“Palestinian” Patriots

Anita Engle, Kiryat Amal, Israel

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“‘Palestinian’ Patriots. KIRYAT AMAL, Israel — Passing through Ness Ziona, a settlement of private orange growers, to the south of Tel Aviv, I noticed an odd looking structure set amongst the buildings of the village. It looked like a mosque, but was very primitive, as though made of mud. ‘What is that building?’ I asked someone in the bus.

‘That’s the mosque belonging to the community of Arabs from Egypt which used to live here. They came to work in the orange groves of Ness Ziona, and fled during the War of Liberation.’

It suddenly occurred to me: Are these ex-Egyptians from Ness Ziona among the Arab refugees who are sitting in the Gaza strip, and elsewhere, demanding to be repatriated to Palestine? And what about the laborers from the Hauran, who created a shanty town suburb on the outskirts of Jaffa, on either side of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway?

For a few pitstres these ‘Palestinian’ patriots were always ready to create a disturbance. Armed with stones and cudgels, they started the murderous assault on traffic which began the riots of 1936. Are these patriots and their offspring also among the Arab refugees demanding to be returned to Palestine, at Jewish expense?

And what about all the other Arabs who began pouring into Palestine from Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan and Egypt, from 1920 onwards? It was a natural drift from countries of depressed standards to the one country in the Middle East where there was steady work, rising wages, and decreased death rate for their children.

No Accurate Estimate Available. The Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1937 (known as the Peel Report) admits that no accurate estimate can be made of the number of Arabs who have come into Palestine from neighboring Arab lands and settled there.

This incidentally, reveals an astonishing carelessness to Arab immigration as opposed to the pained anxiety with which the Palestine Administration counted every Jewish immigrant to Palestine. As many a bereaved family remembers, the Authorities even sent refugees back to gas chambers, rather than admit one more than the ‘legal’ limit.

Whatever the number of Arab immigrants into Palestine, the Peel Report records that during the first 17 years of the Jewish National Home, the Arab population in Palestine increased over 50%!

‘These are remarkable figures,’ the report admits, ‘especially in view of the general belief that the population of Palestine under the Ottoman regime was more or less stationary.’

And so if the truth were known — which appears to be the last thing that the governments concerned seem to want known — most of the so-called Palestinian Arab refugees are probably not Palestinian at all.

These miserable people who have been kept in stagnation and decay which is even a greater disgrace to the Western Powers, for it is they who have implanted the Arab governments to make political pawns of human being — at Western expense — these people would not so easily have fled if they had real roots in Palestine.

Some Arabs Remained. All around Kiryat Amal, where I live, and throughout the Galilee, there are Arab farmers, going their own way, as they have always done. There are Arab farmers all over Israel. They also must have heard the Arab leaders’ order to the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes ‘so as to clear the way for the victorious Arab armies.’

Not only were their own leaders inciting them to leave, but no less an authority than Great Britain’s Near East Arab Broadcasting Station.

Here is a quotation from a recent and shocking article on this station’s activities, as revealed by Ray Alan in American published ‘The Reporter’: ‘By playing up anti-Jewish atrocity stories and the Arab leaders’ order to the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes . . . the station . . . gave strong encouragement to the exodus that created the Arab refugee problem.’

What a slimy tissue of lies has been cast over this whole business of Arab refugees. Each Power has been so busy trying to truss up Israel and throw us to the wolves, they don’t see that they’ve got themselves hog tied, and the only country left with any freedom of action in the Middle East is Russia.”

Context added by this archive

The argument that the refugees were not really Palestinian, made in 1958 with the word in scare quotes in the headline. It is one of the clearest statements in the archive of the claim the collection is assembled against, and it is printed here in full.

Cite this clipping

"“Palestinian” Patriots," Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, 21 February 1958, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1958-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1958-001

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