I notice your favorite source, electronicintifada, is a little light on descriptions of how wonderful Palestine was in the nineteenth century, which is the period in question since that's when Zionism began. That's because the nineteenth century just sucked in Palestine.
Palestine in 1800 is estimated to have had only 300,000 inhabitants, and its population keep declining through much of the century, despite the fact that the Turks kept importing Arabs, Turks and Circassians into the region to supply agricultural labor.
In 1857 the British Consul reported "Palestine...was almost empty of inhabitants" and urgently needed "a body of population irrespective of religious conderations."
Palestine was almost empty because of the endemic corruption and misrule it suffered from in this period. The historian Haas reports "The population was hopelessly incompetent and lethargic, owing to the taxation."
In 1867 Mark Twain visited Palestine. In the Innocents Abroad, he describes most of it as a dreary wasteland and ascribes rosier descriptions of it to travelers with their heads full of New Testament images. He describes Jerusalem:
"A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I don not know how else to make one understand how small it is...The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Pretestants...It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty, and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparantly -- the eternal "bucksheesh."
Now obviously no one knows how Palestine would developed without Zionism. Probably like Syria, only more slowly since it was a backwater province. Is Syria your great model for development? |
