Time to re-visit the history of the area with this extract from the Harif blog, Clash of Cultures: the West thinks it has always been Arab land, but Jews once owned thousands of dunams in Judea and Samaria. 'Ethnic cleansing' is nothing new.
Nothing is ever that simple in the Middle East. Land ownership is a tangled web, although that's a point not often made by the Israeli government.
The Golan Heights are almost universally considered 'Syrian' territory and yet the Jewish National Fund lays claim to 73,974 dunams in southern Syria. The earliest purchase was made in the 1880s.
Similarly, land ownership in Jerusalem and the 'West Bank' is far
more complex than the EU thinks. The 'Jewish settlements' north of
Jerusalem, Atarot and Neve Yaakov, were evacuated in 1948. Mount Scopus -
technically in 'Arab' East Jerusalem - remained a Jewish enclave in
Jordanian-controlled territory.
It is also little known that hundreds of thousands of Arab
squatters in 'Arab East Jerusalem' live on land still owned by the
Jewish National Fund. The JNF purchased hundreds of individual parcels
of land in and around Jerusalem during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In
1948, on one of these parcels the UN built the Kalandia refugee camp. The Deheishe refugee camp south of Bethlehem was also built on JNF land.
In the 1920s and 30s Iraqi and Iranian Jews queued up to buy
parcels of JNF land; after the 1948 war, they were cut off from their
purchases when these came under Jordanian rule, as Gil Zohar explained
in his 2007 Jerusalem Post piece. In total 145,976 dunams (I dunam = 1,000 sq. m) of Jewish land is said to have come under Jordanian control. (Jewish property claims against Arab countries by Michael Fischbach, p 85).
In Abu Dis, the site of the putative Palestinian parliament, some 598 dunams of land are actually Jewish-owned as even Palestinian organisations acknowledge.
During the 1920s and 30s the ‘Agudat HaDayarim’ Jewish Cooperative
Society was established in Jerusalem in order to create Jewish
neighbourhoods outside the Old City. The Society had over 210 members,
from all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds - including Persian, Iraqi
and Yemenite Jews. In 1928 the Aguda purchased 598 dunams of land on
the city outskirts in Abu Dis in order to build a ‘Garden Community’
(homes with agricultural plots). Although it acquired a legal title to
the area, the Arab revolts of 1929 and 1936-9 prevented the Aguda from
establishing the new community. The War of Independence resulted in the
Jewish-owned lands in Abu Dis coming under the control of the Jordanian
Custodian of Enemy Property.
Another 16,684.421 dunams of Jewish land in the rural West Bank -
including the Gush Etzion settlements, land between Nablus, Jenin and
Tulkarm, and in Bethlehem and Hebron - were seized by the Jordanians
after 1948.
Even before 1948, riots and massacres caused Jews of the centuries-old Yishuv to evacuate their homes in Hebron and parts of Jerusalem.
Before it fell to the Arab Legion in 1948, Jerusalem had a Jewish
majority. The first refugees from eastern Jerusalem were Jews from the
Shimon Hatzaddik quarter - the site of the tomb of Simon the High Priest.
The Old City of Jerusalem became 'judenrein' as thousands of Jews were
expelled, leaving their property behind. The Old City was ransacked and
some 58 synagogues were destroyed during the 19-year Jordanian
occupation. Jews were banned from their holiest places.
There is a respectable body of opinion which argues that most
Israeli settlements are legal. Even if Israel were to agree that the
Jewish settlements stigmatized by the EU are illegal under international
law, the proportion of land 'built on Arab land' in the West Bank
represents a tiny fraction of the Jewish-owned land abandoned or seized
as a matter of deliberate policy in Arab countries.
The issue of Jewish settlements has to be seen in the context of
the mass exchange of land and population between Jews and Arabs across
the entire region.
The status quo represents an exchange far more favourable to Arabs than to Jews. According to economist Sidney Zabludoff,
the Jewish refugees – 75 percent of whom resettled in Israel - lost
assets worth twice as much as those abandoned by Palestinian refugees.
On the macro-level, the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries estimates that Jews living in Arab countries owned some 100,000 sq km of deeded property, equivalent to four or five times the size of Israel itself.
Many cities in the 'Arab' Middle East and North Africa had large
Jewish populations. Baghdad was a quarter Jewish. Within a generation,
the Jewish population of the Arab world will have been ‘cleansed’ out of
existence.
Evidently, private ownership of property does not equate to
sovereignty. But many people – the EU included - assume that areas
inhabited in Jerusalem and the ‘West Bank’ by a majority of Arabs -
regardless of whether they established that majority at the expense of
Jews - should naturally come under Arab sovereignty. Organisations like
J-Street and Yachad are willing to fight for Arab squatters’ rights; you would be hard-pressed to find any human rights group or NGO prepared to campaign for Jewish property rights.
The suggestion is never considered that the attacking parties in
the 1967 war - Syria and Jordan - should be made to forfeit territory as
the price for their aggression. No Arab state has been held to account
for ‘ethnically cleansing’ their innocent Jewish citizens whom they
branded, from1948 onwards, as ‘members of the minority of Palestine’.
Instead, the Arab states have pocketed the spoils. It goes without
saying that no Arab government has paid out any compensation for lost
Jewish property. Israel is expected to make all the concessions.
off topic// a black list of Moroccan artists who visited Israel.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.algemeiner.com/2016/09/12/moroccan-newspaper-publishes-blacklist-of-artists-who-speak-to-israelis/