Palestinian supporters claim that there were little or no Jews in Palestine before Zionism but the Ottoman Empire census shows that the Jews outnumbered the Muslims in Jerusalem in 1905 Is this significant ?
The Ottomans stayed in Palestine for four centuries, and their influence is still felt in many ways today. Israel’s legal system, religious court records (the sijjil), land registry (the tapu), and architectural treasures all bear witness to the Ottomans’ significance. When the Ottomans came, they discovered a predominantly Sunni Muslim and agricultural society with a small urban elite that spoke Arabic. Less than 5% of the populace was Jewish, and between 10% and 15% were Christians. Yonatan Mendel states:
The exact percentage of Jews prior to the rise of Zionism is unknown. However, it probably ranged from 2 to 5 percent. According to Ottoman records, a total population of 462,465 resided in 1878 in what is today Israel/Palestine. Of this number, 403,795 (87 percent) were Muslim, 43,659 (10 percent) were Christians and 15,011 (3 percent) were Jewish.(Jonathan Mendel, The Creation of Israeli Arabic: Political and Security Considerations in the Making of Arabic Language, p. 188.)
As evidenced by Ottoman census records, Palestine was densely populated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in rural areas where agriculture was the primary occupation.
The aforementioned historical facts are not included on the official website of Israel’s foreign ministry’s section on Palestine’s history since the sixteenth century:
Following the Ottoman Conquest in 1517, the Land was divided into four districts, attached administratively to the province of Damascus and ruled from Istanbul. At the outset of the Ottoman era, some 1,000 Jewish families lived in the country, mainly in Jerusalem, Nablus (Schechem), Hebron, Gaza, Safed (Tzfat) and the villages of the Galilee. The community was composed of descendants of Jews who had always lived in the Land as well as immigrants from North Africa and Europe.
Orderly government, until the death (1566) of Sultan Suleiman the magnificent, brought improvements and stimulated Jewish immigration. Some newcomers settled in Jerusalem, but the majority went to Safed where, by the mid-16th century, the Jewish population had risen to about 10,000, and the town had become a thriving textile center.
Sixteenth-century Palestine appears to have been predominantly Jewish, with the area’s commercial lifeblood confined in Jewish towns. What happened next? According to Israel’s foreign ministry’s official site:
With the gradual decline in the quality of Ottoman rule, the country suffered widespread neglect. By the end of the 18th century, much of the Land was owned by absentee landlords and leased to impoverished tenant farmers, and taxation was as crippling as it was capricious. The great forests of the Galilee and the Carmel mountain range were denuded of trees; swamp and desert encroached on agricultural land.
By 1800, Palestine had devolved into a desert, with farmers who did not belong there somehow, were cultivating barren land that was not theirs. The same land occurred to be an island with a sizable Jewish population, governed from the outside by the Ottoman empire and ravaged by intensive imperial projects that depleted the soil’s fertility. Each year, the land became more desolate, deforestation expanded, and agricultural land deteriorated into a desert. This concocted image, which was promoted via a state-sponsored official website, is unprecedented.(Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 5.).
Ironically, most Israeli scholars would be extremely hesitant to accept the credibility of these assertions. Several have directly challenged it, including Amnon Cohen, David Grossman, and Yehoushua Ben-Arieh. Their research demonstrates that, instead of being a desert, Palestine was a flourishing Arab society for centuries.(Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 5-6.).
Despite the invalidity of such claim, it continues to be circulated throughout the Israeli educational curriculum and the media, assured by authors of lesser significance but with a bigger impact on the educational system.
Outside of “Israel”, most notably in the United States, the belief that the promised land was empty, desolate, and barren prior to the arrival of Zionism is still alive and well, and thus needs addressing.
During the Ottoman period, Palestine was a society similar to the rest of the Arab world. It was similar to the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean countries. Rather than being encircled and segregated, as a part of the larger Ottoman empire, the Palestinian people were freely exposed to encounters with other cultures. Second, because Palestine was receptive to change and modernization, it started to develop as a nation long before the Zionist movement arrived. The towns of Acre, Tiberias, Haifa, and Shefamr were redeveloped and re-energized under the leadership of energetic local rulers such as Thaher al-Umar/Zahir al-Umar (1689–1775).The coastal network of ports and towns grew in importance as a result of its trade connections with Europe, while the inner plains traded with neighboring regions.
According to Justin McCarthy, Palestine had a population of 350,000 in the early nineteenth century and 657,000 Muslim Arabs, 81,000 Christian Arabs, and 59,000 Jews in 1914, of which many were European Jews from the first and second Aliyah. (McCarthy, J., 1990. The population of Palestine. 1st ed. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 26.)
Thus, in 1914, the Jewish population in Palestine was less than 8% of the total population, and was smaller than the Palestinian Christian Arab population.
According to Shavtai teveth, Ben-Gurion’s biographer, it’s not only that Palestinians were the majority in their homeland as early as 1906, it also should be noted that:
The vast majority of Palestine’s Jews were not citizens of the country but guests from Tsarist Russia.
The Jews in Palestine were primarily Orthodox, accounting for 7.8% of the total population.
The majority of Orthodox Jews at the time were non-Zionist. In fact, they were anti-Zionists.
Zionist pioneers were virtually non-existent in Palestine in 1906, they constituted only 1% of the total Jewish population there.
According to Ben-Gurion himself, Jews constituted 12% of the total Palestinian population in 1914.(David Ben-Gurion, The Jews in their Land, P. 292.).
Moshe Smilansky wrote in Hapoel Hatzair in the spring edition of 1908:
“Either the Land of Israel belongs in the national sense to those Arabs who settled there in recent years [before 1908], and then we have no place there and we must say explicitly: The land of our fathers is lost to us. [Or] if the land of Israel belongs to us, the Jewish people, then our national interests come before all else. . . . it is not possible for one country to serve as the homeland of two peoples.”(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 57.).
Notably, even in 1908, when the Zionist presence in Palestine was minuscule, they continued to refer to the Palestinian people as “recent immigrants”.
In March 1911, 150 Palestinian notables cabled the Turkish parliament to express their opposition to land sales to Zionist Jews. The governor of Jerusalem, Azmi Bey, responded:
“We are not xenophobes; we welcome all strangers. We are not anti-Semites; we value the economic superiority of the Jews. But no nation, no government could open its arms to groups. . . . aiming to take Palestine from us.”(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 62.).
In 1914, Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first foreign minister, wrote:
We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture ….. Recently there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about “the mutual misunderstanding” between us and the Arabs, about “common interests” [and] about “the possibility of unity and peace between two fraternal peoples.”….. [But] we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes ….. for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate- all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 91).
In February 1914, Ahad Ha’Am stated:
” ‘[the Zionists] wax angry towards those who remind them that there is still another people in Eretz Yisrael that has been living there and does not intend at all to leave its place. In a future when this ILLUSION will have been torn from their hearts and they will look with open eyes upon the reality as it is, they will certainly understand how important this question is and how great our duty to work for its solution.”
(UN: The Origins And Evolution Of Palestine Problem, section II).
In 1914, Chaim Weizmann attempted to lay the groundwork for the realization of Zionism by stating that Palestine is empty and its original inhabitants have no say in its fate:
“In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country.What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite this people with this country? The owners of the country [the Ottoman Turks] must, there for, be persuaded and conceived that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the [Jewish] people and for the country, but also for themselves.”
(Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 6.).
Ironically, Chaim Weizmann wrote a description of the Palestinian people before the British conquest of Palestine (The empty country he mentioned previously):
“The rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.”(Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 17.).
Walter Laqueur (a major Zionist historian) gave a different perspective on the early Zionist pioneers’ status in 1914 in comparison to the Palestinian population:
“The Zionist immigrants, as distinct from established Jewish community [religious orthodox], numbered no more than 35,000-40,000 in 1914, of whom only one-third lived in agricultural settlements. While Arab spokesmen protested against Jewish immigration, Jewish observers noted with concern that the annual natural increase of the [Palestinian] Arab population was about as big as the total number of Jews who had settled with so much effort and sacrifice on the land over a period of forty years.”(Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, p. 213).
According to Zionist historian Benny Morris, speaking about the period 1882-1914:
“The Arabs (Palestinians) sought instinctively to retain the Arab and Muslim character of the region and to maintain their position as its rightful inhabitants; the Zionists sought radically to change the status quo, buy as much land as possible, settle on it, and eventually turn an Arab populated country into a Jewish homeland.”
For decades, Zionists attempted to conceal their true aspirations out of fear of angering authorities and Palestinians. They were, however, certain of their objectives and how they would accomplish them. From the very beginning of the Zionist enterprise, internal correspondence between the olim [immigrants] leaves little room for doubt.
Most of the early Zionist thinkers, most of whom did the majority of their writing in Europe, barely mentioned the fact that Arabs were living in Palestine. Thus, while these thinkers spoke of establishing a Jewish society in Palestine in which Jews could work and farm, emancipating themselves from shopkeeper middleman positions prevalent in Europe, there was no vision for how the land’s native inhabitants would fit into that dream.
Herbert Samuel (a prominent Jewish British official who later became one of the earliest proponents of the Balfour Declaration and the first British Mandate High Commissioner to Palestine in 1920) wrote in 1915:
“[A state in which 90,000 or 100,000 Jewish inhabitants [would rule over] 400,000 or 500,000 Mohammedans of Arab race. . . might vanish in series of squalid conflicts with the [Palestinian] Arab population.”(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 72.).
It should be noted that Jews constituted 1/3 of the total Populace in 1948, and only 1/3 of those Jews in Palestine (1/9 of the total population) were citizens; the remainder were either recentillegal immigrants or simply immigrants granted entry to Palestine in order to flee German and European crimes.
Settled population, excluding the nomadic Arab Bedouins, by town and sub-district estimated as of 31st December, 1946. The table below was directly extracted from the Supplement to a Survey of Palestine (p. 12-13) which was prepared by the British Mandate for the United Nations in 1947:
Note that all Jewish towns were all exclusively Jewish populated as a result of the apartheid policies of the Zionist Movement. These apartheid policies were approved and encouraged by the British Mandate and affected all sectors of society, such as housing, landownership, schools and higher education, finance, political parties, official languages, ... etc. Also it should be noted that Palestinian Christians and Muslims resisted the implementation of apartheid policies tooth and nail in order to preserve a united country, however, that was counter to Zionists ambitions. The data doesn’t include the nomadic Bedouins, who were estimated in other studies to number close to 100,000 Palestinians. Many of them were resettled in Al-Ramla after the 1948 war.