How many Arabs lived in “Palestine” before the establishment of the State of Israel 🇮🇱?

A thread 🧵 with historical sources:

🔸In 1785, Constantine Francois Volney describes the "ruined" and "desolate" state of the country: "We with difficulty recognized Jerusalem... The population is supposed to amount to twelve to fourteen thousands..."

🔸In 1843, Alexander Keith wrote that "in this [Volney's] day the land had not fully reached its last prophetic degree of desolation and depopulation."

🔸In 1816, J.S. Buckingham had described Jaffa as "a poor village", and Ramleh as a place "where, as throughout the greater portion of Palestine, the ruined portion seemed more extensive than that which was inhabited."

🔸In 1835, Alphonse de Lamartine gave this description: "Outside gates of Jerusalem, we saw indeed no living object, heard no living sound. We found the same void, the same silence as we should have found in the enrombed gates of Pompeii and Herculaneum... a complete, eternal silence resigns in the town, in the highways, in the country... The tomb of a whole people."

🔸In 1857, the British consul in Palestine, James Finn, reported back to England: "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population."

🔸In 1867, Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad: "Stirring senses... occur in this valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not for thirty miles in either direction." He goes on to describe Galilee, Judea, and around Jerusalem as deserts devoid of population. And for the country as a whole: "Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies... Palestine is desolate and unlovely... It is hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land."

🔸In 1881 (the year designated by Arafat as the beginning of the Zionist "invasion" and "displacement" of the local population), English cartographer Arthur Penrhyn Stanley wrote: "In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or habitation."

🔸By the third quarter of the 19th century, the total population of the entire country, Arabs and Jews, was only 400,000. Less than 3% of today's figure.

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