the whole of Palestine, was full of Arab immigrants, many of them descendants of Ibrahim Pasha’s army, who had conquered the country on behalf of Muhammad Ali, the Khedive of Egypt, in the 1830s. After the conquest was complete in 1841, many of the military families were settled in Palestine. The majority were native Egyptian but there were also Maghrebi Arabs from Algeria and Morocco, Circassians and Bosnians. At the same time, there was some immigration from Syria and Lebanon, including Druze and Christians. The assumption that, before the arrival of Jews in the nineteenth century, Arab
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