Ironically, many of the strongest opponents of Jewish land purchases were also the people who profited most from them. A brief list of Arab leaders who sold land to Jews includes Fahmi el-Husayni, mayor of Gaza; Ragheb Nashashibi, mayor of Jerusalem and founder of the National Defense Party, Mussa el- Alami, government advocate of the Palestine Government and a member of the Arab Higher Committee; As’ad el-Shuqairi, father of Ahmed Shuqairi, the first chairman of the PLO; and Jamal el-Husayni, who is quoted at the beginning of this essay.
Of course, the Arab leadership attempted to suppress this information, but it was brought to public attention by Lewis French, the first director of the British Mandatory Government’s Department of Development. The news of the Arab leadership’s hypocrisy eventually led to the collapse of the Arab Executive (the governing Arab body in the Mandate) in the early 1930s. It would not be until 1936 that another body of political leadership would come to exist, in the form of the Arab Higher Committee.
Husayni’s claim of 1300 years of uninterrupted Arab presence in Palestine is clearly a convenient simplification. Any statements about the demographics of Palestine before 1948 must recognize the country’s dynamic history. The first half of the 20th century was a period of sweeping changes for the land and all the people living on it — Arab and Jew.
After remaining nearly stagnant for centuries, the population exploded in modern times due to improved infrastructure, agriculture, and immigration, both Jewish and Arab. As a result, from 1890 to 1947, in less than sixty years, the population grew from 532,000 to 1,845,560. The Arab population of Palestine grew more from 1922 to 1947 than it had over the previous 400 years.
But the population shift that would occur over the following three years, as a result of the U.N. partition plan and the Arab-Israeli war, would be so momentous that it almost makes this prior data seem irrelevant. Each side blames the other for the consequences of the war, but even Benny Morris, the historian who argued that the Palestinian refugee problem was caused in part by Israeli military actions, points out that ”the [refugee] problem was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians — and, in their wake, the surrounding Arab states — had launched.”
From the beginning, it was Arab intolerance of the Jewish presence that caused the widespread opposition to Israel, an intolerance that resulted in the war of 1948. Jews, of course, had not chosen arbitrarily to immigrate to this area of the world. Moreover, they did so legally and with positive effects. As evidenced by the massive growth in population, the improvement of agriculture, and increased wages, the claim against Jewish return to Palestine was not pragmatic but ideological.
The idea of a Jewish state as such was, from the beginning, anathema to the Arabs living there, and they sought to discredit and defeat it by any means possible. It is in this context that the birth of the Arab-Israeli conflict must be considered.
(From the Spring 2002 issue of Harvard Israel Review — hcs.harvard.edu/~hireview/toc.html)
