https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-desolation-of-palestine/
In the eighteenth century, an English traveler, Thomas Shaw, noted that Palestine was “lacking in people to till its fertile soil.”The French count Constantine François Volney, an eighteenth-century historian, called Palestine “ruined” and “desolate,” observing that “many parts” had “lost almost all their peasantry.” Volney complained that this desolation was unexpected, for the Ottoman imperial records listed larger populations, which led to tax collection efforts’ being frustrated. Of one area, Volney wrote: “Upwards of three thousand two hundred villages were reckoned, but, at present, the collector can scarcely find four hundred. Such of our merchants as have resided there twenty years have themselves seen the greater part of the environs…become depopulated. The traveller meets with nothing but houses in ruins, cisterns rendered useless, and fields abandoned. Those who cultivated them have fled.”
Another English traveler, James Silk Buckingham, visited Jaffa in 1816 and wrote that it had “all the appearances of a poor village, and every part of it that we saw was of corresponding meanness.” In Ramle, said Buckingham, “as throughout the greater part of Palestine, the ruined portion seemed more extensive than that which was inhabited.” Twenty-two years later, the British nobleman Alexander William Crawford Lindsay, Lord Lindsay, declared that “all Judea, except the hills of Hebron and the vales immediately about Jerusalem, is desolate and barren.”
In 1840, another traveler to Palestine praised the Syrians as a “fine spirited race of men,” but whose “population is on the decline.” He noted that the land between Hebron and Bethlehem was “now abandoned and desolate,” marked by “dilapidated towns.” Jerusalem was nothing more than “a large number of houses…in a dilapidated and ruinous state,” with “the masses…without any regular employment.”
In 1847, a U.S. Navy officer noted: “The population of Jaffa is now about 13,000, viz: Turks, 8000; Greeks, 2000; Armenians, 2000; Maronites, 700; and Jews, about 300.” Significantly, he counted no Arabs there at all.
