The Everlasting Hatred (25 page)

There are many more such sufferings that the pen would weary to describe. These occur particularly when we go to visit the cemetery and when we pray at the Wall of Lamentations, when stones are thrown at us and we are jeered at.
¹⁸⁷

Though reforms made life slightly more tolerable for the Jews and Christians in the Holy Land, the local Muslims resented the edicts from Istanbul and often disregarded them. In addition, the reforms were not long lasting. Faced with a budding Zionist
movement urging the return of Jews to Palestine, Istanbul repealed the reforms and enacted even more restrictive laws against Jews.

In 1887, a law was passed forbidding Jews to immigrate into Palestine, to reside there, to buy land, to restore houses, or to live in Jerusalem. It applied only to Jews but not to Christians or Muslim immigrants.
¹⁸⁸

At the same time, to counteract the effect of Jewish emigration between 1847 and 1880, Ottoman authorities began an affirmative action program to resettle mostly European Muslims in Palestine. While the Arabs often make much of the European heritage of many of Israel's Jews—even calling them “foreign invaders”—the truth is that many of today's so called Palestinians have European roots that go back no more than a generation or two.

During the latter stages of the receding Ottoman Empire, beginning in the late 1870s, Muslim refugees from the lost Islamic provinces of Europe streamed into Palestine. “The Ottoman government settled these emigrants in troubled regions, thereby tightening its control through a policy of Muslim colonization,” writes author Bat Ye'or. “In 1878 after annexation of
Bosnia-Herzegovina
by Austria,
Bosnian Muslim colonists arrived in Macedonia and on the coastal plain of Palestine.”
¹⁸⁹

The Holy Land under the Ottoman Turks suffered more devastation in four hundred years than in the previous fifteen hundred years. By the nineteeth century, the ancient canal and irrigation systems were destroyed. The land was barren and filled with
malaria-ridden swamps. The hills were denuded of trees and brush so that all of the terraces and topsoil were eroded away, leaving only rocks.
¹⁹⁰

Mark Twain writes his observations from his visit to the Holy Land in 1867: “Stirring scenes . . . occur in the valley [of Jezreel] no more,” wrote Mark Twain as he described the Holy Land he visited in 1867. “There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for 30 miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride 10 miles hereabouts and not see 10 human beings.”
¹⁹¹

How accurately Mark Twain described the exact conditions predicted by Ezekiel and other prophets about the land Holy Land in the Last Days—just before the Lord would began to return His people to it.

Because of the horrible condition of the land in the late-nineteenth century, most Muslim inhabitants of the Holy Land were only too eager to leave if a buyer for their property could be found.

Perhaps the greatest factor in the final desertification of Palestine was the practice of the landlord class—the
effendis
—exploiting the Muslim peasants who worked the fields. In some cases, the peasant farmer would have to pay 200 to 300 percent interest to buy seeds.
¹⁹²

When the debts would reach an unbearable level, the Muslim peasant farmer would simply pack up his meager belongings and join a band of Bedouins. The land then was left without workers and became despoiled.

The steady pattern: No one really cared for the land. The absentee Ottoman effendi landlords cared only about profit and seldom left the luxury of Istanbul to even check on the land.

From the 1880s through 1918, the Jews returning to Palestine faced a harsh life in a barren, Malaria-infested land. But still they came. And by the turn of the century, Jewish villages dotted the countryside. A few years later, Jews represented a majority of the population in Jerusalem. There was new life in Haifa, Safed, and Tiberias. In 1909, the first modern all-Hebrew city was founded on the sands of the Mediterranean—Tel Aviv.

Far from being run off the land, the Muslim population benefited greatly from these developments. Very quickly, opportunities arose for three Arab groups:

The landless population looking for work

The people indebted to the absentee landlords

The effendis themselves, who were selling land to the Jews at astronomical prices
¹⁹³

The effendis collected taxes for the Turkish administration and controlled the populace from seats of power on governing councils. But, before long, many of them began to see their little feudal empires threatened by the growing influence of the Jews. So, effendis resorted to the age-old tactic that always worked in Muslim history—make the Jews the scapegoats.

“It was in 1909, at the time when leading effendis felt their grip over the lives and fortunes of their erstwhile prey was getting too loose, that effendi Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi warned that the Jews would ‘displace the Arab farmers from their land and their fathers' heritage. . . . The Jews were not here when we conquered the country,'” writes historian Joan Peters. “It mattered little that the effendi's argument was false. It served his group's long-range
economic interests, and at least some of his misstatements would be swallowed whole by a surprisingly large part of the world for the better part of a century.”
¹⁹⁴

Peters continues:

Those few “Arab effendi” families . . . who had been dispossessing and then continuing to exploit the hapless peasant-migrant in underpopulated Palestine would become threatened by the spectacle of “dhimmi Jews” living on the land as equals, tilling their own soil and granting previously unknown benefits to the Arabic-speaking non-Jewish worker. The Jews would undoubtedly upset the “sweets of office” which had been accruing to the effendis. Thousands of peasant-migrants would be emigrating to reap the better wages, health benefits and improvements of the Jewish communities. Although the effendis would charge scalper's prices for land they sold to the Jews, at the same time they would lose thousands of their former debtors who saw an escape from the stranglehold of usury and corruption prevalent in Palestine for generations. In short, in “Palestine,” the greatest exploitations and injustices against the peasant-migrant Muslims were committed against them by their “brother” Muslim effendis.
¹⁹⁵

The Jews became a victim of their own success. The more they restored the land and made it fertile, the more Muslims were attracted from nearby Muslim countries and flocked to Jewish-settled areas for jobs. These same poor Muslims who benefited from Jewish-created jobs later charged that the Jews had stolen land that had been in their families since time immemorial. This remains one of the most colossal lies of history. Yet the West has swallowed the lie hook, line, and sinker. This lie will eventually lead to Armageddon.

During World War I, it became clear to the Zionist leaders—Chaim Weizmann, Zeev Jabotinsky, and Aaron Aaronson—that working through the Ottoman Empire, now at war with its one-time protector Britain and the allied powers, was a no-win situation.

“Each independently came to the conclusion that Jewish restoration could be built only on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire,” explains author Samuel Katz. “Each in his own way sought to provide Britain and her allies with help to win the war.”
¹⁹⁶

The Jews' alliance with Britain during World War I, which was critical to the allies' success in the Middle East campaign, was not without heavy risks for the Jews. By this time, there was a considerable Jewish population in Palestine under Turkish rule. Every one of these lives would be in great peril if the Jewish people were to be perceived as anti-Turkish.

“Fear of Turkish reprisals . . . was overcome, however, by a more powerful emotion—the urge to national regeneration,” writes Katz.
¹⁹⁷

What exactly did the Jews contribute to the successful allied war effort? A Jewish legion was formed to fight within the British Army for the liberation of Palestine. A Jewish auxiliary unit, the Zion Mule Corps, took part in the Gallipoli campaign. Jewish battalions comprised of volunteers from Britain, the United States, Canada, and Palestine took part in Gen. Allenby's ultimate liberation of the Holy Land. Meanwhile, in Palestine, Aaronson organized the Nili group, an indispensable intelligence service operating behind Turkish lines for the British.
¹⁹⁸

Movie fans might ask at this point: “Well, what about Lawrence of Arabia? Wasn't the Arab revolt key to the liberation of the
Middle East from the Turks?” To get at the truth on this issue, you have to forget the magnificent movie that was so beautifully acted by Peter O'Toole, Anthony Quinn, and Omar Sharif. It was great entertainment, but nothing close to the truth.

No folks—once again, Hollywood has helped perpetuate a gross myth on the public with its glorification of the young British army officer T. E. Lawrence and his largely fabricated Arab revolt.

Stunned by their early military disaster on the shores of Gallipoli, some British diplomatic and military leaders got the brilliant idea of bringing vast areas of the Arab-speaking world, now under Ottoman rule, under British control after the war. They envisioned “a federation of semi-independent Arab states under European guidance and supervision . . . owing spiritual allegiance to a single Arab prelate, and looking to Great Britain as patron and protector.”
¹⁹⁹

The British were about to get a lesson in the age-old Arab trait—“Promise an Arab a centimeter and he will demand a kilometer.”

Another gross British miscalculation had to do with the Muslim religious power structure. The sherif of Mecca did not have the same kind of authority and control over Islam that the pope exercises over the Roman Catholics Church. Yet the British plan to control the Arabs after the war depended on this basic assumption. In fact, the Turks had destroyed the Arab Caliphate centuries before—so the British had no central authority with which to deal. There was only a bunch of warring tribes all wanting to get the best deal in the great land-grab following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Britain's first step in achieving its glorious imperial ambition was to enlist the Arabs in their fight against the Turks. The first contact was with Hussein ibn-Ali, sherif of Mecca. Hussein was
promised much of Arabia and vast amounts of gold and arms if he would lead a revolt against the Turks.

A key player in what followed was Lawrence, an ambitious and imaginative officer who dramatized and embellished his own heroics in the desert. It was this bit of self-aggrandizement that helped create the myth that the Arabs played a key role in the British Middle East campaign.