Rebuttal note: Violence Against Jews Before 1948 uses the 1834 Safed/Hebron pogroms below to counter “the Arabs welcomed Jews peacefully.”
Chronology
[line-3, body-2, active-color-interactive-accent]
date: 1818
title: More Jews than Muslims in Jerusalem
content: Robert Richardson, physician to the Earl of Belmore, estimated 10,000 Jews in the city — twice the number of Muslims.
[[1800-1899#1818: More Jews than Muslims in Jerusalem|→ full entry]]
date: 1834
title: Looting of Safed
content: Arab and Druze attackers spent 33 days looting, killing and raping, taking advantage of a defenceless population during the Peasants' Revolt against Egyptian rule. 13 synagogues and 500 Torah scrolls destroyed.
[[1800-1899#^77fa0c|→ full entry]]
date: 1834
title: Battle of Hebron
content: Seven Jewish men and five girls killed; synagogues desecrated and homes ransacked. Isaac Farhi described it as worse than the plunder of Safed — the community did not fully recover until 1858.
[[1800-1899#^cff289|→ full entry]]
date: 1838
title: Druze attack on Safed
content: During the Druze revolt against Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt, rebels and a Muslim mob spent three days attacking Jews in Safed, plundering homes and desecrating synagogues.
[[1800-1899#^a1d88a|→ full entry]]
date: 1839
title: Allahdad pogrom in Persia
content: Pogrom against the Jewish community in Persia.
[[1800-1899#^ba6c73|→ full entry]]
date: 1880
title: Jewish land purchases begin
content: Organised purchasing starts, concentrated on uncultivated, swampy and tenant-free land bought at high prices, mostly from large and often absentee landowners rather than from fellahin.
[[1800-1899#1880: Jewish Land Purchases in Palestine|→ full entry]]
date: 1881 – 1884
title: Pogroms in the Russian Empire
content: Waves of anti-Jewish violence across the empire, driving mass Jewish emigration westward and to Palestine.
[[1800-1899#1881-1884: Pogroms in the Russian Empire|→ full entry]]
date: 1882
title: First Aliyah begins
content: Zionist settlers begin arriving from Eastern Europe and Yemen. Roughly 20,000–25,000 Jews were living in Palestine in the 1870s.
[[1800-1899#1882: Zionist settles begin to come|→ full entry]]
date: 1886
title: Attack at Petah Tikva
content: An elderly Jewish woman was killed in the attack on Petah Tikva.
[[1800-1899#^9d1771|→ full entry]]
date: 1897
title: First Zionist Congress
content: The First Zionist Congress convenes.
[[1800-1899#1897: First Zionist Congress|→ full entry]]Zionism
1818: More Jews than Muslims in Jerusalem
- In 1818, Robert Richardson, family doctor to the Earl of Belmore, estimated the number of Jews to be 10,000, twice the number of Muslims.20(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Jerusalem#cite_note-Richardson1822-20)[[21]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Jerusalem#cite_note-21)
Demographic history of Jerusalem
1834 looting of Safed (Pogram against Jews in Ottoman Empire)
- 1834 looting of Safed - Wikipedia ^6b5d42
- Perpetrators: Arabs and Druze
- Last 33 days
- Took advantage of defenseless population
- Took place during 1834 Peasants’ Revolt against Egyptian rule
- Large scale looting
- Killing and raping
- Destruction of homes and synagogues
- 13 synagogues and 500 Torah scrolls destroyed
- Hundreds fled
- blamed the incident on the intolerant rantings of a local Muslim cleric named Muhammad Damoor. The account stated that at the beginning of 1834, Damoor publicly prophesied that on June 15 the “true believers would rise up in just wrath against the Jews, and despoil them of their gold and their silver and their jewels.”
1834 Battle of Hebron
- Battle of Hebron - Wikipedia
- 12 Jews killed
- In the end, seven Jewish men and five girls were killed. Isaac Farhi also described violent attacks on the Jews of Hebron committed by Egyptian soldiers. He writes that the attack in Hebron was even worse than the plunder in Safed. Synagogues were desecrated, houses were ransacked, and valuable items were stolen leaving the Jewish community of Hebron destitute. The massacre succeeded in uniting Hebron’s Sephardic and Ashkenasic communities, but it took until 1858 for the community to fully recover.
1838 Druze attack on Safed
- 1838 Druze attack on Safed - Wikipedia
- during the Druze revolt against the rule of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt
- The Druze rebels and a Muslim mob descended on the Jewish quarter of Safed and, in scenes reminiscent of the Safed plunder four years earlier, spent three days attacking Jews, plundering their homes and desecrating their synagogues.
1839: Allahdad Pogram in Iran
1880: Jewish Land Purchases in Palestine
Jewish Land Purchases in Palestine (1880–1947)
Malaria in Mandatory Palestine - Wikipedia
Myths & Facts - The Mandatory Period
Jewish_Land_purchase_in_Palestine (file not included in this release)
- Despite the growth in their population, the Arabs continued to assert they were being displaced. The truth is from the beginning of World War I, part of Palestine’s land was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut. About 80 percent of the Palestinian Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads and Bedouins.
- Jews went out of their way to avoid purchasing land in areas where Arabs might be displaced. They sought land that was largely uncultivated, swampy, cheap and, most important, without tenants. In 1920, Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion expressed his concern about the Arab fellahin, whom he viewed as “the most important asset of the native population.” David Ben-Gurion said, “under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them.” He advocated helping liberate them from their oppressors. “Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement,” Ben-Gurion added, “should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.”
- It was only after the Jews had bought all this available land that they began to purchase cultivated land. Many Arabs were willing to sell because of the migration to coastal towns and because they needed money to invest in the citrus industry.
- When John Hope Simpson arrived in Palestine in May 1930, he observed: “They [Jews] paid high prices for the land, and in addition they paid to certain of the occupants of those lands a considerable amount of money which they were not legally bound to pay.”
- In 1931, Lewis French conducted a survey of landlessness and eventually offered new plots to any Arabs who had been “dispossessed.” British officials received more than 3,000 applications, of which 80 percent were ruled invalid by the Government’s legal adviser because the applicants were not landless Arabs. This left only about 600 landless Arabs, 100 of whom accepted the Government land offer.
- Even at the height of the Arab revolt in 1938, the British High Commissioner for Palestine believed the Arab landowners were complaining about sales to Jews to drive up prices for lands they wished to sell. Many Arab landowners had been so terrorized by Arab rebels they decided to leave Palestine and sell their property to the Jews.
- The Jews were paying exorbitant prices to wealthy landowners for small tracts of arid land. “In 1944, Jews paid between $1,000 and $1,100 per acre in Palestine, mostly for arid or semiarid land; in the same year, rich black soil in Iowa was selling for about $110 per acre.”
- By 1947, Jewish holdings in Palestine amounted to about 463,000 acres. Approximately 45,000 of these acres were acquired from the Mandatory Government; 30,000 were bought from various churches and 387,500 were purchased from Arabs. Analyses of land purchases from 1880 to 1948 show that 73 percent of Jewish plots were purchased from large landowners, not poor fellahin. Those who sold land included the mayors of Gaza, Jerusalem, and Jaffa. As’ad Shuqeiri, a Muslim religious scholar and father of the first PLO chairman, Ahmad Shuqeiri, took Jewish money for his land. Even King Abdullah leased land to the Jews. In fact, many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including members of the Muslim Supreme Council, sold land to Jews.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-arabs-in-palestine - All the land that the Jews purchased, only 20% Arab lived on there.
Pages_from_Israel_Notes-7 1.pdf (file not included in this release)
1881-1884: Pogroms in the Russian Empire
1882: Zionist settles begin to come
- 20,000-25,000 Jews living in Palestine in the 1870s.
- Eastern Europe & Yemen
- 25,000
- Zionism
1886: Arabs killed a older Jewish Woman
1897: First Zionist Congress
Misc
- 1881-1914: 2 million Jews fled Russia to the United States
- 1881-1930s: Europe uninhabitable for the Jews
- Zionist movement created to get out of Russia and Europe—fleeing to Israel
- Palestinian observers increasingly interpreted the newcomers as foreign colonists or as a national movement that might gain European protection. Many Jewish migrants were also refugees. Those descriptions are not mutually exclusive; test settlement structure, political aims, and local effects rather than deciding by motive alone. → Colonizers · Early Arab Responses to Zionism (1882–1914)
- Some suspected Russian or German geopolitical sponsorship; suspicion is evidence of contemporary perception, not proof that migrants were agents of those governments.
- Israeli’s are a refugee people with nowhere to go and that’s why they can’t be terrorized away.
- Mark Twain Visiting Palestine
https://blog.nli.org.il/en/mark-twain-in-palestineTwain was fed up with the primitiveness of the settlements and roads he encountered: “The further we went the hotter the sun got, and the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became…There was hardly a tree or a shrub any where. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country”.
Twain states that “Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? Palestine is no more of this work-day world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition – it is dream-land.” - During the Annual General Meeting of the PEF in 1875, the Earl of Shaftesbury said of Palestine, “We have there a land teeming with fertility and rich in history, but almost without an inhabitant – a country without a people, and look! scattered over the world, a people without a country.”
- As late as 1880, the American consul in Jerusalem reported the area was continuing its historic decline. “The population and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last forty years,” he said.
- The late American economist Fred M. Gottheil published an article titled “The Population of Palestine, circa 1875” in 1979 in the journal Middle Eastern Studies. In it Gottheil refers to the writings and reports of 13 additional mid-19th century observers, including James Finn, the British consul for Palestine. All of them, he writes, report that Palestine is a desolate and underpopulated place.
- Gottheil undertook a detailed statistical analysis of the population. Using data from the best available sources, such as that provided by the Palestine Exploration Fund, a British Society organized in 1865 to study the geography and demographics of the Southern Levant (Palestine), Gottheil concluded that the population of Palestine in 1875 would be, at most, a little less than half a million, confirming the observation by several observers that it was underpopulated.
Was Mark Twain’s depiction of Israel in the 1800s accurate? - The Jerusalem Post
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-arabs-in-palestine
1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus - Wikipedia
What Did Herman Melville Find on His 1857 Trip to Jerusalem? Dust, Flies, and Piles of Rocks. - Tablet Magazine
Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel 1922-1931
Israel_Notes_4.pdf (file not included in this release)
Palestine was not ruled as one political or administrative entity but as a collection of subdistricts, governed from the provincial capitals of Damascus or Beirut, or in the case of the Jerusalem subdistrict, directly from Istanbul One State, Two States Resolving the Israel Palestine — Prof Benny Morris — 2009 flattened, page 40 (file not included in this release)
Palestine at the time was not ruled as a united, single, separate administrative entity. It was subdivided into districts, each ruled from a distant capital One State, Two States Resolving the Israel Palestine — Prof Benny Morris — 2009 flattened, page 48 (file not included in this release)
under the Ottomans the area traditionally known as “Palestine” (eretz yisrael in Hebrew or falastin in Arabic) was undefined administratively or politically, and its inhabitants, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, rarely defined themselves as “Palestinians.” (Arabs living in the pre-Crusader district en- compassing southern and central Palestine, jund falastin, already from the eighth century sometimes referred to themselves, in a geographical sense, as filastini, or Palestinian. But they never used the term filastini as a political designation.) One State, Two States Resolving the Israel Palestine — Prof Benny Morris — 2009 flattened, page 49 (file not included in this release)
Muslims subsequently adopted the term, although one thirteenth- century Arab text refers only to “the land around Jerusalem” (as far north as Nablus) as al-ard al-muqaddasa (the holy land) and the term al-quds (the holy) was used only for Jerusalem itself. As for Palestine, to many Muslims it was no more sacred than, say, Syria or Iraq or Egypt. One State, Two States Resolving the Israel Palestine — Prof Benny Morris — 2009 flattened, page 49 (file not included in this release)