In Mark Twain's book "Innocents Abroad" he travel through the Holy Land and observes that it is dry, inhospitable and nearly empty. That was 1867, many years after Adriaan Reland observed similar things, although Reland was more of an accurate historian than Twain, and entertaining curmudgeon.

The Arabs started the modern push to flood the Holy Land with their people after Balfour declared that a Jewish State would be carved out of Ottoman-occupied territory, around 1917.