Abstract
The concept of “discovery” in international law was famously articulated by Chief Justice John Marshall. In a series of cases, notably Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Marshall expounded on the legitimacy of claims made by European powers during the 15th and subsequent centuries as they took possession of foreign lands. Although control could be established by conquest, purchase and treaty, Europeans could also validate claims through discovery. If these territories were not inhabited by fellow Christians and subject to a European monarch, they could be claimed by the European states that “discovered” and colonized them. In effect, the rights of natives were not considered. While discovery may seem less relevant today, and its legal standing challenged because it bypasses the rights of the indigenous, note that “discovery” is still operative in the modern world where explorers expect to lay national claims to hitherto uncharted areas in Antarctica, on the ocean floor, and in space. Moreover, it is still cited in the United States to validate rights to lands that indigenous people inhabit or claim.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), pp. 197–201.
- 2.
UN Economic and Security Council, Impact on Indigenous Peoples of the International Legal construct known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which has served as the Foundation of the Violation of their Human Rights, E.C.19/2010/13, 3 February 2010.
- 3.
Followers of Edward Said view the growing intrusion and mastery of the West as a phenomenon in which Western imperial powers lorded it over Oriental society and culture that they sought to control and denigrated. Multiple contrary views have emerged, perhaps notably that of John MacKenzie, who find considerable appreciation for the Orient as well as creative interaction. When applied to the Arab/Israeli dispute, the Saidian perspective casts Zionists as typical external imperialists intent on disregarding if not diminishing local culture. See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1994); John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, theory and the arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
- 4.
Ilan Troen, “The Price of Partition, 1948: The Dissolution of the Palestine Potash Company,” Journal of Israeli History, 15:1 (March 1994), 53–81; Ran Or-Ner, Tide below sea level; Jews, English, Palestinians, and Jordanians in the Potash Factories (Tel-Aviv: Riesling, 2022) [Hebrew].
- 5.
For extensive sections on discovery in Daniel Boorstin, The Americans; The National Experience (New York: Vintage, 1967); and Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (New York: Vintage, 1985).
- 6.
Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Jewish Virtual Library, “Population of Israel/Palestine (1553–Present),” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/population-of-israel-palestine-1553–present. The question of when Jews, outsiders, and the Palestinians themselves viewed the local Arab population as a distinct nationality or “people” will be treated in Chap. 5 and passim.
- 7.
Troen, “The Price of Partition,” op. cit.
- 8.
The two most important and referenced were the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1946) https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/angap04.asp; and the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (1947): https://search.archives.un.org/united-nations-special-committee-on-palestine-unscop-1947.
- 9.
Dov Gavish and Ruth Kark, “The cadastral mapping of Palestine, 1858-1928,” The Geographic Journal, 159:1 (March 1993), 70–80.
- 10.
Chaim Weizmann to Harry S. Truman, Dec. 12, 1945. Weizmann Papers (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979), vol. 22, p. 78.
- 11.
Moshe Mossek, Palestine immigration policy under Sir Herbert Samuel: British, Zionist and Arab attitudes (London, 1978), p. 7 and pp. 157–161; Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, The Making of Eretz Israel in the Modern Era; A Historical-Geographical Study,1799-1949 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), Chap. 3.
- 12.
Mossek, 58–60; British White Paper, Cmd. 1700, 22-29. Gur Alroey, An Unpromising Land; Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century (Stanford: Stanford University, 2014).
- 13.
British White Paper, Cmd. 1700, pp. 17–21; Royal Institute of International Affairs, Great Britain and Palestine, 1915-1945 (London, 1946), pp. 60–70.
- 14.
Robert A. Macalister, A century of excavation in Palestine (London, 1925); David Amiran, “The pattern of settlement in Palestine,” Israel Exploration Journal, 3: 2 (1953), p. 68; Statistical abstract of Palestine, 1944-45, p. 273.
- 15.
Claude R. Conder, “The fertility of ancient Palestine,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (July 1876), 32.
- 16.
Charles Warren, The land of promise (London, 1875), pp. 5–6.
- 17.
Ellsworth Huntington, Palestine and its transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), pp. 4–5. The book was also intended to bring a Christian message. Huntington wished to demonstrate how natural environment “prepared the way for the teachings of Christ.” Since there was much water for supporting life during the time of the Romans, Huntington argues the population present to receive Christ’s teachings was large. Among the proofs was that in 30 A.D., at the time of the Baptism of Christ, “the sea [of Galilee] stood high.” Later, in “333 A.D., the Dead Sea stood as low as now. A dry era.” The ensuing climatic catastrophe served to disperse the people of Palestine and therefore contributed to the dissemination of Christian teachings. Huntington was also writing in a new scientific tradition that endeavored to study climatic changes and the influence of these changes on history. See Hubert Lamb, Climate: present, past and future (London, 1972), pp. xxv–xxvi.
- 18.
Huntington, Palestine and its transformation, p. 39.
- 19.
Huntington, Palestine and its transformation, pp. 281–2.
- 20.
David Ben-Gurion and Izhak Ben-Zvi, Eretz Israel in the past and in the present, (Hebrew) trans. from Yiddish by David Niv (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1979). 25,000 copies were sold in three years and yielded funds that provided the main support of the American branch of Poalei Zion who supported the writing the book.
- 21.
Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, Eretz Israel, p. 223. The formula by which they arrived at this number is interesting, if naive. They investigated how many people were living in various parts of the country at the time and compared this with the numbers indicated by archaeological or biblically based textual evidence. In this way, they demonstrated that in many locations the contemporary population was but one-tenth of the ancient. The conclusion was simple. Since one million people were presently living in the area they examined, then ten million could live there in the future. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, Eretz Israel, pp. 214–222.
- 22.
Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, Eretz Israel, p. 227. They also suggested that the Arabs resident in Palestine were descendants of the Hebrews who converted to Christianity and Islam. This surmise foreshadows Palestinians reaching back in history to imagine themselves as Canaanites as will be discussed in Chap. 5.
- 23.
William F. Albright, The archaeology of Palestine and the Bible (Cambridge, MA: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1974).
- 24.
Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert: a history of the Negev (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. xii and 283. See, too, Michael Evenari, “Twenty-Five Years of Research on Runoff Desert Agriculture in the Middle East,” in Settling the Desert, ed. Louis Berkofsky, David Faiman and Joseph Gale (New York: Gordon and Breech, 1981), pp. 3–28.
- 25.
Adolf Reifenberg, “The struggle between the “Desert and the Sown,”” in Desert research: proceedings, international symposium held in Jerusalem, May 7-14, 1952 sponsored by the Research Council of Israel and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Jerusalem, 1953): pp. 378–391.
- 26.
Aryeh Issar, “Climatic changes as the critical factor in the settlement and abandonment of the desert frontier in Israel,” Sede Boqer, unpublished paper, November 1987; Aryeh Issar and Haim Tsoar, “Who is to blame for the desertification of the Negev, Israel?” S. I. Solomon, M. Beran, W. Hogg, eds., Proceedings of a conference on the influence of climatic change and climatic variability on the hydrologic regime and water resources: International Association of Hydrological Sciences, publication no. 168 (Wallingford, Oxfordshire : International Association of Hydrological Sciences, 1987), 577–583.
- 27.
Walter C. Lowdermilk, Palestine: Land of Promise (London: Harper, 1944).
- 28.
Jean Gottmann, Études sur L’état d’Isräel et le Moyen Orient, 1935-1938 (Paris: A. Colin, 1959). His impact on Palestinian geography was such that when the Hebrew University decided to establish a Chair in his discipline soon after the creation of the State, he was invited to be its first incumbent. This and other personal information derive from an interview with Professor Gottmann.
- 29.
Robert Nathan, Oscar Gass, and Daniel Creamer, Palestine: problem and promise, an economic study (Washington, 1946), pp. v–vi.
- 30.
Observations are from a personal interview with Mr. Nathan.
- 31.
Arthur Ruppin, Arthur Ruppin: memoirs, diaries, letters, ed. Alex Bein (London; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971).
- 32.
Arthur Ruppin, “The Selection of the Fittest,” in Three decades of Palestine (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1936), pp. 66–80.
- 33.
Ruppin, “Settling German Jews in Palestine,” in Three decades of Palestine, p. 278.
- 34.
- 35.
David Ben-Gurion, The reconstruction programme: an address to the Joint Meeting of the Elected Assembly of Palestine and the Zionist General Council, March 24, 1943, Central Zionist Archives, S25/1943.
- 36.
Aryeh Sharon, Physical planning in Israel (Jerusalem: 1951); and Erika Spiegel, New Towns in Israel; (urban and regional planning and development (New York: Praeger, 1967) Plan is examined in a concurrent report: Abraham Gruenbaum, Four year development plan of Israel 1950-1953 (Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv, 1950).
- 37.
“Immigration to Israel: Aliyah Bet (1939–1948),” Jewish Virtual Library. See: Aliyah Bet (1939–1948).
- 38.
The data for 2020 is 9.3 million total population of the State of Israel and 4.8 million on the West Bank and Gaza. This total of 14.1 million is derived from two sources: U.S. Department of State, 2020 Report on International Religious Freedom: Israel, West Bank and Gaza. https://www.state.gov/reports/2020-report-on-international-religious-freedom/israel-west-bank-and-gaza/west-bank-and-gaza/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20government%20estimates%20the%20total%20Palestinian%20population,Muslims%2C%20with%20small%20Shia%20and%20Ahmadi%20Muslim%20communities; and Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Population of Israel on Eve of 2021, see: https://www.cbs.gov.il/en/mediarelease/Pages/2020/Population-of-Israel-on-the-Eve-of-2021.aspx. The number of Jews appears to be accurate and uncontested. The number of Arabs is disputed. Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli ambassador, heads a research group that claims that the number of Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza is exaggerated by about a million. See: https://theettingerreport.com/category/jewish-arab-demographics/
- 39.
Ilan Troen and Carol Troen, “Has Israel Reached he Limits of Growth? The economic and ecological absorptive capacity of Israel/Palestine,” The Journal of the Middle East and Africa, 8:4 (2017), 309–23; Alon Tal, The Land is Full; Addressing Overpopulation in Israel (New Haven: Yale University, 2016).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Troen, S.I. (2024). From Discovery to Rediscovery: The Economic Absorptive Capacity of Palestine. In: Israel/Palestine in World Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50914-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50914-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-50913-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-50914-8
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)