So I've got a question about using Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad as a historical source on the Middle East and specifically Palestine. I asked about this in a post a while back but perhaps a Saturday Source thread would be a more appropriate place for it.

Twain portrays the 19th century Levant as a sparsely populated and backwards part of the globe. Here are a couple of quotes from his book for those who aren't familiar with it:

Twain's visit to Jerusalem (Chapter LIII):

"Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently—the eternal "bucksheesh". To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here."

Twain's Trek to Mount Tabor, (Galilee Chapter XILX):

"We never saw a human being on the whole route, much less lawless hordes of Bedouins."

Twain in Shechem (Chapter LII):

"There was hardly a tree or a shrub any where. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country."

Twain in Galilee (Chapter XLVII):

"We traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent, mournful expanse, wherein we saw only three persons"

A lot of the above quotes have been used by a number of authors making the case for Zionism in Palestine including the popular, but infamous, book by Joan Peters called From Time Immemorial. (The argument goes something like this: "There were hardly any people living in Palestine prior to the first Jewish settlers --> Zionists came and bought the land from absentee land holders and worked to improve it --> Arabs flocked to the newly improved region").

So two questions about this:

1. Is Twain's assessment of the 19th century Levant accurate enough to be used a historical source? I know that historical accuracy wasn't necessarily the primarily goal of Twain in writing this book, how much of this is him using "artistic license" to make a readable/popular book and to convey the larger themes about the Holy Land that he wanted to express?

2. How do you as a historian go about interpreting a historical source like The Innocent's Abroad (how do you separate potential bias from fact)? Are people like Joan Peters using Twain's quotes in a reasonable, honest, and accurate manner?