Claim

The Land was not empty when Jews created Israel

Fact

I have never heard a Zionist say this, if they did they would be lying.

What is said is the Palestinian narrative is a work of fiction, the majority of Arabs came to what today is Israel between the 1800s and early 1900s due to a need of laborers, this was created by the improvement the early Zionist had done to farmland, bring in irrigation and modern fertilization technics.

I see Drew McCormick is here trying to spread a lie about Mark Twain, what he claims has no truth to it.

Mark Twain never said the area was without a population, he spoke of when he visited Jerusalem beyond the city there were very few people, this was backed up by others who visited and wrote down their personal observations:

Here is what Twain said:

“There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent (valley of Jezreel, Galilea); not for thirty miles in either direction… One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee… Nazareth is forlorn… Jericho lies a moldering ruin… Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation… untenanted by any living creature.”
– Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad”, 1867 –

This is a typical method trying to erase what Twain said, yet at the same time they ignore what others said, or act like they never said it.

There are many proofs, such as ancient ruins, broken aqueducts, and remains of old roads, which show that it has not always been so desolate as it seems now. In the portion of the plain between Mount Carmel and Jaffa, one sees but rarely a village or other sights of human life. There some rude mills here which are turned by the stream. A ride of half an hour more brought us to the ruins …”
– B. W. Johnson, in “Young Folks in Bible Lands”: Chapter IV, 1892 –

In other words, between Mt. Carmel and what today is Tel Aviv, there were no villages.

“The land in Palestine is lacking in people to till its fertile soil”.– British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, mid-1700s –

“Palestine is a ruined and desolate land”
– Count Constantine François Volney, XVIII century French author and historian –

“The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population”.
– James Finn, British Consul in 1857 –

In 1844, William Thackeray writes about the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem: “Now the district is quite deserted, and you ride among what seem to be so many petrified waterfalls. We saw no animals moving among the stony brakes; scarcely even a dozen little birds in the whole course of the ride.”

“In Judea, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or habitation.”
-Penrhyn Stanley, British cartographer, 1881-

Naturally, this is not shown, instead a fiction is created saying Zionist said no one lived in what was once the Mandate of Palestine, in that area when it was under Ottoman rule.

As for the Ottoman census? Scientific? Now that is a laugh. The first census they took was not until the 1800s, there was one taken prior to this was a Jesuit census taken with oversight by the Ottoman authorities. What is of interest, the Ottomans never once contested this census, only now the Arabs, for it is not convenient to their narrative.

“Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata” – a detailed geographical survey of Palestine in 1696 written in Latin by Adriaan Reland published by Willem Broedelet, Utrecht, in 1714.
Residents of the REGION mainly concentrated in cities: Jerusalem, Acre, Safed, Jaffa, Tiberius, and Gaza.
In most cities, the majority of residents are Christians, Jews and others, very few Muslims who generally are Bedouin, who came to serve as Seasonal workers in agriculture or building.

Nablus: 120 Muslims, 70 Samaritans
Nazareth: 700 people – all Christians
Umm al-Fahm: 50 people-10 families, ALL Christian
Gaza: 550 people- 300 Jews,250 Christian(Jews engaged in agriculture Christians deal with the trading and transporting the products)
Tiberius: 300 residents, all Jews.
Safed: about 200 inhabitants, all Jews
Jerusalem: 5000 people, most of them (3,500) Jews, the rest- Christian (1000), Muslim (500)

As you can see, in the late 1600s and early 1700s there were very few people living in the land, so what brought the influx of Arabs? Why not let the British show us:

“The area was underpopulated and remained economically stagnant until the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880’s, who came to rebuild the Jewish land. The country had remained “The Holy Land” in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Jewish development of the country also attracted large numbers of other immigrants – both Jewish and Arab.
– The report of the British Royal Commission, 1913 –

But there was more, you had massive Arab migration to the land as the British had stated in the 1800s, that would explain why no one saw them, wrote about them, and there is no record of them, it would be the fact that they weren’t there.

When the Mandate was put in place the Arabs to prevent the Jews from controlling the land started to pay their citizens, encouraged others with the employment needs in what then was the British Mandate of Palestine to migrate, that is why there was such a mass of migrants in the early 1900s, in fact, if you look at what the British were documenting on this you see the same thing stated by them:

In 1939, British PM, Winston Churchill, stated: “The Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population.“

In 1934, the Governor of the Syrian district of Hauran admitted that within just a few months, more than 30,000 Arabs left Hauran for Palestine. The British governor of the Sinai (1922-1936) reported in the Palestine Royal Commission Report that illegal immigration to Palestine was not only occurring from Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria.

The 1844 Ottoman Census shows a Jewish majority living in Jerusalem, Hebron, S’fat, and Gaza City. To claim that the Jews were not there prior to Israel’s establishment is simply false.

So how then did the split in land happen? Where did the claim to Samaria and Judea or the West Bank come in?

Turns out in the war of independence in 1948 the Jordanian army invaded the land, had forced all Jews out where they were conquered, then moved in hundreds of thousands of Arabs, these later became the Palestinians.

This is why people silence me, will not let me post on their line, they can’t stand it when you show the facts to disprove the lies they are peddling.

Source