Per my book report, we find the entire union of Muslim and Arab peoples united as one over that old Byzantine province, that Jews should not come there. Most argued against the Europeans, NIMBY-ly enough; but some went so far as to offer even their own lands - just not Palaestina Prima. What's up with that?
Achcar lets his 1920s-era compatriots speak. And verily what the Arabs spake was: eff off, they're full. They saw al-Filistin(a) as pretty-much a desert which could just about support the farmers it was supporting, and not any more. The Arabs saw Jewish settlement there as zero-sum. By contrast they figured Syria and Morocco, and maybe Yemen, certainly Ethiopia as better options. (The Dominican Republic rather famously begged for more Jews whom they saw as a boon to the economy, but - Dominicans, not Arabs.)
I think, though, that what the Arabs said and what they were, deep down, thinking might not be entirely coterminous.
The Arabs knew that a Jewish majority in Palaestina especially if bolstered by European Jewry would make it a Judaea again. Such would constitute a rollback of the Arab/Muslim conquests. Such would slight the Arab honour and such would discredit the Islamic kerygma. And you know what? Reading some poasts Achcar himself has poasted over the years, I'm honestly not seeing that a lot of nonPalestinian Arabs really wanted all that many Jews in their lands, either.
The neoconservatives were saying just about ALL that over at least the last two decades and, well, sometimes even a neocon gets it right.
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