Faith writes:
Your remarks about it are totally unwarranted.
I hadn't seen the study, I was critising the FPM quote you provided. It first asserts that the records are clear regarding Arab immigration to the area. It then cites the study, claiming the Arab population almost quadrupled between 1855-1947. It seems to imply that high pop growth alone equals high immigration, which is false. The industrial revolution saw a population explosion, this must be taken into account when looking at the data. As it turns out my criticism was entirely justified, here's the quote for reference.
FrontPageMag writes:
Turkish and British records are clear that Palestine was flooded with Arab immigrants from the late 1850’s onward due to the salutary effects of British colonial and Zionist developments from the mid-19th century onward. Groundbreaking work on the Arab historical demography of Palestine during the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries has been done by Professor Justin McCarthy in his book The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (Institute for Palestine Studies Series), summarized here. McCarthy, not a Jew nor an Israeli nor a Zionist, writing for a Palestinian institute, demonstrates that the Arab population of Palestine almost quadrupled from c. 1855 to 1947. Only a tiny minority of Arabs can claim ancestral attachment to this territory, and even those claims are based solely on anecdotal accounts for which there is no empirical evidence.
Now here's a quote from the article you linked to.
In the Ottoman and Mandate periods, migration was a minor factor in the demographic makeup of the Muslim and Christian (though obviously not the Jewish) population of Palestine.
Although there was a certain amount of seasonal labor migration to and from Palestine, analysis of Ottoman statistics (McCarthy, 1990) yields evidence of little permanent migration of Arabs into or out of Palestine from 1860 to 1914.
So the article says literally the exact opposite as the quote from FPM. There's no evidence of high migration. Further, its claim of 'almost quadrupled' is not supported by the article either. The table shows the poplulation at 411k in 1860 and 1308k in 1946, just over 3 times, not nearly 4. We also know that the Jews went from 10% to 30% in the same period so it's impossible for the FPM claim to be true.
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