- “[The Holy Land was] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds – a silent mournful expanse…A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action…We never saw a human being on the whole route…There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country”- Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869).
- The area was underpopulated and remained economically stagnant until the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880′s, who came to rebuild the Jewish land. The country had remained “The Holy Land” in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Jewish development of the country also attracted large numbers of other immigrants – both Jewish and Arab.
- “The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts…Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen…The plows used were of wood…The yields were very poor…The sanitary conditions in the village [Yabna] were horrible…Schools did not exist…The rate of infant mortality was very high…The western part, toward the sea, was almost a desert…The villages in this area were few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants.”- The report of the British Royal Commission, 1913
- “We found it inhabited by fellahin who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent malaria…Large areas…were uncultivated….The fellahin, if not themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these and other criminals. The individual plots…changed hands annually. There was little public security, and the fellahin’s lot was an alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin.”- Lewis French, the British Director of Development
- “There are many proofs, such as ancient ruins, broken aqueducts, and remains of old roads, which show that it has not always been so desolate as it seems now. In the portion of the plain between Mount Carmel and Jaffa one sees but rarely a village or other sights of human life.”There are some rude mills here which are turned by the stream. A ride of half an hour more brought us to the ruins of the ancient city of C?sarea, once a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, and the Roman capital of Palestine, but now entirely deserted.“As the sun was setting we gazed upon the desolate harbor, once filled with ships, and looked over the sea in vain for a single sail. In this once crowded mart, filled with the din of traffic, there was the silence of the desert. After our dinner we gathered in our tent as usual to talk over the incidents of the day, or the history of the locality.
“Yet it was sad, as I laid upon my couch at night, to listen to the moaning of the waves and to think of the desolation around us.”
– by B. W. Johnson, in Young Folks in Bible Lands: Chapter IV, 1892
- “Then we entered the hill district, and our path lay through the clattering bed of an ancient stream, whose brawling waters have rolled away into the past, along with the fierce and turbulent race who once inhabited these savage hills. There may have been cultivation here two thousand years ago.”The mountains, or huge stony mounds environing this rough path, have level ridges all the way up to their summits; on these parallel ledges there is still some verdure and soil: when water flowed here, and the country was thronged with that extraordinary population, which, according to the Sacred Histories, was crowded into the region, these mountain steps may have been gardens and vineyards, such as we see now thriving along the hills of the Rhine.“Now the district is quite deserted, and you ride among what seem to be so many petrified waterfalls. We saw no animals moving among the stony brakes; scarcely even a dozen little birds in the whole course of the ride.”
– by William Thackeray in From Jaffa To Jerusalem, 1844
- So when the Arabs speak of an historical “Palestinian people,” this is a lie and they know it! The Land of Israel was virtually uninhabited when the Jews began their return [“Zionist Movement”] in the late 1800′s. The vast majority of Arabs came to Israel after these Zionist pioneers began to rebuild the land and thereby creating the economic opportunities and medical availabilities which attracted Arabs from both surrounding territories and far-away Arab lands!Terrorism, slaughter, rape and carnage by the Arabs against the Jews began as soon as the Jews began to resettle the barren land and largely uninhabited lands, continued through the British Mandatory period after World War I, continued again after the Jews declared a Jewish Palestinian home [Israel] in 1948 and is still continuing today.
- The Palestinian claim that the Land for centuries sustained a thriving Palestinian culture is not authorized by the facts of history. Yet the world community has given this claim a receptive hearing. PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat in his speech before the UN in 1974 declared, “The Jewish invasion began in 1881…Palestine was then a verdant area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture.”What happens when this claim is compared with the personal observations of the following recognized authorities? In 1738 Thomas Shaw observed a land of “barrenness…from want of inhabitants.” In 1785 Constantine Francois de Volney recorded the population of the three main cities. Jerusalem had a population of 12,000 to 14,000. Bethlehem had about 600 able-bodied men. Hebron had 800 to 900 men. In 1835 Alphonse de Lamartine wrote, “Outside the city of Jerusalem, we saw no living object, heard no living sound…a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, in the highways, in the country…The tomb of a whole people.”In 1857, the British consul in Palestine, James Finn, reported, “The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.”
The most popular quote on the desolation of the Land is from Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1867), “Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies…Palestine is desolate and unlovely…It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land.”
…The records of history simply do not confirm today’s Palestinian claim of Palestinian roots and culture in a “verdant area” since the Arab rule of the land (A.D. 640-1099).
– Bible Students Congregation of New Brunswick
