I've heard and read a lot of misrepresentations about the status of the Arabs living in Palestine under the Ottomans and the Brits, all tending to negate the number of Arabs, both Moslem and Christian. The biggest whopper is the lie that they were all nomads living in tents - I am not attributing that one to you. The one that the land was almost uninhabited I am attributing to you.
Nadine is the one who keeps saying that there was no nation of Palestine, which is a bogus bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu. The Ottomans ruled it, so it wasn't a sovereign nation, that's true, but it was still Palestine. The Romans named it Palestine 2000 years ago.
By the way, the one lie I haven't mentioned yet is the one that the Jews were thrown out so are merely seeking that from which they were dispossessed. Over the last 3000 millennia, the land has belonged to not only Jews but Greeks, Persians, Romans, Arabs, and Ottomans. None of whom ever threw the Jews out.
As Nadine and I discussed a week or two ago, the educated Jews left for brighter lights and bigger cities, e.g., Rome, Greece, Baghdad, Cairo, etc. The Jews who remained were mostly farmers and some traders in the larger towns. |
