http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull%26cid=1062042209808
I’m not sure the point your trying to make barbitu8 (I don’t have a subscription to the Jerusalem post so I can’t access their archives), there are a very few Muslims (i’m not even sure if they’re organised into any sort of group) that believe due to verses in the Koran that God gave Israel to the Jews.
But as I said before religion is not the main factor in this conflict - Zionism is a secular ideology and so was pan-Arabism, also Fatwah (who are not pan-Arabists) like most of the PLO are a secular group.
*Fatah
Sorry…I was confusing the Huleh Valley project with other smaller drainage projects, which did go on throughout Mandate Palestine.
And I would say that, in a lot of ways, Jewish development of the land in the Turkish and Mandate periods was imortant, because most of the land the land organizations bought was marginal to begin with. So, because of their efforts, the settlements brought a lot of otherwise unused or underused land into cultivation.
If you’re interested, btw, here’s a pretty long (and sometimes boring) contemporary analysis of the economic and agricultural situation in Palestine in 1930.
http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/e3ed8720f8707c9385256d19004f057c?OpenDocument
(It also, btw, estimates Jewish settlement higher than you do, saying that the Jewish population at the time of the report (October, 1930) was 162,069.
I have a long (but nowhere as long as that, I’ll read it a little later)and boring analysis of Palestine in 1930, infront of me (written in 1931), this is where I’m drawing much of my information from.
Your right about the population, I read the wrong column (that figure is for Christians), the (British) estimate of the Jewish population should of been 162,467 at that time (1930) with an estimate of 32,000 living in Jewish settlements according to prelimanary figures from the 1931 census.
It’s free registration.
Also, is it just me, or has Fatah been getting more religious of late? Over the past couple of years, they seem to be injecting more religion into their message. I mean, I couldn’t see the Fatah of the '70s calling one of their groups the “Al Asqa Martyrs Brigade”. Do you think this is just tactical on the PLO’s part, to try to outflank Hamas, or are we seeing a real shift in attitudes?
the al-Asqa Matyrs Brigade isn’t a wing of Fatah, the exact connection is really unknown and though it’s possible that it’s under the direct command of Fatah, evidence for this is thin on the ground though (I found the Israeli intelligence report to be unreliable, for example the part where it tried to use a document signed by Yasser Arafat allocating money to bury ‘Martyrs’ to link them to the organisation was delibrately misleading as ‘Matyr’ in PLO-speak just means anyone killed by the IDF).
However the al-Aqsa Matyrs brigade is made up of Fatah members and it does represent a shift in PLO (which IIRC does include the odd Islamic organisation) attitudes, but as the al-Asqa Mayrs themselves are not advocating an Islamic state, like for example Hamas, I see this shift as tactical rather than ideological. Fatah itself is still strong on the ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric that has been it’s mainstay since it’s inception.
The following is a summary and/or paraphrase from certain sections of a book titled *A History of Israel, from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time *, by Howard M. Sachar (1976). So, if you are interested in more details, you can read this book at your leisure.
In the 19th century, western Jews in the US and Europe accepted the premise that loyalty to a national state was incompatible with pluraism in cultures. However, not so in Russia. The most cherished features of the Russian Jewish cultural heritage was the memory of the ancestral homeland, the lost and lamented Zion that was enshrined in the ceremony and folklore of virtually every believing Jew. Russian Jews, distraught and quarantined under the tsars, clung to their accumulated sacred literature; the Holy Land was no mere featureless idyll, to be embellished in lullabies and fireside tales.
The May Laws, and the pogroms of 1881-82 and their aftermath, shattered Russian Jewry’s final lingering illusions of equality and achievement under tsarist rule. The US was initially regarded as the most likely sanctuary, but for many a continuation of minority status among Gentiles anywhere was no longer an answer. Moshe Lilienblum, the distinguished Jewish humanist, spent two days cowering in a basement as Russian mobs churned through his neighborhood. Henceforth, he regarded departure for Palestine as the one remaining solution, and he pressed this view in innumerable articles. In 1881, Smolenski wrote, too, that the time was ripe to acquire funds to emigrate to Palestine. But hundreds of thousands of Jews continued to nurture the dream of successful integration with societies. It was then that Leo Pinsker, due to an anti-Jewish outbreak in Odessa, and disillusionment by the political events in 1881, at the age of 60, promulgated his plan for Jewish survival.
Pinker’s central thesis was that normal dealings between peoples are founded on mutual respect, not live and that Jews would never get that respect because they lacked its prerequisite national equality. As a “phantom people,” the Jews inspired fear and whatever people feared, they hated. It was futile to seek the disappearance of those “natural laws.” The solution was not in the will-o’-the-wisp of emancipaton, but in a concerted attempt by the Jews to restore a national home.
By then (the late 1870s), Zionist study circles and clubs had begun to function in hundreds of cities and towns in Russia. A number adopted such titles as Ezra or Maccabi, but all were generally known as Chovevei Zion: Lovers of Zion.
In the 1890s the Chovevei Zion grew rapidly in many parts of Europe and overseas. It was then, in Vienna, Dr. Nathan Birnbaum first coined the term “Zionism.” Zionism continued to be an avant-garde within the Jewish world in the late 19th C, but it was not insignificant. Its origians traced back in part to Jewish liturgy and tradition, where the messianic image of Zion remained as tactile as the geography of the Diaspora itself.
Now to backtrack in historical perspective. The Romans laid waste to the entire Jewish nation between 70 ACE and 135, slaughtering as many as 600,000 Jews and carrying off half that number in bondage. However, a few thousand remained in the country. Heavily taxed, denied the right to visit their ancient capital, the survivors made their home in Galilee, where they farmed the land and plied their trades. In the late Roman era, this decimated Jewish community managed something of a revival. The community extended to towns, villages, and farms as far as the coastal plain. During this period, the Palestinian Talmud was compiled. The Jewish population sustained its growth well beyond the Arab conquest in the 7th C, and even under the Seljurk Turks, ultimately reaching 300,000 inhabitants by the year 1000.
This promising interlude ended abruptly, however, and quite terribly, with the arrival of the Crusaders. Thereafter, the butchery of Jews was so extensive under Christian rule that in 1169, only a thousand Jewish familes were still alive. Subsequently, under a tolerant Moslem regime, pilgrimages of Jews from overseas augmented the tiny Palestinian remnant. Well before the pressures of the Spanish Inquisition, some 5,000 Sephardic Jews (from Sepharad, the Hebrew word for Spain) had already established their preeminence among other Jews in the Holy Land, swallowing up the Musta’aribin (Arabized Jews). It was most notably the Inquisition, and finally the Spanish expulsion decree in 1492, that propelled tens of thousands of Sephardim into all corners of the Mediterranean world, and not less than 8,000 into Palestine. In the ensuing years, other Jews made their way to Palestine from the Mediterranean littoral.
At its high point, in 1890, Jewish settlement in Hebron comprised barely 1500 souls, most of the Jewish settlement being in Jerusaleum.
In the mid-18th C, Palestine was agriculture-based, but stunted in its growth by tghe depredation of tax farmers, by army recruitment, forced labor, drought, and locusts. Concentraed in four holy cities, the Jews numbered between 5,000 and 6,000 at the opening of the 19th C. An Anglo-Turkish understanding provided the stimulus for a growing European Jewish immigration, and by 1856, the Jewish population of the Holy Land exceeded 17,000.
Most of the newcomers were devoutly religious, and as a result more than a third chose to settle in Jerusalem.
It was Sir Moses Montefiore who recognized the fundamental problem of Jewish indigence in Palestine would have to be solved by creative manual labor and self-help. To that end, he negotiated in 1838 with Mehemet Ali, viceroy of Egypt (and int hose days also ruler of Syria and Palestine) for the purchase of land on which Jews might live and earn their bread without interference. In 1869, Joel Moshe Salomon and six of his friends bought a tract of land outside the city wall. In 1875, another group of Jerusalemites procured a second tract on the other side of the wall. In 1878, Salomon purchased a tract of land in the Sharon Valley.
The first aliyah (immigration wave) was between 1882 and 1903. 25,000 Jews entered Palestine. This actually was two waves of 1882-84 and 189-91. Many were Zionists, but the majority were simply refugees from tsarist oppresion. All but 5% settled in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, and Haifa.
In January 1882, a group of youthful Russians formed an emigration society, to be known as “Bilu” (a Hebrew biblical acrostic of “House of Jacob, let us go”). It was then that two Jerusalem Jews, Zalman Levontin and Joseph Feinberg, collected money from investors in Jerusalem and Europe, and acquired a tract of 100 acres, 8 miles from Jaffa. Tiny shacks were built and called “Rishon l’Zion”: First to Zion.
However, eaten alive by flies, robbed of their livestock by Bedouins, the settlers and their families began to wilt under disease, heat, and sheer exhaustion. It was then that Baron Edmund de Rothschild, offered 30,000 francs to drill a well at Rishon l’Zion. In the fall of 1884, Yechiel Pines, a Russian Jew who had emigrated to Palestine in 1878, brought with him moneys collected from various Chovevei Zion groups, and with this, and borrowed funds, purchased 2800 dunams (700 acres) of land near Yavneh, few miles from the coast.
In 1890, the tsar realized that emigration of Jews from Russia was a good thing for Russia. It was then that a society was formed in Odessa which raised $20,000 - $30,000 annually. As a result, in 1890-91, more than 3,000 Russian and Rumanian Jews departed for Palestine. However, the sheer hardships of farming in Palestine, a series of lethal malaria and typhoid epidemics, and the endless legal obstacles interposed by the Ottoman authorities, proved too heavy a burden for many hundreds of settlers.
By the end of the 19th C, 50,000 Jews remained in Palestine.
I have to shorten my summary now as I have other things to do, but suffice it to say that it was a writer, Theodor Herzl, who realized that passive receipts of charitable funds was not the answer. He urged politcal education for self-support and ultimately self-government in a land of their own. Noting that integration was not successful, he said only one solution remained: an exodus from the diaspora into a land of their own. Herzl’s Zionism was unique in many respects. It was Zionism articulated for the first time by a man of the world, a distinguished political observer and broadly traveled journalist.
By 1923 Haifa ahd become a glittering international city. Palestine, renamed Altneuland by its Jewish inhabitants, had other, equally flourishing cities and a thriving, irrigated agriculture. A race of Jewish fugitives had been transformed by orderly Zionist direction into a nation of successful farmers, industrialists, and businessmen. A new social and economic order had been created, too, based on a copeative economy. Women enjoyed equal rights. Ample employment opportunities, medical facilities, health and old-age insurance benefits were available for all. Education was free. Arabs and Jews lived in friendship side by side. “The Jews have enriched us,” observed one Arab notable, Reshid Bey. “Why should we have anything against them? They live with us like brothers, why should we not love them?”
The following is a summary and/or paraphrase from certain sections of a book titled *A History of Israel, from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time *, by Howard M. Sachar (1976). So, if you are interested in more details, you can read this book at your leisure.
In the 19th century, western Jews in the US and Europe accepted the premise that loyalty to a national state was incompatible with pluraism in cultures. However, not so in Russia. The most cherished features of the Russian Jewish cultural heritage was the memory of the ancestral homeland, the lost and lamented Zion that was enshrined in the ceremony and folklore of virtually every believing Jew. Russian Jews, distraught and quarantined under the tsars, clung to their accumulated sacred literature; the Holy Land was no mere featureless idyll, to be embellished in lullabies and fireside tales.
The May Laws, and the pogroms of 1881-82 and their aftermath, shattered Russian Jewry’s final lingering illusions of equality and achievement under tsarist rule. The US was initially regarded as the most likely sanctuary, but for many a continuation of minority status among Gentiles anywhere was no longer an answer. Moshe Lilienblum, the distinguished Jewish humanist, spent two days cowering in a basement as Russian mobs churned through his neighborhood. Henceforth, he regarded departure for Palestine as the one remaining solution, and he pressed this view in innumerable articles. In 1881, Smolenski wrote, too, that the time was ripe to acquire funds to emigrate to Palestine. But hundreds of thousands of Jews continued to nurture the dream of successful integration with societies. It was then that Leo Pinsker, due to an anti-Jewish outbreak in Odessa, and disillusionment by the political events in 1881, at the age of 60, promulgated his plan for Jewish survival.
Pinker’s central thesis was that normal dealings between peoples are founded on mutual respect, not live and that Jews would never get that respect because they lacked its prerequisite national equality. As a “phantom people,” the Jews inspired fear and whatever people feared, they hated. It was futile to seek the disappearance of those “natural laws.” The solution was not in the will-o’-the-wisp of emancipaton, but in a concerted attempt by the Jews to restore a national home.
By then (the late 1870s), Zionist study circles and clubs had begun to function in hundreds of cities and towns in Russia. A number adopted such titles as Ezra or Maccabi, but all were generally known as Chovevei Zion: Lovers of Zion.
In the 1890s the Chovevei Zion grew rapidly in many parts of Europe and overseas. It was then, in Vienna, Dr. Nathan Birnbaum first coined the term “Zionism.” Zionism continued to be an avant-garde within the Jewish world in the late 19th C, but it was not insignificant. Its origians traced back in part to Jewish liturgy and tradition, where the messianic image of Zion remained as tactile as the geography of the Diaspora itself.
Now to backtrack in historical perspective. The Romans laid waste to the entire Jewish nation between 70 ACE and 135, slaughtering as many as 600,000 Jews and carrying off half that number in bondage. However, a few thousand remained in the country. Heavily taxed, denied the right to visit their ancient capital, the survivors made their home in Galilee, where they farmed the land and plied their trades. In the late Roman era, this decimated Jewish community managed something of a revival. The community extended to towns, villages, and farms as far as the coastal plain. During this period, the Palestinian Talmud was compiled. The Jewish population sustained its growth well beyond the Arab conquest in the 7th C, and even under the Seljurk Turks, ultimately reaching 300,000 inhabitants by the year 1000.
This promising interlude ended abruptly, however, and quite terribly, with the arrival of the Crusaders. Thereafter, the butchery of Jews was so extensive under Christian rule that in 1169, only a thousand Jewish familes were still alive. Subsequently, under a tolerant Moslem regime, pilgrimages of Jews from overseas augmented the tiny Palestinian remnant. Well before the pressures of the Spanish Inquisition, some 5,000 Sephardic Jews (from Sepharad, the Hebrew word for Spain) had already established their preeminence among other Jews in the Holy Land, swallowing up the Musta’aribin (Arabized Jews). It was most notably the Inquisition, and finally the Spanish expulsion decree in 1492, that propelled tens of thousands of Sephardim into all corners of the Mediterranean world, and not less than 8,000 into Palestine. In the ensuing years, other Jews made their way to Palestine from the Mediterranean littoral.
At its high point, in 1890, Jewish settlement in Hebron comprised barely 1500 souls, most of the Jewish settlement being in Jerusaleum.
In the mid-18th C, Palestine was agriculture-based, but stunted in its growth by tghe depredation of tax farmers, by army recruitment, forced labor, drought, and locusts. Concentraed in four holy cities, the Jews numbered between 5,000 and 6,000 at the opening of the 19th C. An Anglo-Turkish understanding provided the stimulus for a growing European Jewish immigration, and by 1856, the Jewish population of the Holy Land exceeded 17,000.
Most of the newcomers were devoutly religious, and as a result more than a third chose to settle in Jerusalem.
It was Sir Moses Montefiore who recognized the fundamental problem of Jewish indigence in Palestine would have to be solved by creative manual labor and self-help. To that end, he negotiated in 1838 with Mehemet Ali, viceroy of Egypt (and int hose days also ruler of Syria and Palestine) for the purchase of land on which Jews might live and earn their bread without interference. In 1869, Joel Moshe Salomon and six of his friends bought a tract of land outside the city wall. In 1875, another group of Jerusalemites procured a second tract on the other side of the wall. In 1878, Salomon purchased a tract of land in the Sharon Valley.
The first aliyah (immigration wave) was between 1882 and 1903. 25,000 Jews entered Palestine. This actually was two waves of 1882-84 and 189-91. Many were Zionists, but the majority were simply refugees from tsarist oppresion. All but 5% settled in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, and Haifa.
In January 1882, a group of youthful Russians formed an emigration society, to be known as “Bilu” (a Hebrew biblical acrostic of “House of Jacob, let us go”). It was then that two Jerusalem Jews, Zalman Levontin and Joseph Feinberg, collected money from investors in Jerusalem and Europe, and acquired a tract of 100 acres, 8 miles from Jaffa. Tiny shacks were built and called “Rishon l’Zion”: First to Zion.
However, eaten alive by flies, robbed of their livestock by Bedouins, the settlers and their families began to wilt under disease, heat, and sheer exhaustion. It was then that Baron Edmund de Rothschild, offered 30,000 francs to drill a well at Rishon l’Zion. In the fall of 1884, Yechiel Pines, a Russian Jew who had emigrated to Palestine in 1878, brought with him moneys collected from various Chovevei Zion groups, and with this, and borrowed funds, purchased 2800 dunams (700 acres) of land near Yavneh, few miles from the coast.
In 1890, the tsar realized that emigration of Jews from Russia was a good thing for Russia. It was then that a society was formed in Odessa which raised $20,000 - $30,000 annually. As a result, in 1890-91, more than 3,000 Russian and Rumanian Jews departed for Palestine. However, the sheer hardships of farming in Palestine, a series of lethal malaria and typhoid epidemics, and the endless legal obstacles interposed by the Ottoman authorities, proved too heavy a burden for many hundreds of settlers.
By the end of the 19th C, 50,000 Jews remained in Palestine.
I have to shorten my summary now as I have other things to do, but suffice it to say that it was a writer, Theodor Herzl, who realized that passive receipts of charitable funds was not the answer. He urged politcal education for self-support and ultimately self-government in a land of their own. Noting that integration was not successful, he said only one solution remained: an exodus from the diaspora into a land of their own. Herzl’s Zionism was unique in many respects. It was Zionism articulated for the first time by a man of the world, a distinguished political observer and broadly traveled journalist.
By 1923 Haifa had become a glittering international city. Palestine, renamed Altneuland by its Jewish inhabitants, and other, equally flourishing cities, had a thriving, irrigated agriculture. A race of Jewish fugitives had been transformed by orderly Zionist direction into a nation of successful farmers, industrialists, and businessmen. A new social and economic order had been created, too, based on a cooperative economy. Women enjoyed equal rights. Ample employment opportunities, medical facilities, health and old-age insurance benefits were available for all. Education was free. Arabs and Jews lived in friendship side by side. “The Jews have enriched us,” observed one Arab notable, Reshid Bey. “Why should we have anything against them? They live with us like brothers, why should we not love them?”
The following is a summary and/or paraphrase from certain sections of a book titled *A History of Israel, from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time *, by Howard M. Sachar (1976). So, if you are interested in more details, you can read this book at your leisure.
In the 19th century, western Jews in the US and Europe accepted the premise that loyalty to a national state was incompatible with pluraism in cultures. However, not so in Russia. The most cherished features of the Russian Jewish cultural heritage was the memory of the ancestral homeland, the lost and lamented Zion that was enshrined in the ceremony and folklore of virtually every believing Jew. Russian Jews, distraught and quarantined under the tsars, clung to their accumulated sacred literature; the Holy Land was no mere featureless idyll, to be embellished in lullabies and fireside tales.
The May Laws, and the pogroms of 1881-82 and their aftermath, shattered Russian Jewry’s final lingering illusions of equality and achievement under tsarist rule. The US was initially regarded as the most likely sanctuary, but for many a continuation of minority status among Gentiles anywhere was no longer an answer. Moshe Lilienblum, the distinguished Jewish humanist, spent two days cowering in a basement as Russian mobs churned through his neighborhood. Henceforth, he regarded departure for Palestine as the one remaining solution, and he pressed this view in innumerable articles. In 1881, Smolenski wrote, too, that the time was ripe to acquire funds to emigrate to Palestine. But hundreds of thousands of Jews continued to nurture the dream of successful integration with societies. It was then that Leo Pinsker, due to an anti-Jewish outbreak in Odessa, and disillusionment by the political events in 1881, at the age of 60, promulgated his plan for Jewish survival.
Pinker’s central thesis was that normal dealings between peoples are founded on mutual respect, not live and that Jews would never get that respect because they lacked its prerequisite national equality. As a “phantom people,” the Jews inspired fear and whatever people feared, they hated. It was futile to seek the disappearance of those “natural laws.” The solution was not in the will-o’-the-wisp of emancipaton, but in a concerted attempt by the Jews to restore a national home.
By then (the late 1870s), Zionist study circles and clubs had begun to function in hundreds of cities and towns in Russia. A number adopted such titles as Ezra or Maccabi, but all were generally known as Chovevei Zion: Lovers of Zion.
In the 1890s the Chovevei Zion grew rapidly in many parts of Europe and overseas. It was then, in Vienna, Dr. Nathan Birnbaum first coined the term “Zionism.” Zionism continued to be an avant-garde within the Jewish world in the late 19th C, but it was not insignificant. Its origians traced back in part to Jewish liturgy and tradition, where the messianic image of Zion remained as tactile as the geography of the Diaspora itself.
Now to backtrack in historical perspective. The Romans laid waste to the entire Jewish nation between 70 ACE and 135, slaughtering as many as 600,000 Jews and carrying off half that number in bondage. However, a few thousand remained in the country. Heavily taxed, denied the right to visit their ancient capital, the survivors made their home in Galilee, where they farmed the land and plied their trades. In the late Roman era, this decimated Jewish community managed something of a revival. The community extended to towns, villages, and farms as far as the coastal plain. During this period, the Palestinian Talmud was compiled. The Jewish population sustained its growth well beyond the Arab conquest in the 7th C, and even under the Seljurk Turks, ultimately reaching 300,000 inhabitants by the year 1000.
This promising interlude ended abruptly, however, and quite terribly, with the arrival of the Crusaders. Thereafter, the butchery of Jews was so extensive under Christian rule that in 1169, only a thousand Jewish familes were still alive. Subsequently, under a tolerant Moslem regime, pilgrimages of Jews from overseas augmented the tiny Palestinian remnant. Well before the pressures of the Spanish Inquisition, some 5,000 Sephardic Jews (from Sepharad, the Hebrew word for Spain) had already established their preeminence among other Jews in the Holy Land, swallowing up the Musta’aribin (Arabized Jews). It was most notably the Inquisition, and finally the Spanish expulsion decree in 1492, that propelled tens of thousands of Sephardim into all corners of the Mediterranean world, and not less than 8,000 into Palestine. In the ensuing years, other Jews made their way to Palestine from the Mediterranean littoral.
At its high point, in 1890, Jewish settlement in Hebron comprised barely 1500 souls, most of the Jewish settlement being in Jerusaleum.
In the mid-18th C, Palestine was agriculture-based, but stunted in its growth by tghe depredation of tax farmers, by army recruitment, forced labor, drought, and locusts. Concentraed in four holy cities, the Jews numbered between 5,000 and 6,000 at the opening of the 19th C. An Anglo-Turkish understanding provided the stimulus for a growing European Jewish immigration, and by 1856, the Jewish population of the Holy Land exceeded 17,000.
Most of the newcomers were devoutly religious, and as a result more than a third chose to settle in Jerusalem.
It was Sir Moses Montefiore who recognized the fundamental problem of Jewish indigence in Palestine would have to be solved by creative manual labor and self-help. To that end, he negotiated in 1838 with Mehemet Ali, viceroy of Egypt (and int hose days also ruler of Syria and Palestine) for the purchase of land on which Jews might live and earn their bread without interference. In 1869, Joel Moshe Salomon and six of his friends bought a tract of land outside the city wall. In 1875, another group of Jerusalemites procured a second tract on the other side of the wall. In 1878, Salomon purchased a tract of land in the Sharon Valley.
The first aliyah (immigration wave) was between 1882 and 1903. 25,000 Jews entered Palestine. This actually was two waves of 1882-84 and 189-91. Many were Zionists, but the majority were simply refugees from tsarist oppresion. All but 5% settled in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, and Haifa.
In January 1882, a group of youthful Russians formed an emigration society, to be known as “Bilu” (a Hebrew biblical acrostic of “House of Jacob, let us go”). It was then that two Jerusalem Jews, Zalman Levontin and Joseph Feinberg, collected money from investors in Jerusalem and Europe, and acquired a tract of 100 acres, 8 miles from Jaffa. Tiny shacks were built and called “Rishon l’Zion”: First to Zion.
However, eaten alive by flies, robbed of their livestock by Bedouins, the settlers and their families began to wilt under disease, heat, and sheer exhaustion. It was then that Baron Edmund de Rothschild, offered 30,000 francs to drill a well at Rishon l’Zion. In the fall of 1884, Yechiel Pines, a Russian Jew who had emigrated to Palestine in 1878, brought with him moneys collected from various Chovevei Zion groups, and with this, and borrowed funds, purchased 2800 dunams (700 acres) of land near Yavneh, few miles from the coast.
In 1890, the tsar realized that emigration of Jews from Russia was a good thing for Russia. It was then that a society was formed in Odessa which raised $20,000 - $30,000 annually. As a result, in 1890-91, more than 3,000 Russian and Rumanian Jews departed for Palestine. However, the sheer hardships of farming in Palestine, a series of lethal malaria and typhoid epidemics, and the endless legal obstacles interposed by the Ottoman authorities, proved too heavy a burden for many hundreds of settlers.
By the end of the 19th C, 50,000 Jews remained in Palestine.
I have to shorten my summary now as I have other things to do, but suffice it to say that it was a writer, Theodor Herzl, who realized that passive receipts of charitable funds was not the answer. He urged politcal education for self-support and ultimately self-government in a land of their own. Noting that integration was not successful, he said only one solution remained: an exodus from the diaspora into a land of their own. Herzl’s Zionism was unique in many respects. It was Zionism articulated for the first time by a man of the world, a distinguished political observer and broadly traveled journalist.
By 1923 Haifa had become a glittering international city. Palestine, renamed Altneuland by its Jewish inhabitants, and other, equally flourishing cities, had a thriving, irrigated agriculture. A race of Jewish fugitives had been transformed by orderly Zionist direction into a nation of successful farmers, industrialists, and businessmen. A new social and economic order had been created, too, based on a cooperative economy. Women enjoyed equal rights. Ample employment opportunities, medical facilities, health and old-age insurance benefits were available for all. Education was free. Arabs and Jews lived in friendship side by side. “The Jews have enriched us,” observed one Arab notable, Reshid Bey. “Why should we have anything against them? They live with us like brothers, why should we not love them?”
I’m sorry for the triple posting, but I kept getting the message that the page could not be displayed.