An English clergyman, the Reverend W. M. Christie, who lived in Haifa in the early twentieth century, noted:
They constitute the most fanatical section of the Palestine population.
To a great extent without education, they are ready to accept any statement concerning things done to the detriment of Islam, and to act without sense of responsibility....
In 1889, we often heard it remarked that the 10,000 Moslems living in a state of barbarism in the Moghrabiyeh quarter were a real danger to the city. In the recent massacres [of Jews] in Safed, it was this party that carried through the nefarious work.
[T]he settlement of sections of Yemenite and Kaisite Arabs in Nazareth and Cana of Galilee, [as well as] representatives of the Moslem rulers settled in the larger towns -- Jerusalem, Hebron, Nablus, Jenin, Nazareth, and Acre. These are probably represented today by the Effendi class, who claim, without genealogical proof, however, to be the descendants of the conquerors.
[When the great twelfth-century jihad warrior Saladin] was hard pressed by the Crusaders, he begged help from Persia, and in response there came 150,000 Persian Moslems, who ultimately received for services rendered lands in Upper Galilee and in the Sidon district.
Other Arabic-speaking settlers have come from various places outside of Palestine proper.
There remains the 'Arab' peasantry, or villagers. Every evidence points to their being Arabs only in the matter of language. They have much less Arabic blood than any of the sections of the people already named...
At the turn of the [twentieth] century there were 40,000 Jews in Palestine and about 140,000 others of all complexions. The inhabitants had no other feeling for this pauperized, disease-ridden country than a fervent desire to get away from it. Emigration proceeded steadily. Immigration was virtually non-existent. Not until the Zionists had arrived in numbers did the Arab population begin to augment itself. The introduction of European standards of wage and life acted like a magnet on the entire Near East. Abruptly Palestine became an Arab center of attraction. By 1922, after a quarter century of Jewish colonization, their numbers mushroomed to 488,000. Today they are over a million....
It is precisely in the vicinity of these Jewish villages that Arab development is most marked. Arab Haifa, profiting by the Zionist boom, grew from 1922 to 1936 by 130%, Jaffa by 80%, and Jerusalem by 55%. The Arab rural settlement in the Tel Aviv district increased by over 135%. The all-Arab city of Nablus, which held 33,000 before the war, has fallen to less than 12,000. Safed which had 20,000, dropped to less than 9,000.