Who really owns "Palestine" : AZ IMC

Who really owns Palestine?

Folks, daily we hear assertions that Israel is occupying Palestinian land.

This is, of course, propaganda of the first order, since there is no such thing as Palestinian land, and to use that phrase is to promote a blatantly political — anti-Israel — agenda.

The excellent article below, by Lawrence Auster, lays bare the historical facts of the matter: Israel has never taken land from the Palestinians, and the Palestinians have no legal claim to Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) or Gaza.

We urge you, whenever you see unquestioning reports of ”Palestinian land“, to write your editor with clarification. This article will supply you with all the facts you need.
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There is a myth hanging over all discussion of the Palestinian problem: the myth that this land was "Arab" land taken from its native inhabitants by invading Jews. Whatever may be the correct solution to the problems of the Middle East, let's get a few things straight:

* As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn't take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don't want it back.
* If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don't want it back.
* If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine over in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of the yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mamluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mamluks don't even exist any more, so they can't want it back.

So, going back 800 years, there's no particularly clear chain of title that makes Israel's title to the land inferior to that of any of the previous owners. Who were, continuing backward:

* The Mamluks, already mentioned, who in 1250 took Palestine over from:
* The Ayyubi dynasty, the descendants of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader who in 1187 took Jerusalem and most of Palestine from:
* The European Christian Crusaders, who in 1099 conquered Palestine from:
* The Seljuk Turks, who ruled Palestine in the name of:
* The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, which in 750 took over the sovereignty of the entire Near East from:
* The Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which in 661 inherited control of the Islamic lands from:
* The Arabs of Arabia, who in the first flush of Islamic expansion conquered Palestine in 638 from:
* The Byzantines, who (nice people—perhaps it should go to them?) didn't conquer the Levant, but, upon the division of the Roman Empire in 395, inherited Palestine from:
* The Romans, who in 63 B.C. took it over from:
* The last Jewish kingdom, which during the Maccabean rebellion from 168 to 140 B.C. won control of the land from:
* The Hellenistic Greeks, who under Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. conquered the Near East from:
* The Persian empire, which under Cyrus the Great in 639 B.C. freed Jerusalem and Judah from:
* The Babylonian empire, which under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. took Jerusalem and Judah from:
* The Jews, meaning the people of the Kingdom of Judah, who, in their earlier incarnation as the Israelites, seized the land in the 12th and 13th centuries B.C. from:
* The Canaanites, who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before they were dispossessed by the Israelites.

As the foregoing suggests, any Arab claim to sovereignty based on inherited historical control will not stand up. Arabs are not native to Palestine, but are native to Arabia, which is called Arab-ia for the breathtakingly simple reason that it is the historic home of the Arabs. The territories comprising all other "Arab" states outside the Arabian peninsula—including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authority—were originally non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century, defeating, mass-murdering, enslaving, dispossessing, converting, or reducing to the lowly status of dhimmitude millions of Christians and Jews and destroying their ancient and flourishing civilizations. Prior to being Christian, of course, these lands had even more ancient histories. Pharaonic Egypt, for example, was not an Arab country through its 3,000 year history. The recent assertion by the Palestinian Arabs that they are descended from the ancient Canaanites whom the ancient Hebrews displaced is absurd in light of the archeological evidence.

There is no record of the Canaanites surviving their destruction in ancient times. History records literally hundreds of ancient peoples that no longer exist. The Arab claim to be descended from Canaanites is an invention that came after the 1964 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the same crew who today deny that there was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Prior to 1964 there was no "Palestinian" people and no "Palestinian" claim to Palestine; the Arab nations who sought to overrun and destroy Israel in 1948 planned to divide up the territory amongst themselves. Let us also remember that prior to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the name "Palestinian" referred to the Jews of Palestine.

The only nations that have perfect continuity between their earliest known human inhabitants and their populations of the present day are Iceland, parts of China, and a few Pacific islands. The Chinese case is complicated by the fact that the great antiquity of Chinese civilization has largely erased the traces of whatever societies preceded it, making it difficult to reconstruct to what extent the expanding proto-Chinese displaced (or absorbed) the prehistoric peoples of that region. History is very sketchy in regard to the genealogies of ancient peoples. The upshot is that "aboriginalism"—the proposition that the closest descendants of the original inhabitants of a territory are the rightful owners—is not tenable in the real world. It is not clear that it would be a desirable idea even if it were tenable. Would human civilization really be better off if there had been no China, no Japan, no Greece, no Rome, no France, no England, no Ireland, no United States?

Back to the Arabs: I have no problem recognizing the legitimacy of the Arabs' tenure in Palestine when they had it, from 638 to 1099, a period of 461 years out of a history lasting 5,000 years. They took Palestine by military conquest, and they lost it by conquest, to the Christian Crusaders in 1099. Of course, military occupation by itself does not determine which party rightly has sovereignty in a given territory. Can it not be said that the Arabs have sovereign rights, if not to all of Israel, then at least to the West Bank, by virtue of their majority residency in that region from the early Middle Ages to the present?

To answer that question, let's look again at the historical record. Prior to 1947, as we've discussed, Palestine was administered by the British under the Palestine Mandate, the ultimate purpose of which, according to the Balfour Declaration, was the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In 1924 the British divided the Palestine Mandate into an Arabs-only territory east of the Jordan, which became the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and a greatly reduced Palestine Mandate territory west of the Jordan, which was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews. Given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were unable to coexist in one state, there had to be two states. At the same time, there were no natural borders separating the two peoples, in the way that, for example, the Brenner Pass has historically marked the division between Latin and Germanic Europe. Since the Jewish population was concentrated near the coast, the Jewish state had to start at the coast and go some distance inland. Exactly where it should have stopped, and where the Arab state should have begun, was a practical question that could have been settled in any number of peaceful ways, almost all of which the Jews would have accepted.

The Jews' willingness to compromise on territory was demonstrated not only by their acquiescence in the UN's 1947 partition plan, which gave them a state with squiggly, indefensible borders, but even by their earlier acceptance of the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan, which gave them nothing more than a part of the Galilee and a tiny strip along the coast. Yet the Arab nations, refusing to accept any Jewish sovereignty in Palestine even if it was the size of a postage stamp, unanimously rejected the 1937 Peel plan, and nine years later they violently rejected the UN's partition plan as well. When the Arabs resorted to arms in order to wipe out the Jews and destroy the Jewish state, they accepted the verdict of arms. They lost that verdict in 1948, and they lost it again in 1967, when Jordan, which had annexed the West Bank in 1948 (without any objections from Palestinian Arabs that their sovereign nationhood was being violated), attacked Israel from the West Bank during the Six Day War despite Israel's urgent pleas that it stay out of the conflict. Israel in self-defense then captured the West Bank. The Arabs thus have no grounds to complain either about Israel's existence (achieved in '48) or about its expanded sovereignty from the river to the sea (achieved in '67).

The Arabs have roiled the world for decades with their furious protest that their land has been "stolen" from them. One might take seriously such a statement if it came from a pacifist people such as the Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by the Communist Chinese in 1950. The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic; who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964—sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel; and who to this moment continue to seek Israel's destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the creation of the Arab state they demand. The Arab claim to sovereign rights west of the Jordan is only humored today because of a fatal combination of world need for Arab oil, leftist Political Correctness that has cast the Israelis as "oppressors," and, of course, good old Jew-hatred.

Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He offers his traditionalist conservative perspective at View from the Right.

Great overview of mid-east politics and history. Much needed around here.

What is Muslim Land?
by http://smoothstone.blogspot.com/2007/12/what- Thursday, Mar. 20, 2008 at 7:09 AM

What is Muslim land?

The virus calling itself Osama bin Laden emerged from its toilet and vowed to expand the Muslim holy war to Israel in a new audiotape Saturday, threatening "blood for blood, destruction for destruction." The Muslim cripple went on to say "We intend to liberate Palestine, the whole of Palestine from the (Jordan) river to the sea," he said, threatening "blood for blood, destruction for destruction. We will not recognize even one inch for Jews in the land of Palestine as other Muslim leaders have." Same crap, different day.

Let's talk about Muslim land. Who and what are the origins of the hubris of Islam to lay claim to any land it occupies, breaches and terrorizes? What is "Muslim land"? What are its borders? Is the Arabian nation truly one nation? If so, then why are Egyptians called Egyptians and not Arabs? What is the caliphate? The Islamic empires of the Middle Ages were ruled by caliphs. Is there a call to reintroduce the caliphate? Is your land next?

From Robert Spencer, The Goal of the Jihad:

This is from the Turkish branch of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an international political party whose stated goal is reviving the caliphate – or khilafah:

It was a day like this 79 years ago, and more specifically on the 3rd of March 1924 that...the criminal English agent, Mustafa Kemal (so-called Ataturk, the “Father of the Turks”!) announced that the Grand National Assembly had agreed to destroy the Khilafah; and...the establish...a secular, irreligious, Turkish republic....

Since that day the Islamic ummah [nation, community] has lived a life full of calamities; she was broken up into small mini states controlled by the enemies of Islam in every aspect. The Muslims were oppressed and became the object of the kuffar’s [that is, unbelievers’] derision in Kashmir, Philippines, Thailand, Chechnya, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan, Palestine and other lands belonging to the Muslims [...]

So the crime took place and the kuffar tightened their grip over the Islamic lands and tore it up into pieces....In place of a single Khilafah state they established cartoon states and installed rulers as agents to carry out the orders of their kuffar masters. They abolished the Islamic Sharee’ah [religious law] from the sphere of ruling, economy, international relations, domestic transactions and judiciary.[...]

“Without the Khilafah, the Islamic lands will remain torn up and the Islamic peoples will remain divided. Without the Khilafah the kafir, crusader and colonial states will continue to control us, plunder our resources and create divisions amongst us. Without the Khilafah, the Jews will continue to occupy our sacred places and kill and humiliate our brothers in Palestine. Without the Khilafah, the Islamic peoples in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir, Uzbekistan and so on will continue to be killed....Without the Khilafah, those Muslims who do not work seriously for its implementation will be sinful and incur the anger of Allâh, even if they fast, pray, make Hajj [pilgrimage] and pay Zakah [alms]. This is because the work to establish the Khilafah Rashidah is a fard [obligation] on every Muslim, and it should be conducted with the most extreme effort and utmost speed.[...]

Well, just from the above passage, we have learned that Muslims believe that they own Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Kashmir, Philippines, and Thailand. They also lay claim to the entity calling itself "palestine" but we already know that "palestine" was never a nation, just another region stolen by and occupied by Muslims. Robert Spencer adds:

And there is something else also. In Islamic law, jihad warfare may be defensive or offensive. Jihad is ordinarily fard kifaya – an obligation on the Muslim community as a whole, from which some are freed if others take it up. Jihad becomes fard ayn, or obligatory on every individual Muslim to aid in any way he can, if a Muslim land is attacked. That is what jihadists argue today – that the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan makes jihad fard ayn, or obligatory on every individual Muslims.

But still, that is just jihad for the defense of Muslim lands. There is also offensive jihad, in line with Muhammad’s command that Muslims offer non-Muslims conversion to Islam, subjugation as inferiors under Islamic rule, or war. But in Islamic law, only the caliph is authorized to wage offensive jihad.

That’s a primary reason why jihadists want to restore the caliphate. Some would even say that they’ve already done so. In 1996 the Taliban’s Mullah Omar went to the shrine of the Respectable Cloak of Muhammad in Kandahar and stood on the roof of the shrine wrapped in the cloak. His followers proclaimed him Emir al Momineen, or leader of the believers – a title of the caliph. So far, however, only a jihadist group in Algeria has joined the Taliban in accepting Mullah Omar as caliph.

In any case, the desire to restore the caliphate ultimately highlights the expansionist, imperialist, totalitarian, globalist aims of the jihad movement, even as today it presents itself as a defensive action against Western evils. This is, I believe, a crucial point for our understanding the enemy properly, so that we can formulate the proper defensive responses. If we don’t understand what we’re up against correctly, we will not defend ourselves properly against it. And that is, unfortunately, in many ways the fix we’re in today.

Now, by the time of his death in 632 AD, Muhammad had extended his control via raids and battles over most of southern Arabia. Near the end of his life, Muhammad sent letters to the empires of the Middle East demanding their submission to his authority. This dispels any notion that the Muhammad intended Islam's expansion to stop with Arabia. Muhammad fought and crushed the people of the Arabian peninsula. Other Caliphs fought and crushed the people of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe, all in the name of Allah. Arab Muslim armies occupied and terrorized the Holy Land, conquered what is now Iraq and Iran, then swept west across North Africa, into Spain, and finally into France. Forunately, the Muslim offensive was halted at the Battle of Poitiers/Tours, not far from Paris, in 732 AD. But, in the east, the jihad penetrated deep into Central Asia.

In another excellently researched article, Robert Spencer writes "Almost overnight, the more advanced civilizations of the Middle East, North Africa, Persia, and Iberia saw their agriculture, native religions, and populations destroyed or plundered... jihad engulfed much of the Byzantine, Visigothic, Frankish, and Persian Empires and left the newborn Islamic Empire controlling territory from Southern France, south through Spain, east across North Africa to India, and north to Russia. Early in the second millennium AD, the Mongol invasion from the east greatly weakened the Islamic Empire and ended Arab predominance therein."

Here is a map depicting historical Arab Muslim occupation, land theft, plundering and barbarity, from 632 to 750AD.

Robert Spencer adds,

"Some twenty-five years before the first Crusading army set out from central Europe for the Holy Land, the Turkish (Ottoman) armies began an assault on the Christian Byzantine Empire, which had ruled what is now Turkey since the Roman Empire’s capital was moved to Constantinople in 325 AD. At the battle of Manzikert, in 1071, the Christian forces suffered a disastrous defeat, which left much of Anatolia (Turkey) open to invasion. This second wave of jihad was temporarily held up by the invading Latin Armies during the Crusades (see Islam 101 FAQs), but, by the beginning of the 14th century, the Turks were threatening Constantinople and Europe itself. In the West, Roman Catholic armies were bit by bit forcing Muslim forces down the Iberian peninsula, until, in 1492, they were definitively expelled (the Reconquista).

One of the most significant engagements between the invading Muslims and the indigenous peoples of the region was the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where the Turks annihilated a multinational army under the Serbian King, St. Lazar, though their progress into Europe was significantly slowed. After numerous attempts dating back to the seventh century, Constantinople, the jewel of Eastern Christendom, finally fell in 1453 to the armies of Sultan Mahomet II. Lest one ascribe the atrocities of the first wave of jihad to the "Arabness" of its perpetrators, the Turks showed they were fully capable of living up to the principles of the Quran and the Sunnah."

Here is a map of the second wave of jihad from 1099 through 1492.We all know the canard perpetrated by Muslims that Muslims are not attacking their enemies, but only counterattacking, so that if non-Muslims would only stop provoking them, all would be well.

Those maps above say otherwise. History says otherwise. That is why when Osama bin Laden talks, he utters orthodox Islam: Muslims must convert non-Muslims by force, if necessary, or otherwise kill them. This is why Islam has been on the attack since its birth in the 7th century AD. Muhammad started fighting to force conversions and his followers continue to fight to this day, hoping to spread Islam throughout the world.

Logical arguments as to why Islam is appealing to so many millions of people are scarce, which is why moderate Islam today is nearly non-existant, and with regards to deception and mendacity, for Muslims, history renews itself each day. This is all the more reason why Osama bin Laden and his vicious followers need to be hunted down, targetted, and destroyed.

So, readers, when Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, hold an anti-American, anti-Israel demonstration and carry signs bearing slogans such as “US Hands Off Muslim Land”, now you'll know what they're talking about.

There is a myth hanging over all discussion of the Palestinian problem: the myth that this land was "Arab" land taken from its native inhabitants by invading Jews. Whatever may be the correct solution to the problems of the Middle East, let's get a few things straight:

* As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn't take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don't want it back.
* If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don't want it back.
* If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine over in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of the yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mamluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mamluks don't even exist any more, so they can't want it back.

Arabs? No, ZIonists are murderous thieves of Palestinian lands. NOT Arab Lands. Palestinians are not Arabs. After the Arab Muslims drove the east Roman Empire out of Palestine (see next "Brittish sovereign" for a hoot!), the Arabs Muslims left. We KNOW this because they THEN drove the East Roman Empire out of Lebanon, and Syria, etc. It took the locals 200 years to adopt Arabic. Guess what. The ONLY Arabs who need to learn how to speek Arabic are babies. DUH! Also there is the genetics of Palestinians (and Lebanese, Syrians, etc ) NOT being Arab. Arabs didn't replace nations anywhere I am aware of. But the Arabic language, the language of the local's new religion, did settle down.

Brittish sovereign? Well then, the Soviet Union didn't occupy eastern Europe. They drove soveriegn Nazi occupiers out.

You do know what soveriegn means, don't you? It means rule. Nothing more.

This "article"/propaganda is going to be a load of fun to trash. But I got some things to do. You just sit their with your buttholes all puckered up

Not knowning that article was going to be such a load of dung, I compleatly forgot what I was going to write when I came here. i was taken back by all the shots dink gave me on a silver platter.

ANYWAY! Who own's palestine. Acording to the Judao-christian (small c) dominated 1947 UN, Palestine this THEIR'S. And that they have some unexplained Satanic authority to draw a line across a map of Palestine and give Zionists their blessings for the Zionists to break out of their beach head kibbutzes that they set up under Brittish guns while the Brittish killed thousand and thousands of palerstinians who tried to libeterate their homeland from Zionist invadors.

War of independance is what ZIonists call their murderous theft of Palestinian lands. because the Britts were no longer there to do the ZIonist's killing of palestinians for them. "Independance" because Zionists had to start staining their own hands with Palestinian blood.

Oh, also the Leage of nations which was even more of a judao-christian (small c) boy's club that the 1947 UN. they also think that palestinian lands were their's to give to England. Ooooooh, England has a MANDATE! Oooooh!

Yep, western powers have a long sordid history in promissing their friends (themselves) other people's homelands. 1884-1885, at the conferance of berlin, western interloapers got busy drawwing lines across the whole continent of Africa. Oh, but not the USA which helped in drawing the lines on the map. We didn't get jack in Africa. What is the point of helping draw lines acroos a map of Africa if you aren't going to be promissing yourself any of it??? But don't worry, Bush's handlers have fixed that. A real man of vision, he is. He even wants Palestinians to have a "vision" of peace, but then presents Zionist occupation of palestinian lands as "peace". Do you suppose Palestinians are stupid enough to confuse Zionist occupation (a state of war) with peace? We all know that you have been, up until now, anyways.

The point was, it was never a Palestinian state. It was just land

We know palestine is land. we also know palestine is the Palestinian's homeland and that Zionists are murderous thieves of the palestinian's homeland.

A "state"? And do you have any idea what that word means???

I am still too busy to trash every single pile of the "article's" propaganda.

I'll Be back.

Ask me if I give a damn.

This is a forgery, one of many. For some idea of how often nessie's name gets forged, Google "nessie indymedia forgery" and see what comes up:

http://tinyurl.com/2wsq6m

So, aren't you the least bit curious?

http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/begging.htm

Begging the Question
(petitio principii)

Definition:

The truth of the conclusion is assumed by the premises. Often, the conclusion is simply restated in the premises in a slightly different form. In more difficult cases, the premise is a consequence of the conclusion.

Examples:

1. Since I'm not lying, it follows that I'm telling the truth.
2. We know that God exists, since the Bible says God exists. What the Bible says must be true, since God wrote it and God never lies. (Here, we must agree that God exists in order to believe that God wrote the Bible.)

Proof:

Show that in order to believe that the premises are true we must already agree that the conclusion is true.

References:

Barker: 159, Cedarblom and Paulsen: 144, Copi and Cohen: 102, Davis: 33

nessie posts xeroxed nonsense about "logic". nessie's also the one who for years posts about "forgery" of pseudonyms in faraway places where nobody knows or cares who he is. The question to be begged is how such a mental cripple can pretend to know of logic and debating skills?

(1.) My name isn't nessie.

(2.) But that has nothing to do with whether I can prove it. I can’t prove it. So what? That, doesn’t mean it’s not true. Personally, I don’t care whether you believe me or not. If you don’t believe me, then you’re not who I’m talking to. I’m talking people smart enough to know that when something that is inconsistent with the bulk of my writing comes signed with my name, it’s a forgery. Anybody who’s not smart enough to grasp that, wouldn’t understand what I was saying, anyway.

(3.) Besides, who it was that wrote something is irrelevant. Only content counts. If it’s true, it doesn’t matter who says it, or why. The truth is the truth, period.

(snip)

Later, when you encounter something with my name on it, posted somewhere else on the internet, consider that it may be a forgery. If it is consistent with what you know I have actually written, then I wrote it. If it is not consistent, then it’s a forgery. If you can’t tell the difference, you’re too stupid to understand what I’m saying, anyway, so don’t waste time trying.

This is a forgery, one of many. For some idea of how often nessie's name gets forged, Google "nessie indymedia forgery" and see what comes up:

http://tinyurl.com/2wsq6m

That's right, boys and girls! Right here, on this *very same thread*, will I post the same xeroxed idiocy about "forgery" on a site hundreds of miles from my cesspit, expecting everyone to just know who I am and kneel and bow.

Am I in a mental hospital, or just need to be? You make the call!

I forgot about this "article"/ shit.

Damn, but I was worn out. What a fuckin week. Along with trashed muscles, 5 hours of sleep a night, and no coffe the last 3 days of it, I got a brews on my leg 7 inches long and 4 inches wide.

Right now, I'm a bit buzzed on icehouse but will, as I hoped to do earlier, be back. I owe it to myself to trash such a stinking vile offensive load of shit.

I remember a time when the IMC's were full of intelligent people, up for a good debate. Not any more.
Now its little more than spambots like Prion Party

Cuz YOU sez so, right?

Before the "Palestinians" arrived as eco nomic migrants in recent times, one historian after another has reported the same findings regarding Palestine.

In the twelve and a half centuries between the Arab conquest in the seventh century and the beginnings of the Jewish return in the 1880's, Palestine was laid waste. Its ancient canal and irrigation systems were destroyed and the wondrous fertility of which the Bible spoke vanished into desert and desolation... Under the Ottoman empire of the Turks, the policy of disfoliation continued; the hillsides were denuded of trees and the valleys robbed of their topsoil.2
In 1590 a "simple English visitor" to Jerusalem wrote, "Nothing there is to bescene but a little of the old walls, which is yet Remayning and all the rest is grasse, mosse and Weedes much like to a piece of Rank or moist Grounde."3
"While Tiberias was being resettled by Jews from Papal states, whose migration was approved by a papal Bull, Nazareth was continuing its decline." A Franciscan pilgrim translated a Latin Manuscript that reported that " 'A house of robbers, murderers, the inhabitants are Saracens.... It is a lamentable thing to see thus such a town. We saw nothing more stony, full of thorns and desert.'"4 A hundred years afterward, Nazareth was, in 1697, "an inconsiderable village.... Acre a few poor cottages ... nothing here but a vast and spacious ruin." Nablus consisted of two streets with many people, and Jericho was a "poor nasty village."5

In the mid-1700s, British archaeologist Thomas Shaw wrote that the land in Palestine was "lacking in people to till its fertile soil."6 An eighteenth-century French author and historian, Count Constantine Frangois Volney, wrote of Palestine as the "ruined" and "desolate" land.

William Thomson, a missionary for 45 years in Syria and Palestine, wrote a comprehensive 592 page book "Southern Palestine and Jerusalem" published in 1882. His meticulous region by region description of unpopulated landscapes includes the following: "How melancholy is this utter desolation! Not a house, not a trace of inhabitants, not even shepherds, to relieve the dull monotony. Was it thus when Peter came from Joppa to Caesarea?" A visitor traveling the same route today would traverse the cities of Tel Aviv, Herzliya and Netanya with over a million people. Thomson continues, "Much of the country through which we have been rambling for a week appears never to have been inhabited, or even cultivated; and there are other parts, you say, still more barren. How could a land as small as Palestine, and with so much waste territory support the vast population assigned to it in the Bible?"

. US Naval Commander W.F.Lynch subtitles his Narrative of the United States` Expedition to The River Jordan with the words: "Unrelieved Desolation".

If you chose opinions over hundreds of years of Turkish census, then that just showcases your own prejudices.

Alexander Keith, recalling Volney's 1785 description (quoted above) fifty years later, commented: "In his day [Volney's] tthe land had not fully reache its last degree of desolation and depopulation." (The Land of Israel).

Other travelers and pilgrims recorded similar reports of the dreary state of the Land around the middle of the nineteenth century. Here are just a few examples:

Alphonse de Lamartine, in 1835: "...a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways, in the country ... the tomb of a whole people" (Recollections of the East, Vol. I, p. 308).

A contemporary German encyclopedia (Brockhaus, "Allegmeine deutsche Real- Encyklopaidie", Vol. VIII, p. 206, Leipzig, 1827) calls Palestine "desolate and roamed through by Arab robber-bands."

In 1849, the American W. F. Lynch described the desertion of Palestinian villages "caused by the frequent forays of the wandering Bedouin" (Narrative of the United States Expedition to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea, p. 489).

And again H. B. Tristram, in 1865: "... both in the north and south (of the Sharon plain), land is going out of cultivvation, and whole villages ar rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages have been thus erased from the map (by the Bedouin) and the stationary population extirpated" (p. 490).

Mark Twain, 'Innocents Abroad' 1867:

""Desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds - a silent mournful expanse ... We reached Tabor safely ...
We never saw a human being on the whole route" (p. 451, 480);
"There is not a solitary village throughout its (the Jezreel Valley's) whole extent - not for thirty miles in either direction.
There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents but not a single permanent habitation.
One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings" (p. 448);
"Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren ... the valleys are unsightly deserts... It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land... Palestine is desolate and unlovely... Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition - it is dreamland" (pp. 564, 567).

Referring to the same era, the Christian historian James Parkes writes in Whose Land?: "Peasant and Bedouin alike have contributed to the ruin of the countryside on which both depend for a livelihood... In spite of the immense fertility of the soil, it is probable that in the first half of the nineteenth century the population sank to the lowest level it had ever known in historic times."

In 1738, the land was described by the English archeologist Thomas Shaw as "lacking in people to till its fertile soil" (Travels and Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant). The French historian Conte Constantine Francois Volney writes:

"The peasants are incessantly making inroads on each other's lands, destroying their corn, durra, sesame and olive-trees, and carrying off their sheep, goats and camels. The Turks, who are everywhere negligent in repressing similar disorders, are attentive to them here, since their authority is very precarious. The Bedouin, whose camps occupy the level country, are continually at open hostility
Alexander Keith, recalling Volney's 1785 description (quoted above) fifty years later, commented: "In his day [Volney's] tthe land had not fully reache its last degree of desolation and depopulation." (The Land of Israel).

Other travelers and pilgrims recorded similar reports of the dreary state of the Land around the middle of the nineteenth century. Here are just a few examples:

Alphonse de Lamartine, in 1835: "...a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways, in the country ... the tomb of a whole people" (Recollections of the East, Vol. I, p. 308).

A contemporary German encyclopedia (Brockhaus, "Allegmeine deutsche Real- Encyklopaidie", Vol. VIII, p. 206, Leipzig, 1827) calls Palestine "desolate and roamed through by Arab robber-bands."

In 1849, the American W. F. Lynch described the desertion of Palestinian villages "caused by the frequent forays of the wandering Bedouin" (Narrative of the United States Expedition to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea, p. 489).

And again H. B. Tristram, in 1865: "... both in the north and south (of the Sharon plain), land is going out of cultivvation, and whole villages ar rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages have been thus erased from the map (by the Bedouin) and the stationary population extirpated" (p. 490).

Mark Twain, 'Innocents Abroad' 1867:

""Desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds - a silent mournful expanse ... We reached Tabor safely ...
We never saw a human being on the whole route" (p. 451, 480);
"There is not a solitary village throughout its (the Jezreel Valley's) whole extent - not for thirty miles in either direction.
There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents but not a single permanent habitation.
One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings" (p. 448);
"Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren ... the valleys are unsightly deserts... It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land... Palestine is desolate and unlovely... Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition - it is dreamland" (pp. 564, 567).

Referring to the same era, the Christian historian James Parkes writes in Whose Land?: "Peasant and Bedouin alike have contributed to the ruin of the countryside on which both depend for a livelihood... In spite of the immense fertility of the soil, it is probable that in the first half of the nineteenth century the population sank to the lowest level it had ever known in historic times."

In 1738, the land was described by the English archeologist Thomas Shaw as "lacking in people to till its fertile soil" (Travels and Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant). The French historian Conte Constantine Francois Volney writes:

"The peasants are incessantly making inroads on each other's lands, destroying their corn, durra, sesame and olive-trees, and carrying off their sheep, goats and camels. The Turks, who are everywhere negligent in repressing similar disorders, are attentive to them here, since their authority is very precarious. The Bedouin, whose camps occupy the level country, are continually at open hostility

Yep, Zionists and their enablers come up with all sorts of sorces telling you that Palestinian lands are a land without a people for a people witrhout a land. BUT since it is just a tactic to avoid the Turk's actual census which contradict those sorses, ALL these OPINIONS become meaningless.

I feel for Lakota becacause I know that they too had a difficult time getting the heirs of the conquerors off of tribal land. The best claim thaat the "Palestinians" make is that they have the same religion as the conquerors!