I find it difficult to believe they were inhabiting all that space when there is desert out there.
Pre-Israel
Palestine was not quite the barren dustbowl of Zionist fantasy - far from it. In December 1945 and January 1946, a comprehensive
Survey of Palestine was conducted and published by British Mandate authorities on behalf of the
United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The survey revealed that the land was rather prosperous for Arab Palestinians and Jewish famers alike. During the 1944-1945 planting season, nearly 210,000 tons of grain were cultivated in Palestine, of which 193,376 tons were Arab crops, compared to 16,579 tons of Jewish crops. Almost 80,000 tons of olives were cultivated that year, over 78,000 tons of which were grown by Arab Palestinians. Of the over 244,800 tons of vegetables produced in Palestine that season, Arab farmers were responsible for more than 189,000 tons; of the 94,700 tons of fruit, Arab orchards produced 73,000 tons. Almost all of the region's citrus groves were Palestinian owned and operated. Nearly 143,000 tons of melons were cultivated, over 135,600 tons of which were Arab-produced, while almost all of the more than 1,680 tons of tobacco grown were on Arab farms, as were 20,000 tons of figs and 3,000 tons of almonds. Eighty percent of the 40-50,000 tons of grapes and 4-5 million liters of wine were produced in Arab vineyards. The survey found that in Jericho, Tiberias, and in the central coastal plain, "about 60 per cent. of the area (nearly 8,000 dunums) planted with bananas is Arab owned."
The overall price of the Palestinian agricultural yield that season was more than £21,800,000. Jewish cultivation was responsible for nearly £4,711,000 compared with Palestinian Arab production of over £17,100,000, accounting for almost 80% of total value. Less than two years later, in November 1947, the United Nations
recommended that the indigenous Arab majority of Palestine (then consisting of about 70% of the population) establish a state of their own on 44% of its historic homeland, while the 30% Jewish
minority (consisting mostly of recent immigrants from Europe) would get 56% of Palestine, despite the fact that the minority owned
less than 8% of the land at the time. When that suggestion was understandably rejected by Palestinian representatives, a unilateral declaration established a Jewish State of Israel in Palestine and, in the ensuing war, Israel snatched an additional 22% of Palestine as its own.
As
another noted wisely (for brief excerpt):
By 1940, Yoseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency Settlement Department, commented, “Between ourselves, it must be clear that there is no room in this country for both peoples ... the only solution is Eretz Israel [Greater Israel], at least the Western Israel [west of the Jordan River], without Arabs, and there is no other way but to transfer them all — not one village, not one tribe should be left.” (cited by Noam Chomsky in his book, Peace in the Middle East). During the 1948 War, three-quarters of a million people were driven from their homes by armed zionist settlers; the newly formed state quickly employed its Absentee Property Law to dispossess thousands of their land, their shops, and their orchards. Of the approximately four hundred Jewish settlements established after 1948, some 350 were on Palestinian refugee property. Two-thirds of cultivated land was originally Palestinian-owned. As Don Peretz noted in the September 1969 issue of the Israeli magazine New Outlook, as a result of the 1948 War:
Whole Arab cities — such as Jaffa, Acre, Lydda, Ramle, Baysan, and Maidal — 338 towns and villages, and large parts of others, containing nearly a quarter of all buildings standing in Israel during 1948, were taken over by new Jewish immigrants. Ten thousand former Arab shops, businesses and stores were left in Jewish hands as well as some 30,000 acres of groves that supplied at least a quarter of the new state’s scarce foreign currency earnings from citrus. Acquisition of this former Palestinian Arab property helped greatly to make the Jewish state economically viable and to speed up the early influx of refugees and immigrants from Europe.
Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan observed afterward, in 1969, “There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab village.” By 1958, a quarter of a million acres of land had been expropriated from Palestinians who had remained in Israel. This same genocidal, culturcidal policy remains in operation today.
Zionist propaganda, on the other hand, has always portrayed Palestine as an uninhabited desert before the arrival of the Jews, a racialist-nationalist mystique typified, for example, by the notorious declaration made by the American-born Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who declared, “It is not as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” In reality the zionist invaders “made the desert bloom” by stealing the villages, orchards, gardens and pastures from their original owners — a desert that had been in bloom for centuries.
For other places:
There are other Jewish scholars on the issue that've often dealt with the issue in-depth. One of them is
Israel Shahak, who was a a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and Israeli professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has done a lot of work addressing the ways that life existed before the formation of the Israeli state - including the myth that the land was not developed well by the Arabs/Jews who lived throughout it for a good bit.
Noam Chomsky and Israel Shahak on Jewish Fundamentalism - Part 1 of 2
Noam Chomsky and Israel Shahak on Jewish Fundamentalism - Part 2 of 2
There are other Jewish settlers who've noted issues as well with the ways people avoid the ways that the land of Israel was cultivated - although it's often avoided due to the narrative that gets passed along of "Palestinian = bad, no hard worker/developer" and "Jew = one who cultivated the land and works hard!". Sad but it happens..and now with the
Israel's Bedouins being under persecution due to their settlements being erased and them herded in, it's a pity to see how much of the situation in the Middle East is ignored.