Edited sentence: In the middle of the nineteenth century, the estimated population for the whole of Palestine was between 50,000 and 100,000 people.It was the gaping emptiness of the country, the spectacle of ravages and neglect, the absence of a population that might be dispossessed and the growing sense of the country's having "waited" for the "return of her banished children," that lent force and practical meaning to the awakening Christian realisation that the time had come for Jewish restoration.Katz does not deny the existence of some Arab population but brings evidence that the country was mostly desolate.. In 1785, there were no more than 200,000 people in the country.Since the general population was small, Katz is trying to show the significance of the Jewish continuous presence in spite of the general desolation.They point out that Katz bases his work on variety of sources and references, pagan and Christian, Jewish and Moslem.With this in mind, Katz details the history of the Jewish people in Palestine, the people that was "not there".Writers and journalists such as Moshe Shamir, Yishayahu Ben Porat answer to critics