Free A Durable Peace by Benjamin Netanyahu Page A

condition of the country that is completely different from the one the Arabs
offer today. As early as 1697, Henry Maundrell wrote that Nazareth was “an inconsiderable village,” that Nablus consisted
of two streets, that Jericho had become a “poor nasty village,” that the fortress city of Acre was “nothing here but a vast
and spacious ruin.” 50 In 1738, English archaeologist Thomas Shaw wrote of a land of “barrenness and scarcity… from the want of inhabitants.” 51 In 1785, Constantine François Volney described the “ruined” and “desolate” state of the country:
    [W]e with difficulty recognize Jerusalem….[The population] is supposed to amount to twelve to fourteen thousand…. The second
place deserving notice is Bait-el-labm, or Bethlehem…. [A] s is the case everywhere else, cultivation is wanting. They reckon
about six hundred men in this village capable of bearing arms…. The third and last place of note is Habroun, or Hebron, the
most powerful village in all this quarter, and… able to arm eight or nine hundred men. 52
    Yet in 1843, Alexander Keith wrote that “in his [Volney’s] day, the land had not fully reached its last prophetic degree of
desolation and depopulation.” 53
    In 1816, J. S. Buckingham had described Jaffa as “a poor village,” and Ramleh as a place “where, as throughout the greater
portion of Palestine, the ruined portion seemed more extensive than that which was inhabited.” 54 By 1835, the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine gave this description:
    Outside the gates of Jerusalem, we saw indeed no living object, heard no living sound. We found the same void, the same silence
as we should have found before the entombed gates of Pompeii or Herculaneum…. a complete, eternal silence reigns in the town,
in the highways, in the country… The tomb of a whole people. 55
    And in 1857, the British consul in Palestine, James Finn, reported back to England, “The country is in a considerable degree
empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.” 56
    Perhaps the most famous traveler to the Holy Land was Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867 and wrote of his experiences
in
The Innocents Abroad:
    Stirring senses… occur in this [Jezreel] valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for
thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation.
One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.
    For dreary solitude, Twain recommended the Galilee:
    These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines… ; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under six funereal palms…. A desolation
is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action…. We reached [Mount] Tabor safely…. We never saw
a human being on the whole route.
    In “the barren mountains of Judea,” as he called them, he found more of the same:
    Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago….[Bethlehem,]
the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang, “Peace on earth, good will
to men,” is untenanted by any living creature.
    And around Jerusalem:
    The further we went… the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became. There could not have been more fragments
of stone… if every ten square feet of the land had been occupied by a separate and distinct stone-cutter’s establishment for
an age. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil,
had almost deserted the country…. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur,
and become a