WHO does this land belong to?? Part 1

So I studied this and read From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine by Joan Peters and written in 1984.  It is a very thick book.  She was a statistician, English, not Jewish, and writes that she began the book expecting to be able to validate the Palestinian claims. But that's not what happened.

She went through boxes and boxes of British Home Office reports. She was able to reconstruct a lot of the population demographics before 1948 and the results were quite remarkable.  A vast majority of Palestinians were not indigenous to the land; they had been migrants -- or were workers imported by the British as they developed the country.

Mark Twain visited Israel in 1867, and published his impressions in Innocents Abroad.  He described a desolate country – devoid of both vegetation and human population:
“….. A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse…. a desolation…. we never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”

Others who came described the same thing. Desolate, Empty.  Certainly people lived here -- but what were their circumstances?

You can read lots of books on this -- and should -- but you can also just sit and think about it for a minute.  It's hot and dry here.  There were huge swampy areas in the north.  The Judean desert is...well, a desert.  The Dead Sea is...well, dead.  The Negev is a desert.  It's a pretty hostile land agriculturally speaking -- or can be.  And 100 years ago, it most certainly was. 

When I researched how much land was privately owned, I read that by 1948, Jews owned about 7%  of the land.  Not much, right?  But Arabs owned....wait for it....11%. This was the Ottoman Empire.  There were absentee landowners. 

So this image of a land filled with Arabs farmers, peacefully farming (and growing what???) the land they had lived on for centuries is just not reality.

More on this to come.