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
The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 announcing British support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The statement came in the form of a letter from Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, […]
The partition of the Ottoman Empire (30 October 1918 – 1 November 1922) was a geopolitical event that occurred after World War I and the occupation of Istanbul by British, French, and Italian troops in November 1918. The partitioning was planned in several agreements made by the Allied Powers early in the course of World […]
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
In February of 1947, Britain announced it would end it’s mandate in Palestine the following year. Arabs and Zionists had failed to reach an agreement about Palestine, and 53,500 illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine were being held in camps in Cyprus. On November 29 1947, the UN proposed partitioning Palestine into 3 sections: a Palestinian […]
Britain announces it will end the Palestinian mandate and leave Palestine. There are no plans about what will happen next. A joint Jewish-Arab conference in London in September 1946 ended in deadlock. The Palestinian position had not changed since the revolt. The Jewish Agency refused to participate with its staff in detention camps. Tens of […]
Click to Read from 1947- Britain Announces End of Palestinian Mandate