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Thus, on the eve of the Zionist settlement, which began with the founding of Petah Tikva in 1878, the country was mostly deserted and abandoned. Its population was sparse and partly nomadic. Famous tourists who visited Israel at the time testified separately to this situation: They found a small rural Bedouin population living in muddy huts and described the place as a marshland, mostly uncultivated terrain, used as a grazing fields for goats and sheep. The local inhabitants were not the owners of the land. The owners were wealthy families from throughout the Ottoman Empire, who had no use for the land beyond the titles and honors it bestowed upon them.
Tawfiq Bey al-Hourani, the Syrian governor of Hauran, said in 1934 that “over 30,000 Syrians invaded Palestine within a few months.”
Winston Churchill, on May 22, 1939, stated that Arab immigration during the Mandate period to Palestine was so great that their numbers grew by such a rate that even the Jews of the entire world could not match.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States, said on May 17, 1939 that the immigration of Arabs to Palestine since 1921 was far greater than the immigration of Jews in recent times.
According to the British census in 1931, the Muslims in the country were not necessarily Arabs, judging from the languages they spoke: Afghan, Albanian, Arabic, Bosnian, Circassian, Kurdish, Persian, Sudanese and Turkish.
These are the locations of some of the Arab tribes in Israel who are mistakenly referred to as “Palestinians”:
Hebron – Tamimi, Natshi, Ja’abri, Abu Sanina, Qawasma,,,,Jericho – Erekat (Arikat),,Beith Lehem – Touqan , Shak’kaSchem* (Nablus) – Al-Masri
Tulkarem – Al-Carmi, Ramallah – Baraguthi, Tawil, AbbasUm Al-Fahm (Israeli citizens) – Jabrin East Jerusalem – Hejazi (The Hejaz region is the eastern shoreline by the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia) Gaza – Al-Masri, Tarabin, Al-Abid