From: "Strong, Lee" <StrongL at MTMC.ARMY.MIL>
To: "'WSFA members'" <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Political Inventions
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2002 16:03:14 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

-----Original Message-----
From: ronkean at juno.com [mailto:ronkean at juno.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 1:51 PM
To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Political Inventions

On Mon, 8 Apr 2002 11:22:18 -0400 "Strong, Lee" <StrongL at MTMC.ARMY.MIL>
writes:

> Zionist Jews began returning to what is now Israel in the
> very late 19th Century.  They bought the land from the locals who were
then
> controlled by the Ottoman Empire.

I found a book first published in Oct. 1944 (Palestine: Land of Promise,
by Walter Clay Lowdermilk, U.S. Soil Conservation Service) which provides
more information on the land purchases than I had before.  I have a copy
of the sixth impression from Jan. 1946.  I assume this data is at least
current as of 1944.  On page 93 the book says that the Jewish National
Fund had bought a total of 140,000 acres, 35% of Jewish land in
Palestine.  The JNF was leasing land to Jewish farmers.  Another 20% of
the Jewish land at the time belonged to Pica, a colonization agency set
up by British Baron Rothschild.  The remaining 45% was held by several
thousand Jewish private owners.  From this, we can conclude that Jewish
owned land in 1944 amounted to 400,000 acres, or 625 square miles.
Israel proper (the pre-1967 borders) has 7,843 square miles of land (not
counting water surface).  So about 92% of the land of Israel proper is
not accounted for by Jewish land purchases as of 1944.  That seems to
support the idea that most of Israel's land was not acquired by purchase.

> The Jews and Arabs lived together relatively peacefully.

So I had thought, that things were mostly peaceful until the late 1940s.

> During the 1930s, the Muslim Grand Mufti of Jerusalem
> was an open Nazi sympathizer and preached a violent jihad against the
Jews.
>  The British prevented open hostilities but not all hostilities.

The above-cited book mentions that riots occurred in 1936.

> A lot of the conflict stems from the differences in Jewish and Arabic
culture.
> Basically, Jews work for success and Arabs fight for it with the
> result that Israel's domestic economy is more productive than Saudi
Arabia's
> despite the latter's oil wealth.

Israel's 1994 purchasing power parity GDP is $70.1 billion, Saudi
Arabia's $173.1 billion for the same year on the same basis.  However the
Israeli economy has grown rapidly in the past few years, and more current
figures I saw recently (I can't quote them exactly) put Israel's per
capita GDP at about $18,000, which would be about twice that of Saudi
Arabia.  About one third of the resident population of Saudi Arabia are
not citizens, which weighs down their per capita GDP average.

> There is, IMHO, no problem that can not be
> resolved by Arab-Israeli cooperation.  However, SOME Arabs do not want
to
> cooperate. They routinely ignore facts and expect that the Israelis can
be
> forced out, leaving the possessions built by the Israelis for the
taking.

The more paranoid of Arab views is that the Zionists moved in and took
over, and that their ultimate goal seems to be to possess and rule all of
Palestine.  The more paranoid Israeli view is that the Arabs want to
completely expel the Jews from the region, or at least rule over what
Jews choose to remain there.  The sad truth is that there are Israelis
who want what the Arabs fear, and there are Arabs who want what the Jews
fear.

> My personal proposal for peace in the Middle East is that
> Europe and the United States should stop having one policy for
themselves and
> one policy for Israel.  The terrorist organization known as the
> Palestinian Authority has had 8 years to meet the legitimate needs of
the
> Palestinian people and it has clearly failed to do so.  Abolish it and
create a > real Palestinian government that will build a real nation of
Palestine
> rather than the present policy of destroying both Palestine and Israel.

Having an honest Palestinian government in an independent Palestinian
state not under Israeli occupation sounds like it would be a big step
towards peace.  That seems to be what the U.S. is trying to achieve, but
it promises to be quite difficult.

I see a parallel between the Zionist colonization and take-over in
Palestine, and the way the British and later the Americans took over in
Hawaii.  But we don't have angry Hawaiian suicide bombers seeking to
avenge the wrongs of the past, probably because the Hawaiians don't think
of themselves as oppressed by America.

Ron Kean