Extras about Zionists Purchasing Israel, Not Stealing Palestine

Some additional points that did not fit my article today, "Not Stealing Palestine but Purchasing Israel":

1. The ultimate justification for the Jewish presence 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.
2. Israel's existence refutes Pascal Bruckner's generalization that "There is no state that is not founded on crime and coercion."
3. The Partition Plan passed by the U.N. General Assembly in November 1947 allocated 14,900 sq. km to the Jewish state. When Israel's war of independence ended in March 1949, it controlled an area 20,500 sq. km., an increase of 37 percent.
4. "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.
5. The anti-Zionist argument emphasizes that, at the time of the British withdrawal 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.
6. For specifics on who owned what, see Moshe Aumann, "Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880–1948," in Isi Leibler. The Case for Israel (Melbourne: Executive Council of Australian Jewry, 1972), Appendix 2, and this passage in particular:

   "In May 1948 the State of Israel was established in only part of the area allotted by the original League of Nations Mandate. 8.6 percent of the land was owned by Jews and 3.3 per cent by Israeli Arabs, while 16.9 per cent had been abandoned by Arab owners who imprudently heeded the call from neighbouring countries to "get out of the way" while the invading Arab armies made short shrift of Israel. The rest of the land—over 70 per cent—had been vested in the Mandatory Power, and accordingly reverted to the State of Israel as its legal heir."
   

7. For more on land ownership, note this quote from Abraham Granott, The Land System in Palestine: History and Structure (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1952), p. 278:

   "The total area of land in Jewish possession at the end of June 1947 amounted to 1,850,000 dunams, of this 181,100 dunams had been obtained through concessions from the Palestinian Government, and about 120,000 dunams had been acquired from Churches, from foreign companies, from the Government otherwise than by concessions, and so forth. It was estimated that 1,000,000 dunams and more, or 57 per cent, had been acquired from large Arab landowners, and if to this we add the lands acquired from the Government, Churches, and foreign companies, the percentage will amount to seventy-three. From the fellaheen there had been purchased about 500,000 dunams, or 27 per cent, of the total acquired. The result of Jewish land acquisitions, at least to a considerable part, was that properties which had been in the hands of large and medium owners were converted into holding of small peasants."

8. For the history of Jewish land purchases, see Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
9. The Dutch purchased Manhattan for 60 guilders in 1626.
10. Colonists and the United States government engaged in conquest against Indians; then, after the polity came into existence, Washington purchased substantial territories, including the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Florida (Adams-Onis Treaty) purchase of 1819, the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, the Alaska Purchase of 1867, the Philippines purchase of 1898, and Danish West Indies purchase of 1917 - but all these came well after the founding of the state on July 4, 1776. (In addition, the U.S. government offered Denmark $100 million for Greenland in 1946, but was turned down.)
    
11. Wikipedia has an interesting entry, "List of territory purchased by a sovereign nation from another sovereign nation," that puts the U.S. purchases into a larger context. Only two future countries were purchased, Singapore by the United Kingdom in 1824 and the above-mentioned Philippines purchase by the United States in 1898; obviously, neither were purchased by the inhabitants of those future countries.
12. The 1947 United Nations partition borders were drawn precisely to include within the Jewish area those lands that had been purchased; had the Palestinians and Arab states not responded to partition by trying to snuff out the "Zionist entity," Israel today would likely be a quite tiny state delineated by the land purchased during the Mandatory era.
13. Along with Hitler, the mufti was the chief unintended creator of the Zionist state. Had it not been for Husseini's ruthless, extremist, and vicious opposition to any Jewish presence in the Holy Land, modern Israel may not even exist today. Some Arabs realized this irony, such as the Arab League's American representative, Cecil Hourani, who noted in 1947 that "If a Jewish State is established in Palestine, [Zionists] will have to thank the Mufti."
14. No less ironically, the one Arab leader who did accept the Jewish presence in Palestine and even saw it benefiting the Arabs, King Abdullah of Transjordan, nearly choked the Zionist enterprise to death at birth. As Efraim Karsh observes, "Had Abdullah discarded his Palestine (and Greater Syria) ambitions and played a less prominent role in the Palestine conflict, the Arab states might well have contented themselves with political posturing and military support for the Palestinians."
15. By coincidence, the Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday, "What If Jews Had Followed the Palestinian Path?" by Warren Kozak 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?"

(June 21, 2011)

July 31, 2016 update: In the article to which this is an addition, I stated that Palestinians "are overwhelmingly the off-spring of invaders and immigrants seeking economic opportunities." My blog today looks at the authoritative Encyclopædia Britannica, 11^th edition, dating from 1910-11, to confirm this point and provide details on the many, many peoples who lived in the area known as Palestine.

July 18, 2020 update: Israelis continue to be accused of "stealing Palestinian land." Moshe Dann dispatches this calumny in an article today, "What is not 'private Palestinian land?'" He establishes that because most land on the West Bank "has not been registered, proving ownership is often difficult." It's a complex picture that again vindicates Israeli practices.

June 30, 2022 update: Mitchell Bard flips the "stolen" narrative on its head, suggesting that the BDS movement be directed instead at Jordan:

Isn't the minority tribal autocracy in Jordan akin to apartheid? Shouldn't human rights advocates focus their ire on the Hashemites, the true interlopers in Palestine, instead of the Jews who have lived in the land for millennia? Shouldn't the international community insist that Jordan be recognized as the Palestinian state and that Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank be given Jordanian citizenship?