Dear Melanie Phillips, I am a historian of Palestine, specializing on the period of this tweet. Almost everything you wrote is fiction. Let's review. Melanie: “When organized Jewish colonization began in 1882, there were fewer than 150,000 Arabs in the land." Reality: There were 500,000. The authoritative source on population of late Ottoman Palestine is Justin McCarthy's The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (Columbia University Press, 1990). The population of Palestine in 1882 was at a minimum 468,089 people (ibid, p.10, see screenshot). This undercounted Bedouins and nomads. The actual figure is probably more like 500,000. degruyterbrill.com/document/… Melanie: "The Arab population was small and limited until Jewish resettlement restored the barren lands and drew Arabs to it from neighboring countries .... The great majority of the Arab population in recent decades were comparative newcomers—either late immigrants or descendants of persons who had immigrated into Palestine in the previous 70 years”: Reality: The book that makes a version of this argument is Joan Peter's From Time Immemorial. Turns out Peters invented data, fabricated statistics. The whole book is a fraud. Thoroughly debunked by Norman Finkelstein, Yehoshua Porath and others. Citing this book is the equivalent of citing a scientific paper arguing the world is flat. 0 historians believe that "a great majority of the Arab population... were... newcomers". You are just outing yourself as historically illiterate. Melanie: “The Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied …”Winston Churchill, 1939. Reality: Alas, a quote from a British imperialist who visited Palestine once in 1921 and whose knowledge of migation patters in the Arab East in the 1920s and 1930s rounded down to 0. Melanie: "People used to come from all over the Middle East to work in Jaffa and the whole of Palestine. From Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Hijaj, Marrakesh, from everywhere. Tens of thousands of workers”: Reality: Regional migration was not uncommon, before, during and after Zionist immigration. Palestinians went to Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, Egyptians and Syrians came to Palestine. But, as the quote indicates, we are talking thousands, possibly tens of thousands. In the 1920s-1930s, the population of Palestine went from 750K-1.5M. Indeed, there were thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of people, who migrated to and from Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt during this period. Perhaps a few percentage points of the population were migrants!?! Melanie, you have essentially undermined your entire argument by quoting "tens of thousands" out of a population of a million. You are saying the migrant population was somewhere between 1-10%. That's the point I'm making too! Melanie: Encyclopaedia Britannia 1911 listed more than fifty languages being spoken in Palestine including Czech, Finnish, Hindustani, Hebrew, Arabic, Dutch, Kurdish, Russian, Serbian, Syrian and Turkish. Reality: Indeed, 90% of Palestine spoke Arabic in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. There were also many internationals based in Palestine for a wide range of reasons. We are talking about a few thousand people out of 600,000+ on the eve of WWI. Another stunning revelation by Melanie. Melanie: “‘In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race. UK government handbook 1920." Reality: A British colonial official went around Gaza and the rest of Palestine and surveyed the native population to understand their ancestral origins. I'm joking. They didn't do that. They just pulled this observation out of their ass and presented it as fact. Or maybe they read that in a book of another Orientalist, who himself made it up. Serious historians cite these anecdotes as reflections of how British imperialist imagined natives, rather than as accurate scientific facts about the racial composition of the natives. Melanie once against outs herself as historically illiterate. Melanie: "Between 1922 and 1946 the Arab population of Palestine increased by 118 per cent. Roosevelt concluded in 1939 that “Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during the whole period”. Your ignorance is painful." Reality: Pure fiction. Between 1922-1938, about 300,000 Jews moved to Palestine. There is 0 evidence to believe "vastly more" than 300,000 Arabs migrated to Palestine during the Mandate period. As we already said, 0 historians believe that, because there is 0 evidence to believe. That's why you didn't cite any (not fraudulent) historians, because there aren't any. There simply was no mass migration of hundreds of thousands of Arabs into Palestine, that's just a Zionist fantasy to write into history a land that was empty. All of this is further undermined by the fact that a breakthrough 2020 study found that Palestinians derive 81 to 87 per cent of their ancestry from Bronze Age Levantines. researchgate.net/publication… In other words, the modern Palestinian people have been living in Palestine, by and large, for literally millenia. Thank you for your attention to this matter.