Palestine was not an empty land waiting for a people. It was a living society of farmers, merchants, poets, priests, imams and rabbis, with ports, newspapers, schools and orange groves that fed markets in Europe. What happened to that society in the twentieth century is one of the great dispossessions of modern history.
This piece tells that story plainly. It does not flatter anyone, including the Arab leaders who failed Palestinians, and it does not pretend the suffering of Jews in Europe was not real. Honesty is the strongest case Palestine has. The facts, laid out in order, are damning enough.
An ancient land, a modern name
Palestine is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth. Canaanites, Israelites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks and Ottomans all ruled it at some point. The name itself is ancient: Greek writers called the coast "Palaistine" around 2,500 years ago, and the Romans made "Syria Palaestina" an official province in the second century.
The people who lived there did not vanish with each new empire. They absorbed, converted and intermarried. After the Arab conquest in the seventh century, the population gradually became Arabic-speaking and mostly Muslim, with large Christian communities and a small Jewish one. Modern Palestinians are the descendants of that long, layered history, not recent arrivals.
For four centuries, from 1516 to 1917, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. It was not one province but several districts. Jerusalem was governed directly from Istanbul because of its importance to three religions, while Nablus and Acre were attached to other provinces. Ottoman records for 1878 counted about 462,000 subjects in these three districts: roughly 87% Muslim, 10% Christian and 3% Jewish (Palestinian Journeys chronology). Most people lived in several hundred villages, and Arabic was the shared everyday language.
How people lived
Most Palestinians before 1948 were villagers. They grew wheat and barley on the plains, olives and figs on the terraced hills, and vegetables along the springs. The olive harvest each autumn was a family and village event, and olive oil was both food and currency. A village had its mosque or church, its threshing floor, its guest house (madafa) where elders met and travellers were fed, and its well-defined lands passed down through generations.
Towns had their own crafts and identities. Nablus was famous for olive-oil soap, Hebron for blown glass and pottery, Bethlehem for olive-wood and mother-of-pearl carving, Majdal (near today's Ashkelon) for weaving. Women's embroidered dresses (thobes) told you which village a woman came from, by their colours and patterns. Coffee houses hosted storytellers (hakawati), card games and political talk.
The religious calendar was shared and public. The Nabi Musa festival drew huge processions from Jerusalem toward the shrine near Jericho every spring. Christian Easter in Jerusalem and Bethlehem's Christmas were city-wide events. This was not a paradise. Peasants carried heavy taxes and debt, and many depended on landlords and moneylenders. But it was a settled, rooted society with its own rhythms, institutions and pride.
Living together: Muslims, Christians and Jews
The conflict in Palestine did not begin as a religious war. For centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in the same cities, traded in the same markets and spoke the same Arabic. The old Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias were part of the local fabric. Some of them saw themselves as Arab Jews, culturally at home in the region.
The system was not equal. Under Ottoman rule, Christians and Jews were "protected peoples" with their own religious courts and fewer formal rights than Muslims. There were quarrels, and sometimes violence. But they were not persecuted for their faith in the way Jews often were in Europe.
After the 1908 Ottoman constitutional revolution, something remarkable happened. Historian Michelle Campos shows that Muslims, Christians and Jews in Palestine began to see themselves as fellow citizens, and Jews and Arabs cooperated in local institutions even as Zionism and Arab nationalism were emerging (Journal of Palestine Studies review of Ottoman Brothers). Her conclusion is the key point of this section: Arab-Jewish conflict was not inevitable. It grew out of a specific political project and the way empires handled it.
A developed society, not a desert
The claim that Palestine was a backward wasteland "made to bloom" by newcomers does not survive the evidence. By the 1930s it was one of the most commercially active places in the Arab East.
The clearest example is the Jaffa orange. Arab farmers developed the Shamouti (Jaffa) variety in the mid-nineteenth century, and exports grew from about 200,000 oranges in 1845 to 38 million by 1870 (Jaffa orange). By 1938, citrus brought in about £3.75 million of Palestine's £5.68 million in exports, according to figures given to the UN after 1948 (UN Conciliation Commission). Half of the country's orange groves were Arab-owned.
The numbers compared well with neighbours. In 1934, government revenue per person was about LP 4 in Palestine against LP 2.14 in Egypt and LP 1.74 in Syria, and foreign trade per person was LP 17 in Palestine against roughly LP 4 in Syria, Iraq and Egypt (1937 economic survey). Economic historian Jacob Metzer's work on the Mandate economy also places Palestinian Arabs above most neighbouring Arab societies on income, schooling and life expectancy by the late 1930s (The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine).
Intellectual life was just as lively. Haifa's al-Karmil (1908) and Jaffa's Filastin (1911) were among the region's important newspapers, and Filastin was one of the first to warn about Zionist land purchases. Mission schools, Ottoman state schools and the Arab College in Jerusalem trained teachers, lawyers, doctors and writers.
Honesty requires two caveats. Part of the 1930s boom came from Jewish capital and British spending, and the Jewish sector was richer and more literate than the Arab one. And most Arab villagers were still poor. But a poor peasantry is not an empty land, and Palestine's Arab society was modernising on its own terms before it was cut short.
Cosmopolitan cities: Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem
Jaffa was called the "Bride of the Sea" and was the cultural capital of Arab Palestine. Before 1948 it had schools teaching in English, French, Italian and Arabic, three newspapers, many printing houses and a radio station, and its cinemas screened both Cairo films and Hollywood releases (LeBor, City of Oranges, excerpt). Old residents remember the cafés, theatres and the hall where Umm Kulthum sang (Adalah newsletter). Jaffa also had the most important cinemas in the country and dozens of sports clubs and cultural societies, all built on the wealth of citrus, banking and shipping (Zochrot). Arab families attended weddings at the homes of Jewish neighbours, and the city's nickname, "Mother of Strangers", captured its openness.
Haifa was the industrial and transport hub: a modern deep-water port, the railway junction linking Palestine to Egypt, Lebanon and the Hejaz line, and from 1934 the terminal of the oil pipeline from Iraq. Workers came from across the region, and Arab trade unions, clubs and newspapers flourished.
Jerusalem was the political and religious heart, home to Muslim, Christian, Armenian and Jewish quarters within one wall. From 1936 the Palestine Broadcasting Service carried Arabic music, news and literature across the region. The diaries of the Jerusalem musician Wasif Jawhariyyeh describe a city where Muslims, Christians and Jews shared music, festivals and friendships.
These cities were connected to Beirut, Cairo and Damascus by road, rail and sea. Palestine was a crossroads, not a backwater.
A promise made over their heads
The turning point came in 1917. During the First World War, Britain made three incompatible promises. It promised the Sharif of Mecca an independent Arab kingdom. It secretly agreed with France (Sykes-Picot) to divide the region between them. And in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, it promised the Zionist movement a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.
The declaration referred to roughly 90% of the population only as "existing non-Jewish communities", promising them civil and religious rights but not political ones. They were never asked. In 1919 an American commission sent by President Wilson did ask. The King-Crane Commission found that 85% of petitions from Palestine opposed the Zionist programme, recommended that the plan for a Jewish commonwealth be given up, and was then shelved (King-Crane report summary). Balfour himself wrote that same year that in Palestine Britain did "not propose even to go through the form of consulting" the inhabitants.
The League of Nations Mandate of 1922 wrote the Balfour promise into international law. It obliged Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration and recognised a Jewish Agency, but gave the Arab majority no elected government. In 1922 the population was 757,182, of whom 78% were Muslim, 11% Jewish and about 10% Christian (British report to the League). By the mid-1940s Jews made up around a third.
This is where honesty matters most. Most Jewish immigrants were fleeing real persecution: pogroms in Eastern Europe and then Nazism. Western countries, including Britain and the United States, largely shut their own doors to Jewish refugees in the 1930s. So the cost of Europe's antisemitism was paid by a people who had no part in it. And Zionism's leaders were not seeking only shelter but a state, which could not be built without displacing the majority.
Palestinians resisted from the start. Land bought from absentee landlords, such as the Sursock family's sale of the Jezreel Valley villages, evicted the tenant farmers who had worked it for generations. Protests in 1920, 1921 and 1929 led to the Great Revolt of 1936 to 1939, a general strike and armed uprising. Britain crushed it with mass arrests, home demolitions, executions and the exile of Palestinian leaders, leaving the society militarily broken a decade before 1948.
1948: the Nakba
In 1947, exhausted Britain handed the problem to the new United Nations. On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly recommended partition. Jews were about a third of the population and owned roughly 7% of the land, yet the plan gave the Jewish state more than 55% of Palestine (IMEU). The Zionist leadership accepted it as a starting point. Palestinians and Arab states rejected it as the division of their country without their consent.
Fighting began almost at once. Between the UN vote and Israel's founding on 15 May 1948, an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 Palestinians had already been driven from their homes, before any Arab army entered (IMEU quick facts). On 9 April 1948, fighters of the Irgun and Lehi militias killed about 100 villagers, including women and children, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem (Jerusalem Fund). News of the massacre spread terror. Haifa's Arab neighbourhoods fell in April; Jaffa fell in May, and about 95% of its Arab residents were displaced (Zochrot).
By the end of the war, about 750,000 Palestinians, over 80% of those living in what became Israel, had been expelled or had fled, and more than 500 villages and eleven urban neighbourhoods were destroyed or emptied (Nakba overview). Israeli historians working from Israel's own archives, notably Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé, documented direct expulsions, such as that of the towns of Lydda and Ramle in July 1948, alongside flight driven by fear. UN Resolution 194 of December 1948 said refugees wishing to return should be allowed to. Israel refused, passed laws transferring "absentee" property to the state, and razed many villages to make return impossible.
Honesty also requires saying this: Arab forces committed atrocities too, including the attack on the Hadassah medical convoy and the massacre at Kfar Etzion in 1948. The Arab armies that entered in May were divided, poorly led and pursuing their own aims; Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt took Gaza. None of this changes the central fact. A people became refugees in their own land, and seventy-eight years later they are still not allowed home.
Occupation, siege and Gaza
The Nakba never really ended; it changed form. Palestinians who stayed inside Israel lived under military rule until 1966. In the 1967 war, Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, and roughly 300,000 more Palestinians were displaced. Those territories have now been under military occupation for 59 years, the longest in modern times.
Occupation means daily life controlled by others: checkpoints, permits to travel, farm or build, night raids, administrative detention without trial, and home demolitions. Settlements, illegal under international law, have grown to house more than 700,000 Israelis in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, cutting Palestinian land into isolated pockets. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice advised that Israel's continued presence in the occupied territories is unlawful and should end. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s promised a Palestinian state; settlement growth and violence on both sides buried that promise.
Gaza has been under Israeli and Egyptian blockade since 2007, after Hamas took control. On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostages. That was a grave crime. Israel's response has been one of the most destructive military campaigns of this century. As of 29 October 2026, Gaza's Health Ministry reports 74,570 Palestinians killed and 175,808 wounded (YPA). Nearly 1.9 million people, most of the population, have been displaced, many of them repeatedly (Anadolu). Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, Israeli strikes have killed more than 1,500 more people (Haaretz).
South Africa's genocide case against Israel is still before the International Court of Justice. Many human rights organisations and genocide scholars, including Israeli ones, have concluded that genocide is taking place; Israel rejects the charge and says it targets Hamas. Whatever the court decides, the scale of death, famine and destruction is a matter of record.
Who is responsible?
It is tempting to name one villain. The honest answer is harder: Palestinian suffering was built over a century by several hands, and some bear far more weight than others.
Britain made the original decision. Arthur Balfour and the Lloyd George government promised another people's land without asking its inhabitants, then ruled Palestine for thirty years in a way that let one community build a state while the other was denied self-government and, after 1936, crushed. Britain then walked away in 1948 and left the outcome to force.
The Zionist leadership turned a refuge movement into a state project that required removing the majority. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, is the single most consequential figure. He openly discussed the "transfer" of Arabs in the 1930s, oversaw the 1948 war in which most Palestinians were expelled or fled, and blocked their return afterwards. The militias that carried out Deir Yassin were led by Menachem Begin and others who later became Israeli leaders.
Successive Israeli governments, Labour and Likud alike, built and expanded the occupation and the settlements after 1967. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, worked for years to prevent a Palestinian state and led the war on Gaza. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for him and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes, alongside a warrant for Hamas commander Mohammed Deif.
The United States has supplied the weapons and the diplomatic cover, using its Security Council veto again and again. Without that backing, the occupation and the Gaza war could not have continued on this scale.
Arab rulers used Palestine as a slogan and failed it in practice. Jordan annexed the West Bank and fought Palestinians in 1970; Egypt held Gaza without granting it freedom; Gulf states normalised ties and kept trading during the Gaza war. Their silence did not cause the suffering, but it allowed it to continue unchallenged.
Palestinian leaders also failed their people at key moments. Hajj Amin al-Husseini's wartime alliance with Nazi Germany handed their enemies a propaganda gift. Later leaders were divided, sometimes corrupt, and the Fatah-Hamas split since 2007 has weakened the national cause. Hamas's 7 October attack killed civilians and gave Israel the pretext for a catastrophe.
These responsibilities are not equal. The people with armies, states and superpower support carry the heaviest burden. But naming all of them is what separates an honest account from propaganda.
What the other side argues
An honest piece should state the strongest counter-case. Israelis and their supporters point to the Jewish people's ancient ties to the land and argue that, after centuries of persecution and the Holocaust, Jews needed a state of their own. They note that Zionist leaders accepted the 1947 partition plan while Arab leaders rejected it and Arab armies invaded. Many Israeli historians argue that much of the 1948 exodus was flight in wartime rather than planned expulsion. And they point out that roughly 800,000 Jews left or were driven out of Arab countries after 1948, mostly settling in Israel. Readers should weigh these arguments against the record above.
Conclusion
Palestine was a real country with real people: farmers who pressed olive oil, merchants who shipped oranges to Liverpool, editors who argued in print, and Muslim, Christian and Jewish neighbours who shared feasts. That society was not defeated because it was backward. It was defeated because a great power promised it away, a determined movement took it, and the world, including much of the Arab world, accepted the result.
The Palestinian story is not only one of loss. It is also one of memory and persistence. Refugees still keep the keys to houses in Jaffa and Haifa. Their grandchildren still embroider village patterns into dresses. Telling this history honestly, without myths and without excuses for anyone, is the first step toward any justice worth the name.