Joan Peter’s research has exposed the truth about Arab claims
Many individual authors have challenged the “Palestinian” narrative. Among these, one of the most ambitious was Joan Peters, who in 1984 published her thoroughly researched study of Arab immigration into Palestine, From Time Immemorial (FTI). Peters assembled many accounts of 19th century travelers’ journeys through the Holy Land that paint the picture of a forsaken and almost uninhabited land.Mark Twain’s comments in 1867 are probably the best known: “….. A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse…. a desolation…. we never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere.”Peters documents how the current land of Israel with its millions of Arabs and Jews gradually emerged from its desolate 19th century beginnings. She analyzes the respective populations of Muslims, Christians and Jews based on data available from existing sources including Ottoman census figures, government documents, old publications, scientific research, etc.Peters’ work was received with accolades and praise in most quarters and with predictable outrage by the supporters of the “Palestinian” narrative The vehemence with which Peters was attacked was very telling. She had undermined the basis for the delegitimization of Israel. She had shown that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are not indigenous to Palestine but rather descendants of the Arab economic migrants who arrived in the late 19th and 20th centuries.Peter’s thorough analysis consists of 410 pages of text and 190 pages of documentary appendices. The general public could hardly be expected to wade through the 600-page tome full of data tables and quotes from hundreds of sources. Thus the book was unable to reverse the continuing fiction of the indigenous “Palestinian” people whose lands have been stolen by the Jews.A simple new way to prove Peters’ key conclusion
In the midst of various arguments, what has been overlooked is a simple and incontrovertible way to prove that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are the descendants of the relatively recent Arab immigrants.Peters calculated that in 1882, just the non-nomadic, settled Muslims in Palestine numbered 141,000. Among them, those that resided in Palestine before the 1831 Egyptian invasion numbered 75 percent, or 105,700 (FTI page 197). By 2015, descendants of these 105,700 persons can trace their linage in Palestine for almost 200 years. Therefore, one might consider them to be the indigenous residents. The date 1831 is important, because this was the beginning of the war with Arab Egypt, during which many thousands of Arabs settled in Palestine and changed its demographics.The number of 105,700 thousand settled Muslims is in general agreement with other important data. Walter Lowdermilk gives the total number of 200,000 people residing in Palestine in 1850 (page 76 – Palestine Land of Promise 1944). Lowdermilk's number includes Jews, Christians, travelling nomadic Bedouins and settled Muslims. It also includes Arabs that immigrated after the war of 1831. Arthur Ruppin estimates the total population in year 1882 as 300,000 Palestinian inhabitants, including nomadic and settled Muslims, Christians and Jews (The Jews in the Modern World, MacMillan - 1934 page 368).If these 105,700 indigenous Muslims were to increase in numbers only through natural population growth, how many would they number today in 2015? This would represent the size of this population as if there were no Muslim immigration at all.We can calculate the estimated 2015 native population, based on natural rates of population growth. I assume that the post-1882 Muslim population in Palestine -- apart from immigration — grew at approximately the same rate as the populations of neighboring Syria, Egypt and Lebanon for which rates we have reliable data. That rate of growth was 1.1% per annum. (FTI page 529 table in note 78) **I used the compounded interest formula to do the math. Applying the 1.1% growth rate to the Muslim population resident in Palestine in 1882 yields a total number of 453,000 Muslim descendants in 2015 of these original 105,700 native people.According to the 2015 World Almanac, the current “Palestinian” population, including Israeli Arabs, and Arab residents of Gaza, Golan, Judea and Samaria totals 10,523,715 people. 453,000 descendants of indigenous Muslim residents constitute only 4.3% of the current “Palestinian” population. Therefore the other 95.7% of present-day “Palestinians” are clearly those Arabs and their descendants who migrated to Israel between 1831 and 2015.