Palestinian fellahin (peasants) viewed the land they cultivated as their birthright. They might not formally own it but that was somewhat beside the point. Landlordism had only really taken off in Palestine with the Ottoman Land Code of 1858. Many peasants failed to register their land under the new laws. They often couldn’t afford the registration fee or didn’t want their names on government documents for fear of conscription into the Ottoman army. In these cases the land was registered in the name of the local notable. The fellahin believed that this way they would hold onto ‘their’ land. Elsewhere the Ottoman government simply seized land claiming it was needed for security reasons or that it wasn’t being cultivated properly. Such land was then put up for sale and often bought by wealthy men from Beirut.
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| City of Bethlehem during the Ottoman Empire, 1880 |
The result was that many cultivators lost control of their land. The dispossessed ended up as sharecropping tenants on what had been their own land. When Zionist settlers purchased such land from the landlords, they evicted the fellahin. As early as 1883, peasants were attacking these new Jewish settlements. This affected not just the fellahin but also the nomadic Bedouin who were no longer able to graze their animals on what had been seen as common land. In response the Ottoman government often called out the army to remove peasants who had occupied their old lands or were refusing to leave. Such resistance continued into and throughout the entire period of British rule.
Peasant unrest pushed the local elite into protesting about Zionist immigration. Such protests were pretty feeble, and began to undermine the relationships between the notables and their followers. Many of these elite figures hoped that Palestine would be incorporated into Syria following the end of the war. When this didn’t happen, a distinctive Palestinian nationalism begins to develop.
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In reality none of the notables were able to play an effective role as a nationalist leadership. They were far too compromised. Some had good jobs in the colonial government. They couldn’t defend the peasants from the settlers who were evicting them from their land because it was they, the a’yan who were selling the land to the Zionists. Nor could they offer any political progress to their supporters, as the British were hostile to any democratic reforms that would relegate the Jewish settlers to a minority position. They were totally incapable of providing any serious leadership to ordinary Palestinians faced with the growing settler threat.
Colonial policies helped ruin the countryside. The drive to commercial agriculture, the encouragement of land sales to the settlers and the sheer greed of landlords wretched rural Palestine.
By 1930 some 30% of all Palestinian villagers were landless, while as many as 75% to 80% of the remainder didn’t have sufficient land to meet their needs. On top of this, colonial taxation policies hit Palestinian peasants far harder than the Jewish agricultural enterprises. Such taxes were of course used to pay for British rule and its support of the settlers.
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The impoverishment of the rural Palestinian population accelerated with the global depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash. This was made worse by the increasing number of settlers who arrived following Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in 1933 and the growth of an increasingly deadly anti-Semitism in Poland. Peasant indebtedness led to many selling their land to pay their debts. Simultaneously the big landlords made huge killings selling their estates to the Jewish National Fund.
The bankruptcy of the notables’ policies was therefore increasingly apparent: they had made no progress toward achieving national independence, and were incapable of stemming the Zionist tide of increasing population, land settlement and economic development.
In these circumstances the a’yan class themselves splintered. The Nashashibi family clan turned against the policies of the Arab Executive, dominated by the Husseini family. The Nashashibis called for compromise with the British and the settlers. This followed from their class interest: the Nashashibis were the wealthiest landowners, the largest citrus exporters and greatest sellers of land to the settlers.
