Origins of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict - Statistical Data Included

Between 1854 and 1869, Egypt built the Suez Canal. But in doing so it drove itself into bankruptcy and in 1882 became a British protectorate. Remember that around 1882 events in Russia and western Europe were leading toward the development of a Zionist movement and the start of Jewish immigration into Palestine. From 1882 on, proximity to the canal and to British power was to have a profound influence on Palestinian-Jewish relations.

The Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine was called, began small and grew slowly during the years leading up to World War I. Immigration was funded mainly by a small number of wealthy European Jews, led by the French Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who was not a Zionist himself. Initially the land was owned by a few rich, mainly absentee landlords who lived in or near urban areas and occupied and worked by many poor peasant farmers (fellahin, in Arabic).

Usually the fellahin were driven off the land so that Jewish immigrants could occupy it. According to Justin McCarthy's The Population of Palestine: Population, History, and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (1990)--the definitive source for such population data--the first aliyah continued from 1882 to 1903, by which time about 90,000 acres were purchased, with about twenty villages and 10,000 new settlers, about half of them in the villages. Successive waves of immigrants varied strikingly in their past lifestyles, those from western or eastern Europe being more accustomed to urban or rural environments, respectively. Accordingly, some chose to work the land themselves while others hired back some of the fellahin. According to Bickerton and Klausner:

   Initial Arab peasant opposition subsided when the peasants realized that
   Jewish landowners would maintain the tradition of permitting them to work
   the land and keep their income. The number of Jewish settlers was too small
   to have any serious impact upon Arab agriculture, especially in the hill
   country. Interestingly, public opposition to Zionist settlement was led by
   the Greek Orthodox Christians of Palestine.

Still other immigrants gave up and emigrated from Palestine. Of the 40,000 new immigrants arriving in the second aliyah, between 1904 and 1914 (David Ben-Gurion was one of the leaders of this group), some estimates say that as many as 90 percent found the conditions inhospitable and left. By 1914 there were still only about forty Jewish settlements in Palestine, owning about 100,000 acres. Of this land about 4 percent had been purchased by the Jewish National Fund (established in 1901), a protected source considered Jewish national property. In 1914 the total population of Palestine was about 722,000, of which only about 60,000 or 8 percent were Jews (12,000 in collective farms and villages). This would be a net increase of only 35,000 in 114 years. By contrast, during the same period, the number of Jews in Europe increased from two million to thirteen million. Equally striking is the fact that, while almost three million Jews left Russia between 1880 and 1914, only about 30,000 of them went to Palestine. After World War I, however, a radical change took place.