The Desperate Lies of 'No Peace on Stolen Land'
The belief that Israel is built on stolen Arab land has become orthodoxy among the anti-Israel movement. It is dangerous fiction in need of correction.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
“No peace on stolen land” is a battle cry at many pro-Palestinian rallies.
The stolen land narrative is a powerful lie designed to delegitimize Israel. It has made its way into media, academia, and policy-making discourse. It is a lie that makes the impossible task of correcting something that never happened a requirement for peace.
How Israel was created is well documented, but the propaganda has been so effective that few people know it. Many useful idiots for the Islamist Hamas murder machine refuse to learn the history because it undermines their worldview, in what is surely some kind of derangement.
In 1917, the British Government issued the Balfour Declaration, in which it announced its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire and the Jews’ ancestral home. After the First World War, the League of Nations (the precursor to the equally ineffective United Nations) partitioned the Ottoman Empire's territory in the Middle East.
These were given to Britain and France as mandates (France got a Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon), meaning they were to be turned into nation-states when they were ready to self-govern.
British Mandatory Palestine comprised what is now Israel, including Gaza and the West Bank, and Jordan (formerly Transjordan, which was carved out of the mandate in 1921). Palestine was sparsely populated. The British census of Palestine in 1922 recorded a population of 757,182, including the military and foreigners (78 percent Muslim, 11 percent Jewish, and 9 percent Christian).1
About 80 percent of the Arabs were peasants, semi-Nomads and Bedouins.2 A second census in 1932 recorded a population of 1.03 million (73 percent Muslim, 17 percent Jewish, and 9 percent Christian). By way of comparison, Israel and the Palestinian territories today have a combined 14 million people.
Migrant Jews, through consortia, began buying land for their state (though Jews had been buying land since the 1800s). They paid exorbitant prices to buy land from wealthy absent landowners in Damascus, Cairo, and Beirut. Much of it was a malaria-infested swamp and desert.
Far from opposing this, many Arabs sold their land to Jews, delighted to get such prices for swamp land. Prominent Arabs, including members of the Arab nationalist movement, mayors of Gaza and Jerusalem, and members of the Muslim Supreme Council sold land to Jews. This includes As’ad el-Shugeiri, an Islamic scholar whose son Ahmed Shugeiri was a founder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Jordan’s King Abdullah said, “It has been made quite clear to all, both by the map drawn up by the Simpson Commission and by another compiled by the Peel Commission, that the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping.” This did not stop King Abdullah, himself, from leasing land to Jews.
By 1947, Jews owned 463,000 acres of land in Palestine, of which 45,000 acres was bought from the mandatory government, 30,000 acres from churches, and 387,500 from Arab landowners.3
There is a paper trail for all of this. The claim of stolen land, like much of the Palestinian narrative, is a lie that is a precise inversion of history. Far from being built on stolen land, Israel is the only state built partly on purchased land. One can only imagine what lies in the hearts of men who sold land to the Jews and then tried to take it back through conquest.
This Jewish immigration — and their turning of swamp and desert into orange groves — gave the long-neglected economy a much-needed fillip. Arabs from Egypt and Syria also poured in to take advantage of the boom. Jewish immigration was capped in this period, while Arab immigration was unrestricted. Between the two world wars, the Jewish population increased by 470,000, while the non-Jewish population rose by 588,000.
Discord grew as Jewish and Arab nationalist movements awakened. This did not happen in isolation. Zionism, the Jewish liberation movement, was one of many nationalist movements that emerged with the weakening of Europe’s empires after the First World War.
These movements laid the foundations of modern nation-states such as India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Finland, and Lithuania, to name but a few. The 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine and the 1944-47 Jewish insurgency in Palestine were part of this wider nationalist phenomenon.
The carve-out of Transjordan gave about 78 percent of mandatory Palestine to the Arabs with the remaining 22 percent to become a Jewish state. The Jews accepted this. The Arabs did not.
Arab attacks on Jews started small, but grew in intensity and organization, including the infamous Hebron massacre in 1929. Other Jewish settlements attacked included Bnei Yehuda in 1920, Kfar Saba, Jaffa, and Petah Tikvah in 1921, Kfar Uria, Rahama, Hartuv, Hulda, Motza, Poria, in 1929, and Ben She’an in 1936, among many more.
Many of these settlements were rebuilt. Arab attacks on Jews predate Israel’s creation, never mind any occupation.
In 1936, the British Peel Commission concluded co-existence was impossible and proposed again splitting Palestine (now just 22 percent of the original mandate) into two states, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem as an international city. The United Nations passed a partition plan. Although the Jews were not pleased at having their promised state partitioned, they accepted this. Again, the Arabs did not.
After World War Two, nationalist movements globally gathered greater strength. In 1947 Civil War erupted between Jews and Arabs in mandated Palestine. The Jews won, and during the fighting took control of many areas allocated to be part of a Jewish state, Jerusalem, and some areas allocated to an Arab state. Israel declared its independence on May 14th, 1948. About 70 percent of its territory was formerly Ottoman state land.
Eight Arab countries immediately declared war on Israel and invaded, with the Grand Mufti of Palestine Haj Amin al-Husaini saying:
“I declare holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all.”
For Israel and Jews, this was an existential war. For Jordan and Egypt, it was about killing Jews and expanding territory. All sides gained territory. Israel expanded is territory, Egypt gained the Gaza strip, and Jordan occupied East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria (which it successfully rebranded as the West Bank and later annexed).
The Arab states promptly ethnically cleansed Jews from the areas it occupied, including 17,000 from East Jerusalem. No Arabs were calling for Palestinian liberation from Jordanian and Egyptian occupation at this time because there was never a Palestinian Arab nation to be occupied.
The civil war and the 1948 War of Independence (the First Arab-Israeli War), created two groups of refugees, about 700,000 Arabs and 800,000 Jews.
The Arab refugees were those who fled the fighting, those who left on the advice of Arab leaders (who told them the Arab armies would come and destroy Israel) and some were forced out. Those Arabs who stayed became Israeli citizens (21 percent, of Israelis are Arabs) and have more rights than people in any Arab state. The Jews were always willing to live alongside Arabs, the reverse was not (and is not) true.
The Jewish refugees were the 50,000 to 60,000 Jews displaced during the war and those expelled from the Arab nations of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Jews later fled Iran (Persian, not Arab) after its 1979 Islamic revolution. This ethnic cleansing and dispossession of Jews is hardly known because it complicates the fictitious stolen land narrative.
While Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees, its Arab neighbors refused to grant citizenship to the Arab ones and put them into refugee camps, where their descendants remain to this day. These are the people who today call themselves Palestinians. Rarely noted is that the displaced Palestinians never went far. Most of them still live in what was British Mandatory Palestine.
There was no stolen land. The Arabs refused to accept Israel, started a war, and lost. People on both sides got displaced. If the Arabs had accepted Israel, instead of attacking it, there would have been no Palestinian refugees. Likewise, if the Arab states had granted citizenship to these people, 75 years of misery could have been avoided. The Arabs states caused the Palestinian refugee problem, not Israel’s creation.
This conflict was one of many upheavals that came with the unravelling of Europe's empires. About 14 million people were displaced and one million killed in the partition of India in 1947 when the British Raj collapsed. People fled or were forced to move in both directions into what became India and Pakistan, of which the refugees became citizens.
In Europe after World War Two, Poland expelled about three million ethnic Germans. Germany absorbed them. More recently, 100,000 ethnic Armenians had to flee the Nagorno-Karabakh region when Azerbaijan took control of the disputed area. Armenia has taken them in.
The Israel-Palestine story is a tragedy, but it does not stem from Jews stealing Arab land. That is a lie that needs to die.
1922 Census of Palestine, Report and General Abstracts.
Aumann M, Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880-1948, (Jerusalem: Academic Committee on the Middle East), 1976.
Granott A, The Land System in Palestine (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode), 1958.
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Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel
Excellent historical summary. The Arabs’ most effective weapon against the Jews has always been toxic lies, which mixed with 2,000 years of entrenched Jew hatred and blood libels, spew forth a deadly poison. The evil that fueled the Shoah is still with us, but now, thank Gd, we have the means to defend and protect ourselves. And fight we must, on all fronts, always.