CHAPTER FOUR

       The Palestinian Economy

      After World War II, when the surviving Jews of Europe fled to Palestine and what became the state of Israel, there was still no self-conscious Palestinian nation, no Arab industrial base, and virtually no exports other than oil. The Jews were not occupying a nation; they were building one.

      Many people imagine that this new and larger influx of Jewish settlers after World War II perpetrated an injustice on the Arabs. But these Jews continued the heroic and ingenious pattern of development depicted in 1939 by Lowdermilk and imparted the same massive benefits to the Palestinian Arabs.

      With the Arab population growing apace with the Jewish population in most neighborhoods, and, indeed, even faster in some, no significant displacement could possibly have occurred. The numbers discredit as simply mythological or mendacious all the literature of Palestinian grievance and eviction invented by the likes of Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Rashid Khalidi and scores of other divas of the naqba narrative. What took place, in fact, was the reclamation and enrichment of the land, and, as a consequence, a massive Arab migration to inhabit that land.

      By 1948, the Arab population in the Mandate area had grown to some 1.35 million, up 6 0 percent since the 1930s, and up by a factor of seven since the arrival of the first creative cohort of Jews from Russia and what was then The Ukraine in the 1880s. Mostly concentrated in neighborhoods abutting the Zionist settlements, this Arab population was the largest in the history of Palestine. Only invasion by five Arab armies – and a desperate, courageous Israeli self-defense – drove out many of the Arabs, some 700,000. These Palestinian Arabs were chiefly evicted or urged to flee by their own Arab leaders in 1948 in a war that the Jews neither sought nor initiated. But the war’s outcome inflicted no demographically perceptible hardship on the Palestinian Arabs. The creation of the state of Israel and the success of its thriving economy only served to accelerate Arab immigration into the area. Today Israel, Gaza and the West Bank accommodate some 5.5 million Arabs, with a population density ten times that of Jordan.