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To: Mr Majestic
I myself do not buy into those figures. I would say there had been almost that many Jews (say 15-20M) at the population nadir in about 1798; I would have said some 54,000 by 1881.

As to Arabs, I am not sure there were more than some 700,000 even by 1948, and if so then both because of immigration and birth rate, the number in 1881 is probably only some 150-200M if indeed not just 100-120M.

Lets look for better statistics, that one is highly suspect. The 24M Jews looks like just the Zionist yishuv, without the earlier Jewish population. The Arab figure looks like the entire population, incl Christians and Jews and yishuv.

52 posted on 01/19/2002 10:37:10 AM PST by crystalk
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To: crystalk
The figures are from Jsource a reliable source of info. However, the map used is probably more illustative of one view of the population composition. Notice the rather curious figure 470,000 in 1881 for Arabs (again, by the way, for population purposes the authorities usually didn't distinguish what "Arabs" meant - i.e., could refer to Circassians, Bosnians, Turks, Persians, etc., i.e., relatively recent immigrants particularly with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and resettlement by them) and only to 500,000 by 1914?

Peters notes that according to the French geographer Vital Cuinet the population of Western Palestine by 1895 had grown to more than 495,000, "of which Muslims numbered roughly 252,000 throughout Western Palestine.

1882: 141,000 "settled" Muslims

1895: 252,000 "settled" Muslims

The above figures for the Muslim population would indicate that their numbers almost doubled in the thirteen years between 1882 and 1895". Peters states that the only variable which could account for the large 1895 figure would be an approx. 82,000 increase by virtue of "Arab" immigration coinciding with the Jewish development (this is assuming a high rate of natural increase) (p. 244 of her book).

53 posted on 01/19/2002 11:33:10 AM PST by Lent
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To: crystalk, monkeyshine
Further, according to Peters (p. 244)
the total population when Jewish colonization began (1872-882) was between 300,000 and 400,000 souls, according to the most reliable estimates. Thirty-four thousand were Jews, living largely in their four "holy cities." Less than half the population was "settled" Muslim, 65,000 were Bedouin-nomadic, and roughly 55,000 were Christians. Thus the total of roughly 200,000 Muslims were living in all of Western Palestine in 1882.

54 posted on 01/19/2002 11:40:40 AM PST by Lent
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To: crystalk
Pre 1921 population figures for Palestine included both sides of the Jordan River. British figures for 1921 put the number of Arabs on the East Bank (that part which became Jordan) at about 200,000.

On the installation of Hussein as Emir the population of Jordan dropped by an estimated 30-50% due to emigration to the West Bank where there was much more economic opportunity and the fear of harsh rule and taxation by the new Hashemite rulers.

57 posted on 01/19/2002 3:46:02 PM PST by anapikoros
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