The Danger Zone (DZ)

On 19 April 1936 the Muslims gave the Jews the gift of their homeland, promised by the British in the Balfour Declaration, then by the League of Nations when it created the British Mandate on 24 July 1922 – far bigger than was looking likely at that time – if they were to get one at all. 

What the Jewish homeland would eventually look like was tricky. The Muslims had fought against it ever being created, they had fought against Jewish immigration, they had fought against the British Mandate. But thanks to the Arab Revolt that began on 19 April 1936, they gave the Jews what they had been trying to block - their homeland. 

They gave the Jews pretty well everything they had wanted (if you ignore Churchill giving away 83% of their promised homeland to King Abdullah in Transjordan) and much much more than the pittance that the British had ended up promising the Muslims in the 1936 Peel Report, nothing in the 1939 White Paper and the land that the United Nations offered them with their Resolution 181 for the partition of the rump of the Jewish homeland on 29 November 1947.

The Muslims had wanted it all – and they ended up with close to nothing.

The Jews paid a price for what happened during the Arab Revolt, a price that they’re sill paying today, but overall, they could never have hoped for a better outcome at the time that Arab Revolt started.

In my last two programmes I looked at the early days of the Arab Revolt. Now it’s time to look at the big picture – starting with the unplanned and runaway strike and revolt, that started by itself, and never really found anyone to lead it.

Tag words: Muslims; Arabs; Balfour Declaration; League of Nations; British Mandate; Arab Revolt; Churchill; King Abdullah; 1936 Peel Report; 1939 White Paper; United Nations; Resolution 181; Easter Riots; Nabi Musa; Adolf Hitler; Nuremberg Laws; Palestine; US Immigration Act 1924; anti-semitism; Quran; Mohammad; Istiqlal Party; Arab Higher Committee; Izz al-Din al-Qassam; Fawzi al-Qawuqji; Chaim Weizmann; David Ben-Gurion; Golda Meyerson; histadrut; Grand Mufti; havlagah; Ze’ev Jabotinsky;

The murders of the Jews living in Palestine on 15 April 1936, Israel Hazan, Zvi Danenburg and the wounding of Nafchi, was typical of what the Muslim leadership wanted for Palestine – no Jewish homeland. A goal that they single mindedly pursue, even down to this day. Stop more Jews coming in. Create a new country out of at least Syria and Palestine combined, like it was under the Ottomans. The fact that there was never a country called Palestine in the 1300 years of Ottoman Rule is now lost in the myths that the Muslims have successfully told since the Six Day Arab Israeli war.

After this torch had been lit by these Muslims on 15 April 1936, who seemed to be acting on their own, a massive popular eruption followed. The Muslim leadership, mostly under the control of the Grand Mufti through the Arab Higher Council, scrambled to get on board and then to lead what had started spontaneously as a popular movement that these leaders had no idea was coming.

Many more Jews were going to be murdered, but the response of the Jewish leadership to that was happening was far-sighted and brilliant. The modern state of Israel, that was born from the bloodbath, and the total defeat of the Muslims in the 1948 civil war between the Jews and the Muslims and the survival of the state of Israel in the 1948 war when the adjoining Arab nations tried and failed to crush Israel, had been guaranteed because of what had happened from 15 April 1936 until the Revolt had petered out by about 1939. The Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe, as the 1948 wars are known, had had its roots firmly laid over a decade before in the Arab Revolt. This is the beginning of that story.

Tag words: , Israel Hazan; Zvi Danenburg; Nafchi; Arab Higher Committee; Nakba; Palestinian Catastrophe; the Arab Revolt; Salim al-Musri; Hassan Abu Rass; Jews, Muslims; Arabs; National Muslim Committees; League of Nations; British Mandate; Grand Mufti; Hajj Amin al-Husseini; Eliezer Bichutsky; Haim Pashigoda; Kornfeld; Kupermintz; Yosef Lieberman; Hauranis; Al-Jamia al-Islamiya; Davar newspaper; Palestine Post; Muhammad Abu Zeid; Abed Ali; Al-Difiz; Filastin; The Nation; Selig Levinson; Shlomo Marsum; General Sir Arthur Wauchope; Palestine (Defence) Order in Council 1931; Emergency Regulations 1936;

History tells us that between 800 and 1100 AD was the Golden Age of Arabic science. Well it isn’t history that I’m getting this from. It’s from Hassan Hassan, a columnist for The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, the UAE., He’s also a contributor for The Guardian, Foreign Policy and the Carnegie Endowment. He graduated from the University of Nottingham, the UK, with a Master of Arts in International Relations.

During that period, Hassan says, the Muslim world was the beacon of innovation that triggered Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. But after that time, he tells his readers, Islam turned its back on science. If you’re a Muslim, most likely a devoutly religious one, who is happy about this state of affairs, well that’s your choice. Whose to blame, or to take the credit for that rejection of science? It seems that most people hold Abu Hamid Al Ghazali responsible for this state of affairs. He lived between 1055-1111AD. But Hassan Hassan says that’s not true and he is innocent of any responsibility for that change. Hassan says that the one man force, driving Muslims away from science, was actually Abu Ali al-Hassan al-Tusi, better known as Nizam al-Mulk, the grand vizier of the Seljuq dynasty between 1018–1092.

For the first time in Islamic history, religious studies became institutionalised. Because of the new winds that were blowing through the palaces of Baghdad, the smart Muslim dropped science like a hot potato, and did the smart thing. Religious studies were seen as a more lucrative career path – that was where the big bucks were. Up until then science and Islam were intertwined – liked the strands in DNA’s double helix.

Century on century then passed. Islam that had been such a dominant and feared force in the world at first started to hit the hard defensive walls of Christian Europe which brought what had up until then been the irresistible advance of Islam to a grinding halt. Defensive resistance of the Christians to Islam, with the advances in science driven technology, hastened the decline of Islam. The West began to advance into Islamic countries. Stalemate turned to defeat. The first of many great insults was the arrival of Napoleon with a small force of French soldiers, and scientists to add insult to injury, thrashed the Mamluks and then marched on the Promised Land. It was other European powers, mainly the Royal Navy, that ended Napoleon’s successes in the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire went into a slow decline and eventually died the death at the end of the First World War.

But then, a little bit at a time, slow at first, but gathering pace much more swiftly then, change did start to sweep through just one country in the Middle East. It was the British Mandate of Palestine – the promised new Jewish homeland. This is what happened.

Tag words: Golden Age of Arabic science; Hassan Hassan; Abu Hamid Al Ghazali; Abu Ali al-Hassan al-Tusi; Nizam al-Mulk; Ottoman Empire; Passfield White Paper; effendi; the notables; fellahin; the peasant farmers; W. B. Fisher; Middle East; goats; Akira Kurosawa; Seven Samurai; Sam Peckinpah; The Magnificent Seven; Aaron Aaronsohn; Baron Rothschild; Atlit; Roderique Davison; Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876; Cevdet Efendi; Balfour Declaration; Chaim Weizmann; General Allenby; Mount Scopus; Hebrew University; Emir Feisal; Albert Einstein; Lord Balfour; Sigmund Freud; Pan-Islamic Congress 1931; Zionists; Jaffa; British Mandate; Haifa; Palestine Railways; Nesher Cement Works; Maya Seikaly; Haifa: Transformation of an Arab Society 1918-1939; Kalandia; airport; Atarot; David Ben-Gurion; Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline; Iraq Petroleum Company; IPC; Mediterranean Fleet; Arab Revolt; Israel Hazan; Florentin; Salonica; Zvi Danenberg; Haganah; Nablus; Tulkarem; keffiyah; Yasser Arafat; Izza Din El Kassam; Nafchi; Knoll;

The 9th of Av in Jewish calendars is Friday on steroids. Nerves must be jangling as that day of the calendar approaches.

The worst high points in the history of the Jews happen on this day.

On that day in 586 BC, the Babylonians demolished the First Temple in Jerusalem built by the legendary Jewish king, Solomon. In the year 70AD, the Romans almost completely demolished the Second Temple built by King Herod the Great. What survived were the retaining walls, particularly sacred to the Jews is the wall on the west side. It's known as either the Wailing Wall or the Western Wall. 

Continuing the Jews incredible run of bad luck, on that same date in the year 135 AD, Rome brought to an end the Bar-Kochba revolt. Ending Jewish dreams of independence. After that revolt the province of Judaea was renamed Palestina harkening back to the previous occupants of that land in the long distant past, before the Jews arrived, the Philistines. The Philistines had lived in and around Gaza.

Then moving closer to our own times, on that same day, England expelled its Jews in the thirteenth century, France expelled its Jews in the fourteenth, and Spain, after Ferdinand and Isabella had reconquered all of their country from the Muslims, expelled their Jews in the fifteenth century.

You won’t be surprised to hear that in Jerusalem, on the 9th of Av, in 1929, one of the bloodiest riots so far against the Jews started, the triggering factor was the Grand Mufti. The object of the riot was over what the Jews call the Wailing Wall, or the Western Wall.

That riot was significant – it marked the beginning of a swelling violence against the Jews in Palestine, that would culminate in the Arab Revolt that broke out in 1936, all of which trouble saw the Jews having various rights of immigrating into Palestine, limited or ended, and likewise their entitlement to acquire land. This programme’s about the 1929 riots – and you’re not going to believe what happened.

Tag words: 9th of Av; Babylonians; Destruction of the First Temple; Romans; destruction of the Second Temple; King Solomon; King Herod the Great; Wailing Wall; Western Wall; Bar-Kochba revolt; Palestina; Philistines; Ferdinand and Isabella; Grand Mufti; Haj Amin al-Husseini; Arab Revolt 1936; Mohammad; Buraq; Night Journey to Jerusalem; British Mandate; Abu Maidan waqf; Saladin; Afdal; Yom Kippur; Torah; Balfour Declaration; Ottoman Empire; Star of David; the Dome of the Rock; Buraq Campaign; Al-Aqsa Mosque; Zionists; Joseph Klausner; Jabotinsky; Superintendent Raymond Cafferata; Ahron Bernzweig; God; Abu Mahmoud al-Kurdiya; North Vietnamese Tet offensive; Thawrat al-Buraq; the Buraq Uprising; British High Commissioner to the Palestinian Mandate; Sir John Chancellor; Cairo's Al-Ahram newspaper; Evening Star; Pan-Islamic Congress; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Shawkat Ali; Muhammed Ali; Abraham; Shakib Arslam; Arab Party for Independence; Adolf Hitler; White Paper; Hope Simpson Report; Chaim Weitzman; World Zionist Organisation; Ramsay MacDonald; David Ben-Gurion;

Ok – enough of the Palestinian refugees already. Nuff said in Parts 25 to 27 of this series.

The issue of illegal Muslim immigration into Palestine is huge when looking at what happened before the state of Israel was created in 1948.

The worst part of it was that a lot of bad hats came in. That was what Colonel MacKereth called them in Part 19. He used that term to mean any of the Muslims that were entering Palestine to commit acts of violence to very extreme violence. They were criminals, thugs, soldiers of fortune, whose very existence was about bringing violence to whoever their employer wanted harmed or killed. Their targets covered a wide range of people from moderate Muslims, who were able to live with the incoming Jews, to the Jews themselves of course. The moderate Muslims and the Jews were all fit to be killed.

The categories of Muslims coming in to Palestine did so for a wide variety of motives apart from the hired killers that I just spoke about. The Grand Mufti was pretty much single mindedly interested in doing violence, to moderate Muslims and all Jews, hence his association is with the bad hats.

But a lot of Muslims were drawn to Palestine for the prosperity that followed in the wake of the Jewish immigrants, and the money that was coming into the country that was creating jobs. The Muslim migrants coming into Palestine were coming in in very large numbers. They were taking up all of the jobs. The British, whose administration’s leanings had over the years from when Balfour first had the vision of creating a Jewish homeland, to the 1920’s when that attitude began to do a backflip, changed from pro-Zionist to anti-Zionist. These Arabist British administration officials developed an extreme interest in making sure that Jewish immigrants coming into the country, weren’t taking the jobs that they were creating. These British officials didn’t see it that way. But the truth was that the Muslim illegal immigrants were coming in in such large numbers, that some of the Muslims couldn’t get a job. When the British felt that there was a shortage of jobs for Muslims, legal or illegal – mostly they couldn’t tell, they would slow or stop Jewish immigration. That would in turn probably slow down the creation of jobs for everyone. Since the Jewish money that was coming into the country from wealthy Jews was intended to create jobs for Jews.

The common thread throughout the British administration of Palestine, was that they held what seemed like a never ending series of commissions that issued endless papers – mostly white in colour. 

And so in 1930 the British convened yet another commission, to look into the situation with Jewish immigration. As I said right at the beginning of this series, apart from the Easter Riots of 1920, which the Grand Mufti was very much behind, but those riots backfired on the Muslims, almost every other outbreak of Muslim violence saw the British crack down on the Jewish immigration, land purchases etc.

The latest commission was the Hope-Simpson Report. In it’s findings, it didn’t give the Jews much hope.

Tag words: Palestinian refugees; Muslim immigration; Colonel MacKereth; Jews; Grand Mufti; Haj Amin al-Husseini; Hope-Simpson Report; Report on Immigration, Land Settlement, and Development, 1930; the League of Nations British Mandate; Immigration of Other Than Jewish Labour; The White Paper; Lewis Yelland Andrews; Lewis Andrews; Arab Revolt; Passfield White Paper of 1933; Musa Alami; David Ben-Gurion; Chaim Wiezmann; Winston Churchill; Herbert Samuel; Lloyd George; Ramsay MacDonald; the Black Letter; Balfour Declaration; Ottoman Turks; Islamic Golden Age; Bar Kochba; Ezekiel 33:28; Peel Report 1937; Shaw Commissions Report; Palestine Mandate; 1948 Arab Israeli war;

In 1939, Stalin did a deal with Hitler. He would get half of Poland, and other countries which aren’t important just now, although it was important for them, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and other countries, because he was also swiping parts of those other countries too.

Anyway Hitler attacked Russia in 1941, before Russia could attack Germany, and then all hell broke loose for the next 4 years in a titanic struggle between the Nazis and the Communists. Things didn’t go well for Hitler in that war, he ended up placing second, which isn’t a good place to end up in in a war.

By the end of World War II, Stalin had swept through all of eastern Europe and half of Germany. Stalin wanted to keep his ill-gotten gains in Poland from his deal with Hitler. So he kept the half of Poland that Hitler had promised him, and kicked out those unpleasant Poles. But Stalin was nothing if not a fair man, and so he helped the Poles by kicking the Germans of a equally large slab of their country, forcing them to leave land that they had lived on for hundreds of years.

Six million ethnic Germans were expelled from their homes – most of them women, children and elderly people. The Russians had killed all of the military age males, or sent them to their labour camps, where many were worked to death. Another six million Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia.

During all of these massive population movements maybe 500,000, possibly 1.5 million, Germans died. Lots of other Europeans died too in those horrific, apocalyptic times.

Stalin never had any problems brutally expelling people from lands they had lived on for hundreds of year. He also expelled all of the Tatars from their homelands in the Crimea. They had preferred the Nazis to the Communists, who had been brutal to them before the German invasion. The Russians also expelled enormous numbers of Germans who had been invited to permanently move to Russia by Catherine the Great in the 1700s – so they had lived in the Caucasus, on land given to them by Catherine 200 years before their expulsion. Most of the kulak peasants from Ukraine were expelled, millions of them died before they could be expelled and died in the godforsaken places they were sent to by Stalin. Greeks from the Russian side of the Russian border were also forcibly relocated. Stalin had no problems shifting millions of people from their homes to others parts of Russia, mostly Siberia.

You may be shocked to hear that if those many millions of people had a right to return where they originally came from Stalin never did anything about it.

But hypocrisy in the left is their standard stock in trade. And so it came to pass that on 11 December 1948 the United Nations passed the resolution acknowledging the right of return of the so-called Palestinian refugees to return to where they’d come from in what was now Israel, even if they’d only lived there for less than two years. I’ll discuss later than no North African or Middle Eastern Muslim country voted in favour of this resolution ....

Tag words: Stalin; Hitler; Nazis; Communists; World War II; Catherine the Great; United Nations; Muslims; Jews; World War I; British Empire; Indian Independence; Pakistan; 1948 Arab Israel War; Joan Peters; From Time Immemorial; Al Nahar; Sabri Jiryis; Palestinian National Council; 1982 World Refugee Survey; Philip Hauser, former United States Census Director; United Nations' Population Commission; World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries; WOJAC; American Sephardi Federation; Dr. Elfan Rees; World Council of Churches; Century of the Homeless Man; Kurt René Radley; United Nations Resolution 194; British Mandate; General Assembly Resolution 393 of 2 December 1950; United Nations, Resolution 394 of 14 December 1950; UN Resolution 513 of 26 January, 1952; Egyptian Foreign Minister, Muhammad Salah al-Din; Cairo newspaper Al-Misri; Neue Zuercher Zeitung; Terence Prittie; The Palestinians: People History, Politics;

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;