Does Israel Exist on Stolen Land?

By R.W. Napper

A Gentleman from Tennessee

Since the horrible events of October 7 and the subsequent Israeli attack on Hamas in Gaza, there have been worldwide pro-Palestinian protests. Such protests have occurred in major American cities as well as on college campuses. Observing these demonstrations, protesters are seen holding signs and banners displaying their belief that the founding of Israel displaced the Arab residents of Palestine. It is believed that with the founding of modern Israel in 19418, the land known as Palestine was forcibly taken from the indigenous Arab inhabitants–known as Palestinians–and given to Jews; thus, Israel and its Jewish population exist on stolen land. This belief is reflected in the signs and banners unfurled at the pro-Palestinian protests: “Free Palestine,” “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” and “Stolen Land.”

Are the protesters accurate in their belief? Does the state of Israel exist on stolen land? Were the Palestinians forced from their homes and lands to become a displaced people? Were the Palestinians a population indigenous to the area known as Palestine? These are fundamental questions that must be accurately answered.

In approximately 1500 B.C., the twelve Israelite tribes migrated into Canaan (Palestine today). The Israelites successfully conquered the area and inhabited Canaan as a confederation of twelve tribes. In approximately 1000 B.C., the tribes chose a king to unite them; thus, the ancient state of Israel was born. Following the reign of Israel’s third king, Solomon, the Israelite nation was torn by civil war. The ten northern kingdoms broke away and founded a separate kingdom. It was called the Kingdom of Israel with its capital at Samaria. The two southern tribes remained loyal the Solomon’s descendants and became known as the Kingdom of Judah with its capital at Jerusalem. In 722 B.C., the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians from the city of Nineveh in northern Iraq. The Assyrians exiled the ten tribes to parts unknown, and they became known to history as “the ten lost tribes.” It is important to note that the Assyrians replaced the exiled people with other conquered people, most Arabs, into the area that had been the Kingdom of Israel. In 608 B.C., King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon conquered the southern kingdom, Judah, and exiled large numbers of Jews to various parts of the Babylonian Empire. After seventy years in exile, the Persian conqueror, Cyrus the Great, allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and to rebuild Jerusalem and its temple of worship. In approximately 325 B.C., the Greeks led by Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire taking control of Palestine. Greek kings ruled the area until 63 B.C. when the Roman general, Pompey, conquered the area taking control of Jerusalem. The Jewish homeland found itself ruled by Romans for several centuries.

The Romans found that the Jews were a difficult people to rule. Several Jewish revolts occurred during the Roman occupation. In 70 A.D., the Romans responded to a Jewish uprising by surrounding Jerusalem with a Roman army under the command of Titus, a future emperor. The Romans had lost all patience with Jews and put Jerusalem under siege. According to Josephus, a first century Jewish-Roman historian, approximately 100,000 Jews were captured, enslaved, and exiled to various parts of the Roman Empire. These Jewish slaves and those fortunate enough to escape the Romans provided the basis for numerous Jewish communities that developed in Europe as well as in Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Iran, and many other areas. It is important to note the dispersion of the Jews did not end with Titus. The Diaspora, as the Roman dispersion of the Jews is called, was achieved over several years culminating with the Bar Kochba Revolt in 132-135 A.D. Following the crushing of this Jewish revolt, the Romans under Emperor Hadrian engaged in mass execution, enslavement, and dispersion. Large numbers of Jewish towns were destroyed, depopulated, and repopulated by Arabs and other non-Jews. Beginning with Hadrian and continuing through the reigns of succeeding emperors, it was the policy of Rome to destroy the Jewish nation and prevent it from reconstituting. It was the Romans who called the area Palestine. Continuing to encourage non-Jews to settle the land, the Romans were intent upon permanently severing the Jews from Palestine.

Although brutal and greatly efficient, the Romans were not able to extract all Jews from Jerusalem and Palestine. It is documented that at least 43 Jewish communities remained in Palestine; however, Roman policy effectively turned the Jews of the Diaspora into a permanently exiled people with no national homeland.

For the next 1900 years or so, the Jewish homeland was under the control of a succession of foreign powers. Following the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, the Roman Empire in the east centered on Constantinople survived as the Byzantine Empire. It ruled Palestine until the rise of Mohammad and the Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. The Arabs establish several Islamic caliphates in the Middle East. In the 900’s, these caliphates were conquered by the Turks, Mongol invaders who had converted to Islam. It was the Turks of the Seljuk dynasty that wrested control of Palestine from the Byzantines. In 1453, the succeeding Turkish dynasty, the Ottomans, captured Constantinople and brought the Byzantine Empire to an end. The Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine for the next 400-plus years.

Unfortunately for the Ottoman Empire, it allied with Germany in World War I (1914-1918). With its defeat in World War I, the victorious European powers broke the empire, bringing it to an end. Palestine was put under the control of Great Britain and was referred to as the British Mandate. The Jewish homeland including Jerusalem was administered by the British until 1948.

Zionism, the Jewish national movement, had as it goal the establishment of a Jewish national state in Palestine. The movement began in 1878 and was triggered by the persecution of Jews in Russia and some Western countries. From 1882 until 1948, approximately 500,000 acres was purchased, and 315 Jewish settlements were established in Palestine. A small portion of the land was purchased by Jewish individuals from small Arab landowners. Most of the land was purchased by Zionist organizations bent upon establishing a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. Among those organizations was the World Zionist Organization, the Palestine Colonization Association, the Jewish National Trust, and others. Land in Palestine was sold to these organizations by individual Arab farmers who had debts to satisfy (only about 9.8% of land). Most of the land was sold by wealthy absentee landlords who were Arabs living in Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, and Jaffa. A Greek banking family, the Sursocks, acquired 90,000 acres from the Ottoman Empire in 1872. Over the next several decades, the Sursocks sold that land to various Jewish interests.

Each purchase of land was followed by a wave of Jewish migration into Palestine. The Zionist Movement encouraged Jews to “make Aliyah”–migrate and settle in Palestine, the ancient Jewish homeland. The First Aliyah occurred in the 1880’s. This migration was mainly composed of Jews escaping anti-Semitism in Russia as well as Jews from Yemen and the Arab peninsula. The new settlers moved onto land that been purchased, and they established several towns. Just prior to World War I, the Second Aliyah was almost exclusively made up of Jews fleeing Russia.

The Zionist Movement was particularly strong in Great Britain as evidenced by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The declaration was a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the Jewish community in Britain. The letter was transmitted to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The letter stated in part: “His Majesty’s government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that object.” Following World War I, the Balfour Declaration was made a part of the British Mandate and was accepted by the League of Nations in 1922.

Encouraged by the Balfour Declaration and its acceptance by the League of Nation, another wave of Jewish settlement occurred in Palestine. This Third Aliyah was composed almost exclusively of Russian Jews. The Fourth Aliyah, occurring between 1924 and 1929, was made up of Jews seeking to escape anti-Semitism in Poland and Hungary. Many of these immigrants were middle class families and professional people who established businesses and created a more diverse economy in Palestine. The Fifth Aliyah coincided with the rise of Nazism in Germany and anti-Semitic nationalism in Eastern Europe. Between 1929 and 1936 approximately 250,000 Jews entered mandated Palestine. These immigrants included doctors, lawyers, artists, and other professionals.

Many Arabs in Palestine accepted Jewish immigration and were willing to sell land for Jewish settlement; however, a large segment of the Arab community became increasingly angry over Jewish immigration. Increasing violence in Palestine between Arabs and Jews led the British government to set restrictions on Jewish immigration into the Mandate. The British also attempted to halt land sales; however, there seemed to be an unending number of Arab landowners who were willing to circumvent land sale restrictions and sell their land to Jewish organizations. Immigration, though slowed, continued.

The holocaust, the killing of approximately 6 million European Jews by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, had a major impact upon the decision to create a modern state of Israel following World War II. On November 29, 1947, The General Assembly of the newly created United Nations voted 33-10 with 10 abstentions to adopt a plan that would partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with Britain relinquishing its mandate. The British government announced that it would withdraw from the Palestine Mandate at midnight on May 14, 1948. On that date, a meeting occurred of the Jewish National Council in a small art museum on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. The leader of the council was David Ben-Gurion. At approximately 4 p.m., he rose to speak. In a speech of some 20 minutes, he addressed an audience of approximately 200 people. During the speech, Ben-Gurion read the following proclamation: “By virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people and by resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby proclaim the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine to be called Israel.” Moments later, he added, “The state of Israel has arisen. This meeting has ended.”

The United Nations plan of partition, a two-state solution, was not accepted by the Arab League, the organization that had formed in 1945. The U.N. partition plan of 1947 was rejected by the Arab League on the grounds that the Jews had no right to Palestinian land; therefore, the proposed Arab state in Palestine did not come into being.

The Arabs responded to the establishment of Israel with war. On May 15, 1948, the day after the proclamation, Israel was invaded by armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. On that day, Egyptian warplanes bombed Tel Aviv. The Israeli forces, hastily armed by France, proved superior to the Arab forces and inflicted heavy losses on the invaders. An armistice was negotiated in 1949 which resulted in more land being added to Israel including one-half the city of Jerusalem. In the plan rejected by the Arab League, Jerusalem had been reserved for the proposed Arab state. The land gained by the 1949 negotiations was the first part of Palestine that had not been gained by the willing sale of land by Arabs to Jews.

Several other conflicts took place precipitated by attacks on Israel by its Arab neighbors. Each attack ended with Israel receiving more land through negotiation. The very quick victory by Israel in the Six Day War in 1967 resulted in the entire city of Jerusalem being incorporated into Israel along with the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. Later wars ended with more land being added to Israel.

In conclusion, two factors are true. Israel was not founded upon stolen land. From the 1880’s until 1948, Arabs were more than willing to sell land to Jewish entities. The Arabs, now referred to as Palestinians, could have prevented the establishment of Israel by simply refusing to sell land. The expansion of Israel could have been prevented by Arabs not making war on the Jewish state.

Secondly, it is unfortunate that many Arab families were uprooted from the land; however, these were people who lived and worked the land as tenants. They rented from Arab landlords who sold the land. The new Jewish owners displaced the tenants in order to have full use of the land that they had purchased.

Most people in the throngs of pro-Hamas demonstrators in American cities and on college campuses are acting out of ignorance. They have little knowledge of the history of Palestine and are too academically lazy to research it. Others know the facts, but they are attempting to reverse history by using false propaganda like “stolen land,”

One more thing is true. The actions of the pro-Hamas demonstrators should awaken patriotic Americans to the fact that people have immigrated into the United States who do not share American values or respect American culture. They are bent upon fundamentally changing America. The anti-American and anti-Semitic immigration into our nation should stop. It must stop.

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The next article will appear on this blog site on August 30, 2024. It will be titled: What is the Real Cause of the Ukranian War?

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R.W. Napper is a life-long resident of Nashville, Tennessee. He is a graduate of North Nashville High School and Middle Tennessee State University. He holds a Master’s Degree in History. He is a retired educator having taught History for 39 years on the high school and college levels. He is the author of Trustworthy and True: The Unfolding of Biblical Prophecy Upon the Pages of History (non-fiction, 2016) and Kalb Hollow: A Nashville Story (fiction, 2023).

This article and those that will follow will reflect his interest in history, government, economics, and current events.