Argument · heard from pro-Israel voices
“Most Palestinians are descendants of recent Arab immigrants who came for the jobs Zionism created; the real locals were only a few villagers and tribes.”
Before Zionism the land was nearly empty, with a small population of peasants and tribes. Most of today's Palestinians descend from economic migrants of the late Ottoman and Mandate years, and their surnames still show where they came from, so their claim to be the land's people is weaker than it looks.
Reported as a pro-Israel argument by Yehoshua Porath
Where it's been said
“From a position of apparently great learning and research, she attempts to refute the Arab myths merely by substituting the Jewish myths for them.”
Traps in play:◆ "They all…"◆ Judging by origin
Why people find it convincing
- Some Arab migration into Palestine did happen: Egyptians settled during Ibrahim Pasha's rule in the 1830s, labourers came from the Hauran, and the Mandate economy drew workers from neighbouring lands.
- Some common surnames record an origin elsewhere: al-Masri (Egyptian), al-Mughrabi (Maghrebi), Hourani, al-Halabi (Aleppan).
- Arab population growth was fastest in the districts where the Jewish-driven economy grew, around Jaffa and Haifa, which suggests newcomers.
- Nineteenth-century travellers described a sparsely populated, neglected land, and Palestinian national identity as a political movement consolidated only in the 20th century.
What's true
Some migration, some telling surnames, and faster growth where the Jewish economy grew.
Migration from Egypt, the Hauran and elsewhere is documented, and some surnames preserve it. Economist Fred Gottheil attributes roughly a third of Arab population growth in 1922–31 in the districts with large Jewish populations to immigration. The scholarly consensus Porath himself cites is that during the Mandate the country absorbed on the order of 100,000 legal and illegal Arab immigrants and their offspring.
advocacy / viewFred Gottheil, 'Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel: 1922–1931'
Published in Middle East Quarterly (pro-Israel-leaning); census-based estimate ~55–64k for 1922–31.
historyYehoshua Porath, 'Mrs. Peters's Palestine', New York Review of Books (1986) ⚠
Verify title/date; a leading critique.
What's left out
Most Arabs of Palestine were settled farmers and townspeople whose families had been there long before the Mandate.
The majority were fellahin in villages and townspeople in Jaffa, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza and Jerusalem, with tribes in the Negev and elsewhere a minority, out of about 1.2–1.3 million Arabs in 1947. How much Arab immigration there was is genuinely uncertain. Recorded net legal Arab immigration 1922–1945 was about 40,000–42,000 (demographer Roberto Bachi); estimates that include illegal and unrecorded entry range from about 100,000 to 270,000 (Bachi, Ettinger, Gottheil — the upper estimates come mostly from pro-Israel-leaning authors). Economist Fred Gottheil attributes roughly a third of Arab population growth in 1922–31 in the districts with large Jewish populations to immigration. Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial (1984) pushed a far larger thesis and was heavily criticised, including by the Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath; the data themselves are poor (incomplete Ottoman registers, unrecorded border crossings). So: some real Arab immigration, concentrated where the Jewish-driven economy grew — but on any estimate most of the Arab population of 1947 descended from people already there before the Mandate. The Palestinian national leadership came from old Jerusalem families (Husseini, Nashashibi, Khalidi, Nusseibeh), and surnames can record origins centuries old — Jerusalem's Mughrabi quarter dates to the 12th century.
Traps here:◆ "They all…"◆ Judging by origin
advocacy / viewJoan Peters, From Time Immemorial (1984)
Origin of the mass-immigration thesis.
historyYehoshua Porath, 'Mrs. Peters's Palestine', New York Review of Books (1986) ⚠
Verify title/date; a leading critique.
dataJustin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (1990)
Give ranges, name the estimate used.
dataRoberto Bachi, The Population of Israel (1977) ⚠
Mandate-era migration estimates; verify page for 40–42k legal net Arab migration.
advocacy / viewFred Gottheil, 'Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel: 1922–1931'
Published in Middle East Quarterly (pro-Israel-leaning); census-based estimate ~55–64k for 1922–31.
Where it leads if pressed
Descent-based legitimacy, the mirror image of the 'real descendants' argument.
It asks who arrived when, instead of what rights people who have lived somewhere for generations should have. If we reject 'modern Jews aren't really from there', we must reject 'Palestinians aren't really from there' by the same rule. Old families produced both extremes — the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini and the moderate Nashashibis — so descent doesn't even predict politics.
The usual reply — and its own traps
Arguments travel in pairs. Here is what the other side typically answers. Check whether both lean on the same trick.
heard from pro-Palestinian voices“Only a small share of ancient Jews ever left; Palestinians are the real descendants of the ancient inhabitants, and today's Jews are mostly Europeans.”Where this argument points
Followed through, this argument is used to support: