“So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country [Palestine] and multiplied till their population has increased.”
— Winston Churchill in 1938

"[T]he Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period.”
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939

Editor’s note: The following analysis makes up the first half of a two-part study. The second part, “A Muslim Aliyah Paralleled the Jewish Aliyah: Part II, since 1948,” will appear in the Fall 2024 edition of the Middle East Quarterly.

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Famously, Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, called aliyah, is centuries old and took on an organized form in 1882. Described as “the central goal of the State of Israel” (in the words of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon), it provides the demographic basis on which the entire Zionist enterprise rests. Both very public and highly controversial, it has inspired millions of Jews to move to territories now under Israeli control.

Much less famously, a large and diverse non-Jewish immigration to Palestine (meaning here, roughly Gaza, the West Bank, and the northern half of the State of Israel), mostly Muslim, has also taken place. These immigrants included Arabs, Muslims, and many others. They and their descendants probably make up a majority of the population now called Palestinian. Palestinians, in other words, are not an aboriginal, autochthonous, first, indigenous, or native people; most of them are as recently arrived as Zionists. They are also as ethnically diverse.

The scale of this non-Jewish immigration was once well known, as the Churchill and Roosevelt quotes above indicate. It has, however, long since disappeared from view, replaced by a fable about a homogeneous people living on the land since the deepest antiquity.

This article seeks to restore the historical record by reviewing non-Jewish immigration to Palestine during the century from the 1840s until the creation of Israel in 1948; then it examines the fairytale that displaced that record. A future article will take up non-Jewish immigration since 1948 to the State of Israel.

Geography and religion explain why Palestine has experienced a disproportionate number of conquests and an unusual pattern of settlement.

Located at the crossroads of Asia and Africa, of desert and sown, of land and sea, containing holy places for multiple faiths, Palestine has come under unceasing attack. In addition to countless tribal raids and assaults by petty princes, the region suffered such notable invaders as Pharaoh Ramses II, Alexander the Great, Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, King Richard the Lionheart, the Mongol Kitbuqa, the Ottoman Selim the Grim, Napoleon, General Edmund Allenby, and Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Jerusalem’s history exemplifies this history of conquest. “No other city has been more bitterly fought over throughout its history,” observes Eric H. Cline of George Washington University. He counts “at least 118 separate conflicts in and for Jerusalem during the past four millennia” and calculates Jerusalem was completely destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, captured 44 times, and attacked 52 times. Another calculation, by U.S. military historian John D. Hosler, finds 20 attacks on Jerusalem during the 630 years between 614 and 1244, every 31.5 years, or about once each generation.

Many invaders brought new cohorts of settlers, thereby adding new strata of population. For example, after Egypt’s conquest of Palestine in 1831, 6,000 Egyptian peasants moved to Palestine. Significantly, they maintained a cultural distinctiveness across nearly two centuries. The German Philip Baldensperger, a long-time resident of Palestine, observed in 1913 that “we find entire villages of Egyptians all along the plains of the Philistines, from the river of Egypt [i.e., the Nile]* to Jaffa, – descendants of those of 1831, and who continue unmixed.” In 2013, Israeli scholars Gideon Kressel and Reuven Aharoni noted that their descendants still “have not assimilated entirely into the local Arab population.” The same applies to several other communities, notably the Circassians.

This centuries-long retention of ethnicity has political implications. As Israeli historian Moshe Dann explains, Palestinians “have little in common, and are merely a collection of tribes and clans that are often at war with each other.” The Hamas vs. Palestinian Authority confrontation offers one example of this; another is the continuous internecine fighting, often clan based, among peoples living on the West Bank.

Non-Jewish immigration to Palestine took off in the 1840s as a result of two main economic developments. First, the region’s Ottoman rulers encouraged commercial activity by building modern infrastructure such as paved roads, railroads, ports, and telegraphs. Market agriculture began (for example, in wheat and oranges), the government created a public-school system, and entrepreneurs founded banks. The German historian Alexander Schölch estimates that during the 1850s, Palestine had a population of about 350,000, roughly 85 percent of whom were Muslim, 11 percent Christian, and 4 percent Jewish.

Second, European Jews began to immigrate. At first, they focused on religious activities, spurring only modest economic activity. Starting about 1870, modern Zionists brought capital and modern skills to the region. They purchased land, improved it, applied scientific agricultural methods, improved sanitation, opened factories, built infrastructure, and engaged in international trade. Many of these activities required labor by non-Jews; by 1900, the Jewish philanthropist Edmund de Rothschild appears to have been the largest employer of Palestinian labor. Even that did not suffice, however, as Arieh L. Avneri of the Tabenkin Institute explains: “Palestine attracted not only Jews who came because of national motivation but also Arab immigrants from neighboring countries who hoped to find easier ways to earn a living than prevailed in their native lands.”

Such regional movement was generally unrestricted because, through the end of Ottoman rule in 1917, Palestine had no administrative definition nor boundaries but made up a small part of a large empire.

Indeed, this movement of peoples fit into a larger context; “before the signing of international agreements that defined national boundaries that restricted the migratory streams,” Kressel and Aharoni explain, the Middle East saw “an immense amount of travel.”

Muslim immigration was not entirely spontaneous. Fearing another Western-oriented, non-Muslim population like the Armenian one, Ottoman rulers encouraged Muslims to move to Palestine. Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909), once commented that “We cannot view Jewish immigration favorably. We could only open our borders to those who belong to the same religion as we do.” Thus, Alan Dowty of Notre Dame University explains:

In contrast to Jewish immigrants, resented as foreigners and conspicuous as non-Muslims, Egyptians and other Middle Easterners were welcomed for their part in increasing the Muslim population.

Imperial British control in the years 1917-48 saw Palestine become an administrative unit, the quasi-colony called the Mandate for Palestine, defined as the familiar dagger- shaped territory still cherished by Palestinian organizations.

Motives for immigration: As in earlier decades, imperial and Zionist need for labor spurred further non-Jewish immigration. The British needed workers to build their infrastructure, such as military bases, and they (in Avneri’s description) “preferred Egyptian, Syrian or other foreign laborers to the Jewish immigrant.” This stimulated further non-Jewish immigration, which still encountered few obstacles to enter Palestine.

Booming Zionist economic activity attracted yet more Muslim workers, employed mostly in agriculture, building, and services. Joan Peters, author of a book on this topic, compares the non-Jewish population of the future mandate’s territory in 1893 and 1947. Dividing it into three subregions according to the intensity of their Jewish settlement—none, some, and much—she finds that non-Jews increased over that period by, respectively, 116, 185, and 401 percent. In other words, many of today’s Palestinians acquired that ethnicity via their contribution to the Zionist project. Officialdom both far away (such as Churchill and Roosevelt) or nearby understood this. Thus, C.S. Jarvis, British governor of the Sinai in 1922-36, noted the illegal Arab immigration coming not only “from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria.” The price of real estate soared, with the British-sponsored Peel Commission reporting in 1937 that a “shortfall of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population.”

Egyptian immigration to Palestine increased after World War I, due in part to the jobs and the much higher standard of living, facilitated by improved security and transportation, especially a railroad link opened in 1918. Young men who successfully pursued opportunities in Palestine often sent for their families. In 1937, the Peel Commission heard that “There are Egyptians who are spread throughout Eretz-Israel, some of whom have made their sojourn permanent.”

Jarvis pointed to the economic attraction of Zionism: “it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery.” Winston Churchill concurred:

Confirming their views, the University of Illinois’ Fred M. Gottheil documents the universal human propensity to migrate toward greater economic opportunities, the Palestinian pattern of doing precisely this, and the greater economic opportunities in Palestine than in neighboring countries. He understatedly concludes that “consequential immigration of Arabs into and within Palestine occurred.”

Of course, not all Muslim migrants came to work for Zionists; some came to assault them, including two famous leaders: Fawzi al-Qawuqji from Lebanon and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam from Syria; the latter’s legacy remains alive, commemorated by Hamas as the name of its militia.

Provenance of immigrants: The authoritative Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911, written by Irish archeologist Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister, lists no less than 23 ethnicities under the “Palestine” entry: Afghan, Algerian, Armenian, Assyrian, Bedouin, Bosnian, Canaanite, Circassian, Crusader, Egyptian, German, Greek, Italian, Jewish, Kurd, Motawila, [1] Nowar, [2] Persian, Roman, Samaritan, Sudanese, Turkish, and Turkoman. Long as this list is, Macalister missed a number of ethnicities (including the Arabian, Chechen, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Yemeni). He further found that “no less than 50 languages [were] spoken in Jerusalem as vernaculars.”

Toponyms in common Palestinian surnames commemorate these origins. They include, going from west to east: al-Mughrabi (North Africa), al-Masri (Egypt), al-Yamani (Yemen), al-Hijazi (Saudi Arabia), al-Lubnani and al-Tarabulsi (Lebanon), al-Shami, al-Halabi, and al-Hourani (Syria), al-Iraqi, al-Baghdadi, and al-Tikriti (Iraq). The family name al-Ifranji, meaning “the Frank,” even memorializes the Crusader colonizers.

Arabians are particularly conspicuous. The Jerusalem family called Al-Husseini claims to be descended from Hussein, the grandson of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, implying roots in Arabia; the two dominant Palestinian politicians of the twentieth century, Amin al-Husseini and Yasir Arafat (birth name: Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini) belonged to this family. Saeb Erekat, a top Palestinian negotiator, belonged to the Huweitat clan from the vicinity of Mecca.

Numbers of immigrants: British authorities paid minute attention to Jewish immigration but nearly ignored its non-Jewish counterpart, making numbers about the latter vague. As an example of this uninterest, a severe shortage of workers attracted thousands of illegal Egyptian and other Arab laborers during World War II, many of whom settled permanently without the authorities paying them attention. A 1946 Survey of Palestine prepared for the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry made no effort to estimate their numbers but vaguely noted that “inhabitants of neighboring countries, attracted by the high rates of wages offered for employment on military works, entered Palestine illegally in considerable numbers during the War.” Even more vaguely, the report continues:

Peters rightly says of British rule, “there was not even a serious gauge for considering the incidence of Arab immigration” into Palestine.

The British eventually tried to compensate for their vagueness in 1947 by offering an estimate of 37,000 Arab immigrants to Palestine over the whole of the prior thirty years. Others counted much larger numbers. The Jewish Agency estimated that 20,000 Syrians from the Hauran district (or Houran, just east of the Golan Heights) entered Palestine during a seven-month period in 1934, two-thirds of whom stayed. Also in 1934, the governor of Hauran, Tewfik Bey El-Huriani, confirmed this number, estimating that 30,000-36,000 Hauranis had recently entered Palestine and settled there. Avneri found that “during the period of the Mandate the country [i.e., Palestine] had absorbed 100,000 legal and illegal Arab immigrants and their offspring.” Leftist American journalist Albert Viton reported in 1936 that “Not only has Palestinian Arabia been enriched by Jewish immigration, but Palestine has become the center of attraction for the whole Near East. Tens of thousands of Arabs enter illegally every year in search of work.” In a 1948 report from Mandatory Palestine, future U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy (who twenty years hence would be assassinated by a Palestinian) concurred: “The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500,000 Arabs, in the 12 years between 1932 and 1944, came into Palestine to take advantage of living conditions existing in no other Arab state.”

This massive movement of Middle Easterners accounts for some unexpected developments. First, it explains the United Nations’ peculiar definition of Palestine refugees as “people whose normal place of residence was Palestine between 1 June 1946 and 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” Requiring not even two years’ residence implicitly acknowledged how many residents had only recently arrived. Thus did non-Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine increase the number of “Palestine refugees” that fled the fighting in 1948-49; even today their descendants swell the official number of those “refugees.”

Second, it points to non-Jewish immigrants making up a majority of the West Bank and Gaza population. In the exaggerated wording of Fathi Hammad, a top Hamas figure, “half of Palestinians are Egyptian and the other half are Saudis.” Third, it undermines Palestinian claims to have lived in Palestine ever since antiquity, claims we now turn to by entering the colorful world of the historical assertions forwarded by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestinian Authority (PA), and their related organizations.

Weirdly, the PLO narrative relies not on the Koran but on the Jewish Bible to establish that Palestinians have always inhabited the Land of Israel while Jews are strangers to it.

Canaanite origins: The PLO emphasizes that the Israelites under King David conquered Jerusalem from the Canaanites or their sub-tribe, the Jebusites in about 1000 bce. Yasir Arafat spoke of “Our forefathers, the Canaanites and Jebusites” and with this staked a claim to antedating the Jews in Palestine. “We are the Canaanites,” echoed his successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Others make similar claims. Ignoring his Arabian family origins, Saeb Erekat called himself “a son of Jericho, aged 10,000 years. ... I am the proud son of Canaanites, and I existed 5,000 years ago.” So too Faisal Husseini, another top figure: “I am a Palestinian. I am a descendant of the Jebusites, the ones who came before King David.” Outdoing them all, Palestinian National Council president Rawhi Fattouh stated that Palestinians lived in Palestine for more than 1.5 million years.

Celebrated Columbia University professors piled on. Edward Said, in his capacity as a self-described “Canaanite,” rued the Jewish conquest of Canaan as the malign inspiration for future rampages “from Indian-killing Puritans in New England to South African Boers claiming large swatches of territory held by Blacks.” When Rashid Khalidi, Columbia’s Edward Said Professor and an historian, served as president of the American Committee on Jerusalem, the organization claimed that “the majority of Palestinian Arabs are descendants of the ancient Jebusites and Canaanites.”

To spread these novel ideas, the PA has sponsored historical reenactments such as one in Sebastia on the West Bank in 1996, witnessed by Israeli journalist Ehud Ya’ari:

Young people—in flowing robes tailored especially for the event, decorated with Canaanite motifs, on light wooden chariots built according to specifications from drawings found in the Megiddo excavations—made their way through Sabastia’s narrow alleyways to a stone stage in the center of the village. There, they recreated the legend of Ba’al, the supreme Canaanite god, and his struggle with his brother Mut, god of the underworld. In the end, Ba’al emerged victorious with the help of his sister Anat, the goddess of war. The narrator of the text put special emphasis on the warning against the “Habiru” tribes (the Hebrews), who were moving into the land.

In like spirit, Jesus gets variously described as the first Palestinian martyr, a Palestinian messenger, or the great-grandfather of the Palestinian people.

Exclusivity: In this account, Palestinians alone have lived on the land continuously and always made up a majority of the population. PA mufti Muhammad Hussein says they “have been firmly established upon this land [of Palestine] since the Canaanite era.” Responding to an alleged quote by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Jews have historical rights to the Land of Israel dating back to 3000 bce, Abbas representative Abdullah al-Ifranji (note his name) retorted that “the people of Palestine have a history in the land of Canaan going back to 7000 bce.” PA textbooks repeat this claim, with a seventh-grade Arabic-language book stating, for example, that “Since the dawn of history the soil of Palestine has raised its Arab identity high through the giants of Canaan.” PA supreme Shariah judge Mahmoud al-Habash, focuses on continuity in Jerusalem:

Our forefathers and historical lineage, the Jebusite Canaanites, built Jebus, Jerusalem, the City of Peace – the Canaanites called it the City of Peace – 5,000 years ago. Our presence in Jerusalem has not ceased for 5,000 years. Nations and occupations have passed through, and colonialism, whether brief or long. It came and left, but the people of Jerusalem stayed. These transients will move on, while the people of Jerusalem will stay. They have no place in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is ours, not theirs.

No Jews: Of course, all this implies an absence of Jews. Bakr Abu Bakr, a member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, calls the historic “Children of Israel” an “Arab tribe that became extinct.” As for present-day Israelis, Abbas portrays them as descendants of Khazar Turks with no historic connection to Palestine, but as European colonialists pretending to trace their lineage to the ancient Israelites to justify stealing Palestinian land. Jews twice stole Palestine, in ancient and modern times. They are the eternal, foreign aggressive interlopers who must be expelled. Remarkably, this drivel resounds from the halls of academe to the United Nations.

To summarize: ancestors of today’s Palestinians arrived in the land of today’s Israel long before the Jews, who anyway are extinct, and they have lived there continuously.

Arab and Muslim Disagreement: Before taking leave of this Palestinian nationalist account, three challenges to it bear noting. First, Arabs claim descent from Ishmael whom both the Bible and Koran record as the son of the Iraqi Abraham and the Egyptian Hagar; i.e., he was no Canaanite. Second, the 1968 PLO Charter identifies Palestinians as Arabs 32 times; the 1988 Hamas Covenant does so 26 times – Arab, not Canaanite. Third, Islamists deride talk of Canaanites. Issam Amira, a prominent Palestinian Islamist associated with the Hizb ut-Tahrir movement, ridicules the Canaanite story:

Amira says that when Arafat made his Canaanite claims, he “cursed his own people.” Rather, “The only thing you are allowed to say is: Oh Palestinians, you are Muslims.”[3]

Historians and archaeologists widely dismiss the Palestinian narrative. They find, Cline generalizes, that “most, if not all, modern Palestinians are probably more closely related to the Arabs of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, and other countries than they are to the ancient Jebusites.” Israeli journalist Pinhas Inbari adds that “not a single Palestinian tribe identifies its roots in Canaan; instead, they all see themselves as proud Arabs descended from the most notable Arab tribes of the Hejaz, [or] today’s Iraq, or Yemen.”

That the ancestors of so many contemporary “Palestinians” immigrated from elsewhere undermines the narrative of an indigenous and cohesive ethnicity antedating Jews in the Land of Israel. It also substantially reduces the number of legitimate Palestine refugees.

Thus have Arafat, Abbas, et al. managed to hide the bothersome fact that most of today’s self-described Palestinians descend from recent immigrants. This propaganda triumph also buries a startling imitation: Palestinians, like Israelis, represent the in-gathering of a far-flung religious community in the Holy Land. Two populations in parallel immigrated to one small territory, one defeated the other, and the vanquished refuses to give up.

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[1] Macalister writes that they “form the majority of the inhabitants of the villages north-west of Galilee, are probably long-settled immigrants from Persia.”

[2] Roughly analogous to gypsy.

[3] DNA research as yet has little to say about the Canaanite/Jebusite claim. One study led by Lily Agranat-Tamir found a majority of genes among both Jews and Levantine Arabs, including Palestinians, share a link to the ancient Canaanites. Another, headed by Michal Feldman, found that the Philistines came from southern Europe, including the present-day Spain, Sardinia, and Greece. The Feldman study prompted Netanyahu to conclude that “There’s no connection between the ancient Philistines & the modern Palestinians, whose ancestors came from the Arabian Peninsula to the Land of Israel thousands of years later. The Palestinians’ connection to the Land of Israel is nothing compared to the 4,000-year connection that the Jewish people have with the land.”

* A reader points out that context makes clear that “the river of Egypt” here cannot be the Nile but most likely a minor waterway around Gaza such as Wadi el-Arish or Nahal Basor.