Jews in
the Land of Israel are: indigenous - aboriginal - native -
home-grown
The legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise of returning Jews to
Eretz Yisrael is based on Jewish descent from the ancient Israelites. The
Jewish people has inherited their right to the land, religiously, legally, and
historically, the Jewish people are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel . Jews
have always looked and prayed toward Zion (Jerusalem ),
never relinquished their relationship to the land, and have always maintained a
presence since ancient times, despite expulsions. Jews were treated as
foreigners and persecuted wherever they were during their long Exile.
Zionism was an authentic response to the persecution of Jews
over millennia around the world. Jews did not come as colonizers, but rather as
pioneers and redeemers of the land, and did not intend to disrupt the lives of
the current inhabitants of the Land of Israel . All
land for Jewish settlement was legally bought and paid for, often at inflated
prices. The Arabs in Palestine-Israel are occupiers of Jewish territory just
like the previous occupiers since the Jewish Second Temple Destruction by the
Romans in 70 AD who named "Israel - Palestine "
and "Jerusalem -
Aelia Capitolina".
The Arabs also terrorized and expelled over a million Jewish
families and confiscated all their assets including over 120,000 square km. of
land which is about 6 times the size of Israel . Most
of the Expelled Jewish families from Arab states have been resettled in Israel and
today consist over half the population.
The Arabs of Palestine were not a national group and never
had been. They were largely undifferentiated from the inhabitants of much of Syria , Lebanon and Jordan . They
had no authentic tie to the Land of Israel . Many
only came for economic opportunity after the Zionist movement began to make the
land fruitful and the economy thrive. In all the years of Arab and Muslim
control from the 7th century, Palestine was
never a separate state and Jerusalem was
never a capital of any other nation but Israel .
Zionist diplomacy legitimately sought a Great Power patron
since Herzl, and found one in Great
Britain . True, Britain had
its own imperial agenda, but this does not detract from the righteousness of
the Zionist cause. The Balfour Declaration was ratified by the San
Remo treaty of 1920, confirmed by the 1920
Treaty of Sevres and Lausanne and
adopted by the League of Nations ,
constituting a statement of international law approving a Jewish homeland in all
of Palestine .
Moreover, The Arabs agreed to the Balfour Declaration in the 1919 Faisal
Weizmann agreement.
The riots of 1920, 1929 and 1936 were instigated by
unscrupulous Arab leaders for their own nefarious purposes, particularly the
Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al Husseini. The “Palestinian” population had
increased rapidly through hundreds of thousands in illegal immigration of Arabs
who were attracted by Zionist economic successes, and the Arab population’s
living standards rose rapidly during this period. The British frequently stood
aside when Arabs murdered Jews.
The British, who had been initially supportive of the Zionist
enterprise through the Balfour Declaration and the early mandate, began to
backtrack early and violated international law and treaties, as reflected in
the splitting off of Transjordan in
1922 which took away 78% of Jewish territory, the Passfield White Paper of
1930, and many other incidents. They definitively repudiated the Balfour
Declaration with the White Paper of 1939 by restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine , causing
the death of millions in Nazi extermination camps, and were unabashedly
pro-Arab after that point.
The English change of heart vis-à-vis their duty and obligation
to the Jewish people under the law and as trustee for the Mandate of
Palestine-Israel. The British agenda was to placate the Arabs as much as
possible in order to control the oil resources in the Middle
East . As a matter of historical facts, The British
went overboard violating international treaties and the Mandate and its terms,
by severely restricting Jewish immigration into Palestine-Israel from
1939-1948, thus causing the deaths of millions of Jews trying to escape Nazi
extermination camps. Furthermore, the British sent out British agents to
blow-up Holocaust Jewish refugee ships bound for Palestine-Israel, known as
"Operation Embarrass".
The Zionist movement accepted the UN partition resolution of
1947 in good faith, albeit reluctantly, as it had the 1937 Peel Commission
Report recommending partition. War was forced on the Yishuv (Jewish national
community) by the Arabs. Solely in self-defense, the Haganah (later the Israeli
Army) took over more land than had been allotted in the Partition Resolution (which
is invalid, since the Arabs rejected it) and was justified in holding it, as it
would have inevitably become a base for attacks on Israel .
Furthermore, according to international law and treaties from 1920. Israel was
reconstituted as a State in 1920 in all of Palestine , the
only impediment to self rule was the increase in number of Jews in Palestine which
the Arabs fought against but lost.
The Yishuv was numerically vastly inferior to the combined
Arab population, and it bordered on a miracle that Israeli survived the war
(“the few against the many”). All Jews realized they would be massacred if they
lost, and fought with absolute determination to prevent another Holocaust. Arab
atrocities proved they had no other choice.
The Arab-Palestinians were not expelled. They fled, in most
cases, because they were ordered and cajoled by their leaders and the Arab
states and the Arab League, in order to make room for conquering Arab armies.
In many cases Jewish officials pleaded with the refugees to stay. The Israeli
decision to prevent refugees from returning was justified, as otherwise Israel would
be destroyed by a hostile Arab internal majority. Ultimately, the
responsibility and blame rests with the Arab leadership for rejecting the
partition resolution.
The refugee issue was artificially kept alive by the Arab
states, who deliberately used the refugees as pawns against Israel (while
the million Jewish refugees terrorized, persecuted and expelled from Arab
countries, who had all their assets confiscated, were resettled). The real
reason for the continuation of the conflict was the refusal of the Arab states
to recognize Israeli’s existence. Israel has
repeatedly offered peace, but not at the price of the destruction of Israel as a
Jewish state, which has been the Arab goal since 1948.
“A corollary of the inalienable right of the Jewish people to its Land is the right to live in any part of Eretz Yisrael, including Judea and Samaria which are an integral part of Eretz Yisrael. Jews are not foreigners anywhere in the Land of Israel. Anyone who asserts that it is illegal for a Jew to live in Judea and Samaria just because he is a Jew, is in fact advocating a concept that is disturbingly reminiscent of the ‘Judenrein’ policies of Nazi Germany banning Jews from certain spheres of life for no other reason than that they were Jews. The Jewish villages in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district are there as of right and are there to stay.
ReplyDelete“The right of Jews to settle in the Land of Israel was also recognized in the League of Nations ‘Mandate for Palestine’ which stressed ‘the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and … the grounds for reconstituting’ – I repeat, reconstituting ‘their national home in that country.’
“The Mandatory Power was also entrusted with the duty to encourage ‘close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.'”