Jaffa Palestine
Population 80,000 (120,000 counting nearby associated towns and villages)
...Zionist forces initiated a cruel siege on the city of Jaffa in March 1948. The youth of the city formed popular resistance committees to confront the assault. On 14 May 1948, the Bride of the Sea fell to the Zionist military forces; that same evening the leaders of the Zionist movement in Palestine declared the establishment of the state of Israel. Approximately 4,000 of the 120,000 Palestinians managed to remain in their city after it was militarily occupied. They were all rounded up and ghettoized in al-Ajami neighborhood which was sealed off from the rest of the city and administered as essentially a military prison for two subsequent years; the military regime under which Israel governed them lasted until 1966. During this period, al-Ajami was completely surrounded by barbed wire fencing that was patrolled by Israeli soldiers and guard dogs. It was not long before the new Jewish residents of Jaffa, and based on their experience under Nazism in Europe, began to refer to the Palestinian neighborhood as the “ghetto.”
In addition to being ghettoized, the Palestinians who remained in Jaffa had lost everything overnight: their city, their friends, their families, their property and their entire physical and social environment. Most had lost their homes as the Israeli military forced them into al-Ajami. Legislator, judge and executioner in the Ajami ghetto was the military commander; without his permission one could not enter or leave the ghetto, and rights to things like education and work were among those rights that Palestinians were denied. Arab states were classified as enemy states, and so making contact with the expelled family and friends, the refugees, was strictly prohibited. This was the nightmare lived by the Palestinians of Jaffa after the 1948 Nakba.
Jaffa: from eminence to ethnic cleansing | The Electronic Intifada
eao: The propaganda video in the OP claims that author Mark Twain's described Palestine as desolate which isn't entirely true. Twain wrote that description of Palestine's desert areas to contrast it with the Palestine's arable land which he described as:
The narrow canon in which Nablous, or Shechem, is situated, is under high cultivation, and the soil is exceedingly black and fertile. It is well watered, and its affluent vegetation gains effect by contrast with the barren hills that tower on either side"..."Sometimes, in the glens, we came upon luxuriant orchards of figs, apricots, pomegranates, and such things, but oftener the scenery was rugged, mountainous, verdureless and forbidding" "We came finally to the noble grove of orange-trees in which the Oriental city of Jaffa lies buried" "Small shreds and patches of it must be very beautiful in the full flush of spring, however, and all the more beautiful by contrast with the far-reaching desolation that surrounds them on every side"
Demographics of Palestine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Other 19th century descriptions of Palestine:
Bayard Taylor who wrote of the Jezreel Valley in 1852 "..
one of the richest districts in the world"..."The soil is a dark-brown loam, and, without manure, produces annually superb crops of wheat and barley." [17] Laurence Oliphant wrote in 1887, again of the Valley of Jezreel "..
a huge green lake of waving wheat, with its village-crowned mounds rising from it like islands ... it presents one of the most striking pictures of luxuriant fertility which it is possible to conceive"[18]
Mason Martin, an American author who spent sixteen years as an ****yst for the CIA, was critical of attempts to use Twain's humorous writing as a literal description of Palestine at that time. She writes that "Twain's descriptions are high in Israeli government press handouts that present a case for Israel's redemption of a land that had previously been empty and barren. His gross characterizations of the land and the people in the time before mass Jewish immigration are also often used by US propagandists for Israel."
(same link as above)
In 1920, the League of Nations' Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine stated that there were nearly 700,000 people living in Palestine:
There are now in the whole of Palestine nearly 700,000 people...Of these 235,000 live in the larger towns, 465,000 in the smaller towns and villages. Four-fifths of the whole population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race. Some 77,000 of the population are Christians, in large majority belonging to the Orthodox Church, and speaking Arabic. The minority are members of the Latin or of the Uniate Greek Catholic Church, or--a small number--are Protestants. The Jewish...population numbers 76,000. Almost all have entered Palestine during the last 40 years. Prior to 1850 there were in the country only a handful of Jews. ...
By 1948, the population had risen to 1,900,000, of whom 68% were Arabs, and
32% were Jews (UNSCOP report, including bedouin).
eao: 32% Jewish and that's after 20 years of Jewish emigration from Europe, fleeing Nazi horrors for the relative safety of Palestine. The UN partition Palestine and gave 32% of the people 55% of Palestine, including nearly all the arable land and control of the water, leaving the other 68% of the population only 45% of the land, (most of that was the desert areas described by Mark Twain) and little to no access to water... which is kind of important when the UN awards your home and property in a fertile valley to a Jewish refugee from Europe and tells you to go live in a tent in the desert.