The map is based on the utterly risible notion that any land not owned by Jews before 1948 must – de facto – be owned by Palestinian Arabs. Why? Because (obviously!), the autocratic Ottoman Turkish rulers of the region played by the same rules as modern western democracies do today.

Upon such nonsensical idiocies are many of the erroneous assumptions about the Israeli-Arab issue built. As described here and here, only a tiny percentage of the land was privately owned by anyone in the true western sense of the word and the Ottoman state arrogated to itself ownership of the vast vast bulk of the land area. It also arrogated to itself the right to impose pretty much any level of taxation on pretty much anyone with the consequences described below.

The guy who writes the IsraellyCool online column recently uncovered a fascinating New York Times article from 1880 describing conditions at the time in what is now modern Israel. Unsurprisingly – in a region where there was little real sense of private ownership of a holding – what emerges is a story of appalling mismanagement and neglect by the Ottoman Turkish rulers.

It’s a dirt poor country and in a state of utter desolation. The forests are rapidly disappearing and not being replaced. There is literally not one road in the entire country; the best “thoroughfare” being a mud track between Jaffa and Jerusalem. The few people who live there do so in a state of absolute poverty in mud hovels with barely enough clothes to clothe themselves.