Swiss Scholar Felix Bovet visited the region in 1858. He wrote that the “Arabs themselves, who are its inhabitants, cannot be considered but temporary residents. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind any sign of their passage through it.” In 1785, Constantine François Volney described the country as “ruined” and “desolate.” In 1843, Alexander Keith wrote “in his (Volney’s) day, the land had not fully reached its last prophetic degree of desolation and depopulation.” Mark Twain traveled through Palestine and wrote his observations in his book "The Innocents Abroad." “Palestine is desolate and unlovely… It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land.” Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, an eminent English cartographer writes about Judea, “it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or habitation.”
In his book, A Durable Peace, Benjamin Netanyahu points out that Stanley wrote these words in 1881 – “the very year that Arafat designates as the beginning of the Zionist ‘invasion’ and the ‘displacement’ of the dynamic local population. That Arafat is caught in another lie is by itself unimportant. What is important is that the lie endlessly repeated, refined, and elaborated, has displaced what every civilized and educated person knew at the close of the nineteenth century, that the land was indeed largely empty and could afford room to the millions of Jews.”
British archeologist Thomas Shaw wrote in the mid-1700’s that Palestine was “lacking in people to till its fertile soil.” Count Volney echoes Shaw when he wrote, “many parts… lost almost all their peasantry.” He continued, “Our merchants as have resided there twenty years have themselves seen the greater part of the environs…become depopulated.”
The British Consul in Palestine reported in 1857 “that the country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population…” Mark Twain wrote, “There is not a solitary village throughout its 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.”
Reverend Samuel Manning mourned when he wrote, “But where were the inhabitants… the land is left void and desolate and without inhabitants.” British Historian, Charles Doughty found “a desert that was devoid of but a few “human lives.”
There was a large influx of illegal in-migrants into the land between 1917-1947.
Between 1922 and 1947, the Arab population in Haifa grew 290%, in Jaffa by 158%, and in Jerusalem, 131%.4 Most of the Arab immigration was illegal. The British Government authorized the 1930 Hope-Simpson Report to look into this matter. The Report stated that there was an uncontrolled influx of illegal Arab immigrants from Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and Syria into Palestine.
In Time Immemorial, author Joan Peters does extensive research into Arab in-migration from the surrounding area into Palestine. To show that in-migration was rampant and largely unreported by the British, Peter cites the Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, which met from June 3 to June 18, 1935, in Geneva, Switzerland. These Minutes contain an interview that Tewfik Bey El-Hurani, Governor of Syria, gave to La Syrie. This interview was published on August 12, 1934. El-Hurani states, “In the last few months 30,000 to 36,000 Syrians had entered Palestine and settled there.” Peters writes, “The Mandates Commission – which was an overseer to the League of Nations Mandatory Administrations – took special ‘note’ in its Minutes of the fact that the Syrians, were not merely passing through, but had indeed ‘settled.’ Yet no official account of that important wave of Arabs, who entered illegally, appears in British immigration records.”
Winston Churchill observed that the “Arabs have crowded into the country and not even if all world Jewry migrated into Palestine, they could not equal the influx of Arab immigrants who have come since the Jews arrived.”
In 1947, there were approximately 1,000,000 Arabs in the whole of western Palestine. Of these, 561,000 lived in the part partitioned to Israel. At the end of the war, 140,000 remained in Israel. That means approximately 421,000 Arabs fled to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip.
These refugees were forced into camps by their host countries and then turned over the care to the UN. Seven months later, the UN reported the number had swelled to 1,000,000. Where did the additional refugees come from? They were hungry and needy Arabs of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza who came to the camps to take advantage of the free care. The International Committee of the Red Cross pressed the United Nations Relief headquarters to recognize, as refugees, any destitute Arab in Palestine and to let him have refugee facilities in his own home.
Finally, the Jordanian and Egyptian government insisted that the refugee rolls include any Arab who could be described as needing support due to the war. Joan Peters writes that to the UN, a refugee was any Arab “who had been in Palestine for only two years before Israel’s statehood in 1948.”
If you read Joan Peter's book Time Immemorial you will find the quote from the UN. I may be wrong on the date. It could be earlier. I don't have my copy handy, otherwise, I would quote it for you.
While certainly many areas were somewhat desolate (especially the Negev and the areas south and west of Jerusalem and Hebron), its difficult to term the rest of the area the same way without willfully ignoring the facts.
The Turkish Census from around the turn of the century found around 55,000 dwellings present in the Sanjaks which now constitute Israel/Palestine. These were located within many hundreds of settled villages and towns. Most major towns like Jaffa, Acre, Hebron, Nabulus, etc. had about 10,000 inhabitants. Jerusalem was the leading city with around 40,000 inhabitants. The total area of what was then termed Palestine was around 10,000 square miles, with the 1909 Encyclopedia Britannica estimating a population of around 650,000 circa 1900, or 65 people per square mile. I believe about 5% of this popualtion would have consisted of Jews at that time. The overhwelming majority of the native Arabs at that time were Christians, as also in Lebanon and the Syrian littoral.
If you do the math each settlement (a village or town), when you exclude the wastes of the Negev Desert, had an area of about 10 square miles about it, putting the distance between them at approximately 3 miles. This is a density of settlement comparable to most parts of the American midwest.
Obviously the land was capable of holding many more people, because it has around 8 million+ today. That does not mean it was an uninhabited waste.
The vast blooming of the population from an influx of both Arabs and Jews was a self-feeding phenomena. As more and more people moved into Palestine, bringing more and more money and talent, the economy increased ever faster requiring more and more laborers, thus bringing in more settlers of both ethnicities. There was no sinister plot to feed Arabs into the territory.