The British eventually tried to compensate for their vagueness in 1947 by offering an estimate of 37,000 Arab immigrants to Palestine over the whole of the prior thirty years. Others counted much larger numbers. The Jewish Agency estimated that 20,000 Syrians from the Hauran district (or Houran, just east of the Golan Heights) entered Palestine dur

Of course, not all Muslim migrants came to work for Zionists; some came to assault them, including two famous leaders: Fawzi al-Qawuqji from Lebanon and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam from Syria; the latter’s legacy remains alive, commemorated by Hamas as the name of its militia Provenance of immigrants: The authoritative Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911,

Imperial British control in the years 1917-48 saw Palestine become an administrative unit, the quasi-colony called the Mandate for Palestine, defined as the familiar dagger- shaped territory still cherished by Palestinian organizations Motives for immigration: As in earlier decades, imperial and Zionist need for labor spurred further non-Jewish imm

Non-Jewish immigration to Palestine took off in the 1840s as a result of two main economic developments. First, the region’s Ottoman rulers encouraged commercial activity by building modern infrastructure such as paved roads, railroads, ports, and telegraphs. Market agriculture began (for example, in wheat and oranges), the government created a p

Famously, Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, called aliyah, is centuries old and took on an organized form in 1882. Described as “the central goal of the State of Israel” (in the words of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon), it provides the demographic basis on which the entire Zionist enterprise rests. Both very public and highly controversial