In my last programme I told you about the restrictions that the Muslim world started to impose to stop Jews who were living in other Muslim countries, or in European countries emigrating to the Holy Lands – the land given to them by God. They had been the native inhabitants of those lands since 1406BC, up until the time that the Arab invasion happed in 635AD. So there were no Muslim natives to that land during the 2,000 years that the Jews had lived there before the Arab invasion, but there had always been Jews in the land – as I have discussed in my previous programmes and Jews remained in the Holy Lands at all times.

After the Arab Conquest, the Jewish homeland had been occupied by Muslims – different empires over the time. It is not accurate to call those people Arabs, as they have many different ethnicities, most of them are not Arabs. 

Many Jews had scattered throughout North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, before the arrival of the Muslims. They were living in what would later became Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East and Spain, which was a Muslim country for many centuries, until the Christians drove them out finally in 1492.

Many Jews also settled in Europe. But, as I said, there had always been Jews in the Holy Land who had not left – and over centuries of Muslim rule they had mostly been reduced to the status of badly treated beggars.

But something began to stir at the end of the 1800s. Jewish farming settlements were started before the Zionist Movement came into existence. Jews came to the Holy Land before the Zionist emigrations began.

Around this time, the Muslims, in the form of the Ottoman Empire, and mostly absentee Muslim landlords who owned land in the Holy Lands, and who partly incited the existing Muslim hostility to the Jews, began, with some success, to block the Jews from returning to their homeland. There were no restrictions on Muslims from other Muslim countries preventing them coming and settling on those same lands that the Jews wanted to move to.

Often the Arabs that were moving to the Holy Lands were attracted by the success of the Jewish farms that were breathing life back into the wasteland that Palestine had become and remained for centuries under the various rulers, including lastly the Ottoman Empire.

In this programme I’m going to finish the story of the Jews trying to return to their country up until the end of World War I.

Tag words: Muslim; Arab invasion; God; Arab Conquest; Zionist Movement; Ottoman Empire; Holy Lands; World War I; Theodor Herzl; The Jewish State; Der Judenstaat; Zionist Conference; John Hickson; Edmund Fane; Sandjak of Jerusalem; Palestine; Arab notables; the effendi; Reverend A Ben Oliel; the Presbyterian Alliance; S.E. Simeon; Mutasarrif of Jerusalem; Resid Bey; Sultan Abdulhamed; Yasser Arafat; David Farhi; Dr. Sami Gunzberg; Dr Atif Huseyin; PLO Charter; Nashashibi family; Anti-semitism; Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi;