PART 4: Did the Zionist Jews take something from the Arab Palestinians?

The ARAB NARRATIVE, the WAR OF 1948, and the COLLAPSE OF THE LEFT (an MOR series)

If you didn’t read PART 3 yet, you may do so here:

Part 3: 'Palestine': Who are the ancestral natives? And who the colonizers and oppressors?

Go to Part 1.

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The interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict that is considered ‘correct’ in Western ‘polite society’—that is, among the managers of our Western institutions, including the UN, the Western governments, the mainstream media, and the NGOs—is that the Zionist Jews came to British Mandate Palestine to forcibly dispossess and oppress the Arabs there. This oppression, they claim, continues to this day. I call this the Arab Narrative.

These managers are professionals—university trained. They believe the Arab Narrative because they learned it from their university professors in the humanities and social sciences, who’ve been teaching it for half a century now. The professors made the anti-Israel stance a moral leftist imperative—and they transformed the culture. So much, that racist students today build university encampments to bar entry to Jews because something, they claim, is happening on the other side of the world!

The employers of these activist professors, the Western universities, have been getting generous subsidies from Arab jihadi slave States—for example, Qatar—that are committed to Israel’s genocidal destruction.¹ Many believe this is not a coincidence.

But what matters, in the end, is the scientific question: Is the Arab Narrative historically sound, or is it propaganda?

I will here make the following claims:

• most Arabs in British Palestine were oppressed by the local landowning Arab gentry in a frankly feudal arrangement;

• the Zionist Jews were helping to liberate these Arab slaves;

• in response, the Arab aristocrats launched a racist and genocidal movement against the Jews of British Palestine.

To establish all this, I’ll be quoting extensively from historian Nathan Weinstock’s book Zionism: False Messiah (1979), which investigated the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Why him? Well, because the entire point of this series is to expose how the Arab Narrative fails even within its own native leftist grammar, the rules of which I explain in Part 2:

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PART 2: The moral grammar of the political left

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And Weinstock is ideal for my project, for two reasons:

1. Zionism: False Messiah was written from an explicitly Marxist, anti-Zionist position (one reviewer called it “the definitive Marxist history of the rise of Zionism”²); and

2. Weinstock’s carefully collected historical data—despite his strongly motivated pro-Arab reasoning—in fact damns the Arabs and rescues the Zionist Jews.

Weinstock’s evidence shows that, long before any Zionist Jews arrived from Europe, the Arab absentee-landowning aristocrats oppressed a multitude of Arab slaves in what became British Mandate Palestine. And it shows that many of those slaves won their liberty and a better life thanks to the arriving Zionist Jews.

The Arab Narrative is Orwellian grammar: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Absentee feudal landlords are revolutionaries. Though it masquerades as a story of leftist liberation, the Arab Narrative is a false tale, crafted by oppressive aristocrats to confuse and recruit you—to antisemitism.

Weinstock’s contradictions

Nathan Weinstock’s Zionism: False Messiah is a strange and revealing book because the author’s twin ideological commitments—Marxism and anti-Zionism—are, at a fundamental level, in contradiction.

You would reasonably expect Weinstock the Marxist to defend Zionism because its dominant faction, Labor Zionism, was deeply shaped by Marxist thought and European leftist traditions. The Labor Zionists built institutions rooted in collectivist, anti-capitalist ideals, and they waged fierce ideological war against the less numerous, market-oriented Zionists. Moreover, these quasi-Marxist Zionists commanded genuine grassroots support: the kibbutzim stand as the only State-sponsored collectivist project in modern history implemented without coercion. So Weinstock the Marxist had far more in common with Zionism than with the “Palestinian Arab national movement,” as he called it. In fact, until shortly before Weinstock published his book, Zionism had been a darling of the international left.

But regardless, Weinstock sided with the Arabs. Why?

Because Weinstock, with a few others, was pioneering the New Left, which held that: “Zionism is an oppressive colonisatory movement; Palestinian nationalism is (…) a movement of national liberation.”³ The quote is from an interview with the Marxist Moshe Machover that Weinstock presented qua introduction to establish his New Left Marxist framing of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

And yet, and yet…, because Weinstock’s French original was published in 1969—before cultural Marxism had fully displaced the classical form—Weinstock felt compelled to do the traditional thing: to investigate the class relations of the Arab Palestinians. He diligently documented that the Arab landowning aristocrats were mercilessly oppressing the great majority of the population, subjecting them to frank slavery.

Weinstock also found that “the leadership” of the Arab anti-Zionists “was in the hands of the big landowners of the a’yan stratum (urban notables).” A simple but powerful fact: from its inception, the Arab Palestinian “national movement” was in fact a creature of the Arab oppressors. It had nothing to do with liberating the common folk—just the opposite. Arab anti-Zionism was an attack on the Arab poor, because the Zionist immigrants—as Weinstock’s evidence also shows—were in fact helping to liberate those Arabs from their feudal oppressors.

Weinstock’s rigor describing all of that made his dogmatic defense of the ‘pro-Palestinian’ thesis logically… awkward, to say the least. But Marxists have a tolerance for that.

It was the other awkwardness—namely, Weinstock’s ‘friendly-fire’ on the fervently preached New-Left dogma—that was harder for his fellow leftists to stomach. Because, with steroids, a massive New Left campaign was afoot to clean up the image of the Arab Palestinians, and especially the terrorist PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization).

At the center of this campaign was Columbia University literature professor and media darling Edward Said. This Edward Said, mind you, was a card-carrying member of the PLO! In Said’s prose, the terrorist PLO underwent a magical whitewashing and became the worthy epitome and metonym for the broader anti-colonial struggle of Third-World peoples. The Arab Palestinians—not in themselves, certainly, because nobody cares about them as persons, but as a symbol—now became sacred to Western leftists, and all on account of Said’s efforts, as we explain here:

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DAVID INTO GOLIATH: How the left (and the US bosses) cleaned up PLO/Fatah

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It was in the middle of constructing all that, right as Said was publishing his massively influential Orientalism (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1979), that Nathan Weinstock threw a wrench into the works with his English edition of Zionism: False Messiah (1979).

Weinstock: the awkward friend at the New Left Party

Though a fellow New Leftist on the bandwagon against Israel, Weinstock nevertheless exposed (for the sake of historical rigor!) the aristocratic register and hypocrisy of the Arab Palestinian so-called ‘national’ movement, revealing its leaders to be violent, primitive, and oppressive gangsters. And Weinstock named the top gangster: Hajj Amin al Husseini, who’d mentored PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

For the controllers of the meaning-making and reality-managing institutions of media and academia, the problem that Weinstock posed could be dealt with in one of two different ways: attack him, or bury him out of sight.

The first option was not available. Edward Said couldn’t face-off with Nathan Weinstock because Said was a literature professor—long on rhetoric, short on facts. Outside of some leftist ideologues to whom Said dutifully genuflected, his books contained few footnotes, cited little primary material, and offered almost no critical analysis of the internal structure of Arab Palestinian society.

In fact, Said’s interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict descended to the comic-book level, portraying Zionism as a monolithic colonial evil, and Palestinian ‘nationalism’ as pure, virtuous resistance. This total lightweight could do nothing against Nathan Weinstock’s heavily footnoted work, which presented “an incredible wealth of detail … from Jewish, Arab and British sources,” such that, according to one reviewer, “no source book more adequately and engagingly puts together such an array of information.”⁴

The second option, then: Weinstock was ignored—as if he didn’t exist. The English version of his book, published in 1979, has a grand total of 57 citations in Google Scholar. That’s barely over one citation a year. Scholarly erasure—Weinstock was buried.

And that is how your reality is managed.

But we will exhume Weinstock below, and we’ll take a look at what he documented.

Weinstock’s description of the oppressive Arab aristocrats

The Arab oppressors—the big landowners of the Ottoman sanjaks in the Levant, and then of British Palestine—were the effendis.⁵ What were they like? Writes Weinstock:

“At the summit of the social pyramid, which was characterized by a rigid, traditional structure, was the effendi group, that special phenomenon of the Middle East, the ‘city notable, an absentee landlord whose main function is to provide credit and who does not interest himself at all in farming.’ They belonged to the handful of leading families who derived their incomes from the estates cultivated by the fellahin [Arab debt slaves] and from usury.”

In other words, the Arab effendi profited from the labor of debt-bound Arab peasants whose bondage was secured by lending at ruinous interest. Weinstock continues:

“Not that [the effendis] turned their noses up at property speculation. The indifference they showed for the lot of the peasantry, their economic activities (investments) and their parasitic role therefore made them akin, to a certain degree, to the comprador bourgeoisie of the colonial countries.”⁶

The term “comprador bourgeoisie” is Marxist jargon. A “comprador bourgeois,” says Wikipedia, is a native “who acts as an agent for foreign organizations engaged in … economic or political exploitation.” A pitiless exploiter of the poor, allied with foreign, imperialist interests. In Marxist theory, few if any are more reviled than the comprador bourgeoisie, and yet this is the term that Weinstock chooses to describe the leadership of “the Palestinian Arab national movement.”

It doesn’t fit. In Marxist theory, the comprador bourgeoisie serves foreign capital, facilitating imperialist economic domination. But these Arab landlords were not agents, not middlemen for an imposed colonial trade; they were autonomous dominators. And they were idle predators—parasites—bleeding the peasant underclass they had enslaved with usurious debt that kept generations trapped in immiserating bondage.

The effendis. In the center: Hajj Amin al Husseini.

The proper term for these Arab absentee landlords is feudal lords, as Weinstock concedes when he describes the social arrangement in ‘Palestine’ as “quasi-feudal.”⁷ Yes, “quasi,” because, unlike European feudal lords, these absentee landlords owed their serfs no military protection—only extraction.

Let us now take a closer look at this extraction.

How severely did the Arab aristocrats oppress the fellahin?

“The Arab serfs, called fellahin, ‘formed the mass of the population (nearly 70 per cent), living in the country’s 850 Arab villages,’ ” Weinstock explains. “They suffered ‘fierce exploitation … at the hands of the landowners and usurers.’ ”⁸

“The fellahin, attached to the land, were mercilessly exploited by the big landowners, and burdened with levies and taxes. In the village, the peasant was at the mercy of the sheikh, the governor, the farmer-general to whom the taxes were farmed out, and the merchants and usurers who vied with each other for the prize of crushing him. Traditionally the villager had only one means of escaping this misery: nomadism, the peasant’s last resort.”⁹

Elsewhere he remarks:

“In 1936...the average debt run up by an Arab peasant family—£25-30 a year—was equivalent to or in excess of its annual income. In these conditions there was hardly any hope of escaping recurrent indebtedness. ...Interest rates, usually 30 per cent, sometimes went as high as 50 per cent. In such conditions, and taking into account the parasitic mentality of the landowners who considered their lands above all as a speculative investment, Arab farming remained refractory to technical progress.”¹⁰

In other words, the system ensured that Arab farming remained backward.

The main point for us is this: since “the landed aristocracy had practically undivided control over political life,”¹¹ we should expect that what Weinstock calls “the Palestinian Arab national movement” was a cynical ploy by the Arab feudal landlords to increase the value they were getting from squeezing the common Arab folk. And, indeed, this is precisely what Weinstock documents: the Arab ‘nationalist’ cause was, in fact, a vehicle for entrenching—not challenging—aristocratic oppression.

The “Palestinian Arab national movement”—a terrorist racket run by the Arab feudal lords

How did the big Arab landowners react to Zionist immigration? Weinstock explains:

“When the question of the acquisition of land by the Zionist organizations in Palestine is broached, it is usually not stated that these land transactions are to be explained by the big Arab landowners’ eagerness to sell their property. Furthermore, these purchases led to an extremely lucrative wave of property speculation: the price of a dunam near Rishon-le-Zion, originally 8 shillings, had gone up to £P10-£P25 by 1931. The Zionists certainly paid dearly for their Holy Land. The high prices sales, which brought a fortune to the usurious, parasitic effendi class, proved disastrous for the fellahin who were expelled from the estates they had worked on.”¹²

So, the Arab peasants were “mercilessly exploited by the big landowners.” With great “eagerness,” these oppressive “big landowners” rushed “to sell their land” to the Zionist Jews, who were paying top pound for it. In these transactions, “the fellahin … were expelled from the estates.” And yet these landowners, according to Weinstock, were the leaders of the supposed “Palestinian Arab national movement”? Well, in that case, what passed for a “Palestinian Arab national movement” was nothing of the sort—there was no Arab Palestinian nationalism.

Why then would Weinstock insist on this “national” movement’s alleged existence? And why does Weinstock insist on blaming “the Zionist enterprise” for fellahin misery? Because Weinstock is a committed anti-Zionist, and no matter what the facts, his interpretation will assign blame to the Zionist Jews. Thus, he asserts that,

“Massive dispossession of the fellahin was the essence of the Palestinian problem, both as a national and a social issue. Certain authors try and skirt round this direct consequence of the Zionist enterprise...”¹³

The problems of the fellahin, according to Weinstock, were a “direct consequence of the Zionist enterprise”—they were the fault of the Jews. Here Weinstock denies everything he himself has documented: that the essence of the ‘Palestinian’ problem was the exploitation and oppression of the Arab fellahin by the Arab effendis. The Zionist Jews simply came to buy land—they did not create the conditions of extreme exploitation and oppression that the Arab feudal lords perpetuated in British Mandate Palestine, and which existed since Ottoman times.

Who could the Zionist Jews buy land from? Most of the poor had no title to the lands they worked on, so the Zionists bought land from those who did have title: the effendis. There was absolutely nothing that the Zionist Jews could do about this particular state of affairs, and so when Weinstock blames the Zionist Jews for the conditions of the fellahin he plumbs the depths of absurdity. But this is the only move left to an anti-Zionist cornered by the facts, because, unlike the Europeans who conquered the Americas, Africa, and Asia by slaughtering the natives and stealing their land, the Zionist Jews offered good money in order to purchase legally from those who had title and moreover freely wanted to sell.

What is most amazing is that, against the blame-the-Zionists argument that he prefers, even Weinstock concedes that, when the fellahin were expelled from the land, it was usually not in transactions with the Jews. He writes that many “fellahin [were] displaced following purchases made by non-Jews, say, for example, an Arab middleman or moneylender who then sold the property acquired to a Zionist purchasing body.”¹⁴

Moreover, as Weinstock also documents, many other displaced Arab poor had been “peasants who were not share-croppers ...[but] smallholders” with title to their tiny plots. Any who dared to imagine they could make a decent buck selling their land to the Zionists were accused by the large Arab landowners of committing ‘treason.’ Terrorist bullies would pay a visit, guns swinging, and they’d offer to buy the land for a song; then, after consolidating the plots, they’d resell to the Zionists at extortionate prices.

But I’ll let Weinstock explain it:

“... whilst in public these [Arab] leaders stepped up their incendiary attacks on Zionism, denouncing any transfer of ancestral soil to the Jews as a betrayal, they secretly enriched themselves by means of the very operations which they so furiously attacked. The fanatical braggadocio was designed for the gallery. It made it possible to win the support of the masses. It also, no doubt, served other less avowable goals. Under nationalist pressure, the small Arab landowners no longer dared to sell their land openly to the Jews. During the 1936-39 Revolt, Husseini’s guerillas actually executed ‘traitors,’ but ‘at the same time a close relative of the Mufti was doing a brisk trade in precisely such allegedly criminal deals, but with a notable difference, for this person used to force sales from Arab smallholders at niggardly prices and then resell to the Jews at the usual exorbitant rates...’ In other words, hyper-nationalist propaganda became a lucrative industry, indeed even an American-style racket, for the Arab gentry.”¹⁵

The references to “Husseini” and “the Mufti” above are to the same person: Hajj Amin al Husseini—scion of the biggest feudal landowning family in British Mandate Palestine—whom the British made Mufti of Jerusalem in 1920 after he demonstrated that he could organize massive terrorist riots against the Jews. Husseini’s genocidal career would later climax with his leading role running Hitler’s death camps in Europe (you read correctly).

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The responsibility of the Arab Palestinian movement in the German Nazi Final Solution

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What matters here is that Hajj Amin al Husseini was the Founding Father and supreme leader of what Weinstock calls the “Palestinian Arab national movement.” So, clearly, there was no such “national” movement. What existed in ‘Palestine’ was a racist movement against all Jews, Zionist or not. Just look at what Weinstock concedes:

“... the Palestinian anti-colonialist movement was deformed by racism. The distorted national struggle expressed itself in anti-Jewish slogans (‘Palestine is our country and the Jews are our dogs’), followed up by attacks upon Jewish passers-by and store-owners, and eventually in mob violence akin to the all-too familiar pogrom.”¹⁶

The pogrom is a term borrowed from the Russian Tsarist context. It means an unprovoked racist attack against the Jewish population.

Since Hajj Amin al Husseini was organizing anti-Jewish terror even as he sold land to the Jews, he obviously calculated that his terrorism would kick the Jews out and he would get those lands back—keeping the huge fortune made with the land sales. It seems he worried, however, that in the meantime the Zionist Jews might spread their socialism to the Arabs, because any who fraternized with the Jews risked execution. Husseini even murdered his own cousin for this.¹⁷

The hypothesis that Husseini feared the Arab poor would be attracted to the Arab poor is entirely reasonable, in context, because…

The Zionist Jews were much nicer to the Arab poor than the Arab ruling elite

While the Arab lords were mobilizing the masses to carry out terrorist attacks against the Jews, it was the Zionist Jews who showed greater compassion for these same Arab poor. And yet, even historians affiliated with Zionism sometimes criticize the early Zionists for not entirely solving the problems created by the Arab lords! They impose such a tremendous double-standard on the Jews, making demands on their behavior that are never applied to anybody else, that they force a frame of interpretation in which the Jews—grammatically—just have to come out as the bad guys.

It is quite remarkable.

Take, for example, historian Anita Shapira, who presents as a (left-wing) Zionist. She recognizes, first, that “[the] Jews were obliged to adhere to the acceptable canon of [Jewish] ethical tenets in interpersonal behavior,” and hence “it was argued [in the Zionist community] that one should act to promote the rights of the Arab worker and better his lot and avoid placing him at any disadvantage.”¹⁸

Okay. So, can we say, “Congratulations, Zionist Jews”? Not a chance. Shapira pushes forward with the obligatory indictment. “Yet at one and the same time,” she writes, “it was permissible [for Zionists] to demand of the Arab that he renounce his exclusive claim to Palestine”—which, to her, is an example of how “the constraints of national [Zionist] interest served to release persons from compliance with those rules [of Jewish ethics].”

Can you see what this means? If Shapira considers the Zionist Jews bad (contradicting their ethical norms) because they demand that “the Arab … renounce his exclusive claim to Palestine,” then she is saying it was moral for Arabs to make an exclusive claim to British Palestine.

That’s not merely ‘post-Zionist’—it flirts with madness.

The Arab “exclusive claim to Palestine” means—quite literally—that the Jews can have no part of ‘Palestine.’ If we say it is unethical for the Jews to demand that the Arabs renounce the goal to kill or chase them all, then the frame is like this: the Jews will either accept genocide or they will be immoral. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. (Keep in mind that Shapira is supposed to be a Zionst!)

Still on the how-can-we-damn-the-Jews path, Shapira adds:

“It was prohibited [for a Jew] to expel the fellahin; but it was perfectly alright to purchase land from the effendis, even if that involved eviction [by Arabs] of fellahin from the soil.”¹⁹

She is criticizing—the phrase “perfectly alright” is sarcastic. She is saying that the Zionist Jews were ethical when they forbade expelling the fellahin, but they were unethical when they purchased land (because in many such cases the Arab landowners would expel the fellahin prior to the sale).

Just look at this structure—it is laid bare. Shapira blames the Jews for the expulsion of the fellahin despite the fact that they had zero control over that, and even though they did not evict the fellahin when it was up to them. So what is Shapira really criticizing? That the Jews bought land.

This much insanity is hard to fathom. And I remind you that Shapira is supposed to be a Zionist!

But we are not quite done. Notice also Shapira’s deference to the idea that an Arab nationalist movement existed. She may congratulate herself, perhaps, on her ‘gallantry’ to the other side, but she has no business doing any of that because she is a historian, and this move simply contradicts the facts. There was no such Arab nationalist movement—what existed was a racist anti-Jewish movement, built on the traditional anti-Jewish bigotry always rampant in the Muslim world, and run by the oppressive Arab aristocrats as a profit-making criminal racket that victimized both the Zionist Jews and the Arab poor.

Anita Shapira’s chest-beating, Zionist ‘self-criticism’ must be recognized for what it is: a psychological pathology—a peculiar one, because it appears only in communities where people are taking ethics very seriously. People who really mean to be good may, via ethical zealotry, fall into the trap of thinking that, since they can never be good enough, then they must be ‘bad,’ so they must try harder (and always apologize—always take the blame). This orientation creates opportunities to manipulate the Jews—via guilt-tripping accusations of injustice—into making dangerous concessions to their enemies. As you might expect, this deeply Jewish pathology has been responsible for many, many Jewish deaths across the centuries. It is a pathology rooted not in malice but in ethical overreach—the tragic side effect of taking moral responsibility more seriously than any people in history.

The ultimate root of this is the biblical God’s eternal disappointment with the Israelites, which conditions their Bible-reading descendants to see Jewish moral failure as the default, and to find virtue in taking ‘God’s side’ against the Jews. If you’ve ever wondered why so many modern Jews become critics of the Jewish State, sometimes echoing the arguments of Israel’s most violent enemies, this is why. “We are not yet good enough” is the sacred Jewish mantra—a virtue signal weaponized by antisemites as supposed description, instead of recognized as the peculiar psychological pathology of those who really, really want to be good, but who mistakenly equate moral superiority with eternal self-criticism.

Hajj Amin al Husseini.

Ironically, Anita Shapira herself identifies the pathology. There are “three sins,” she says, that, “rather than commit, a Jew preferred to be killed”—these are “ ‘idol worship’ ... along with bloodshed and incest.”²⁰ Well, that’s a pathology of ethics: to prefer to be killed rather than to shed blood. Because you may not—not ethically—prefer your enemy’s life to your own, and especially not when your enemy is making a racist attack against you. Because you have an ethical obligation to yourself—and especially when you are innocent. However, from trying hard always to be good, people committed to ethics can become confused. They may end up concluding that violence is always bad, even in self-defense. One dramatic example is from the Middle Ages, when more than 1000 Jews were trapped in a bishop’s palace in the city of Mainz by a mob of ‘Crusaders.’ As they awaited the carnage that was to come, these Jews decided to commit suicide rather than take enemy lives in self-defense.²¹

I have taken a deeper look at this pathology here:

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Does Jewish goodness (khesed) sabotage Jewish self-defense?

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This pathology is evident today: many Israelis and Diaspora Jews oppose the IDF’s actions in Gaza to destroy Hamas, despite the fact that Hamas launched a genocidal attack against innocent Jews on 7 October 2023.

And this same pathology made it very difficult for Jews in British Palestine to take up arms to protect themselves, even after repeated Arab terrorist attacks. In fact, Shapira’s entire book is her effort to explain, based on this Jewish ethos, why it took so long for the Jews to use force in self-defense, and why it always remained controversial. Yet despite her laser focus on this very question, Shapira cannot guess that her own framing of justice and injustice is likewise a product of this pathological Jewish difficulty with self-defense, and hence another unreasonable concession to the enemy.

Anyway, as with Weinstock, the evidence to defend the Jews from Shapira is all in Shapira. In line with the Jewish commitment to ethics, she writes, the Zionist Jews “argued that one should act to promote the rights of the Arab worker and better his lot”; by contrast, the Arab effendi class couldn’t run out of ways to oppress the Arab fellahin, and they executed smallholders if they tried to get rich—as the big landowners were getting rich—by selling land to the Zionist Jews. Moreover, to Jewish ethics, “It was prohibited to expel the fellahin,” Shapira observes, whereas the Arab landowners were evicting them. Even though some Zionists held that Jewish land should only be worked by Jewish labor, many others disagreed, and in those plots where the Arab landowners did not evict the fellahin, as Shapira herself admits, “Arab workers stayed on to work in the Jewish-owned fields.”²²

Indeed, evidence abounds that the Zionist Jews were on the whole a blessing to the Arab poor. Nathan Weinstock, so hostile to Zionism, nevertheless gives us a lot of detail on this point. He writes:

“... the repercussions on the Arab economy of the inflow of [Zionist] capital into Palestine and the country’s economic expansion were felt in the long run. Agriculture advanced considerably during this period, when there were the beginnings of an evolution towards intensive farming. Arab orchards, which covered an area of 332,000 dunams in 1921, spread over 832,000 dunams in 1942. Cattle-breeding and poultry-rearing made rapid headway; there was an increase of the order of 60 per cent in 13 years. The orange-groves developed at great speed: 22,000 dunams of citrus fruit in 1922, 144,000 dunams in 1937. Vegetable production increased almost tenfold between 1920 and 1938. On the whole, however—and it was here that the immobilisme and the backwardness of the social structures really told—Arab agriculture continued to suffer from a shortage of capital.

On the other hand, in a period of economic boom and massive immigration, the scarcity of man-power and the intense tempo of construction favoured the taking on of Arab workers. Moreover, a growing number of Palestinian Arabs found jobs in the public services: 18,000 in 1930, more than 30,000 in 1945. One should add to this those employed by concessionary companies, concerns in which the majority of capital was Jewish but which were bound under their statutory provisions to take on a certain proportion of Arab workers.

An Arab industry likewise made its appearance...”²³

The Zionist Jews were not God. They could not remake Arab society or reform a class system not of their making. But they were a blessing to the Arabs. So if the only criticism you can make is that they didn’t save all the Arabs, then… you are not really making a criticism.

It is difficult to see how the Arab Narrative—which claims that the Zionist Jews somehow hurt the Arabs of British Palestine—can have a leg to stand on if the rich effendi were receiving tremendous injections of capital in exchange for selling to the Zionists their (to them) unusable desert and swampland, and especially if the fellahin at the bottom were emancipating themselves from slavery by finding new jobs in the booming, Zionist-built economy.

And boom that economy did. So much, in fact, that Arabs and Muslims from all over the region, and from as far away as Algeria, immigrated massively into British Palestine to enjoy the fruits of this economy, as we discuss in Part 3:

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Part 3: 'Palestine': Who are the ancestral natives? And who the colonizers and oppressors?

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Yes, the Zionists caused a displacement of Arabs and Muslims—into ‘Palestine.’ For a better life.

But the definitive testimony that the Zionist Jews took nothing from the Arabs of British Palestine comes from Hajj Amin al Husseini, Founding Father of the Arab Palestinian movement.

Husseini testifies that the Zionist Jews took no land by force

Hajj Amin al Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, launched his fourth major terrorist attack against the Jews of British Palestine in 1936. The violence and chaos would last until 1939. In the middle of it, in 1937, the British government sent the Royal ‘Peel Commission’—headed by the eponymous William Robert Wellesley Peel (1st Earl Peel)—to investigate the causes of the unrest. Husseini was called to testify. Sir Laurie Hammond, a member of the Commission, took his testimony.

SIR L. HAMMOND: His Eminence gave us a picture of the Arabs being evicted from their land and villages being wiped out. What I want to know is, did the Government of Palestine, the Administration, acquire the land and then hand it over to the Jews?

Husseini had claimed that Zionism was responsible for “Arabs being evicted from their land and villages being wiped out.” Since it was the British occupiers—and not the Zionists—who had a formal monopoly of force in British Palestine, Hammond was asking if the local British authorities had been evicting Arabs and destroying villages to favor the Jews.

Lord Peel exiting the King David Hotel.

At this, because he was under formal examination before an investigative commission that would demand evidence for any such charge, Husseini’s entire theater collapsed. He confessed the truth.

MUFTI: In most cases the lands were acquired.

SIR L. HAMMOND: I mean forcibly acquired—compulsory acquisition as land would be acquired for public purposes?

MUFTI: No, it wasn't.

SIR L. HAMMOND: Not taken by compulsory acquisition?

MUFTI: No.

SIR L. HAMMOND: But these lands amounting to some 700,000 dunams were actually sold?

MUFTI: Yes, they were sold, but the country was placed in such conditions as would facilitate such purchases.

SIR L. HAMMOND: I don’t quite understand what you mean by that. They were sold. Who sold them?

MUFTI: Land owners.

SIR L. HAMMOND: Arabs?

MUFTI: In most cases they were Arabs.

SIR L. HAMMOND: Was any compulsion put on them to sell? If so, by whom?

MUFTI: As in other countries, there are people who by force of circumstances, economic forces, sell their land.

SIR L. HAMMOND: Is that all he said?

MUFTI: They were not prevented from selling the land, and mostly the country was in such economic condition as facilitated the sale. If the Government had the interest of these poor people at heart they should have prevented sales and these people would not have been evicted from their land. A large part of these lands belong to absentee landlords who sold the land over the heads of their tenants, who were forcibly evicted. The majority of these landlords were absentees who sold their land over the heads of their tenants. Not Palestinians but Lebanese.²⁴

There was no compulsion—Husseini said it.

He still tried vaguely to accuse malfeasance with insinuations about “economic conditions” and posing as the defender of “these poor people,” the fellahin, whom absentee landlords had evicted. He even tried to blame the Lebanese. But Husseini himself was the biggest of those absentee landlords making land sales to the Zionist Jews!

He was the one selling land over the heads of the fellahin.

He was the one evicting them.

He was the one sending gunmen to force smallholders to sell for pennies, so he could resell to the Zionist Jews at massive profit.

What had the Jews done? They had bought the worst land—desert and swamp—and made it productive. They had given jobs to the fellahin, now free, whom the Arab slave masters had cast aside. And they had given jobs to the thousands upon thousands of illegal Arab immigrants who flooded British Palestine in search of the better life that Zionist industry made possible.

Conclusion

On the whole, the Arab poor benefited from Zionist immigration. That is the inescapable message of the historical record—even in the pages of anti-Zionist historian Nathan Weinstock, who, despite his evidence, insists the Zionists were doing harm.

The Zionist Jews took nothing from the Arabs of British Palestine.

It is true, however, that many Arabs lost their land and/or homes during the war of 1948 (Israel’s War of Independence). But this, as you should already suspect, was once again not the fault of the Zionist Jews.

We take up that story in Part 5 of this series.

Stay tuned!

1. Bard, M. (2024, June 11). Universities soak up $13.1 billion in Arab funds. JNS.org.
https://www.jns.org/universities-soak-up-13-1-billion-in-arab-funds/

For MOR’s article on Qatar:

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Paradox: The anti-Qatar protests on US campuses

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2. Johnson, P. (1979). LEFT OF ZION: Nathan Weinstock. Zionism: False Messiah. Translated and edited by Alan Adler. Introductory interview with Moshe Machover. Journal of Palestine Studies, 9(1), 135–138.

3. ‘Introductory interview with Moshe Machover,’ in Weinstock, N. 1979. Zionism: False Messiah. London: Ink Links Ltd. (p.xiv)

Weinstock, N. 1979. Zionism: False Messiah. London: Ink Links Ltd. (p.156)

4. Johnson, P. (1979). LEFT OF ZION: Nathan Weinstock. Zionism: False Messiah. Translated and edited by Alan Adler. Introductory interview with Moshe Machover. Journal of Palestine Studies, 9(1), 135–138.

5. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (p.59).

6. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (p.156)

7. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (p.157)

8. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (p.157)

9. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (p.52)

10. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (pp.157, 159)

11. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (p.157)

12. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (p.161)

13. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (pp.161-62)

14. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (p.162)

15. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (pp.163-64)

16. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (pp.166-167)

17. “Fawzi El-Husseini, a cousin of the Mufti’s, who sympathized with Zionism...became the spokesman of a small section of the urban bourgeoisie anxious to collaborate with the Zionists. This option cost him his life: he was assassinated in November 1941.”

SOURCE: Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (p.190)

18. Shapira, A. 1992. Land and power: The Zionist resort to force 1881-1948. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. (pp.356-57)

19. Land and power, op. cit. (pp.356-57)

20. Land and power, op. cit. (p.64)

21. “The crusaders were unleashed, storming through the city [of Mainz], looking for ‘the circumcised.’ The Jews who had eluded crusaders, or bribed them during the early phase of the Rhineland incursion, had been succeeded, especially in Speyer and Worms, by Jews who were murdered in cold blood. By the time of Mainz, crusader ferocity was at its peak, fueled by a cross-inspired righteousness… More than one thousand men, women, and children huddled in the courtyard of the archbishop’s palace [this man appears genuinely to have tried to save their lives]. They knew very well what had happened elsewhere in the preceding weeks, how bribes and flight had failed, finally, to protect even children. In Mainz, Jews had time to reflect on what was coming, and they knew that the only possible escape was through apostasy. Some few took that way out, but to most conversion to Christianity was more unthinkable than ever…

Solomon bar Simson wrote:

The hand of the Lord rested heavily on His people, and all the Gentiles assembled against the Jews in the courtyard to exterminate them… When the people of the Sacred Covenant saw that the Heavenly decree had been issued and that the enemy had defeated them and were entering the courtyard, they all cried out together—old and young, maidens and children, menservants and maids—to their Father in Heaven… ‘There is no questioning the ways of the Holy One, blessed be He and blessed be His Name, Who has given us His Torah and has commanded us to allow ourselves to be killed and slain in witness to the Oneness of His Holy Name…’

Then in a great voice they all cried out as one: ‘We need tarry no longer, for the enemy is already upon us. Let us hasten and offer ourselves as a sacrifice before God. Anyone possessing a knife should examine it to see that it is not defective, and let him then proceed to slaughter us in sanctification of the Unique and Eternal One, then slaying himself—either cutting his throat or thrusting the knife into his stomach.’”

SOURCE: Carroll, J. 2001. Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (pp.261-262)

22. Shapira, A. 1992. Land and power: The Zionist resort to force 1881-1948. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. (p.65)

23. Zionism: False Messiah, op. cit. (p.160)

24. Peters, J. (1984). From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict Over Palestine. New York, NY: Harper & Row. (pp.432-433)