Of all the blood libels that have been spun against the Jewish people for thousands of years, the invention of Palestinian refugees is the most sophisticated and dangerous, and one that could lead to the destruction of the Jewish state and a second Holocaust.
Even at a time when it seems the truth has little value, it’s worthwhile to check the facts. When did the illegal Arab immigrants—the “Palestinians”—invade the Land of Israel?
Journalist Samuel Clemens, best known by his pen name Mark Twain, toured the Land of Israel in 1869 and wrote about it for his readers. Among his reflections, published in the book Innocents Abroad, he wrote that when traveling from the Sea of Galilee to Mount Tabor, “We never saw a human being on the whole route.”
Of Jerusalem, he said, it is “mournful and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.” Summing up his visit, Twain wrote that the land “is desolate and unlovely.”
Research carried out by professor and demographer Mustafa Abbasi of Tel-Hai College found that in 1890, before the British Mandate was implemented, Jerusalem had an absolute Jewish majority with 25,000 Jewish residents, 9,000 Muslims and 8,000 Christians.
After they took over, the British authorities carried out repeated population surveys. According to a report submitted in 1937 by the Royal Palestine Commission, better known as the “Lord Peel Commission,” in just six years under British control, the Arab population in Haifa (where I reside) increased by 86%. In Jaffa, the population increased by 62%, and in Jerusalem, it increased by 37%.
Where did these masses of illegal Arab immigrants come from?
In minutes from the Permanent Committee of the League of Nations in June 1935, we find a partial answer to the origin of the “Palestinians.” It records an interview with Tewfik Bey El-Huriani, the governor of Hauran, a region in southern Syria, who said that “in the last few months, from 30,000 to 36,000 Hauranese had entered Palestine and settled there.”
The committee emphasized that these Hauranese had “actually settled” and were not just visiting. Just to get a perspective, the number of Arabs who illegally immigrated to the Land of Israel from just one area in just a few months exceeded immeasurably the number of Jews who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine during an entire year.
That wasn’t the world’s first inclination that the Arab population was rapidly and illegally coming to British Mandatory Palestine.
In 1930, British authorities were so disturbed by the increase in unemployment of unlawful Arab immigrants in Palestine that they appointed a royal commission headed by Sir John Hope Simpson to investigate the matter. In his report, Simpson wrote: “The chief immigration officer has brought to notice that illicit immigration through Syria and across the northern frontier of Palestine is material. … It may be a difficult matter to ensure against this illicit immigration, but steps to this end must be taken if the suggested policy is adopted, as also to prevent unemployment lists being swollen by immigrants from TransJordania.”
Did world leaders know, in real time, the facts about the massive illegal Arab immigration?
In the minutes of a British Parliament meeting in May 1939, Winston Churchill said: “So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population.”
In a letter to his secretary of state in May of 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote, “ … the Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period.”
But where did the hundreds of thousands of illegal Arab immigrants live? In a study by Professor Mahmoud Yazbek, he pointed out that the Arab immigrants to Haifa founded a neighborhood called the “Gaza neighborhood,” though many immigrants simply lived in makeshift shelters on city streets. In 1941, an epidemic broke out. The British evacuated these improvised huts, and so the Arabs rented caves in Wadi Rushmiya, near the city.
After the State of Israel was declared, many Arabs returned to their former countries, but instead of allowing them to reintegrate into society, the authorities in Jordan and Syria imprisoned them in refugee camps. To be clear, for political reasons, the Arab states imprisoned the “Palestinians” in refugee camps.
Today, the whole world knows that there are “Palestinian refugees.”
In a speech before Parliament in 1939, Churchill said accusations that the Jewish people in Mandatory Palestine were persecuting Arabs as an “agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by fascist propaganda.”
The Nazi and fascist ideologies are still in force today but have been rebranded as “progressive.” The nakba (“catastrophe” of the creation of modern-day Israel) bluff has become “fact” in many circles. Antisemitic and progressive elements invented a fictitious nation to promote the destruction of the Jewish state. The blood libel against the Jews and Israel won out.