Britain's naval and political reaction to the illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine, 1945-1948, Fritz Liebreich, Routledge, 2005, ISBN 0714656372, 9780714656373, Page 30
The Determinants of British Policy... Matters improved with the departure of Lieutenant General Sir Louis Bols on 30 May 1920, the ending of the military adminidstration and the appointment of Sir Samuel as the first British High Commisioner for Palestine. However, under constant pressure from British pro-Arab spokesmen and officials, relations between Britian and the Jewish Zionists deteriorated steadily.
A Very good exaple of virtuallly general anti-Zionist bias of successsive British mandatory adiminstrations would be the virtual continuation of the Ottoman policy of supporting or at least condoning non-Jewish illegal [p. 31] immigration to Palestine. In contrast to the near universal and general condemntation and confrontation with Jewish illegal immigration.
As a buffer against the Bedouin the Ottomans had already brought the first Circassians from the Caucasus to Palestine in 1878. These truculant habitual warriors had been settled by the Turks as irregular garrisons on the desert fringes, allowing them to occupy and cultivate land, and thus hold back the nomad Arabs, who neither paid tax nor tilled the land at any tim. Egyptian immigrants were settled by Ibrahim Pasha in Jaffa, Acre, Nablus and Beisan, Moors and Kurds settled in Safed, while the Arab tribes of the Wulda, Bu Sheille, Lheib and Adwquat, having been defeated in tribal wars and raids, entered Palestine at about the same time as the first Jewish settlers arrived. These Arabs cannot be considered indigenous to the land and neither can the Turks, Kurds, Moors, Algerians, Egyptians and Circassians imported by the Turks as aprotective force. The virtually generally accepted British claim of an overwhelming Arab indigenous population, settled for a thousand years in a crowded Palestine, whe were in danger of being swamped and displaced by the Jews was, therefore, considered by the more extreme Zionists to be a rewriting of history.
Illegal Jewish immigration was always fastidiously reported by successive British administrations, while the very considerable Arab illegal immigration was only addressed when their detection has became flagrant. The British Mandatory authorities whose tasks included recording the comings and goings in Palestine, was occasionally forced to mention the illegal Arab immigration, but only when the battle became too prevalent. The movement was always underestimated, minimised and considered casual:
In addition to increase in recorded immigration, a number of persons are known to enter Palestine illegally from both adjacent and European countries and remain there permanently.
Considerable Arab immigration was indeed proceeding without restriction or record from such areas as Syria, Egypt, Trans-Jordan and Lebanon. There has been some immigration from the surrounding territories, which, since it avoids the frontier controls, is not recorded.
Jewish illegal immigration was minutely detailed and meticulously recorded but all references to Arab illegal immigration were, perhaps deliberately, obscured. The preponderant concentration on the Jewish illegal immigration overwhelemd and negated all record of the parallel Arab traffic.
Tewfik Bey al-Haurani, Governer of the Hauran, was quoted as saying, 'In the last few months from 30,000 to 36,000 Hauranese Syrians have entered Palestine and settled there.
http://books.google.com/books?id=LsgnW34jp90C&pg=PA31&dq=arab+immigration+palestine&hl=en&ei=QqEBTJ-yHobMNOL4sTs&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=arab%20immigration%20palestine&f=false(The economic consequences of Zionism, Rafael N. Rosenzweig, BRILL, 1989, ISBN 9004091475, 9789004091474)
The economic consequences of Zionism - Pages 69-71 Rafael N. Rosenzweig - 1989 - 260 pages
Throughout the period of British rule in Palestine, there was a considerable amount of Arab immigration, most of which was never properly recorded. ...Many of the Arabs who had come to find work in Palestine had initially done so as temporary and seasonal migrant labour. Thus, for instance, the term "Hawranis" (people coming from the Hawran area in Syria) became [p. 70] synonymous for unskilled labourers.
The Hawranis were, in fact, Druze. Many of the newcomers settled in Western Galilee and on Mount Carmel, were smaller Druze communities had existed before. Others, mainly Bedouins, came from Egypt and Jordan. Most of this type of migration over Palestine's land borders was never officially recorded by the immigration officers.
Taking into account the various rates of net natural population increase as they were reported by Government of Palestine statisticians, we arrive for 1945 at an unaccounted for addition, since 1920, of 126,000 persons for the Arab sector. Apart from mistakes and inaccuracies in the official vital statistics, which probably cancelled out, the increase can be due only to immigration. Because the figure of 120000 also includes the children of these Arab immigrants, the net immigration figures were smaller than this sum. When Palestine became an important Allied base during World War II, Arab immigration increased. However, a large part of the net increase of the population due to Arab migration occurred prior to 1940.
The almost continuous Arab immigration into Palestine, following the establishment of the Mandate, contradicted the political argument regarding the displacement of the native population by the Zionist settlers. What in fact occurred was a limited, and at times indirect, effect of the Jewish development effort on the Arab population. In this respect, the very low standards of living in the areas from which Arabs flocked into Palestine provided the necessary push factor. TThe dominant pull factor was the availability of work, and not the increase of the Palestinian standard of living which was, at the most, rather marginal. Indirectly, this type of immigration, even if it was of an only temporary nature, had a beneficial influence on the existing Arab population ...
Arab immigration also proves the point that the isolation between the two communities was not an absolute one. At least in part, the conditions leading to leading to this influx had been created by the Jews. However, isolation had become an important though not always directly expressed tenet of some Zionists. Rather absurdly, Arab political representatives actively [page 71] assisted these Zionists. They harbored the mistaken idea that the Jewish community depended upon them to a decisive degree. It was this theory which formed the background for the decision to protest against the threat of the Jews achieving a majority with an economic boycott.
http://books.google.com/books?id=wKuU3ZBS7gEC&pg=PA69