Palestine, a Land virtually laid waste with little population

EretzYisroel.org -- excerpt from "From Time Immemorial" ^ | 1984 | Joan Peters

[Sabertooth]

Palestine, a Land virtually laid waste with little population  A review of Palestine, before the era of prosperity began with the late nineteenth-century renewal of Jewish land settlement, shows that periodically Palestine was virtually laid waste, and its population suffered acute decline. An enormous swell of Arab population could only have resulted from immigration and in-migration (from Jordan and the West Bank to the coastal area). It is helpful to see the land that was virtually emptied-and why. Dio Cassius, writing at the time, described the ruin of the land beginning with the destruction of Judah: Of their forts the fifty strongest were razed to the ground. Nine hundred and eighty-five of their best-known villages were destroyed.... Thus the whole of Judea became desert, as indeed had been foretold to the Jews before the war. For the tomb of Solomon, whom these folk celebrate in their sacred rites, fell of its own accord into fragments, and wolves and hyenas, many in number, roamed howling through their cities.1 One historian after another has reported the same findings. In the twelve and a half centuries between the Arab conquest in the seventh century and the beginnings of the Jewish return in the 1880's, Palestine was laid waste. Its ancient canal and irrigation systems were destroyed and the wondrous fertility of which the Bible spoke vanished into desert and desolation... Under the Ottoman empire of the Turks, the policy of disfoliation continued; the hillsides were denuded of trees and the valleys robbed of their topsoil.2 In 1590 a "simple English visitor" to Jerusalem wrote, "Nothing there is to bescene but a little of the old walls, which is yet Remayning and all the rest is grasse, mosse and Weedes much like to a piece of Rank or moist Grounde."3 "While Tiberias was being resettled by Jews from Papal states, whose migration was approved by a papal Bull, Nazareth was continuing its decline." A Franciscan pilgrim translated a Latin Manuscript that reported that " 'A house of robbers, murderers, the inhabitants are Saracens.... It is a lamentable thing to see thus such a town. We saw nothing more stony, full of thorns and desert.'"4  A hundred years afterward, Nazareth was, in 1697, "an inconsiderable village.... Acre a few poor cottages ... nothing here but a vast and spacious ruin." Nablus consisted of two streets with many people, and Jericho was a "poor nasty village."5 In the mid-1700s, British archaeologist Thomas Shaw wrote that the land in Palestine was "lacking in people to till its fertile soil."6 An eighteenth-century French author and historian, Count Constantine Frangois Volney, wrote of Palestine as the "ruined" and "desolate" land. In "Greater Syria," which included Palestine, Many parts ... lost almost all their peasantry. In others.... the recession was great but not so total.7 Count Volney reported that, "In consequence of such wretched government, the greater part of the Pachilics [Provinces] in the empire are impoverished and laid waste." Using one province as an example, Volney reported that ... upwards of three thousand two hundred villages were reckoned; but, at present, the collector can scarcely find four hundred. Such of our merchants as have resided there twenty years have themselves seen the greater part of the environs ... become depopulated. The traveller meets with nothing but houses in ruins, cisterns rendered useless, and fields abandoned. Those who cultivated them have fled... 8 ... And can we hope long to carry on an advantageous commerce with a country which is precipitately hastening to ruin? 9 Another writer, describing "Syria" (and Palestine) some sixty years later in 1843, stated that, in Volney's day, "the land had not fully reached its last prophetic degree of desolation and depopulation." 10 From place to place the reporters varied, but not the reports: J. S. Buckingham described his visit of 1816 to Jaffa, which "has all the appearances of a poor village, and every part of it that we saw was of corresponding meanness."11 Buckingham described Ramle, "where, as throughout the greater part of Palestine, the ruined portion seemed more extensive than that which was inhabited."12 After a visit in 1817-1818, travelers reported that there was not "a single boat of any description on the lake [Tiberias]."13 In a German encyclopedia published in 1827, Palestine was depicted as "desolate and roamed through by Arab bands of robbers."14 Throughout the nineteenth century the abandonment and dismal state of the terrain was lamented. In 1840 an observer, who was traveling through, wrote of his admiration for the Syrian "fine spirited race of men" whose "population is on the decline."15 While scorning the idea of Jewish colonization, the writer observed that the once populous area between Hebron and Bethlehem was "now abandoned and desolate" with "dilapidated towns."16 Jerusalem consisted of "a large number of houses ... in a dilapidated and ruinous state," and "the masses really seem to be without any regular employment." The "masses" of Jerusalem were estimated at less than 15,000 inhabitants, of whom more than half the population were Jews.17 The British Consul in Palestine reported in 1857 that The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.... 18 In the 1860s, it was reported that "depopulation is even now advancing."19 At the same time, H. B. Tristram noted in his journal that The north and south [of the Sharon plain] land is going out of cultivation and whole villages are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages there have been thus erased from the map [by the Bedouin] and the stationary population extirpated. 20 Mark Twain, in his inimitable fashion, expressed scom for what he called the "romantic" and "prejudiced" accounts of Palestine after he visited the Holy Land in 1867.21 In one location after another, Twain registered gloom at his findings. Stirring scenes ... occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent-not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. 22 In fact, according to Twain, even the Bedouin raiders who attacked "so fiercely" had been imported: "provided for the occasion ... shipped from Jerusalem," by the Arabs who guarded each group of pilgrims. They met together in full view of the pilgrims, after the battle, and took lunch, divided the baksheesh extorted in the season of danger and then accompanied the cavalcade home to the city! The nuisance of an Arab guard is one which is created by the sheikhs and the Bedouins together, for mutual profit... 23 To find ". . . the sort of solitude to make one dreary," one must, Twain wrote dramatically, Come to Galilee for that... these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal palms.... We reached Tabor safely .... We never saw a human being on the whole route. 24 Nazareth is forlorn .... Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago: Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Savior's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang, "Peace on earth, good will to men," is untenanted by any living creature... Bethsaida and Chorzin have vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them, where thousands of men once listened to the Savior's voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.25 "Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.... desolate and unlovely.. . Twain wrote with remone. it is dreamland." 26 Jaffa, a French traveler wrote late in the nineteenth century, was still a ruin27. Haifa, to the north, had 6,000 souls and "nothing remarkable about it," another Frenchman, the author of France's foremost late-nineteenth-century Holy Land guidebook, commented. Haifa "can be crossed in five minutes" on the way to the city of Acre, he judged; that magnificent port was commercially idle. 28 Many writers, such as the Reverend Samuel Manning, mourned the atrophy of the coastal plain, the Sharon Plain, "the exquisite fertility and beauty of which made it to the Hebrew mind a symbol of prosperity." But where were the inhabitants? This fertile plain, which might support an immense population, is almost a solitude.... Day by day we were to learn afresh the lesson now forced upon us, that the denunciations of ancient prophecy have been fulfilled to the very letter -- "the land is left void and desolate and without inhabitants." 29 Report followed depressing report, as the economist-historian Professor Fred Gottheil pointed out: "a desolate country"; 30 "wretched desolation and neglect";31 "almost abandoned now"32 "unoccupied";33  "uninhabited";34  "thinly populated."35 In a book called Heth and Moab, Colonel C. R. Conder pronounced the Palestine of the 1880s "a ruined land." According to Conder, so far as the Arab race is concerned, it appears to be decreasing rather than otherwise.36 Conder had also visited Palestine earlier, in 1872, and he commented on the continuing population decline within the nine or ten-year interim between his visits: The Peasantry who are the backbone of the population, have     diminished most sadly in numbers and wealth.37 Pierre Loti, the noted French writer, wrote in 1895 of his visit to the land: "I traveled through sad Galilee in the spring, and I found it silent. . . ." In the vicinity of the Biblical Mount Gilboa, "As elsewhere, as everywhere in Palestine, city and palaces have returned to the dust; This melancholy of abandonment, weighs on all the Holy Land." 38 David Landes summarized the causes of the shriveling number of inhabitants: As a result of centuries of Turkish neglect and misrule, following on the earlier ravages of successive conquerors, the land had been given over to sand, marsh, the anopheles mosquito, clan feuds, and Bedouin marauders. A population of several millions had shrunk to less than one tenth that number-perhaps a quarter of a million around 1800, and 300,000 at mid-century.39 Palestine had indeed become "sackcloth and ashes." 1. Dio Cassius, History of the Romans, lxix, 12-14, cited by de Haas, History, pp. 55-56. De Haas adds: "In the third of the Schweich Lectures of 1922 the late Israel Abrahams ('Campains in Palestine from Alexander the Great' London, 1927) belittles Dio, Cassius' record of this war, and repeats the suggestion that the Jews were influenced by Hadrian 'consent to the rebuilding of the Temple.' This rebuilding myth, depending upon the alleged visit of Hadrian to Palestine on the death of Trajan, has been fully dealt with by Henderson in his biography of Hadrian. All the dimensions of the war, its gravity, and its duration, are fully attested by the inscriptions relating to the legions and by the honors distributed at the end of the campaign. The archeological records, carefully analyzed, support Dio Cassius and not his would-be corrector. 2. Carl Hermann Voss, "The Palestine Problem Today, Israel and Its Neighbors" (Boston, 1953), p. 13.  3. Gunner Edward Webbe, Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement, p. 86, cited in de Haas, History, p. 338. 4. De Haas, History, p. 337, citing Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement, 1925, p. 197, translation of Latin manuscnpt by a Franciscan pilgrim. 5. Henry Maundrell, The Journal of Henry Maundrellfrom Aleppo to Jerusalem, 1697, Bohn's edition (London, 1848), respectively pp. 477, 428, 450. 6. Thomas Shaw, Travels and Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant (London, 1767), p. 331ff. De Haas notes: "Hasselquist, the Swedish botanist, munching some roasted ears of' green wheat which a shepherd generously shared with him, in the plain of Acre, reflected that the white bread of his northern homeland and the roasted wheat ears symbolized the difference between the two civilizations' Had he known that Mukaddasi boasted in the tenth century of the excellence Of Palestine's white bread he might have been still more impressed by the low estate to which the country had fallen in seven hundred years.... Hasselquist joined a party of four thousand pilgrims who went to Jericho under an escort of three hundred soldiers. He estimated that four thousand Christians, mostly of the eastern rites, entered Jaffa each year, and as many Jews. The Armenian Convent in Jerusalem alone could accommodate a thousand persons. The botanist viewed the pilgrim tolls as the best resource of an uncultivated and uninhabited country. . ~ . Ramleh was a ruin." (Emphasis added.) De Haas, History, pp. 349, 358, 360, citing Frederich Hasselquist, Reise nach Palastina, etc., 1749-1752, pp. 139, 145-146, 190. 7. Norman Lewis, "The Frontier of Settlement in Syria, 1800-19 50," in Charles Issawi, ed., The Economic History of the Middle East (Chicago, 1966), p. 260. 8. Count Constantine F. Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, 1785 (London, 1788), Vol. 2, p. 147. According to Volney, ". . . we with difficulty recognize Jerusalem.... remote from every road, it seems neither to have been calculated for a considerable mart of commerce, nor the centre of a great consumption.... [the population] is supposed to amount to twelve to fourteen thousand.... The second place deserving notice, is Bait-el-labm, or Bethlehem, ... The soil is the best in all these districts ... but as is the case everywhere else, cultivation is wanting. They reckon about six hundred men in this village capable Of bearing arms.... The third and last place of note is Habroun, or Hebron, the most powerful village in all this quarter, and able to arm eight or nine hundred men . . ." (pp. 303-325). 9. Volney, Travels, Vol. 2, p. 431. 10. A. Keith, The Land of Israel (Edinburgh, 1843), p. 465. "The population (viz., of the whole of Syria), rated by Volney at two million and a half, is now estimated at half that amount." 11. J.S. Buckingham, Travels in Palestine (London, 1821), p. 146.  12. Ibid., p. 162. 13. James Mangles and the Honorable C.L. Irby, Travels in Egypt and Nubia (London, 1823), p. 295. 14. Brockhaus, Alig. deutsch Real-Encyklopaedie, 7th ed. (Leipzig, 1827), Vol. VIII, p. 206. 15. S. Olin, Travels in Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land (New York, 1843), Vol. 2, pp. 438-439. 16. Ibid., pp. 77-78. 17. No. 238, "Report of the Commerce of Jerusalem During the Year 1863," F.O. 195/808, May 1864. ". . . The population of the City of Jerusalem is computed at 15,000, of whom about 4,500 Moslem, 8,000 Jews, and the rest Christians of various denominations. . ." From A.H. Hyamson, ed., The British Consulate in Jerusalem, 2 vols. (London, 1939-1941), Vol. 2, p. 331. 18. James Finn to the Earl of Clarendon, Jerusalem, September 15, 1857, F.O. 78/1294 (Pol. No. 36). Finn wrote further that "The result of my observations is, that we have here Jews, who have been to the United States, but have returned to their Holy Land -Jews of Jerusalem do go to Australia and instead of remaining there, do return hither, even without the allurements of agriculture and its concomitants." Ibid., 1, pp. 249-52. 19. J.B. Forsyth, A Few Months in the East (Quebec, 1861), p. 188.  20. H.B. Tristram, The Land of1sraek A Journal of Travels in Palestine (London, 1865), p. 490. 21. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, pp. 349, 366, 367.  22. Ibid., p. 349. 23. Ibid., p. 429. 24. Ibid., p. 366, 375. 25. Ibid., pp. 441-442. 26. Ibid. 27. Jules Hoche, Les Pays des croisades (Paris, n.d.), p. 10, cited by David Landes, "Palestine Before the Zionists," Commentary, Feb., 1976, p. 49.  28. Brother Lievin de Hamme, Guide indicateur, Vol. Ill, pp. 163, 190. 29. The Reverend Samuel Manning, Those Holy Fields (London, 1874), pp. 14-17. W.M. Thomson reiterated the Reverend Manning's observations: "How melancholy is this utter desolation! Not a house, not a trace of inhabitants, not even shepherds, seen everywhere else, appear to relieve the dull monotony.... Isaiah says that Sharon shall be wilderness, and the prediction has become a sad and impressive reality." Thomson, The Land and the Book (London: T. Nelsons & Sons, 1866), p. 506ff. 30. W.C. Prime, Tent Life in the Holy Land (New York, 1857), p. 240, cited by Fred Gottheil, "The Population of Palestine, Circa 1875," Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 15, no. 3, October 1979. 31. S.C. Bartlett, From Egypt to Palestine (New York, 1879), p. 409, cited in ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 410. 33. W. Allen, The Dead Sea: A New Route to India (London, 1855), p. 113, cited in ibid. 62), p. 466, 34. W.M. Thomson, The Land and the Book (New York: Harper Bros., 18 cited in ibid. 35. E.L. Wilson, In Scripture Lands (New York, n.d.), p. 316, cited in ibid. 36. Colonel C.R. Conder, Heth and Moab (London, 1883), pp. 380, 376. 37. ibid., p. 366. 38. Pierre Loti, La Galilee (Paris, 1895), pp. 37-41, 69, 85-86, 69, cited by David Landes, "Palestine Before the Zionists," Commentary, February 1976, pp. 48-49. 39. Landes, "Palestine," p. 49. This page was produced by Joseph E. Katz Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst  Brooklyn, New York  E-mail to a friend Source: "From Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters, 1984, a national Portions Copyright © 1984 Joan Peters, Portions Copyright © 2001 Joseph Katz All Rights Reserved

[rdww]

Couldn't "finish" it without "re-editing" it, eh? Say, do your crew still use terms like "untermensch?"

[NativeNewYorker]

Tom Sowell always says the reason Jews, overseas Chinese, and other successful diasporas are hated is exactly because they show the locals that prosperity is simply a matter of hard work.

[dennisw]

Assertion is not proof. Especially from you. Come back and dispute what has been posted.

[Canoe Man]

"Making the desert bloom," re-visited:  Challenging another false Zionist Myth Written May 2000 One of the Zionist myths is that before they arrived in Palestine there was nothing but barrenness and emptiness. In essence, so the myth goes, it was a desert. But due to their efforts that desert blossomed like a rose to become what it is today. In a recent letter (April 29/00) written to National Public Radio (Rev.) G. Simon Harak challenges this myth when it was once again mentioned by Maxine Davis on the radio show "The Savvy Traveler." Below you can read Mr. Harak's letter. Dear Savvy Traveler, In her Feature Story "postcard" which is mostly about India, Maxine Davis wrote about her parents' travels, reminiscing, "My parents saw Israel when it was still desert and Japan before cars." I can understand the part about Japan without cars, but at exactly what point in time did her parents see Israel when it was "still desert?" It couldn't have been in 1946. That was the year that Walter C. Lowdermilk, Assistant Chief of US Soil Conservation Service, examined Palestine, and compared it to California, except that "the soils of Palestine were uniformly better" [_Palestine's Economic Future: A Review of Progress and Prospects_ (London, UK: Percy Lund Humphries and Co., Ltd., 1946), 19-23. It couldn't have been in 1945, when Palestine had over 600,000 dunums of land planted with olive trees, producing nearly 80,000 tons of olives, and accounting for 1 percent of the olive oil production for the WORLD [_Statistical Abstract of Palestine, 1944-45_ (Department of Statistics, Government of Palestine), 225], and produced nearly 245,000 tons of vegetables [_A Survey of Palestine_, for the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Vol.I, 325-26]. It couldn't have been in 1943, when Palestine produced 280,000 tons of fruit, excluding citrus fruits [_Statistical Abstract of Palestine, 1944-45_, 226]. It couldn't have been in 1942, when Palestine produced nearly 305,000 tons of grains and legumes [_A Survey of Palestine_, Vol.I, 320]. It couldn't have been in 1939, when Palestine exported over 15 million cases of citrus fruit [ _A Survey of Palestine_, Vol. 1, 337]. But maybe Ms. Davis's parents went to Israel/Palestine more than 60 years ago. Could it have been "a desert" then, I wonder. Well, they couldn't have gone in the early 1900s and found a desert, because Moshe Dayan pointed out that "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages . . . There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population" [_Ha'aretz_ Interview, April 4, 1969_]. It couldn't have been in 1893. That was the year the British Consul advised his government of the value of importing trees from Jaffa to improve production in Australia and South Africa [quoted in Marwan R. Beheiry, "The Agricultural Exports of Southern Palestine, 1885-1914," _Journal of Palestinian Studies_ Vol. 10, No. 4, 1981, p. 67] It couldn't have been in 1887, when Lawrence Oliphant's visit to the Esdralon Valley prompted him to marvel at the "huge green lake of waving wheat, with its village-crowned mounds rising from it like islands; and it presents one of the most striking pictures of luxuriant fertility which it is possible to conceive" [quoted from Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ed., _The Transformation of Palestine_ (Chicago, IL: Northwestern Press, 1971), 126]. It couldn't have been any time between 1856 and 1882, because the German geographer Alexander Scholch found that in those years, "Palestine produced a relatively large agricultural surplus which was marketed in neighboring countries," and to Europe [Alexander Scholch, "The Economic Development of Palestine, 1856-1882," _Journal of Palestinian Studies_ Vol 10, No. 3, 1981, 36-58]. And in 1859 a British missionary described the southern coast of Palestine as "a very ocean of wheat," observing that "the fields would do credit to British farming" [quoted from James Reilly, "The Peasantry of Late Ottoman Palestine," _Journal of Palestine Studies_, Vol. 10 No. 4, 1981, p. 84]. It couldn't have been in 1856, when Henry Gillman, the American consul in Jerusalem, suggested that Florida citrus growers could learn from Palestinian grafting techniques [Beheiry, 75-76]. And really, it couldn't have been any time during the 18th or 17th centuries. French economic historian Paul Masson acknowledges that during that time, imports of wheat from Palestine saved France from numerous famines [Beheiry, 67]. Could it have been earlier then? Apparently not. In 1615, Englishman George Sandys described Palestine as "a land that flows with milk and honey," with "no part empty of delight or profit" [quoted in Richard Bevis, "Making the Desert Bloom: An Historical Picture of Pre-Zionist Palestine," _The Middle East Newsletter_, Vol. 2, Feb.-Mar., 1971, p.4]. In the late 10th century, a visitor wrote, "Palestine is watered by the rains and the dew. Its trees and its ploughed lands do not need artificial irrigation. Palestine is the most fertile of the Syrian provinces" [Guy Le Strange, _Palestine under the Moslems_ (Beirut, Lebanon, Khayat, 1965), 28.]. Before he died in 986 AD, Muqqadisi, who lived in Jerusalem, told of Palestine produce that "was particularly copious and prized: fruit of every kind (olives, figs, grapes, quinces, plums, apples, dates, walnuts, almonds, jujubes and bananas), some of which were exported, and crops for processing (sugarcane, indigo and sumac)" [quoted in Walid Khalidi, _Before Their Diaspora_ (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984), 28-29. It seems, then, that Ms. Davis is "remembering" a "desert" land that never existed. The point is, of course, that she (and with her, you) are just propagating a Zionist fabrication that the Zionists "made the desert bloom," and so "deserve" the land from which they expelled the Palestinians. I hope that next time, you will not inadvertently invite us to travel to lands that never existed, and uncritically accept a mythology that underwrites ethnic cleansing. We travelers need to be more "savvy" than that, don't you agree?* *Most of this information can be found in Issa Nakhleh, _Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem_ (New York, NY: Intercontinental Books 1991).

[dennisw]

Why do you try to pollute this thread by throwing in your nazi buzzwords?

Not up for honest discourse today?

[Sabertooth]

Good propaganda post. I find the comment above an excellent summary of the Lynch Mob's beliefs...

"I see the Pales not as a people"

Not sure, but was your "propaganda" comment self-descriptive? I have a few reasons for asking...

First, you didn't dispute a single point in the article, you only called it "propaganda." Not particularly compelling.

Second, the quote you chose to address, you took out of context. All the more easy to miss the point, I suppose. Here's the actual quote:

"I see the Pales not as a people but as a gang like the Cripes or the Bloods. I see Israel as the Homeowner's Association."

An analogy was being made. You might disagree with it, but address the analogy.

Further, the phrase "a people" is not synonymous with "people." The statement, "I see the Pales not as a people," is not equvalent in meaning to "I see the Pales not as people." No one is suggesting that "Palestinians," or Crips or Bloods aren't people.

The point being made, the one you failed to address, is that there is no Historical basis for the claim that there is any such thing as a "Palestinian people."

Palestine is one name of a particular geographical region. Just like South America, or Indochina, or Southern California. While people live in all of those places, the fact that they might have a common geographical perimeter doesn't make them "peoples," with coherent and Historically valid national identies.

That's the point being made here about the "Palestinians." That's the argument you might consider addressing. Specifics would be nice.

[imperator2]

The thread clearly demonstrates that Jerusalem, and the Dome of the Rock were never holy to the Moslems, until Israel reunited the city in 1967.

The severe neglect, and deterioration of the mosque while it was under Moslem control for hundreds of years illustrates that they really had no interest in that mosque, as an important religious site.

It has become a religious icon for them only as a lever against Israel. Another total Arab lie. All the Arabs do is LIE, LIE , LIE!!!

[DeckTheHallsHolly]

You appear to know more about terms like that then I do.

[Valin]

Not unlike "the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people", something that was never heard of before 1967.

[Goblins]

If they were born there, raised there, or their parents were born and raised there before being thrown out and turned into exiles and the place is called palestine, then I guess they have the right to call themselves palestinians.

Wouldn't you call yourself an american? or maybe you would prefer a united states of american? or a north american? or whatever...

[dennisw]

At least that's something. Palestine was agriculturally productive in some places but still depopulated. The Jews paid steep prices for marginal land and made something of it. No land was stolen.

In 1875 the Temple Mount looks like a dump. This not what a productive and populated land does with it most important religious shrines. Where were all the Muslims back in 1875 to make the Dome of the Rock and Al Aksa Mosque look at least semi-decent?

[dennisw]

If they were born there, raised there, or their parents were born and raised there before being thrown out and turned into exiles and the place is called palestine, then I guess they have the right to call themselves palestinians.

How about the 800,000 Jews who were booted out of Arab lands post 1948??? All I see is population exchange. One of many that happened after WW2. Now all these surrounding Arab nations have no Jews while Israel has 1,000,000 Muslim citizens

[Goblins]

So are you saying these people have no rights?

When I said never again I meant it for the arab as well as the jew, for the german as well as the russian... How about you, or does the ghettoization of people not bother you if they happen to be the wrong people?

[Sabertooth]

"Making the desert bloom," re-visited:  Challenging another false Zionist Myth Written May 2000 One of the Zionist myths is that before they arrived in Palestine there was nothing but barrenness and emptiness. In essence, so the myth goes, it was a desert. But due to their efforts that desert blossomed like a rose to become what it is today.

Let's start at the top with the main straw man argument here...

"One of the Zionist myths is that before they arrived in Palestine there was nothing but barrenness and emptiness. In essence, so the myth goes, it was a desert."

No... The Historical fact is that much of Israel then, as now, was desert. No one claims, except on hyperbolic occasion, that it was "nothing but desert." It's not an example of serious thinking to dispute those types of claims.

But you'll have to concede that there is less desert now than there was then. This is because of the efforts of Jewish immigrants and Israelis siince the late 19th Century. They were assisted by some of the indigenous Bedouins, and by itinerant Arab immigrants who came to work on the Jewish land projects. The land wasn't empty, but there wasn't a big enough population to do the work.

These Arab immigrants form the bulk of the ancestral population of the so-cailled "Palestinians." BTW, you're aware, are you not, that their leader, Yasser Arafat, was born in Cairo to Egyptian parents?

Having dealt with the straw man, we can now afford to stipulate the bulk of the supporting arguments may even be true, though their contexts can be disputed.

Doesn't change the fact the the notion of a Historically coherent "Palestinain" people, with any kind of a national identity, is unabashed fiction.

[dennisw]

 

Reviewed at Amazon:

Myth buster, September 14, 2001
Reviewer:
This exceedingly well-documented book (From Time Immemorial) lays bare the false claim that Jewish settlers dispossessed Arab people from their land in Palestine. The examination of records from 1830 onward will shock most readers.

In the first place, Palestine's population barely grew for 250 years--rising from 205,000 Moslems, Christians and Jews in 1554 to only 275,000 in 1800. In the second, records from 1830, 1863, 1878 and 1893 and 1917, among others, demonstrate that when the heaviest Jewish immigration began in 1880, a large proportion of the 425,000 to 440,000 Arabs in Palestine were themselves recent immigrants.

Many came from Egypt: The 1831 invasion by the Egyptian Khedive, Ibrahim Pasha, forced Palestine fellaheen, urban dwellers and Bedouin to permanently flee Ottoman military drafts and taxes. The 1837 Great Earthquake and epidemics that followed further cut their numbers. In their wake came Ibrahim Pasha's Egyptian Arabs, who settled the empty land. In 1831 alone, 6,000 Egyptian Arabs settled in Akko. But the Egyptian Arab-Hinadi, Ghawarna tribes settled in the Beit Shean and Hula Valleys and in the Jordan Valley towns of Ubeidiya, Delhamiya and Kafer-Miser. In the Hula Valley, the Egyptian ez-Zubeids later sold their land to Jewish settlers from Yessud-Hama'ala. According to an 1893 British Palestine Exploration Fund report, Egyptians composed most of the population in Jaffa.

Arab and Muslim immigrants also came from Algeria, Damascus, Yemen, Afghanistan, Persia, India, Tripoli, Morocco, Turkey and Iraq. The French conquest of Algeria, for example, led to the eventual rebellion and imprisonment of Abd el-Kadar el-Hassani, whose followers in 1856 fled to Syria and the Lower Galilee towns of Shara, Ulam, Ma'ader, Kafer-Sabet, Usha (near present-day Ramat-Yohanan), the Mount Atlas village of Qedesh and villages on Lake Hula and in the Upper Galilee, where they spoke Berber. In Ramle, immigrants spoke Qebili, a Mugrabi dialect. Circassian refugees from the Caucasus settled in Trans-Jordan and as far east as Caesarea.

Arab immigration continued to rise through World War I, despite locusts, the Ottoman draft and more epidemics. Egyptian laborers, contractors and businessmen flooded the country. By 1922, the Moslem population had more than doubled to 566,311, including 62,500 Bedouins. The 1931 Mandatory government census counted 693,147 permanent Moslem residents, including 66,553 Bedouins. It also gave the natural increase of the population as 132,211--57,125 less than the absolute increase. Only illegal Arab immigration explains this contradiction, Avneri shows.

The next census, in 1948, followed unprecedented economic growth, during which illegal Arab immigration continued. From April 1934 to November 1935, for example, 20,000 Haurani Arabs came to Palestine. These and thousands of other Arab immigrants worked on farms, construction projects (building roads, railroads and the Haifa port), and government and municipal jobs. Syrians and Lebanese Arabs were free to come with nothing but border passes, and they came along with immigrants from Somalia, Trans-Jordan, Persia, India, Ethiopia and the Hejaz. Mandatory government rules required the supervision of immigration, but Palestine's borders remained porous to all but Jews. In all, Avneri shows that 35,000 to 40,000 illegal Arab immigrants came from 1931 to 1947--on top of up to 20,000 other Arab immigrants who arrived from 1935 to 1945.

The book also carefully examines numerous historical descriptions of a desolate landscape, composed almost entirely of swamps and deserts, and sold to the Jewish people by absentee Arab landlords, appointed by the Ottoman government, at enormous profits. Dozens of sales are documented specifically, including some by the Egyptian el-Husseini family of Yasser Arafat.

Altogether, this book shatters the Arab claim of dispossession.

[dennisw]

Hard work and working smart. Some peoples work harder than donkeys but to no avail.

[Goblins]

http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1998/02/03/intl/intl.3.html

Might want to check this out.

[vrwc54]

You got your cut and paste from here: http://www.iap.org/bloommyth.htm.

You conveniently left off the end of the page which was:

Sincerely yours,
(Rev.) G. Simon Harak, S. J. Baltimore, MD

and the URL which is http://www.iap.org/ or ISLAMIC ASSOCIATION FOR PALESTINE

[Goblins]

http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/5855/

Might want to check this out too.

[Magician]

The descriptions of the land during the Ottoman Empire before the immigration of the Jews began is uniformly that of a barren, depopulated land. These descriptions, like that of Mark Twain's, all by people who were respected writers, and none of whom were Jewish.

The descriptions of the barren land prior to the entry of the Jews on the scene come from multiple sources and are simply quoted by the book referenced above.

Also, I have read the book "From Time Immemorial" and find it to be both well documented and entirely plausible. Its thesis is that Palestine was essentially depopulated until the late 19th century. The rapid rise in population thereafter was due to migration of large numbers of both Jews and Arabs into the country. Since most Arabs in the country are the result of immigration (as with the Jews), neither group has an exclusive claim.

The Palestinians' claim that their families have been there since the Phillistines is totally fabricated bullshi!t. They are no more native to the land than most Blacks are native to South Africa (the Whites arriving there found only a few wandering tribes of Bushmen).