Turkey’s Middle East Policy of Seeking To Gobble, Gobble Up the Middle East Makes Enemies of Everyone
by Barry Rubin, Rubin Reports
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“Countries may vary, but civilization is one, and for a nation to progress, it must take part in this one civilization. The decline of the Ottomans began when, proud of their triumphs over the West, they cut their ties with the European nations. This was a mistake which we will not repeat.” –Kemal Ataturk, 1924
Spinning in his grave, indeed. for now his successors not only think they can revive a Turkish-ruled imperium but have made the very mistake of turning their backs on the West that the republic’s founder rightly saw as the downfall of that earlier incarnation of his country. I’d change Ataturk’s wording slightly: the Ottomans turned their backs on the modern world then being developed in the West while still forming alliances with European powers.
Once upon a time there was a country named Turkey whose republic was created by Kemal Ataturk who famously said: “Peace at home; peace abroad.”
He and the Turkish people had seen their Ottoman Empire collapse after failing to modernize, engaging in chauvinistic nationalism (under the Young Turks), and entering an unnecessary war that led to 20 percent of its population dead and the country prostrate.
And so Ataturk and his colleagues saved the country based on two basic principles: at home, joining Western civilization through modernization and secularization; abroad, avoiding foreign ambitions and conflicts. Whatever their faults, they did a remarkable job. Turkey made steady progress far in excess of what happened in Iran or the Arabic-speaking world.
But then came the regime of the Justice and Development Party. Pretending to be moderate and democratic it was actually a radical Islamist party seeking to — if I may coin a phrase — fundamentally transform Turkey. This regime was not moderate but merely patient in achieving its radical goals.
It insisted that under its rule Turkey would be everyone’s friend and no one’s enemy. And President Barack Obama thought this would be a great model for the Middle East. In fact, though, the regime didn’t see everyone as an equal friend. It preferred the company of Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hizballah.
Soon, as events developed in the region, the veneer of modesty boiled away and the aggressive ambition was revealed. And that ambition was expressed most clearly by the devious Foreign Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu to parliament in late April:
We will manage the wave of change in the Middle East. Just as the ideal we have in our minds about Turkey, we have an ideal of a new Middle East. We will be the leader and the spokesperson of a new peaceful order, no matter what they say.
Wow. Off with the “everyone’s buddy” image and out comes the raving would-be dictator over the Middle East. But the problem is that there are these people called “Arabs” who don’t want to be bossed around by a Turk, even if they both are Sunni Muslims. In addition, those Arabs have their own ambitions. So when they hear stuff like this they become even more angry and suspicious.
“No matter what they say,” intones Davuto?lu, a man who has gone even further in addressing his party’s convention in a closed meeting where he said that somebody ought to run the Middle East so why not him and his colleagues. Since his speech was reported in a U.S. embassy message it was available to the White House. Yet it has been Obama’s naiveté about Turkey that has even further puffed up the arrogance of such people.
Sounding like another man who wanted to become the dictator of the Middle East — Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who once said that those who didn’t like him running things could “go drink the Nile,” Davuto?lu says:
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I’d like to advise those who are criticizing us: Go to Cairo. Go to Tripoli. Go to the streets of Beirut, Tunisia, Jerusalem, and ask about Turkey’s policy on Syria. They will hug you and express their appreciation for Turkey’s honorable policy.
Yes, this regime has supported the overthrow of its former close ally in Syria in order to install an Islamist regime friendly to Ankara. It has even obtained full support from Obama for creating an anti-American government in Damascus.
After the foreign minister spoke, an opposition leader, Osman Korutürk, explained that he was just back from Cairo for a regional conference of parliamentarians and did not find such a love and worship of Turkey there. On the contrary, they were not thrilled with the idea of Turkey dominating Syria, or anything else in the area for that matter.
The increasingly power-drunk behavior of Turkish leaders may go unnoticed by a worshipful Obama, who touts the “Turkish model,” but the Arabs have been alienated by such attitudes. Having also threatened Israel, Greece, and Cyprus, while partly antagonizing Iran — though the Ankara regime continues to break trade sanctions with Tehran, sabotage totally accepted by the pliant Obama Administration, the Turkish leaders have destroyed their own foreign policy. While this regime began with a realistic chance of being everyone’s friend, it has now made itself everyone’s enemy.
Regarding domestic governance, the power-drunk arrogance is also increasingly contradicting democratic practice. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said that democracy was like a trolley. You ride it until you get to your destination and then get off. Presumably that’s at the point where you have consolidated power to the point you can do whatever you want and have turned Turkey into an Islamist state.
Speaking in Adana and threatening retaliation to Kurdish PKK terrorist attacks he abandoned the pose of moderation and pluralism to threaten:
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“We have four fundamental principles. And these principles are:
“1. One people
“2. One flag
“3. One religion
“4. One government.
While there are echoes here of traditional Turkish centralization under the old republic established by Ataturk, the third principle shows not only the abandonment of Turkish secularism but its replacement by Islamic rule. Where Erdogan is willing to compromise is that he left off the demand for one language, accepting some use of the Kurdish language.
Thus, Turkey, which had done so well for decades under pragmatists, has now fallen under the sway of megalomaniacal ideologues who believe that they can impose Islam on Turkey and Turkey on the region.
Meanwhile the regime is arresting scores of former high-ranking officers — here and here — destroying the army that used to protect secularism. The time will come when it appoints Islamists or opportunists who act as if they were Islamists to the top commands.
And the U.S. government has finally given some tiny indication of dissatisfaction of Turkey’s hostile policy toward Israel. Obama and the top officials have done nothing while the Islamist regime has behaved as if Israel is its worst enemy in the world and sided with radical terrorist groups that seek Israel’s extinction. Of course, this statement of mild dissatisfaction was dragged out of a junior official by critical members of Congress and was narrowly limited. In other words, for all practical purposes the Obama Administration has done zero after two years of the Turkish regime’s bashing of Israel.
@ Catarin:
Catarin,
Are you really expecting an answer? Yes, you have answered yourself: The greatest period of Islamic Civilization was when it didn’t exist! I hope you’re not having trouble understanding that!. Egypt was a center of learning unequalled in its greatness, until the rampaging Arabs destroyed the last vestiges of it. Most of the great mosques in the ancient world, such as the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (now a museum) and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, were Christian structures that antedated Islam. The Hagia is an architectural masterpiece, which makes the Kaba’a of Mecca look like a sharp-cornered cow turd by comparison.
@ BlandOatmeal:
Bland, how then can you say the Golden Age of Islam was 500 CE when Muslims didn’t exist? What was their scholarship about and what Arab tribes produced it? What language were they writing in, as Arabic was still in the process of being invented? Where is this scholarship today? I got the year 1500 by googling it.
Years ago I was in a disagreement with a Muslim over whether the Garden of Eden’s Adam and Eve were early Jews or early Muslims. I told him they were Jews who were there so early that they had met G-d’s parents…
@ Catarin:
Alexander Keith [The Land of Israel (Edinburgh, 1843), p. 465]; J.B. Forsyth [A Few Months in the East (J. Lovell, Quebec, 1861), p. 188]; and H.B. Tristram [The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels in Palestine (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, 1865), p. 490] had all noted a progression of ongoing ruin, desolation & depopulation more advanced in each instance than even that last previously reported at the time.
By the mid-19th century the population of Western Palestine had withered to 50-100,000 — this, in a country which, by Josephus’ estimation, had housed a vibrant citizenry of, easily, some six or seven million before Jewish political independence had ended in A.D. 70. [Jacob de Haas, History of Palestine, the Last Two Thousand Years (Macmillan, N.Y., 1934), p. 34n; The Works of Flavius Josephus, trans. Wm Whiston (T. Nelson & Sons, Edinburgh, 1880)]
@ Catarin:
Another retrospective, this focusing on the decline of the land itself, comes once again from the above-cited Dr Carl Hermann Voss, then Chairman of the American Christian Palestine Committee (which maintained a huge membership of American citizens, both private & prominent — among them, Harry Truman, ever since his days as a US Senator):
“In the twelve and-a-half centuries between the Arab conquest in the seventh century and the beginnings of the Jewish return in the 1880’s, Palestine was laid waste. Its ancient canal and irrigation systems were destroyed and the wondrous fertility of which the Bible spoke vanished into desert and desolation… Under the Ottoman empire of the Turks, the policy of disfoliation continued; the hillsides were denuded of trees and the valleys robbed of their topsoil.” [Carl Voss, The Palestine Problem Today, Israel and Its Neighbors (Beacon Press, Boston, 1953), p. 13]
Moreover, even as late as 1907, the progressive desertification was continuing apace, as the Calcutta-born, Scottish theologian & cartographer, Sir George Adam Smith [1856-1942], in alluding to the city of Jerusalem — which lacks a natural water supply — noted, “The desert creeps close to the city gates.” [George Adam Smith, The Topography, Economics and Historical Geography of Jerusalem, 2 Vols. (Ariel, Jerusalem {orig. pub. 1907}), p. 12; cited in Mordecai Nisan, Minorities in the Middle East: A History of Struggle and Self-Expression, 2nd ed. (McFarland & Co, London; and Jefferson, NC, 2002), pp. 253-54]
In 1783, fifteen years before Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, Count Volney had traveled through the territory of Syria-Palestine and Egypt. He would write of “Jerusalem’s destroyed walls, its de-bris-filled moat, its city circuit choked with ruins.” His carefully kept journal recorded his impressions, which include the numbers of the then-current populations of each of Western Palestine’s three ‘main’ cities of the period:
• Jerusalem, 12,000-14,000;
• Bethlehem, 600 “able-bodied” men;
• Hebron, 800-900.
[Count Constantine F. de Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, 1785 (Pater Noster & Row, London, 1788), Vol. 2, pp. 303-25]
And the numbers were unmistakably in freefall.
I’ll show you the pattern of that fall in one more post.
@ Catarin:
Yes. And the better working conditions attendant to working for Jews, as well as the better life GENERALLY — health, sanitation, transportation, etc.
Yes.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was constant throughout the era. Their numbers had been declining from a substantially higher level for some time when the khalutzim began their work on the land.
The French poet Pierre Loti, after a visit: “…everywhere in Palestine, city and palaces have returned to the dust…This melancholy of abandonment…weighs on all the Holy Land.” [La Galilée (Paris, 1895), p. 69]
David Landes speaks succinctly to the wherebys & wherefores of that abandonment:
“As a result of centuries of Turkish neglect and misrule, following on the earlier ravages of successive conquerors, the land had been given over to sand, marsh, the anopheles [malaria-carrying] mosquito, clan feuds and Bedouin marauders. A population of several millions had shrunk to less than one-tenth that number.” [David Landes, “Palestine Before the Zionists,” Commentary, February 1976, p. 49]
I’ll give you more detail of that decline in another post.
@
So Dweller, is it safe to say there was a small but steady influx of Jews into Palestine during the last half of the 1800s which was occasioned by a steady flow of Arabs into Palestine who came primarily for the jobs the Jews created? That in the beginning of the 20th century the influx of both Jews and Arabs grew, but the Arabs were still coming primarily for the jobs the Jews offered? That during the 400 years the Ottomans ruled the Holy Land the Arab population was about 150,000?
Great job!
@ Catarin:
The Golden Age of Islam was in 500 CE. It’s been downhill ever since.
PS Yes, I know — There WAS no Islam in 500 CE.
@ Catarin:
Part Seven: This all used to be common knowledge — in both the private AND public sector
This understanding was plainly set forth during the early 50’s in the observations of Carl Hermann Voss:
“The Arab population was small and limited until Jewish settlement restored the barren lands and drew to it Arabs from neighboring countries. When organized Jewish colonization began in 1882, there were fewer than 150,000 Arabs in the land. The great majority of the Arab population in recent decades were comparative newcomers — either late immigrants or descendants of persons who had immigrated into Palestine in the previous seventy years.”
[Carl H. Voss, The Palestine Problem Today, Israel and Its Neighbors (Beacon Press, Boston, 1953) p. 3]
What’s more, as noted in 1939 by FDR in a memorandum to his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, “Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921…vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during the whole period.”
[Memo to the Secretary of State, 5-17-39, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1939, vol. 4 (U.S. Govt Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1955), p. 757; cited in Dore Gold, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City (Regnery, Washington, DC, 2007), p. 128]
@ Catarin:
Part Six: More data & the view of the Arab friendlies
Hasan Shukri, for example: Arab mayor of Haifa during the war years immediately preceding the Mandate, and who would hold that same post again for another 14 years [1927-40], cabled HMG in 1921, denouncing Arab demand that Britain forsake her obligations to foster upbuilding of the Jewish National Home:
“We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy…. We consider the Jews as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the construction of our common country. We are certain that without Jewish immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development of our country: as may be judged from the fact that the towns inhabited in part by Jews, such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Tiberias, are making steady progress — while Nablus, Acre and Nazareth, where no Jews reside, are steadily declining.”
[cited in Benny Morris, ”The Tangled Truth,” The New Republic, 7 May 08]
Writes Ramon Bennett regarding the astonishing phenomenon, “Arabs swarmed around the Jewish settlers like bees around a honey pot. The Arabs in Palestine and neighboring countries were poor, and they came looking for the jobs that were being created by Jewish agriculture and industry.”
What’s more, during the period between 1893 & 1947
— just as Arab numbers increased in direct proportion to Jewish settlement, so the PERCENTAGE of increase was in direct proportion to Arab proximity to Jewish settlement.
• A 400-percent Arab increase was recorded inside Jewish-settled areas,
• a 150-percent Arab increase adjacent to Jewish-settled areas, and
• a 100-percent Arab increase outside the Jewish-settled areas. [emphases in original]
Arabs poured into Palestine — and MOST sought to find work among the Jews themselves.
[Ramon Bennett, Philistine: The Great Deception (1995), pp. 150-51]
Ernst Frankenstein, prominent jurist [lectured at Academy of International Law in The Hague], noted — 5 yr before Israeli statehood — the conclusion of most informed observers that 75 percent of Arab population of Palestine were themselves immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, into Palestine during the preceding 60-year period (1882-1942) of Zionist reclamation & development.
[Ernst Frankenstein, Justice For My People (Ivor Nicholson & Watson, London, 1943), p. 130]
Finally: US Exec Branch acknowledged this phenomenon. Coming up.
@ Catarin:
Part Five: Some noteworthy numbers
In detailed studies of economic conditions in Western Palestine, the economist-historian Prof. Fred Gottheil found that during the first 10 years of the Palestine Mandate, the Arab population increased by 216 percent in Haifa, 134 percent in Jaffa and 90 percent in Jerusalem, while Arab increases (where they increased at all) were far more modest — 42 percent in Nablus, 40 percent in Jenin, 32 percent in Bethlehem — in precisely those towns & areas where Jewish development was NOT pursued.
[Fred M. Gottheil, “Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel, 1922-1931,” from Michael Curtis, Joseph Neyer, Chaim Waxman & Allen Pollock, eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ, 1975), p. 38]
What’s more, these observations, so apparent to independent observers, were no less clear to many Arab leaders, who took a dim view of the agitations of early Arab nationalists who pressured Britain to renounce her Zionist commitment. Some were, in fact, animated by genuine sympathy for the Zionist cause and a heartfelt appreciation of Zionist accomplishment & potential. I’ll touch on that in the next installment.
@ Catarin:
Part Four: Who wanted those jobs?
ARABS wanted them, that’s who.
Arab migrants and Arab immigrants: from the Syrian interior, from the Hauran, from the Hijaz, from Transjordan, from Egypt, from Libya, from Morocco, from southern Russia, from Bosnia — all flocked to Palestine, drawn by its new opportunities of work, settlement & a steadily rising standard of living — and grasped those opportunities with both hands. The flow of Arab traffic reversed dramatically:
“Palestine changed from a country of Arab emigration to one of Arab immigration.” [Irving Howe & Carl Gershman, Israel, the Arabs & the Middle East (Quadrangle Press, NY, 1972), p. 178]
The phenomenon was confirmed in the 1937 Report of the Palestine Royal Commission (the “Peel Report”).
Within 7 years after its founding, Rishohn L’tziohn, for example, and its 40 families, had attracted over 400 Arab families: which settled themselves around the community itself.
Numerous Arab villages came to be, following much the same pattern, often with numbers in the same ten-to-one ratio.
The French geopgrapher, Vital Cuinet, recorded that in Western Palestine the 1882 “settled” Muslim population of 141,000 had grown, by 1895, to more than 252,000: an increase of 111,000, or nearly 80 percent within a 13-year period. [Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine, Géographie Administrative, Statistique, Déscriptive et Raisonnée (Paris, 1896)]
Moreover, Zionist advances in medicine & medical technology, in public health & sanitation, in engineering & agriculture reduced Arab infant mortality in Western Palestine by over 50 percent — and increased Palestinian Arab longevity by more than twenty years. And within just a few generations, Arab numbers west of the River virtually exploded: the half-century between 1893 & 1947 showing overall increases exceeding 400 percent — with the steepest gains in precisely those areas where Jewish settlement was heaviest, and Jewish development most intensive.
Some of the stats are even MORE interesting than these; they’re coming up next.
@ Catarin:
Part Three: The chalutzim in perspective
Today, Israel’s fruits, vegetables & wines are in-demand the world over [Isaiah 27:6]; fine roses — grown in her deserts [Isaiah 35:1] — are a major export & witness to the world’s 3rd largest flower-export industry; and in certain seasons of the year, Israel’s tulips are imported FROM the Holy Land by. . . . Holland.
Moreover, the country where George Sandys [son of the Archbishop of Canterbury] had found fewer than a thousand trees in Shakespeare’s day is, in our day, reputed to be the only country on the planet whose body is consistently arrayed in more trees each year than the previous year.
The Swiss scholar & theologian, Felix Bovet, who visited the Holy Land in 1858, observed:
“The Christians who conquered the Land of Israel did not know how to hold it, and it was never anything more to them than a battleground and a graveyard. The Saracens [i.e., Arabs] who took it from them also left, and it was taken by the [Seljuk & Mameluke] Turks and the Ottomans, who are still there. They have made a desert of it, and it is seldom possible, even for them, to walk [there] without fear.
“Even the Arabs, who dwell there now, do so as temporary sojourners. They set down their tents wherever there is pasture land, and seek refuge in the ruins of the towns. They did not create anything, as they were, in truth, strangers, not masters of the land. The spirit of the desert, which had brought them hither, could in the same fashion take them away, without their ever leaving behind any sign of their passage through it.
“God, who has given Palestine to so many nations, has not permitted any one of them to establish itself, or to take root, in it. There can be no doubt that it is reserved for His People: Israel…”
[Felix Bovet, Egypt, Palestine and Phoenicia: A Visit to Sacred Lands (London, 1882), pp. 384-85; cited in Michael Ish-Shalom, Christian Travels in the Holy Land (Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 1965, Hebrew), p. 714]
BUT AGRICULTURE AND REFORESTATION weren’t the half of it. The chalutzim built homes & settlements & towns — and then cities, and they re-built old, ruined ones. They designed, and then constructed: schools & parks; hospitals & houses of worship; roads & bridges; shops & factories & industries; dams & reservoirs & pipelines, and more [Amos 9:14-15] — all of which created jobs & real possibilities: and not solely for Jews, but for anybody who wanted them.
Next, I’ll tell you WHO wanted those jobs & opportunities.
@ Catarin:
Work of the khalutzim
They planted gardens & fields; farms & orchards & vineyards. More often than not, this necessitated first creating the very conditions — developing the very elements — on which agriculture depends, because frequently they were dealing with either malaria-infested marshes, or uncleared, untilled ground: arid, rocky & largely soilless. They drained the marshes. They terraced the hillsides to build the soil. They built barns & water systems.
And, as foretold two-and-a-half millennia earlier, in the Book of Joel (2:23-24), the Biblical rainy seasons — the “early rains” & the “latter rains,” which would disappear for many centuries after the Dispersion — returned: virtually on the heels of the chalutzim in 1878, the very year of the founding of what was to become the first enduring Jewish colony of Petakh Tiqvah [“Door of Hope”], northeast of Jaffa, on the deserted, once-fertile Plain of Sharon, by old-time Palestinian Jewish families who had finally had enough of the overcrowded “Jewish Quarter” of Jerusalem’s Old City.
Within 4 years were established the struggling communities of Rishon L’tzion [“First to Zion”: the first village founded by immigrants], south of Jaffa, and Zichron Ya’acov [“In Memory of Jacob”: founded by Romanian Jews (among them, the parents of the extraordinary Aaronsohn brood, and subsidized in its early years by the Baron Edmond de Rothschild (French wing of the family), who named it after his father], in the northcoast, Carmel Mountain region, south of the port city of Haifa.
By 1893 there were more than 20 settlements, many of whose success was slow & painstaking, fraught with pitfalls and pocked by setbacks; not all of the settlements endured. And in several of those that did, Bedouin raids, exhaustion & disease — especially malaria & yellow fever, which often wiped out whole families — took a heavy toll in communities like Petakh Tiqvah & Khadera during the early years.
Moreover, some colonies, like the cooperative settlement of G’dera, learned to survive (or renew themselves after early failure) — in a pattern recalling that of Plymouth & Jamestown in No. America — but only after losing their socialist pretensions under the bullyings of their predatory Arab neighbors & the initial unpreparedness of their own agriculturally unskilled & economically shortsighted residents, as well as, predictably, the latter’s persistent enshacklement to hidebound ideology. But the renewal of the Land of Israel was not to be gainsaid — not by hardship & not by heartache. Its time had come.
Touring the countryside in March of 1921 as Britain’s Colonial Secretary, and viewing Rishohn’s vineyards & orange groves, Winston Churchill would tell the House of Commons upon his return,
“I defy anybody, after seeing work of this kind, achieved by so much labour, effort and skill, to say that the British Government, having taken up the position it has, could cast it all aside and leave it to be rudely and brutally overturned by the incursion of a fanatical attack by the Arab population from outside.” [Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (Henry Holt & Co., NY, 1991), p. 436]
Next: the chalutzim in perspective.
Xalootseem 🙂
Yes, Dweller, please go on. Is the h in the ch pronounced the same way as it is in Arabic? Because of the cartoon series Family Guy, I’ve heard the h pronounced several times, because it likes to poke fun at Arabs. But it really loves to poke fun at the Jews.
@ yamit82:
I’ve seen it all three ways, Yamit — though the ch spelling IS most common.
Problem is, most English-speaking readers take the ch sound to be pronounced like the ch in “cheese” — as they have no equivalent of the gutteral ch in “chanukah.”
So as a courtesy I use kh to alert them to the difference.
No big deal.
@ Catarin:
The view of the Arab friendlies
Hasan Shukri, for example: the Arab mayor of Haifa during the war years immediately preceding the Mandate, and who would hold that same post again for another fourteen years from 1927 to 1940, cabled HMG in 1921, denouncing the Arab demand for Britain to forsake her obligations to foster the upbuilding of the Jewish National Home:
“We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy…. We consider the Jews as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the construction of our common country. We are certain that without Jewish immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development of our country: as may be judged from the fact that the towns inhabited in part by Jews, such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Tiberias, are making steady progress — while Nablus, Acre and Nazareth, where no Jews reside, are steadily declining.”
[cited in Benny Morris, ”The Tangled Truth,” The New Republic, 7 May 08; see also Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, Haim Watzman, trans. (Univ. of Calif. Press, Berkeley, 2008)]
Writes Ramon Bennett regarding the astonishing phenomenon, “Arabs swarmed around the Jewish settlers like bees around a honey pot. The Arabs in Palestine and neighboring countries were poor, and they came looking for the jobs that were being created by the Jewish agriculture and industry.” What’s more, during the period between 1893 & 1947,
Just as Arab numbers increased in direct proportion to Jewish settlement, so the PERCENTAGE of increase was in direct proportion to Arab proximity to Jewish settlement.
• A 400-percent Arab increase was recorded inside Jewish-settled areas,
• a 150-percent Arab increase adjacent to Jewish-settled areas, and
• a 100-percent Arab increase outside the Jewish-settled areas. [emphases in original]
Arabs poured into Palestine and most sought to find work among the Jews themselves.
[Ramon Bennett, Philistine: The Great Deception (Shekinah Books, Keno, OR, 1995), pp. 150-51]
The prominent jurist, Ernst Frankenstein, who lectured at the Academy of International Law in The Hague, noted in 1943 that it was the conclusion of most informed observers that 75 percent of the Arab population of Palestine were themselves immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants, into Palestine during the preceding 60-year period (1882-1942) of Zionist reclamation & development. [Ernst Frankenstein, Justice For My People (Ivor Nicholson & Watson, London, 1943), p. 130]
This same understanding was plainly set forth a decade later in the observations of Carl Hermann Voss:
“The Arab population was small and limited until Jewish settlement restored the barren lands and drew to it Arabs from neighboring countries. When organized Jewish colonization began in 1882, there were fewer than 150,000 Arabs in the land. The great majority of the Arab population in recent decades were comparative newcomers — either late immigrants or descendants of persons who had immigrated into Palestine in the previous seventy years. [Carl H. Voss, The Palestine Problem Today, Israel and Its Neighbors (Beacon Press, Boston, 1953) p. 3]
What’s more, as noted in 1939 by FDR in a memo to his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, “Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921…vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during the whole period.” [Memo to the Secretary of State, 5-17-39, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1939, vol. 4 (U.S. Govt Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1955), p. 757; cited in Dore Gold, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City (Regnery, Washington, DC, 2007), p. 128]
Looks like one or two of these may have run a trifle long; so they’re presently in limbo. They’ll probably surface presently; if not, I’ll re-post them (in smaller bites).
@ Catarin:
Who wanted those jobs?
ARABS wanted them, that’s who.
Arab migrants and Arab immigrants: from the Syrian interior, from the Hauran, from the Hijaz, from Transjordan, from Egypt, from Libya, from Morocco, from southern Russia, from Bosnia — all flocked to Palestine, drawn by its new opportunities of work, settlement & a steadily rising standard of living — and grasped those opportunities with both hands. The flow of Arab traffic reversed dramatically: “Palestine changed from a country of Arab emigration to one of Arab immigration.” [Irving Howe & Carl Gershman, Israel, the Arabs & the Middle East (Quadrangle Press, NY, 1972), p. 178]
The phenomenon was confirmed in the 1937 Report of the Palestine Royal Commission (the “Peel Report”).
Within seven years after its founding, Rishohn L’Tziohn, for example, and its 40 families, had attracted over 400 Arab families: which settled themselves around the community itself. Numerous Arab villages came to be, following much the same pattern, often with numbers in the same ten-to-one ratio. The French geopgrapher, Vital Cuinet, recorded that in Western Palestine the 1882 “settled” Muslim population of 141,000 had grown, by 1895, to more than 252,000: an increase of 111,000, or nearly 80 percent within a thirteen-year period. [Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine, Geographie Administrative, Statistique, Descriptive et Raisonnee (Paris, 1896)]
Moreover, Zionist advances in medicine & medical technology, in public health & sanitation, in engineering & agriculture reduced Arab infant mortality in Western Palestine by over 50 percent — and increased Palestinian Arab longevity by more than twenty years. And within just a few generations, Arab numbers west of the River virtually exploded: the years between 1893 & 1947 showing overall increases exceeding 400 percent — with the steepest gains in precisely those areas where Jewish settlement was heaviest, and Jewish development most intensive.
In detailed studies of economic conditions in Western Palestine, the economist-historian Prof. Fred Gottheil found that during the first 10 years of the Palestine Mandate, the Arab population increased by 216 percent in Haifa, 134 percent in Jaffa and 90 percent in Jerusalem, while Arab increases (where they increased at all) were far more modest — 42 percent in Nablus, 40 percent in Jenin, 32 percent in Bethlehem — in precisely those towns & areas where Jewish development was NOT pursued.
[Fred M. Gottheil, “Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel, 1922-1931,” from Michael Curtis, Joseph Neyer, Chaim Waxman & Allen Pollock, eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ, 1975), p. 38]
What’s more, these observations, so apparent to independent observers, were no less clear to many Arab leaders, who took a dim view of the agitations of early Arab nationalists who pressured Britain to renounce her Zionist commitment. Some were, in fact, animated by genuine sympathy for the Zionist cause and a heartfelt appreciation of Zionist accomplishment & potential. I’ll cover that in a final post on this matter.
@ Catarin:
Work of the khalutzim
They planted gardens & fields; farms & orchards & vineyards. More often than not, this necessitated first creating the very conditions — developing the very elements — on which agriculture depends, because frequently they were dealing with either malaria-infested marshes, or uncleared, untilled ground: arid, rocky & largely soilless. They drained the marshes. They terraced the hillsides to build the soil. They built barns & water systems.
And, as foretold two-and-a-half millennia earlier, in the Book of Joel (2:23-24), the Biblical rainy seasons — the “early rains” & the “latter rains,” which would disappear for many centuries after the Dispersion — returned: virtually on the heels of the chalutzim in 1878, the very year of the founding of what was to become the first enduring Jewish colony of Petakh Tiqvah [“Door of Hope”], northeast of Jaffa, on the deserted, once-fertile Plain of Sharon, by old-time Palestinian Jewish families who had finally had enough of the overcrowded “Jewish Quarter” of Jerusalem’s Old City.
Within four years were established the struggling communities of Rishon L’tzion [“First to Zion”: the first village founded by immigrants], south of Jaffa, and Zichron Ya’acov[“Memory of Jacob”: founded by Romanian Jews (among them, the parents of the extraordinary Aaronsohn brood, and subsidized in its early years by the Baron Edmond de Rothschild (French wing of the family), who named it after his father], in the northcoast, Carmel Mountain region, south of the port city of Haifa.
By 1893 there were more than 20 settlements, many of whose success was slow & painstaking, fraught with pitfalls and pocked by setbacks; not all of the settlements endured. And in several of those that did, Bedouin raids, exhaustion & disease — especially malaria & yellow fever, which often wiped out whole families — took a heavy toll in communities like Petakh Tiqvah & Khadera during the early years.
Moreover, some colonies, like the cooperative settlement of G’dera, learned to survive (or renew themselves after early failure) — in a pattern recalling that of Plymouth & Jamestown in North America — but only after losing their socialist pretensions under the bullyings of their predatory Arab neighbors & the initial unpreparedness of their own agriculturally unskilled & economically shortsighted residents, as well as, predictably, the latter’s persistent enshacklement to hidebound ideology. But the renewal of the Land of Israel was not to be gainsaid — not by hardship & not by heartache. Its time had come.
Touring the countryside in March of 1921 as Britain’s Colonial Secretary, and viewing Rishohn’s vineyards & orange groves, Winston Churchill would tell the House of Commons upon his return,
“I defy anybody, after seeing work of this kind, achieved by so much labour, effort and skill, to say that the British Government, having taken up the position it has, could cast it all aside and leave it to be rudely and brutally overturned by the incursion of a fanatical attack by the Arab population from outside.” [Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (Henry Holt & Co., NY, 1991), p. 436]
Today Israel’s fruits, vegetables & wines are in-demand the world over [Isaiah 27:6]; fine roses — grown in her deserts [Isaiah 35:1] — are a major export & witness to the world’s 3rd largest flower-export industry; and in certain seasons of the year, Israel’s tulips are imported FROM the Holy Land by. . . . Holland.
Moreover, the country where George Sandys [son of the Archbishop of Canterbury] had found fewer than a thousand trees in Shakespeare’s day is, in our day, reputed to be the only country on the planet whose body is consistently arrayed in more trees each year than the previous year.
The Swiss scholar & theologian, Felix Bovet, who visited the Holy Land in 1858, observed:
“The Christians who conquered the Land of Israel did not know how to hold it, and it was never anything more to them than a battleground and a graveyard. The Saracens [i.e., Arabs] who took it from them also left, and it was taken by the [Seljuk & Mameluke] Turks and the Ottomans, who are still there. They have made a desert of it, and it is seldom possible, even for them, to walk [there] without fear.
“Even the Arabs, who dwell there now, do so as temporary sojourners. They set down their tents wherever there is pasture land, and seek refuge in the ruins of the towns. They did not create anything, as they were, in truth, strangers, not masters of the land. The spirit of the desert, which had brought them hither, could in the same fashion take them away, without their ever leaving behind any sign of their passage through it.
“God, who has given Palestine to so many nations, has not permitted any one of them to establish itself, or to take root, in it. There can be no doubt that it is reserved for His People: Israel…” [Felix Bovet, Egypt, Palestine and Phoenicia: A Visit to Sacred Lands (London, 1882), pp. 384-85; cited in Michael Ish-Shalom, Christian Travels in the Holy Land (Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 1965, Hebrew), p. 714]
BUT AGRICULTURE & REFORESTATION weren’t the half of it. The chalutzim built homes and settlements and towns—and then cities, and they re-built old, ruined ones. They designed, and then constructed: schools and parks; hospitals and houses of worship; roads and bridges; shops and factories and industries; dams and reservoirs and pipelines, and more [Amos 9:14-15] —all of which created jobs and real possibilities: and not solely for Jews, but for anybody who wanted them.
Coming up, in installment three, I’ll tell you WHO wanted those jobs & opportunities.
@ Catarin:
My thanks for the vote of confidence. Kind words always welcome; I’ll take all I can get (by hook or by crook!).
Not in any formalistic sense. The university system has never said so.
And I’ve never asked them to.
We become knowledgeable about those things that interest us.
And this is a subject that has fascinated me all my life.
I’ll try to address these & your other questions with a narrative that ties together as many of them as possible. I’ll have to do it in a few posts, however — as one alone would be way too long.
THE FAITH & FORTITUDE, the patience & persistence, the resolve & sacrifice of the chalutzim [khah-loo-TZEEM: early Jewish pioneers — or, if you like, “settlers”] eventually yielded habitability, and with it, expanded opportunity. [Ezek. 36:33-35] Their commitment to ahvo-DAH ahtz-MIT [“self-labor”] would prove a living, ongoing witness to the substance of the adage that no water is holier than the sweat off of a man’s brow.
Even so, the wise and the knowledgeable held their breaths and hedged their bets. In 1901 the scholarly, Cmdr David George Hogarth [later — during the Great War — to become Director of the Arab Bureau in Cairo], characterized by eminent Arab writers like George Antonius as “one of the greatest authorities of his time on Arab history,” would take it upon himself to remark,
“For some centuries Palestine has been in the evil case of having to receive from time to time broken remnants of Hamad [SW Syrian] tribes worsted in desert warfare, who must perforce take up the uncongenial status of fellahin [settled peasants]. Such have no skill in agriculture and no heart [for it]. They impoverish the land and lightly abandon it to denudation and sand-drift; and it is largely due to them that Palestine, especially in the south of Judea, is the waste that it is.
“The Bedawin [Bedouin], born of the desert, becomes in turn its creator; and it remains yet to be seen whether the strangers [such as the] Jews [or — indeed, anybody else — ever]…will be able to reclaim permanantly for agriculture what has so long been exposed to the worst neglect of the nomads. For the moment great change has been wrought…and it is worth remark, that the Jewish immigration has largely restored its importance to Jerusalem.” [David G. Hogarth, The Nearer East (London, 1902), p. 264]
The chalutzim were composed of socially-minded, Russian & Eastern European Jews (seeking relief from Czarist oppression), as well as indigenous Palestinian Jews: some of whose ancestors had, in fact, never left the Holy Land and whose families had lived there continuously for thirty-five centuries, as well as — inescapably — Jewish dreamers from North Africa, from Central Asia, from Persia, from Asia Minor, from Mesopotamia, from the tip of the Arabian peninsula and other parts of the Arab universe — all hoping to build a better life in the land for which their forbears of every successive generation, without exception, had daily prayed ever since the Babylonian Captivity of 586 BC.
In the next installment [!] I’ll tell you about what kinds of things the chalutzim did.
@ dweller:
FIFY
Dweller, thanks for this overview which gave information I didn’t know. You are so knowledgeable. Are you a scholar? I remember in the early 1970s Jews I knew in Arizona were making big contributions and talking about the top soil that Israel was bringing in. I’m curious about the swamps. Where in Israel were they located? At this time were the Jews enhancing the land in Judea and Samaria?
The Jews have accomplished a miracle in Israel. Do you have any idea how many Arabs came from surrounding Muslim countries to find work after Israel became a state and how many descendents they would have today, who shouldn’t be part of the count of displaced Arabs, but of course, they are there.
I’m hearing right now on CNN about the Arab monarchy countries holding a meeting to promote the monarchy style of government, because the Arabs are spooked about the Arab Spring. One thing they could do is be nice to their people, help those in need and offer education to all. I think the Saudis have a lot of educated people but not enough jobs to go around. Welcome to the real world.
I think the EU wants to pressure for a state for Arab Palestinians, because they think they can dump supporting them. Israel, don’t fall for it. With Gaza as an example, this would give the radicals hope they are one step closer to destroying Israel. This would only mean more war. The EU should consider other options such as relocating them to Jordan, or maybe Syria when the troubles die down, because before all the conniving, Arabs considered themselves to be southern Syrians.
@ leonard white:
Yes.
Well, the desire for it anyway; it’s not quite correct to speak in terms of ‘rights’ where collectivities of persons are concerned (inasmuch as rights are, strictly speaking, the province of individuals, not groups).
No, not so; wrong, indeed, on a multiplicity of counts.
The land encountered by the khalutzim [Jewish pioneers] in the late 1800’s was occupied by Arabic-speaking PERSONS but not by any “people” — there was no existing Arab polity of any kind. The region was merely the southern portion of the Ottoman province of Syria.
What’s more, there weren’t even very many of those individual, Arabic-speaking persons either.
The territory was simply not hospitable to human (or even animal) habitation. Scarcely 10 percent of the land was even under cultivation (yes, you DID read that right, it’s no typo: one-tenth of the land was cultivated) — and the countryside was infested with the anopheles mosquito & the tse-tse fly: carriers of deadly malaria & yellow fever — the place was not safe for man OR beast.
And it would not become thus safe until the Zionists drained the swamps & wiped out those above-noted scourges — and planted the area with orange groves, etc.
— which, in turn ATTRACTED large numbers of Arabs seeking a better life from all over the Levant, the Maghreb, and the greater M-E.
But not only was there no such thing as ‘Palestinian Arab nationalism’ at the time the Jews were pioneering the Land
— but there was scarcely (if at all) at that point even such a thing as ARAB ‘nationalism’ generally (let alone, ‘Palestinian Arab nationalism). If there had been much of the latter, the Arabs would have supported far more significantly than they did the Allied effort to defeat the Turks in the Great War. (Actually there was overwhelmingly more Arab support for the Ottomans than for the Entente — and in the Palestine area specifically, Arab support was entirely for the Ottomans.)
To the degree that the Palestinian Arabs had ANY sense of nationalistic identification at all, it was not as ‘Palestinians’ (only the JEWS of the area so identified themselves) — but rather as “southern Syrians.”
In fact the original usage by the Arabs of the term “naqkba” referred NOT to the 1947-48 evacuation of the local ethnic Arabs from the Palestine area (when the Arab world tried unsuccessfully to strangle the newborn Jewish state in its cradle) — but rather to the 1920 dividing of Greater Syria into two Mandates:
— the French Mandate of Syria in the North (later to become the Republics of Syria & Lebanon)
and the British Mandate of Palestine in the South (earmarked for the Jewish state, but which became two states:
a larger one, consisting of an Arab colonial outpost of Britain — Jordan
and a much smaller one — Israel.
The ethnic Arabs of the Palestine region did not identify as ‘Palestinians.’
— Quite the contrary, they (the few locals with any sense of political cohesion or aspiration) were bitter over being separated from their northern Syrian brethren.
It was that separation which they originally regarded in 1920 as the Naqba.
No, Sir. Rather, the struggle to which you refer “underscores” the ease with which Westerners (such as, with all due respect, PresentCompany) can be induced to project their own histories on to areas which reflect an entirely different paradigm altogether.
@ leonard white:
I think you mean, “w-e-a-r it.”
In any case, however, it doesn’t fit.
Israel is nobody’s oppressor.
@ dweller:
The Paradox of Nationalism.
Jewish nationalism reflects a universal ideal, the right of a people to self-determination . However, fulfillment of this ideal involved the occupation and colonization of a territory already occupied by another people, the Palestinian Arabs, who where themselves seeking self-determination after centuries of oppressive Ottoman rule. This struggle underscores the problematic nature of nationalistic aspirations: the ideal of national self-determination that simultaneously entails the removal or military domonation of another people.
@ dweller:
Yesterday’s oppressed becomes todays oppressor in order not to become tomorrow’s oppressed. If the shoe fits where it.
1. Ein Volk,
2. Ein Reich,
3. Ein Fuhrer.
What has been is what shall be, and what has been done is what shall be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.
Kohelet [Ecclesiastes] 1:9
Was it the Ottoman Empire that brought the Golden Age of Muslim scholars to a close? Is it a coincidence that the Age of Muslim scholars ended in the 1500s, at the time the Ottomans got control over most of the Middle East? Was it the Ottoman Empire that forbade Muslims to study the Quran and Islam? Is the Ottoman Empire to blame for the majority of Muslims to be one hundred or two hundred years behind the times by virtually taking their intellects prisoner? Is this belief by some Muslim upper classes still prevalent? A Muslim from Pakistan told me he didn’t want the majority of Muslims to lift themselves out of poverty. He said Islam needed many poor people who would riot on command and go on jihads. The Muslim sitting out by his pool likely is not going to fall for the propaganda and lies their leaders and clerics force upon them.
Tyranical dictators usually thrive in Islamic religious countries. Saudi Arabia is an example. The Saudi royal family well supports the clerics while the clerics keep the people in line with a brand of Islam Mohammed would not recognize.
I haven’t studied this in depth, but on a history Channel program about Islam, it said the Ottoman Empire ran out of easy targets in the West. It then attacked other Muslim communities, killing them, taking their property and forcing them under its rule.
Muslims would be smart to choose secular rule with democratic elections so they won’t repeat this sorry history.
REMBERE EVERY BODY ISLAM WILL NOT STOP TILL THEY FULLFILL THIER DREAMS THATS TAKING AND CONVERTING THE WORLD WITH THIER CORRUPT RELIGION
Erdogan is very smooth. Compared to him, That’s the trouble with articles like this – they underestimate Erdogan. He’ll be travelling to France to meet with Hollande next week.
instead of
which replaced
Erdogan is getting with the times, and perhaps his actions should not be criticized, but seen as a harbinger of things to come, world-wide. Turkey is not the only state that discovered “nationhood” along language lines after Napoleon’s era (“Vive la France!”), and is now seeking a new, trans-national identity based on religion. Count the Soviet Union and China into the club, with their new religion of Atheism; and now, count in the whole “New World Order”.
What will the “One Religion” be, in the non-Islamic world? We can already see elements of it:
1. God — That’s easy. “I’m God, you’re God, we’re all God; we are One. We all think alike. We all speak PC talk and agree with one Party Line. We are many colors, and together we make white; we are the rainbow. That is our flag.”
2. The scriptures. “Do we follow ancient, obsolete scriptures? Nay, we move forever FORWARD into the realm of self-evident truth, as presented to us by the MSM.”
3. Morality. Legislated by the UN High Court. We are good; the Bible is bad; Jews are bad; Israel is bad; Christians are bad; Birthers are bad; Gay is good, etc.
That’s all baloney, you say? Yeah, but it’s POPULAR baloney!
Erdogan’s a perceptive fellow. Give him some credit.