than Five Thousands year!!
The Zionism is a colonial movement and its attachment to the imperialism is an obvious matter. And the country project as a strange body and odd, is a colonial racial project. The illegal international imperialistic countries created it (13).
And the using power, and the misleading, imposes a specific position, and the time may lengthen with it, but it will not cancel the truth, fact, and can not forgery the morals and ideals. And the international Israeli entity, is illegal and immoral, and the entity will vanish, before the moral victory!
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from: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=481&letter=C
Associations, in Europe and the United States, of persons interested in agricultural settlement of Jews in Palestine and in the connection of Jews with the future of the Holy Land.
This movement, which was the predecessor of political Zionism ( see Basel Congress ), had as its sponsors a number of men living in different countries, but whose common interest in and observations of the phenomena of Jewish life, stimulated by the persecution of the Jews in Rumania prior to 1880, and more recently in Russia, led to the foundation of organizations like the Chovevei Zion Association of England, whose objects are:
1.
To foster the "national idea" in Israel.
2.
To promote the colonization of Palestine andneighboring territories by Jews by establishing new colonies, or by assisting those already established.
3.
To diffuse the knowledge of Hebrew as a living language.
4.
To better the moral, intellectual, and material status of Israel.
5.
The members of the association pledge themselves to render cheerful obedience to the laws of the lands in which they live, and as good citizens to promote their welfare as far as lies in their power.
The appeal from Palestine to Jews to settle there as agriculturists, made in 1867, went unheeded. But from 1879 on, there were active in the advocacy of colonization Dr. Lippe and Pineles in Rumania, Lilienblum and Leon Pinsker in Russia, a non-Jewish Syrian and Palestinian Association in London, and Laurence Oliphant. The idea of agricultural settlement in Palestine, tested first by the founding of the colony of Samarin by the Rumanian Chovevei Zion, was voiced in 1881 by N. L. Lilienblum in an article in the "Razsvyet" entitled "The Jewish Question and the Holy Land." The most serious objection to the new idea came from these who feared that resettlement in Palestine would mean the observance of the 613 commandments and the rebuilding of the Temple. Charles Netter, who subsequently became the leading exponent of the agricultural settlement idea, opposed the new movement—which had excited the enthusiastic interest of the Jews of Russia—on the ground that Palestine was unsuitable for colonization.
Baron Edmund de Rothschild having agreed to pay the expenses of six colonists to Palestine, the movement, initiated by Pinsker and supported by Rabbi Mohilewer of Byelostock, took practical shape. The Odessa Central Committee, which had been called into existence in 1881, and which was now recognized by the Russian government, went no further in the direction of active propaganda than to send Pinsker and Mohilewer upon a tour of private and public agitation throughout Europe.
However, the movement spread with the emigration from Russia. Various societies with a similar purpose were founded at Berlin (Ezra), Vienna (Kadimah), London (B'nei Zion, 1887), and America (Shove Zion in New York, Chovevei Zion in Philadelphia, 1891).
In 1890 it was recognized that some endeavor should be made to give form and coherence to these various movements, and Dr. Haffkine, with M. Meyerson, encouraged by the prospect of financial support from Baron Edmund de Rothschild organized the Paris Central Committee. The actual leadership of the movement, however, remained with the Odessa committee, which was well supported, and which kept in close touch with those who had already settled in Palestine. The movement, however, reached its zenith in 1893, when organizations existed in every country, except France, that had an appreciable Jewish population.
In December, 1892, the movement of Jews toward Palestine was checked by the Turkish authorities, who prohibited further immigration. Additional discouragement was caused by the difficulty of finding markets for the produce of the colonies, and also by the coloring given to the idea by such men as Colonel Goldsmid, who, at the head of the Chovevei Zion Association of England, with its military organizations, sought to give the movement a strong national tendency. In addition, the colonists were in constant need of support. The Hirsch Argentine Settlement followed, and affected the agitation in Western Europe. Though the colonies continued to find support, and though some new ones were founded the movement seemed, by 1894, to have spent its force.
Typical of the enthusiasm which the idea had once aroused was the mass-meeting held in London in 1892, on the advice of Sir Samuel Montagu, to petition the sultan, through Lord Rothschild and the British Foreign Office, for the right of settlement. A detailed plan was then worked out for colonization on a large and regulated scale.
The decline of the Chovevei Zion was consequent upon the suddenly created leadership, in 1896, of Dr. Theodor Herzl . Indirectly every Chovevei Zion championed, without formally adopting, his doctrine, and, indirectly, all were represented at the first Zionist congress. A more or less direct adherence to the Zionist movement, which had no sympathy for individual, sporadic colonization, was forced upon the old organizations by their members. But while they would not disavow the nationalist standpoint, they declined to become a medium of the new propaganda. A conference, the first of its kind in London, was held (March, 1898) in the Finsbury (Clerkenwell) town-hall, and lasting twelve hours; it decided upon reorganization, and accepted the leadership of the Vienna Executive Committee created by the previous congress. This was typical of the process of transition from a philanthropic to an avowed political movement, which continued until the Minsker Conference (September, 1902), when the Russian Chovevei Zion associations without exception accepted the platform of the Zionist congresses.
The literature of the movement is extensive, but scattered. A vast number of polemical pamphlets have been published, as well as brochures on colonization and propagandist literature and on the fostering of Hebrew as a living tongue, which must be included in the literary efforts of the Chovevei Zion ( see Zionism ).
Bibliography:Palestina (organ of the Chovevi Zion Association of England), 1891-98;
Report of Proceedings Clerkenwell Town Hall Conference, 1898;
The Maccabœan, i., ii., and iii., 1901-02.E. C.J. De H.
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From: http://stargazers.home.pages.at/endworld/signs/news/israel_nws.htm
NEWSARTICLES ON RESTORATION OF ISRAEL
January 1998
When will Jesus return?
By Joseph Farah, executive director of the Western Journalism Center
As we enter 1998, I can't help but think about how close we must be to the Second Coming--when the Lord will return for His church and personally rule over the Earth for 1,000 years.
Oh, I know, some of you don't believe in such things. You think it's just a bunch of silly superstition. You prefer I stick to writing about news events of the physical world rather than arcane spiritual matters.
But, as a journalist, I can't ignore hard evidence--no matter where it may lead me. And the more I study the prophetic scriptures of the Holy Bible and look at the condition of our world today, the more convinced I become that we are nearing that time. In fact, I think we are very close.
For just as Jesus' virgin birth in Bethlehem was foretold by the Hebrew prophets hundreds of years earlier, so, too, was His return to Earth predicted. The only question is when.
The most dramatic evidence for His imminent return our generation has witnessed was the rebirth of the nation of Israel 50 years ago. The Jews were, as prophesied, scattered over the whole earth for nearly two millennia beginning shortly after Jesus' death on the cross. Yet, the scriptures leave no doubt that the Jewish state would exist once again before He returned.
Interestingly, Orthodox Jews have long taught that the world would last for 6,000 years before the Messiah would come and usher in a 1,000-year period of restful human history. Since God created the world in six days, according to Genesis 1:31, and rested on the seventh day, according to Genesis 2:2, they reasoned the world's history would climax the same way. They cite Psalm 90:4, which says: "For a thousand years in Thy sight are like yesterday when it passes by."
Likewise, Christians have looked to II Peter 3:8: "But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
The early church understood this "six-day theory" of world history. It was widely accepted teaching for the first three centuries of the church. From the time of Adam, we've got genealogical records to show that 4,000 years passed until the time of Christ. From Jesus' time until the present age represents another 2,000 years, for a total of 6,000 years or six days.
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There's also a three-day theory: Jesus rose on the third day. Would the beginning of the third millennium--or thousand-year period--not be the likely time for His return to earth?
In 1776, Edward Gibbon published "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," in which he cites early documents suggesting the Christian disciples of the first century were taught that Jesus would return after 2000 years. We'll soon find out if they were right.
For many reasons, I believe Jesus is returning soon--if not in the year 2000, certainly thereabouts. But I'm especially drawn to II Timothy 3:1-5, which describes the state of the world in the "last days." Tell me if this doesn't sound like our world: "But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these."
Jesus came 2,000 years ago and died for our sins. Now we should be hopeful and expectant of His imminent return.
(David:) Wow, whatta witness! Sometimes people have to hear it from someone who isn't part of what they consider a "cult" or from a scientific standpoint before they'll sit up and take notice. I like this article! I believe it was written by a sincere man who has discerned the signs of the times. You ought to get excited when you see these things! You ought to get moved and motivated to get out the witness. Look up, for your redemption draweth nigh! It won't be long now!
Israel says U.N. resolution on Jerusalem void
(Reuters) Israel said it regarded as "null and void" a 1947 U.N. resolution that called for the internationalization of Jerusalem. In remarks in Jerusalem to foreign ambassadors, Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon said: "Resolution 181 which speaks about Jerusalem not being part of Israel is null and void and … we have a very wide national consensus about this issue."
The hawkish Sharon reaffirmed Israel's hold over all of the holy city against the backdrop of a diplomatic dispute with the European Union over the EU's position that Jerusalem is a separate entity from Israel. Most countries reject Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem, saying the city's status is unresolved. Under interim peace deals the future of Jerusalem is to be decided in final status talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Israeli settlements
(AP) Ignoring Israeli and U.S. objections, the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for an international conference on Israeli settlements in traditionally Arab areas that Palestinians claim are illegal. The vote was 115-2 with five abstentions.
The resolution contends that Israel is violating the Geneva conventions by constructing new settlements in east Jerusalem and on other lands the Israelis captured in 1967. During two days of speeches, speaker after speaker supported the Palestinians and demanded that Israel halt construction in contested areas and adhere to the peace agreements.
Israel's U.N. ambassador, Dore Gold, said that his country opposes "one-sided U.N. resolutions." Israel has routinely ignored U.N. declarations regarding relations with the Arabs.
Religion in the News:
Falwell on the Antichrist
(AP) In a speech about the concern people have over the new millennium, the Rev. Jerry Falwell said the Antichrist is probably alive today and is a male Jew. Falwell also told about 1,500 people at a conference that he believes the second coming of Christ probably will be within 10 years.
"Who will the Antichrist be? I don't know. Nobody else knows," said Falwell, whose Sunday morning services are carried by television stations nationwide.
"Is he alive and here today? Probably. Because when he appears during the Tribulation period he will be a full-grown counterfeit of Christ. Of course he'll be Jewish. Of course he'll pretend to be Christ. And if in fact the Lord is coming soon, and he'll be an adult at the presentation of himself, he must be alive somewhere today."
[Later, after accusations that he was encouraging anti-Semitism by speaking of the Antichrist as a Jewish man, Mr. Falwell said he regretted saying this.] "I should have known better," Falwell said at the 18th International Christian Prayer Breakfast.
"I apologize to my Jewish friends here and around the world and I apologize to the Christians here for having created any kind of rift. I apologize not for what I believe, but for my lack of tact and judgment in making a statement that served no purpose whatsoever," Falwell said.
The Rothschilds
By Richard E. Smith—International Herald Tribune
FRANKFURT--The Rothschilds, the family that emerged from Frankfurt's Jewish ghetto 200 years ago to become virtually synonymous with international banking, are returning home after an absence of nearly a century. A spokesman for the family, which has branches in London, Paris & Geneva, confirmed Friday that N.M. Rothschild & Sons, the British investment arm, & Bank Rothschild AG, the Swiss branch, plan to set up a representative banking office as early as this summer in Frankfurt. "Frankfurt is the last major international banking center where the family is not represented," said Reto Lyk, senior vice president of Rothschild Bank AG in Zurich. "It is high time to be present there."
The Rothschilds, whose emergence from the ghetto in the late 18th century led them to nobility & power throughout Europe & beyond, closed their Frankfurt bank in 1901 & folded the unit into their Vienna operation. Even though the new entity is to be less than a full-fledged bank, the move to establish it would nevertheless be a milestone for one of the world's most important banking centers, where the home-town Rothschilds became more & more conspicuous by their absence with each passing decade. The Rothschilds, unlike other Jewish banking families in Germany such as the Warburgs, did not have to flee Hitler. The male line of the German branch of the Rothschilds died out around the turn of the century, & the bank in Frankfurt closed its doors in 1901.
But the Third Reich did not leave the family unscathed. The Vienna branch was pressured to sell its banking operations, & one of its leading members, Baron Louis de Rothschild, was held hostage for a year after the German occupation of Austria. He was released through a combination of ransom & international financial pressure. And a member of the French branch of the family, Robert Rothschild, was exterminated in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 after repeatedly refusing to assign rights to his company, Austin SA, a tractor manufacturer, to the Krupp industrial concern.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the dynasty, began operations in the late 18th century as a coin dealer & lender in Frankfurt. His business acumen soon caught the attention of Elector William of Hesse, the extravagant local lord who could recognise financial talent & often needed it. The elector's family had accumulated one of the largest fortunes in Germany--due in part to his father's hiring out of mercenary Hessian soldiers to the British for use against the United States--but William's heavy spending forced him to become the first major client of the Rothschilds.
The elector, like many German princes an enemy of the invading Napoleon, fled to Prague & left the Rothschilds to fend for themselves in Frankfurt, where their home was searched by French soldiers who never did find evidence of incriminating transactions. Another enemy of Napoleon & client of the Rothschilds, Emperor Francis I of Austria, rewarded the house with the first of its many titles of nobility in 1817. Mayer Amschel Rothschild sent his sons to open banks in London, Paris, Vienna & Naples, where they continued to finance state treasuries & played a major role in financing the construction of Europe's railroads.
There are few traces of the Rothschilds left in Frankfurt. But Mayer Amschel's tombstone somehow survived the pillagings of Nazi toughs in the 1930s, & remains untouched to this day in the old Jewish cemetery.
TNT and the BALFOUR DECLARATION
Source: unknown
By the year 1916, World War I was going badly for England. She was in a desperate plight due to shortage of gun powder. Up until then, gun powder had been made from nitrates taken from mines in Chile, South America. But with German submarines controlling the sea lanes, Britain was unable to obtain the precious raw material.
At this time, Chaim Weizmann, a brilliant Jewish scientist, discovered how to make gun powder from nitrogen that was taken from the air. Eighty percent of the air we breathe is nitrogen! This changed the course of the war.
In appreciation, Lloyd George, representing the British government, told Dr. Weizmann to name his reward. He requested that Palestine be declared national homeland for the Jewish people. Consequently, the Balfour declaration was drawn up and signed on November 2, 1917. The letter reads:
Dear Lord Rothschild:
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of his Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations, which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet. His Majesty's Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely,
ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR
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From: http://www.anglojewish.co.uk/Blank%20Page%201.htm
The Anglo-Jewish Association
established 1871
In over 130 years, the AJA has had an illustrious history
The Story of the AJA
The Alliance Israelite Universelle was founded in France in 1860 to represent World Jewry as a protest against increasingly antisemitic incidents such as the Damascus Affair and the Mortara Case (see below). The Alliance later expanded to world membership and became the central agency for Jewish education for the Mediterranean area. In 1869 it opened the first agricultural school in Palestine.
In 1871, the AJA was founded in conjunction with the Alliance by approximately two hundred leading English Jews led by its first President, the lawyer Jacob Waley. It disassociated itself shortly after, due to the pressures of the Franco-Prussian War and established branches throughout the British Empire. The aims of the association were to “promote the moral, social and intellectual advancement of the Jewish people” and those abroad.
By 1874, the Board of Deputies referred all matters on the education of Jews abroad to the AJA and in 1878 helped create the Conjoint Foreign Committee which was enpowered to make representations to the government on foreign affairs. The Board and the Association each had seven members and could not act without total agreement of both bodies.
Former Presidents of the AJA
The united communal response to foreign affairs was under threat by the birth of Zionism and the English Zionist Federation which was promoting Palestine as a future homeland for the Jews. Israel Zangwill further split the Zionist cause by creating the Jewish Territorial Organisation, urging the need for a state (not necessarily Palestine) to house the Jewish victims of the Russian pogroms. He did not get the support of the President of the AJA and joint-chairman of the Conjoint, Claude G Montefiore. As a philosopher of Liberal Judaism, Montefiore was opposed to any Jewish state on religious grounds but was open to a campaign for equal rights for the Jews in Palestine.
Before the First World War, the Conjoint led by David Lindo Alexander KC, Claude G Montefiore and Leopold de Rothschild were trying to rally the country to oppose Russia which was against the then government’s policy. Their main concern was the ill-treatment of the Jews in Russia but there was a danger that the Jewish community would be seen by the British government as being pro- German or even pacifist. These sensitivities grew even more acute during the war.
Claude G Montefiore
In 1915, Sir Francis Montefiore resigned from the English Zionist Federation so that his loyalties to the nation could not be questioned and urged communal bodies to tighten up their appointments system. This was seen as a criticism of Lucien Wolf who became paid secretary to the Conjoint the same year, even though he lost his job on the Daily Graphic due to his anti-Russian and pro-German sentiment before the war.
The established Jewish leadership was becoming more out of touch with large sections of the community especially the Zionists and the immigrant constituency. In the Summer of 1916, the Home Secretary Herbert Samuel called on Lucien Wolf to facilitate the mobilisation of Russian Jews in to the British Army. This was seen as a possible solution to the growing unrest against forced enlistment in the Jewish quarter of Whitechapel. Wolf had to admit that the Conjoint’s influence in this area was negligable.
Former Vice Presidents of the AJA
During the war, the Conjoint was anti-Zionist and saw the solution to the Jewish question solely as defeating antisemitism in Russia. On 17 May, 1917 the President of the Board, D L Alexander and Montefiore as President of the AJA (possibly irked by the success of Weizmann’s personal influence on the government) approved a statement to The Times rejecting the wider Zionist theory but approving Jewish ‘rights’ in Palestine. The un-democratic nature of this incident led to uproar within the community and the Chief Rabbi, Lord Rothschild and The Times sided with the Zionists. The Board of Deputies voted by 56 to 51 on 17 June, 1917 that it had no confidence in the statement and the Conjoint was dissolved. Alexander resigned. Montefiore remained as AJA president. On 4 September, the Conjoint was re-constituted as the Joint Foreign Committee.
During the Spring and Summer of 1933, the Joint Foreign Committee under Neville Laski of the Board and Leonard G Montefiore of the AJA met weekly, sometimes twice weekly to discuss the situation in Germany. They set up sub-committees to deal with refugees, information, parliamentary affairs, public meetings, finance and co-ordination with grassroots movements in the East End. A Central British Fund (CBF) for German Jewry (balanced between the Zionists and the anti-Zionists) was set up which raised £100,000 in May, 1943.
In July 1943, a carefully planned (and successful) campaign to get Zionist deputies returned to the Board of Deputies led to the Joint Foreign Committee being dis-banded as a way of diminishing the influence of the anti-Zionist AJA.
By 1947, the AJA had itself become more Zionist. Leonard Stein, a former political secretary of the World Zionist Organisation became its President. It welcomed the new Jewish state by dissolving a Jewish Fellowship on ‘the anti-Zionist role of the League of British Jews’.
Source:
“The History of the Jews in Britain Since 1858,” Lipmann
The Mortara Case (1858) Church authorities kidnapped the six-year old Edgar Mortara from his Jewish parents when they learnt that his Catholic nurse had secretly baptised him when he was two. Despite international efforts to get the boy returned, the Church refused saying that baptism was irrevocable. He grew up as a Christian and was never re-united with his natural parents. The Damascus Affair (1840) When Syria was under Egyptian rule, a general blood libel was brought against the Jewish community of Damascus. The leadership were imprisoned and to rtured. One died and another eight condemned to death. Moses Montefiore and Isaac Cremieux secured their release and obtained a pardon. An expression of dis-belief in all charges against the leadership and Jewish community of Damascus was declared by the ruler, Mehemet Ali.
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from: http://www.jerusalemiloveyou.net/article.php3?id_article=2
Before Their Diaspora
PART I
Tuesday October 1st, 2002, by Walid Kalidi
INTRODUCTION
PALESTINE was the name applied by Herodotus and other Greek and Latin writers to the Philistine coastland, and sometimes also to the territory between it and the Jordan Valley. Early in the Roman Empire the name Palaestina was given to the region around Jerusalem. The Byzantines in turn named the province west of the Jordan River, stretching from Mount Carmel in the north of Gaza in the south, Palaestina Prima.
ROME AND BYZANTIUM
In A.D. 70 the Roman emperor Titus suppressed a Jewish revolt in Palestine, razed Jerusalem to the ground, and destroyed its Temple. After a second Jewish revolt (A.D. 132 - 135) the emperor Hadrian built a new, pagan city on the ruins of Jerusalem, which he called Colonia Aelia capitolina and forbade Jews to enter. After Hadrian's reign the number of Christians living in Jerusalem rose steadily until, with the conversion to Christianity of the emperor Constantine I (died 337) and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 320 of his mother, Queen Helena, the Christian character of Jerusalem and Palestine began to predominate over the pagan. Constantine himself built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and his successors, particularly Justinian (died 565) covered the country with churches and religious monuments. The Byzantines allowed the Jews to enter Jerusalem only one day a year to weep by a stone on the site of the Temple, but in deference to Jesus' prediction in Matt. 24:2, they kept the site desolate.
ISLAM AND THE UMAYYADS
Long before the rise of Islam in the seventh century, there had been continuous intermingling between the Christian peoples of Palestine and the Arab inhabitants (some of whom were also Christians) to the south and east. At first the prophet Muhammad and his followers turned in their prayers to Jerusalem, not Mecca. According to the Koran, Muhammad was miraculously transported in nocturnal flight from Mecca to Jerusalem, whence he ascended in seven stages to the presence of God. To this day Muhammad's spiritual journey is celebrated throughout the Muslim world on the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month by the Muslim calendar. Centuries after the event, the Muslim accounts of Muhammad's ascension became a source of inspiration to Dante in the writing of the Divine Comedy [1].
The Arabs captured Jerusalem from the Byzantines in 637. To show his respect for the city, Omar (the second caliph after the death of the Prophet) accented its surrender in person and treated its inhabitants with extraordinary clemency and moderation. In the words of Sir William Fitzgerald: "never in the sorry story of conquest up to that day, and rarely since, were such noble and generous sentiments displayed by a conqueror as those extended to Jerusalem by Omar." [2] Omar was anxious to identify the places associated with Muhammad's ascension. The rock from which the ascension had taken places was located with difficulty, as it lay buried under a dunghill. After cleansing the rock, Omar led his entourage (which included many Companions, i.e., close associates, of the Prophet) in prayer beside it. The call to prayer was made for the first time since Muhammad's death by Bilal, his muezzin. One of the Companions who attended the ceremony, Ubadah, was appointed by Omar as first gadi ("judge") of Jerusalem and died in the city while holding that office. The Arabic name given to Jerusalem was al-Bait al-Muqaddas (the Holy House) in apposition to al-Bait al-Haram (the Sacred House), Mecca's designation. The Byzantine province of Palaestina Prima became the administrative and military province (djund) of Filastin - the Arabic name for Palestine since then.
Palestine was particularly honored by the Umayyad Arab dynasty (661-750), whose capital was Damascus Mu'awiya (661-680), the founder of the dynasty, had himself proclaimed caliph in Jerusalem. One of his successors, the firth Umayyad caliph, Abd al-Malik (685-705), built the magnificent Mosque of the Dome of the Rock over the rock from which Muhammad had ascended to heaven; Abd al-Malik's son Walid (705-715) built the adjacent Mosque of al-Aqsa. The Mosque of the Dome of the Rock, a dazzling synthesis of Byzantine, Persian, and Arab architecture, is the earliest surviving Muslim monument anywhere. The area of the two mosques became known as al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary). The Umayyads' preference for Palestine and Jerusalem was in part politically motivated, because during the earlier decades of the dynasty Mecca and Medina were in the hands of rivals. But their attitude was also rooted in the Traditions (i.e., sayings) of the Prophet, some of the most famous of which equated Jerusalem with Mecca and Medina. It was to these Traditions the Umayyads appealed when they urged Muslims to perform the pilgrimage at Jerusalem instead of in the two other holy cities. Thus even after Mecca and Medina came under Umayyad control in 692, the seventh Umayyad caliph, Suleiman (715-717), had himself invested with the caliphate in Jerusalem; he also built the city of Ramleh in Palestine, which he made his residence and adorned with a magnificent mosque and palace. Long after the Umayyads, the magnetic pull of Jerusalem was noted by the Persian traveler Nasir-i-Khusrau, who on visiting the city in 1047, wrote: "The people of these parts, if they are unable to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, will go at the appointed season to Jerusalem." [3]
THE ABBASIDS
The Abbasid dynasty (750-1225), with its seat in Baghdad, succeeded the Umayyads. It reached the zenith of its power and influence within a century of its foundation. Thereafter many provinces of the empire fell under local Muslim rulers holding only nominal allegiance to the Abbasid caliph, whose role now resembled that of the Holy Roman emperor after the decline of his power. For the greater part of the period from the end of the ninth century until the Crusades, Palestine was governed by Muslim rulers based in Cairo.
At the height of their power, two Abbasid caliphs made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph (754-775), visited Jerusalem twice and ordered the repair of damage to the city caused by an earthquake. Al-Mahdi, the third Abbasid caliph (775-785), visited Jerusalem especially to pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque. The seventh Abbasid caliph, al-Ma'mun (813-833), ordered major restorations to be carried out in the Mosque of the Dome of the Rock under the supervision of his brother and successor, al-Mu'tasim (833-842), who was then his viceroy in Syria. So anxious were the Abbasids to be associated with Jerusalem that they ineptly substituted in inscriptions on the dome and the name of al-Ma'mun for the Umayyad Abd al-Malik as the builder of the mosque.
Descriptions of Palestine in the centuries the Crusades abound in the writings of Muslim and Arab geographers. Ya'kubi from Khorasan noted in 891-892 that Palestine had "a numerous population of Arabs . . . and a certain proportion of non-Muslims, Christians, Jews and Samaritans." [4] Ibn-al-Fakih from Hamadhan, who wrote in 903, related the Traditions about Jerusalem and gave detailed descriptions of its mosques. Ibn-Abd Rabih (died 940) from Cordova described the Dome of the rock as well as other Muslim sanctuaries in Jerusalem, as did Istakhri (fl. 950) from Persepolis, closely followed by ibn-Hawkal (died 977). Overshadowing all of these accounts is the work of Muqqadasi (died 986), a native of Jerusalem. He enumerated the principal products of Palestine, "among which agricultural produce was particularly copious and prized: fruit of every kind (olives, figs, grapes, quinces, plums, apples, dates, walnuts, almonds, jujubes and bananas), some of which were exported, and crops for processing (sugarcane, indigo and sumac). But the mineral resources were equally important: chalk earth . . . marble from Bayt Djibrin, and sulphur mined in the Ghawr (Jordan Valley) not to mention the salt and bitumen of the Dead Sea. Stone, which was common in the country, was the most generally used building material for towns of any importance." [5]
In the wake of the caliphs Omar onward, pious men and women in their thousands made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Jerusalem exerted a powerful attraction on the adherents of the mystical Sufi movement from its beginnings in the eighth century. For example Rabi'a al-Adawiyah (ca. 717-801), a woman mystic accorded first place in the list of Muslim saints, who preached a life of "penitence, patience, gratitude, holy fear, voluntary poverty and utter dependence (tawakkul) upon God," [6] chose to leave her native Basra in Iraq in order to live, meditate, and die in Jerusalem. In addition to ordinary pilgrims and mystics, Jerusalem attracted a steady flow of scholars: experts in Koranic exegesis and in the Traditions, theologians and grammarians who came to write and lecture in the city's grand mosques and the dozens of colleges affiliated with them.
The greatest of these scholars was al-Ghazzali (1058-1111), the leading theologian of Islam and one of its most original thinkers. Al-Ghazzali left his post as lecturer at the prestigious Nizamiyah Academy in Baghdad in 1095 to take up residence in Jerusalem, where he began work on his magnum opus. The Revivification of the Sciences of Religion, a magisterial reconciliation of rationalism, mysticism, and legal orthodoxy which, in addition to revitalizing Islamic theology, left its mark through partial Latin translations on Jewish and Christian scholasticism. Also in Jerusalem, at the insistence of his tudens there, al-Ghazzali completed a concise exposition of the Muslim creed, calling it The Jerusalem Tract.
Omar had allowed Christians the undisturbed use of their churches in Jerusalem. His successors strictly maintained this policy except for some serious outbreaks of anti-Christian fanaticism in Jerusalem in 966 (in which Jews took part with Muslims), and again in 1009. Otherwise Christian pilgrimage to the holy places continued uninterrupted. The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809), of legendary fame, acceded to Charlemagne's request that hostels for Christian pilgrims be established in Palestine and nuns be permitted to serve in Jerusalem.
Jews had been debarred from living in Jerusalem first by the Romans under Hadrian and then by the Christian Byzantines. In their negotiations for the surrender of the city to Omar, the Christian inhabitants probably demanded that the ban on the residence of Jews be included in the treaty of surrender. Nevertheless, Omar's successors deviated from the terms of the treaty with regard to the Jews, and gradually allowed Jews to take up residence in the city. The first mention of a synagogue in Jerusalem after Hadrian seems to be one made by the Persian traveler Nasir-i-Khusrau in 1047. [7]
THE CRUSADES AND COUNTER-CRUSADES
Arab and Muslim rule over Palestine was interrupted by the Crusader invasion and the establishment of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1187). The counter-Crusades, led by Saladin (died 1193) and his successors, persisted until 1291, when the last Frankish strongholds, Caesarea and Acre, were retaken. After their entry into Jerusalem, the Crusaders had tortured, burnt, and massacred thousands of defenseless Muslims (men, women and children) as well as the small number of Jewish residents who had taken refuge in their synagogue. By contrast, Saladin's entry into Jerusalem in 1187, at the pinnacle of his military might, displayed the same reverence for the city and compassion for its Christian inhabitants that the caliph Omar had shown some five hundred years earlier. As Stanley Lane-Poole commented: "If the taking of Jerusalem were the only fact known about Saladin, it were enough to prove him the most chivalrous and great-hearted conqueror of his own, and perhaps of any, age." [8]
Saladin's first task after entering Jerusalem was to cleanse the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque of defilement. For a whole week, noble and humble men alongside each other washed the walls and floors of the buildings and sprinkled them with rose water. The relatives and descendents of the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem (who had been made refugees by the Crusader conquest of the city) were given back their family properties; and where no owners could be found, the dwellings were assigned to well-known Arab clans. Saladin introduced the institution of the madrasah ("colegiate mosque") into Jerusalem and endowed one bearing his name (al-Salahiyyah). He also endowed a hospital and two hostels for scholars and mystics. The soldiers who had died in his campaign were buried outside the Gate of Mercy on the eastern side of the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) by his command. In 1193 Saladin's son al-Afdal built the Magharibah Mosque near the gate of the same name on the southwest side of the Haram; this was the site where Muhammad had tethered his wondrous mount before his ascension. Al-Afdal dedicated the land outside the gate as waqf ("religious endowment") for the mosque and for pilgrims and scholars from North Africa.
Saladin and his successors, the Ayyubids, allowed Christians to reside and practice their faith in Jerusalem; and the city was kept open to Christian pilgrims from Europe, although the fear persisted for centuries that the Franks might attempt to reconquer it. The number of Jews residing in Jerusalem under the Crusaders had declined to one, a dyer, noted by the Jewish traveler Rabbi Pethahiah of Regensburg (ca. 1177). But Saladin and his successors revived the Jewish presence in Jerusalem. Indeed, after the Crusades all the lands of Islam became a haven for Jews from Europe, inasmuch as the Crusades were equally anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim.
The Crusades and counter-Crusades inspired a resurgence of intense Muslim and Arab interest in Palestine, which took three forms:
A host of writers and poets celebrated the religious significance and value of Jerusalem in a new literary genre known as the Books of Virtues (Fada'il). The themes of these works were the special efficacy of prayers offered in the city and the advantages of pilgrimage to it or residence and death in it. But Jerusalem was not the only place singled out for veneration. Great emphasis was laid both on Muslim tombs and shrines in different parts of the country (e.g., the tomb of Hashim, grandfather of Muhammad, at Gaza) and on sites associated with the Hebrew prophets - tombs or reputed tombs and birthplaces or spots the prophets had visited or dwelt in.
Pilgrimages and visits to Palestine multiplied and became a popular regional phenomenon.
Competition arose among Muslim rulers and affluent individuals to build public institutions (schools, hostels, soup kitchens, clinics, baths, and fountains) as endowments for the mosques and other Muslim shrines in Palestine.
The resurgence of Muslim and Arab interest in Filastin/Palestine was no passing mood in mere reaction to the Crusader threat. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, it took yet another form. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem became a central tenet of many Sufi tariqahs ("brotherhoods"). The Mosque of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (which housed the rock from which Muhammad ascended to heaven) became the site of special rituals and elevating experiences. There the mentors of the tariqahs would instruct their disciples in programs of rigorous fasting and contemplation. Special prayer sessions known as dhikrs ("recollections") were held at which the attributes of God and the Prophet were repeatedly recollected in such variations as to induce a state of religious ecstasy. These sessions were in preparation for the climactic experience of identification, at the very site of the Prophet's ascension, with the Prophet's own imagined spiritual state during his ascension. For the Sufis, Muhammad's ascension symbolized the soul's escape from its corporeal moorings. Palestinian and other Arab adherents of Sufi tariqahs are still found today.
THE MAMELUKES
In 1260 power passed for the hands of Saladin's descendants, the Ayyubids, to those of the Mameluke sultans of Egypt. From that date until the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, Palestine remained a part of the Mameluke realm. It wasthe Mamelukes who drove the last Crusaders out of Palestine and who in 1260, at the battle of Any Jalut near Nazareth, defeated the Mongol hordes under Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, saving the country from certain destruction. Except during the period of the Crusades, the administrative unit of the djund of Filastin, established by the caliph Omar, had been maintained. The Mamelukes reorganized the country administratively by dividing it into six districts: those of Gaza, Lydda, Kakun (after a village north of Lydda), Jerusalem, Hebron, and Nablus. These territories west of the Jordan River continued to serve as a major crossroads linking Cairo with Damascus and Aleppo, traversed as much by merchants as by administrators, pilgrims, and couriers.
The Mamelukes granted Jerusalem special favors. Several of the sultans lightened its taxes or presented splendid copies of the Koran to its mosques, while most undertook repairs and additions (e.g., colonnades and minarets) to its sanctuaries. Sultan Baibars (1260-77) built a khan, or inn, for the relief of the poor, and Sultan al-Ashraf Ka'it Bay (1468-95) rebuilt on a grand scale a madrasah that bears his name (al-Ashrafiyyah). Muslim geographers made frequent mention of Palestine and Jerusalem during this period, among them Yakut (1179-1229) from Asia Minor; Abul Fida (1273-1332), a descendant of Saladin's brother; and ibn-Battuta (1304-77) from Tangiers. They recounted the references to Jerusalem in the Koran and the Traditions, and described its mosques, sanctuaries, schools, bazaars, inns, and pious foundations. Most important for Jerusalem as well as Hebron under the Mamelukes is the work written in 1495 by the gadi of Jerusalem. Mujir al-Din, who also listed the names of famous Muslim scholars, soldiers, rulers, and mystics buried in the city, in addition to the many Jerusalemites who attained high office in the service of the Mamelukes.
THE OTTOMANS
From 1516 until the end of World War I, the whole region of western Asia was part of the Ottoman Empire. The majestic superstructure of the walls encircling the Old City of Jerusalem, built by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66), attests to Jerusalem's standing in Ottoman eyes. Equally revealing is the endowment made in 1552 by Khasseki Sultan (known in Europe as Roxelana), the favorite and queen of Suleiman. Seeking "the pleasure of Allah," she built a complex in Jerusalem "for the poor and the needy, the weak and the distressed" that included a monastery "with fifty-five doors" and an inn together with a public kitchen, bakery, stables, and storerooms. The endowment deed specified the range of employees required to run this institution - stewards, clerks, master cooks (and apprentices), food inspectors, dishwashers, milers, handymen, and garbage collectors. It described in detail the menus to be served, the ingredients to be used, and the quantities to be cooked. For the maintenance of the establishment, it set aside the revenues from twenty-three Palestinian villages as well s those from a village in northern Lebanon, and shops and soap factories in Tripoli. [9] Khasseki Sultan's public kitchen and bakery were still functioning under the British Mandate.
The Ottomans scrupulously continued the Muslim tradition of tolerance toward Christian religious interests in Palestine. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem was acknowledged in the sixteenth century as the custodian of the Christian holy places, and from about the same time France became the guardian of the Latin clergy. Like earlier Muslim powers, the Ottoman Empire opened its gates to hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Spain and other parts of Christendom. But the vast majority, as in the earlier centuries after the Crusades, did not choose to live in Palestine. Thus the number of Jews in Jerusalem in the first century after the Ottoman conquest dropped from 1,330 in 1525 to 980 in 1587. [10] Even by the middle of the nineteenth century, only a few Jews had availed themselves of the opportunity to settle in the Holy Land. Those who did so lived in the four cities of special significance to Judaism: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. The Ottomans presided over a set of regulations and understandings, known as the "status quo," that governed privileges and access rights of Jews and Christians at their respective religious sites and monuments. These regulations and understandings were based on customary practice as it had accumulated over the years. They included rights acknowledged by earlier Muslim rulers and the decisions of Muslim courts in support of these rights, as well as Christian and Jewish commitment to adhere to customary practice. The activities of European merchants in the coastal towns of Palestine were unimpeded by the Ottomans. The agricultural and industrial products of the interior found their way to Europe via the ports of Gaza, Acre, and Jaffa. As before, the overland trade routes between Syria and Egypt passed through Palestine, while the pilgrimage routes to Mecca (whether from Cairo, Damascus, or beyond) converged at the Palestinian port of Aqaba. By the mid-nineteenth century, many European powers had consulates in the country and during the second half of the century Christian missions - Catholic, Protestant, and Greek Orthodox - proliferated along with their schools, hospitals, printing presses, and hostels. In 1892 a French company completed the building of a railroad connecting Jaffa and Jerusalem. Of all the Arab provinces in the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of the Maronite sections of Mount Lebanon, Palestine was the most exposed and accessible to Christian European influences.
This exposure also had its disadvantages, particularly with the gradual decline of Ottoman political and military power. The industrial revolution and the European economic penetration of the region dealt a severe blow to local crafts and industries, while increasing European political leverage against Constantinople. One much-abused avenue for such leverage was afforded by the so-called Capitulations - a system of extraterritorial privileges granted to nationals of European powers who resided in the Ottoman Empire. The early Zionist immigrants and settlers were to make full use of the Capitulations.
In 1887-88, the area that later became Mandatory Palestine was divided into three administrative units: the district (sanjak) of Jerusalem comprising the southern half of the country; and the two northern districts of Nablus and Acre. The two northern districts were administratively attached to the province (vilayet) of Beirut, but because of its importance to the Ottomans, the district of Jerusalem was governed directly by Constantinople. The area across the Jordan River (Trans-Jordan or Jordan) was administratively separate from the Palestinian districts and formed part of the province of Syria, with Damascus as its capital. At this time the population of three Palestinian districts was ca. 600,000, about 10 percent of whom were Christians and the rest mostly Sunnite Muslims. The Jews numbered about 25,000; the majority was deeply religious, devoting themselves to prayer and contemplation and deliberately eschewing employment or agricultural activity. Until the advent of Zionism, relations between Palestinians and Jews were stable and peaceful, mellowed by more than a millennium of coexistence and often shared adversity.
Contributing to the climate of tolerance was the reverence held by Islam for the Hebrew prophets, enhanced in the case of Palestine by the tradition of pilgrimage to biblical sites. Palestinian Muslims, more than any other Muslims, were particularly imbued with such reverence if only because they lived in continuous proximity to the sites associated with these prophets. The inscription over Jaffa Gate (the main western gate into the Old City of Jerusalem) reads: "There is no God but Allah, and Abraham is his friend." Mosques and Muslim shrines honoring Hebrew prophets and bearing their names in Arabic were regular features of the Palestinian landscape. Perhaps among Muslims was the Palestinian practice of celebrating religious festivals in honor of Hebrew prophets. No less distinctive was the widespread use by Palestinians of Hebrew first names. The same tolerance is evident in the attitudes of Palestinian Muslims toward their Christian compatriots, relations with whom have been remarkably free of tension (unlike the situation in some neighboring Arab countries). It is no coincidence that the various Christian sects in Jerusalem have traditionally entrusted the keys of the Holy Sepulcher to a Palestinian Muslim family. Although proud of their Arab heritage and ancestry, the Palestinians considered themselves to be descended not only from the Arab conquerors of the seventh century but also from indigenous peoples who had lived in the country since time immemorial, including the ancient Hebrews and the Canaanites before them. Acutely aware of the distinctiveness of Palestinian history, the Palestinians saw themselves as the heirs of its rich associations. Politically their loyalty was to Constantinople, partly because the Ottoman sultan was also caliph and head of the Muslim community (ummah) and partly because they felt like citizens rather than subjects of the empire. Their feeling of citizenship derived from the fact that the Ottoman Turks had never colonized the Arab provinces in the sense of settling in them; thus among the Arabs Ottomanism had acquired the connotation of partnership between the peoples of the empire rather than that of domination by one ethnic group over another. Nevertheless, relations between the different ethnic groups within the empire became increasingly strained during the period from the turn of the century to World War I, largely under the influence of growing European nationalism. Both Arabs and Turks were affected by this climate, which strengthened the appeal of the specific ethnic and political identity of each. A powerful secondary influence in the same direction was the Arab intellectual and literary renaissance that crystallized toward the end of the nineteenth century and radiated its influence from Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut.
The promulgation of the new Ottoman Constitution in 1876 (short-lived as it was) enabled the first elections to be held to the Ottoman Parliament, in which delegates from the Arab provinces, including Palestinians from Jerusalem, took their seats. (It is ironic that Palestinians were sitting in the Parliament in Constantinople twenty years before the Zionists held their first congress in Basel in 1897.) Arabs, including Palestinians, were appointed to high office not only in the civil service, the diplomatic corps, the judiciary, and the army, but also as ministers in the Ottoman cabinet. The "Young Turks" Revolution in 1908, which brought reformists to power, further raised Arab and Palestinian expectations, stimulating political debate and intellectual activity best exemplified in Palestine by the appearance of new journals and newspapers. DelegatesfromJerusalem, Jaffa, Nablus, Acre, and Gaza were elected to the Ottoman Parliament in 1908 and 1912. But Ottoman reforms could not keep abreast of deteriorating Turkish-Arab relations. Many Arabs wanted a greater share in government. Some advocated decentralization; others spoke of Arab unity, revolt, and independence.
ZIONISM AND WORLD WAR I
Meanwhile, during the 1880s an important development in Eastern Europe began to cast its lengthening shadow on the future of the Palestinians. The phenomena of European nationalism and colonialism had inspired a national political movement known as Zionism among a growing number of East European Jewish intellectuals. The Zionists yearned to escape from Jewish minority status and the twin threats of assimilation and persecution. They saw the acquisition of territory where a Jewish sovereign state could be established as the means of national fulfillment and salvation. The ancient Jewish association with and religious attachment to Palestine were regarded as justifying its choice as the site for such a state, though some early Zionists were willing to consider alternative sites.
The Zionist decision, late in the nineteenth century, to colonize Palestine with a view to turning into a Jewish state irrespective of the existence and wishes of its indigenous population ushered in the turbulent modern phase of Palestinian history, whose consequences are with us today. The course set by the Zionists was bound to lead to conflict and tragedy, and outcome foreseen by some Zionists was bound to lead to conflict and tragedy, and outcome foreseen by some Zionist leaders themselves. For Palestine, as we have seen, was not an empty land. Its inhabitants lived in a score of cities and towns, and some eight hundred villages and hamlets, built of stone. While the bulk of the population gained their living from agriculture, the townspeople engaged in commerce and the traditional crafts; some ere in the civil service, other in the professions. Many of the urban rich were landlords, but members of the older families were also in the upper echelons of the civil service, the judiciary, and the professions. The Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim, formed a proud and vibrant community that had already crossed the threshold of an intellectual and national renaissance. They shared and reflected the cultural and political values of the neighboring Arab metropolitan centers. For centuries they had had trade links with Europe and contact with Europeans who came as Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. For decades they had been exposed to modernizing influences as a result of the educational and medical work of European and American Christian missions. Service in the European and Asian provinces of the Ottoman Empire had widened their horizons.
The Palestinians were as deeply entrenched in their country on the eve of the Zionist venture as any citizens of peasantry anywhere. The contemporaneous photographic collection of Felix Bonfils (1831-85) and his son Adrien (1860-1929) is visual testimony to this fact. No less telling is the evidence of the many European artists and painters who visited Palestine before the advent of Zionism, e.g., William Henry Bartlett (1809-54), David Roberts (1796-1864), Edward Lear (1812-88), and William Holman Hunt (1827-1910). After all, the Palestinians' main grievance against Constantinople was that they wanted greater recognition of their rights and more responsibility in government; they were altogether unlikely to acquiesce in the Zionist political program, which challenged their very title to their land.
The first Zionist colony in Palestine was founded in 1878, and the first wave of Zionist immigrants arrived in 1882. In the same year a French Jewish millionaire, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, began his support of Jewish colonization in Palestine. In 1896 a German Jewish millionaire, Baron Maurice de Hirsch, established a branch of his Jewish Colonization Association in Palestine, while Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew, published der Judenstaat - a treatise that integrated prevailing Zionist ideas and outlined a program of implementation. The following year in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress, which created the World Zionist Organization, the institutional framework for subsequent Zionist diplomacy and operations. In 1901 the Keren Kayemeth (Jewish National Fund) was established in London to acquire land in Palestine that would remain inalienably Jewish and on which only Jewish labor would be employed. Between the 1880s and 1914 some thirty Zionist colonies were founded, and by 1914 the total Jewish population in Palestine had reached about eighty thousand, although the majority retained their European nationalities.
The initial phases of Zionist activity in Palestine took place in spite of the mounting alarm and opposition of the Palestinians. The Ottoman authorities repeatedly tried to legislate controls on Zionist mass immigration and land acquisition only to be frustrated by the pressure of European powers, the corruption of their own local officials, the greeof individual landowners, and Zionist ingenuity in exploiting the Capitulations system. The earliest tensions between Palestinians and Jews developed as a result of the colonizing program and declared political purposes of European Zionist immigrants. Vast estates were purchased by the central Zionist institutions from feudal absentee landlords in Beirut, over the heads of Palestinian tenants and sharecroppers.
World War I brought Britain and those Arabs who were dissatisfied with Ottoman rule into an alliance with each other. Sharif Hussein of Mecca hoped, by siding with Britain and the Western Allies against Constantinople, to win unity and independence for the Arabs at the end of the war. In July 1915 Hussein undertook a correspondence in good faith with Sir Henry McMahon correspondence was interpreted by the Arabs to mean that, in the postwar settlement, the British would recognize the independence of a united Arab state comprising the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, including Palestine. By May 1916, however, Britain, France, and Russia had reached a secret agreement according to which the bulk of Palestine was to be internationalized. More significant for future developments was a secret letter addressed in November 1917 by Arthur James Balfour, British secretary of state for foreign affairs, to Baron Lionel Walter de Rothschild, a British Zionist, promising British support for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People. This document marked the historic watershed in the fortunes of Zionism. Jerusalem was captured by British and Dominion forces under the command of General Sir Edmund Allenby in December 1917. The rest of the country was occupied by October 1918. The road to the realization of Zionism lay wide open.
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CONTINUED IN PART II
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[1] Maguel Asin, Islam and the Divine Comedy, trans and abridged Harold Sunderland (London: John Murray, 1926), pp. 67 - 76.
[2] Report by Sir William Fitzgerald on the Local Administration of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Government Printer, 1945), p. 4.
[3] Quoted in A.L. Tibawi, "Jerusalem: Its Place in Islam and Arab History," Arab World 14, nos. 10 - 11(1968): 11.
[4] Encyclopedia of Islam, new ed., s.v."Filastin."
[5] Ibid
[6] Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arab from the Earliest Times to the Present, 8th ed. (London: Macmillan & Co, New York: st. Martin's Press, 1964), p. 439.
[7] Tibawi, "Jerusalem," p. 11.
[8] Stanley Lane-Poole, Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Beirut: Khayats, 1964), p. 234.
[9] St. H. Stephan, "An Endowment Deed of Khasseki Sultan, Dated the 24th of May 1552, "Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 170-94.
[10] Abnon Cohen, Jewish Life under Islam: Jerusalem in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass. And London: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 34.
from: http://www.jerusalemiloveyou.net/article.php3?id_article=18
Before Their Diaspora
PART II
Tuesday October 1st, 2002, by Walid Kalidi
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IN THE SAME ISSUE :
Child Prisoner Briefing
Israel can halt this now
The caged bird sings
Accepting condolences
When Martyrs are rapped with the American flag
Israeli soldiers kill American peace activist in Rafah
Israeli measures continue in Hebron
Day 249: The TRUTH that is reaching DEAF ears
Al Quds Foundation to Create Rich Internet Presence Using PublishArabia.com
Mahmoud is Dead - Mahmoud is Dead
TOPICS DISCUSSED :
November 1999
The Issue of East Timor
Ottoman Jerusalem
ID Card Confiscation in Jerusalem
PALESTINIAN REFUGEE QUESTION IN THE FINAL STATUS NEGOTIATIONS
The Growth of the Western Communities, 1917-1948
CHRONOLOGY
1876
Ottoman constitution promulgated.
1876-1877
first Ottoman Parliament convenes in Constantinople; first Palestinian deputies from Jerusalem elected to this Parliament.
1878
Petah Tikva, first Zionist colony, established in Palestine.
1881
November:
Ottoman government announces permission for foreign (non-Ottoman) Jews to settle throughout Ottoman Empire excluding Palestine.
1882
Baron Edmund D. Rothschild of Paris begins financial backing of Jewish colonization in Palestine.
First wave of Zionist mass immigration to Palestine begins.
Jewish population of Palestine numbers 24,000.
July:
Ottoman government adopts policy allowing Jewish Pilgrims and businessman to visit Palestine but not to settle there.
December:
Ottoman government informs Jewish leadership and Constantinopel that it views Zionist, colonization in Palestine as political problem.
1884
March:
Ottoman government decides to close Palestine to foreign (non-Ottoman) Jewish businessmen but not to Jewish Pilgrims.
1888
May:
European powers pressure Ottoman government to allow foreign (non-Ottoman) Jews to set on Palestine provided they do so singly and not en masse.
1891
German Jewish millionaire Baron Maurice de Hirsch founds Jewish colonization Association (JCA).
Ottoman sultan Abd-al Hamid II expresses fears that granting Ottoman nationality to Jewish immigrants in Palestine "may result in the creation of the Jewish government in Jerusalem".
1892
November:
Ottoman government for bid sale of state land to foreign (non-Ottoman) Jews in Palestine.
1893
April:
the European powers pressure Ottoman government to permit Jews legally resident in Palestine to buy land provided they establish no colonies on it.
1896
JCA begins operations in Palestine.
Publication of Der Judenstaat, by Hungarian Zionist leader Theodore Herzl, advocating creation of Jewish state in Argentina or Palestine. Abd-al Hamid rejects Herzel's proposal that Palestine be granted to the Jews: "I cannot give away any part of it (the empire)…..I will not agree to vivisection".
1897
Commission headed by Mohammed Tahir al-Husseini, mufti (highest Muslim religious dignitary) of Jerusalem, appointed to scrutinize Zionists land-acquisition methods.
August:
first Zionist Congress, convening in Basel, Switzerland, issues Basel program on colonization of Palestine and establishment of World Zionist Organization (WZO).
In response to first Zionist Congress, Abd-al Hamid II initiates policy of sending members of his own Palace staff to govern province of Jerusalem.
1898
Arabic press reacts to first Zionist Congress. Cairo Journal al-Manar warns that Zionism aims to take possession of Palestine.
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany visits Jerusalem.
1899
October:
Albert Antebi, JCA representative in Jerusalem, observes that program of first Zionist Congress has adversely affected relations between Palestinians and Jewish immigrants.
March 19:
Herzl sends letter to Palestinian mayor of Jerusalem hinting that, if Zionists are not welcome in Palestine, they will go elsewhere.
1900
ICA takes responsibility for colonies supported by Baron de Rothschild.
June:
Ottoman government sends Commission of inquiry to Palestine to study implications of Zionist mass immigration and land acquisition.
1901
Pressured by European powers, Ottoman government allows foreign 9non-Ottoman) Jews to buy land in northern Palestine.
Keren Kayemeth (Jewish National Fund) founded as land-acquisition organ of WZO; land acquired by JNF in Palestine to be inalienably Jewish, and exclusively Jewish labor to be employed on it.
January:
Ottoman restrictions on Zionist immigration to and land acquisition in Jerusalem District take affect.
May:
Administrative council of Jerusalem strongly objects to JCA's attempts at acquiring land in Jerusalem district.
July:
Palestinian peasants in region of Tiberius expressed alarm at extent of Zionist land acquisition.
1902
January:
Al-Manar warns that Zionists seeks national sovereignty in Palestine.
February:
JCA representative Antebi observes that "the ill will of the local population coincides with the creation of Zionism".
1903
Second wave of Zionist mass immigration to Palestine begins.
December:
Anglo-Palestine Company (APC), subsidiary of JCA, established in Palestine to finance Zionists colonization.
1904
July:
Death of Theodore Herzl.
August-September:
Tensions develop between Zionist colonists and Palestinian farmers in region of Tiberius.
1905
Publication of Le Reveil de la Nation Arabe, by Negib Azoury, warning of Zionist political aims in Palestine.
1907
first kibbutz, based on exclusively Jewish labor, established.
August:
report issued by Ottoman Governor of Jerusalem on Zionist evasion of Ottoman immigration and land-transfer regulations.
1908
Palestinian deputies from Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nablus, and Acre elected to Ottoman parliament of 1908 in Constantinople.
Palestinian journal al-Karmil founded in Haifa with purpose of opposing Zionists colonization.
March 16:
clash between Zionist immigrants and Palestinians in Jaffa results in one Palestinian dead and 13 Jews wounded.
July 24:
beginning of "Young Turks" Revolution Constantinople.
1909
Tel Aviv founded north of Jaffa.
February-April:
renewed tensions and clashes between Zionists Colonists and Palestinian farmers near Nazareth.
June:
Zionist issue raised the first time in Ottoman Parliament by Palestinian Deputy from Jaffa.
July:
five members of Ottoman Parliament, including Palestinian Deputy from Jerusalem, meet with British Zionist leader Sir Francis Montefiore in London to voice their concern about political objectives of Zionism.
1910
Arabic newspapers in Beirut, Damascus, and Haifa expressed opposition to Zionist land acquisition in Palestine.
June:
Deputies in Ottoman Parliament from Arab provinces request assurances from Ottoman Minister of interior against Zionist land acquisition policies in Palestine.
1911
Palestinian journalist Najib Nassar publishes first book in Arabic on Zionism, entitled Zionism: Its history, Objective and Importance.
January:
Palestinian newspaper Falistan begins to appear; "addressing its readers as Palestinians," it warns them about consequences of Zionist colonization.
January-February:
European powers pressure Ottoman government to allow Zionist land acquisition in Palestine.
March-April:
Arab deputies from Jerusalem, Beirut, and Damascus lobby in Ottoman Parliament for legislation against Zionist mass immigration to Palestine.
April:
In telegram to Constantinople, 150 Palestinians from Jaffa demand measures against Zionist mass immigration and land acquisition.
May 16:
2 Jerusalem deputies opened first full-scale debate in Ottoman Parliament on Zionism, charging that Zionist aim is to create Jewish State in Palestine.
1912
Palestinian deputies from to Jerusalem, Gaza, Nablus, and Acre elected to Ottoman parliament of 1912.
January:
European powers renew pressure on Ottoman government to facilitate Zionist land acquisition in Palestine.
1913
January:
Palestinian contributor to Falistin writes: "The Zionists will gain mastery over our country village by village, town by town."
1914
August 1:
Outbreak of World War I.
1915
July 14:
correspondence between Sharif Hussein of Mecca and Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, begins.
August:
Jemal Pasha, Ottoman military governor, hangs 11 Arab Nationalist in Beirut.
1916
January 30:
Hussein-McMahon correspondence concludes; Arabs understand it as ensuring postwar independence and unity of Arab provinces of Ottoman Empire, including Palestine.
May:
Jemal Pasha hangs 21 Arab leaders and intellectuals, including two Palestinians, in Beirut and Damascus.
May 16:
Signing of secret Sykes-Picot agreement dividing Arab provinces of Ottoman Empire between Britain and France.
June:
Sharif Hussein proclaims Arab independence from Ottoman rule on basis of his correspondence with McMahon. Arab revolt against constantinople begins.
November:
Sharif Hussein proclaimed "King of the Arab countries."
1917
November 2:
British foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour sends letter to Baron Lionel Walter de Rothschild of pledging British support for establishment of Jewish national home in Palestine (Balfour Declaration).
December 9:
Surrender of Ottoman forces in Jerusalem to Allied forces under General Sir Edmund Allenby.
1918
September:
Whole of Palestine occupied by Allied forces under General Allenby.
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Greetings, J.C.MacHislopp
