In 1945, columnist I.F. Stone (1907 – 1989) visited the Middle East where he took in all the bone-crushing poverty that was the lot of your average Egyptian. From there he traveled to British Palestine, where the Jewish refugees of Europe were arriving in droves – and as a result, the land was generating economic activity for the first time in two thousand years:
“…the Arab population showed the largest percentage of increase in areas of Jewish development. The Commission reported 186 percent increase in Arab population in Haifa, a 62 percent increase in Jaffa and a 37 percent increase in Jerusalem ‘while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of two percent’… I spoke frankly of what I had seen in Egypt and of my impressions in Palestine to a Reverend Haj I visited in an Arab village in the Emek. ‘Thirty years ago, before the Jews came’, the Haj informed me, ‘you would have seen villages in Palestine much like those of Egypt.'”
The image above represents those Arabs who chose to hitchhike to British Palestine in search of a better life.
