[_Q_]

Originally Posted by Beninho

That’s been common knowledge to me, Arabs from other areas immigrated into pre-state Israel because of better living conditions, which is why the Arab population doubled. There are obviously Arabs who had been in this land for hundreds of years but there also was Arab immigration from Syria, Transjordan, Egypt in the 100 years before the creation of Israel.

https://cqpress.sagepub.com/cqresear...s%20built%20up.

The Peel Commission even stated “The Arab population shows a remarkable increase ….. partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the [Jewish] National Home..”

The Simpson Report also discusses Arabs from neighbouring areas immigrating

Edit: i have been unable to verify the 37% of immigration into pre-state Israel was Arab. It was not cited in the article I read so I will take that back. My apologies.

Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath:

As all the research by historian Fares Abdul Rahim and geographers of modern Palestine shows, the Arab population began to grow again in the middle of the nineteenth century. That growth resulted from a new factor: the demographic revolution. Until the 1850s there was no "natural" increase of the population, but this began to change when modern medical treatment was introduced and modern hospitals were established, both by the Ottoman authorities and by the foreign Christian missionaries. The number of births remained steady but infant mortality decreased. This was the main reason for Arab population growth. ... No one would doubt that some migrant workers came to Palestine from Syria and Trans-Jordan and remained there. But one has to add to this that there were migrations in the opposite direction as well. For example, a tradition developed in Hebron to go to study and work in Cairo, with the result that a permanent community of Hebronites had been living in Cairo since the fifteenth century. Trans-Jordan exported unskilled casual labor to Palestine; but before 1948 its civil service attracted a good many educated Palestinian Arabs who did not find work in Palestine itself. Demographically speaking, however, neither movement of population was significant in comparison to the decisive factor of natural increase.

American historian Justin McCarthy

From analyses of rates of increase of the Muslim population of the three Palestinian sanjaks, one can say with certainty that Muslim immigration after the 1870s was small. Had there been a large group of Muslim immigrants their numbers would have caused an unusual increase in the population and this would have appeared in the calculated rate of increase from one registration list to another... Such an increase would have been easily noticed; it was not there.

The argument that Arab immigration somehow made up a large part of the Palestinian Arab population is thus statistically untenable. The vast majority of the Palestinian Arabs resident in 1947 were the sons and daughters of Arabs who were living in Palestine before modern Jewish immigration began. There is no reason to believe that they were not the sons and daughters of Arabs who had been in Palestine for many centuries.

And also from anecdotal evidence. I know a lot of palestinians, both in the US, Canada and the Middle East. None of them claim to have come from anywhere that is not Palestine.