LIKE SPOTS ON A LEOPARD, CHANGE IS RARE

Unfortunately, the same general observation holds true today. Note the comments below, taken from T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, for what light he sheds on the area in 1916 and 1917. For all his fascination with the nomadic peoples, Lawrence, in his own words, remained a proud and obedient English officer.

He had not much positive to say of the Palestinian farmers who lived side by side with German Jewish farmers who had begun to settle in the previous two decades.

"A fifth section in the latitude of Jerusalem would have begun with Germans and with German Jews, speaking German or German-Yiddish, more intractable even than the Jews of the Roman era, unable to bear contact with others not of their race, some of them farmers, most of them shopkeepers. Around them glowered their enemies, the sullen Palestinian peasants, more stupid than the yeoman on North Syria, material as the Egyptians, and bankrupt."