Orson Hyde Quotes

It was signed by over 400 American notables—politicians and clergy, Christian and Jewish. Signers included the Mayors of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, congressmen and editors of most of the leading newspapers of the day. Blackstone’s Memorial predated the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl by 4 years and Blackstone, thought a Christian, was credited as being the “Father of Zionism” by many of the American Jewish Zionist leaders. See {614859}.

Mr. Brandeis was Louis D. Brandeis, first Jewish Supreme Court Justice and one of the leading Zionist world leaders. Theodor Herzel is generally credited with being the father of Zionism but his treatise was written in 1895. Four years earlier, Blackstone, a Methodist Evangelical Minister, had drafted what has come to be called the Blackstone Memorial, which was a petition to President Benjamin Harrison to have American foreign policy work to return the Jews to Palestine where they would have a state and government. The petition was signed by over 400 notables. Straus, Brandeis and other Jewish Zionists credited Blackstone even though history has almost forgotten him. See {614860} for quotes from the Blackstone Memorial.

There was a strong movement among the religious Christian Americans to go to the Holy Land to help the Jews reclaim the Kingdom God promised in the Bible. American missionaries went to the Middle East and even an early American President was enthusiastic about Jews reclaiming their kingdom. See {585141}.

This quotation documents the Jews making Jerusalem its capital. There are some in the Arab-Israeli dispute who claim that the Jews never inhabited Jerusalem, hence have no claim on it today. This quotation also establishes that there were other people in Jerusalem—the Jebusites—besides the Jews. This fact is denied by some claiming sole Jewish occupation of the city. In the Crusades, the Christians took Jerusalem and made it the capital of a Christian kingdom. There was a Christian King of Jerusalem. Then the Muslims took Jerusalem from the Christians. So all three major religions have a historical claim on Jerusalem—and all three established their claim by conquest.

There are two movements ongoing:

This is the first statement of a Jewish nation since Biblical Times.

The pre WWII Zionists who returned to the Holy Land brought with them, the education, culture, technology, and particularly the modern scientific methods of agriculture and irrigation. The Arabs lived the same way as they had done since 1100 when the Muslim world "closed" to new ideas and change. At that earlier time, the Arabs had the advanced agricultural techniques which Europeans copied throughout Spain and Italy. While advanced for 1100, Arab agriculture was backward by early 20th century standards. Arab farms could mostly just feed the land owning family and produced little surplus, and they wasted huge amounts of water in the process. The returning Jews assumed that the Arabs would welcome these new techniques as well as the public health, medicine, engineering and science. They thought that they were bringing great gifts to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land. However, even though the Jewish farms improved the quality of the produce and increased the productivity many times with much less water needed, for the most part, the Arabs would not depart from their traditions and religious dictates. One of the reasons Islam had been so successful in its inception was that it prescribed behavior in every phase of life, not just religious. But then it became very difficult to change. So the benefit that the Zionists thought that they were bringing back to the Middle East were not seen as benefits by the Arabs whose various cultures and countries have remained religiously and tradition bound even into the 21st century.

Wilson did so later: {585123}. Wilson was not the only early American President who had “Zionist” aspirations for Palestine. See John Adams quotation: {585141}.

There was a strong movement among the early religious Christian Americans to go to the Holy Land to reclaim the Kingdom God promised in the Bible. American missionaries went to the Middle East. See {585147} for another early American politicians view.

It was speeches like this which created a distrust of the Palestinian intentions when there were negotiations of land for peace. Worry that peace was just a pretext for war or takeover, inhibited many Israelis from wanting to give up anything unless they could get a more reliable partner. The Palestinians had a traditional fertility rate that was several times that of the Israelis.

His is one extremist view of Jerusalem. Most historians agree that both Jews and Arabs have lived in Jerusalem since recorded history. Extremists on both sides of the Arab Israeli debate have constructs which deny the existence of the other group. Sisalem is one. Both the Palestinians and Jews claim Jerusalem as their capital and both have reasonable historical claims, and both have shared the city for thousands of years.

The recommendation for partition was the basis of the decision of the United Nations in 1949 to partition Palestine.

The “Mandatory” was Great Britain who received the “Mandate” from the League of Nations to administer Palestine for the purposes set forth, and the methods specified, in this document. This together with {624531} are very important historically for two reasons. First, the San Remo Conference established the responsibility of the British for the Governance of Palestine. Second, it refutes an argument that some people make that the establishment of Israel by the United Nations in 1947 was a sudden act of guilt by the world over the Holocaust, thereby making the Muslim Arabs pay for the sins of the Christian Germans. What these quotations show is that the original mandate to the British by League of Nations, as early as 1920, envisioned the Jews as having a homeland in Palestine and provided specific methodologies and cautions regarding such an establishment. The world’s nations had decided the issue of the Jews in Palestine almost 20 years BEFORE the start of the Holocaust and more than 25 years earlier than the UN Resolution recognizing the nation of Palestine.

at the First World Zionist Congress, 1897

A terrorist organization

Olmert was speaking for a significant minority of Israelis who believe that God consecrated the land of Palestine to the Jewish People and all other peoples who controlled it did so by conquest. So their logic is for those who do not believe in the Bible and give no modern credence to God’s will, the Jews have no taken back the land by conquest which is the way the Palestinians and all of the many peoples had controlled that land. For believers, the Jews have the highest right; for non-believers, their right of conquest is no weaker than any of the others.

The “Mandatory” was Great Britain who received the “Mandate” from the League of Nations to administer Palestine for the purposes set forth, and the methods specified, in this document. This together with {590281} are very important historically for two reasons. First, the San Remo Conference established the responsibility of the British for the Governance of Palestine. Second, it refutes an argument that some people make that the establishment of Israel by the United Nations in 1947 was a sudden act of guilt by the world over the Holocaust, thereby making the Muslim Arabs pay for the sins of the Christian Germans. What these quotations show is that the original mandate to the British by League of Nations, as early as 1920, envisioned the Jews as having a homeland in Palestine and provided specific methodologies and cautions regarding such an establishment. The world’s nations had decided the issue of the Jews in Palestine almost 20 years BEFORE the start of the Holocaust and more than 25 years earlier than the UN Resolution recognizing the nation of Palestine.

He was very critical of the early Zionist movement which he felt was only concerned with resettling Jews in Palestine rather than turning Palestine into a culturally Jewish nation. On this issue, he was tragically correct.

Question of FDR who was explaining the Jewish Claims to Part of Palestine. That was a considered option but the Jews had no historical relationship to Germany in the sense that the did in the Middle East, Fir several hundred years all of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and much of the rest of the Middle East belonged to a Jewish Kingdom under a dynasty of Jewish Kings. Jews had lived in the Middle East for over 5000 years. However, the Jewish Kingdom fell to the Romans, and then hundreds of years later the area was under Muslim Rule, then it was controlled by the Christian crusaders, retaken by the Muslims, and then conquered by the Jews when 14 Arab Armies attacked the fledgling state of Israel. So all the contesting ethnic groups claiming the Middle East as their land, base that claim on their domination and rule of the area by conquest at different points of history. All have conquered the land from someone else and ruled it till they were conquered with the Jews being the latest conquerors. So Arabs and Jews both have claims and can object to the other’s behavior of taking the land by force.