Remember that a person didn‘t have to be a Palestinian, or a refugee to be classified as a Palestinian refugee.

Accurately counting the number of refugees that there were in 1948 has become much more important, and relevant today, when the Palestinian refugees include the children of a male Palestinian refugee, or the children that such a male Palestinian refugee adopted. In the roughly 75 years of increase in the number of Palestinian refugees, from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, count of 750,000 in the beginning, to today’s count of 5.9 million, means getting an accurate number of people at the start, has something of an exponential effect on the number today if the count included many people who shouldn’t have been included. Any error in counting the number of refugees results in a significant increase when the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren etc of people who should not have have been counted as Palestinian refugees are included. And looking back at what happened in the beginning, there are good reasons to think that this has happened.

For example, on 1 November, 1950, UNRWA Director Howard Kennedy, reported to the United Nations Ad Hoc Political Committee, 5th Session that:

a large group of indigent people totalling over 100,000. .. could not be called refugees, but . . . have lost their means of livelihood because of the war and post-war conditions . . . The Agency felt their need was even more acute than that of the refugees who were fed and housed.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

In November 1950, Kennedy referred to 

the 600,000 [Muslim] refugees,

although he had reported in May 1950 that UNRWA had distributed 860,000 rations, citing the hundreds of thousands of "hungry Arabs" who were not bona fide refugees but who claimed need.

The count of Palestinian refugees, as you’ll soon hear, was inflated for all sorts of reasons which I’ll now discuss.

Tag words: Palestinian refugee; United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees; UNRWA; UNRWA Director Howard Kennedy; United Nations Ad Hoc Political Committee, 5thSession; 1948 Arab Israeli War; Statistical Abstract of Palestine in 1944-45; Walter Pinner; How Many Arab Refugees: A Critical Study of UNRWA's Statistics and Reports; Disaster Relief Organization; Rony Gabay; A Political Study of the Arab-Jewish Conflict: The Arab Refugee Problem; The Arab League; Joan Peters; From Time Immemorial – the Origins of the Arab Jewish Conflict over Palestine; Director of Field Operations for the United Nations Disaster Relief Project, W de St. Aubin; US Senator Gale McGee; US Senator Albert Gore; President Eisenhower; Secretary of State Christian Herter; Mideast Mirror; Arab News Agency of Cairo; Palestinian Mandate; King Abdullah; Eliyahu Kanovsky; Jordan, People and Politics in the Middle East; Prime Minister Hazza al-Majali; Saddam Hussein; the Gulf War; UNHCR;

Let me tell you a story.

Mohammad was a Muslim. He was born in Syria on 23 June 1926. He was a citizen of Syria. There was fabulously well paid work for farm hands on the Jewish farms, which he heard about from one of his friends who, even now, was at the Jewish farm settlement at Petah Tikva. Ever since Mohammad heard about the ridiculous money they were paying, he wanted to go. He got his friend to get him a job there, and organise somewhere for him to live, as his home. Then he set out to illegally enter the British Mandate of Palestine. The easiest way to get into the British Mandate, as an illegal immigrant, was to go through Transjordan.

That was how his friend had gotten into Palestine. His friend told him who to contact to organise this for him.

Early on 31 May 1946 Mohammad arrived at Petah Tikva and began work there that same day. He was one lucky boy. If the British had found him, although they never bothered with illegal Muslim immigrants, in theory he could have been deported back to Syria at any time.

Things went well there for him until 14 May 1948 when the state of Israel was declared. Muslims in Israel were then urged, by some of their fellow Muslims, to leave the new state of Israel while the invading Muslim armies pf the Arab League, from Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Yemen purged the land of the Jews. Then they said Mohammad, and all of those Muslims who had acted on the advice of the Muslims who were supporting the invasion of Israel, could return and pick up their lives where they had left off. Except I guess the Jewish farms, and the Jews who were giving Mohammad his job, would then have been killed by the invading Muslim armies, or forced to flee for their lives and never return, because like Transjordan banned Jews living there, the Muslims invading Israel would have done the same, or what was the point of their invasion.

Mohammad decided to take their advice, that he should leave the country. He’d acquired some possessions by them, but it wasn’t practical to take them with him so he left them behind. They all said he would soon be back and he could get them then. That was obvious – there was no way the Israelis could defeat the armed might of the invading Muslim nations.

Mohammad headed to Gaza on 16 May 1948. Soon the Egyptian Army was advancing there, unstoppably into Israel.

But things didn’t turn out well for the Muslims in this 1948/1949 Arab Jewish war. Mohammad ended up as a Palestinian refugee – and I’ll tell you all about that in this programme and the following ones. He’d been illegally in Palestine for just under 2 years. Because of that now he was entitled to all of the benefits offered by United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA, to Palestinian refugees for the rest of his life – and so were his children – ....

I’ll continue the story of the illegal Muslim immigrants in Palestine in the first programme after I’ve covered this story – so you can fully appreciate the importance of illegal immigrants in today’s Palestinian refugee situation that I’m about to tell you about.

It’s important to realise that to be a Palestinian refugee under the UNRWA definition you never had to be either a Palestinian or a refugee. Let that sink in.

Tag words: Mohammad; Petah Tikva; British Mandate of Palestine; Transjordan; Arab League; Egypt;Transjordan; Iraq; Syria; Lebanon; Saudi Arabia; Yemen; United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East; UNRWA; Palestinian refugees; UNHCR; UN Refugee Agency; 1951 Refugee Convention; 1948 Arab Israeli War; Peter Dodd; Halim Barakat; River Without Bridges: A Study of the Exodus of the 1967 Arab Palestinian Refugees; Arab National Committee of Haifa; Near East Arabic Radio; Khaled Al-Azm; Jewish Haifa Workers' Council; Paper Filastin;Azzam Pasha; secretary general of the Arab League; New York Lebanese daily Al-Hoda; Jordanian daily Al-Difaa; Cairo Akhbar al-Yom;

In Chapter 12 verse 3 of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, part of the Torah, which makes up the most sacred first 5 books of the Bible to the Jews, God makes a promise to Abraham, the first Jew, about the Jewish race.

He promised this to Abraham:

And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.

The British were the people who came up with the idea of re-storing the Jewish homeland once the Ottoman Empire had fallen. It was the perfect time to do it. The land was barren and desolate, as I’ve talked about in previous programmes. Done properly it would be fairly easy. They drove the idea through the League of Nations, and when their plans were about to be realised, they made a 180 degree turn and started to vigorously advocate for the Muslim side. After that the steps taken to bring the Jewish homeland into existence were done with enormous reluctance by the British who had the job of making it happen. By 1922 the key people administering the creation of a Jewish homeland didn’t want it to happen.

Looking to please the Muslims, and almost always doing everything they could to frustrate Jews from returning to their homeland, I believe with the fundamental hope of preventing the Jewish homeland from coming into existence it took far longer than it should have for the Jewish homeland to come into existence. If it had happened before World War 2 how many of the Western European Jews would have survived I wonder. The Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union were in a different category and probably couldn’t have been saved.

In the lead up to, during and after World War 2, the full horror of what the British did to the Jews came to light. I’ll talk about all of that in later programmes. In this programme I’m going to talk about how the British turned a blind eye, looked the other way, to a massive immigration of Muslims from around the Muslim Middle East and North Africa, coming in to the future state of Israel. Often the British authorities passed off these newly arriving Muslims as being the indigenous people of Palestine. People who had lived there from time immemorial. That was a lie, and that lie is still repeatedly being told to us today.

From about the time that the Jewish state of Israel came into existence, the British Empire started to go out of existence. As I said at the beginning of this programme, God told Abraham:

And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee

So His will was done it would seem- the British Empire was rapidly extinguished.

Tag words: Genesis 12:3; Torah; Bible; Abraham; Ottoman Empire; League of Nations; Muslims; Jews; World War 2; the British Empire; Joan Peters; From Time Immemorial; Civil Rights movement; Ku Klux Klan; Yom Kippur War; Palestine Liberation Organisation; CBS free-lance writer; British Mandate; Public Records Office; Kew Gardens; Samakh; G. Farley, the Southern Deputy Commissioner; Deportation of Persons in Palestine Without Permission; Albert M. Hyamson; British High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope; 1936 Arab Revolt; Grand Mufti; Haj Amin al-Husseini; Lawrence of Arabia; Ernest Main; Palestine at the Crossroads;

With the Muslim population numbers in Western Palestine, modern Israel, stable for over 200 years it’s hard to see how they suddenly had a massive surge in numbers. Unless … large numbers of Muslims came from other Muslim countries, and the Muslims living in the British Mandate, who had for hundreds of years gone anywhere else because that country was a barren wasteland – that is until the Jews started up their farms – God’s promised re-birth of that country when the Jews returned in numbers.

From what I’ve seen I can only assume that vast numbers of Muslim natives to the land in what were now new countries, that had not really existed before, carved out of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious European powers. Muslims from those countries, attracted by the thriving Jewish farms, just dropped in to the British Mandate to say hello and didn’t go home. Well until the 1948 Arab Israel War, that I’ll talk about in a much later programme, when a lot of them moved onto the borders of Israel and, for mostly bad reasons, have stayed there ever since.

And now it’s time to get serious and tell you what happened and where the Muslims in the British Mandate, especially the ones crowing into the areas of the new Jewish farms, came from.

Tag words: Muslim; Western Palestine; Ottoman Empire; British Mandate; 1948 Arab Israel War; Colonel MacKereth; Jews; Winston Churchill; British Governor of the Sinai; Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations; Tewfik Bey El-Hurani; Hauranis; Palestine High Commissioner; The Hope Simpson Report of 1930; The White Paper; Sherif Hussein; Yasser Arafat; Palestine is Jordan and Jordan is Palestine; Black September; TransJordan; Kemal Karpat; Rishon l'Tsion; Riad Tabbarah; Population; Saddam Hussein; Colonel Conder; Heth and Moab;

In my last programme I ended with the rather depressing note that the Jordanians, even though they‘d conquered a part of the lands that formed the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948 didn’t hand them over to the proud Muslim Palestinian people for their homeland. They clung onto those lands for 18 years until the Israelis retook them in the 1967 Six Day War. What’s more no voice was raised anywhere in protest by or on behalf of the Palestinian people to return this land to them. 

In fact the Jordanians stripped the West Bank bare of anything and everything that it had that was worth taking. When 18 years later the Israelis took it back in the 1967 Six Day War the entire Arab world, as if woken from a dream, realised that this was part of that precious ancient Muslim country of Palestine whose peoples were again being denied their birthright by those vile Jews.

I also mentioned that Egypt had conquered another sacred part of the country of Palestine, Gaza. I left you wondering whether the Egyptians had honourably given that land to the poor Muslim Palestinians as a down payment on their homeland. Well I ran out of time and couldn’t answer that for you – not then anyway.

To be honest I could have told you that the Egyptians clung tenaciously to it, just like the Jordanians had to the West Bank, and only parted with it when it was taken off them by the Israelis in the Six Day War. Again, as for the West Bank, the Palestinians didn’t mind that their sacred country, well a part of it, hadn’t been handed over to them. In fact the Palestinians Muslims don’t mind who else has their country unless they’re Jews. So this claim to a Palestinian state looks a bit dodgy to me.

While the Jordanians stripped the West Bank bare, the Egyptians certainly had their moment in their treatment of the Muslim Palestinians too. I’ll tell you about that and then I’m going to start on the investigation to find out where these Muslim Palestinians came from, if they hadn’t lived there from time immemorial as they all claim to have.

Tag words: British Mandate; Palestine; Muslim Palestinian; 1967 Six Day War; West Bank; Gaza; First Arab Israeli War; World War II; Nazism; Adolf Hitler; David Pryce-Jones; The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs; Grand Mufti; anti-semitism; Abed al-Kader al-Husseini; Fawzi Qawukji; Nazi Army; King Abdullah; Transjordan; Arab Conquest; Yasser Arafat; Gamal; Neil C Livingstone; David Halevy; Inside the PLO: Covert Units, Secrets Funds, and the War Against Israel and the United States; Conor Cruise O’Brien; Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism; Western Palestine; British Consul James Finn; Lord John Russell; Earl of Clarendon; AJ Sussnitzki; Ottoman Empire; Malcolm McDonald; Chamberlain-McDonald White Paper of 1939;

When did Muslim Palestinians, that we hear so much about today, come into existence?

The Arab Conquest of the Holy Land happened in 635AD. So maybe you’re thinking over 1300 years ago. You’d be wrong if you thought that. 

Muslims who call themselves Palestinians only began to happen after the Muslims, Egypt, Syria, Jordan were decisively defeated by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. Not because any Muslim before then had thought of themselves as Palestinians but for the reasons I’ll tell you about shortly. Up until 1967, if you made the mistake of calling a Muslim a Palestinian, you’d probably have been punched in the face. Up until then the only people called Palestinians, were the people whose land this had been going back to 1406 BC – the Jews. That should be the beginning and the ending of the argument that there was, or is now, such a thing as a Muslim Palestinian people. So let’s see what the Muslims had been saying up unril the Six Day War about who they were.

Tag words: Muslims; Palestinians; Arab Conquest; Holy Land; Six Day War; Allah; Emile Ghoury; Secretary of the Arab Higher Command; Musa Alami; Zuheir Muhsin; Palestinian Liberation Organisation; Paris Peace Conference; Arabs; Arab Conquests; Dennis Prager; British Palestinian Mandate; Ba’ath Party; Saddam Hussein; Umma; Greater Syria; Ottoman Empire; Fertile Crescent; George Antonius; Marie Syrkin; Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and Goal; Haj Amin al-Husseini; President Assad; Sir George Adam Smith; The Historical Geography of the Holy Land; Yasser Arafat; Zionist Organization; Felix Frankfurter; San Remo Conference; Gaza Strip; the West Bank; Winston Churchill; Balfour Declaration; PJ Vatikiotis; Nasser and his Generation; Transjordan; King Hussein; Benjamin Netanyahu; A Durable Peace;

Now many of my listeners will not be religious Jews or Christians. So they may not believe anything that I’m about to say, but I promise you that at the very least I’m going to tell you a good yarn And the facts of what have happened must make even those doubters, doubt.

In 1995 the prime minister of Israel was Yitzak Rabin. On 5 October, he signed the Oslo Peace Agreement with the Palestinians. It gave up lands that made up part of the lands that God had promised to Abraham in Chapter 15:17 of the very first book of the Bible, the very first book of the Jewish Torah, that we know as the Book of Genesis.

Yitzak Rabin boldly pointed out at the time of signing the Peace Accords, contradicting God’s promise of the land that he gave to the Jews that:

The Bible is not Israel’s title deed.

On 4th November 1995 Rabin was assassinated. As fate would have it on that day, in accordance with Jewish tradition, in synagogues all over the world, read from the same verses in the Torah. The verse for that day was Genesis 15.

For the creation of modern day Israel, and the history of the British Mandate, it’s useful to look back at what God’s promise to Israel was about the Promised Land, because it seems to have been faithfully fulfilled in the history of Palestine so far – up to this very day.

Like everything in the Bible, God’s arrangements with the Jews were very specific. They are nothing like you would find in any other religion of the day. They had a number of very specific purposes and provisions. God told Moses what the deal was just before the Jews entered the Promised Land in about 1406BC. And now I’m going to tell you what He said.

Tag words: Yitzak Rabin; Oslo Peace Agreement; Abraham; Genesis 15:17; British Mandate; Moses; Promised Land; Leviticus 18:26-28; Torah; Exodus 29:46; Deuteronomy 7:6-8; Amos 3:2; Boney M; By the Rivers of Babylon; Deuteronomy 28:63-67; Ezekiel 33:28; Muslim; Dennis Prager; Arab Conquest;Muslims; Count Volney; James William Parkes; Whose Land? A History of the People of Palestine; Encyclopaedia Britannica;

The British Mandate over Palestine didn’t give England the same control as they had over one of their colonies or Dominions of the British Empire. The British, who had conquered the Middle East from the Ottoman Empire, and whose Lord Balfour had come up with the inspired idea of creating a homeland for the Jews in their traditional home, the Promised Land that God had given them, were put in charge of running Palestine. The Ottoman rulers were gone - forever. Someone had to run Palestine. That someone was the English.

They were put in charge of Palestine by the League of Nations. The job of the British was to make it easy for Jews to migrate there. To stop Muslims and other peoples from anywhere else in the world moving in there. The end-game was to see the Jews make up the majority of the people living in Palestine, and then to give them their independence.

Palestine, when England was given the Mandate, was mostly a run down uninhabited country. It was a wasteland. But that had begun to change from about the 1880s but only because Jewish immigrants had started to arrive and set up farming estates. These Jews were very successful in transforming the land. The Muslims were largely a nomadic people, looking for opportunities where they could make a living. The Muslims weren’t entrepreneurs they were just labourers. The Jews paid their farm workers really well. So the more Jews who arrived in Palestine and set up farms, the more Muslims came too.

Muslim countries entirely surrounded the British Mandate and every other country within cooee of Palestine was Muslim too. In these programmes I’ve used the word Muslim and not Arab. Arabs are a particular race and there aren’t that many of them in the area of Palestine. Of Muslims there are many, but they’re made up of all sorts of other races, including Persians in Iran and the Asiatic Turks in Turkey. Mostly everyone calls them Arabs, but that’s misleading.

So ideally Jews were supposed to be able to rock up to Palestine and walk straight in, and Muslims, who were not living in Palestine ideally might be allowed in temporarily to help with harvests etc, but then were supposed to return home. Most ideally of all no more Muslims from other countries should have been allowed into Palestine from the time the British mandate started in July 1922.

But that wasn’t how it was working out. Increasingly the British were dramatically slowing down legal Jewish immigration. Totally stopping illegal Jewish immigration. At the same time they did nothing to prevent all, except the most outrageous examples of Muslims entering Palestine from other countries, staying there. This has given the Muslims so much chance to cause so much trouble ever since making claims about having lived on the land from time immemorial – that aren’t true.

Generally far more Muslims entered Palestine illegally than Jews who entered legally or illegally. Since there were more Muslims there to start with than Jews, if this kept up there would never be a Jewish homeland. That actually seems to have been the goal of the British Middle East Department that had been given the job of bringing the Jewish state into existence. So I’d better talk about Colonel MacKereth because he should have been a giant of a figure in establishing the Jewish homeland – and that before World War 2. So many of the Jews who perished in the holocaust, would have been able to escape to Palestine if the British had done their job the way Colonel MacKereth was urging them to.

Tag words: British Mandate; Palestine; British Empire; Ottoman Empire; Lord Balfour; League of Nations; Muslims; Arabs; British Middle East Department; Colonel MacKereth; Anthony Eden; WD Battershill; Grand Mufti; George W Rendel; Head of the Eastern Department; Chaim Weizmann; Lord Ormsby-Gore; Palestine Royal Commission;

The Muslims who were willing to negotiate a settlement of their disputes were either dead or didn’t want to be dead so were never going to speak up in favour of a settlement with the Jews ever again. The Grand Mufti had done such a good job, that even today there are no so-called Palestinian Muslims that will speak up in favour of some amicable solution with the Jews over anything.

The British had appointed Earl Peel to investigate where the Jewish homeland was heading and how to deal with the angry Muslims who seemed to be constantly revolting after the latest revolt in 1921.

So what was the Grand Mufti’s position going to be when he appeared before the Peel Commission.

Tag words: Muslims; Arabs; Grand Mufti; Palestinian Muslims; Earl Peel; Peel Commission; Balfour Declaration; Jews; Adolf Hitler; Transjordan; Nashahsibis; Sheikh Kassab; Lewis Yelland Andrews;Colonial Secretary Ormsby-Gore; Round Table Conference of Middle Eastern leaders; Britain; Husseini clan; Ottoman Empire; British Mandate; Jewish immigration; League of Nations Mandate; anti-semitic; Jewish nation; Feisal; Felix Frankfurter; Zionist Organization; Churchill; Neville Chamberlain; Abdullah; Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen; Middle East Diary, 1917-1965; Herbert Samuel; Ronald Storrs; General W. N. Congreve; Ernest Richmond; Haj Amin al-Husseini;

When you hear Muslims, especially the new type of Muslims called Palestinians, speaking about Israel, all you ever hear is blind hatred directed at that nation and the Jews. Well the Zionists. In the last programme I told you about the subtle distinction that had grown up. It was supposedly not anti-semitic to say that you hated Zionists. It was anti-semitic to say that you hate Jews.

But since a Zionist is a person who wants a Jewish homeland, that doesn’t leave many Jews out. All of the problems that the Jews have suffered in the world since the conquest of their land by the Arabs in 635AD, could have been avoided to a great extent if they had had a separate country of their own to go to for sanctuary. The country that has been theirs 2500 years before the Arab Conquest armies arrived.

Largely since then, and especially from 1900 onwards, the Muslim regime and influential people, had been doing everything possible to stop Jews from other parts of the world going back to their homeland in Palestine. Anyone else could go there but not Jews. Because it was their homeland. I talked about this in Parts 9 and 10 of this series.

And as far as I can see, and have seen for the whole of my long life, is that all Muslims, with very few exceptions, feel exactly the same way about Israel and the Jews. They really want the nation of Israel wiped from the map and all of the Jews driven into the sea.

Except that isn’t actually how a lot of the Muslims feel, and when you think about it, that’s not surprising. There are always people of goodwill and who want to peaceably resolve differences, especially differences that end in war.

So why don’t we ever hear from those Muslims? Well the answer is disturbing. I’m going to look at what happened from the time of the British Mandate until the start of the Second World War.

Tag words: Muslims; Palestinians; Jews; Zionists; anti-semitic; Arab Conquest; British Mandate; Second World War; 1920 Easter Riots; Grand Mufti; Simon Sebag Montefiore; Jerusalem: A Bigoraphy; Haj Amin al-Husseini; World Islamic Conference; Temple Mount; Nashashibi family; Mayor Nashashibi; Dajanis family; Suleiman; Nabi Daoud; Khalidis family; Supreme Muslim Council; Adolf Hitler; Umma; völk; Nazi; Ba’thist; Saddam Hussein; Mein Kampf; Mussolini; Emil Ghouri; David Pryce-Jones; Closed Circle; Sir Arthur Wauchope; Higher Arab Committee; British Army; Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen; Peel Report; Joan Peters; From Time Immemorial; Sheikh Izzat al-Din al-Qassam; Ragheb Nashashibi; Abd al-Kadir-Husseini; Falchri Bey Nashashabi; Musa Kazem Husseini; Abu Musa; Palestine Arab Party; Green Hand militia; Wasif Jawhariyyeh; Ein Kerem; John the Baptist; Yasser Arafat; Neville Chamberlain; Earl Peel;