LOcATING THe ZIONIST-ARAB eNcOUNTeR • 31immigrated to palestine. as John efron and others have shown, iden-
tifying the Jews as a race was useful for the purposes of establishing
the Jews as a distinct nation (at a time when the terms and concepts
of “nation” and “race” were often used interchangeably). In the course
of this book, we will see the implications of european race- thinking
not only on Jewish self- perception but also on Zionists’ perceptions of
others, especially the arabs of palestine.^59
Palestine’s PopulationHaving placed al- Khalidi and Ben- Yehuda’s Jerusalem in its Palestin-
ian, Middle eastern, Ottoman, and transnational contexts, we must
now turn to the question of who was living in palestine during this
Late Ottoman period. For a variety of reasons both methodological
and political, Palestine’s historical demographics are hotly contested.^60
First, though the Ottomans registered their populations, primarily for
the purposes of taxation and conscription, non- Ottoman subjects were
excluded as they provided neither taxes nor conscripts.^61 Because the
large majority of immigrant Jews from europe chose to retain their eu-
ropean citizenship or subject status, so as to benefit from the legal and
tax advantages of the Capitulations^62 and to avoid the Ottoman mili-
tary draft, Ottoman records are not terribly useful for gauging the size
of the Jewish immigrant population. Second, the Ottoman registers did
not count Bedouin as they too were considered irrelevant for taxation
and conscription. these records are thus imprecise for ascertaining the
number not only of Jews but also of arabs in palestine. third, given
the problems associated with the sources and thus the necessity for
estimation, the numbers scholars offer often indicate as much about
the scholar’s political inclinations vis- à- vis the Israeli- Palestinian con-
flict as they do about the number of residents of Palestine at any given
(^59) efron, Defenders of the Race; hart, Jews and Race; Falk, “Zionism and the Biology of
the Jews,” 587– 607.
(^60) For a discussion of the problems associated with demographic analysis in Ottoman
palestine, as well as an impressive attempt at engaging in such an analysis, see McCar-
thy, The Population of Palestine, especially 2– 5. the work that generated perhaps the most
controversy and debate on this question is peters, From Time Immemorial. See also Said
and hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims, 296. For an insightful discussion of the demo-
graphic ambiguities of Late Ottoman palestine, see Jacobson, From Empire to Empire, 3.
(^61) Mccarthy notes one exception: “Official statistics of resident noncitizens,” he ex-
plains, “were published only in 1895 (for the year 1893).” Mccarthy, The Population of
Palestine, 23.
(^62) On the Capitulations and the Jews, see Friedman, “the System of Capitulations and
Its effects on Turco- Jewish Relations in Palestine, 1856– 1897.”