Strategy Of Conquest: Part 8 (The Butchery Begins II "Seizure of the Land")

It is appropriate to review the pervasiveness of this murderous policy and its consequences. In the territory which came under Israeli occupation after Partition there were approximately 950,000 Palestinian Arabs. They inhabited nearly 500 villages and all the major cities, which included Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Shafa Amr, Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Lydda, Ramle, Jerusalem, Majdal (Ashqelon), Isdud (Ashdod) and Beersheba.

After less than six months only 138,000 people remained. (Figures vary from 130,000 to 165,000.) The great majority of Palestinians were killed, forcibly expelled or fled in panic before slaughtering bands of Israeli army units.

Having thus eliminated most of the Palestinian inhabitants from the land of Palestine, the Israeli government undertook the systematic destruction of their homes and possessions. Nearly 400 villages and towns were razed to the ground during 1948 and 1949. More followed in the 1950s.

Moshe Dayan, former Chief of Staff and Minister of Defense, was uninhibited in his summary of the nature of Zionist colonization before students at the Israel Institute of Technology (The Techniyon): “We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs, and we are building here a Hebrew, Jewish state. Instead of Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You do not even know the names of these villages and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only the books, but also the villages do not exist”

Nahalal was established in place of Mahalul, Gevat in place of Jibta, Sarid in the place of Hanifas and Kafr Yehoushu’a in the place of Tel Shamam. There is not a single settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab village.

The following table was prepared by Israel Shahak, Chairperson of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, under the heading "Arab Villages Destroyed in Israel: 1. Jerusalem, 37 villages, 29 distroyed, 2. Bethlehem, 7 villages, 7 distroyed, 3. Hebron, 16 villages, 16 distroyed, 4. Jaffa, 23 villages, 23 distroyed, 5. Ramle, 31 villages, 31 distroyed, Lydda, 28 villages, 28 distroyed, and 6. Jenin, 8 villages, 4 distroyed.

Shahak stresses that this documented list is incomplete because it is impossible to find numerous Arab communities and "tribes". Israeli official data characterize, for example, 44 Bedouin villages and towns as "tribes", to reduce, by census contrivance, the number of permanent Palestinian communities.

With the expulsion of the Palestinians and the destruction of their towns and villages, vast amounts of property were seized under the rubric of the "Absentee Property Law" (1950).

Until 1947, Jewish land ownership in Palestine was some 6%. By the time the state was formally established, it had sequestered 90% of the land. Of the entire area of the state of Israel only about 300,000 to 400,000 dunums (67,000-89,000 acres) are state domain which the Israeli government took over from the Mandatory regime (British Mandate), that is 2%. The J.N.F. (Jewish National Fund) and private Jewish owners possess under two million dunums; that is 10%. Almost all the rest, i.e., 88% of the 20,225,000 dunums (4,500,000 acres) within the 1949 armistice lines, belongs in law to Arab owners, many of whom have left the country. The value of this stolen property was over $300 million over thirty years ago. (Arab League estimates are ten times this amount.) In current dollars, this figure would have to be quadrupled. The U.N. Refugee Office estimated the value of Arab abandoned orchards, trees, movable and immovable property in the territory under Israeli jurisdiction was about 118-120 million Pounds Sterling, an average of £130 ($364) per refugee. The seizure of Palestinian property was indispensable to make Israel a viable state. Between 1948 and 1953, 370 Jewish towns and settlements were established. Three hundred fifty were on "absentee" property.

By 1954, some 35% of Israel’s Jews lived on property confiscated from absentees and some 250,000 new immigrants settled in urban areas from which Palestinians had been expelled. Entire cities had been emptied of Palestinians, such as Jaffa, Acre, Lydda, Ramle, Bisan and Majdal (Ashqelon). This plunder embraced 385 towns and villages in their entirety and large sections of 94 other cities and towns, containing 25% of all buildings in Israel. Ten thousand businesses and retail stores were handed over to Jewish settlers.

From 1948 to 1953; the period of greatest immigration, the economic importance to Israel of seized Arab property was decisive. The amount of cultivatable land seized from Palestinians driven from their country by massacre was two and one half times the total area of land granted the Zionists with the end of the mandate. Virtually all citrus groves of Palestinians were seized, consisting of more than 240,000 dunums (53,000 acres).

By 1951, 1.25 million boxes of citrus from seized Arab groves were in Israeli hands - 10% of the country’s hard currency profits from export.

By 1951, 95% of all Israel’s olive groves came from seized Palestinian land. Olive produce from stolen Palestinian groves represented Israel’s third largest export - after citrus and diamonds. One third of all stone production came from 52 seized Palestinian quarries.

Zionist mythology includes the claim that Zionist industry, dedication and skill transformed an otherwise barren desert land, neglected by its primitive nomadic Arab custodians, into a garden, making the desert bloom. Palestinian orchards, industry, rolling stock, factories, houses and possessions were pillaged after slaughtering conquest; the Ship of State a vessel of pirates, its proper flag a skull and crossbones.