Israel's Historic Rothschild Dynasty Connection Revisited: Part 3

James Armand Rothschild: Was president of Palestine colonization association [PICA]

Despite the evidence after November 1917 that the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs did not want Palestinian society to be transformed in the way that the Zionist movement wanted it to be, members of the Western European-based Rothschild dynasty continued to back the Zionist movement’s settler-colonialist project, during the end of World War I and after World War I. As the 2007 edition of Encyclopedia Judaica recalled, James Armand de Rothschild, Edmond Rothschild’s son, during World War I, “was sent to Palestine to recruit volunteers for the Palestinian battalion of the Jewish Legion” of UK imperialist troops; and “when the Zionist Commission arrived in Palestine” in 1918, James Armand Rothschild “was seconded to it as liaison officer and from that time on his interest in Palestine never flagged.”

According to the same book, in 1924, for example, James Armand Rothschild “was appointed president for life of the newly-founded Palestine Jewish Colonization Association [PICA], which was largely financed by his father;” and “he also took an active interest in other enterprises in Palestine, including the Palestine Electric Corporation, the Hebrew University, and excavations at `Hazor,’ which “he sponsored.” In addition, following James Armand Rothschild’s death in 1957, his wife transferred Rothschild Dynasty money to the Israeli government to help finance “the construction of a new Knesset building in Jerusalem.”

As the 1994 book, The Rothschilds: A European Family, which Greg Heuberger edited, observed, “as the largest” Zionist “landowner in Palestine, the PICA made land and money available for the” Zionist settlers, “who were again arriving in large numbers above all from Russia” after World War I; and “without the land that Edmond” Rothschild (who died in 1934), “made available from 1918 onwards through the PICA, and without the technicians and engineers, whom he had employed and paid, without the reports that he commissioned and the machinery he had bought, Palestine would not during the years,” when under UK imperialist rule, “have developed into a `national homeland’ that could serve as the basis for the foundation” of the Zionist movement’s “State of Israel.”

According to a March 1997 Jewish News of Northern California article, for example, “it is estimated that” Edmond Rothschild’s total “expenditure in Palestine between 1884 and 1934 was about $6 million, an enormous sum at the time;" and “on his death in 1934, almost 125,000 acres of land and more than 40 settlements testified to his contribution and support.”

According to Simon Schama’s 1978 book Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel, “PICA found itself in the 1930s” at “the crossroads of its history;” and “at Edmond Rothschild’s death in 1934” it “could still lay claim to an immense estate: some 440,000 dunams (including 80,000 acres across the Jordan), 30 settlements owned, founded or assisted by the Association, 23 of which, Petah Tikva, Roshan Le Zion…and Hadim…were all small townships rather than overgrown villages,” in part, because “immediately after” World War I, Edmond Rothschild “had clinched some important deals with Elias Sursuq and a number of other Beirut absentee landowners, mostly for properties in Lower Galilee and the Upper Jordan basin.”

The same book also noted that James Armand Rothschild “himself had on many occasions gone on record as being against the restraint of new settlement” in Palestine “and was a prime mover in the establishment, not only of Ashdot Ya’aqov in 1933 but the `Massada’ group near Yavnie, which became the kibbutz Mishmar Hashlosha,” so that “of the 65,000 cultivable dunams acquired by PICA” after 1914, “45,000 had been leased by 1940” to Zionist movement settler-colonialists. In addition, according to the 1978 Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel book:

“…The PICA settlements and industries had depended exclusively on finance originating with the single source of Edmond de Rothschild…In the last 6 years of its career, PICA…entered into a comprehensive and ambitious programme of development. The last land reserves were duly colonized. Ma’agan Michael (1950), Beeit Hanania (1951) and Talmey Elazar (1954) being established on the Sharon coastal plain and Sde Eliezer (1952) in the Huleh Valley north-west of Ayelet Hashahar…The development of Caesarea as a future tourist resort combining the cultural interest of the excavation with a recreation dear to James [Rothschild]’s heart: golf…”

In a 1957 letter that James Rothschild wrote, shortly before his death in 1957,  to the then-prime minister of the Zionist Movement’s State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, James Rothschild summarized the Rothschild Dynasty’s historic connection to the Zionist movement’s settler-colony and State of Israel, in the following way:

“My father began his colonization work…75 years ago…When in 1924 my father set up the Palestine Jewish Colonication Association—PICA—he assigned it the task of colonizing all his landholdings. It fell to me to preside over PICA since its inception.

“…All these lands were then colonized by PICA. Today there is no cultivable land left to PICA for further colonization…I propose to transfer now all remaining PICA lands (leased and not leased) to National Institutions…We intend to provide the sum…for the construction of the new Knesseth building in Jerusalem. Let the new Knesseth building become a symbol…”

(end of part 3)