Tel Aviv was born in 1909 on sand dunes and malaria-infested swamps. Not on the ruins of an Arab village, but on empty, barren, and unhealthy land, sold at a high price by absentee landlords from Beirut or Damascus, so worthless was it.
Sixty-six Jewish families (photo attached), refugees, planted eucalyptus trees to drain the marshes, built hospitals to combat malaria, and introduced modern agricultural techniques. From this nothingness, a prosperous city soon emerged.
It must be recalled that at that time, “Palestine” was neither a state nor a political entity: it was merely a marginal province of the Ottoman Empire, administered from Istanbul, without a capital, without defined borders, and without a distinct national identity. The Jews who came there did not “invade” a country; they legally immigrated, often buying wasteland at exorbitant prices from absentee Arab landlords, and settled on the land of their ancestors.
The Jews did not settle in a foreign land: they returned to their ancestral homeland, where Jewish communities had never ceased to exist despite exiles. A people without a refuge, driven out of Europe by pogroms and soon from the Arab world by mass expulsions, had nowhere else to go.
Nineteenth-century accounts are unanimous: Mark Twain, in 1867, described Palestine as “desolate,” “silent,” “a land almost without inhabitants.” The British consul James Finn spoke of a territory “covered with swamps and fevers.” Even Ottoman reports acknowledged that “fevers claimed anyone who tried to live there.” Far from being a prosperous and populous land, it was a neglected region, with a total population of only a few hundred thousand, a mix of Arabs, Jews, Druze, Circassians, and Christians.
It was in this disease-ravaged and impoverished land that Jewish refugees built schools, hospitals, roads, fields, and orchards.
In 1947, the UN proposed two states: the Jews accepted, the Arab leaders rejected it and called for war. They told the Arab populations to leave, promising they would return once the Jews were thrown into the sea. The war was lost, some Arabs stayed, others left: thus, the tragedy was born.
Nothing prevents recognizing today that there is room for two peoples on this land: the Arabs who have lived there for centuries, and the Jews who returned, also to their home. But telling the story by speaking of “plunder” is a revisionist joke.
The facts are stubborn: there was neither a Palestinian nation nor a state, but wastelands within a decaying Ottoman Empire, bought at a high price and made valuable by refugees persecuted for centuries.
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