Tewfik Bey El-Huriani, confirmed this number, estimating that 30,000-36,000 Hauranis had recently entered Palestine and settled there. Avneri found that “during the period of the Mandate the country [i.e., Palestine] had absorbed 100,000 legal and illegal Arab immigrants and their offspring.” Leftist American journalist Albert Viton reported in

Toponyms in common Palestinian surnames commemorate these origins. They include, going from west to east: al-Mughrabi (North Africa), al-Masri (Egypt), al-Yamani (Yemen), al-Hijazi (Saudi Arabia), al-Lubnani and al-Tarabulsi (Lebanon), al-Shami, al-Halabi, and al-Hourani (Syria), al-Iraqi, al-Baghdadi, and al-Tikriti (Iraq). The family name al-Ifra

Booming Zionist economic activity attracted yet more Muslim workers, employed mostly in agriculture, building, and services. Joan Peters, author of a book on this topic, compares the non-Jewish population of the future mandate’s territory in 1893 and 1947. Dividing it into three subregions according to the intensity of their Jewish settlement—n

Second, European Jews began to immigrate. At first, they focused on religious activities, spurring only modest economic activity. Starting about 1870, modern Zionists brought capital and modern skills to the region. They purchased land, improved it, applied scientific agricultural methods, improved sanitation, opened factories, built infrastructure

mostly Muslim, has also taken place. These immigrants included Arabs, Muslims, and many others. They and their descendants probably make up a majority of the population now called Palestinian. Palestinians, in other words, are not an aboriginal, autochthonous, first, indigenous, or native people; most of them are as recently arrived as Zionists. Th