Reread what Arafat, Fathi Hammad, Zuheir Mohsen and King Hussein said about a Palestinian national identity separate from other Arabs. Why do you know more than they do? Nationality itself is a western import into an Arab world whose politics are centered on religion (Umma), clan, tribe and multiethnic empire (Caliphate). As Arab journalist Joseph Farrah said, the so-called Palestinians only discovered their "national" identity after 1967. And I won't get into the Nazi-adjacent nonsense of defining nationhood by DNA. Try that in today's Germany and Austria and you'll get arrested.
And read about immigration into the Ottoman vilayets of South Syria and Jerusalem and League of Nations mandatory "Palestine", facilitated by Jewish immigration and capital investment: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/palestinians-nakba-stolen-land-myth-ac8d1849166d
"Who’s local and who’s not: demolishing Arab demography fraud
Then they brand Israel as a “white European settler colonial state” to “prove” that Israel is not the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.
To do so they spin DNA tales about Ashkenazi Jews, who are less than 40% of Israelis, as a “foreign element” from the Jewish kingdom of Khazaria, or from Poland with no Middle Eastern ancestry. This is why we hear college encampment demos chant “Yahood, go back to Poland” to Jewish students.
The problem is that both are utter nonsense because the Arabs who live on the West Bank and Gaza are no more local than the Jews they denounce as foreign colonizers. Here we’ll refute the Arabs “who have lived on this land uninterruptedly for 1300 years” myth with the land’s true history of massive population exchanges in just the 120 years before Israel existed.
To uncover demographic truth ask these questions and:
Trace the sources of Jewish settlement. Who sold what lands to whom?
Trace the sources of Arab and other Muslim immigration. How did Jewish immigration trigger Arab and other Muslim in-migration?
Where did the existing Arab population emigrate to?
By the 19th century the Judea the Romans renamed as Palestine entered the modern era desolate and despoiled by imperial and tribal war, pestilence and extractive tributary governance, by Arabs, Crusaders, Mongols, Mamelukes and Ottoman Turks. Three centuries of relative order with neglect provided by Ottoman rule ended with Napoleon’s three year long Egyptian-Syria invasion.
Then came conquest by Egypt’s ruler, the Albanian mercenary Mehmet Ali and his army commander son, Ibrahim Pasha, in 1831–40. These Muslim modernizer conquerors from Egypt brought European-type taxation and conscription, which triggered a peasant revolt that caused massive mortality and demographic upheaval, Great Replacement practice, Arab vs Arab edition:
“The 1834 revolt and the immediate aftermath reduced the male population of Palestine by about 1/5. This decrease is attributed to the large numbers of peasants who were either deported to Egypt to work in manufacturing, drafted into Egypt’s military, or abandoned their villages and farms to join the Bedouin nomadic populations. Around 10,000 peasants were deported to Egypt and the general population was disarmed. The conscription orders were extended beyond the Muslim population to the local Christians. Taxes were also extended from landed property to include livestock as well….Abandoned or rebellious villages were destroyed by Ibrahim Pasha’s troops, which prevented their inhabitants from returning. Ibrahim’s army razed 16 villages before taking Nablus.”
This was just one of many population exchanges that was part of the nationalism-driven breakdown of cosmopolitan multi-ethnic empires into ethno-states. The local Levant version of this global process would transform Palestine in the 19th and 20th centuries. It also exposed Jamal Husseini’s 1939 speech about 13 uninterrupted centuries in the land of Judea is demographic fiction. Palestine’s demographic transformation involved massive immigration and emigration after it was renamed Southern Syria when Ottoman rule was restored with British help in 1840.
In The Claim of Dispossession (1984), the historian Arieh Avneri meticulously documents the process of Arab and non-Arab Muslim immigration, local Arab emigration and Jewish (Ashkenazi and Mizrahi) land settlement:
From 19th and early 20th century travelers’ accounts.
British mandatory and Ottoman government documents.
Jewish Agency land purchase records and settler memoirs
Avneri documents Palestine’s demographic upheavals triggered by:
War, malaria & increased concentrated absentee Arab land ownership.
The WWI and mandatory era economic boom triggered by Jewish land reclamation capital investment and British military and infrastructure spending.
The demographic delusion underlying today’s Palestinians’ jihadi War of Return is that they’re all indigenous to the land they claim, whether since the 7th century or since Jews created Judea by conquering Canaan.
First the immigration
The Ottoman Empire that had laid siege to Vienna in 1683 was a shadow of its former self less than a century later, when French mercenaries were training its army and in 1799–1801 when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded its Egyptian province.
This was the backdrop to the conquest of its southern Syria vilayet by the upstart Albanian mercenary ruler of Egypt. It was as if a nominally American state of Texas had seized Louisiana from the federal government.
“The French scholar, M. Sabry, whose sources were the archives in Cairo writes: “Abdullah, the Governor of Akko, encouraged the migration of fellaheen from Egypt and gave them shelter. Mohammed Ali, the ruler of Egypt, complained to the Porte (the Sultan), who replied that the immigrants were citizens of the Empire and were entitled to settle anywhere they pleased. In 1831, more than six thousand fellaheen crossed the Egyptian border, and Abdullah, in his bountiful mercy, refused to return them (to Egypt).” After he conquered Palestine, not only did Mohammed Ali refrain from sending back the draft evaders to Egypt, but he sent new settlers to consolidate his rule. The Egyptian settlers scattered to many urban and rural points, appropriated large tracts of land, and lent variety and numbers to the existing population.” (Avneri, page 13)
The British traveler Henry Baker Tristram first visited Palestine in 1858, writing that:
“the inhabitants of one of the villages in the Beit-Shean Valley “are Egyptian immigrants and they are grievously oppressed by the neighbouring Bedouin.” The Arab Hinadi tribe came to the Jordan Valley, and after some years settled in the village of Delhamiya. The village Ubeidiya in the Jordan Valley was settled by Egyptians, as was Kafer-Miser, in the vicinity of Kaukab el-Hawa. Many Egyptians also settled in Akko and its suburbs. Members of the Arab el-Ufi tribe settled in Akko and its suburbs.” (Avneri, page 13)
In the 1860s the British Palestine Exploration Fund reported in its:
“regional map of Jaffa, most of the city was made up of Egyptian-populated districts. “Saknet el-Mussariya,” “Saknet Abu Kebir,” “Saknet Hammad” and “Saknet Abu Derwish” were all settled by Egyptians who had accompanied the conquering army. Another district, “Saknet el-Abid,” was settled by freed slaves.” (Avneri, page 14)
If in today’s West Bank you meet families named Masri, an Egyptian surname meaning “Egyptian,” this is their origin:
“In the cities of Samaria and Judea there are hundreds of families which, to this day, are named Masri. The origin of all of them is traceable to those who left Egypt at the time of Ibrahim Pasha.” (Avneri, page 14)
The PEF is an invaluable source for documenting Palestine’s demographic upheavals disproving Husseini’s 13 centuries of continuity thesis:
“W.J. Masterman, an associate of the Palestine Exploration Fund, dated 1914, describes the Moslem population as being of mixed origin. One of the neighborhoods was called Hareth el-Karad, which denotes a population of Kurdish origin. There were also many families of Algerian origin. In another part of his report Masterman comments that half the Moslem population of Safed were Mugrabis who had accompanied Abd el-Kader when he went into exile….Asians from all over the world — Persians, Afghans, Hindus and Baluchis — were engaged in commerce.” (Avneri, page 17)
Events as far afield as Crimea and Algeria impacted Palestine’s demography, triggering the immigration of thousands of Arab, Berber, Kurdish and Turkic refugees:
“In 1878 Sultan Abd el-Hamid took under his protection Circassian refugees who had fled the Christian-Russian rule in the Caucasus…Some Moslems from Bosnia also found refuge in Palestine and settled near Caesarea.” (Avneri, page 18)
This was the same sultan that refused to meet Theodor Herzl, alluding to the Jewish money that couldn’t buy his assent to Jewish immigration.
“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.” (Avneri, page 18)
“In 1856, the French permitted (rebel) Abd el-Kader to leave Algeria, together with some followers. Some of them went to Syria and others to Palestine. The Algerian Arabs settled in several cities and founded about ten villages. These immigrants, who were called by the natives Mugrabis (Westerners), founded four villages in Lower Galilee — Shara, Ulam, Ma’ader and Kafer-Sabet….The elders of these villages continued to speak the Berber language up to the end of the nineteenth century….W.J. Masterman, an associate of the Palestine Exploration Fund, dated 1914, describes the Moslem population as being of mixed origin. One of the neighborhoods was called Hareth el-Karad, which denotes a population of Kurdish origin. There were also many families of Algerian origin. In another part of his report Masterman comments that half the Moslem population of Safed were Mugrabis who had accompanied Abd el-Kader when he went into exile.” (Avneri, page 18)
“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, page 18)
Christian Arabs who’d experienced Muslim violence sheltered with Jewish families:
“A few refugee families from the Deir el-Kamer massacre sought safety with the Jews of Safed, who hid them from the Moslems. When the War of Independence was in its early stages in 1947, the elders of the small Christian community in Safed recalled their ancestors’ plight, and tried to dissuade the Christian youths from joining in the attack on the Jewish Quarter.” (Avneri, page 18)
War between tribes and nomadic Bedouin raider-Arab farmer wars, a story as old as civilization itself, made demographic continuity as impossible as French, Egyptian and Ottoman imperial wars had. Again, the traveler H.B. Tristram tells the story:
“land is going out of cultivation, and whole villages rapidly disappeared from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than twenty villages there have been thus erased from the map, and the stationary population extirpated…“When, in 1863, they encamped in the Ghor, just before their raid on the plain of Esdraelon [Jezreel], their tents, like the Midianites’, covered the ground for miles, far as the eye could reach from the Mount of Beisan [Beit-Shean], and in a week there was not a green blade to be seen, where before the arrival of these locusts one stood knee-deep in the rank herbage.” (Avneri, page 20)
The writ of the Ottoman state was irregular at best until modern Jewish land reclamation investment funded by Baron Rothschild gave the Ottomans the tax revenue incentive to provide some order:
““A few years ago the whole Ghor [Jordan Valley] was in the hands of the fellaheen, and much of it cultivated for corn. Now the whole of it is in the hands of the Bedouin, who eschew all agriculture, excepting in a few spots cultivated here and there by their slaves; and with the Bedouin come lawlessness, and the uprooting of all Turkish authority….” (Avneri, page 20–21)
Until the 20th century after the modernizing and proto-fascist Young Turks had overthrown the sultan’s absolute power:
“In 1900 a war broke out between the ed-Dulam tribe and the village of Yatta in the Hebron district. The Bedouin tribe tried to seize 20,000 dunam of land belonging to Tel ‘Arad. The dispute and the bloodshed lasted for many years. There were dead and wounded on both sides. In 1912, the Turkish authorities decided to put an end to the unceasing wars. They took control of Tel ‘Arad and annexed it to the land holdings of the Turkish Govenment. They then arrested many sheikhs on both sides and threw them into prison in Jerusalem.” (Avneri, page 22)
Illegal immigrant laborers to mandatory Palestine clustered in their own neighborhoods, keeping their particular identity before assimilating in later generations that gave them the patina of indigeneity that gullible western woke-istan falls for:
“The Hauranis in Haifa lived in a special quarter which they called Hareth el-Tanaq. In the course of time the Government built a housing project for them on the slopes of Mount Carmel, called Howassa. It housed about a thousand souls. In the War of Independence they vigorously attacked Jewish settlements and transportation.” (Avneri, pages 32–33)
Jewish immigrants also clustered tribally, with many refugees from Nazi Germany settling in Haifa. When I visited Haifa in 1971 my high school German came in handy. In Haifa my non-Hebrew speaking father used Yiddish, a linguistic cousin to German (German with a sense of humor) to communicate. English was far less widespread in 1971 Israel than now.
So the clustered settlement pattern followed by Arab immigrants attracted by Jewish land reclamation investment and British road, rail and port building was just like recent immigrants globally, whether Italians in the North End of Boston and Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst, or my Polish-Cockney maternal grandfather’s family in London’s East End (Whitechapel).
“The Egyptians lived in separate areas called Saknat, and though they had lived in the country for seventy years, they preserved their distinctive native dress. Y. Shimoni writes: “The primary areas of settlement of the Egyptians are in the coastal plain in the south of the country, between Tulkarem and Gaza. The further south one goes, the greater the percentage of Egyptians among the Arab population, both in the villages and the towns. In all the villages in this area, one finds a district, or at the least a family, that is known as el-Musriya, Egyptian. Some villages were actually founded by Egyptian immigrants….Many of these Egyptians settled in Hadera and (those who survived the malaria) found work in the citrus groves. Zvi Nadav relates: “In Hadera we worked together with about twenty Arabs, most of them blacks and Egyptians.” (ibid, 15–16)
“Mais, an Algerian village near Qedesh and he noted in his diary: it is “a colony of Algerian Arabs, refugees, who still wear the Algerian burnous, and build the ‘gourbis’ of Mount Atlas. They cordially responded to me when addressed in the patois of North Africa.” (Avneri, page 16)
Labeling any of these immigrants “indigenous” to where they clustered with their Landsman (Yiddish for compatriots) is clearly nonsense. The Algerian, Egyptian and Sudanesse immigrants to Ottoman and mandatory Palestine were no more indigenous than the Italians and Irish to Boston and Brooklyn, or my Ukrainian Jewish grandparents were to New York.
Mid 19th to early 20th century Arab society had a clear intra-Muslim racial pecking order, with blacks, often freed slaves, at the bottom, then Egyptians and Mugrabis (westerners) at the top:
“In the same report to the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly, 1893, Baldensperger describes the Mugrabis of Jaffa, who had migrated to the country over the years. They tended to live near the mosques and were employed as watchmen in the citrus groves and in the fields. Some established themselves permanently. Most of them had passed through Jaffa on their way to Mecca and some Mugrabis intermarried with the local Moslems, something that the Egyptians and blacks had not succeeded in doing.” (Avneri, page 17)
That UNRWA classified anyone who’d been living in mandatory Palestine only since June 1, 1946 legitimized this false indigeneity.
Arab Emigration
Visit the triangle border area of Paraguay-Brazil-Argentina and you can speak Arabic, the result of this 20th century immigration wave:
“the immigration wave to the New World, which swept millions of people from Europe to North and^ South America, did not by-pass the Palestinian Arabs. Thousands of Arabs, mostly Christians, who despaired of bettering themselves economically in Palestine, left the country and went across the seas. The process of population turnover among the Palestinian Arabs continued but the causes changed: The introduction of a foreign population no longer came in the wake of military conquest, nor was the population any longer diminished as a result of internal strife. Instead, there was migration to and from Palestine usually for economic reasons.”
The mandatory government kept tabs on the demographic revolving door of locals leaving while thousands of Hauranis, Iraqis, Egyptians and Jews immigrated in a population exchange completely ignored by the partisans of the “stolen land” libel:
“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.62 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. There is no documentation on migration for other Districts. 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 26)
Who’s local and who’s not?
If the descendants of the 851,000 Jews expelled and expropriated from Arab lands since Baghdad’s Farhud pogrom of 1941 aren’t “local,” then neither are the Egyptian Masris of Nablus and Ramallah. Clearly a higher standard for “local” — indigeneity — is applied to Jews returning to their ancestral homeland than to Arabs coming from the Maghreb, Egypt, Iraq and Syria.
If the great grandchildren of the Eastern European Jews who reclaimed the malaria-ridden swamps of the Ottoman-ruled vilayet called Southern Syria aren’t local, then neither are the descendants of the Haurani, Syrian, Egyptian, Algerian, Circassian and Iraqi refugees and laborers who found jobs in the ports, railroads and building sites created by the British army and Jewish capital investment after centuries of Ottoman neglect.
“The building of the Jerusalem-Jaffa railroad inaugurated in 1892 employed many workers from Palestine and from other countries. The Belgian company that built the railroad imported Egyptian laborers to do the digging. They remained in the country. At the start of the century, work on the railway track between Haifa and Edrei was begun. (It was completed in 1905.) At the outbreak of World War I, the Haifa-Nablus railroad was begun. The local fellaheen and urban labor forces did not have the required skills for building and operating railroads. Many workers were imported from neighboring countries, mainly from Syria and Lebanon. 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…” (Avneri, page 27)
“Before the First World War they worked on the reclamation of the swamp-lands of Hadera. The engineer in charge of the reclamation project writes: “In view of the dearth of local laborers, capable of working in water and mud, I imported 150 Egyptians to do the work of digging. They participated in the laying of the railroad tracks from Jerusalem to Jaffa that a Belgian company executed, and thereafter remained in the country.” (Avneri, page 15)
The British ignored Jewish demands that they employ local labor, whether Arab or Jewish:
“The head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency demanded some years later that the railroad employ local rather than foreign labor, but the Chief Secretary of the Palestine Government replied that it would be unfair to discharge veteran employees and hire new ones.” (Avneri, page 29)
Many of the “Palestinians” who would later flee Haifa in 1948 on orders from their Mufti and Arab league military commanders, were Egyptian:
“Many Arab workers came from the neighboring countries as well….The building of the railroad to Qantara on the Egyptian border was directed from Haifa. For this project thousands of Egyptians were employed. They began laying the tracks simultaneously from the south and from the north. Many did not return to Egypt, but preferred to settle in Haifa where they found employment with the railroad or other governmental agencies.” (ibid, 29)
During March 1935, 3,220 Arabs, of whom 1,470 were Hauranis, were employed in the citrus groves of Petah-Tikva. In February 1935 there were 1,654 non-Palestinians employed in the Haifa port on the 25th of the month; 1,854 on the 26th; and 1,892 on the 27th. (Avneri, page 32)
The result was an increase in the Arab population far beyond any conceivable natural increase through high fertility, as the percentage figures in the right-hand column show:
From Time Immemorial, Joan Peters, 1984
Multi-ethnic immigration turned mandatory Palestine into one of the polyglot champions of the world, resembling today’s New York or L.A.:
From Time Immemorial, Joan Peters, 1984
Winston S. Churchill recognized how British policy favored all immigration that wasn’t Jewish, demolishing the lie that today’s Israel is a white settler colonialist creature of Britain’s empire:
From Time Immemorial, Joan Peters, 1984
On both far right and far left Jews are portrayed as rootless cosmopolitans, the ultimate “anywhere people” indigenous to nowhere and foreign everywhere. This ancient anti-Semitic trope drives how Hamas and Fatah’s western woke-istan useful idiots frame their libel that “Israel is a white settler colonial state” and lives on “stolen land.” This disinformation would never succeed without Husseini’s fake demographic history.
Mythologized demography has successfully branded the Arabs as the opposite, as the quintessential anti-cosmopolitan “somewhere people”, possessing 13 centuries worth of indigeneity. In reality, they were no more local than the Jews against whom they launched the self-declared war of extermination in 1948 that triggered their self-inflicted Nakba.
The facts of Palestine’s demographic history of inbound and outbound population exchanges have exposed this localist branding as utterly fraudulent. Othering Israel’s Jews as foreign settler colonizers is classic double standards anti-Semitism, not just anti-Zionism.
It gives a free pass to Palestine to the 19th and 20th century Arab descendants of immigrants from Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Circassia, Turkmenistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Iraq and Persia, while denying it to Jews expelled and expropriated from exactly those countries. If that isn’t anti-Semitism, then nothing is."
____________________________________________________Sources:
The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs, 1878–1948, Arieh Avneri, 1984 (https://archive.org/details/claimofdisposses00avne_0/page/n3/mode/2up)
The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (https://fathomjournal.org/book-review-review-of-the-war-of-return-how-western-indulgence-of-the-palestinian-dream-has-obstructed-the-path-to-peace/)
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, Joan Peters, 1984 (https://www.amazon.com/Time-Immemorial-Arab-Jewish-Conflict-Palestine/dp/0963624202)
