When Mark Twain visited the Land of Israel in 1867 under Ottoman rule, he did not describe some booming, densely populated Arab state that Jews later โcolonized.โ He described a neglected and desolate land.
In The Innocents Abroad, Twain wrote about empty valleys, uncultivated fields, swamps, ruins, and long stretches of land with barely any people at all. He famously described parts of the land as โdesolateโ and โunpeopled.โ
That does not mean nobody lived there. Arabs, Jews, Christians, Druze, and others were living throughout the land. But Twainโs firsthand observations completely contradict the modern revisionist fantasy that the land was a thriving Palestinian national society before Zionism.
Jerusalem itself had only around 15,000 people at the time, and Jews were already the largest demographic group in the city. Much of the land was poor, undeveloped, malaria-ridden, and economically stagnant after centuries of Ottoman neglect.
The transformation came later. Jewish pioneers drained swamps, fought malaria and typhus, built farms, roads, universities, hospitals, ports, industries, and entire cities from the ground up, turning a neglected province into one of the most advanced and innovative countries in the world.
People ignore Twainโs testimony because it destroys the simplistic colonial narrative they try to force onto Jewish history.