Palestine, Palestine

Sir Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs ,Clarendon Press, Oxford (1961) 1964 pp.131, 199, 285, n.1 Early archeological textual reference to the territory of Palestine is found in the Merneptah Stele, dated c. 1200 BCE, containing a recount of Egyptian king Merneptah's victories in the land of Canaan, mentioning place-names such as Gezer, Ashkelon and Yanoam, along with Israel, which is mentioned using a hieroglyphic determinative that indicates a nomad people, rather than a state. Carol A. Redmount, 'Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt' in The Oxford History of the Biblical Word, ed: Michael D. Coogan, (Oxford University Press: 1999), p. 97 Egyptian texts of the temple at Medinet Habu, record a people called the P-r-s-t (conventionally Peleset ), one of the Sea Peoples who invaded Egypt in Ramesses III's reign. This is considered very likely to be a reference to the Philistines. The Hebrew name Peleshet ( ) usually translated as Philistia in English, is used in the Bible to denote their southern coastal region.

Herodotus, The Histories Bk.7.89 During the Roman period, the province of Iudaea covered much of modern Palestine, although the Galilee and other northern areas remained distinct administratively. However, many writers continued to use the Greek name. For example, in the first century C.E., the Roman writer Pliny the Elder mentions a region of Syria that was "formerly called Palaestina " among the areas of the Eastern Mediterranean. Pliny the Elder, Natural History V.66 and 68.

Palestine and IsraelDavid M. JacobsonBulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 313 (Feb., 1999), pp. 65-74 After the Jewish rebellions of the first and second centuries CE, the Romans merged the province of Iudaea with Galilee, Samaria and Idumaea, uniting the entire area in a new province bearing the Greco-Latin name, Syria-Palaestina.

The cities of Palestine, such as Caesarea Maritima, Jerusalem, Scythopolis, Neapolis, and Gaza reached their peak population in the late Roman period and produced notable Christian scholars in the disciplines of rhetoric, historiography, Eusebian ecclesiastical history, classicizing history and hagiography.

It then became part of the vilayet of Saida (Sidon), briefly interrupted by the 7 March 1799 - July 1799 French occupation of Jaffa, Haifa, and Caesarea. During the Siege of Acre in 1799, Napoleon prepared a proclamation declaring a Jewish state in Palestine.

The northern part, above a line connecting Jaffa to north Jericho and the Jordan, was assigned to the vilayet of Beirut, subdivided into the sanjaks (districts) of Acre, Beirut and Nablus. The southern part, from Jaffa downwards, was part of the special district of Jerusalem. Its southern boundaries were unclear but petered out in the eastern Sinai Peninsula and northern Negev Desert. Most of the central and southern Negev was assigned to the wilayet of Hijaz, which also included the Sinai Peninsula and the western part of Arabia. Gideon Biger, The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840-1947 , pp. 13-15. Routledge, 2004. ISBN 0714656542 Nonetheless, the old name remained in popular and semi-official use. Many examples of its usage in the 16th and 17th centuries have survived. Gerber, 1998.

Shortly thereafter, British foreign minister Arthur Balfour issued the controversial Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised to establish a Jewish state in Palestine in exchange for the Jewish financial support to the British in their war against Ottomans and Germans.

The British Mandate enacted English, Hebrew and Arabic as its three official languages. The land designated by the mandate was called Palestine in English, () in Arabic, and in Hebrew or ().

The United Kingdom obtained a mandate for Palestine and France obtained a mandate for Syria. The boundaries of the mandates and the conditions under which they were to be held were not decided. The Zionist Organization's representative at Sanremo, Chaim Weizmann, subsequently reported to his colleagues in London: There are still important details outstanding, such as the actual terms of the mandate and the question of the boundaries in Palestine. There is the delimitation of the boundary between French Syria and Palestine, which will constitute the northern frontier and the eastern line of demarcation, adjoining Arab Syria. The latter is not likely to be fixed until the Emir Feisal attends the Peace Conference, probably in Paris. 'Zionist Aspirations: Dr Weizmann on the Future of Palestine', The Times , Saturday, 8 May, 1920; p. 15.

France in turn refused to reach a settlement over Palestine until its own mandate in Syria became final. According to Louis: Together with the American protests against the issuance of mandates these triangular quarrels between the Italians, French, and British explain why the A mandates did not come into force until nearly four years after the signing of the Peace Treaty.... The British documents clearly reveal that Balfour's patient and skillful diplomacy contributed greatly to the final issuance of the A mandates for Syria and Palestine on September 29, 1923. Louis, 1969, p. 90.

The article related that the 'Mandates were not the creation of the League, and they could not in substance be altered by the League. The League's duties were confined to seeing that the specific and detailed terms of the mandates were in accordance with the decisions taken by the Allied and Associated Powers, and that in carrying out these mandates the Mandatory Powers should be under the supervision--not under the control--of the League.' Excerpts from League of Nations Official Journal dated June 1922, pp. 546-549 The Palestine Exploration Fund published surveys and maps of Western Palestine (aka Cisjordan) starting in the mid-19th century. Even before the Mandate came into legal effect in 1923 (text), British terminology sometimes used '"Palestine" for the part west of the Jordan River and "Trans-Jordan" (or Transjordania ) for the part east of the Jordan River. Ingrams, 1972 on a 1927 British Mandate stamp. "Palestine" is shown in English, Arabic (), and Hebrew, the latter includes the acronym for The first reference to the Palestinians, without qualifying them as Arabs, is to be found in a document of the Permanent Executive Committee, composed of Muslims and Christians, presenting a series of formal complaints to the British authorities on 26 July 1928.

The Arab governments at this point refused to set up a State of Palestine.

Various declarations, such as the 15 November 1988 proclamation of a State of Palestine by the PLO referred to a country called Palestine, defining its borders based on the U.N. Resolution 242 and 383 and the principle of land for peace. The Green Line was the 1967 border established by many UN resolutions including those mentioned above.

The Census of David is said to have recorded 1,300,000 males over twenty years of age, which would imply a population of over 5,000,000. The number of exiles who returned from Babylon is given at 42,360. Tacitus declares that Jerusalem at its fall contained 600,000 persons; Josephus, that there were as many as 1,100,000. According to Israeli archeologist Magen Broshi, "... the population of Palestine in antiquity did not exceed a million persons. It can also be shown, moreover, that this was more or less the size of the population in the peak period--the late Byzantine period, around AD 600" Magen Broshi, The Population of Western Palestine in the Roman-Byzantine Period, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research , No. 236, p.7, 1979.

Katz, 115 citing C.F.C Conte de Volney: Travels through Syria & Egypt in the years 1783, 1784, 1785 (London, 1798). Vol II p. 219 In his paper 'Demography in Israel/Palestine: Trends, Prospects and Policy Implications' DellaPergola, 2001, p. 5.

In 1914 Palestine had a population of 657,000 Muslim Arabs, 81,000 Christian Arabs, and 59,000 Jews. McCarthy, 1990.

This number had doubled by 1914 and reached 600,000 by 1920 and 840,000 by 1931. Thus, between 1922 and 1946 the Arab population of Palestine increased by 118 percent, the highest rate of population growth among all Arab lands except Egypt. Sachar, p. 167.

Twain held some of the usual colonialist and orientalist assumptions of the day, but he openly mocked Christian and Jewish claims to Arab-owned lands in Palestine.

She writes that "Twain's descriptions are high in Israeli government press handouts that present a case for Israel's redemption of a land that had previously been empty and barren. His gross characterizations of the land and the people in the time before mass Jewish immigration are also often used by US propagandists for Israel." K. Christison, Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy, Univ. of California Press, 1999; p16.

B. B. Doumani, The political economy of population counts in Ottoman Palestine: Nablus, Circa 1950, International Journal of Middle East Studies , Vol 26 (1994) 1-17.

RELANDI HADRIANI Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata.Trajecti Batavorum, Guilielmi, 1714., pages 648-649 According to Paul Masson, a French economic historian, "wheat shipments from the Palestinian port of Acre had helped to save southern France from famine on numerous occasions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." Marwan R. Beheiry, "The Agricultural Exports of Southern Palestine, 1885-1 9 14", Journal of Palestine Studies , volume 10, No. 4, 198 1, p. 67.

In the following 30 years a few hundreds came to Palestine. Most of them were animated by religious motives; they came to pray and to die in the Holy Land, and to be buried in its soil. After the persecutions in Russia forty years ago, the movement of the Jews to Palestine assumed larger proportions.

The official British Census data for Palestine, the reports made by the Mandatory Administration to the League of Nations, the 1938 Palestine Partition Commission, Population expert A.M. Carr-Saunders, and the Anglo-American Committee concluded that Arab population growth was attributable to "natural increase", not to any substantial immigration.

Thus, Arab population increase during the 1930s was 87 percent in Haifa, 61 percent in Jaffa, 37 percent in Jerusalem. A similar growth was registered in Arab towns located near Jewish agricultural villages. The 25 percent rise in of Arab participation in industry could be traced exclusively to the needs of the large Jewish immigration. Sachar, pp. 167168 According to Martin Gilbert, 50,000 Arabs immigrated to Palestine from the neighboring lands between 1919 and 1939 "attracted by the improving agricultural conditions and growing job opportunities, most of them created by the Jews". Gilbert, 2005, p. 16.

Among the most compelling arguments in support of such immigration is the universally acknowledged and practiced linkage between regional economic disparities and migratory impulses. The precise magnitude of Arab immigration into and within Palestine is, as Bachi noted, unknown. Lack of completeness in Ottoman registration lists and British Mandatory censuses, and the immeasurable illegal, unreported, and undetected immigration during both periods make any estimate a bold venture into creative analysis. In most cases, those venturing into the realm of Palestinian demographyor other demographic analyses based on very crude dataacknowledge its limitations and the tentativeness of the conclusions that may be drawn. Gottheil, 2003.

The vast majority of the Palestinian Arabs resident in 1947 were the sons and daughters of Arabs who were living in Palestine before modern Jewish immigration began. There is no reason to believe that they were not the sons and daughters of Arabs who had been in Palestine for many centuries. McCarthy, 1990, p. 38.

Radical economic change was occurring all over the Mediterranean Basin at the time. Improved transportation, greater mercantile activity, and greater industry had increased the chances for employment in cities, especially coastal cities... Differential population increase was occurring all over the Eastern Mediterranean, not just in Palestine... The increase in Muslim population had little or nothing to do with Jewish immigration. In fact the province that experienced the greatest Jewish population growth (by .035 annually), Jerusalem Sanjak, was the province with the lowest rate of growth of Muslim population (.009). McCarthy, 1990, pp. 16-17.

Although the reasons for growth were exogenous to Palestine the bearers were not waves of Jewish immigration, foreign intervention nor Ottoman reforms but "primarily local Arab Muslims and Christians." Gilbar, 1986, p. 188.

Specifically, of Muslims, 93.1% were born in their current locality of residence, 5.2% were born elsewhere in Palestine, and 1.6% were born outside Palestine. Of Christians, 93.4% were born in their current locality, 3.0% were born elsewhere in Palestine, and 3.6% were born outside Palestine. Of Jews (excluding the large fraction who were not Ottoman citizens), 59.0% were born in their current locality, 1.9% were born elsewhere in Palestine, and 39.0% were born outside Palestine. Schmelz, 1990, pp. 15-67.

He writes: As all the research by historian Fares Abdul Rahim and geographers of modern Palestine shows, the Arab population began to grow again in the middle of the nineteenth century. That growth resulted from a new factor: the demographic revolution. Until the 1850s there was no "natural" increase of the population, but this began to change when modern medical treatment was introduced and modern hospitals were established, both by the Ottoman authorities and by the foreign Christian missionaries. The number of births remained steady but infant mortality decreased. This was the main reason for Arab population growth. ... No one would doubt that some migrant workers came to Palestine from Syria and Trans-Jordan and remained there. But one has to add to this that there were migrations in the opposite direction as well. For example, a tradition developed in Hebron to go to study and work in Cairo, with the result that a permanent community of Hebronites had been living in Cairo since the fifteenth century. Trans-Jordan exported unskilled casual labor to Palestine; but before 1948 its civil service attracted a good many educated Palestinian Arabs who did not find work in Palestine itself. Demographically speaking, however, neither movement of population was significant in comparison to the decisive factor of natural increase. Porath, Y. (1986).

She supports this argument with an array of demographic statistics and contemporary accounts, the bulk of which have not been questioned by any reviewer, including Professor Porath. Professor Porath replied with an array of data culled from expert demographers to confirm his position. He also pointed out that Peters demographic statistics were inexplicable: ...nowhere in her main text or in the methodological appendices (V and VI) did Mrs. Peters bother to explain to her readers how she managed to break down the Ottoman or Cuinet's figures into smaller units than subdistricts. As far as I know no figures for the units smaller than subdistricts (Nahia; the parallel of the French commune), covering the area of Ottoman Palestine, were ever published. Therefore I can't avoid the conclusion that Mrs. Peters's figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that.

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