The Danger Zone (DZ)

Which of the great European powers offered the best chance for the Jews to realise their own homeland wasn’t clear.

The Ottoman Empire was there, and the Holy Lands were part of that Empire. Any Jewish homeland inside the Ottoman Empire wouldn’t be a free independent country.

Theodor Herzl, the head of the Zionist movement (the movement to win a homeland for the Jews) had travelled to the courts of Europe to plead his cause – the creation of a home for the Jews – that’s what Zionism means.

Kaiser Wilhelm, a man of dubious mental stability and no wisdom (as his starting World War I would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt), received Herzl and his cause favourably.

Strong anti-semitic views flourished in Germany at this time (but we hadn’t seen nothing yet – Hitler would take that to a whole new level). But the Kaiser’s unusual views on Jews, of the kind always involved with anti-Semitism, encouraged him to support Herzl’s ambition for a home for the Jews.

The Kaiser recorded:

…. considering the immense and extremely dangerous power which International Jewish capital represents, it would be a huge advantage to Germany if the Hebrews looked up to it in gratitude.

The Kaiser told Herzl that he would intercede with the Sultan on behalf of Herzl, music to Herzl’s ears. He asked Herzl what he wanted. Since the Holy Lands were part of the Ottoman Empire, that really meant that there was no hope of an independent Jewish homeland. So Herzl said he wanted a chartered company, under German protection. That was a novel idea.

The Kaiser invited Herzl to meet him in Jerusalem.

The Kaiser was true to his word. When he met with the Sultan he put Herzl’s request. The Sultan, Abdulhhamed (also rendered Abdul Hamid), rejected the idea but he was realistic about the likely outcome of the determination of the Jews for their own homeland, ultimately being successful, not the first time he had expressed this opinion. He said to his daughter:

The Jews may spare their millions. When my empire is divided, perhaps they will get Palestine for nothing. But only our corpse can be divided.

So there was a certain warm, fuzzy feeling, in the Jewish community about the Germans and where their support may lead for the Jews.

Tag words: Ottoman Empire; Holy Lands; Theodor Herzl; Zionist movement; Kaiser Wilhelm; Sultan Abdulhhamed; Sultan Abdul Hamid; General Baron Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein; Ahmet Jemal; the Husseinis; David Ben-Gurion; Pan Arabists; Christians; World War I; Abdullah ibn Hussein; Sherif of Sherifs; Emir of Mecca; Marshall Lord Kitchener; Your Country Needs You; Hashemite; Sir Henry McMahon; al-Fatah; Al-Ahd; Three Pashas; TE Lawrence; Gertrude Bell; the Imp; Saladin; Abu Ubayda; British Foreign Office; Ronald Storrs; Simon Sebag Montefiore; Jerusalem: The Biography; Secret Despatches from Arabia; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Aqaba; Jesus Christ; Zion Mule Corps; Aaron Aaronshohn; Yosef Lishansky; Sarah Aaronshohn; Avshalom Feinberg;

The rich Muslims, the effendi, who owned a great deal of land in Palestine, whether they lived in Jerusalem or not, had a lot of influence with the local administrator of those lands. The most important of the local administrators, appointed by Constantinople, was the Sultan. There was also a lot of attention paid to Palestine in Constantinople the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

The newly established Jewish farm settlements were paying proper wages to the Muslims who worked for them. The rich Muslims, the effendi, had never done that. That was one of the reasons they had become so rich by exploiting the poor, ignorant, peasant Muslim farmers, the fellahin.

The effendi very often forced these peasant farmers off the land because they found that the Jews were able to come up with ridiculous amounts of money to buy what was frankly, appalling land. Still, as the old legal warning goes, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.

Poor Muslim peasant farmers started to be expelled from their land by the rich Muslim landowners more and more often from about 1880 with the increasing number of Jews wanting land to star farms. 

Where did these Jews get their money? Some came from other Sephardic Jews living in Muslim countries. There had long been a duty on Jews living away from the Holy Land to send what money they could to the Jews who were actually in the land.

But the real money especially came from the fabulously rich Jews in Europe, like Baron Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, being able to pay the extortionate prices that the effendi found that they could ask for and get it. This fact alone kills the argument that the Jews were no worse off living under Muslims than living under Europeans. There were ways to the top for Jews in Europe. One Jew, Benjamin Disraeli, was the prime minister of England, in 1868 and again from 1874 to 1880. Jews were certainly singled out as being different, but there were none of the crushing religious practices that had seen the Jews. This is seen in the report from the British ambassador in Jerusalem, W.T. Young to Viscount Palmerston on 13 May 1839 when he wrote:

The spirit of toleration towards the Jews is not yet known here to the same extent it is in Europe. . . still, the Jew in Jerusalem is not estimated in value much above a dog. . . .

But selling the land to the Jews at an enormous profit, was a two edged sword for the effendi because they were losing their lowly paid peasant farmers to the Jewish farmers, and if they wanted to keep them, they were being forced to pay their peasant farmers more than ever before.

But there was one thing that united the effendi and the fellahin and that was their common religion, Islam. More importantly the beliefs of that religion had, for almost the time that the Jews had lived in countries ruled by Muslims, and to this very day shaped how Muslims saw, reacted to and treated the Jews and that is what I’m going to talk about in this programme.

Tag words: Muslims; the effendi; the notables; Ottoman Empire; peasant farmers; the fellahin; Holy Land; Benjamin Disraeli; W.T. Young; Viscount Palmerston; the Bible; the Torah; Moses; Leviticus 19:34; Deuteronomy 10:19; Exodus 22:21; Hermann Cohen; Sodom; Genesis 19:4-5; Quran; the Hadith; Mohammad; angel Gabriel; Nessim Joseph Dawood; Surah III v.112; Surah II v.96; Surah II v.90; Surah III v.181; Surah III, v. 117-120; Surah IV, vv 160-161; Surah IV, v 46; Surah IV, v 101; Surah V, v 51; Surah V, vv 62-66; Surah II, vv 71-85; PLO Charter; Bernard Lewis; Islam in History; PJC McGregor; Arthur Rupin; Sultan Mehmet V Rashid; Ha Lebanon; Habazeleth; Zionist movement; Theodor Herzl; Max Norda; Zikhron; Petach Tikvah; Rishon; Arab Revolt; TE Lawrence; David Lean; Lawrence of Arabia;

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;

For the longest time, there had been many Jewish leaders who had revived discussion in the Sephardic Jewish community – the Jews who lived under Muslim rule in North Africa and the Middle East, including the Ottoman Empire - about actually doing something about returning to the Promised Land. That was the land that God had promised Moses that the Jews would have forever – on one condition - that they honoured and worshipped God in accordance with his laws. Well the Jews had failed miserably on that deal. They had been punished by God more than once. By the Assyrians destroying the Northern Kingdom - forever. By the Babylonians destroying much of the Southern Kingdom, and deporting many Jews to Babylon – although that one was only temporary – for 70 years. That’s the exile that Boney M sang about in their song, “By the Rivers of Babylon”.

As early as the 1100s the famous Jewish rabbinical scholar, Jehudah Halevi, was urging a return to the Promised Land, a journey which he made – but not for long as I’ll soon share with you.

By the 1800s many of the world’s Jews lived under Muslim rule – which included the occupation of their homeland Israel by the Muslim conquerors. Who the masters of the Jewish homelands were was something that changed over time. It included the original Arab conquerors, the European Crusaders, the former slaves of the Muslims, the Mamluks, the Ottoman Turks for the longest time. Finally there was a little post script when, after World War I, the British were put in charge of a new land, carved out of the Ottoman Empire, that was called Palestine, or the British Mandate – modern Israel and Jordan. The plan there had been to have all of that land as a new Jewish homeland, where the more recent occupants of these historic lands, who were living there at the time the Mandate ended, the Muslims, could live together with the Jews in peace and harmony.

Many Jews lived in Europe, including Russia. They had been persecuted there – at times very badly. But at all times, always, there were still, and always had been, Jews living in their Promised Land. Those Jews clung on tenaciously to their homeland, although they were living in abysmally poor circumstances. Largely they had to survive on charity from Muslims, from gifts of money from other Sephardic Jews in Muslim ruled countries, and with gifts of money from Jews in Europe. It was important to keep the Jews in the Promised Land and it was the duty of every Jew to make sure that they could survive there until they all came together again.

The Jews living in the Promised Land had been oppressed by the Muslims for most of the time. But from the late 1800s, beginning first with Yehudah Alkalay’s 1857 treatise, which inspired Theodor Herzl’s 1897 book Der Jüdenstaat - The Jewish State, the yearning to return to their land began to become a reality. In the late 1800’s, from about 1873, the movement of Jews from outside the Promised Land to the Promised Land began, with a lot of obstacles.

Tag words: Sephardic Jewish community; Ottoman Empire; Promised Land; Moses; Assyrians; Babylonians; Boney M; By the Rivers of Babylon; Jehudah Halevi; British Mandate; Yehudah Alkalay; Theodor Herzl; Der Jüdenstaat; The Jewish State; effendi; the notables; Rishon L’Tsion; moshava; fellahin; peasant farmers; Promised Land; Arab invasion; Genesis 26:13-15; Philistines; Baron Edmond von Rothschild; Zikhron Ya’akov; Metullah; farming research station; Triticum dicocoides; American Ministry of Agriculture; Atlit; Zionist movement; Mehmed Sherif Rauf Pasha; Lovers of Zion; Hovevei Zion; Kerak;

On 13 November 1974 Yasser Arafat addressed the United Nations. He told them that from 1881 the Jewish invasion began of the verdant area inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture.

Everything he said was true.

Well not that there was a Jewish invasion. There was no Jewish state so how could they invade a part of the world that formed a part of one of the world’s then great powers the Ottoman Empire without an army. It took England, Russia and Australia four years to defeat the Ottoman Empire with their vast and powerful armies, but the idea that a bunch of Jews could forcibly take land off the poor Muslim farmers in the Holy Lands and from the Ottoman Empire, which had a proven track record of really hating the Jews for hundreds of years, did nothing to stop them is just nonsense.

The real story is that the Jews came into possession of land in the Holy Lands the way most of us do. They bought it. They bought it from wealthy Arabs, who mostly lived nowhere near the Holy Lands. Who lived in more distant and sophisticated cities in the Muslim world, like Cairo and Damascus. Muslim owners who had finished robbing their peasant fellahin farmers of every last shekel they had, then had expelled them from their land to become nomads roaming all through Muslim controlled lands. Then those same rich Arabs, the notables, the effendi, sold the land, at outrageously high prices, to the Jews. After they’d sold the land, those effendi told their poor fellow Muslims that the Jews were stealing their land. Yes, they did that and that lie continues today, as Yasser Arafat’s speech to the UN revealed. It’s a lie we hear all of the time in the media today as well as from many of the world’s leading politicians.

Oh, and the land was verdant - a rich green. No it wasn’t. It was a barren desert from centuries of neglect by the Ottoman rulers and their sultans who had robbed Muslim farmers blind until they were forced to walk off their land.

And, of course people who don’t know where their next meal’s coming from aren’t going to be dynamically enriching their indigenous culture, as Yasser Arafat said they were doing. In any event the people living in the Holy Lands brought their culture with them from some other part of the Ottoman Empire or the Muslim world because there were very few Muslims who had lived in Palestine for long.

The Zionist movement that Yasser Arafat complains about, began with the first Zionist Congress held in 1897. The first settlers from Europe under this new movement didn’t arrive in the Holy Lands until about 1907. So Yasser Arafat saying the invasion by Zionists began in 1880, is again way off the mark.

Well it looks like everything that Yasser Arafat said at the UN was wrong about the Holy Lands.

Let me tell you now what was really happening with Jews going onto their Promised Land to start farming, something they hadn't really done in a serious way since the Muslim invasion in 630AD – 1250 years before. But in the late 1870’s they did start to go back onto the land, even before the Zionist movement came into existence, and before settlers under that movement started coming to the Holy Lands. Something was stirring.

Tag words: Yasser Arafat; United Nations; Jewish invasion; Ottoman Empire; Holy Lands; Muslim; peasant farmers; fellahin; the notables; the effendi; Zionist movement; Zionist Congress; Baron Rothschild; Moses Montefiore; Petachvah; Petach Tikvah; Rishon-Le-Zion; Sephardic Jew; Jehudah Halevi; Promised Land; Rudolf Kayser; The Life and Time of Jehudah Halevi; Mohammad; Torah; Assimilation; state of Israel; Nazis; World War I; UNRWA; Theodor Herzl; Rabbi Yehudah Alkalay; Destiny of the Lord; WT Young; Viscount Palmerston; Colonel Charles Churchill; James Finn; Damascus Affair; 2 Samuel 5:7; 

What were things like for the peasant farmers, the fellahin, living and farming in Palestine after the Ottoman Empire took over from the Mamluks in the 1880s when the Zionist invasion began and the land was forcibly taken from those peasant farmers? 

According to Yasser Arafat’s speech to the UN on 13 November 1974 it would have been thanks to an enlightened system of government that let to Palestine under the Muslims who lived in the area of modern day Israel, and worked the farms there to make it, in his words, a verdant area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture. 

Syria, as it was called, which covered Syria, Israel and Jordan, was ruled by sultans. Sultans were secular rulers of an area in the Ottoman Empire – not Muslim religious leaders. The sultan’s power was virtually unlimited. A wise sultan could make the area he governed prosperous. And if he was the opposite, then the result would be bad.

Historian Jacob de Haas in his 1939 book, History of Palestine – The Last Two Thousand Years, wrote of Palestine:

"The sultans regarded Palestine as their personal domain, acquired by the law of arms and war. The inhabitants …. could not pretend to real or personal property. Even private inheritance reverted to the sultan. …. all the country was crown land. When this system of crown land was compromised by grants to nobles, the peasants did not go with the land. …. The individual could not be imprisoned for debt though the village, as a unit, could be made to suffer for its collective obligation. The struggle, therefore, was between the land and the tax collector. If the assessor arrived at the right moment he seized what he claimed, and satisfied his demand. The peasant had no interest in thorough cultivation, or in the fertilization of the soil. His primitive tools were evidence of his poverty and indifference."

Obviously, for Yasser Arafat to have been right in his description of Palestine as a thriving, verdant green land, things had to have changed from what Jacob de Haas was describing, so let’s find out what happened and when that made this transformation of Palestine, that Yasser Arafat knew, possible.

Tag words: peasant farmers; fellahin; Palestine; Ottoman Empire; Mamluks; Zionists; Yasser Arafat; UN; Muslims; Sultans; Jacob de Haas; History of Palestine – The Last Two Thousand Years, wrote of Palestine; Count Constantine Francois Volney; Travels Through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, 1785; Charles Issawi; Columbia University; Princeton University; The Economic History of the Middle East. 1800-1914; Abraham Granott; The Land System in Palestine: History and Structure; Sir John Hope Simpson; The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey; Lord Ormsby-Gore; Bernard Lewis; John Lewis Burckhardt; Travels in Syria and the Holy Land; William McClure Thomson; The Land and the Book; Roderique Davison; George Washington University; Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876; Ziya Bey; Hurriyet #5; Suleyman Pasha; Printing presses; Hebron; Charles Thomas Wilson; Peasant Life in the Holy Land; Akira Kurosawa; The Seven Samurai; Sam Peckinpah; The Magnificent Seven; Count Volney;Charles Issawi; H. B. Tristramm; Lortet; G Schumacher; Der Arabische Pflug; Zionist Jews; Neville Mandel; al-Husayni; al-Khalidi; al-Nashashibi; Abdul Razak Kader; The Jerusalem Post;

Yasser Arafat, in his speech at the United Nations on 13 November 1974, declared that the Jewish invasion (his words not mine) of Israel began with Zionism in 1881. Then on 29 November 1947, the United Nations passed Resolution 181 for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine, modern day Israel and Jordan, into Jewish and non-Jewish areas. This led to the creation of the modern states of Israel and Jordan. The British Mandate covered the area of Biblical Palestine, as it existed in the Bible. The whole of the area of Israel and Jordan was supposed to have been the new Israel. That didn’t happen.

The UN Resolution gave the Jews just about 8.3% of the British Mandate of Palestine. That was a bit puzzling because the League of Nations resolution of 24 July 1922 gave the British certain territories in the Middle East, including where the much smaller modern Israel is today, for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people. This Mandate was for the purposes of expressly putting into effect the declaration originally made by the British government on 2 November 1917, the Balfour Declaration, which had that aim. Why this happened will be the subject of some later programmes – and that is a story you won’t find told today.

The UN Resolution for creating the state of Israel, even in the form that it was passed in giving Israel only 8.3% of what it should have been given as its homeland, was voted against by all Arab nations.

Jews had been mostly blocked from moving to their Promised Land by the Ottoman Empire at the request of the local rulers it had appointed to that area. This has to be remarked on. Why would the Muslims have no problem with Jews living anywhere in the Ottoman Empire which covered all of North Africa and the Middle East, but forbade the Jews returning to their Promised Land. You would be justified in thinking that the reason for that was what was likely to come out of it. The Jews returning to their homeland that the Arabs had conquered and reclaiming it for their home. Just speculation on my part but it sounds plausible.

But with Zionism emerging in Europe, with powerful and wealthy Jews backing it, like Baron Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, and with well educated Jews, including many professional people, this stopping of Jews going to the Holy Lands looked like it was going to end. The Jews have always been a major race in the world, over represented in most fields of human endeavour. But without a country of their own they had been powerless and as my previous programmes have recorded from observations of travellers through Muslim lands over that time, at the overwhelmingly and unrelentingly cruel mercy of the Muslims for 1500 years.

The Jews had been mostly passive victims of the inhuman treatment they had received for so long from the Muslims and many European countries. Zionism, a movement expressing a strong urge for Jews to return to their Promised Land and make it their own again after thousands of years, was not a welcome development. How would the Muslims react in the time leading up to the creation of the ..

According to Yasser Arafat 1881 was when Zionism got under way, and some surprising and unexpected things happened that no one has bothered to tell you. Not even Yasser Arafat.

Tag words: Yasser Arafat; United Nations; Zionism; British Mandate of Palestine; Resolution 181; Israel; Jordan; League of Nations; Balfour Declaration; Ottoman Empire; Muslims; Jews; Baron Rothschild; Moses Montefiore; Promised Land; Holy Lands; fellahin; Egyptian Nationality Code; Theodor Herzl; Der Jüdenstaat; The Jewish State; Zionist Congress; Alfred Dreyfuss; anti-Semitic; Adolf Hitler; Joseph Stalin; Jewish Colonial Trust; Bank Leumi; Jewish National Fund; World War I; Statistical Abstract of Palestine; Arab Conquest; Jewish Revolt; Sephardic Jews; Reverend James Parkes; Vital Cuinet; Mohammad; Mamluk; Bedouin; Bernard Lewis; The Emergence of Modern Turkey; A Granott; The Land System in Palestine;