Part VIII

By 1900, Palestine was home to nearly 600,000 inhabitants according to historian Kenneth W. Stein. The population was overwhelmingly Arab Muslim, but also included large Jewish, Arab Christian and Druze communities. However, through steady immigration, the Jewish population increased markedly over the next half century. While in 1880 Jews numbered 6,700 and Arabs 268,000, a ratio of 1:40, by 1947 Jews numbered 630,000 and Arabs 1.31 million, a ratio of 1:2. As the Nazis and other fascist movements gained strength in Europe, Jews fled in large numbers to Palestine. In 1929, they comprised 17% of the population, but had increased to 31% by 1936.

Within the minority Jewish community, there were two distinct entities: the old Yishuv and the new one, writes R. Harari in “Report on the Economic and Commercial Situation in Palestine to March 31st 1921.” The old Yishuv was mainly composed of Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews from Europe, who lived in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron and Tiberias, and had been the largest religious group in Jerusalem since the middle of the 19th century. Although they were in the minority, Sephardic Jewish communities from Asian and African countries also predated the new wave of immigrants fleeing European antisemitism.

Historian Shlomo Avineri said that in 1878, following the increased persecution, Romanian Jews began arriving in large numbers. The first group came as an organized body, according to an agreed-upon plan, and settled in Zikhron Ya’akov. Historian David Vital adds that in 1882, Jews from czarist Russia began arriving in Palestine. Pogroms and persecution had forced them to flee, as did their desire to help build a new society in the country as part of Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion), the national renaissance movement.

During the winter of 1882, several hundred Jews from Yemen also arrived. They had been immigrating to Eretz Israel in small numbers since the 15th century, if not before. They lived in Jerusalem and were Ottoman subjects. In the coming years, famine and oppression drove many more toward Palestine, Avineri said.

This wave of immigration, known as the First Aliyah, continued until 1903 and brought 30,000 Jews to the country, asserts historian Yosef Gorny. A group of mostly Russian middle-aged religious families established 20 moshavot (colonies) from the Galilee in the north to Judea in the south. Hadera was established by a small group of secular Jews as a prototype for the future Jewish society.

He adds that from 1904-1914, the Second Aliyah arrived in Palestine “to show the way to independence.” Almost equal in number to the first wave of immigrants, this group consisted of thousands of young, idealistic people, motivated by the desire to create egalitarian and agricultural societies. Much of Israel’s future political leadership arrived in this wave, including future prime ministers David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett (Shertok) and Levi Eshkol; Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of Israel; Berl Katznelson, the spiritual leader of the labor movement; and Yitzhak Tabenkin, a founder and one of the leaders of the kibbutz movement.

The Land

Stein notes there were about 26.3 dunams of land in Palestine in the 19th and early 20th centuries, of which less than a third were deemed cultivable. (A metric dunam equals 1,000 square meters or ¼ acre.) The rest of the land was “dotted by intermittent mountain ranges, sand dunes, bleak terrain, alkaline soils, mountain regions, obstructed water courses, and marshlands.”

Harari quotes an interim report presented to the British Parliament in August 1921 on the civil administration of Palestine, that commented on the condition of Palestine after World War I: “It is obvious to every passing traveler … that the country was before … War [I], and is now undeveloped and under-populated. The methods of agriculture are for the most part primitive; the area of laud [sic] now cultivated could yield a far greater product. Other large cultivable areas have remained untilled. The hills are suitable to grow trees, but there are no forests. Miles of sand dunes that could be redeemed, are untouched … The Jordan and the Yarmuk offer an abundance of water-power, but it is unused. Some industries—fishing and the culture and manufacture of tobacco are examples—have been killed by Turkish laws; none have been encouraged; the markets of Palestine … are supplied almost wholly from Europe. The seaborne commerce, such as it is, is loaded and discharged in the open roadsteads of Jaffa and Haifa: there are no harbors…

“The country is under-populated because of this luck [sic] of development. There are now in the whole of Palestine hardly 700,000 people, a population much less than that of the province of the Gallilee [sic] alone during the time of Christ.

“And yet, wherever Jews touched the land, this changed. Russian Jews, for example, came to escape
persecution and established agriculture colonies where they grew oranges, manufactured and exported wine, planted eucalyptus trees, and used modern agriculture methods. Every traveler in Palestine who visits them is impressed by the contrast between these pleasant villages with the beautiful stretches of prosperous cultivation about them and the primitive conditions of life and work by which they are surrounded.”

Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.