Palestinian land: Bought or seized
THE propaganda we have heard from the West throughout our life was that the Palestinians sold their lands to the Jews themselves.
And this propaganda was spread so intensely that all the people of the West and the East started admitting this lie to be true.
One of the reasons for this is that Muslims have never paid attention to the media.
In fact, the answer can be found in the pages of history.
In fact, with a little research, the world can be convinced that the Palestinians did not sell their lands but were forcibly taken from them.
Dr. Talat Afza has drawn our attention to this important point during a Webinar arranged by the DHA Suffa University.
After a little research, I successfully gathered historical-based evidence to prove that the lands were seized.
An article by Muhammad Saleh is of great importance in this regard who is the former head of Department of History and Civilization at the International Islamic University Malaysia.
He explained with a solid evidence that how the British played the key role in creating the Zionist State.
He explained in quite detail that the Zionist propaganda has been founded on the idea of “a land without a people for a people without a land “ since the 18th Century, assuming that there are no people in Palestine and that Jews who do not own property have the right to claim it.
Palestinian intellectuals and delegates to the Ottoman government, as well as Palestinian newspapers, warned of the dangers of Zionist Jewish settlement and requested stringent action to combat them.
Sheikh Muhammad Tahir al-Hussaini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, led a local group with governmental powers to examine property transfer requests at the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem’s Office in 1897, thus preventing the transfer of many lands to the Jews.
The Jews had acquired around 420 thousand dunams (or 1.5 %) of Palestine’s land by the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.
These acquisitions accounted for 93% of the land obtained by the Jews. In any event, due to the modest scale of the Jewish settlement and population at the time, the people of Palestine did not believe the Zionist threat to be significant, and the development of a Zionist entity under a Muslim state (the Ottoman Empire) was practically impossible.
When Britain occupied Palestine from 1917 to 1948, it was evident that it intended to carry out the Zionist dream and build a national home for the Palestinian Jews. It used brutal force to establish the Jewish State.
During the British occupation, Zionist Jews were only able to take roughly 1.2 million dunam of land, or roughly 4.5% of Palestine. The majority of these lands were not purchased from Palestinians!
Most of this land was leased to the Jews, either through British government gifts of Palestine’s miri lands “state lands” or through big non-Palestinian feudal landlords.
Based on these facts, the entire amount of land that the Jews gained from the Palestinians until 1948 did not surpass 1% of the total land area of Palestine.
This occurred only seventy years after the start of settlement and organized emigration to Palestine, and under difficult circumstances.
Evidently, it emphasizes both the amount to which the Jews struggled in consolidating and completing their enterprise in Palestine, and the amount to which the Palestinians are determined to remain in their homeland.
—The writer is contributing columnist, based in Karachi.
