Palestine inhabited by a mixed population

The "chauvinist Arab version of history," then--so important to the current claim of "Palestinian" rights to "Arab Palestine," which Arab Palestinians purportedly inhabited for "thousands of years" --omits several relevant, situation-altering facts
History did not begin with the Arab conquest in the seventh century. The people whose nation was destroyed by the Romans were the Jews. There were no Arab Palestinians then -- not until seven hundred years later would an Arab rule prevail, and then briefly. And not by people known as "Palestinians." The short Arab rule would be reigning over Christians and Jews, who had been there to languish under various other foreign conquerors, -- Roman, Byzantine, Persian, to name just three in the centuries between the Roman and Arab conquests. The peoples who conquered under the banner of the invading Arabians from the desert were often hired mercenaries who remained on the land as soldiers -- not Arabians, but others who were enticed by the promise of the booty of conquest.
From the time the Arabians, along with their non-Arabian recruits, entered Palestine and Syria, they found and themselves added to what was "ethnologically a chaos of all the possible human combinations to which, when Palestine became a land of pilgrimage, a new admixture was added."¹  Among the peoples who have been counted as "indigenous Palestinian Arabs" are Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Germans, Afghans, Circassians, Bosnians, Sudanese, Samaritans, Algerians, Motawila, and Tartars.

John of Wurzburg lists for the middle era of the kingdom, Latins, Germans, Hungarians, Scots, Navarese, Bretons, English, Franks, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Georgians, Armenians, Syrians, Persian Nestorians, Indians,Egyptians, Copts, Maronites and natives from the Nile Delta. The list might be much extended, for it was the period of the great self-willed city-states in Europe, and Amalfi, Pisans, Genoese, Venetians, and Marseillais, who had quarters in all  the bigger cities, owned villages, and had trading rights, would, in all probability, have submitted to any of the above designations, only under pressure. Besides all these, Norsemen, Danes, Frisians, Tartars, Jews, Arabs, Russians, Nubians, and Samaritans, can be safely added to the greatest human agglomeration drawn together in one small area of the globe."²

Greeks fled the Muslim rule in Greece, and landed in Palestine. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Greeks lived everywhere in the Holy Land--constituting about twenty percent of the population-and their authority dominated the villages.³

Between 1750 and 1766 Jaffa had been rebuilt, and had some five hundred houses. Turks, Arabs, Greeks and Armenians and a solitary Latin monk lived there, to attend to the wants of the thousands of pilgrims who had to be temporarily housed in the port before proceeding to Jerusalem.⁴

"In some cases villages [in Palestine] are populated wholly by settlers from other portions of the Turkish Empire within the nineteenth century. There are villages of Bosnians, Druzes, Circassians and Egyptians," one historian has reported. ⁵
Another source, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911 edition (before the "more chauvinist Arab history" began to prevail with the encouragement of the British), finds the "population" of Palestine composed of so "widely differing" a group of "inhabitants" -- whose "ethnological affinities" create "early in the 20th century a list of no less than fifty languages" (see below)  -- that "it is therefore no easy task to write concisely ... on the ethnology of Palestine." In addition to the "Assyrian, Persian and Roman" elements of ancient times, "the short-lived Egyptian government introduced into the population an element from that country which still persists in the villages."

. . . There are very large contingents from the Mediterranean countries, especially Armenia, Greece and Italy . . . Turkoman settlements ... a number of Persians and a fairly large Afghan colony . . . Motawila ... long settled immigrants from Persia ... tribes of Kurds ... German "Templar" colonies ... a Bosnian colony ... and the Circassian settlements placed in certain centres ... by the Turkish government in order to keep a restraint on the Bedouin ... a large Algerian element in the population ... still maintain(s) [while] the Sudanese have been reduced in numbers since the beginning of the 20th century.

In the late eighteenth century, 3,000 Albanians recruited by Russians were settled in Acre. The Encyclopaedia Britannicafinds "most interesting all the non-Arab communities in the country . . . the Samaritan sect in Nablus (Shechem); a gradually disappearing body" once "settled by the Assyrians to occupy the land left waste by the captivity of the Kingdom of Israel."⁶
The disparate peoples recently assumed and purported to be "settled Arab indigenes, for a thousand years" were in fact a "heterogeneous" community ⁷ With no "Palestinian" identity, and according to an official British historical analysis in 1920, no Arab identity either: "The people west of the Jordan are not Arabs, but only Arabic-speaking. The bulk of the population are fellahin.... In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race." ⁸

Birthplaces of Inhabitants of Jerusalem. District circa 1931

Moslems	Chnstians	Others
Palestine Syria Transiordan Cyprus EgyptHejaz-Nejd Iraq Yemen Other Arabian   Territories Persia Turkey Central Asiatic   Territories Indian Continent Far Eastern Asia Algeria Morocco Tripoli Tunis Other African   Territories Albania France Greece Spain United Kingdom U.S.S.R. U.S.A. Central & South   America Australia	Palestine Syria Transiordan Cyprus MaltaOther Mediterranean   Islands Abyssinia Egypt Hejaz-Neid Iraq Other Arabian   Territories Persia Turkey Central Asiatic Territories Indian Continent Far Eastern Asia Algeria Morocco Tripoli Tunis Other African   Territories Albania Austria Belgium Bulgaria Czechoslovakia Denmark France Germany Gibraltar Greece Holland Italy Latvia Lithuania Norway Poland Portugal Rumania Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom U.S.S.R. Yugoslavia Canada U.S.A. Central & South   America Australia	Palestine Syria Egypt Persia CzechoslovakiaPoland Rumania Switzeriand United Kingdom U.S.S.R.

Languages In Habitual Use In Palestine circa 1931

Moslems	Chnstians	Others
Afghan Albanian Arabic Bosnian Chinese Circassian English French German Greek Gypsy Hebrew Hindustani Indian dialects Javanese Kurdish Persian Portuguese Russian Spanish Sudanese Takrurian Turkish	Abyssinian Arabic Armenian Basque Brazilian [sic] Bulgarian Catalan Chaldean Chinese Circassian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish Flemish French German Greek Hebrew Hindustani Indian dialects Irish Italian Kurdish Latin Magyar Malayalam Maltese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Rumanian Russian Serbian Slavic Spanish Sudanese Swedish Swiss Syrian Turkish Welsh	Arabic Czech English French German Hebrew Persian Polish Russian Spanish Yiddish

Source: Census of Palestine --1931, volume 1, Palesfine; Part 1, Report by E. Mills, B.A., O.B.E., Assistant Chief Secretary Superintendent of Census (Alexandria, 1933), p. 147.
1. Richard Hartmann, Palestina unter den Araben, 632-1516 (Leipzig, 1915), cited by de Haas, History, p. 147.
2. De Haas, History, p. 258. John of Wurzburg list from Reinhold Rohricht edition, pp. 41, 69.
3. F. Eugene Roger, La Terre Sainte (Paris, 1637), p. 331, cited by de Haas, History, p. 342.
4. Frederich Hasselquist, Reise nach Palastina, etc., 1749-52 (Rostock, 1762), p. 598, cited by de Haas, History, p. 355.
5. Parkes, Whose Land?, p. 212. See Chapters 13 and 14. 
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. XX, p. 604.
7. Ibid.
8 .In a handbook, prepared under the direction of the historical section of the Foreign Office, no. 60, entitled "Syria and Palestine" (London, 1920), p. 56.