William Eugene Blackstone Quotes

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.

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

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.

There are two movements ongoing:

This Mormon prayer turned out to foresage one of the most fascinating set of events in world history. In 1841, an American Mormon leader and prophet journeyed all the way to Jerusalem to consecrate Palestine for the Jewish people. His prayer predicted the creation of the state of Israel with a Jewish government and its capital in Jerusalem. He stated that David, a descendent from the biblical Jewish King David will be its first ruler. Over 100 years later the state of Israel came into being and its first prime minister was Jewish David Ben-Gurion. This regathering of the Jews in Israel had been prophesized in the Bible, but this seems to be the first modern action taken to make it happen. This was more than 20 years before the first Jewish writing appeared advocating the Jewish return to Palestine--Moses Hess's 1862 work, Rome & Jerusalem; The Last National Question. It was over 50 years before Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, even published his first work on the subject.

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.

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.

To make matters worse for the Muslims, the tiny foreign entity in their midst—populated by "heathens who do not follow the command of God"—have created a much higher standard of living for their people, improved the land and its productivity in ways that have been far superior to traditional Islamic methods, reclaimed much of the desert that the Muslims could not, and produced a military that has staved off the hostilities of all of Islam, and has done all this without any oil or other natural resources to sell. Israel is a living counter-example to the superiority of Islam and its traditions which is so important to Muslims.

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.

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}.

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

at the First World Zionist Congress, 1897

This quotation has great historical significance for its logic and perception as much as for its content, The Jewish population that the British admitted plus those already in Israel was a small fraction of the Arab population then and a tiny proportion of the Jews and Arabs now inhabiting Israel with a very high standard of living. This included over 1 million Russian Jewish immigrants, The perception of the capacity of land to support a population has always been underestimated, The Arabs simply extrapolated assuming no modernization, no technology, and every family having a small farm. Given Arab traditional perceptions of societal development, modern Israel could not possibly function, much less thrive as it does. This is one of the reasons that the Arab nations have been so reluctant to absorb more Palestinian Arab refugees. A backward view of society and assumption that the Arab status quo was then the optimum society prohibited the Arabs from modern developmental possibilities.

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.

Shlomo ben Yitzchak

There were Arabs living in Palestine since Roman times. However, there was no concept of Palestinians as a separate people from Jordanians or other Arabs in the Middle East. There had never been a Palestinian government separate from the other Arabs in the region and separate from the Kingdom of Jordan. At the birth of Israel, all the Arab Armies of the region attacked the new state, which managed to defend itself but in the process the Arab governments had told the Arabs of Israel to leave the Area so their Armies would be able to attack all others. After the Arab victory, they could return and could have their land and the Jewish land. The victory never happened and the Arabs who left have been refugees outside of Israel and describe themselves as “Palestinians” which have had a quasi government in the PLO. The Palestinians who stayed in Israel became full citizens of the Jewish State. Other Palestinian refugees left the area and emigrated throughout the Middle East and elsewhere.

Because of the classic historical anti-Semitism and discrimination, Jews were barred from land ownership and as a result few were farmers or had agricultural experience in their families. They were tradesmen, artisans, professionals in Europe. So amongst Jews and non Jews alike the notion of Jews settling the land of Palestine and farming it or trapping, the way the Boers had in South Africa or the French in Canada, was not a very credible image. The Zionists, realizing this potential weakness, placed strong emphasis on agriculture, developed the agricultural kibbutz concept and encouraged Jews to become farmers. The effort was so successful that almost all the leading early Zionist immigrants to Palestine became farmers. When independence came to Israel, the Jewish agriculture was more productive than most of that in Europe and almost on a par with small farms in the United States. The Israelis were known for “making the desert bloom.