How Israel was carved out of Palestine

By Online Editor on 14th April 2021 • ( 0 )

How Israel was carved out of Palestine

Today is the independence day of Israel. In 1933, Jews were only 12% of the total population and held 3% of the total land in Palestine. In 1948 after carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, they seized 80% of the area.

When Palestine was partitioned by the UN in 1947 without the consent of Palestinians, the Jews, who owned less than six per cent of the total land area of Palestine and constituted no more than one third of the population at the time of partition, were handed more than half of its overall territory. Within the borders of the UN-proposed state, they owned only eleven per cent of the land, and were the minority in every district. Palestine was proposed to be divided into three parts by the UN.

On forty-two per cent of the land, 818,000 Palestinians were to have a state that included 10,000 Jews, while the state for the Jews was to stretch over almost fifty-six per cent of the land which 499,000 Jews were to share with 438,000 Palestinians.

The third part was a small enclave around the city of Jerusalem which was to be internationally governed and whose population of 200,000 was equally divided between Palestinians and Jews.

But the Zionists under Ben Gurion’s Plan Dalet took over 80% of the land after carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The same Palestinians who gave their houses to the Jews during the Ottoman empire when Europe threw them out and they had arrived wretched.

During the Nakba, more than half of Palestine’s native population close to 800,000 was uprooted and 531 villages were destroyed by the Zionists. Qisarya was the first village to be expelled on 15 Feb 1948 followed by the destruction of 4 other villages on the same day.

Jordan had the strongest army among the Arabs at that time. But after WW2, Abdullah, scion of the Hashemite royal family who were ruling Jordan colluded with Ben Gurion over how to divide post-mandatory Palestine.

Abdullah promised not to join any all-Arab military operations against the Jewish state and the Jewish community was ‘willing’ to give up this part of Palestine, even though it included some biblical Jewish sites, such as the city of Hebron (al-Khalil).

Hashemite had fought alongside the British in WW1 against the Ottomans. In reward for their services to the crown, the Hashemites had been granted the kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan that the Mandate system had created.

Palestinian sources, combining Israeli military archives with oral historians list 31 confirmed massacres of the innocent people of Palestine by the Zionists beginning with the massacre in Tirat Haifa on 11 Dec 1947 and ending with Khirbat Ilin in the Hibron area on 19 Jan 1949.