Arabs began flooding into what has become known in modern times as Palestine in large numbers after Zionists began arriving there.
As diaspora Jews returned to their ancient homeland in the early nineteenth century, Arabs came as well, although their presence in the land remained generally sparse.
This from frontpagemag.com.
In 1830, Muhammad Ali of Egypt conquered Jaffa, Nablus, and Beisan, and settled Egyptian and Sudanese Muslim Arab soldiers there.
Approximately the same time, the French conquest of Algeria led to an exodus of North African moslems who refused to live under infidel rule. They came in large numbers to Palestine. Once there, they followed the pattern of the Turks and other Arab moslems in making life as difficult as they possibly could for the Jews.
An English clergyman, the Reverend W. M. Christie, who lived in Haifa in the early twentieth century, noted:
They constitute the most fanatical section of the Palestine population.
In a glimpse of what was to come, Christie added:
To a great extent without education, they are ready to accept any statement concerning things done to the detriment of Islam, and to act without sense of responsibility….
In 1889, we often heard it remarked that the 10,000 Moslems living in a state of barbarism in the Moghrabiyeh quarter were a real danger to the city. In the recent massacres [of Jews] in Safed, it was this party that carried through the nefarious work.
These North African moslems were not singular. Many, if not most, of the Arabs in Palestine were not the descendants of those who had conquered the land in the seventh century. Most of them had arrived from elsewhere. In 1930, Christie published a study entitled Arabs and Jews in Palestine.
He noted:
[T]he settlement of sections of Yemenite and Kaisite Arabs in Nazareth and Cana of Galilee, [as well as] representatives of the Moslem rulers settled in the larger towns—Jerusalem, Hebron, Nablus, Jenin, Nazareth, and Acre. These are probably represented today by the Effendi class, who claim, without genealogical proof, however, to be the descendants of the conquerors.
Moslems came from far-off lands. According to Christie:
[When the great twelfth-century jihad warrior Saladin] was hard pressed by the Crusaders, he begged help from Persia, and in response there came 150,000 Persian Moslems, who ultimately received for services rendered lands in Upper Galilee and in the Sidon district.
Further from Christie:
Other Arabic-speaking settlers have come from various places outside of Palestine proper.
He explained that these included Christians, who were brought into the area in the latter half of the nineteenth century from Lebanon and many other places:
[A]nd the only soldering element is their common Arabic speech.
Further:
In Galilee, we meet with Maronites and Druses, both clearly immigrants.
And:
[T]he Shi’ite Muslims of that region had a non-Galilean origin.
Christie concluded:
There remains the ‘Arab’ peasantry, or villagers. Every evidence points to their being Arabs only in the matter of language. They have much less Arabic blood than any of the sections of the people already named…
In 1938, the historian William B. Ziff wrote:
At the turn of the [twentieth] century there were 40,000 Jews in Palestine and about 140,000 others of all complexions. The inhabitants had no other feeling for this pauperized, disease-ridden country than a fervent desire to get away from it. Emigration proceeded steadily. Immigration was virtually non-existent. Not until the Zionists had arrived in numbers did the Arab population begin to augment itself. The introduction of European standards of wage and life acted like a magnet on the entire Near East. Abruptly Palestine became an Arab center of attraction. By 1922, after a quarter century of Jewish colonization, their numbers mushroomed to 488,000. Today they are over a million….
It is precisely in the vicinity of these Jewish villages that Arab development is most marked. Arab Haifa, profiting by the Zionist boom, grew from 1922 to 1936 by 130%, Jaffa by 80%, and Jerusalem by 55%. The Arab rural settlement in the Tel Aviv district increased by over 135%. The all-Arab city of Nablus, which held 33,000 before the war, has fallen to less than 12,000. Safed which had 20,000, dropped to less than 9,000.
Winston Churchill observed drily in 1939, when Arab moslems were ever more frequently presenting the British with claims of having been victimized by the Jews:
[F]ar from being persecuted,
the Arabs have crowded into the country.
Eli E. Hertz, president of the organization Myths and Facts, which is devoted to setting forth the facts and dispelling myths about Israel, likewise noted the Palestinian people are nonindigenous:
Family names of many Palestinians attest to their non-Palestinian origins. Just as Jews bear names like Berliner, Warsaw and Toledano, modern phone books in the Territories are filled with families named Elmisri (Egyptian), Chalabi (Syrian), Mugrabi (North Africa). Even George Habash—the arch-terrorist and head of Black September—bears a name with origins in Abyssinia or Ethiopia, Habash in both Arabic and Hebrew.
Most of the indigenous people of Palestine, like Los Angelenos, seem to have come from somewhere else.
