Does Palestine Want To Be Zionized?

Correspondent Finds Remarkable Union Between Christians and Mohammedans Opposing Settlement of "Their Country" by Jews

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“JERUSALEM, June 30.—The greatest peril to the peace of Palestine is Zionism. The little link between the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa which is Palestine, has seen more fighting than any other land in the world during its 5,000 years of history. It will see another war unless Zionism is arrested.

Given peaceful development under British direction, it will develop into the peak of the British Empire… Before the ‘menace’ of Zionism, Moslems and Christians alike are united. Never before have these two religions sunk their differences as they have sunk them before the common peril of Jewish colonization. They are no longer enemies.

They are Palestinians. It is Zionist money that they fear. Turkish tax collectors have left Palestine a poverty-stricken country. The ‘osher’ has left its mark everywhere in the arrested development of Palestine.

For years, the ‘osher,’ the principal tax in the Ottoman Empire, was sold by public tender in Palestine and was collected by its purchaser or tax farmer, whose primary interest was collecting many times the amount he paid for it. The only limit to the amount he could collect was the necessity of avoiding a complaint to the Porte.

Provided the tax farmer did not provoke a revolt, he could rob right and left. The result is that today the number of Moslems in Palestine whose personal fortunes exceed [figure illegible] could be named on the fingers of one hand. The vast majority of Palestinians live from day to day.

Zionism, however, commands unlimited wealth… Unless Zionism is checked at once, it will succeed in the next few years in buying up all the good land in Palestine and in peopling it with Jewish colonies, leaving the 7[5]0,000 present inhabitants of Palestine as hirelings and strangers in their own homeland. None knows this better than the Palestinians themselves.

Their answer to it is the Mohammedan-Christian Society, an organization whose headquarters is in Jerusalem and whose branch offices now cover Palestine like a blanket. Its governing board consists of thirty Moslems and ten Christians.”

Context added by this archive

A correspondent writing from Jerusalem in 1919 uses “Palestinians” as a national noun and defines it on the page: Moslems and Christians who stopped being enemies. He names their organization, the Mohammedan-Christian Society, and counts its board.

He also counts them on the same page — 600,000 Arabs, 75,000 Christians, 75,000 Jews — and says what he expects will happen to them. Forty-five years before the PLO was founded.

Cite this clipping

"Does Palestine Want To Be Zionized?," San Antonio Express, 13 July 1919, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1919-010. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1919-010

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