So what did the british census of the early twenties give as proportions, well over eighty per cent muslim arab speakers, right ... and that was after significant zionist importation of personnel, far from 1917 proportions ... there were around ten per cent christians, a few per cent 'other', which included druze and others i forget ... there is an earlier census, maybe ottoman, can't recall it just now ... the british one didn't count many of the bedouins, who traditionally roamed the whole area including Palestine, so that skews the numbers
Anybody else notice how the "Druze" are in but "Jews" are carefully excluded? Yet they were a significant minority at the time, certainly much larger than the Druze:
Estimates of the population in late Ottoman Palestine vary. According to Ottoman data, there were around 712,000 inhabitants in Palestine before World War I.3 Muslim Arabs consisted of the largest group and reached 83% of the entire population in 1914.4 The Jewish population numbered around 80,000-90,000, or about 14% of the total population.5
5 Israel Kolatt, "The Organization of the Jewish Population in Palestine and the Development of its Political Consciousness before World War I", in: Moshe Maoz (ed.), Studies on Palestine During the Ottoman Period, (Jerusalem, 1975), p. 211. McCarthy offers a somewhat different estimation of 60,000 Jews in 1914 (McCarthy, p. 24). In his book, Gorny claims that there were 85,000-90,000 Jews in Palestine, in comparison to 590,000 Arabs (Muslims and Christians). See: Yosef Gorny, The Arab Question and the Jewish Problem, (Tel Aviv, 1985), p. 21 (Hebrew) jqf-jerusalem.org
The first British census had similar numbers
First British census of Palestine shows population of 757,182, with 78% Muslim, 11% Jewish and 9.6% Christian
So if the Druze are indigenous, are the Jews "indigenous" too? |
