Israel/Land Purchases

• Wikipedia: Jewish land purchase in Palestine

• Is it true that Israel stole Palestinian land? [1]

• Population in Palestine/Israel from the 1800s to 1947 Short 🧵 1. Jews began legally purchasing land in Ottoman Palestine from the late 1800s

• In April of 1948, about a month before the invading Arab armies attacked the nascent State of Israel, in the urban center with the largest Arab population, the Jews were appealing for the Arabs to stay while the Arab leaders were imploring the Arabs to leave. The local Arabs thought that the invading Arab states would annihilate the Jews and that they ( the Arabs) would then return to the state the Jews had re-built from nothing (over a period of more than 100 years) and enjoy the fruits of Jewish labor and capital.

• Between 1891 and 1894, Baron Edmond James de Rothschild purchased nearly 80,000 dunams (30 miles sq.) of land consisting of 16 villages in southern Syria for Jewish settlement. In 1899, the Pasha of Damascus expelled the Jews from all of Rothschild’s estates. Between 1904–08, a group of Crimean Jews settled in the Bethsaida Valley, initially as tenants of a Kurdish proprietor with the prospects of purchasing the land, but the arrangement faltered. In 1921–1930, during the French Mandate, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PJCA) obtained the deeds to the Rothschild estate and continued to manage it, collecting rents from the Arab peasants living there. In 1944, the Syrian Land Settlement Campaign refused to recognize the foreign owned PJCA as the legal owners of the land and the Syrian government confiscated it without compensation on the grounds that “it was contrary to Syrian policy to allow Jews to own land in Syria.” The JNF still lays claim to the land.

• In 1948 almost all Jews in #Israel lived on large land blocs legally owned by Jews.

See also

• Palestine/Land Sale

• Israel/Refugees

• Palestine/Malaria