Neil Rogall on Palestinian landownership under Ottoman and British rule and rise of conflicted Palestinian leadership

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.

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

~ Neil Rogall, "The birth of Palestinian Resistance and the 1936 uprising," rs21, September 12, 2014

Mohsen Mohammad Saleh on pre-1948 land purchases by Jewish immigrants into Palestine

By the end of the Ottoman State in 1918, the Jews had acquired about 420 thousand dunams (or 1.5%) of the land of Palestine, which they bought mainly from Lebanese feudal landlords, most notably the families of Sursock, Tayyan, Tueni and Medawar, or from the Ottoman administration through public auction in which the lands of Palestinian peasants who are unable to pay their taxes are sold, or from some Palestinian landlords who belong to feudal families like the Ruk and Kassar families. These purchases covered 93% of the land the Jews acquired. In any case, the Zionist threat was not considered serious by the people of Palestine at that time, due to the small size of the Jewish settlement and population, and that the establishment of a Zionist entity under a Muslim state (the Ottoman State) was practically impossible.

When Palestine came under British occupation 1917–1948, it was clear that it came to implement the Zionist project, and establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine. It invested all the powers of colonial rule and oppression to impose this reality. The Palestinian national movement resisted Jewish settlement with all its political, media and protest means, fought many uprisings and had many confrontations. The total land the Zionist Jews were able to seize during British occupation was about 1.2 million dunam or only 4.5% of Palestine, and this was despite the British global capabilities, huge capital, and under the direct support of the oppressive occupation force. 

But wait! Most of these lands were not actually bought from the people of Palestine! Objective facts indicate that most of this land was leaked to the Jews, either through British government grants of Palestine’s miri lands “state lands,” or through major non-Palestinian feudal landlords, who resided abroad and were practically and officially prohibited from entering this region (under British occupation) to invest in their land if they really wanted to. 

The British authorities granted about 300 thousand dunams of miri lands to the Jews without charge, and 200 thousand dunams for a nominal fee. The first British High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel (1920–1925), who was a Zionist Jewish, granted 175 thousand dunams of the most fertile lands of the state, on the coast between Haifa and Caesarea, to the Jews. He also gave them massive grants of other coastal lands, and in the Negev, and on the Dead Sea coast.

There were huge feudal properties for families who acquired these lands, particularly in 1869, when the Ottoman State was forced to sell miri lands to rich Lebanese families to provide some money for its treasury, and that was another aspect of the tragedy. The feudal landlords from outside Palestine sold a total of 625 thousand dunams; the Sursock family sold more than 200 thousand dunams of Marj Ibn ‘Amer lands to the Zionists, displacing 2,746 Arab families from 22 Palestinian villages, who have been cultivating these lands for hundreds of years. The tragedy was repeated when other Lebanese feudal landlords sold about 120 thousand dunams around Lake Hula, in northern Palestine, and two Lebanese families sold the Wadi al-Hawarith lands (32 thousand dunams), thus displacing 15 thousand Palestinians. During the period 1920–1936, the agricultural lands sold by absentee feudal landlords (of Lebanese and Syrian families) reached 55.5% of agricultural lands acquired by the Jews.

Despite the responsibility borne by the families who sold these lands, the blame is not entirely on them alone, for the British authorities prevented them from entering Palestine to exploit these lands, on the pretext that they were foreigners. That was after Palestine was separated from Syria and Lebanon according to the Sykes-Picot divisions between the British and French colonies.

As for the sum of the lands leaked into the hands of the Jews, which were sold by the Palestinian Arabs during the British occupation, it was about 260 thousand dunams (less than 1%) of the land of Palestine. The Zionist Jews acquired these lands because of the harsh conditions imposed by the British colonial government on the Palestinian peasants, and as a result of the British expropriation of Arab property for the benefit of the Jews, according to articles of the British Mandate for Palestine, which entitle the High Commissioner to this right. Some sales occurred because of the weakness of a number of Palestinians towards financial temptations, and this is not surprising, such cases are found in every time and place in any Arab or non-Arab country. These were few groups weakened by temptations, who were, in any case, a pariah group fought by the entire people of Palestine. Many of them were boycotted, liquidated and assassinated, especially during the Arab Revolt that swept Palestine during the 1936–1939 period.

Based on the above, the total of what the Jews obtained from the people of Palestine until 1948 does not exceed 1% of the land of Palestine. This happened within seventy years since the beginning of settlement and organized emigration to Palestine, and under harsh conditions. Evidently, it highlights on one hand the extent that the Jews suffered in stabilizing and making their project in Palestine succeed, and on the other hand, the extent of the determination of the Palestinians to stick to their land.

~ Dr. Mohsen Mohammad Saleh, "Did the Palestinians Sell Their Land? And leave it to the Jews?!," Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies & Consultations, May 22, 2020

Murray Rothbard on irreconcilable claims in Palestine

If we take off our blinders, it should be stunningly obvious that what we have in the entire Israeli region are two absolutely irreconcilable claims, an irreconcilability that applies equally well to Israel Proper as it does to the occupied West Bank.  On the one hand, there are the Palestinian Arabs, who have tilled the soil or otherwise used the land of Palestine for centuries; and on the other, there are a group of external fanatics, who come from all over the world, and who claim the entire land as "given" to them as a collective religion or tribe at some remote and possibly legendary time in the past.  There is no way the two claims can be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties.  There can be no genuine settlement, no true "peace" in the face of this irrepressible conflict; there can be either a war to the death, or an uneasy practical compromise which can satisfy no one.  That is the harsh reality of the Middle East.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Vital Importance of Separation," Rothbard-Rockwell Report, April 1994, p. 4

Anonymous Israeli woman: "we conquered the territory of the Arabs"

Q: Why do you steal land from the Palestinians?

A: This is a question related to history, yeah?  And stealing is not the word.  It's conquering.  We conquered.  Every state, every nation in history, conquered.  So we conquered the territory of the Arabs.  They left so now it's ours.  Now they want to take it in their own way.  It's fine by me.

Q: Okay.  So what do you mean it's fine by you?

A: It's fine by me.  If they want their territory back, so they fight for it.  If they bomb, they kill, their own way.

Q: So you can even understand.

A: Yes, I can understand.

Q: So what do you think should happen then?  If, let's say, the goal is to end violence, how do we do that?

A: We as a people?  We as a country?  The government?

Q: Whatever you think.

A: I don't know.  We want to hold the land, yeah?  I don't want to release my home.  So I think the fight will never end.

~ anonymous Israeli woman, "Question: Why did you steal Palestinian land?," The Ask Project, 4:35 mark, February 13, 2021

Anonymous Israeli woman on land rights in Israel

Q: Why do you steal more and more Palestinian land?

A: We steal?  They steal our land.

Q: But you came here.  They were living here and you came here...

A: We lived here before them.  Look at the history.  Not just 100 years, a lot of years.  God gave us Israel.  God gave us this area.  We didn't steal from them.  We didn't hate them.  They hate us.  Really.  I appreciate them.  We let them live here, but they want to kill us.  It's from the Bible, you know.

~ Anonymous Israeli woman, "Question: Why do you steal Palestinian land?," The Ask Project, 0:15 mark, February 13, 2021

Sheldon Richman on the plight of the Palestinians

Realization of the [Zionist] dream of a Jewish state logically entailed the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians, who by the common standard of justice were legitimate owners of their land.  Those who remained were made third-class citizens or even worse in an apartheid state.  The countless micro offenses against those individuals were compounded by a macro offense: the destruction of their flourishing culture, communities, and country...  [H]ere's one thing advocates of universal freedom and justice can say: The rights of the Palestinians must not be plastered over by irrelevant claims about the Jewish State's right to exist.

~ Sheldon Richman, Coming to Palestine

Murray Rothbard on the Israel-Palestine conflict (1982)

Libertarians are opposed to every State.  But the State of Israel is uniquely pernicious, because its entire existence rests and continues to rest on a massive expropriation of property and expulsion from the land.  Libertarians in the United States often complain about the radical libertarian adherence to “land reform,” i.e. the giving back of stolen land to the victims.  In the case of expropriations centuries ago, who gets what is often fuzzy, and conservative libertarians can raise an important point.  But in the case of Palestine, the victims and their children—the true owners of the land—are right there, beyond the borders, in refugee camps, in hovels, dreaming about a return to their own.  There is nothing fuzzy here.  Justice will only be served, and true peace in the devastated area will only come, when a miracle happens and Israel allows the Palestinians to stream back in and repossess their rightful property.  Until then, so long as the Palestinians continue to live and no matter how far back they are pushed, they will always be there, and they will continue to press for their dream of justice.  No matter how many square miles and how many cities Israel conquers (shall it be Damascus next?), the Palestinians will be there, in addition to all the other Arab refugees newly created by the Israeli policy of blood and iron.  But allowing justice, allowing the return of the expropriated, would mean that Israel would have to give up its exclusivist Zionist ideal.  For recognizing Palestinians as human beings with full human rights is the negation of Zionism; it is the recognition that the land was never “empty.” 

A just Israeli state (insofar as any state can be just), then, would necessarily be a de-Zionized state, and this no Israeli political party in the foreseeable future would have the slightest desire to do. And so the slaughter and the horror will go on.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Massacre," The Libertarian Forum, October 1982