Debunking the claim that “Palestinians” are the indigenous people of Israel

[bripat9643]

This pulls the major justification that leftists use to justify destroying Israel out from under them.

Debunking the claim that “Palestinians” are the indigenous people of Israel - Blogs - Jerusalem Post​

Despite the substantial documentation assembled by Peters, demonstrating massive Arab immigration into Palestine, anti-Israel propagandists continue to deny it. Based on what we know today, and the simple truths of basic math, the issue has become clear and unambiguous. All historic records indicate that only insignificant number of long-term settled Muslims were present in Palestine before 1882, when the large Jewish immigration began. Muslim Arab numbers increased dramatically as Jewish settlements developed infrastructure and provided work opportunities to Arabs from the neighboring countries.

Also worth noting is that the “indigenous” 4.3% comprised many non-Arab nationalities. All of them were swamped by the Arab immigrants and within a few generations largely lost their identity.

Given the complete absence of any historical record to the contrary, we can authoritatively say that the “Palestinian people” never existed until they were invented in the 1960s as a tool for continuing the Arab war against Israel.

The claim that “Palestinians” are the indigenous people of Israel and that most of the present Palestinian Arabs have lived in these lands since time immemorial is a total fraud. Albeit posthumously, Joan Peters has had the last word on the subject.​

 

[Pete7469]

Palescumians are parasites. Fuck 'em.

I used to sympathize with them until I saw them celebrate 9/11.

Now I don't care if the yids wipe them out.

 

[Coyote]

The Population of Palestine Prior to 1948

Major Conclusions


1. The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times, and the relative contributions of natural increase and immigration, imprecision in the counts and other issues.


2. Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began. The lowest estimates claim there were about 410,000 Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine in 1893. A Zionist estimate claimed there were over 600,000 Arabs in Palestine. in the 1890s. At this time, the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was still negligible by all accounts. It is unlikely that Palestinian immigration prior to this period was due to Zionist development. Though uncertainty exists concerning the precise numbers of Arabs living in the areas that later became Israel, it is very unlikely that the claims of Joan Peters that there were less than 100,000 Arabs living there are valid.


3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by sub-districts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs. For a detailed discussion that focuses on this myth, please refer to Zionism and its Impact.


4. Historic population data in Palestine during Ottoman times and during Mandatory times show significant discrepancies. For example, figures reported in Table A-1 for 1930 population of Arabs are about 100,000 too low according to census figures for 1931


5. It is not possible to estimate illegal Arab immigration directly, but apparently there was some immigration. The total Arab immigration to Palestine recorded or estimated by the Mandate government was in the neighborhood of 45,000. Illegal immigration that was not recorded would not register in the final population figures for 1945, because those figures were estimates. We simply do not know how many Arabs and Jews there were in Palestine before the declaration of the state of Israel. It is probable that there were about 100,000 Arab immigrants into Palestine. An unknown number may also have migrated internally, from the Arab areas in the West Bank that were formerly the centers of commercial activity and population to the coastal plain and Galilee. The Arab population increase of areas with large Jewish settlement was about 10% greater than that in areas without Jewish settlement. This effect cannot be totally separated from urbanization. A population of approximately 103,000 Bedouin (1922 estimate reported in the 1927-1929 reports of the Mandatory) may have been excluded or included in different population figures as the authorities and demographers saw fit. There is no way to know how many of these Bedouin made a permanent home in Palestine or how many became part of the city population in the course of industrialization between 1922 and 1948. However, the evidence indicates that they were in fact included in all the official population figures. This is shown by the fact that estimates of Muslim population that explicitly do not include Bedouin were significantly lower than the census figures, and by the fact that population growth is consistent with figures for natural increase if we assume that the Bedouin were included.


5. There are large discrepancies between official population figures and the number of Palestinian refugees - An analysis of population by subdistricts and villages, using the admittedly incomplete data of the Palestine Remembered Web site, shows that there were about 736,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs in the part of Palestine that was to become "Green Line Israel" in 1949. There would not have been more than 620,000 refugees in 1949 if these figures are correct, since the Israeli census showed 156,000 non-Jews living in Palestine in November 1948, of whom about 14,000 were Druze. The number of refugees reported by UNRWA in 1948 was 726,000. It might indicate that an unregistered and illegal population of 100,000 was included in the refugees, or it might be due to serious and systematic undercounting of Arab population by the Mandate authorities. McCarthy suggests that there was such undercounting, yet his figures for the total population of Palestine agree with projections based on official figures for 1945.


6. There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees. In 1949, UNRWA reported 726,000 refugees. By 1950 they reported 914,000 according to one source (McCarthy), an increase of 26% that could not come either from births or further displacement of refugees, which were negligible.


7. The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896 - The city of Jerusalem itself there was a Jewish majority since about 1896, but probably not before. The district of Jerusalem (as opposed to the city) comprised a very wide area in Ottoman and British times, in which there was a Muslim majority. This included Jericho, Bethlehem and other towns. Within the Jerusalem district, there was a subdistrict of Jerusalem that includes many of the immediate suburbs such as Eyn Karem, Beit Zeit etc. In that subdistrict, the Jews remained a minority , with only about 52,000 out of 132,000 persons in 1931 for example.



And on Mrs. Peters's claims:

The main flaw in Mrs. Peters's arguments, which Mr. Sanders seems to accept, is her statement (in Mr. Sanders's words) "that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living in the main area of Jewish settlement; alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000." By 1947, she argues, the number of non-Jews in those areas had quintupled while in other areas of Palestine it only slightly more than doubled. This difference, in her view, can be accounted for only by the factor of Arab migration. But how did Mrs. Peters arrive at the number of the non-Jews in "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine for 1893? Her claim that there were about 92,000 non-Jews is made on page 250 of her book and the reader is referred there for the source to Appendix V. However, in the appendix no source is given. Only in the next appendix devoted to methodology does she claim that she used "Turkish census figures" (p. 427). But in the footnotes to chapters 10–12, where the composition of the Palestine population during the nineteenth century is discussed, no reference is made to the Ottoman archives where Mrs. Peters would, if she had consulted them, have found the returns of the Ottoman censuses of 1893 and 1915 that she uses in Appendix V.


The Ottoman census returns, in fact, were never published. Therefore Mrs. Peters could use them only by referring to a secondary source based on research in the Ottoman archives. And indeed that is the case with the article by Kemal Karpat quoted by Mrs. Peters and cited above. Karpat's figures are given, presumably as they appear in the Ottoman census returns, according to subdistricts (Kaza). It is impossible to ascertain from the figures he cites which of the Ottoman subdistricts of Palestine correspond to what Mrs. Peters defined as "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine. But one does find such a characterization of Ottoman subdistricts in the work by Vital Cuinet mentioned in Mr. Sanders's letter. And if one consults Cuinet's book to find where in Palestine, in 1893, 59,431 Jews (the number quoted by Mrs. Peters on page 251 of her book) were living, one finds that exactly the same number is given for the aggregate of Jews living in the seven subdistricts (Kaza) of Acre, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Consequently, we now know precisely what Peters defines as "the Jewish-settled areas"; she is evidently referring to the seven Ottoman subdistricts mentioned by Cuinet.​

Now we must consider the number of non-Jews living in those areas. According to Mrs. Peters (again on page 251), and apparently Mr. Sanders accepts her view, they numbered about 92,300, of which nearly 38,000 were Christians (making the number of Muslims about 54,300). But the Ottoman census figures in Karpat's table (pages 262 and 271 of his article) give the number of Muslims as 158,379 and of the Christians as 39,884, making a total number of 198,263 non-Jews in "the Jewish settled areas." If we use Cuinet's own figures we still do not get an estimate of the non-Jewish population that brings us much closer to the number of non-Jews claimed by Mrs. Peters. According to Cuinet's data on the seven Ottoman subdistricts comprising "the Jewish-settled areas" we have 124,686 Muslims and 61,964 Christians, a total of 186,263 non-Jews.[3]​

Obviously, these figures are more than double the figure of 92,000 non-Jews given in Mrs. Peters's book. One could argue that the actual area defined by Mrs. Peters as "the Jewish-settled areas" is smaller than the total area covered by the seven subdistricts listed above, and the map published on page 246 of her book indicates such a possibility. But if this were the case, nowhere in her main text or in the methodological appendices (V and VI) did Mrs. Peters bother to explain to her readers how she managed to break down the Ottoman or Cuinet's figures into smaller units than subdistricts. As far as I know no figures for the units smaller than subdistricts (Nahia; the parallel of the French commune), covering the area of Ottoman Palestine, were ever published. Therefore I can't avoid the conclusion that Mrs. Peters's figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that.​

I would add that even a superficial glance at Cuinet's figures should make any serious historian recoil from using them. While the official Ottoman figures for the Muslims are underestimated for the reasons I earlier explained, Cuinet's are much more so. As far as his figures for the Christians are concerned, their main flaws are not only their inflated character but also the distortion in the estimates he gives for the various Christian communities. First, Cuinet found hardly any Greek Orthodox Christians living in Palestine (450 in the Haifa subdistrict and 169 in the Jama'in subdistrict of the Nablus district). But by all other accounts, this community was the largest single Christian community living in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century; indeed, it is still the largest such community in the combined territory of present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza strip.​

Secondly, Cuinet claimed that substantial numbers of Syrian Orthodox Christians (about seven thousand) were living throughout Palestine, whereas in fact this Christian community was hardly to be found in Palestine at all. Its only presence in the country was a small monastery in Jerusalem. And thirdly and most absurdly, Cuinet claimed that precisely five thousand Maronites, who amounted to 10 percent of the population of the district, were living in the district of Nablus. But as everyone knows Maronites were to be found in the Middle East only in Mount Lebanon. The only exceptions were a cluster of villages in Cyprus and one village and half a village in the upper-most Galilee in northern Palestine (Bir'am and Jish in Israel of today), a direct extension of the Lebanese stronghold. No Maronites were to be found in the Nablus district and no other writer claimed that they were. Cuinet's mistakes were deliberately made in order to prove that Palestine, as much as Lebanon and Syria, should be put under French protection. His attitude is well known and requires that his material be used with great caution.​

Since we are left with no sound basis for Mrs. Peters's figures for the population in the "Jewish-settled areas" in 1893, there is no need to account for the supposed quintupling of the Arab population in those areas by 1947; so dramatic an increase did not take place. It is true nevertheless that during the Mandatory period the Arab population of the coastal area of Palestine grew faster than it did in other areas. But this fact does not necessarily prove an Arab immigration into Palestine took place. More reasonably it confirms the very well-known fact that the coastal area attracted Arab villagers from the mountainous parts of Palestine who preferred the economic opportunities in the fast-growing areas of Jaffa and Haifa to the meager opportunities available in their villages.​

The coastal area had several main attractions for the Arab villagers. They found jobs in constructing, and later working in, the port of Haifa, the Iraq Petroleum Company refineries, the railway workshops, and the nascent Arab industries there. They also took part in the large-scale cultivation of the citrus groves between Haifa and Jaffa and found jobs connected with the shipment of citrus fruits from the Jaffa port. Contrary to what Mr. Pipes claims, all these developments had almost nothing to do with the growth of the Jewish National Home. The main foreign factor that brought them about was the Mandatory government. The Zionist settlers had a clearly stated policy against using Arab labor or investing in Arab industries. At the same time, the natural increase in the Palestinian Arab population I referred to is made clear in the statistical abstracts and quarterly surveys published by the Mandatory government in the years following the census of 1931.​

Why is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

 

[fanger]

Joan Peters née Friedman

From Time Immemorial - Wikipedia

 

[Hollie]

The Population of Palestine Prior to 1948

Major Conclusions


1. The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times, and the relative contributions of natural increase and immigration, imprecision in the counts and other issues.


2. Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began. The lowest estimates claim there were about 410,000 Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine in 1893. A Zionist estimate claimed there were over 600,000 Arabs in Palestine. in the 1890s. At this time, the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was still negligible by all accounts. It is unlikely that Palestinian immigration prior to this period was due to Zionist development. Though uncertainty exists concerning the precise numbers of Arabs living in the areas that later became Israel, it is very unlikely that the claims of Joan Peters that there were less than 100,000 Arabs living there are valid.


3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by sub-districts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs. For a detailed discussion that focuses on this myth, please refer to Zionism and its Impact.


4. Historic population data in Palestine during Ottoman times and during Mandatory times show significant discrepancies. For example, figures reported in Table A-1 for 1930 population of Arabs are about 100,000 too low according to census figures for 1931


5. It is not possible to estimate illegal Arab immigration directly, but apparently there was some immigration. The total Arab immigration to Palestine recorded or estimated by the Mandate government was in the neighborhood of 45,000. Illegal immigration that was not recorded would not register in the final population figures for 1945, because those figures were estimates. We simply do not know how many Arabs and Jews there were in Palestine before the declaration of the state of Israel. It is probable that there were about 100,000 Arab immigrants into Palestine. An unknown number may also have migrated internally, from the Arab areas in the West Bank that were formerly the centers of commercial activity and population to the coastal plain and Galilee. The Arab population increase of areas with large Jewish settlement was about 10% greater than that in areas without Jewish settlement. This effect cannot be totally separated from urbanization. A population of approximately 103,000 Bedouin (1922 estimate reported in the 1927-1929 reports of the Mandatory) may have been excluded or included in different population figures as the authorities and demographers saw fit. There is no way to know how many of these Bedouin made a permanent home in Palestine or how many became part of the city population in the course of industrialization between 1922 and 1948. However, the evidence indicates that they were in fact included in all the official population figures. This is shown by the fact that estimates of Muslim population that explicitly do not include Bedouin were significantly lower than the census figures, and by the fact that population growth is consistent with figures for natural increase if we assume that the Bedouin were included.


5. There are large discrepancies between official population figures and the number of Palestinian refugees - An analysis of population by subdistricts and villages, using the admittedly incomplete data of the Palestine Remembered Web site, shows that there were about 736,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs in the part of Palestine that was to become "Green Line Israel" in 1949. There would not have been more than 620,000 refugees in 1949 if these figures are correct, since the Israeli census showed 156,000 non-Jews living in Palestine in November 1948, of whom about 14,000 were Druze. The number of refugees reported by UNRWA in 1948 was 726,000. It might indicate that an unregistered and illegal population of 100,000 was included in the refugees, or it might be due to serious and systematic undercounting of Arab population by the Mandate authorities. McCarthy suggests that there was such undercounting, yet his figures for the total population of Palestine agree with projections based on official figures for 1945.


6. There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees. In 1949, UNRWA reported 726,000 refugees. By 1950 they reported 914,000 according to one source (McCarthy), an increase of 26% that could not come either from births or further displacement of refugees, which were negligible.


7. The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896 - The city of Jerusalem itself there was a Jewish majority since about 1896, but probably not before. The district of Jerusalem (as opposed to the city) comprised a very wide area in Ottoman and British times, in which there was a Muslim majority. This included Jericho, Bethlehem and other towns. Within the Jerusalem district, there was a subdistrict of Jerusalem that includes many of the immediate suburbs such as Eyn Karem, Beit Zeit etc. In that subdistrict, the Jews remained a minority , with only about 52,000 out of 132,000 persons in 1931 for example.



And on Mrs. Peters's claims:

The main flaw in Mrs. Peters's arguments, which Mr. Sanders seems to accept, is her statement (in Mr. Sanders's words) "that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living in the main area of Jewish settlement; alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000." By 1947, she argues, the number of non-Jews in those areas had quintupled while in other areas of Palestine it only slightly more than doubled. This difference, in her view, can be accounted for only by the factor of Arab migration. But how did Mrs. Peters arrive at the number of the non-Jews in "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine for 1893? Her claim that there were about 92,000 non-Jews is made on page 250 of her book and the reader is referred there for the source to Appendix V. However, in the appendix no source is given. Only in the next appendix devoted to methodology does she claim that she used "Turkish census figures" (p. 427). But in the footnotes to chapters 10–12, where the composition of the Palestine population during the nineteenth century is discussed, no reference is made to the Ottoman archives where Mrs. Peters would, if she had consulted them, have found the returns of the Ottoman censuses of 1893 and 1915 that she uses in Appendix V.


The Ottoman census returns, in fact, were never published. Therefore Mrs. Peters could use them only by referring to a secondary source based on research in the Ottoman archives. And indeed that is the case with the article by Kemal Karpat quoted by Mrs. Peters and cited above. Karpat's figures are given, presumably as they appear in the Ottoman census returns, according to subdistricts (Kaza). It is impossible to ascertain from the figures he cites which of the Ottoman subdistricts of Palestine correspond to what Mrs. Peters defined as "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine. But one does find such a characterization of Ottoman subdistricts in the work by Vital Cuinet mentioned in Mr. Sanders's letter. And if one consults Cuinet's book to find where in Palestine, in 1893, 59,431 Jews (the number quoted by Mrs. Peters on page 251 of her book) were living, one finds that exactly the same number is given for the aggregate of Jews living in the seven subdistricts (Kaza) of Acre, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Consequently, we now know precisely what Peters defines as "the Jewish-settled areas"; she is evidently referring to the seven Ottoman subdistricts mentioned by Cuinet.​

Now we must consider the number of non-Jews living in those areas. According to Mrs. Peters (again on page 251), and apparently Mr. Sanders accepts her view, they numbered about 92,300, of which nearly 38,000 were Christians (making the number of Muslims about 54,300). But the Ottoman census figures in Karpat's table (pages 262 and 271 of his article) give the number of Muslims as 158,379 and of the Christians as 39,884, making a total number of 198,263 non-Jews in "the Jewish settled areas." If we use Cuinet's own figures we still do not get an estimate of the non-Jewish population that brings us much closer to the number of non-Jews claimed by Mrs. Peters. According to Cuinet's data on the seven Ottoman subdistricts comprising "the Jewish-settled areas" we have 124,686 Muslims and 61,964 Christians, a total of 186,263 non-Jews.[3]​

Obviously, these figures are more than double the figure of 92,000 non-Jews given in Mrs. Peters's book. One could argue that the actual area defined by Mrs. Peters as "the Jewish-settled areas" is smaller than the total area covered by the seven subdistricts listed above, and the map published on page 246 of her book indicates such a possibility. But if this were the case, nowhere in her main text or in the methodological appendices (V and VI) did Mrs. Peters bother to explain to her readers how she managed to break down the Ottoman or Cuinet's figures into smaller units than subdistricts. As far as I know no figures for the units smaller than subdistricts (Nahia; the parallel of the French commune), covering the area of Ottoman Palestine, were ever published. Therefore I can't avoid the conclusion that Mrs. Peters's figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that.​

I would add that even a superficial glance at Cuinet's figures should make any serious historian recoil from using them. While the official Ottoman figures for the Muslims are underestimated for the reasons I earlier explained, Cuinet's are much more so. As far as his figures for the Christians are concerned, their main flaws are not only their inflated character but also the distortion in the estimates he gives for the various Christian communities. First, Cuinet found hardly any Greek Orthodox Christians living in Palestine (450 in the Haifa subdistrict and 169 in the Jama'in subdistrict of the Nablus district). But by all other accounts, this community was the largest single Christian community living in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century; indeed, it is still the largest such community in the combined territory of present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza strip.​

Secondly, Cuinet claimed that substantial numbers of Syrian Orthodox Christians (about seven thousand) were living throughout Palestine, whereas in fact this Christian community was hardly to be found in Palestine at all. Its only presence in the country was a small monastery in Jerusalem. And thirdly and most absurdly, Cuinet claimed that precisely five thousand Maronites, who amounted to 10 percent of the population of the district, were living in the district of Nablus. But as everyone knows Maronites were to be found in the Middle East only in Mount Lebanon. The only exceptions were a cluster of villages in Cyprus and one village and half a village in the upper-most Galilee in northern Palestine (Bir'am and Jish in Israel of today), a direct extension of the Lebanese stronghold. No Maronites were to be found in the Nablus district and no other writer claimed that they were. Cuinet's mistakes were deliberately made in order to prove that Palestine, as much as Lebanon and Syria, should be put under French protection. His attitude is well known and requires that his material be used with great caution.​

Since we are left with no sound basis for Mrs. Peters's figures for the population in the "Jewish-settled areas" in 1893, there is no need to account for the supposed quintupling of the Arab population in those areas by 1947; so dramatic an increase did not take place. It is true nevertheless that during the Mandatory period the Arab population of the coastal area of Palestine grew faster than it did in other areas. But this fact does not necessarily prove an Arab immigration into Palestine took place. More reasonably it confirms the very well-known fact that the coastal area attracted Arab villagers from the mountainous parts of Palestine who preferred the economic opportunities in the fast-growing areas of Jaffa and Haifa to the meager opportunities available in their villages.​

The coastal area had several main attractions for the Arab villagers. They found jobs in constructing, and later working in, the port of Haifa, the Iraq Petroleum Company refineries, the railway workshops, and the nascent Arab industries there. They also took part in the large-scale cultivation of the citrus groves between Haifa and Jaffa and found jobs connected with the shipment of citrus fruits from the Jaffa port. Contrary to what Mr. Pipes claims, all these developments had almost nothing to do with the growth of the Jewish National Home. The main foreign factor that brought them about was the Mandatory government. The Zionist settlers had a clearly stated policy against using Arab labor or investing in Arab industries. At the same time, the natural increase in the Palestinian Arab population I referred to is made clear in the statistical abstracts and quarterly surveys published by the Mandatory government in the years following the census of 1931.​

Why is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

Firstly, I believe the mods typically request that entire articles not be cut and pasted but referenced by link.


Secondly, item 3 from your link, (which is confirmed in various other sources), is in direct contradiction to the wailing that takes place when that fact is presented to the more excitable of the screamers and shouters.

3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians.


Lastly, your article should have mentioned that the geographic area of Pal'istan was inhabited. However, it's worth noting that the geographic area was not the formal structure of a "country" as many of the screamers / wailers represent it to be.

 

[Coyote]

The Population of Palestine Prior to 1948

Major Conclusions


1. The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times, and the relative contributions of natural increase and immigration, imprecision in the counts and other issues.


2. Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began. The lowest estimates claim there were about 410,000 Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine in 1893. A Zionist estimate claimed there were over 600,000 Arabs in Palestine. in the 1890s. At this time, the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was still negligible by all accounts. It is unlikely that Palestinian immigration prior to this period was due to Zionist development. Though uncertainty exists concerning the precise numbers of Arabs living in the areas that later became Israel, it is very unlikely that the claims of Joan Peters that there were less than 100,000 Arabs living there are valid.


3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by sub-districts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs. For a detailed discussion that focuses on this myth, please refer to Zionism and its Impact.


4. Historic population data in Palestine during Ottoman times and during Mandatory times show significant discrepancies. For example, figures reported in Table A-1 for 1930 population of Arabs are about 100,000 too low according to census figures for 1931


5. It is not possible to estimate illegal Arab immigration directly, but apparently there was some immigration. The total Arab immigration to Palestine recorded or estimated by the Mandate government was in the neighborhood of 45,000. Illegal immigration that was not recorded would not register in the final population figures for 1945, because those figures were estimates. We simply do not know how many Arabs and Jews there were in Palestine before the declaration of the state of Israel. It is probable that there were about 100,000 Arab immigrants into Palestine. An unknown number may also have migrated internally, from the Arab areas in the West Bank that were formerly the centers of commercial activity and population to the coastal plain and Galilee. The Arab population increase of areas with large Jewish settlement was about 10% greater than that in areas without Jewish settlement. This effect cannot be totally separated from urbanization. A population of approximately 103,000 Bedouin (1922 estimate reported in the 1927-1929 reports of the Mandatory) may have been excluded or included in different population figures as the authorities and demographers saw fit. There is no way to know how many of these Bedouin made a permanent home in Palestine or how many became part of the city population in the course of industrialization between 1922 and 1948. However, the evidence indicates that they were in fact included in all the official population figures. This is shown by the fact that estimates of Muslim population that explicitly do not include Bedouin were significantly lower than the census figures, and by the fact that population growth is consistent with figures for natural increase if we assume that the Bedouin were included.


5. There are large discrepancies between official population figures and the number of Palestinian refugees - An analysis of population by subdistricts and villages, using the admittedly incomplete data of the Palestine Remembered Web site, shows that there were about 736,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs in the part of Palestine that was to become "Green Line Israel" in 1949. There would not have been more than 620,000 refugees in 1949 if these figures are correct, since the Israeli census showed 156,000 non-Jews living in Palestine in November 1948, of whom about 14,000 were Druze. The number of refugees reported by UNRWA in 1948 was 726,000. It might indicate that an unregistered and illegal population of 100,000 was included in the refugees, or it might be due to serious and systematic undercounting of Arab population by the Mandate authorities. McCarthy suggests that there was such undercounting, yet his figures for the total population of Palestine agree with projections based on official figures for 1945.


6. There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees. In 1949, UNRWA reported 726,000 refugees. By 1950 they reported 914,000 according to one source (McCarthy), an increase of 26% that could not come either from births or further displacement of refugees, which were negligible.


7. The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896 - The city of Jerusalem itself there was a Jewish majority since about 1896, but probably not before. The district of Jerusalem (as opposed to the city) comprised a very wide area in Ottoman and British times, in which there was a Muslim majority. This included Jericho, Bethlehem and other towns. Within the Jerusalem district, there was a subdistrict of Jerusalem that includes many of the immediate suburbs such as Eyn Karem, Beit Zeit etc. In that subdistrict, the Jews remained a minority , with only about 52,000 out of 132,000 persons in 1931 for example.



And on Mrs. Peters's claims:

The main flaw in Mrs. Peters's arguments, which Mr. Sanders seems to accept, is her statement (in Mr. Sanders's words) "that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living in the main area of Jewish settlement; alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000." By 1947, she argues, the number of non-Jews in those areas had quintupled while in other areas of Palestine it only slightly more than doubled. This difference, in her view, can be accounted for only by the factor of Arab migration. But how did Mrs. Peters arrive at the number of the non-Jews in "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine for 1893? Her claim that there were about 92,000 non-Jews is made on page 250 of her book and the reader is referred there for the source to Appendix V. However, in the appendix no source is given. Only in the next appendix devoted to methodology does she claim that she used "Turkish census figures" (p. 427). But in the footnotes to chapters 10–12, where the composition of the Palestine population during the nineteenth century is discussed, no reference is made to the Ottoman archives where Mrs. Peters would, if she had consulted them, have found the returns of the Ottoman censuses of 1893 and 1915 that she uses in Appendix V.


The Ottoman census returns, in fact, were never published. Therefore Mrs. Peters could use them only by referring to a secondary source based on research in the Ottoman archives. And indeed that is the case with the article by Kemal Karpat quoted by Mrs. Peters and cited above. Karpat's figures are given, presumably as they appear in the Ottoman census returns, according to subdistricts (Kaza). It is impossible to ascertain from the figures he cites which of the Ottoman subdistricts of Palestine correspond to what Mrs. Peters defined as "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine. But one does find such a characterization of Ottoman subdistricts in the work by Vital Cuinet mentioned in Mr. Sanders's letter. And if one consults Cuinet's book to find where in Palestine, in 1893, 59,431 Jews (the number quoted by Mrs. Peters on page 251 of her book) were living, one finds that exactly the same number is given for the aggregate of Jews living in the seven subdistricts (Kaza) of Acre, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Consequently, we now know precisely what Peters defines as "the Jewish-settled areas"; she is evidently referring to the seven Ottoman subdistricts mentioned by Cuinet.​

Now we must consider the number of non-Jews living in those areas. According to Mrs. Peters (again on page 251), and apparently Mr. Sanders accepts her view, they numbered about 92,300, of which nearly 38,000 were Christians (making the number of Muslims about 54,300). But the Ottoman census figures in Karpat's table (pages 262 and 271 of his article) give the number of Muslims as 158,379 and of the Christians as 39,884, making a total number of 198,263 non-Jews in "the Jewish settled areas." If we use Cuinet's own figures we still do not get an estimate of the non-Jewish population that brings us much closer to the number of non-Jews claimed by Mrs. Peters. According to Cuinet's data on the seven Ottoman subdistricts comprising "the Jewish-settled areas" we have 124,686 Muslims and 61,964 Christians, a total of 186,263 non-Jews.[3]​

Obviously, these figures are more than double the figure of 92,000 non-Jews given in Mrs. Peters's book. One could argue that the actual area defined by Mrs. Peters as "the Jewish-settled areas" is smaller than the total area covered by the seven subdistricts listed above, and the map published on page 246 of her book indicates such a possibility. But if this were the case, nowhere in her main text or in the methodological appendices (V and VI) did Mrs. Peters bother to explain to her readers how she managed to break down the Ottoman or Cuinet's figures into smaller units than subdistricts. As far as I know no figures for the units smaller than subdistricts (Nahia; the parallel of the French commune), covering the area of Ottoman Palestine, were ever published. Therefore I can't avoid the conclusion that Mrs. Peters's figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that.​

I would add that even a superficial glance at Cuinet's figures should make any serious historian recoil from using them. While the official Ottoman figures for the Muslims are underestimated for the reasons I earlier explained, Cuinet's are much more so. As far as his figures for the Christians are concerned, their main flaws are not only their inflated character but also the distortion in the estimates he gives for the various Christian communities. First, Cuinet found hardly any Greek Orthodox Christians living in Palestine (450 in the Haifa subdistrict and 169 in the Jama'in subdistrict of the Nablus district). But by all other accounts, this community was the largest single Christian community living in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century; indeed, it is still the largest such community in the combined territory of present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza strip.​

Secondly, Cuinet claimed that substantial numbers of Syrian Orthodox Christians (about seven thousand) were living throughout Palestine, whereas in fact this Christian community was hardly to be found in Palestine at all. Its only presence in the country was a small monastery in Jerusalem. And thirdly and most absurdly, Cuinet claimed that precisely five thousand Maronites, who amounted to 10 percent of the population of the district, were living in the district of Nablus. But as everyone knows Maronites were to be found in the Middle East only in Mount Lebanon. The only exceptions were a cluster of villages in Cyprus and one village and half a village in the upper-most Galilee in northern Palestine (Bir'am and Jish in Israel of today), a direct extension of the Lebanese stronghold. No Maronites were to be found in the Nablus district and no other writer claimed that they were. Cuinet's mistakes were deliberately made in order to prove that Palestine, as much as Lebanon and Syria, should be put under French protection. His attitude is well known and requires that his material be used with great caution.​

Since we are left with no sound basis for Mrs. Peters's figures for the population in the "Jewish-settled areas" in 1893, there is no need to account for the supposed quintupling of the Arab population in those areas by 1947; so dramatic an increase did not take place. It is true nevertheless that during the Mandatory period the Arab population of the coastal area of Palestine grew faster than it did in other areas. But this fact does not necessarily prove an Arab immigration into Palestine took place. More reasonably it confirms the very well-known fact that the coastal area attracted Arab villagers from the mountainous parts of Palestine who preferred the economic opportunities in the fast-growing areas of Jaffa and Haifa to the meager opportunities available in their villages.​

The coastal area had several main attractions for the Arab villagers. They found jobs in constructing, and later working in, the port of Haifa, the Iraq Petroleum Company refineries, the railway workshops, and the nascent Arab industries there. They also took part in the large-scale cultivation of the citrus groves between Haifa and Jaffa and found jobs connected with the shipment of citrus fruits from the Jaffa port. Contrary to what Mr. Pipes claims, all these developments had almost nothing to do with the growth of the Jewish National Home. The main foreign factor that brought them about was the Mandatory government. The Zionist settlers had a clearly stated policy against using Arab labor or investing in Arab industries. At the same time, the natural increase in the Palestinian Arab population I referred to is made clear in the statistical abstracts and quarterly surveys published by the Mandatory government in the years following the census of 1931.​

Why is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

Firstly, I believe the mods typically request that entire articles not be cut and pasted but referenced by link.

I'm guessing that you did not bother to go to the link and look at the source in your haste to spew an anti-mod comment.

Secondly, item 3 from your link, (which is confirmed in various other sources), is in direct contradiction to the wailing that takes place when that fact is presented to the more excitable of the screamers and shouters.

3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians.

And, your point is what exactly?

Lastly, your article should have mentioned that the geographic area of Pal'istan was inhabited. However, it's worth noting that the geographic area was not the formal structure of a "country" as many of the screamers / wailers represent it to be.

And, your point is what exactly?

Joan Peter's was extremely inaccurate as a source for demographics.

Now, if you're arguing that that there was no huge Zionist displacement of Arabs according to available demographic information. I agree.

If you're arguing that Jews are also indiginous and did not spontaniously appear when immigrants came over from Europe. I agree.

 

[Phoenall]

The Population of Palestine Prior to 1948

Major Conclusions


1. The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times, and the relative contributions of natural increase and immigration, imprecision in the counts and other issues.


2. Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began. The lowest estimates claim there were about 410,000 Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine in 1893. A Zionist estimate claimed there were over 600,000 Arabs in Palestine. in the 1890s. At this time, the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was still negligible by all accounts. It is unlikely that Palestinian immigration prior to this period was due to Zionist development. Though uncertainty exists concerning the precise numbers of Arabs living in the areas that later became Israel, it is very unlikely that the claims of Joan Peters that there were less than 100,000 Arabs living there are valid.


3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by sub-districts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs. For a detailed discussion that focuses on this myth, please refer to Zionism and its Impact.


4. Historic population data in Palestine during Ottoman times and during Mandatory times show significant discrepancies. For example, figures reported in Table A-1 for 1930 population of Arabs are about 100,000 too low according to census figures for 1931


5. It is not possible to estimate illegal Arab immigration directly, but apparently there was some immigration. The total Arab immigration to Palestine recorded or estimated by the Mandate government was in the neighborhood of 45,000. Illegal immigration that was not recorded would not register in the final population figures for 1945, because those figures were estimates. We simply do not know how many Arabs and Jews there were in Palestine before the declaration of the state of Israel. It is probable that there were about 100,000 Arab immigrants into Palestine. An unknown number may also have migrated internally, from the Arab areas in the West Bank that were formerly the centers of commercial activity and population to the coastal plain and Galilee. The Arab population increase of areas with large Jewish settlement was about 10% greater than that in areas without Jewish settlement. This effect cannot be totally separated from urbanization. A population of approximately 103,000 Bedouin (1922 estimate reported in the 1927-1929 reports of the Mandatory) may have been excluded or included in different population figures as the authorities and demographers saw fit. There is no way to know how many of these Bedouin made a permanent home in Palestine or how many became part of the city population in the course of industrialization between 1922 and 1948. However, the evidence indicates that they were in fact included in all the official population figures. This is shown by the fact that estimates of Muslim population that explicitly do not include Bedouin were significantly lower than the census figures, and by the fact that population growth is consistent with figures for natural increase if we assume that the Bedouin were included.


5. There are large discrepancies between official population figures and the number of Palestinian refugees - An analysis of population by subdistricts and villages, using the admittedly incomplete data of the Palestine Remembered Web site, shows that there were about 736,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs in the part of Palestine that was to become "Green Line Israel" in 1949. There would not have been more than 620,000 refugees in 1949 if these figures are correct, since the Israeli census showed 156,000 non-Jews living in Palestine in November 1948, of whom about 14,000 were Druze. The number of refugees reported by UNRWA in 1948 was 726,000. It might indicate that an unregistered and illegal population of 100,000 was included in the refugees, or it might be due to serious and systematic undercounting of Arab population by the Mandate authorities. McCarthy suggests that there was such undercounting, yet his figures for the total population of Palestine agree with projections based on official figures for 1945.


6. There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees. In 1949, UNRWA reported 726,000 refugees. By 1950 they reported 914,000 according to one source (McCarthy), an increase of 26% that could not come either from births or further displacement of refugees, which were negligible.


7. The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896 - The city of Jerusalem itself there was a Jewish majority since about 1896, but probably not before. The district of Jerusalem (as opposed to the city) comprised a very wide area in Ottoman and British times, in which there was a Muslim majority. This included Jericho, Bethlehem and other towns. Within the Jerusalem district, there was a subdistrict of Jerusalem that includes many of the immediate suburbs such as Eyn Karem, Beit Zeit etc. In that subdistrict, the Jews remained a minority , with only about 52,000 out of 132,000 persons in 1931 for example.



And on Mrs. Peters's claims:

The main flaw in Mrs. Peters's arguments, which Mr. Sanders seems to accept, is her statement (in Mr. Sanders's words) "that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living in the main area of Jewish settlement; alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000." By 1947, she argues, the number of non-Jews in those areas had quintupled while in other areas of Palestine it only slightly more than doubled. This difference, in her view, can be accounted for only by the factor of Arab migration. But how did Mrs. Peters arrive at the number of the non-Jews in "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine for 1893? Her claim that there were about 92,000 non-Jews is made on page 250 of her book and the reader is referred there for the source to Appendix V. However, in the appendix no source is given. Only in the next appendix devoted to methodology does she claim that she used "Turkish census figures" (p. 427). But in the footnotes to chapters 10–12, where the composition of the Palestine population during the nineteenth century is discussed, no reference is made to the Ottoman archives where Mrs. Peters would, if she had consulted them, have found the returns of the Ottoman censuses of 1893 and 1915 that she uses in Appendix V.


The Ottoman census returns, in fact, were never published. Therefore Mrs. Peters could use them only by referring to a secondary source based on research in the Ottoman archives. And indeed that is the case with the article by Kemal Karpat quoted by Mrs. Peters and cited above. Karpat's figures are given, presumably as they appear in the Ottoman census returns, according to subdistricts (Kaza). It is impossible to ascertain from the figures he cites which of the Ottoman subdistricts of Palestine correspond to what Mrs. Peters defined as "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine. But one does find such a characterization of Ottoman subdistricts in the work by Vital Cuinet mentioned in Mr. Sanders's letter. And if one consults Cuinet's book to find where in Palestine, in 1893, 59,431 Jews (the number quoted by Mrs. Peters on page 251 of her book) were living, one finds that exactly the same number is given for the aggregate of Jews living in the seven subdistricts (Kaza) of Acre, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Consequently, we now know precisely what Peters defines as "the Jewish-settled areas"; she is evidently referring to the seven Ottoman subdistricts mentioned by Cuinet.​

Now we must consider the number of non-Jews living in those areas. According to Mrs. Peters (again on page 251), and apparently Mr. Sanders accepts her view, they numbered about 92,300, of which nearly 38,000 were Christians (making the number of Muslims about 54,300). But the Ottoman census figures in Karpat's table (pages 262 and 271 of his article) give the number of Muslims as 158,379 and of the Christians as 39,884, making a total number of 198,263 non-Jews in "the Jewish settled areas." If we use Cuinet's own figures we still do not get an estimate of the non-Jewish population that brings us much closer to the number of non-Jews claimed by Mrs. Peters. According to Cuinet's data on the seven Ottoman subdistricts comprising "the Jewish-settled areas" we have 124,686 Muslims and 61,964 Christians, a total of 186,263 non-Jews.[3]​

Obviously, these figures are more than double the figure of 92,000 non-Jews given in Mrs. Peters's book. One could argue that the actual area defined by Mrs. Peters as "the Jewish-settled areas" is smaller than the total area covered by the seven subdistricts listed above, and the map published on page 246 of her book indicates such a possibility. But if this were the case, nowhere in her main text or in the methodological appendices (V and VI) did Mrs. Peters bother to explain to her readers how she managed to break down the Ottoman or Cuinet's figures into smaller units than subdistricts. As far as I know no figures for the units smaller than subdistricts (Nahia; the parallel of the French commune), covering the area of Ottoman Palestine, were ever published. Therefore I can't avoid the conclusion that Mrs. Peters's figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that.​

I would add that even a superficial glance at Cuinet's figures should make any serious historian recoil from using them. While the official Ottoman figures for the Muslims are underestimated for the reasons I earlier explained, Cuinet's are much more so. As far as his figures for the Christians are concerned, their main flaws are not only their inflated character but also the distortion in the estimates he gives for the various Christian communities. First, Cuinet found hardly any Greek Orthodox Christians living in Palestine (450 in the Haifa subdistrict and 169 in the Jama'in subdistrict of the Nablus district). But by all other accounts, this community was the largest single Christian community living in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century; indeed, it is still the largest such community in the combined territory of present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza strip.​

Secondly, Cuinet claimed that substantial numbers of Syrian Orthodox Christians (about seven thousand) were living throughout Palestine, whereas in fact this Christian community was hardly to be found in Palestine at all. Its only presence in the country was a small monastery in Jerusalem. And thirdly and most absurdly, Cuinet claimed that precisely five thousand Maronites, who amounted to 10 percent of the population of the district, were living in the district of Nablus. But as everyone knows Maronites were to be found in the Middle East only in Mount Lebanon. The only exceptions were a cluster of villages in Cyprus and one village and half a village in the upper-most Galilee in northern Palestine (Bir'am and Jish in Israel of today), a direct extension of the Lebanese stronghold. No Maronites were to be found in the Nablus district and no other writer claimed that they were. Cuinet's mistakes were deliberately made in order to prove that Palestine, as much as Lebanon and Syria, should be put under French protection. His attitude is well known and requires that his material be used with great caution.​

Since we are left with no sound basis for Mrs. Peters's figures for the population in the "Jewish-settled areas" in 1893, there is no need to account for the supposed quintupling of the Arab population in those areas by 1947; so dramatic an increase did not take place. It is true nevertheless that during the Mandatory period the Arab population of the coastal area of Palestine grew faster than it did in other areas. But this fact does not necessarily prove an Arab immigration into Palestine took place. More reasonably it confirms the very well-known fact that the coastal area attracted Arab villagers from the mountainous parts of Palestine who preferred the economic opportunities in the fast-growing areas of Jaffa and Haifa to the meager opportunities available in their villages.​

The coastal area had several main attractions for the Arab villagers. They found jobs in constructing, and later working in, the port of Haifa, the Iraq Petroleum Company refineries, the railway workshops, and the nascent Arab industries there. They also took part in the large-scale cultivation of the citrus groves between Haifa and Jaffa and found jobs connected with the shipment of citrus fruits from the Jaffa port. Contrary to what Mr. Pipes claims, all these developments had almost nothing to do with the growth of the Jewish National Home. The main foreign factor that brought them about was the Mandatory government. The Zionist settlers had a clearly stated policy against using Arab labor or investing in Arab industries. At the same time, the natural increase in the Palestinian Arab population I referred to is made clear in the statistical abstracts and quarterly surveys published by the Mandatory government in the years following the census of 1931.​

Why is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

1) The Ottoman census results were as good as any for that period and so would be close to the mark for actual population levels

2) And were do your "estimates" come from what is the source, let us see if you are using biased web sites for your information or valid unbiased ones ?

3) Correct it was Jewish displacement that took place instead, as in the west bank, Jerusalem and gaza when Jews were forcibly expelled

4) And the only example you give is for mandate period during a civil war/uprising proving that the arab muslims flood areas they want to steal. Just look at darfur and the former Yugoslavia

5) CORRECT because the arab muslims LIED and included the Jordanians in the numbers as they were also palestinians. Also the arab muslims over counted the refugees so they could get more money out of the UN to use to buy illegal weapons.

6) Because the arab muslims want more money for more illegal weapons, and have managed to wangle jobs in the infrastructure of UNWRA giving them the chance to manipulate figures. Just recently the UN has queried the numbers again and found major discrepancies between actual numbers and reported numbers

7) And were does this data come from as the Ottoman records show the Jews to have always had a majority in Jerusalem


The problem with Ottoman sources is you need to be very clear what areas they cover, which would explain the discrepancies between the various source's. One will use the villayat of Jerusalem for their data, another will use the sanjak of Jerusalem which is a different area all together. So the numbers will be different. You need the Ottoman maps and the details before you start delving into the data.

Here is a reliable source of population figures





CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA Jerusalem After 1291

"...Present condition of the City: (1907 edition)

Jerusalem (El Quds) is the capital of a sanjak and the seat of a mutasarrif directly dependent on the Sublime Porte. In the administration of the sanjak the mutasarrif is assisted by a council called majlis ida ra; the city has a municipal government (majlis baladiye) presided over by a mayor. The total population is estimated at 66,000. The Turkish census of 1905, which counts only Ottoman subjects, gives these figures:
Jews, 45,000; Moslems, 8,000; Orthodox Christians, 6000; Latins, 2500; Armenians, 950; Protestants, 800; Melkites, 250; Copts, 150; Abyssinians, 100; Jacobites, 100; Catholic Syrians, 50. During the Nineteenth century large suburbs to the north and east have grown up, chiefly for the use of the Jewish colony. These suburbs contain nearly Half the present population...""

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Growth of Jerusalem 1838-Present

....... Jews Muslims Christians Total
1838 6,000 5,000 3,000 14,000
1844 7,120 5,760 3,390 16,270 ..... ..The First Official Ottoman Census
1876 12,000 7,560 5,470 25,030 .... .....Second """"""""""
1905 40,000 8,000 10,900 58,900 ....... Third/last, detailed in CathEncyc above
1948 99,320 36,680 31,300 167,300
1990 353,200 124,200 14,000 491,400
1992 385,000 150,000 15,000 550,000

http://www.testimony-magazine.org/jerusalem/bring.htm




change the .org to .net as the site has moved

 

[bripat9643]

The Population of Palestine Prior to 1948

Major Conclusions


1. The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times, and the relative contributions of natural increase and immigration, imprecision in the counts and other issues.


2. Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began. The lowest estimates claim there were about 410,000 Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine in 1893. A Zionist estimate claimed there were over 600,000 Arabs in Palestine. in the 1890s. At this time, the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was still negligible by all accounts. It is unlikely that Palestinian immigration prior to this period was due to Zionist development. Though uncertainty exists concerning the precise numbers of Arabs living in the areas that later became Israel, it is very unlikely that the claims of Joan Peters that there were less than 100,000 Arabs living there are valid.


3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by sub-districts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs. For a detailed discussion that focuses on this myth, please refer to Zionism and its Impact.


4. Historic population data in Palestine during Ottoman times and during Mandatory times show significant discrepancies. For example, figures reported in Table A-1 for 1930 population of Arabs are about 100,000 too low according to census figures for 1931


5. It is not possible to estimate illegal Arab immigration directly, but apparently there was some immigration. The total Arab immigration to Palestine recorded or estimated by the Mandate government was in the neighborhood of 45,000. Illegal immigration that was not recorded would not register in the final population figures for 1945, because those figures were estimates. We simply do not know how many Arabs and Jews there were in Palestine before the declaration of the state of Israel. It is probable that there were about 100,000 Arab immigrants into Palestine. An unknown number may also have migrated internally, from the Arab areas in the West Bank that were formerly the centers of commercial activity and population to the coastal plain and Galilee. The Arab population increase of areas with large Jewish settlement was about 10% greater than that in areas without Jewish settlement. This effect cannot be totally separated from urbanization. A population of approximately 103,000 Bedouin (1922 estimate reported in the 1927-1929 reports of the Mandatory) may have been excluded or included in different population figures as the authorities and demographers saw fit. There is no way to know how many of these Bedouin made a permanent home in Palestine or how many became part of the city population in the course of industrialization between 1922 and 1948. However, the evidence indicates that they were in fact included in all the official population figures. This is shown by the fact that estimates of Muslim population that explicitly do not include Bedouin were significantly lower than the census figures, and by the fact that population growth is consistent with figures for natural increase if we assume that the Bedouin were included.


5. There are large discrepancies between official population figures and the number of Palestinian refugees - An analysis of population by subdistricts and villages, using the admittedly incomplete data of the Palestine Remembered Web site, shows that there were about 736,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs in the part of Palestine that was to become "Green Line Israel" in 1949. There would not have been more than 620,000 refugees in 1949 if these figures are correct, since the Israeli census showed 156,000 non-Jews living in Palestine in November 1948, of whom about 14,000 were Druze. The number of refugees reported by UNRWA in 1948 was 726,000. It might indicate that an unregistered and illegal population of 100,000 was included in the refugees, or it might be due to serious and systematic undercounting of Arab population by the Mandate authorities. McCarthy suggests that there was such undercounting, yet his figures for the total population of Palestine agree with projections based on official figures for 1945.


6. There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees. In 1949, UNRWA reported 726,000 refugees. By 1950 they reported 914,000 according to one source (McCarthy), an increase of 26% that could not come either from births or further displacement of refugees, which were negligible.


7. The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896 - The city of Jerusalem itself there was a Jewish majority since about 1896, but probably not before. The district of Jerusalem (as opposed to the city) comprised a very wide area in Ottoman and British times, in which there was a Muslim majority. This included Jericho, Bethlehem and other towns. Within the Jerusalem district, there was a subdistrict of Jerusalem that includes many of the immediate suburbs such as Eyn Karem, Beit Zeit etc. In that subdistrict, the Jews remained a minority , with only about 52,000 out of 132,000 persons in 1931 for example.



And on Mrs. Peters's claims:

The main flaw in Mrs. Peters's arguments, which Mr. Sanders seems to accept, is her statement (in Mr. Sanders's words) "that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living in the main area of Jewish settlement; alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000." By 1947, she argues, the number of non-Jews in those areas had quintupled while in other areas of Palestine it only slightly more than doubled. This difference, in her view, can be accounted for only by the factor of Arab migration. But how did Mrs. Peters arrive at the number of the non-Jews in "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine for 1893? Her claim that there were about 92,000 non-Jews is made on page 250 of her book and the reader is referred there for the source to Appendix V. However, in the appendix no source is given. Only in the next appendix devoted to methodology does she claim that she used "Turkish census figures" (p. 427). But in the footnotes to chapters 10–12, where the composition of the Palestine population during the nineteenth century is discussed, no reference is made to the Ottoman archives where Mrs. Peters would, if she had consulted them, have found the returns of the Ottoman censuses of 1893 and 1915 that she uses in Appendix V.


The Ottoman census returns, in fact, were never published. Therefore Mrs. Peters could use them only by referring to a secondary source based on research in the Ottoman archives. And indeed that is the case with the article by Kemal Karpat quoted by Mrs. Peters and cited above. Karpat's figures are given, presumably as they appear in the Ottoman census returns, according to subdistricts (Kaza). It is impossible to ascertain from the figures he cites which of the Ottoman subdistricts of Palestine correspond to what Mrs. Peters defined as "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine. But one does find such a characterization of Ottoman subdistricts in the work by Vital Cuinet mentioned in Mr. Sanders's letter. And if one consults Cuinet's book to find where in Palestine, in 1893, 59,431 Jews (the number quoted by Mrs. Peters on page 251 of her book) were living, one finds that exactly the same number is given for the aggregate of Jews living in the seven subdistricts (Kaza) of Acre, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Consequently, we now know precisely what Peters defines as "the Jewish-settled areas"; she is evidently referring to the seven Ottoman subdistricts mentioned by Cuinet.​

Now we must consider the number of non-Jews living in those areas. According to Mrs. Peters (again on page 251), and apparently Mr. Sanders accepts her view, they numbered about 92,300, of which nearly 38,000 were Christians (making the number of Muslims about 54,300). But the Ottoman census figures in Karpat's table (pages 262 and 271 of his article) give the number of Muslims as 158,379 and of the Christians as 39,884, making a total number of 198,263 non-Jews in "the Jewish settled areas." If we use Cuinet's own figures we still do not get an estimate of the non-Jewish population that brings us much closer to the number of non-Jews claimed by Mrs. Peters. According to Cuinet's data on the seven Ottoman subdistricts comprising "the Jewish-settled areas" we have 124,686 Muslims and 61,964 Christians, a total of 186,263 non-Jews.[3]​

Obviously, these figures are more than double the figure of 92,000 non-Jews given in Mrs. Peters's book. One could argue that the actual area defined by Mrs. Peters as "the Jewish-settled areas" is smaller than the total area covered by the seven subdistricts listed above, and the map published on page 246 of her book indicates such a possibility. But if this were the case, nowhere in her main text or in the methodological appendices (V and VI) did Mrs. Peters bother to explain to her readers how she managed to break down the Ottoman or Cuinet's figures into smaller units than subdistricts. As far as I know no figures for the units smaller than subdistricts (Nahia; the parallel of the French commune), covering the area of Ottoman Palestine, were ever published. Therefore I can't avoid the conclusion that Mrs. Peters's figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that.​

I would add that even a superficial glance at Cuinet's figures should make any serious historian recoil from using them. While the official Ottoman figures for the Muslims are underestimated for the reasons I earlier explained, Cuinet's are much more so. As far as his figures for the Christians are concerned, their main flaws are not only their inflated character but also the distortion in the estimates he gives for the various Christian communities. First, Cuinet found hardly any Greek Orthodox Christians living in Palestine (450 in the Haifa subdistrict and 169 in the Jama'in subdistrict of the Nablus district). But by all other accounts, this community was the largest single Christian community living in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century; indeed, it is still the largest such community in the combined territory of present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza strip.​

Secondly, Cuinet claimed that substantial numbers of Syrian Orthodox Christians (about seven thousand) were living throughout Palestine, whereas in fact this Christian community was hardly to be found in Palestine at all. Its only presence in the country was a small monastery in Jerusalem. And thirdly and most absurdly, Cuinet claimed that precisely five thousand Maronites, who amounted to 10 percent of the population of the district, were living in the district of Nablus. But as everyone knows Maronites were to be found in the Middle East only in Mount Lebanon. The only exceptions were a cluster of villages in Cyprus and one village and half a village in the upper-most Galilee in northern Palestine (Bir'am and Jish in Israel of today), a direct extension of the Lebanese stronghold. No Maronites were to be found in the Nablus district and no other writer claimed that they were. Cuinet's mistakes were deliberately made in order to prove that Palestine, as much as Lebanon and Syria, should be put under French protection. His attitude is well known and requires that his material be used with great caution.​

Since we are left with no sound basis for Mrs. Peters's figures for the population in the "Jewish-settled areas" in 1893, there is no need to account for the supposed quintupling of the Arab population in those areas by 1947; so dramatic an increase did not take place. It is true nevertheless that during the Mandatory period the Arab population of the coastal area of Palestine grew faster than it did in other areas. But this fact does not necessarily prove an Arab immigration into Palestine took place. More reasonably it confirms the very well-known fact that the coastal area attracted Arab villagers from the mountainous parts of Palestine who preferred the economic opportunities in the fast-growing areas of Jaffa and Haifa to the meager opportunities available in their villages.​

The coastal area had several main attractions for the Arab villagers. They found jobs in constructing, and later working in, the port of Haifa, the Iraq Petroleum Company refineries, the railway workshops, and the nascent Arab industries there. They also took part in the large-scale cultivation of the citrus groves between Haifa and Jaffa and found jobs connected with the shipment of citrus fruits from the Jaffa port. Contrary to what Mr. Pipes claims, all these developments had almost nothing to do with the growth of the Jewish National Home. The main foreign factor that brought them about was the Mandatory government. The Zionist settlers had a clearly stated policy against using Arab labor or investing in Arab industries. At the same time, the natural increase in the Palestinian Arab population I referred to is made clear in the statistical abstracts and quarterly surveys published by the Mandatory government in the years following the census of 1931.​

Why is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

Firstly, I believe the mods typically request that entire articles not be cut and pasted but referenced by link.

I'm guessing that you did not bother to go to the link and look at the source in your haste to spew an anti-mod comment.

Secondly, item 3 from your link, (which is confirmed in various other sources), is in direct contradiction to the wailing that takes place when that fact is presented to the more excitable of the screamers and shouters.

3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians.

And, your point is what exactly?

Lastly, your article should have mentioned that the geographic area of Pal'istan was inhabited. However, it's worth noting that the geographic area was not the formal structure of a "country" as many of the screamers / wailers represent it to be.

And, your point is what exactly?

Joan Peter's was extremely inaccurate as a source for demographics.

Now, if you're arguing that that there was no huge Zionist displacement of Arabs according to available demographic information. I agree.

If you're arguing that Jews are also indiginous and did not spontaniously appear when immigrants came over from Europe. I agree.

You posted far more than 500 words, which is a copyright violation, and no one ever claimed that all the Jews in Israel are indigenous. The point is that most of the so-called "Palestinians" are not indigenous. They are immigrants from other countries.

 

[Phoenall]

Joan Peters née Friedman

From Time Immemorial - Wikipedia

Well if Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and Yehoshua Porath all,criticise her work it must be touching a raw nerve and be closer to the truth than their literary works

 

[RoccoR]

Coyote, et al,

I'm not sure that the "rightwing" (what ever we mean by that) no legitimacy.

TWhy is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

(COMMENT)

What ever name we affix to the parties in conflict [(Arab - Israeli)(Muslims - Jews)]; whatever % of personal land property any individual secures, the questions that we have to ask first about the conflict is:

•• TO WHOM did Turkey renounce all rights and title over the territory currently being fought over by the Arabs and Israelis?

•• TO WHOM does the primary interest, Rights and Duties focus on the conservation of peace?
​

These question ask the who did the Ottoman Empire/Turkish Republic --- as the Sovereign --- give the territory?

• IF it was not given to the Arab Palestinians ---
• THEN when did the Arab Palestinian receive all Rights and Title?
​

Most Respectfully,
R

 

[Coyote]

The Population of Palestine Prior to 1948

Major Conclusions


1. The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times, and the relative contributions of natural increase and immigration, imprecision in the counts and other issues.


2. Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began. The lowest estimates claim there were about 410,000 Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine in 1893. A Zionist estimate claimed there were over 600,000 Arabs in Palestine. in the 1890s. At this time, the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was still negligible by all accounts. It is unlikely that Palestinian immigration prior to this period was due to Zionist development. Though uncertainty exists concerning the precise numbers of Arabs living in the areas that later became Israel, it is very unlikely that the claims of Joan Peters that there were less than 100,000 Arabs living there are valid.


3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by sub-districts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs. For a detailed discussion that focuses on this myth, please refer to Zionism and its Impact.


4. Historic population data in Palestine during Ottoman times and during Mandatory times show significant discrepancies. For example, figures reported in Table A-1 for 1930 population of Arabs are about 100,000 too low according to census figures for 1931


5. It is not possible to estimate illegal Arab immigration directly, but apparently there was some immigration. The total Arab immigration to Palestine recorded or estimated by the Mandate government was in the neighborhood of 45,000. Illegal immigration that was not recorded would not register in the final population figures for 1945, because those figures were estimates. We simply do not know how many Arabs and Jews there were in Palestine before the declaration of the state of Israel. It is probable that there were about 100,000 Arab immigrants into Palestine. An unknown number may also have migrated internally, from the Arab areas in the West Bank that were formerly the centers of commercial activity and population to the coastal plain and Galilee. The Arab population increase of areas with large Jewish settlement was about 10% greater than that in areas without Jewish settlement. This effect cannot be totally separated from urbanization. A population of approximately 103,000 Bedouin (1922 estimate reported in the 1927-1929 reports of the Mandatory) may have been excluded or included in different population figures as the authorities and demographers saw fit. There is no way to know how many of these Bedouin made a permanent home in Palestine or how many became part of the city population in the course of industrialization between 1922 and 1948. However, the evidence indicates that they were in fact included in all the official population figures. This is shown by the fact that estimates of Muslim population that explicitly do not include Bedouin were significantly lower than the census figures, and by the fact that population growth is consistent with figures for natural increase if we assume that the Bedouin were included.


5. There are large discrepancies between official population figures and the number of Palestinian refugees - An analysis of population by subdistricts and villages, using the admittedly incomplete data of the Palestine Remembered Web site, shows that there were about 736,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs in the part of Palestine that was to become "Green Line Israel" in 1949. There would not have been more than 620,000 refugees in 1949 if these figures are correct, since the Israeli census showed 156,000 non-Jews living in Palestine in November 1948, of whom about 14,000 were Druze. The number of refugees reported by UNRWA in 1948 was 726,000. It might indicate that an unregistered and illegal population of 100,000 was included in the refugees, or it might be due to serious and systematic undercounting of Arab population by the Mandate authorities. McCarthy suggests that there was such undercounting, yet his figures for the total population of Palestine agree with projections based on official figures for 1945.


6. There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees. In 1949, UNRWA reported 726,000 refugees. By 1950 they reported 914,000 according to one source (McCarthy), an increase of 26% that could not come either from births or further displacement of refugees, which were negligible.


7. The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896 - The city of Jerusalem itself there was a Jewish majority since about 1896, but probably not before. The district of Jerusalem (as opposed to the city) comprised a very wide area in Ottoman and British times, in which there was a Muslim majority. This included Jericho, Bethlehem and other towns. Within the Jerusalem district, there was a subdistrict of Jerusalem that includes many of the immediate suburbs such as Eyn Karem, Beit Zeit etc. In that subdistrict, the Jews remained a minority , with only about 52,000 out of 132,000 persons in 1931 for example.



And on Mrs. Peters's claims:

The main flaw in Mrs. Peters's arguments, which Mr. Sanders seems to accept, is her statement (in Mr. Sanders's words) "that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living in the main area of Jewish settlement; alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000." By 1947, she argues, the number of non-Jews in those areas had quintupled while in other areas of Palestine it only slightly more than doubled. This difference, in her view, can be accounted for only by the factor of Arab migration. But how did Mrs. Peters arrive at the number of the non-Jews in "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine for 1893? Her claim that there were about 92,000 non-Jews is made on page 250 of her book and the reader is referred there for the source to Appendix V. However, in the appendix no source is given. Only in the next appendix devoted to methodology does she claim that she used "Turkish census figures" (p. 427). But in the footnotes to chapters 10–12, where the composition of the Palestine population during the nineteenth century is discussed, no reference is made to the Ottoman archives where Mrs. Peters would, if she had consulted them, have found the returns of the Ottoman censuses of 1893 and 1915 that she uses in Appendix V.


The Ottoman census returns, in fact, were never published. Therefore Mrs. Peters could use them only by referring to a secondary source based on research in the Ottoman archives. And indeed that is the case with the article by Kemal Karpat quoted by Mrs. Peters and cited above. Karpat's figures are given, presumably as they appear in the Ottoman census returns, according to subdistricts (Kaza). It is impossible to ascertain from the figures he cites which of the Ottoman subdistricts of Palestine correspond to what Mrs. Peters defined as "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine. But one does find such a characterization of Ottoman subdistricts in the work by Vital Cuinet mentioned in Mr. Sanders's letter. And if one consults Cuinet's book to find where in Palestine, in 1893, 59,431 Jews (the number quoted by Mrs. Peters on page 251 of her book) were living, one finds that exactly the same number is given for the aggregate of Jews living in the seven subdistricts (Kaza) of Acre, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Consequently, we now know precisely what Peters defines as "the Jewish-settled areas"; she is evidently referring to the seven Ottoman subdistricts mentioned by Cuinet.​

Now we must consider the number of non-Jews living in those areas. According to Mrs. Peters (again on page 251), and apparently Mr. Sanders accepts her view, they numbered about 92,300, of which nearly 38,000 were Christians (making the number of Muslims about 54,300). But the Ottoman census figures in Karpat's table (pages 262 and 271 of his article) give the number of Muslims as 158,379 and of the Christians as 39,884, making a total number of 198,263 non-Jews in "the Jewish settled areas." If we use Cuinet's own figures we still do not get an estimate of the non-Jewish population that brings us much closer to the number of non-Jews claimed by Mrs. Peters. According to Cuinet's data on the seven Ottoman subdistricts comprising "the Jewish-settled areas" we have 124,686 Muslims and 61,964 Christians, a total of 186,263 non-Jews.[3]​

Obviously, these figures are more than double the figure of 92,000 non-Jews given in Mrs. Peters's book. One could argue that the actual area defined by Mrs. Peters as "the Jewish-settled areas" is smaller than the total area covered by the seven subdistricts listed above, and the map published on page 246 of her book indicates such a possibility. But if this were the case, nowhere in her main text or in the methodological appendices (V and VI) did Mrs. Peters bother to explain to her readers how she managed to break down the Ottoman or Cuinet's figures into smaller units than subdistricts. As far as I know no figures for the units smaller than subdistricts (Nahia; the parallel of the French commune), covering the area of Ottoman Palestine, were ever published. Therefore I can't avoid the conclusion that Mrs. Peters's figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that.​

I would add that even a superficial glance at Cuinet's figures should make any serious historian recoil from using them. While the official Ottoman figures for the Muslims are underestimated for the reasons I earlier explained, Cuinet's are much more so. As far as his figures for the Christians are concerned, their main flaws are not only their inflated character but also the distortion in the estimates he gives for the various Christian communities. First, Cuinet found hardly any Greek Orthodox Christians living in Palestine (450 in the Haifa subdistrict and 169 in the Jama'in subdistrict of the Nablus district). But by all other accounts, this community was the largest single Christian community living in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century; indeed, it is still the largest such community in the combined territory of present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza strip.​

Secondly, Cuinet claimed that substantial numbers of Syrian Orthodox Christians (about seven thousand) were living throughout Palestine, whereas in fact this Christian community was hardly to be found in Palestine at all. Its only presence in the country was a small monastery in Jerusalem. And thirdly and most absurdly, Cuinet claimed that precisely five thousand Maronites, who amounted to 10 percent of the population of the district, were living in the district of Nablus. But as everyone knows Maronites were to be found in the Middle East only in Mount Lebanon. The only exceptions were a cluster of villages in Cyprus and one village and half a village in the upper-most Galilee in northern Palestine (Bir'am and Jish in Israel of today), a direct extension of the Lebanese stronghold. No Maronites were to be found in the Nablus district and no other writer claimed that they were. Cuinet's mistakes were deliberately made in order to prove that Palestine, as much as Lebanon and Syria, should be put under French protection. His attitude is well known and requires that his material be used with great caution.​

Since we are left with no sound basis for Mrs. Peters's figures for the population in the "Jewish-settled areas" in 1893, there is no need to account for the supposed quintupling of the Arab population in those areas by 1947; so dramatic an increase did not take place. It is true nevertheless that during the Mandatory period the Arab population of the coastal area of Palestine grew faster than it did in other areas. But this fact does not necessarily prove an Arab immigration into Palestine took place. More reasonably it confirms the very well-known fact that the coastal area attracted Arab villagers from the mountainous parts of Palestine who preferred the economic opportunities in the fast-growing areas of Jaffa and Haifa to the meager opportunities available in their villages.​

The coastal area had several main attractions for the Arab villagers. They found jobs in constructing, and later working in, the port of Haifa, the Iraq Petroleum Company refineries, the railway workshops, and the nascent Arab industries there. They also took part in the large-scale cultivation of the citrus groves between Haifa and Jaffa and found jobs connected with the shipment of citrus fruits from the Jaffa port. Contrary to what Mr. Pipes claims, all these developments had almost nothing to do with the growth of the Jewish National Home. The main foreign factor that brought them about was the Mandatory government. The Zionist settlers had a clearly stated policy against using Arab labor or investing in Arab industries. At the same time, the natural increase in the Palestinian Arab population I referred to is made clear in the statistical abstracts and quarterly surveys published by the Mandatory government in the years following the census of 1931.​

Why is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

Firstly, I believe the mods typically request that entire articles not be cut and pasted but referenced by link.

I'm guessing that you did not bother to go to the link and look at the source in your haste to spew an anti-mod comment.

Secondly, item 3 from your link, (which is confirmed in various other sources), is in direct contradiction to the wailing that takes place when that fact is presented to the more excitable of the screamers and shouters.

3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians.

And, your point is what exactly?

Lastly, your article should have mentioned that the geographic area of Pal'istan was inhabited. However, it's worth noting that the geographic area was not the formal structure of a "country" as many of the screamers / wailers represent it to be.

And, your point is what exactly?

Joan Peter's was extremely inaccurate as a source for demographics.

Now, if you're arguing that that there was no huge Zionist displacement of Arabs according to available demographic information. I agree.

If you're arguing that Jews are also indiginous and did not spontaniously appear when immigrants came over from Europe. I agree.

You posted far more than 500 words, which is a copyright violation, and no one ever claimed that all the Jews in Israel are indigenous. The point is that most of the so-called "Palestinians" are not indigenous. They are immigrants from other countries.

Where is 500 words a copyright infringement according to the rules of USMB? Here, I'll help you, since you and Holly have clearly NOT gone to the link itself, and seen the extremely long article with the graphs and table.

Copyright. Link Each "Copy & Paste" to It's Source. Only paste a small to medium section of the material.

The point is...according to the article from which a posted a "medium" size section, there is no way to prove how many are or are not indiginous, and since your title states that the claim any are is "debunked" ... and you state "most are not indiginous" - your claim is debunked by this information.

 

[Coyote]

Coyote, et al,

I'm not sure that the "rightwing" (what ever we mean by that) no legitimacy.

TWhy is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

(COMMENT)

What ever name we affix to the parties in conflict [(Arab - Israeli)(Muslims - Jews)]; whatever % of personal land property any individual secures, the questions that we have to ask first about the conflict is:

•• TO WHOM did Turkey renounce all rights and title over the territory currently being fought over by the Arabs and Israelis?

•• TO WHOM does the primary interest, Rights and Duties focus on the conservation of peace?
​

These question ask the who did the Ottoman Empire/Turkish Republic --- as the Sovereign --- give the territory?

• IF it was not given to the Arab Palestinians ---
• THEN when did the Arab Palestinian receive all Rights and Title?
​

Most Respectfully,
R

Are you saying the Palestinians have no legitimacy then...? There is also legitimacy gained in living in an area for long period of time ("squatters rights" in some laws).

 

[bripat9643]

The Population of Palestine Prior to 1948

Major Conclusions


1. The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times, and the relative contributions of natural increase and immigration, imprecision in the counts and other issues.


2. Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began. The lowest estimates claim there were about 410,000 Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine in 1893. A Zionist estimate claimed there were over 600,000 Arabs in Palestine. in the 1890s. At this time, the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was still negligible by all accounts. It is unlikely that Palestinian immigration prior to this period was due to Zionist development. Though uncertainty exists concerning the precise numbers of Arabs living in the areas that later became Israel, it is very unlikely that the claims of Joan Peters that there were less than 100,000 Arabs living there are valid.


3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by sub-districts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs. For a detailed discussion that focuses on this myth, please refer to Zionism and its Impact.


4. Historic population data in Palestine during Ottoman times and during Mandatory times show significant discrepancies. For example, figures reported in Table A-1 for 1930 population of Arabs are about 100,000 too low according to census figures for 1931


5. It is not possible to estimate illegal Arab immigration directly, but apparently there was some immigration. The total Arab immigration to Palestine recorded or estimated by the Mandate government was in the neighborhood of 45,000. Illegal immigration that was not recorded would not register in the final population figures for 1945, because those figures were estimates. We simply do not know how many Arabs and Jews there were in Palestine before the declaration of the state of Israel. It is probable that there were about 100,000 Arab immigrants into Palestine. An unknown number may also have migrated internally, from the Arab areas in the West Bank that were formerly the centers of commercial activity and population to the coastal plain and Galilee. The Arab population increase of areas with large Jewish settlement was about 10% greater than that in areas without Jewish settlement. This effect cannot be totally separated from urbanization. A population of approximately 103,000 Bedouin (1922 estimate reported in the 1927-1929 reports of the Mandatory) may have been excluded or included in different population figures as the authorities and demographers saw fit. There is no way to know how many of these Bedouin made a permanent home in Palestine or how many became part of the city population in the course of industrialization between 1922 and 1948. However, the evidence indicates that they were in fact included in all the official population figures. This is shown by the fact that estimates of Muslim population that explicitly do not include Bedouin were significantly lower than the census figures, and by the fact that population growth is consistent with figures for natural increase if we assume that the Bedouin were included.


5. There are large discrepancies between official population figures and the number of Palestinian refugees - An analysis of population by subdistricts and villages, using the admittedly incomplete data of the Palestine Remembered Web site, shows that there were about 736,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs in the part of Palestine that was to become "Green Line Israel" in 1949. There would not have been more than 620,000 refugees in 1949 if these figures are correct, since the Israeli census showed 156,000 non-Jews living in Palestine in November 1948, of whom about 14,000 were Druze. The number of refugees reported by UNRWA in 1948 was 726,000. It might indicate that an unregistered and illegal population of 100,000 was included in the refugees, or it might be due to serious and systematic undercounting of Arab population by the Mandate authorities. McCarthy suggests that there was such undercounting, yet his figures for the total population of Palestine agree with projections based on official figures for 1945.


6. There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees. In 1949, UNRWA reported 726,000 refugees. By 1950 they reported 914,000 according to one source (McCarthy), an increase of 26% that could not come either from births or further displacement of refugees, which were negligible.


7. The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896 - The city of Jerusalem itself there was a Jewish majority since about 1896, but probably not before. The district of Jerusalem (as opposed to the city) comprised a very wide area in Ottoman and British times, in which there was a Muslim majority. This included Jericho, Bethlehem and other towns. Within the Jerusalem district, there was a subdistrict of Jerusalem that includes many of the immediate suburbs such as Eyn Karem, Beit Zeit etc. In that subdistrict, the Jews remained a minority , with only about 52,000 out of 132,000 persons in 1931 for example.



And on Mrs. Peters's claims:

The main flaw in Mrs. Peters's arguments, which Mr. Sanders seems to accept, is her statement (in Mr. Sanders's words) "that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living in the main area of Jewish settlement; alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000." By 1947, she argues, the number of non-Jews in those areas had quintupled while in other areas of Palestine it only slightly more than doubled. This difference, in her view, can be accounted for only by the factor of Arab migration. But how did Mrs. Peters arrive at the number of the non-Jews in "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine for 1893? Her claim that there were about 92,000 non-Jews is made on page 250 of her book and the reader is referred there for the source to Appendix V. However, in the appendix no source is given. Only in the next appendix devoted to methodology does she claim that she used "Turkish census figures" (p. 427). But in the footnotes to chapters 10–12, where the composition of the Palestine population during the nineteenth century is discussed, no reference is made to the Ottoman archives where Mrs. Peters would, if she had consulted them, have found the returns of the Ottoman censuses of 1893 and 1915 that she uses in Appendix V.


The Ottoman census returns, in fact, were never published. Therefore Mrs. Peters could use them only by referring to a secondary source based on research in the Ottoman archives. And indeed that is the case with the article by Kemal Karpat quoted by Mrs. Peters and cited above. Karpat's figures are given, presumably as they appear in the Ottoman census returns, according to subdistricts (Kaza). It is impossible to ascertain from the figures he cites which of the Ottoman subdistricts of Palestine correspond to what Mrs. Peters defined as "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine. But one does find such a characterization of Ottoman subdistricts in the work by Vital Cuinet mentioned in Mr. Sanders's letter. And if one consults Cuinet's book to find where in Palestine, in 1893, 59,431 Jews (the number quoted by Mrs. Peters on page 251 of her book) were living, one finds that exactly the same number is given for the aggregate of Jews living in the seven subdistricts (Kaza) of Acre, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Consequently, we now know precisely what Peters defines as "the Jewish-settled areas"; she is evidently referring to the seven Ottoman subdistricts mentioned by Cuinet.​

Now we must consider the number of non-Jews living in those areas. According to Mrs. Peters (again on page 251), and apparently Mr. Sanders accepts her view, they numbered about 92,300, of which nearly 38,000 were Christians (making the number of Muslims about 54,300). But the Ottoman census figures in Karpat's table (pages 262 and 271 of his article) give the number of Muslims as 158,379 and of the Christians as 39,884, making a total number of 198,263 non-Jews in "the Jewish settled areas." If we use Cuinet's own figures we still do not get an estimate of the non-Jewish population that brings us much closer to the number of non-Jews claimed by Mrs. Peters. According to Cuinet's data on the seven Ottoman subdistricts comprising "the Jewish-settled areas" we have 124,686 Muslims and 61,964 Christians, a total of 186,263 non-Jews.[3]​

Obviously, these figures are more than double the figure of 92,000 non-Jews given in Mrs. Peters's book. One could argue that the actual area defined by Mrs. Peters as "the Jewish-settled areas" is smaller than the total area covered by the seven subdistricts listed above, and the map published on page 246 of her book indicates such a possibility. But if this were the case, nowhere in her main text or in the methodological appendices (V and VI) did Mrs. Peters bother to explain to her readers how she managed to break down the Ottoman or Cuinet's figures into smaller units than subdistricts. As far as I know no figures for the units smaller than subdistricts (Nahia; the parallel of the French commune), covering the area of Ottoman Palestine, were ever published. Therefore I can't avoid the conclusion that Mrs. Peters's figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that.​

I would add that even a superficial glance at Cuinet's figures should make any serious historian recoil from using them. While the official Ottoman figures for the Muslims are underestimated for the reasons I earlier explained, Cuinet's are much more so. As far as his figures for the Christians are concerned, their main flaws are not only their inflated character but also the distortion in the estimates he gives for the various Christian communities. First, Cuinet found hardly any Greek Orthodox Christians living in Palestine (450 in the Haifa subdistrict and 169 in the Jama'in subdistrict of the Nablus district). But by all other accounts, this community was the largest single Christian community living in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century; indeed, it is still the largest such community in the combined territory of present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza strip.​

Secondly, Cuinet claimed that substantial numbers of Syrian Orthodox Christians (about seven thousand) were living throughout Palestine, whereas in fact this Christian community was hardly to be found in Palestine at all. Its only presence in the country was a small monastery in Jerusalem. And thirdly and most absurdly, Cuinet claimed that precisely five thousand Maronites, who amounted to 10 percent of the population of the district, were living in the district of Nablus. But as everyone knows Maronites were to be found in the Middle East only in Mount Lebanon. The only exceptions were a cluster of villages in Cyprus and one village and half a village in the upper-most Galilee in northern Palestine (Bir'am and Jish in Israel of today), a direct extension of the Lebanese stronghold. No Maronites were to be found in the Nablus district and no other writer claimed that they were. Cuinet's mistakes were deliberately made in order to prove that Palestine, as much as Lebanon and Syria, should be put under French protection. His attitude is well known and requires that his material be used with great caution.​

Since we are left with no sound basis for Mrs. Peters's figures for the population in the "Jewish-settled areas" in 1893, there is no need to account for the supposed quintupling of the Arab population in those areas by 1947; so dramatic an increase did not take place. It is true nevertheless that during the Mandatory period the Arab population of the coastal area of Palestine grew faster than it did in other areas. But this fact does not necessarily prove an Arab immigration into Palestine took place. More reasonably it confirms the very well-known fact that the coastal area attracted Arab villagers from the mountainous parts of Palestine who preferred the economic opportunities in the fast-growing areas of Jaffa and Haifa to the meager opportunities available in their villages.​

The coastal area had several main attractions for the Arab villagers. They found jobs in constructing, and later working in, the port of Haifa, the Iraq Petroleum Company refineries, the railway workshops, and the nascent Arab industries there. They also took part in the large-scale cultivation of the citrus groves between Haifa and Jaffa and found jobs connected with the shipment of citrus fruits from the Jaffa port. Contrary to what Mr. Pipes claims, all these developments had almost nothing to do with the growth of the Jewish National Home. The main foreign factor that brought them about was the Mandatory government. The Zionist settlers had a clearly stated policy against using Arab labor or investing in Arab industries. At the same time, the natural increase in the Palestinian Arab population I referred to is made clear in the statistical abstracts and quarterly surveys published by the Mandatory government in the years following the census of 1931.​

Why is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

Firstly, I believe the mods typically request that entire articles not be cut and pasted but referenced by link.

I'm guessing that you did not bother to go to the link and look at the source in your haste to spew an anti-mod comment.

Secondly, item 3 from your link, (which is confirmed in various other sources), is in direct contradiction to the wailing that takes place when that fact is presented to the more excitable of the screamers and shouters.

3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians.

And, your point is what exactly?

Lastly, your article should have mentioned that the geographic area of Pal'istan was inhabited. However, it's worth noting that the geographic area was not the formal structure of a "country" as many of the screamers / wailers represent it to be.

And, your point is what exactly?

Joan Peter's was extremely inaccurate as a source for demographics.

Now, if you're arguing that that there was no huge Zionist displacement of Arabs according to available demographic information. I agree.

If you're arguing that Jews are also indiginous and did not spontaniously appear when immigrants came over from Europe. I agree.

You posted far more than 500 words, which is a copyright violation, and no one ever claimed that all the Jews in Israel are indigenous. The point is that most of the so-called "Palestinians" are not indigenous. They are immigrants from other countries.

Where is 500 words a copyright infringement according to the rules of USMB? Here, I'll help you, since you and Holly have clearly NOT gone to the link itself, and seen the extremely long article with the graphs and table.

Copyright. Link Each "Copy & Paste" to It's Source. Only paste a small to medium section of the material.

The point is...according to the article from which a posted a "medium" size section, there is no way to prove how many are or are not indiginous, and since your title states that the claim any are is "debunked" ... and you state "most are not indiginous" - your claim is debunked by this information.

There's no need to prove the exact number of so-called "Palestinians" are indigenous. The evidence indicates that the vast majority of them aren't. In fact, because of interbreeding, virtually none of them are indigenous. The so-called "indigenous" Palestinians were swamped by vast numbers if immigrants.

 

[bripat9643]

Coyote, et al,

I'm not sure that the "rightwing" (what ever we mean by that) no legitimacy.

TWhy is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

(COMMENT)

What ever name we affix to the parties in conflict [(Arab - Israeli)(Muslims - Jews)]; whatever % of personal land property any individual secures, the questions that we have to ask first about the conflict is:

•• TO WHOM did Turkey renounce all rights and title over the territory currently being fought over by the Arabs and Israelis?

•• TO WHOM does the primary interest, Rights and Duties focus on the conservation of peace?
​

These question ask the who did the Ottoman Empire/Turkish Republic --- as the Sovereign --- give the territory?

• IF it was not given to the Arab Palestinians ---
• THEN when did the Arab Palestinian receive all Rights and Title?
​

Most Respectfully,
R

Are you saying the Palestinians have no legitimacy then...? There is also legitimacy gained in living in an area for long period of time ("squatters rights" in some laws).

That would make the Israelis legitimate, and your kind emphatically rejects that argument.

 

[RoccoR]

Coyote, et al,

And I think there in rest some confusion.

Are you saying the Palestinians have no legitimacy then...? There is also legitimacy gained in living in an area for long period of time ("squatters rights" in some laws).

(COMMENT)

• ON THE ONE-HAND: "Squatters Rights" really deals with the abandonment of real property.

• ON THE OTHER HAND: "Rights and Title" really deals with Sovereignty and Independence.

There is question of legitimacy to the land in terms of civil ownership. This is an entirely different matter. And a complicated one at that.

Sovereignty and Independence are not affected by on it. The Ottoman Empire had Sovereignty over the territory for centuries. The Sultan ruled without regard to who lived on the land.

We still have the first question...

•• TO WHOM did Turkey renounce all rights and title over the territory currently being fought over by the Arabs and Israelis?

Most Respectfully,
R

 

[Shusha]

Are you saying the Palestinians have no legitimacy then...? There is also legitimacy gained in living in an area for long period of time ("squatters rights" in some laws).

Of course, Palestinians have rights and legitimacy. That right does not arise from indigeneity.

 

[Coyote]

Are you saying the Palestinians have no legitimacy then...? There is also legitimacy gained in living in an area for long period of time ("squatters rights" in some laws).

Of course, Palestinians have rights and legitimacy. That right does not arise from indigeneity.

Well...we disagree on sentence 2, but I know you agree to legitimacy all around. I don't think that is a common view in this subforum.

 

[Coyote]

Coyote, et al,

And I think there in rest some confusion.

Are you saying the Palestinians have no legitimacy then...? There is also legitimacy gained in living in an area for long period of time ("squatters rights" in some laws).

(COMMENT)

• ON THE ONE-HAND: "Squatters Rights" really deals with the abandonment of real property.

• ON THE OTHER HAND: "Rights and Title" really deals with Sovereignty and Independence.

There is question of legitimacy to the land in terms of civil ownership. This is an entirely different matter. And a complicated one at that.

Sovereignty and Independence are not affected by on it. The Ottoman Empire had Sovereignty over the territory for centuries. The Sultan ruled without regard to who lived on the land.

We still have the first question...

•• TO WHOM did Turkey renounce all rights and title over the territory currently being fought over by the Arabs and Israelis?

Most Respectfully,
R

Wasn't it the Allied Powers...?

 

[Shusha]

Well...we disagree on sentence 2, but I know you agree to legitimacy all around. I don't think that is a common view in this subforum.

Our disagreement has no practical value, since we both agree that you can't unbreak some eggs and we both agree that both sides have legitimacy. I'm just being picky with the definition of indigenous (correctly picky -- it matters). Indigeneity has nothing to do with individual peoples or families and very little to do with a presence in a geographical territory. Being indigenous means practicing a culture or belonging to a particular culture. Its the culture which creates the indigeneity.

Indigeneity is defined as a pre-conquest culture -- that is, the culture of the place which originated in that place and was practiced by the people of that place. Jewish culture (which is far more than just a religion) originated in the place in question. It was practiced by the people of that place until that culture was overrun by invaders. The invaders, by definition, did not practice a culture which originated in that place. The invaders, by definition, had their culture originate elsewhere. The Arabic culture, which is currently practiced by the Arab Palestinians, originated elsewhere. It suppressed and superceded the Hebrew culture.

Indigeneity has no meaning if you just take it to mean everyone who has lived there for a certain length of time.

 

[Coyote]

The Population of Palestine Prior to 1948

Major Conclusions


1. The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times, and the relative contributions of natural increase and immigration, imprecision in the counts and other issues.


2. Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began. The lowest estimates claim there were about 410,000 Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine in 1893. A Zionist estimate claimed there were over 600,000 Arabs in Palestine. in the 1890s. At this time, the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was still negligible by all accounts. It is unlikely that Palestinian immigration prior to this period was due to Zionist development. Though uncertainty exists concerning the precise numbers of Arabs living in the areas that later became Israel, it is very unlikely that the claims of Joan Peters that there were less than 100,000 Arabs living there are valid.


3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by sub-districts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs. For a detailed discussion that focuses on this myth, please refer to Zionism and its Impact.


4. Historic population data in Palestine during Ottoman times and during Mandatory times show significant discrepancies. For example, figures reported in Table A-1 for 1930 population of Arabs are about 100,000 too low according to census figures for 1931


5. It is not possible to estimate illegal Arab immigration directly, but apparently there was some immigration. The total Arab immigration to Palestine recorded or estimated by the Mandate government was in the neighborhood of 45,000. Illegal immigration that was not recorded would not register in the final population figures for 1945, because those figures were estimates. We simply do not know how many Arabs and Jews there were in Palestine before the declaration of the state of Israel. It is probable that there were about 100,000 Arab immigrants into Palestine. An unknown number may also have migrated internally, from the Arab areas in the West Bank that were formerly the centers of commercial activity and population to the coastal plain and Galilee. The Arab population increase of areas with large Jewish settlement was about 10% greater than that in areas without Jewish settlement. This effect cannot be totally separated from urbanization. A population of approximately 103,000 Bedouin (1922 estimate reported in the 1927-1929 reports of the Mandatory) may have been excluded or included in different population figures as the authorities and demographers saw fit. There is no way to know how many of these Bedouin made a permanent home in Palestine or how many became part of the city population in the course of industrialization between 1922 and 1948. However, the evidence indicates that they were in fact included in all the official population figures. This is shown by the fact that estimates of Muslim population that explicitly do not include Bedouin were significantly lower than the census figures, and by the fact that population growth is consistent with figures for natural increase if we assume that the Bedouin were included.


5. There are large discrepancies between official population figures and the number of Palestinian refugees - An analysis of population by subdistricts and villages, using the admittedly incomplete data of the Palestine Remembered Web site, shows that there were about 736,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs in the part of Palestine that was to become "Green Line Israel" in 1949. There would not have been more than 620,000 refugees in 1949 if these figures are correct, since the Israeli census showed 156,000 non-Jews living in Palestine in November 1948, of whom about 14,000 were Druze. The number of refugees reported by UNRWA in 1948 was 726,000. It might indicate that an unregistered and illegal population of 100,000 was included in the refugees, or it might be due to serious and systematic undercounting of Arab population by the Mandate authorities. McCarthy suggests that there was such undercounting, yet his figures for the total population of Palestine agree with projections based on official figures for 1945.


6. There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees. In 1949, UNRWA reported 726,000 refugees. By 1950 they reported 914,000 according to one source (McCarthy), an increase of 26% that could not come either from births or further displacement of refugees, which were negligible.


7. The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896 - The city of Jerusalem itself there was a Jewish majority since about 1896, but probably not before. The district of Jerusalem (as opposed to the city) comprised a very wide area in Ottoman and British times, in which there was a Muslim majority. This included Jericho, Bethlehem and other towns. Within the Jerusalem district, there was a subdistrict of Jerusalem that includes many of the immediate suburbs such as Eyn Karem, Beit Zeit etc. In that subdistrict, the Jews remained a minority , with only about 52,000 out of 132,000 persons in 1931 for example.



And on Mrs. Peters's claims:

The main flaw in Mrs. Peters's arguments, which Mr. Sanders seems to accept, is her statement (in Mr. Sanders's words) "that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living in the main area of Jewish settlement; alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000." By 1947, she argues, the number of non-Jews in those areas had quintupled while in other areas of Palestine it only slightly more than doubled. This difference, in her view, can be accounted for only by the factor of Arab migration. But how did Mrs. Peters arrive at the number of the non-Jews in "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine for 1893? Her claim that there were about 92,000 non-Jews is made on page 250 of her book and the reader is referred there for the source to Appendix V. However, in the appendix no source is given. Only in the next appendix devoted to methodology does she claim that she used "Turkish census figures" (p. 427). But in the footnotes to chapters 10–12, where the composition of the Palestine population during the nineteenth century is discussed, no reference is made to the Ottoman archives where Mrs. Peters would, if she had consulted them, have found the returns of the Ottoman censuses of 1893 and 1915 that she uses in Appendix V.


The Ottoman census returns, in fact, were never published. Therefore Mrs. Peters could use them only by referring to a secondary source based on research in the Ottoman archives. And indeed that is the case with the article by Kemal Karpat quoted by Mrs. Peters and cited above. Karpat's figures are given, presumably as they appear in the Ottoman census returns, according to subdistricts (Kaza). It is impossible to ascertain from the figures he cites which of the Ottoman subdistricts of Palestine correspond to what Mrs. Peters defined as "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine. But one does find such a characterization of Ottoman subdistricts in the work by Vital Cuinet mentioned in Mr. Sanders's letter. And if one consults Cuinet's book to find where in Palestine, in 1893, 59,431 Jews (the number quoted by Mrs. Peters on page 251 of her book) were living, one finds that exactly the same number is given for the aggregate of Jews living in the seven subdistricts (Kaza) of Acre, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Consequently, we now know precisely what Peters defines as "the Jewish-settled areas"; she is evidently referring to the seven Ottoman subdistricts mentioned by Cuinet.​

Now we must consider the number of non-Jews living in those areas. According to Mrs. Peters (again on page 251), and apparently Mr. Sanders accepts her view, they numbered about 92,300, of which nearly 38,000 were Christians (making the number of Muslims about 54,300). But the Ottoman census figures in Karpat's table (pages 262 and 271 of his article) give the number of Muslims as 158,379 and of the Christians as 39,884, making a total number of 198,263 non-Jews in "the Jewish settled areas." If we use Cuinet's own figures we still do not get an estimate of the non-Jewish population that brings us much closer to the number of non-Jews claimed by Mrs. Peters. According to Cuinet's data on the seven Ottoman subdistricts comprising "the Jewish-settled areas" we have 124,686 Muslims and 61,964 Christians, a total of 186,263 non-Jews.[3]​

Obviously, these figures are more than double the figure of 92,000 non-Jews given in Mrs. Peters's book. One could argue that the actual area defined by Mrs. Peters as "the Jewish-settled areas" is smaller than the total area covered by the seven subdistricts listed above, and the map published on page 246 of her book indicates such a possibility. But if this were the case, nowhere in her main text or in the methodological appendices (V and VI) did Mrs. Peters bother to explain to her readers how she managed to break down the Ottoman or Cuinet's figures into smaller units than subdistricts. As far as I know no figures for the units smaller than subdistricts (Nahia; the parallel of the French commune), covering the area of Ottoman Palestine, were ever published. Therefore I can't avoid the conclusion that Mrs. Peters's figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that.​

I would add that even a superficial glance at Cuinet's figures should make any serious historian recoil from using them. While the official Ottoman figures for the Muslims are underestimated for the reasons I earlier explained, Cuinet's are much more so. As far as his figures for the Christians are concerned, their main flaws are not only their inflated character but also the distortion in the estimates he gives for the various Christian communities. First, Cuinet found hardly any Greek Orthodox Christians living in Palestine (450 in the Haifa subdistrict and 169 in the Jama'in subdistrict of the Nablus district). But by all other accounts, this community was the largest single Christian community living in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century; indeed, it is still the largest such community in the combined territory of present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza strip.​

Secondly, Cuinet claimed that substantial numbers of Syrian Orthodox Christians (about seven thousand) were living throughout Palestine, whereas in fact this Christian community was hardly to be found in Palestine at all. Its only presence in the country was a small monastery in Jerusalem. And thirdly and most absurdly, Cuinet claimed that precisely five thousand Maronites, who amounted to 10 percent of the population of the district, were living in the district of Nablus. But as everyone knows Maronites were to be found in the Middle East only in Mount Lebanon. The only exceptions were a cluster of villages in Cyprus and one village and half a village in the upper-most Galilee in northern Palestine (Bir'am and Jish in Israel of today), a direct extension of the Lebanese stronghold. No Maronites were to be found in the Nablus district and no other writer claimed that they were. Cuinet's mistakes were deliberately made in order to prove that Palestine, as much as Lebanon and Syria, should be put under French protection. His attitude is well known and requires that his material be used with great caution.​

Since we are left with no sound basis for Mrs. Peters's figures for the population in the "Jewish-settled areas" in 1893, there is no need to account for the supposed quintupling of the Arab population in those areas by 1947; so dramatic an increase did not take place. It is true nevertheless that during the Mandatory period the Arab population of the coastal area of Palestine grew faster than it did in other areas. But this fact does not necessarily prove an Arab immigration into Palestine took place. More reasonably it confirms the very well-known fact that the coastal area attracted Arab villagers from the mountainous parts of Palestine who preferred the economic opportunities in the fast-growing areas of Jaffa and Haifa to the meager opportunities available in their villages.​

The coastal area had several main attractions for the Arab villagers. They found jobs in constructing, and later working in, the port of Haifa, the Iraq Petroleum Company refineries, the railway workshops, and the nascent Arab industries there. They also took part in the large-scale cultivation of the citrus groves between Haifa and Jaffa and found jobs connected with the shipment of citrus fruits from the Jaffa port. Contrary to what Mr. Pipes claims, all these developments had almost nothing to do with the growth of the Jewish National Home. The main foreign factor that brought them about was the Mandatory government. The Zionist settlers had a clearly stated policy against using Arab labor or investing in Arab industries. At the same time, the natural increase in the Palestinian Arab population I referred to is made clear in the statistical abstracts and quarterly surveys published by the Mandatory government in the years following the census of 1931.​

Why is the rightwing so intent on INSISTING that the Palestinians have no legitimacy?

Firstly, I believe the mods typically request that entire articles not be cut and pasted but referenced by link.

I'm guessing that you did not bother to go to the link and look at the source in your haste to spew an anti-mod comment.

Secondly, item 3 from your link, (which is confirmed in various other sources), is in direct contradiction to the wailing that takes place when that fact is presented to the more excitable of the screamers and shouters.

3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians.

And, your point is what exactly?

Lastly, your article should have mentioned that the geographic area of Pal'istan was inhabited. However, it's worth noting that the geographic area was not the formal structure of a "country" as many of the screamers / wailers represent it to be.

And, your point is what exactly?

Joan Peter's was extremely inaccurate as a source for demographics.

Now, if you're arguing that that there was no huge Zionist displacement of Arabs according to available demographic information. I agree.

If you're arguing that Jews are also indiginous and did not spontaniously appear when immigrants came over from Europe. I agree.

You posted far more than 500 words, which is a copyright violation, and no one ever claimed that all the Jews in Israel are indigenous. The point is that most of the so-called "Palestinians" are not indigenous. They are immigrants from other countries.

Where is 500 words a copyright infringement according to the rules of USMB? Here, I'll help you, since you and Holly have clearly NOT gone to the link itself, and seen the extremely long article with the graphs and table.

Copyright. Link Each "Copy & Paste" to It's Source. Only paste a small to medium section of the material.

The point is...according to the article from which a posted a "medium" size section, there is no way to prove how many are or are not indiginous, and since your title states that the claim any are is "debunked" ... and you state "most are not indiginous" - your claim is debunked by this information.

There's no need to prove the exact number of so-called "Palestinians" are indigenous. The evidence indicates that the vast majority of them aren't. In fact, because of interbreeding, virtually none of them are indigenous. The so-called "indigenous" Palestinians were swamped by vast numbers if immigrants.

No evidence to support that claim. In fact, even genetically - Palestinians are still very close to the indiginous Jewish population.