It is not just Mark Twain, but every traveler who visited the area. Were they all dreaming?
In fact here are quotes from the official British report to the League of Nations in 1921 no friend of the Jews [link|http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/herbert.html|An Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine to the League of Nations, June 1921]

"... It is obvious to every passing traveller, and well-known to every European resident, that the country was before the War, and is now, undeveloped and under-populated.
...
The Jewish element ... They developed the culture of oranges and gave importance to the Jaffa orange trade. They cultivated the vine, and manufactured and exported wine. They drained swamps. They planted eucalyptus trees. They practised, with modern methods, all the processes of agriculture. There are at the present time 64 of these settlements, large and small, with a population of some 15,000. Every traveller in Palestine who visits them is impressed by the contrast between these pleasant villages, with the beautiful stretches of prosperous cultivation about them and the primitive conditions of life and work by which they are surrounded. "

Also see [link|http://www.israelaustin.com/israelnow/news2003/3february2003a.asp|here]

"Palestine was described by travelers as a desolate empty, ruined land. Thomas Shaw (1738), Volney (1783, 1784, 1785), James Finn (1878), Alphonse de Lamartine (1835) and Mark Twain (1867) all wrote about it with horror.

Volney described the "ruined" and desolate" country and estimated the total population of the much larger area he saw as no more than 50,000 to 100,000.

Lamartine wrote:

"Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw Indeed no living object, heard no living object, heard no living sound, we found the same void the same silence\ufffdas we should have expected before the entombed gates of Pompeli or Herculaneam\ufffda complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways in the country\ufffdthe tomb of a whole people."(Recollections of the East, vol. 1, pp. 268, 308, London, 1815).

see [link|http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~peters/depopulated.html|here] as well:

"Even the British consul in 1857 that "The country is in considerable degree empty... and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population..."

In the 1860s, it was reported that "depopulation is even now advancing." At the same time, H. B. Tristram noted in his journal that The north and south [of the Sharon plain] land is going out of cultivation and whole villages are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages there have been thus erased from the map [by the Bedouin] and the stationary population extirpated.

Many writers, such as the Reverend Samuel Manning, mourned the atrophy of the coastal plain, the Sharon Plain, "the exquisite fertility and beauty of which made it to the Hebrew mind a symbol of prosperity."
But where were the inhabitants? This fertile plain, which might support an immense population, is almost a solitude.... Day by day we were to learn afresh the lesson now forced upon us, that the denunciations of ancient prophecy have been fulfilled to the very letter -- "the land is left void and desolate and without inhabitants." 29

Report followed depressing report, as the economist-historian Professor Fred Gottheil pointed out: "a desolate country"; 30 "wretched desolation and neglect";31 "almost abandoned now"32 "unoccupied";33 "uninhabited";34 "thinly populated."35


In a book called Heth and Moab, Colonel C. R. Conder pronounced the Palestine of the 1880s "a ruined land." According to Conder,
so far as the Arab race is concerned, it appears to be decreasing rather than otherwise.36 Conder had also visited Palestine earlier, in 1872, and he commented on the continuing population decline within the nine or ten-year interim between his visits:
The Peasantry who are the backbone of the population, have diminished most sadly in numbers and wealth.37 Pierre Loti, the noted French writer, wrote in 1895 of his visit to the land: "I traveled through sad Galilee in the spring, and I found it silent. . . ." In the vicinity of the Biblical Mount Gilboa, "As elsewhere, as everywhere in Palestine, city and palaces have returned to the dust; This melancholy of abandonment, weighs on all the Holy Land." 38

David Landes summarized the causes of the shriveling number of inhabitants:
As a result of centuries of Turkish neglect and misrule, following on the earlier ravages of successive conquerors, the land had been given over to sand, marsh, the anopheles mosquito, clan feuds, and Bedouin marauders. A population of several millions had shrunk to less than one tenth that number-perhaps a quarter of a million around 1800, and 300,000 at mid-century.39

Palestine had indeed become "sackcloth and ashes."

At the end of the nineteenth century, despite the claims of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees to ancestral rights, the total Arab population of the entire Holy Land was no more than 300,000 a number less than half of those who are presently citizens of Israel!

An increase in Arab population began to take place at the beginning of the twentieth century. The influx of Arabs was a direct consequence of the activity of the Zionists who began to settle into and develop the land in the 1880's. The Jewish pioneers bought up swampy, desolate or desert land and proceeded under horrendous difficulties to restore it to productivity. The increase in the Arab population was directly proportional to the Zionist\ufffds success in their endeavor " to make the swamps fruitful and the desert bloom."

New employment opportunities brought Arabs from Syria, Egypt, and even Saudi Arabia all underdeveloped lands. Thus, a major proportion of the 1948 Arab population of Israel is attributable to the backbreaking endeavors of the Zionists.

British government statistics substantiate the dramatic increase of Arab population in the new Jewish areas, an increase in sharp contrast to the relatively static number of Arabs in the non-Jewish areas,

In addition, the population statistics between 1893 and 1948 regarding the Arab presence are deceiving. All non-Jews are registered in one category and Jews in another. Thus Christians, Pagans, and Jews who did not declare their religion are registered as Arab! The Jewish population just prior to World War I nonetheless numbered in the skewed census as 85,000.

The population of the walled city of Jerusalem in 1900 was about 40,000. 8250 Christians, 12250 moslems, and 20,000 Jews. Source of information "The University Encycolopedia" copyright 1902 by "P.F. Collier." So much for the myth of historically Arab East Jerusalem.

Do you really expect me to believe a word that Edward Said says, Edward Said is a liar. For years he retailed in print the story of his Jerusalem childhood and his family's cruel eviction at the hands of Zionists. The truth is that he grew up in Cairo. Said's fairy tale about his "beautiful Jerusalem house" is only the most trivial of the many carefully constructed lies peddled by Edward Said to advance Palestinian political ends.