Did Arabs welcome Jews into Palestine?

Answer 1

Yes and No. The Druze and Bedouin Arabs welcomed the Jews into Palestine (the Bedouin more than the Druze initially) while the Palestinian Arabs (the majority) did not.

Druze and Bedouin Arabs did welcome the Jews into Mandatory Palestine. They developed mutual respect for each other. The Jews helped the Druze defend Nabi Shu'ayb, called the Tomb of Jethro, from Muslims who were intending to prevent the Druze from accessing their holy site. This act cemented the Jewish-Druze friendship. The Bedouins developed close relations to the Jewish Settlers since the Jews did not look down on them and offered them water and employment in agriculture. The friendship between the Jews and the Bedouins remains strong in Israel today.

The Palestinian Arabs were actually quite adamant about not giving the Jews any land or space as soon as it became clear in the late 1920s that the Jews intended and would soon realize their own state apparatus. They attacked the Jewish settlement in Hebron in 1929, scalping and beating many Jewish inhabitants. They organized militias to attack other Jewish settlements, they petitioned the British government to prevent Jewish Immigration (resulting in the White Papers of 1939 which banned Jewish immigration during the entire Holocaust when a place of refuge was most necessary), and consistently fought against Jewish Militias who were targeting the British colonizers instead of uniting to overthrow the British before trying to decide a resolution. The Palestinian Arabs did not support a two-state solution prior to 1967 and did not accede to the idea of a two-state solution until the Oslo Accords of 1993. Still to this day, the idea of a two-state solution (as a final solution) is relatively unpopular in Palestinian circles. The reason that Israel exists as a country is because of UN Resolution 181 and the Zionist Jews who used that resolution as the basis upon which to declare a country and defend it from military onslaught.