Well before their partial expulsion from the Holy Land by the Romans in 70 C.E., Jews lived in Hebron, Jerusalem, Tiberias and Safed. So did Bedouin tribes, some in villages. Many Arabs settled the Land of Israel after various incursions, including the taking of Jerusalem by Muhammad’s successors in 636, and during the sporadic rule of Muslim powers from the Fatimids to the Ottomans. For centuries, tax farmers and later urban notables and sheikhs controlled most of the scarce cultivable land in the coastal plain and valleys. The majority-Arab population engaged in subsistence agriculture and lived mostly in the central mountain range, stretching from the Galilee in the north southward through what is present-day Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron.
After modern Israel’s establishment, 160,000 Arabs remained as citizens, while six times that number fled. Arabs constituted some 22% of the Israeli population then and remain about the same percentage today. Arabs of Palestine or Arabs of Israel or Palestinian Arabs living in Israel with citizenship today hold positions in the parliament, the Supreme Court and all walks of life.
By Yehoshua Porath, 1973 Historian Yehoshua Porath wrote “Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement” as a chapter for the book Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, Menachem Milson…
Primary sources, reputable scholarship and archival materials collectively show major communal (Arab-Jewish) socio-economic separation, factors that foreshadowed geo-spatial partition.
Mufti opposes Arab majority state in ten years contrary to wishes of a dozen key other Palestinian leaders. Mufti wants no Jewish political presence in Palestine whatsoever.
In this 46-minute video recorded Dec. 25, 2022, two emeritus professors from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem joined President Ken Stein to discuss the key period when the Zionists succeeded in creating and securing a…
Irrefutable evidence shows Palestinian Arab collaboration with Zionists during the British Mandate greatly assisted Jewish state building. Cohen further asserts a general absence among Palestinians of a sense of national feeling, with loyalties instead tied to families, villages and other localities. Quite certainly without Palestinian Arab collaboration, Zionists would not have succeeded in building a nucleus for the Jewish state. Arabic newspapers in Palestine and British scrutiny show the constancy of the Arab population’s engagement with the Zionists, and this included Arabs resident inside Palestine.
The area of Israel expanded and the potential area for a Palestinian Arab state decreased because of the 1948-49 war, Israel’s War of Independence. The Arab rejection of the 1947 U.N. partition plan thus hurt…
Steady disintegration of Palestinian Arab society from 1945-1949 is detailed by five Arab and non-Arab historians citing local social cleavages, economic impoverishment, fear, indebtedness, and political dysfunction.
For more than a century, Arab and Muslim leaders have expressed hatred for Jews, Zionism and Israel, although some have pointed internally for the failures of the Palestinian Arab national movement.
