THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XIII, Issue # 160, June 21, 2011
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
BUILDING THE STATE OF ISRAEL: THE MOST PEACEABLE
IN-MIGRATION & STATE CREATION IN HISTORY
THE FULL STORY
By Dr. Daniel Pipes
ISRAELIS SHOULD HOLD THEIR HEADS HIGH & POINT OUT THAT THE BUILDING OF THEIR COUNTRY WAS
BASED ON THE LEAST VIOLENT & MOST CIVILIZED MOVEMENT OF ANY PEOPLE IN HISTORY. GANGS DID
NOT STEAL PALESTINE; MERCHANTS PURCHASED ISRAEL.
Not Stealing Palestine, But Purchasing Israel
Zionists stole Palestinian land: that's the mantra both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas teach their children and
propagate in their media. This claim has vast importance, as Palestinian Media Watch explains: "Presenting the
creation of the [Israeli] state as an act of theft and its continued existence as a historical injustice serves as the basis
for the PA's non-recognition of Israel's right to exist." The accusation of theft also undermines Israel's position
internationally.
But is this accusation true?
No, it is not. Ironically, the building of Israel represents about the most peaceable in-migration and state creation in
history. To understand why requires seeing Zionism in context. Simply put, conquest is the historic norm;
governments everywhere were established through invasion, nearly all states came into being at someone else's
expense. No one is permanently in charge, everyone's roots trace back to somewhere else.
Germanic tribes, Central Asian hordes, Russian tsars, and Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors remade the map.
Modern Greeks have only a tenuous connection to the Greeks of antiquity. Who can count the number of times
Belgium was overrun? The United States of America came into existence by defeating "Native Americans," or
"Amerindians." Kings marauded in Africa, Aryans invaded India. In Japan, Yamato-speakers eliminated all but tiny
groups such as the Ainu.
The Middle East, due to its centrality and geography, has experienced more than its share of invasions, including the
Greek, Roman, Arabian, Crusader, Seljuk, Timurid, Mongolian, and modern European invasions. Within the region,
dynastic froth caused the same territory – Egypt for example – to be conquered and re-conquered.
Many wars over Jerusalem: Emperor Titus celebrated his victory over the Jews in 70 A.D. with an arch showing
Roman soldiers carrying off a menorah from the Temple Mount.
The land that now makes up Israel was no exception. In Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern
Israel, Eric H. Cline writes of Jerusalem: "No other city has been more bitterly fought over throughout its history."
He backs up that claim, counting "at least 118 separate conflicts in and for Jerusalem during the past four millennia."
He calculates Jerusalem to have been destroyed completely at least twice, besieged 23 times, captured 44 times, and
attacked 52 times. The Palestinian Authority fantasizes that today's Palestinians are descended from a tribe of ancient
Canaan, the Jebusites; but, in actual fact, the contemporary Palestinians are overwhelmingly the off-spring of
invaders and immigrants seeking economic opportunities.
Against this tableau of unceasing conquest, violence and overthrow, Zionist efforts to build a presence in the Holy
Land until 1948 stand out as astonishingly mild, as mercantile rather than military. Two great empires, the Ottomans
and the British, ruled Eretz Yisrael; in contrast, Zionists lacked military power. They could not possibly achieve
statehood through conquest.
Instead, they purchased land. Acquiring property dunam by dunam, farm by farm, house by house, lay at the heart of
the Zionist enterprise until 1948. The Jewish National Fund, founded in 1901 to buy land in Palestine "to assist in the
foundation of a new community of free Jews engaged in active and peaceable industry," was the key institution – and
not the Haganah, the clandestine defense organization founded in 1920.
Zionists also focused on the rehabilitation of what was barren and considered unusable. They not only made the
desert bloom, but drained swamps, cleared water channels, reclaimed wasteland, forested bare hills, cleared rocks, and
removed salt from the soil. Jewish reclamation and sanitation work precipitously reduced the number of disease-related
deaths.
Only when the British mandatory power gave up on Palestine in 1948, followed immediately by an all-out attempt by
Arab states to crush and expel the Zionists, did the latter take up the sword in self defense and go on to win land
through military conquest. Even then, as the historian Efraim Karsh demonstrates in Palestine Betrayed, most
Arabs fled their lands; exceedingly few were forced off.
This history contradicts the Palestinian account that "Zionist gangs stole Palestine and expelled its people," which led
to a catastrophe "unprecedented in history" (according to a PA 12th.-grade textbook) or that Zionists "plundered the
Palestinian land and national interests, and established their state upon the ruins of the Palestinian Arab people"
(writes a columnist in the PA's daily). International organizations, newspaper editorials, and faculty petitions reiterate
this falsehood worldwide.
Israelis should hold their heads high and point out that the building of their country was based on the least violent and
most civilized movement of any people in history. Gangs did not steal Palestine; merchants purchased Israel.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
More About Zionists Purchasing Israel, Not Stealing Palestine:
Additional Points
The ultimate justification for the Jewish presence in the Middle East is, of course, the ancient tie and the love of Zion,
not modern land purchases; but these purchases reinforce the legitimacy of the in-migration.
"Palestine" today represents the country that would rise out of Israel's elimination; but, in the decades before the
creation of Israel in 1948, the term represented Zionist aspirations.
The anti-Zionist argument emphasizes that, at the time of the British withdrawal from the Palestine Mandate in 1948,
Jews owned only 6 to 10 percent of the territory's land area. True, but when one discounts uncultivated and public
land, the percentage becomes very much higher.
The United States government engaged in war against and conquest of Amerindians, but it too purchased substantial
portions of its patrimony, especially the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Alaska Purchase of 1867.
By coincidence, the Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday, "What If Jews Had Followed the
Palestinian Path?" by Warren Kozak, an article that makes a parallel point to my own:
"It is doubtful that there has ever been a more
miserable human refuse than Jewish survivors
after World War II.... Yet within a very brief
time, this epic calamity disappeared, so much
so that few people today even remember the
period. How did this happen in an era when
Palestinian refugees have continued to be
stateless for generations?"
© Daniel Pipes 2011
Originally Published in National Review Online, June 21, 2011
Republished with the Permission of Daniel Pipes
Reprinted from the Daniel Pipes Mailing List, June 21, 2011
URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/9931/palestine-israel-stealing-purchasing
URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2011/06/zionists-purchasing-israel
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Israel & the Arabs -- The Israeli-Arab Conflict
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Islamism & Jihadism -- Radical Islam & Islamic Terrorism
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Daniel Pipes, a Ph.D. in Islamic History (Harvard University, 1978), is Founder and President of the Middle East Forum,
Publisher of Middle East Quarterly,
Founder of Campus Watch, Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, a
signatory of the Project for the New American Century, a former board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a former
adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Golden Circle supporter of the U.S. Committee for a Free
Lebanon, a former member of the U.S. Department of Defense Special Task Force on Terrorism and Technology, and a
former lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Pennsylvania. Dr. Pipes was the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1986 to 1993.
Author or co-author of eighteen books, Dr. Pipes is a regular columnist for National Review Online, Front Page
Magazine, the New York Sun, and the Jerusalem Post. His analyses of world trends and of forces and
developments in the Middle East have appeared in numerous North American newspapers, including the Washington
Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears on American network
television, as well as at universities and think tanks, to discuss the Middle East, Islam, and the Islamist threat to the
U.S.A. and the West. He also has appeared on BBC and Al Jazeera, and has lectured in approximately
twenty-five countries.
Dr. Pipes is a Polish-American Jew whose parents fled Poland in 1939, immigrated to the U.S.A., and assimilated well into
American society and culture. His father is Richard Pipes, an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history
and serving as Professor of History at Harvard University from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. During the Cold War, the
worldview of Richard Pipes was strongly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
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