The myth of stolen Arab land

Dispelling the lie that Israel is built on stolen Arab land

The belief that Israel is built on stolen Arab land has become orthodoxy among the anti-Israel movement. It is a dangerous fiction in need of correction.

"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% Muslim, 11% Jews, and 9% Christian).[1] About 80% of the Arabs were peasants, semi-Nomads and Bedouins.[2]  A second census in 1932 recorded a population of 1.03 million (73% Muslim, 17% Jewish, and 9% Christian).[3] 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.[4] 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.[5] This includes As’ad el-Shugeiri, an Islamic scholar whose son Ahmed Shugeiri was a founder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.[6]

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.”[7] This did not stop King Abdullah, himself, from leasing land to Jews.