Read “A Muslim Aliyah Paralleled the Jewish Aliyah” by Daniel Pipes here…
The beginning:
“So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country
[Palestine] and multiplied till their population has increased.”
— Winston Churchill in 1938“[T]he Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded
the total Jewish immigration during this whole period.”
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939Famously, Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, called aliyah, is centuries old and took on an organized form in 1882. Described as “the central goal of the State of Israel” (in the words of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon), it provides the demographic basis on which the entire Zionist enterprise rests. Both very public and highly controversial, it has inspired millions of Jews to move to territories now under Israeli control.
Much less famously, a large and diverse non-Jewish immigration to Palestine (meaning here, roughly Gaza, the West Bank, and the northern half of the State of Israel), mostly Muslim, has also taken place. These immigrants included Arabs, Muslims, and many others. They and their descendants probably make up a majority of the population now called Palestinian. Palestinians, in other words, are not an aboriginal, autochthonous, first, indigenous, or native people; most of them are as recently arrived as Zionists. They are also as ethnically diverse.
The scale of this non-Jewish immigration was once well known, as the Churchill and Roosevelt quotes above indicate. It has, however, long since disappeared from view, replaced by a fable about a homogeneous people living on the land since the deepest antiquity.
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