Repatriation Quotes
This idea has been rejected by American Blacks from before the Civil War. There were many Black families that have been in America longer than Rockwell who always had the choice to go back to where they cam from if they were unhappy with America but they never did.
San Domingo was on the Island of Haiti. The government had attempted to have a colony there for American Blacks. Most Negroes of the time were not enthusiastic about colonization. The San Domingo colony was not very successful and most of the colonists were very unhappy. Lincoln gave this order and those who wished to do so were returned to the United States. This quotation also refutes the argument made by a that Lincoln favored forced emigration and colonization of Negroes. Early in his career had had favored colonization {590145}, as it was called, but never forced. See {40859}. And if he was in favor of forced colonization, the easiest thing he could have done was left the dissatisfied San Domingo colonists where they were instead of going to all the trouble to repatriate them.
The strategy was to have Arab refugees, who had been trained to not only hate the Israelis but also in military and terrorist techniques, to return to israel and foment an insurgency. Ironically, this quotation was cited at the time as one of the few statements upon which the Israeli and Egyptian governments could agree.
Lincoln later changed his mind about Colonization when some Black leaders pointed out that the Blacks had built a large part of America and also survived slavery, it they were given fair opportunity, there was no reason that they would not be able to compete and thrive.
The pre WWII Zionists who returned to the Holy Land brought with them, the education, culture, technology, and particularly the modern scientific methods of agriculture and irrigation. The Arabs lived the same way as they had done since 1100 when the Muslim world "closed" to new ideas and change. At that earlier time, the Arabs had the advanced agricultural techniques which Europeans copied throughout Spain and Italy. While advanced for 1100, Arab agriculture was backward by early 20th century standards. Arab farms could mostly just feed the land owning family and produced little surplus, and they wasted huge amounts of water in the process. The returning Jews assumed that the Arabs would welcome these new techniques as well as the public health, medicine, engineering and science. They thought that they were bringing great gifts to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land. However, even though the Jewish farms improved the quality of the produce and increased the productivity many times with much less water needed, for the most part, the Arabs would not depart from their traditions and religious dictates. One of the reasons Islam had been so successful in its inception was that it prescribed behavior in every phase of life, not just religious. But then it became very difficult to change. So the benefit that the Zionists thought that they were bringing back to the Middle East were not seen as benefits by the Arabs whose various cultures and countries have remained religiously and tradition bound even into the 21st century.
A few years later he had a clearer idea of what was to be done. However, the additional factor of the Civil War played a big part in driving his Emancipation Proclamation. See {609360}
Question of FDR who was explaining the Jewish Claims to Part of Palestine. That was a considered option but the Jews had no historical relationship to Germany in the sense that the did in the Middle East, Fir several hundred years all of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and much of the rest of the Middle East belonged to a Jewish Kingdom under a dynasty of Jewish Kings. Jews had lived in the Middle East for over 5000 years. However, the Jewish Kingdom fell to the Romans, and then hundreds of years later the area was under Muslim Rule, then it was controlled by the Christian crusaders, retaken by the Muslims, and then conquered by the Jews when 14 Arab Armies attacked the fledgling state of Israel. So all the contesting ethnic groups claiming the Middle East as their land, base that claim on their domination and rule of the area by conquest at different points of history. All have conquered the land from someone else and ruled it till they were conquered with the Jews being the latest conquerors. So Arabs and Jews both have claims and can object to the other’s behavior of taking the land by force.
