The protection racket Under the rules established by the prophet Mohammed, people living within areas ruled by Muslims must either be Muslim or belong to a religion that is consistent with Islam. This means worship off one God who somehow can be identified with Allah. Others were either forced to convert or expelled. These laws still exist n sharia and are enforced in observant Muslim countries. The protected people are called dhimmi. Dhimmi must wear special clothes, are forbidden to build large places of worship or to have call to prayer, can not have certain jobs and must pay a tax called the jizya .
The Protection Racket and the History of Palestine
(based in part on an essay by Ezequiel Doiny ) Since the expulsion of the crusaders by Saladin, liberated Palestine has lived under the rule of Muslims and one form or another of Islamic law, the sharia.
For Jews living in Palestine, including families whose roots go back before the Roman destruction of the Jewish state of Judea, this meant being a protected people a member of the dhimmi.
The Muslim rules levied a tax, the jizya to “protect” Jews and other non Muslims. Without the tax, these infidels could be killed, forced to convert or have their property destroyed. The jizya only ended after the defeat of the Ottomans in WW1 and beginning of the the British Mandate in 1922. .
Egyptian historian Bat Ye’or writes in her book, The Dhimmi:
“The Jizya was paid in a humiliating public ceremony in which the non-Muslim while paying was struck in the head. If these taxes were not paid women and children were reduced to slavery, men were imprisoned and tortured until a ransom was paid for them. The Jewish communities in many cities under Muslim Rule was ruined for such demands. This custom of legalized financial abuses and extortion shattered the indigenous pre-Arab populations almost totally eliminating what remained of its peasantry… In 1849 the Jews of Tiberias envisaged exile because of the brutality, exactions, and injustice of the Muslim authorities. In addition to ordinary taxes, an Arab Sheik that ruled Hebron demanded that Jews pay an extra five thousand piastres annually for the protections of their lives and property. The Sheik threatened to attack and expel them from Hebron if it was not paid.”
While the jizya discouraged Jews from living in Palestine, the Ottomans actively recruited Muslims. Incentives included free land, 12 years exemption from taxes and exemption from military service. .. and of course freedom from dhimmitude and the jizya. These immigrants were driven by the Muslim concept of non-ethnicity. Under Sharia the nationality of all Muslims is Islam itself. “Forced Migration and Mortality in the Ottoman Empire,” notes that there were about five million Muslims displaced due to the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Crimean War, Balkan wars, and the Turkish war of independence.
Bat Ye’or continues:
“By the early 1800s the Arab population in Palestine was very little (just 246,000) it was in the late 1800s and early 1900s that most Muslim Colonists settled in Palestine because of incentives by the Ottoman Government to resettle displaced Muslim populations because of events such as the Austro-Hungarian Occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Crimean War and World War 1. Those events created a great quantity of Muslim Refugees that were resettled somewhere else in the Ottoman Empire… In 1878 an Ottoman law granted lands in Palestine to Muslim colonists. Muslim colonists from Crimea and the Balkans settled in Anatolia, Armenia, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.”
Things began to change only after the onset of Zionism with the Jewish community’s funding of incentives for European Jews to settle in Palestine. Jews came, but so did Muslims. Both driven by jobs. Demographic data shows a huge growth in Muslims living in Palestine
1890: Arab Population 432,000
1947: Arab Population 1,181,000