Free A Durable Peace by Benjamin Netanyahu

neighboring Arab country. Thus by 1947, the wages
of the Arab worker in Haifa were twice what his counterpart was receiving in Nablus, where there was no Jewish presence. 45 Similarly, the number of factories owned by Arabs increased 400 percent between 1931 and 1942, while the number of their
employees increased tenfold between 1931 and 1946. 46
    The most dramatic increase in Arab immigration was to the areas of Jewish habitation. Between 1922, the advent of the Mandate,
and 1947, the Arab population in the Jewish cities grew by 290 percent in Haifa, 158 percent in Jaffa, and 131 percent in
Jerusalem, as compared with 64 percent in Hebron, 56 percent in Nablus, and 37 percent in Bethlehem, where there were few
or no Jews. 47 But the fact that Arabs migrated into what would eventually be a domain of millions of Jews hardly altered the prevailing
international conception that this was to be a Jewish land, albeit one with an Arab minority. Thus, the unceasing Jewish claim
to the land has been backed up in the last hundred years by unrelenting Jewish efforts to settle it and bring its open wastes
back to life.
    * * *
    However valid the Jewish claim has been, its relevance would have been mitigated if the Arabs had been able to show an equally
persistent claim to the land over the prior centuries. The Arab side makes precisely this claim today—that in recognizing
the Jewish historical claim, the men of Versailles disregarded the presence of a nation that had come into being in the intervening
period and that had developed unique cultural and historical ties to the land that overshadowed and superseded those of the
Jews. The world’s leaders, the Arabs claim, erred in believing that they were “giving a people without a land a land without
a people.”
    Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, Woodrow Wilson, and many of the other statesmen of Versailles were men of education, intelligence,
and vision. But were they really so fired up with the passions of biblical restoration and humanist ideals that they were
simply blinded to the basic demographic and national facts on the ground?
    In fact, they were not. They acted from a reasonable assessment of the well-known and well-documented situation in Palestine
in their day—anchoring their policies in facts that have since grown increasingly unfamiliar to many people.
    The basic Arab claim is that the Jews seized Palestine from an Arab people who had lived there for ages and was its rightful
owner. At his speech at the United Nations in 1974, Yasser Arafat declared:
    The Jewish invasion began in 1881…. Palestine was then a verdant area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of
building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture. 48
    Arafat and Arab lore thus date the beginning of the Zionist invasion at 1881, when the first wave of the modern Zionist immigration
began. (By then, Jews had outnumbered Arabs in Jerusalem for sixty years.) 49
    By now, the idea that the Zionists stole the land from its ageold native inhabitants has been so deeply implanted by Arab spokesmen that in many circles in the West it is almost impossible
to dislodge. But it is not supported by history. The description offered by Arafat and others of Palestine before the return
of the Jews as a verdant area teeming with people is flatly contradicted by the hundreds of eyewitness accounts of European
and American visitors to the Holy Land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the reports of the great archaeological
explorers from Robinson onward.
    In recent centuries, as the interest in biblical scholarship and archaeology grew in Europe and America, diplomats, writers,
scholars, soldiers, and surveyors toured the Holy Land in increasing numbers. They produced detailed records of what they
saw, most often in the form of books, travelogues, and articles published in various periodicals. Without exception, they
give an account of the demographic and physical