Carrying on with all this “book learnin’ stuff” that Phoney and his ilk can’t get their heads around, I found an interesting snippet from a book co-written by none other than David Ben-Gurion, and it pertinent to the OP:
“The fellahin are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming. They did not seek new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam and to collect taxes.” –“Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present” by D. Ben- Gurion & Y Ben-Zvi