The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land-Settlement and the Arabs 1878–1948

by Arieh Avneri

This study sheds new light on the historic background of the contemporary Palestinian problem. Avneri traces the spread of Jewish settlements over the seventy-year period before the establishment of the State of Israel, in order to see how it affected the existing Arab community's economy and social and cultural institutions. He demonstrates that there is no historical evidence for the eviction of the Palestinians from Israel previous to the founding of the state. Most of those who left afterwards did so on their own volition.

Genres: Jewish

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a result of painstaking and in depth research which exposes the lie of Islamic and far-left propagandists that the Arabs of the Holy Land were dispossessed of their land, by the Zionist movement, prior to the re-foundation of the State of Israel.
By comprehensive sourcing of the documentation available from between 1878 and 1948, Avneri proves that most of those Arabs that lived in Palestine in 1948, were descendants of migrants over the previous hundred years, from Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Turkey, the Caucuses, Persia, Bosnia and elsewhere.
He essentially reminds us of the roots of the conflict between Israel and the Arab world.
In the initial chapter he proves the massive Egyptian colonization of Palestine, during the 19th century, and how the Egyptians founded hundreds of settlements across the Holy Land. The Egyptians displaced a number of Druze, who had indeed been living in Palestine for centuries, unlike the Arabs. During the British mandate, a large number of migrants came to Palestine from the Hauran region of Syria. They were attracted by the development and employment by the Zionist enterprises, as well as being given incentives by the British, who reneged on their 1917 promise of a Jewish homeland in the ancient Land of Israel.
Avneri carefully details the population flow and ebb, and explains, through careful documentation, and calculation, how the massive increase in Moslem population during the last decades of Ottoman rule, and during the British mandate, could not have been the result of natural increase.
During the pogroms against Jews in the Holy Land, by the Arabs, in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936-1939, many mercenaries came to help spread terror against the Jewish returnees, especially from Lebanon and Syria.
A large part of the book describes how the land was bought with huge sums, by the Jews, from absentee Arab landlords and Arab tribes, but still the Jews did all they could to help the Arabs there farm the land, and contributed to health, education and development of the Arab populations.
The many transactions are carefully, and in detail, recorded by Avneri.
He speaks of the extreme idealism of the Jewish settlers, who turned desert and swamp into productive land, as it was in ancient times, before the Romans expelled the Jews from their homeland.
'The Jewish settler looked upon himself as coming to conquer the desert, and redeem the land from it's desolate state...He was going to turn the curse of the unoccupied land into a blessing" .With extreme fairness, even after they had bought the land, the Zionists strove to "enable the tenant farmer to settle on part of the land which will remain in their hands, adjacent to plots purchased by the Zionist agencies, and to give them, in addition to the land, sums of money, to develop intensive agriculture".

The author then go's on to describe the 1948 War of Independence and describes how hundreds of thousands of Arabs were commanded by their leaders to leave Palestine and did so, to make way for Arab armies to sweep in an annihilate the Jews.
"Jewish resistance to the threat of annihilation and the rout of several Arab armies turned the myth of Arab displacement, fostered by the Arab leaders, into tragic reality. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were uprooted from their homes, as the Palestinian irregulars retreated and the regular armies of the Arab states fled. Flight and exile were the bitter fruits of a war that the Arab leadership had initiated, and not the result of a calculated Zionist policy of displacement and uprooting."
He also proves how many of the Arab refugees were in fact returning to their old villages of the Arab countries they had come from, after having only a lived in the Land of Israel, for a few years.
Avneri also details the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who fled from Arab lands, after the pogroms initiated against defenseless Jewish communities across the Arab world, in revenge for the refoundation of the State of Israel.
As the author concludes, Zionism as a movement for the renaissance and liberation of the Jewish people sought to achieve it's goal by constructive deeds. As a matter of last resort the Jews took to arms to defend their very lives..."
As regards those who dispute the findings of the book, they are underpinned by very carefully researched evidence, that are available in the footnotes.
Anyone who actually studies the evidence will not be able to fault Avneri's foundings.
This book was written in Hebrew, four years before Joan Peter's From Time Immemorial.
Both books are vital to understand the real facts and events behind the Arab-Israeli conflict.

[Neil]

This work tries to dispel some of the leftist myths of the Jewish migration to present-day Israel: that Jews forcefully evicted Palestinian Arabs from their land, that Jews always had a goal of a national state in mind that would displace the Arabs, that the refugees were forced off of their land. As far as the first claim is concerned, Avneri does a beyond thorough job of citing almost every instance of land purchase by Jewish immigrants from Arabs. The preponderance of evidence shows that Jews did not steal the land, or "evict" the Arabs, as one Palestinian advocate recently said, but they purchased the land fairly and legally. In fact, some of the Arab landowners who sold them the land had no consideration for the plight of the tenant farmers attached to the land, but the Jews were willing to go beyond what was required by compensating the fellaheen with adjacent land grants or with cash compensation.
As far as the "refugee problem" is concerned, I have more reading to do... But Avneri makes the case that many Arabs simply fled during wartime or were evacuated by the incoming Israeli forces. Many left willingly at the outbreak of war, (started by the Arabs, by the way) anticipating the danger. There's obviously more to it, but it begs the question- should Israel be responsible for the refugees from a war they fought defensively? Some of these refugees had been rehabilitated and brought back home, as Avneri points out. Still, the jury's out on what to do with the refugees from a people that would still be hostile to Israelis even after an armistice was signed.