Modern Jewish Migration to Palestine

Back in June, I wrote a piece debunking the surprisingly widely held but totally false idea that most of today’s Palestinians are actually descendants of Arabs who immigrated from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Instead, citing NonZionism’s piece on this subject, the main reason the Palestinians were in a stronger position demographically prior to 1948 is that Zionism was relatively unsuccessful in attracting Jews to Palestine. In 1900, the non-Jewish population of Palestine was around 550,000. At that time, the global Jewish population was around 8,000,000. Had just one fifth of the world’s Jews made aliyah, he notes, there would have been a 75% Jewish majority like that of today’s Israel. Instead, relatively few Jews came, with most preferring the United States, and Arab growth outpaced Jewish migration, resulting in a two-thirds Arab majority as the Mandate ended, setting the stage for the events of 1948.

In response, some argued that one of the main reasons for this disparity were restrictions on Zionist immigration. This is an important issue, so I thought I’d provide an overview of the obstacles faced by the Zionist movement in bringing Jews to Palestine throughout the Ottoman and the British Mandate periods and why they don’t explain how the Palestinians won the demographic battle before 1948.

The start of modern Zionist migration is usually dated to the First Aliyah between 1882 and 1903. Alarmed by this development, the Ottoman government sought to oppose organized Jewish settlement, not out of solidarity with the Palestinians but because they were worried about the “contagious effects” of nationalist sentiment among Jews across the empire. So in June-July 1882 they passed a decree banning Jewish immigration into the empire altogether, before changing it to only apply to Palestine. Jewish visitors were limited to 90-day stays and were required to post bonds, although this generally didn’t apply for casual travellers or tourists, and American diplomatic correspondence from this time shows the U.S. negotiating these requirements for its own citizens. In 1893, the Ottomans extended these restrictions further, prohibiting all Jews, even those already living in Palestine for generations, from purchasing land in Palestine.

In practice, though, these measures were mostly ineffective. Enforcement was inconsistent, officials could be bribed, and the Zionist movement made land purchases using third parties, fictitious Ottoman citizenship, and other workarounds (there are some similarities here to how the settlement movement operates today). The Jewish population still grew from around 9,500 in 1881 to about 85,000 by 1914. The restrictions slowed immigration and made it more complicated but did nothing to stop it, and there is no evidence that they prohibited Jews from immigrating if they wanted to.