the 1980s in the territories was followed by an intifada (“uprising” in Arabic) in 1990, so the advances fostered by Jewish settlers brought the siege of riots and pillaging that came to be known as the “Arab Awakening” of 1936 and 1937. As widely reported by Lowdermilk and others on the scene, and affirmed by Winston Churchill, during the previous decade, “Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were very active in fomenting Arab discontents.”
“I often thought,” wrote Lowdermilk, “of what would happen to the Jews of Palestine and to the country as a whole if Jewish immigration were effectively stopped and the land placed under full Arab control as envisaged in somewhat nebulous form by the British White Paper of May, 1939.” The answer had already been given in 1937, by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the most notable Palestinian leader, who soon enlisted in Hitler’s cause and spent the war at his headquarters in Berlin. “All Jewish immigration should be prohibited,” the Mufti said, “since the country could not even absorb the Jews who were already there.” They would have to be removed by a process “kindly or painful as the case might be.”
Lowdermilk made a prescient prediction based on the precedent of Iraq. When the British relinquished their mandate there, the Iraqi leaders vowed to protect the Assyrians, which was the Christian minority in the country. “Instead, the Assyrian Christians were slaughtered by Arabs of the Mufti’s ilk who did not wish to ‘assimilate or digest them.’”
Lowdermilk foresaw that “Arab rule in Palestine would… put an abrupt end to the reclamation work now being carried on so splendidly. Erosion would begin to have its way again in the fields. Peasant women in search of fuel and goats in search of pasture would make short work of the young forests.”
Any end of Jewish immigration and settlement would mean a rapid end of Arab immigration and prosperity. Under Arab rule, Palestine had always been a somnolent desert land that could have sustained no authentic twentieth-century Arab awakening. Palestine without Jews is a not a nation but a
CHAPTER FOUR
After World War II, when the surviving Jews of Europe fled to Palestine and what became the state of Israel, there was still no self-conscious Palestinian nation, no Arab industrial base, and virtually no exports other than oil. The Jews were not occupying a nation; they were building one.
Many people imagine that this new and larger influx of Jewish settlers after World War II perpetrated an injustice on the Arabs. But these Jews continued the heroic and ingenious pattern of development depicted in 1939 by Lowdermilk and imparted the same massive benefits to the Palestinian Arabs.
With the Arab population growing apace with the Jewish population in most neighborhoods, and, indeed, even faster in some, no significant displacement could possibly have occurred. The numbers discredit as simply mythological or mendacious all the literature of Palestinian grievance and eviction invented by the likes of Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Rashid Khalidi and scores of other divas of the
By 1948, the Arab population in the Mandate area had grown to some 1.35 million, up 6 0 percent since the 1930s, and up by a factor of seven since the arrival of the first creative cohort of Jews from Russia and what was then The Ukraine in the 1880s. Mostly concentrated in neighborhoods abutting the Zionist settlements, this Arab population was the largest in the history of Palestine. Only invasion by five Arab armies — and a desperate, courageous Israeli self-defense — drove out many of the Arabs, some 700,000. These Palestinian Arabs were chiefly evicted or urged to flee by their own Arab leaders in 1948 in a war that the Jews neither sought nor initiated. But the war’s outcome inflicted no demographically perceptible hardship on the Palestinian Arabs. The creation of the state of Israel and the success of its thriving economy only served to accelerate Arab immigration into the area. Today Israel, Gaza and the West Bank accommodate some 5.5 million Arabs, with a population density ten times that of Jordan.
After 1948, the history of Palestinian Arabs may be divided into three periods, each roughly two decades long: the postwar period from Israel’s founding through the war in 1967 when Gaza and Sinai were under Egyptian rule and the West Bank was ruled by Jordan; the period of Israeli administration of these territories between 1967 and 1990; and the recent era of the so-called “peace process” led by international organizations and the U.S. The statistical details remain cloudy and have provoked scores of academic brawls and millipedes of footnotes. But the historic dynamics of population, economic growth, and foreign aid are a matter not of statistical minuti? but of orders of magnitude. The rough orders of magnitude, as exemplified the growth of the Arab population and its longevity, tell a story stunningly contrary to that purveyed through the conventional wisdom.
The only real Palestinian
Like most welfare states, the UNRWA was formed less to provide for the good of its beneficiaries than to assuage the guilt of its creators. In a desire to compensate the Palestinians for their alleged victimization by the creation of the State of Israel, the international bureaucracies perpetrated and created a genuine and permanent victimization. Masked by a roughly $4 billion annual flood of outside aid to the Palestinian Arabs, the UN work of worldly charity has wreaked six decades of moral havoc.
The UNRWA effectively granted its benefactions only on the condition that the Palestinians never relinquish their dream of the complete destruction of the state of Israel. Otherwise, these generations of putative Palestinians could hardly qualify as “refugees.” Sixty years later, the UNRWA continues to underwrite and encourage murder, irredentism, terrorism, fecklessness and futility among the 1.4 million hapless souls who live in its 59 camps.
Financed by the U.S. and the European Union, as Michael S. Bernstam of Stanford’s Hoover Institution explained in
The UNRWA perpetuates the notion of a “right of return” to the land. Yet this land scarcely counted as a desirable asset or a prize to be awarded to anyone before the Jews reclaimed it and made its economy valuable and its land capable of supporting life. The refugees’ forbears in many cases were more recent immigrants to Palestine than were the Jewish settlers.
“This is not the right of return,” writes Bernstam, “it is a claim of the
A typical harvest of misconceived foreign aid, this tragic error is at the heart of the Palestinian imbroglio and extends the Palestinian grievance beyond Gaza and the West Bank into countries such as Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon that also host Palestinian camps.
The invidious ideology of Palestinian victimization by Israel, still guides the policies toward Israel in the majority of Western nations and in international organizations, blinding nearly all observers to the actual facts of economic life in the region. No one reading the literature could have any idea that throughout the three roughly 20- year economic eras following 1948, the Palestinians continued to benefit heavily from Israeli enterprise and prospered mightily compared to Arabs in other countries in the region. The indispensable cause and precursor of Arab enrichment and population growth were always the enabling successes of Israeli settlers. Before the settlers, there was no growth and little Arab immigration to Palestine.
The true test of a culture is what it accomplishes in advancing the human cause — what it creates rather than what it claims. The late economist Lord Peter Bauer devoted much of his distinguished career to the study of the corrosive effects of foreign aid. What might be termed a “Bauer syndrome” prevailed nearly everywhere that
