The People fighting Over Ownership of Palestine

 Nadene Goldfoot                                            

  The sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans, remembered on their Arch of Titus in Rome, carrying away the slaves who must carry the loot.  Here is history vetted in stone, never to be forgotten for the past 2,000 years. Latin has turned into Italian, but Jews remain Jews, now back in Israel once again.

The Jews lost their land to the Romans in 70 CE as their Occupation led to their burning down Jerusalem and the Temple after they had plundered the Temple and taken out all its valuables of gold and silver objects. They took those left alive after starving most to death as slaves.  Then they had the audacity to tell the Jews they could never return, or if tried, would be killed.

      Depicting Bar Kokhba fighting the Romans over Jerusalem.  He was the nephew of Rabbi Eleazar of Modiin and of Davidic descent.  Rabbi Akiva, on the outbreak of the revolt against Hadrian in 132, which Kokhba led,  claimed him to be the Messiah.  He was of great personal strength, autocratic, irascible.  The Romans were on the edge of rebuilding as a Roman colony. Jews that managed to get back or appear in other parts were not allowed to do circumcisions.  By 133, the Roman counter-attack was with an army of 35,000 under Hadrian and the commander Julius Severus, began.   

As it happened, by 132 CE, General Bar Kokhba had gathered followers into an army, and they stormed Jerusalem, holding it for 3 years, stopped when Bar Kokhba was killed in battle  in 135 holding it.   This Jewish attempt to gain back what was theirs happened 62 years after the major destruction of their country, about 2 generations past.  Bar Kochba was most likely the grandson of those who died in 70.                                                

                     Turkish Empire overseers

A Zionist movement began in the late 19th century and by the 1800s with the 1st Aliyah return in 1880.  The land was under the auspices of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.  What used to be Judah was now called Palestine, named by the Romans who were wildly angry over Bar Kochba's 3 year success.  Palestine was regarded by the Turks and its Arab residents as part of Southern Syria.  Today, this holds, has Ahmed Shukairy of the PLO told the UN Security Council, "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."                                                 

King Feisal or Saud, his brother

In the late 19th century, the Arab population in Palestine was under 250,000 and the great majority were comparative newcomers; either late immigrants or descendants of persons who had immigrated into Palestine in  the previous 70 years.  

Only a few of these 1/4 million residents were landowners.  80% of the Arabs living in Palestine were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads, and Bedouins.  

      British army in Palestine 1920s  Britain had been awarded the mandate of 30 years to handle Palestine.  

Turkey held ownership of about 72% of the land;  most of the rest was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut.  Sovereignty over the land was transferred to England after Turkey's defeat in World War I.  

      Jewish immigration as soon as possible  after 1948

Ownership of the land passed to Israel under international law when it became a state on May 14, 1948.  Of the remaining land, 8.6% was owned by Jews, 3.3% by Arabs who lived in Israel, and 16.5% by Arabs who had left the country, many of them many years earlier.  We know this from the Ottoman laws still available and followed to this day, driving American Jewish lawyers wild in despair.  We had a lawyer friend who told us what it was like, laws created by many on the books.                               

              Rabbis buying land from an Arab landowner, 1920s.  

The land that the Jews had acquired before the 1948 War of Independence  was bought at exorbitant prices.  

"In 1944, Jews paid between $1,000 and $1,100 dollars an acre in Palestine, mostly for arid and semiarid land.  Arabs were happy to sell as they couldn't afford the taxes of the Ottoman Empire.  It wasn't profitable.  

In the same year, rich black soil in Iowa was selling for about $110 dollars per acre.  

These purchases were made mainly from large landowners, including the Arab mayors of Jerusalem, Gaza city and Jaffa. 

President Harry Truman, 1st to recognize Israel as a state

The 1947 UN partition resolution offered the Arabs living in Palestine a state alongside the new Jewish state.  The Arabs of Palestine and the surrounding countries rejected the UN offer, and so on May 14, 1948, Israel's 2nd creation, 5 Arab armies, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon  invaded in an effort to destroy the Jewish state.  Israel probably had 15 minutes of peace between announcing and fighting the birth of their state. What is sad is that Emir Feisal of Iraq and Syria had been friendly with Chaim Weismann in the peace discussions in Paris. He had originally welcomed the Jews back.  He's another of the royalty who needed a state to govern, and he gave up his friendship with Weismann in order to be a king of these 2 states, one at a time, of course.  Anyway, Israel won the battle, regardless.   

Resource:

Why the Jews?  by Dennis Prager & Joseph Telushkin

http://honorsaharchive.blogspot.com/2007/09/arch-of-titus-and-roman-triumph.html

From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_land_purchase_in_Palestine

https://lessons.myjli.com/survival/index.php/2017/03/26/land-ownership-in-palestine-1880-1948/