Indigeneity: How is it Yemeni Muslim migrants to the Ottoman vilayet of South Syria, called Palestine by the British victors of WWI, are indigenous, but Yemeni Jewish migrants to the same place are not? Same question for all those Muslim migrants from Algeria, Libya, Egypt (all those Masri surnames), Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, Circassia, Persia, Bosnia.
"Double standards define indigeneity in revolving door demography
We’ll see below that they were no more indigenous to the land than the Jewish immigrants to the Ottoman vilayet of South Syria and British mandatory Palestine. As Ottoman decline accelerated Palestine imported refugees, many not Arab. As Muslims in a region dominated by Islam since the 7th century, they’re of course ineligible for the settler-colonizer label. Muslim supremacy is assumed to be the natural order of things. Its settlers were:
“Asians from all over the world — Persians, Afghans, Hindus and Baluchis — were engaged in commerce…In 1878, the Sultan, Abd el-Hamid took under his protection Circassian refugees who fled Christian-Russian rule in the Caucasus. Many settled in Trans-Jordan. West of the Jordan they settled in three villages: Kafer-Kamma, Sarona, and Reihaniya. Some Moslems from Bosnia also found refuge in Palestine and settled near Caesarea. Laurence Oliphant writes about one of the Turkoman tribes that pitched their black tents near a Circassian village. They were new immigrants who had arrived from the mountains of Iraq. They knew no language other than Turkish and hoped that their fellow-tribesmen in the Sharon Plain would receive them. (Avneri, page 17–18)
from Lebanon and Syria: “In 1880 Haifa was a small town of 6,000 souls, with fewer than two hundred Jews. In 1910 it had 18,000 inhabitants, of whom 15,000 were Moslems and Christians. Many of the newcomers to the city were from Lebanon and Syria. Many Arab villages were practically deserted, with only a few women and children remaining.”
from Yemen: “In the winter of 1908, a group of Arabs arrived in Jaffa from Yemen and settled there. Like the Mugrabis, the Turkomans and the Egyptians before them, they assimilated over the years with the general Arab population.” (Avneri, p18)
Many Yemeni Jews had in the 19th century fled to Palestine to escape pogroms, the oppressive extortion of the Muslim jizya tax and forced child abduction marriages. They’re presumed to be “settler colonizers”, while the Muslim Yemenis who came to Palestine remain ineligible for this label. Stench of double standards anyone?
Palestine’s revolving door demographics: immigration to emigration
Meanwhile, large numbers of Arabs, especially Christians escaping Muslim supremacist dhimmitude, emigrated through the revolving door of Ottoman Palestine:
“There is emigration from the Christian districts, such as Bethlehem, Beit-Jala and Ramallah to North and South America, even though in smaller numbers than from the Lebanon. In many cities of South America there are colonies of people from Bethlehem who maintain contact with their homeland, and some of them even go back. They are engaged mostly in trade. The American Consul in Jerusalem (Daily 25 Consular Trade Reports 6–6–14) estimates the emigration from the Jerusalem District at 3,000 annually, of whom 30% are Christians, 35% Moslems, and 35% Jews.” Thus, from the Jerusalem District alone 2,000 Arabs emigrated annually. The High Commissioner replied that the population of Bethlehem was estimated to be about 14,000 to 15.000 people. During the ten-year period between 1910 and 1920, 4,500 people emigrated from the town; 393 returned. In the year 1919/20, 245 emigrated and 35 returned. In 1920/21, 185 emigrated and 65 returned. during a ten-year period, at a time when the Jews had no political standing, a third of the population of Bethlehem emigrated voluntarily….Safed in those days had the relatively large population of 25,000, of whom 11.000 were Jews…..According to Abramowich-Gelfat, Arab emigration ran to about 2,500 to 3,000 annually. The average over a twenty-five year period was undoubtedly lower, but it must have reached 30,000–40,000 for the period under discussion. (Avneri, page 25–26)
So the demographic reality was large scale population exchange through immigration and emigration, not displacement of a static indigenous population by Jewish settler colonizers.
Ottoman and early mandatory Palestine were depopulated malaria-ridden swamps when Jewish settlers started arriving after the Ottomans legalized land purchases by non-Muslims in 1867. Mark Twain painted a picture of
““a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.” On the approach to Jerusalem, “There was hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”
Which was confirmed by numerous other travelers:
Fredrik Hasselquist, a Swedish doctor and naturalist, visited the Levant (today’s Israel, Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Syria) in the 1750s…Hassel-quist writes that the Holy Land is “uncultivated and almost uninhabited.”
Hasselquist’s friend and fellow Swede, Carl Linnaeus, the prominent biologist and inventor of the taxonomic system still used to identify plant and animal life, translated the account into English.
Journey of a Tour in the Levant, published in 1820 by William Turner, a British diplomat and writer…describes a sparsely inhabited land. He reports that there is a small Jewish community in the town of Acre; that Safed, a town of 1,000 houses, includes 300 to 350 that are Jewish; Tiberius, a town of 550 houses, includes about 100 that are Jewish…
Felix Bovet, a Christian theologian and professor of French Literature and Hebrew, visited the Holy Land in 1858:“the Turks “have made a desert of it where it is scarcely possible to walk without fear. Even the Arabs who dwell there do so as temporary sojourners.”
