Some excerpts:
Most Palestinians are Muslim-Arabs who originated in the Arabian Peninsula...Palestine was never an Arab entity with a unique national, geographic, cultural, identity. It was part of a larger entity, and its Arab inhabitants considered themselves as part of the Arab, Moslem, Ottoman or the Greater-Syria entities...Palestinian Arabs have not been in the area west of the Jordan River from time immemorial; no Palestinian state has ever existed, no Palestinian People was ever robbed of its land, and there is no basis for the Palestinian "claim of return.”
Most Palestinian Arabs are descendants of the 1845-1947 Muslim migrants from the Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, as well as from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, Bosnia, the Caucasus, Turkmenistan, Kurdistan, India, Afghanistan and Balochistan.
Arab migrant workers were imported by the Ottoman Empire and by the British Mandate (which defeated the Ottomans in 1917) to work on infrastructure projects (ports, railroads, military installations, roads, quarries, reclamation of wetlands, etc.)...Legal and illegal Arab laborers were also attracted by the relative economic boom, stimulated by the annual Jewish immigration beginning in 1882.
...The (1831-1840) conquest, by Egypt's Mohammed Ali, was solidified by a flow of Egyptian and Sudanese migrants settling empty spaces between Gaza and Tul-Karem up to the Hula Valley. They followed in the footsteps of thousands of Egyptian draft dodgers, who fled Egypt before 1831 and settled in Acre...In 1917, the Arabs of Jaffa represented at least 25 nationalities, including Persians, Afghanis, Hindus and Balochis. Hundreds of Egyptian families settled in Ara' Arara', Kafer Qassem, Taiyiba and Qalansawa. In 1908, Yemenite Arab migrants settled in Jaffa, and Arabs from Syria's Huran proliferated in the ports of Haifa and Jaffa.
...Az-ed-Din el-Qassam, the role-model of Hamas terrorism, which terrorized Jews in British Mandate Palestine, was Syrian, as were Said el-A'az, a leader of the 1936-38 anti-Jewish pogroms and Kaukji, the commander-in-chief of the Arab mercenaries terrorizing Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.
Libyan migrants settled in Gedera...Algerian refugees (Mugrabis) escaped the French conquest of 1830 and settled in Safed (alongside Syrians and Jordanian Bedouins), Tiberias and other parts of the Galilee. Circassian refugees, fleeing Russian oppression (1878) and Moslems from Bosnia, Turkmenistan, and Yemen (1908) diversified the Arab demography west of the Jordan River.
...Arieh Avneri (The Claim of Dispossession, 1980), a ground-breaking researcher of Palestinian history, wrote: "...The few Arabs who lived in Palestine a hundred years ago, when Jewish settlement began, were a tiny remnant of a volatile population, which had been in constant flux, as a result of unending conflicts between local tribes and local despots…." In 1554, there were 205,000 Moslems Christian and Jews in Palestine. In 1800, the total population was 275,000. In 1890, there were 532,000 people in Palestine, as a result of accelerated immigration, impacted by Jewish-built trade, employment, health and cultural infrastructures. "The population in Palestine underwent radical changes in the wake of two destructive wars that swept the country – Napoleon's campaign of 1799 and the invasion by the Egyptian army and the subsequent rule of Ibrahim Pasha between 1831 and 1840…. [It] caused many old inhabitants to flee and new elements to settle in the land (pp. 11-13)….”
I think that is the real demographic problem, that people don't know all the above.
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