The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate.

• Author: Khalidi, Rashid

Of the many issues relating to Palestine which are subjects of contention, few have been more salient than that of population. Whether it was a question of the growth in the Jewish population of the country via immigration, or the growth and later the diminution of the Arab population, these were matters of abiding interest to all concerned from the outset of the conflict between the Zionist movement and the indigenous population. Throughout the Mandate period, the population balance between Arabs and Jews was a constant focus of attention, as it shifted from roughly 92:8 to 67:33. Thereafter, the climactic events of 1947-49 transformed Palestine from a country with a population of about 1.3 million Arabs and 600,000 Jews into one with under a million Palestinians, over a third of them destitute refugees, and over one million Israelis, a third of them recent immigrants. Given this background of massive and rapid shifts in population, and the political ramifications of the numbers concerned, questions of Palestinian demography have understandably often been highly charged ones.

Among the many vexed problems in this area have been those involving the population of Palestine during the Ottoman era and up to the beginning of the British Mandate, when the first actual census was taken, and it is generally assumed that accurate population counts became available. Justin McCarthy's book first tackles head-on the difficult task of utilizing and explaining Ottoman statistics, showing that they can in fact be used to great effect if properly handled and interpreted. He.then analyzes and coffects the Mandate statistics based on the censuses of 1922 and 1931. In the process, he gives us what will very likely stand as the definitive work on the demography of Palestine before 1948.

McCarthy arrives at a number of significant conclusions. The first is based on his unexceptionable statement (p. 5) that "it has repeatedly been demonstrated that the only ones who can properly evaluate population numbers are those who actually count the population." Having shown that the Ottoman state did engage in a careful and systematic registration of its population for purposes of taxation and conscription, and that it is possible to correct for undercounts of women and children, which were common in the region, he concludes (p. 5): "For the Ottoman Empire, it has been shown that no population statistics but those of the Ottoman government provide usable demographic...