Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
3 December
1922: "ZIONISTS...[WANT] COMPLETE DISPOSSESSION"
On this day in 1922, the New York Times revealed findings of the King-Crane Commission, put together at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference by Britain, France and Italy to divide up the non-Turkish areas of the defeated Ottoman Empire as spoils of war. The commissioners found that "Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine" and that 90% of the Palestinian population was emphatically against the Zionist program.
"في عام 1922: " اراد الصهاينة نزع ملكية الفلسطينيين بالكامل
3 ديسمبر
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1922 ، كشفت صحيفة نيويورك تايمز عن نتائج لجنة كنج ـ كرين ، التي تم تشكيلها من قِبَلْ بريطانيا وفرنسا وإيطاليا في مؤتمر باريس للسلام عام 1919 لتقسيم المناطق غير التركية في الإمبراطورية العثمانية المهزومة باعتبارها غنائم حرب. وجد المفوضون أن "الصهاينة يتطلعون إلى نزع ملكية السكان الفلسطينين غيراليهود المحليين بشكل كامل عمليًا" وأن 90٪ من السكان الفلسطينيين كانوا ضد البرنامج الصهيوني بشكل قاطع.
The King–Crane Commission was appointed at the request of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to determine the attitudes of the inhabitants of Syria and Palestine toward the post-World War I settlement of their territories.
The commission was formed as exclusively American after attempts at creating an Anglo-French group failed. Touring Syria and Palestine between June 10 and July 21, 1919, and soliciting petitions from local inhabitants, the commission found that a vast majority of Arabs favoured an independent Syria, free of any French mandate, and that, of about 1,875 petitions received, 72 percent were hostile to the Zionist plan for a Jewish national home in Palestine. Such findings, coupled with Zionist talk of dispossession of the Arabs, led the commission to advise a serious modification of the Zionist immigration program in Palestine.
The commissioners started out favourably disposed to Zionism
"The Commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favor, but the actual facts in Palestine, coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians have driven them to the recommendation here made.
"The erection of such a Jewish State [cannot] be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the "civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conference with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase."
"If that principle [self-determination] is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine's population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine - nearly nine tenths of the whole - are emphatically against the entire Zionist program...There was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the people's rights, though it kept within the forms of law...
"The Peace Conference should not shut its eyes to the fact that the anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria is intense and not lightly to be flouted. No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required even to initiate the program. That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist program, on the part of the non-Jewish populations of Palestine and Syria. Decisions, requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice. For the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a "right" to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered...
"It must be believed that the precise meaning, in this respect, of the complete Jewish occupation of Palestine has not been fully sensed by those who urge the extreme Zionist program. For it would intensify, with a certainty like fate, the anti-Jewish feeling both in Palestine and in all other portions of the world which look to Palestine as "the Holy Land."
2-minute video - the earliest film footage from Palestine, 1896, ...before the dark shadow of Zionism fell over the area.