First Zionist Congress held in Basel Switzerland. Lead by Theodr Hrzl, founder of the modern Zionist movement. The Basel program declared “Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.” […]
Click to Read from 1897: First Zionist Congress
The Jewish National Fund was the principal Zionist tool for the colonialism of Palestine. Jews started buying Arab land and evicting the Palestinian tenant farmers. Much of the land was held by the JNF as ‘custodian’ on behalf of the Jewish people. The land was then used to settle Jewish immigrants.
During the Mandatory years through the Nakba, Yossef Weitz headed the settlement department. The Jewish Agency bought most of their land from absentee landlords who who registered the land out from under peasant farmers and then sold that land to the Jewish Agency, who would promptly evict the farmers who had lived on that land for hundred if not thousands of years.
Sometimes, these evictions were forcible. Forced to abandon their traditional way of life, displaced peasant farmers moved to urban areas, where economic opportunities were limited. This influx of dispossessed farmers into cities created a sense of anger and frustration among them, contributing to social and political tensions that played a significant role in the Arab-Israeli “conflict”. […]
Click to Read from 1901: Jewish National Fund starts buying land
Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros with the Allies on October 30, 1918, which ended its hostilities in the war. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was a gradual process, but the armistice marked the Empire’s official exit from World War I and set the stage for its eventual dissolution in the following years. […]
The Paris Peace Conference was a set of formal and informal diplomatic meetings in 1919 and 1920 after the end of World War I, in which the victorious Allies set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers. Dominated by the leaders of Britain, France, the United States and Italy, the talks resulted in five […]
The 1929 Palestine riots, Buraq Uprising (Arabic: ثورة البراق, Thawrat al-Burāq), was a series of demonstrations and riots in late August 1929 in which a longstanding dispute between Muslims and Jews over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem escalated into violence. On August 15, 1929, group of 300 Revisionist Zionist youth, who were militant […]
Click to Read from 1929: Arab Revolt
The Peel Commission, formally known as the Palestine Royal Commission, was established in 1937 to investigate the causes of the Arab unrest and general strike of 1936. Their official finding, issued on July 7, 1937, was that the League of Nations Mandate had become unworkable, and recommended partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. […]
Click to Read from 1937 – Peel Commission Recommends Partition
There were many different strains of Zionism. One, adhered to by Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt advocated for the creation of a Jewish homeland but not the establishment of an exclusive Jewish state. In this homeland, Jews would peacefully cohabitate alongside Arabs and others of varied religions (not unlike what had been taking place in […]