What year did the Arabs take Jerusalem?

Answer 1

This question misunderstands how the Arabs "came" to the Land of Israel. They did not arrive; the indigenous people became Arabs. The Pre-Arab ancestors became Arabs almost uniformly (accept for the Jews and some Christians) by around 1200 C.E. Prior to this there were still groups that retained Byzantine identities, Phoenician identities, Samaritan identities, and so forth.

In terms of the population growth of the Arab population in late Ottoman Palestine and Mandatory Palestine, while there are some right-wing Israeli views that this was due to migrations from Arab countries to perform jobs provided by the Jewish improvement of the economy, the dominant scholarship is that the increases in sanitation and development led to the population increase.

Arabs, Turks, Magyars (Hungarians), and numerous other ethnic groups are not actually homogenous. They are composed of two historical groups that intermarried and created a unified culture. In the Arab case, Arab nomads from Arabia conquered the Levant region and brought it under their rule. During that period, those Levantines who converted to Islam began to take on the same mannerisms as the foreign Arabs who had conquered them. They began to speak the same language, dress in the same clothes, and believe in the same general ideologies. This process is well-documented by Arabs and is called Arabization or Ta3arib (تعريب). This is why the Jews and the Christians of the Upper Middle East (the Levant and Mesopotamia) often do not consider themselves Arabs. Unlike their Levantine brothers whose conversion to Islam made them more susceptible to Arabization, they retained their pre-Arabized ethnic sensibility. Therefore, although Palestinians call themselves Arabs, the majority do not and should not have lineages that go back to Arabia, but to pre-Arab ancestors in the Levant region, likely Jews, Christians, and Pagans in the Byzantine Empire.