No. This is the fake history a yes is based on:
“Is it in any way just, that the Arabs, who have lived on this land uninterruptedly for 1300 years, and whose lives are rooted in its soil — should be dispossessed by force, should be pushed aside, and should be blackmailed to enable the Zionist Jews to fashion a Jewish National Home on this land. That‘s the problem…” (Jamal Husseini at the Round Table Conference, London, February 9, 1939)
In The Claim of Dispossession (1984), the historian Arieh Avneri meticulously documents the process of Arab and non-Arab Muslim immigration, local Arab emigration and Jewish (Ashkenazi and Mizrahi) land settlement:
From 19th and early 20th century travelers’ accounts.
British mandatory and Ottoman government documents.
Jewish Agency land purchase records and settler memoirs
Avneri documents Palestine’s demographic upheavals triggered by:
War, malaria & increased concentrated absentee Arab land ownership.
The WWI and mandatory era economic boom triggered by Jewish land reclamation capital investment and British military and infrastructure spending.
The demographic delusion underlying today’s Palestinians’ jihadi War of Return is that they’re all indigenous to the land they claim, whether since the 7th century or since Jews created Judea by conquering Canaan.
Labeling any of these immigrants “indigenous” to where they clustered with their Landsman (Yiddish for compatriots) is clearly nonsense. The Algerian, Egyptian and Sudanesse immigrants to Ottoman and mandatory Palestine were no more indigenous than the Italians and Irish to Boston and Brooklyn, or my Ukrainian Jewish grandparents were to New York.
Mid 19th to early 20th century Arab society had a clear intra-Muslim racial pecking order, with blacks, often freed slaves, at the bottom, then Egyptians and Mugrabis (westerners) at the top:
“In the same report to the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly, 1893, Baldensperger describes the Mugrabis of Jaffa, who had migrated to the country over the years. They tended to live near the mosques and were employed as watchmen in the citrus groves and in the fields. Some established themselves permanently. Most of them had passed through Jaffa on their way to Mecca and some Mugrabis intermarried with the local Moslems, something that the Egyptians and blacks had not succeeded in doing.” (Avneri, page 17)
Who’s local and who’s not?
If the descendants of the 851,000 Jews expelled and expropriated from Arab lands since Baghdad’s Farhud pogrom of 1941 aren’t “local,” then neither are the Egyptian Masris of Nablus and Ramallah. Clearly a higher standard for “local” — indigeneity — is applied to Jews returning to their ancestral homeland than to Arabs coming from the Maghreb, Egypt, Iraq and Syria.
If the great grandchildren of the Eastern European Jews who reclaimed the malaria-ridden swamps of the Ottoman-ruled vilayet called Southern Syria aren’t local, then neither are the descendants of the Haurani, Syrian, Egyptian, Algerian, Circassian and Iraqi refugees and laborers who found jobs in the ports, railroads and building sites created by the British army and Jewish capital investment after centuries of Ottoman neglect.
That UNRWA classified anyone who’d been living in mandatory Palestine only since June 1, 1946 legitimized this false indigeneity.
On both far right and far left Jews are portrayed as rootless cosmopolitans, the ultimate “anywhere people” indigenous to nowhere and foreign everywhere. This ancient anti-Semitic trope drives how Hamas and Fatah’s western wokeratis frame their libel that “Israel is a white settler colonial state” and lives on “stolen land.” This disinformation would never succeed without this kind of fake demographic history:
Mythologized demography has successfully branded the Arabs as the opposite, as the quintessential anti-cosmopolitan “somewhere people”, possessing 13 centuries worth of indigeneity. In reality, they were no more local than the Jews against whom they launched the self-declared war of extermination in 1948 that triggered their self-inflicted Nakba.
The facts of Palestine’s demographic history of inbound and outbound population exchanges have exposed this localist branding as utterly fraudulent. Othering Israel’s Jews as foreign settler colonizers is classic double standards anti-Semitism, not just anti-Zionism.
It gives a free pass to Palestine to the 19th and 20th century Arab descendants of immigrants from Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Circassia, Turkmenistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Iraq and Persia, while denying it to Jews expelled and expropriated from exactly those countries. If that isn’t anti-Semitism, then nothing is.
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/palestinians-nakba-stolen-land-myth-ac8d1849166d
Sources:
The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs, 1878–1948, Arieh Avneri, 1984 (https://archive.org/details/claimofdisposses00avne_0/page/n3/mode/2up)
The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (https://fathomjournal.org/book-review-review-of-the-war-of-return-how-western-indulgence-of-the-palestinian-dream-has-obstructed-the-path-to-peace/)
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, Joan Peters, 1984 (https://www.amazon.com/Time-Immemorial-Arab-Jewish-Conflict-Palestine/dp/0963624202)
