The number was in the paperThe official figure, printed all along · 1892 to 1975
1892 to 1975
The number was in the paper
While American papers were calling Palestine empty, barren and a desert waste, the same papers were printing the count. It came from consuls, censuses, parliaments and commissions, and it ran in every decade.
189250,000 Jews in PalestineMr. Merrill, United States Consul at Jerusalem · New York Herald
1919750,000 present inhabitantsClair Price dispatch · Deseret News. The San Antonio Express set the same sentence as 780,000.
1923757,182The census of three months ago · Associated Press, Madison Courier
1925the Arabs cultivate approximately 9,000,000 dunam; the Jews cultivate 850,000Lord Stanhope, answering Lord Raglan in the House of Lords · Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle
1927600,000 Arabs, 100,000 Jews, 40,000 ChristiansThe News Journal
1941the total population of Palestine is 1,525,000The legal adviser of the Jewish Agency · Buffalo Evening News
1947the Arab population is approximately 1,110,000Omaha Guide
1967in 1918, 90 per cent of the population of Palestine was ArabThe Arizona Republic
1975the Jewish population was less than 2 per cent of the totalKnoxville News-Sentinel, on the years when colonization was being planned
Nobody hid this. The figure was public, official and reprinted, and the empty country ran beside it for eighty years.
The 1925 line is the hardest. A British minister, asked in parliament how much of Palestine was available for Jewish settlement, said the Arabs were farming nine million dunam and that no more than half a million would be available in any case. A Milwaukee weekly printed it.