The audacious lie about the occupation is based, of course, on a bigger, more basic falsehood: namely, that Israel stole ?Palestinian Arab lands? and that the PLO is fighting for the restitution of these illegally ‘occupied lands,’ especially those ostensibly usurped for Israeli ‘settlements’ (which occupy, in fact, less than three percent of the West Bank’s area, and were built on empty government-owned land).
Palestinian propagandists insist that contemporary Jews are not descended from Biblical Jews, and have usurped ‘Palestinian Arab lands’ in three stages. They first allegedly penetrated Palestine in the late 18th century, settling it by stealth under imperial colonialist protection. Then in 1948, after the U.N. partition, they took more land by force, displacing an indigenous Palestinian Arab population fighting for self-determination. Finally, in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel aggressively expanded, occupying the ‘West Bank’ and the Gaza Strip and holding its Palestinian inhabitants in bondage, as they have ever since.
Historical fact, however, belies this enticingly simplistic narrative. The disputed territories, together with the territories that are now Israel and Jordan, were originally (in Biblical and post-Biblical times) Jewish kingdoms, and for most of the last seven centuries part of the Ottoman Empire. After the defeat and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the First World War, the League of Nations divided most of its former possessions in the 1922 peace conference. The Arabs were granted rights to most of the formerly Turkish-controlled lands, to an area that was 500 times larger in size than the small area reserved for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The British received an international mandate over Palestine because they undertook to establish a Jewish national home there, which the League considered an act of ?restoration? of ancient Jewish rights to the land that outweighed any Arab claims based on later conquest and residence.
At first, the Arab representatives to the Versailles conference gladly accepted this division. It gave them control over vast areas lost centuries ago, without requiring them to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of soldiers, as the Allies had, to liberate these lands from Turkish dominion. They did not then consider the tiny sliver of South Syrian wasteland, known to Jews as Judea and Samaria and to the Europeans as the Holy Land, of any significance, politically or religiously, and were happy to give it up in exchange for what they so surprisingly gained. The Emir Faisal, who represented the Arabs, signed a draft agreement with the Zionist movement, welcoming the Jews back to their homeland and pledging cooperation.
So the disputed territories of the West Bank and the Gaza strip were never ?Palestinian lands? neither as national patrimony nor as private property. In fact, until the institution of the British mandate, the Holy Land never had a separate political identity or a distinct people inhabiting it. It was a neglected province of South Syria, whose few and destitute Arab inhabitants considered themselves South Syrians. As Bernard Lewis notes, ?From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries…within a larger entity? of Syria.
Indeed, to date, 93 percent of the land in what was the British Mandate including the lands of the West Bank are still government-owned. They were so despoiled, malaria-infected, and sparsely populated that no private owners evinced any interest in owning them, so they were kept by the sultan and then inherited by the British Mandate in safekeeping for the Jews.
It was only toward the end of the 18th century, when a growing stream of Jewish immigrants rehabilitated the land draining swamps, reclaiming deserts, and controlling the diseases (chiefly malaria) that a decimated Arab population began increasing. The resuscitation of the land by the Jews and the economic opportunity they created brought an influx of Arab immigrants from dirt-poor neighboring Arab states to swell the number of Arabs in Palestine.
