The Biggest Lie In The World Prize

In 1890 Jews began to enter what was then called Palestine. Except for a brief post Muslim-Christian period around 1400, Jews had always lived in “Palestine” and their passports showed that “Palestine” was their country. That however was not true, as Palestine was not a country but was an area of land, named by the Romans and annexed by the Turks.

The people who lived in what is now Israel were mostly poor peasant farmers, often tilling land owned by Syrian landlords. There were a few cities, the largest of which was Jerusalem which was 80% Jewish in the 1890”s. The total population in the 1890’s reached a maximum of 500,000 people.

Since this desolate land was owned and ruled by Turkey, how could a few hundred poor Jews in the late 1800’s move to Israel and conquer it from Turkey and occupy it? The answer is simple. The Jews wanted the land to become a haven for all Jews. This they could not do as peasant farmers, so they bought the land from the Turks – one piece of farmland or swampland at a time – and with the financial help of worldwide Jewry, and the large number of Jewish immigrants and Arab workers from neighbouring Arab lands, turned the pitiful Turkish land into healthy productive farms. Jews also improved impoverished cities and created Tel Aviv on the shores of the Mediterranean. Then, in 1948, as the British left, the Jews claimed the land as theirs and called it Israel.

But wait. There is more to the story than Jews living in Palestine for generations and beginning in the 19the century, buying, living in and developing most of Israel. There is a political side to the story.

In 1948 the Turks lost the war to Britain and with it lost the area called Palestine to the British. In 1921 at a United Nations conference in San Remo, Italy, it was declared that the land composed of all of the land which is now Israel, including Judea and Samaria (the West Bank of the Jordan River) and about 1/2 of what is now Jordan, would be reserved as a sanctuary for Jewish immigrants.

This was adopted by the new League of Nations on July 24, 1922 and by the United Nations on November 2, 1917 codifying into international law, and granting historical rights to the Jewish people, and only to the Jewish people, when Jewish Israel had a small population of about 500,000 people, living on a small portion of this area originally designed by the United Nations to be reserved for Jews.