In the 1880s, Jews, predominantly Ashkenazi,[2][3] began purchasing land and properties across Ottoman Palestine in order to expand the collective territorial ownership of the Yishuv. Large Jewish corporations and private Jewish buyers led this effort through multiple intermittent transactions that continued after Mandatory Palestine was established in 1918. The largest of these arrangements, known as the Sursock Purchases, resulted in the procurement of the Jezreel Valley and the Bay of Haifa by the 1930s. The purchase of land was often accompanied by the eviction of the Arab tenants.[4] On 1 April 1945, the British administration's statistics showed that Jewish buyers had legal ownership over approximately 5.67% of the Mandate's total land area, while state domain (a large part of which was held in hereditary lease or had undetermined ownership) was 46%.[5] By the end of 1947, Jewish ownership had increased to 6.6%.[6] This cycle of land acquisition ultimately ended when the Israeli Declaration of Independence yielded the founding of the Jewish state on 14 May 1948.
Background
Towards the end of the 19th century, the creation of the Zionist movement resulted in many Jews immigrating to Palestine. Most land purchases between the late 1880s and the 1930s were located in the coastal plain area, including "Acre to the North and Rehovoth to the South, the Esdraelon (Jezreel) and Jordan Valleys and to the lesser extent in Galilee".[8] These were mostly the less inhabited coasts and valleys, which had high rates of malaria.[9][10][11] The migration affected Palestine in many ways, including economically, socially, and politically.
From the outset, the Zionist leadership saw land acquisition as essential to achieving their goal of establishing a Jewish state. This acquisition was strategic, aiming to create a continuous area of Jewish land. The WZO established the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1901, with the stated goal "to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people." The notion of land "redemption" entailed that the land could not be sold and could not be leased to a non-Jew nor should the land be worked by Arabs,[12]: 4–7 though most Zionists continued to employ fellaheen to perform labor on their lands.[13] The land purchased was primarily from absentee landlords, and upon purchase of the land, the tenant farmers who traditionally had rights of usufruct were often expelled.[14]: 102 Herzl publicly opposed this dispossession, but wrote privately in his diary: "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."[15]: 20–24 The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine in the late 19th century is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[16][17][18] Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.[19][20][disputed – discuss]
History and purchase policies
In the first half of the 19th century, no foreigners were allowed to purchase land in Palestine.[21] This was official Ottoman policy until 1856 and in practice until 1867.[21] When it came to the national aspirations of the Zionist movement, the Ottoman Empire opposed the idea of Jewish self-rule in Palestine, fearing it might lose control of Palestine after recently having lost other territories to various European powers. It also took issue with the Jews, as many came from Russia, which sought the empire's demise.[22] In 1881 the Ottoman governmental administration (the Sublime Porte) decreed that foreign Jews could immigrate to and settle anywhere within the Ottoman Empire, except in Palestine and from 1882 until their defeat in 1918, the Ottomans continuously restricted Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine.[22] In 1892, the Ottoman government decided to prohibit the sale of land in Palestine to Jews, even if they were Ottoman citizens.[23] Nevertheless, during the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, many successful land purchases were made through organizations such as the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PJCA), Palestine Land Development Company and the Jewish National Fund.[citation needed]
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 "brought about the appropriation by the influential and rich families of Beirut, Damascus, and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and Jaffa and other sub-district capitals, of vast tracts of land in Syria and Palestine and their registration in the name of these families in the land registers".[24] According to Palestinian-American anthropologist Nasser Abufarha, "In 1858 the Ottoman Authority introduced the law of tabu to fix rights of ownership of the land. Land owners were instructed to have their property inscribed in the land register. The tabu was resisted by the fellahin. They saw a threat to their community in registering their land for two main reasons: 1) the cultivated fields were classified as ardh ameriyeh (the land of the Emarit) and were taxed. Owners of registered fertile land were forced to pay tax on it; 2) data from the land register were used by the Turkish Army for the purpose of the draft. Owners of registered lands were often drafted to fight with the Turkish Army in Russia."[25]
In 1918, after the British conquest of Palestine, the military administration closed the Land Register and prohibited all sale of land. The Register was reopened in 1920, but to prevent speculation and ensure a livelihood for the fellahin, an edict was issued forbidding the sale of more than 300 dunams of land or the sale of land valued at more than 3000 Palestine pounds without the approval of the High Commissioner.[26]
From the 1880s to the 1930s, most Jewish land purchases were made in the coastal plain, the Jezreel Valley, the Jordan Valley and to a lesser extent the Galilee.[24] This was due to a preference for land that was cheap and without tenants.[24] There were two main reasons why these areas were sparsely populated. The first reason being when the Ottoman power in the rural areas began to diminish in the seventeenth century, many people moved to more centralized areas to secure protection against the Bedouin tribes.[24] The second reason for the sparsely populated areas of the coastal plains was the soil type. The soil, covered in a layer of sand, made it impossible to grow the staple crop of Palestine, corn.[24] As a result, this area remained uncultivated and underpopulated,[8] enabling the Jews to purchase land without a massive displacement and eviction of Arab tenants.[24]
In the 1930s, most of the land was bought from landowners. Of the land that the Jews bought, 52.6% were bought from non-Palestinian landowners, 24.6% from Palestinian landowners, 13.4% from government, churches, and foreign companies, and only 9.4% from fellaheen (farmers).[27]
On 31 December 1944, out of the land owned in Palestine by large Jewish Corporations and private owners, about 44% was in possession of Jewish National Fund. The table below shows the land ownership of Palestine by large Jewish Corporations (in square kilometres) on 31 December 1945.
| Land ownership of Palestine by large Jewish corporations (in square kilometres) on 31 December 1945 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corporations | Area | |||||
| JNF | 660.10 | |||||
| PICA | 193.70 | |||||
| Palestine Land Development Co. Ltd. | 9.70 | |||||
| Hemnuta Ltd | 16.50 | |||||
| Africa Palestine Investment Co. Ltd. | 9.90 | |||||
| Bayside Land Corporation Ltd. | 8.50 | |||||
| Palestine Kupat Am. Bank Ltd. | 8.40 | |||||
| Total | 906.80 | |||||
| Data is from Survey of Palestine (Vol I, p245).[28] | ||||||
By the end of the mandate, more than half the Jewish-owned land was held by the two largest Jewish funds, the Jewish National Fund and the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.
By the end of the British Mandate period in 1948, Jewish farmers had cultivated 425,450 dunams of land, while Arab farmers had 5,484,700 dunams of land under cultivation.[29]
Peel Commission
In 1936 the British government appointed the Peel Commission to investigate the reasons for the civil unrest in Palestine. Lord Peel's findings on land purchase were as follows:
Economic impact
The fellahin who sold land in an attempt to turn "vegetable tracts into citrus groves became dependent on world markets and on the availability of maritime transportation. A decrease in the world market demand for citrus or a lack of means of transportation severely jeopardized the economic situation of these people".[8]
Impact on the local Arab populace
Director of Development Lewis French established a register of landless Arabs in 1931.[31] Out of 3,271 applicants, only 664 were admitted and the remainder rejected.[31] Porath suggests that the number of displaced Arabs may have been considerably larger, since French's definition of "landless Arab" excluded those who had sold their own land, those who owned land elsewhere, those who had since obtained tenancy of other land even if they were unable to cultivate it due to poverty or debt, and displaced persons who were not cultivators but had occupations such as ploughman or laborer.[31]
See also
References
- ↑ Ismail, Ahmad. "Palestine: Land ownership by sub-district (based on 1945 data) - Map - Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestine Question". Question of Palestine. Retrieved 3 May 2024.
- ↑ Remennick, Larissa (5 July 2017). Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration, and Conflict. Routledge. p. 522. ISBN 978-1-351-49221-8.
- ↑ Rickford, John R. (2016). Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race. Oxford University Press. pp. 185–186. ISBN 978-0-19-062569-6.
- ↑ Ilan Pappe (2022). A History of Modern Palestine. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-24416-9.
The Zionist approach during the Mandate was to buy land from the big landlords and evict the tenants.
- ↑ Hadawi, Sami (1957) Land ownership in Palestine, pp12–14
- ↑ Hallbrook 1981, p. 365,368.
- ↑ A Survey of Palestine, Table 2 showing Holdings of Large Jewish Lands Owners as of December 31, 1945, British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume I - Page 245. Chapter VIII: Land: Section 3.
- 1 2 3 Porath (1977), p. 80.
- ↑ Tyler, W. P. N. (1994). "The Huleh Concession and Jewish Settlement of the Huleh Valley, 1934-48". Middle Eastern Studies. 30 (4): 826–859. doi:10.1080/00263209408701025. ISSN 0026-3206. JSTOR 4283677.
- ↑ Kressel, Gideon M.; Aharoni, Reuven (2013). Egyptian Émigrés in the Levant of the 19th and 20th Centuries. ISBN 978-9652181138.
- ↑ Sufian, Sandra M. (15 November 2008). Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920-1947. University of Chicago Press. p. 100. ISBN 978-0-226-77938-6.
- ↑ Quigley, John (1990). The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-3527-6.
- ↑ Anderson, Scott (2013). Lawrence in Arabia : war, deceit, imperial folly and the making of the modern Middle East. Internet Archive. New York : Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-53292-1.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link) - ↑ Khalidi, Rashid (1997). Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/khal15074.
- ↑ Morris, Benny (2001). Righteous victims : a history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-2001. Internet Archive. New York : Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-679-74475-7.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link) - ↑ Masalha 2012, p. 70.
- ↑ Karsh 2009, p. 12.
- ↑ Morris 2008, p. 1.
- ↑
- Manna 2022, pp. 2 ("the principal objective of the Zionist leadership to keep as few Arabs as possible in the Jewish state"), 4 ("in the 1948 war, when it became clear that the objective that enjoyed the unanimous support of Zionists of all inclinations was to establish a Jewish state with the smallest possible number of Palestinians"), and 33 ("The Zionists had two cherished objectives: fewer Arabs in the country and more land in the hands of the settlers.")
- Khalidi 2020, p. 76: "The Nakba represented a watershed in the history of Palestine and the Middle East. It transformed most of Palestine from what it had been for well over a millennium—a majority Arab country—into a new state that had a substantial Jewish majority. This transformation was the result of two processes: the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited areas of the country seized during the war; and the theft of Palestinian land and property left behind by the refugees as well as much of that owned by those Arabs who remained in Israel. There would have been no other way to achieve a Jewish majority, the explicit aim of political Zionism from its inception. Nor would it have been possible to dominate the country without the seizures of land."
- Slater 2020, pp. 49 ("There were three arguments for the moral acceptability of some form of transfer. The main one—certainly for the Zionists but not only for them—was the alleged necessity of establishing a secure and stable Jewish state in as much of Palestine as was feasible, which was understood to require a large Jewish majority."), 81 ("From the outset of the Zionist movement all the major leaders wanted as few Arabs as possible in a Jewish state"), 87 ("The Zionist movement in general and David Ben-Gurion in particular had long sought to establish a Jewish state in all of "Palestine," which in their view included the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria."), and 92 ("As Israeli historian Shlomo Sand wrote: 'During every round of the national conflict over Palestine, which is the longest running conflict of its kind in the modern era, Zionism has tried to appropriate additional territory.'")
- Segev 2019, p. 418, "the Zionist dream from the start—maximum territory, minimum Arabs"
- Cohen 2017, p. 78, "As was suggested by Masalha (1992), Morris (1987), and other scholars, many preferred a state without Arabs or with as small a minority as possible, and plans for population transfers were considered by Zionist leaders and activists for years."
- Lustick & Berkman 2017, pp. 47–48, "As Ben-Gurion told one Palestinian leader in the early 1930s, 'Our final goal is the independence of the Jewish people in Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan River, not as a minority, but as a community numbering millions" (Teveth 1985:130). Ipso facto, this meant Zionism's success would produce an Arab minority in Palestine, no matter what its geographical dimensions."
- Stanislawski 2017, p. 65, "The upper classes of Palestinian society quickly fled the fight to places of safety within the Arab world and outside of it; the lower classes were caught between the Israeli desire to have as few Arabs as possible remaining in their new state and the Palestinians' desire to remain on the lands they regarded as their ancient national patrimony."
- Finkelstein 2016, Ch. 1 ("Justifying the Zionist Enterprise"), "Zionism's claim to the whole of Palestine not only precluded a modus vivendi based on partition with the indigenous Arab population, it called into question any Arab presence in Palestine."
- Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury 2015, p. 6, "It was obvious to most approaches within the Zionist movement—certainly to the mainstream as represented by Labor Zionism and its leadership headed by Ben Gurion, that a Jewish state would entail getting rid of as many of the Palestinian inhabitants of the land as possible ... Following Wolfe, we argue that the logic of demographic elimination is an inherent component of the Zionist project as a settler-colonial project, although it has taken different manifestations since the founding of the Zionist movement."
- ↑
- Engel 2013, pp. 96 ("From the outset Zionism had been the activity of a loose coalition of individuals and groups united by a common desire to increase the Jewish population of Palestine ..."), 121 ("... the ZO sought ways to expand the territory a partitioned Jewish state might eventually receive ... Haganah undertook to ensconce small groups of Jews in parts of Palestine formerly beyond their sights ... their leaders had hoped for more expansive borders ..."), and 138 ("The prospect that Israel would have only the barest Jewish majority thus loomed large in the imagination of the state's leaders. To be sure, until the late 1930s most Zionists would have been delighted with any majority, no matter how slim; the thought that Jews in Palestine would ever be more numerous than Arabs appeared a distant vision. But in 1937 the Peel Commission had suggested ... to leave both the Jewish state and Arab Palestine with the smallest possible minorities. That suggestion had fired Zionist imaginations; now it was possible to think of a future state as 'Jewish' not only by international recognition of the right of Jews to dominate its government but by the inclinations of virtually all of its inhabitants. Such was how the bulk of the Zionist leadership understood the optimal 'Jewish state' in 1948: non-Jews (especially Arabs) might live in it and enjoy all rights of citizenship, but their numbers should be small enough compared to the Jewish population that their impact on public life would be minimal. Israel's leaders were thus not sad at all to see so many Arabs leave its borders during the fighting in 1947–48 ... the 150,000 who remained on Israeli territory seemed to many to constitute an unacceptably high proportion relative to the 650,000 Jews in the country when the state came into being. This perception not only dictated Israel's adamant opposition to the return of Arab refugees, it reinforced the imperative to bring as many new Jewish immigrants into the country as possible, as quickly as possible, no matter how great or small their prospects for becoming the sort of 'new Jews' the state esteemed most.")
- Masalha 2012, p. 38, "From the late nineteenth century and throughout the Mandatory period the demographic and land policies of the Zionist Yishuv in Palestine continued to evolve. But its demographic and land battles with the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine were always a battle for 'maximum land and minimum Arabs' (Masalha 1992, 1997, 2000)."
- Lentin 2010, p. 7, "'the Zionist leadership was always determined to increase the Jewish space ... Both land purchases in and around the villages, and military preparations, were all designed to dispossess the Palestinians from the area of the future Jewish state' (Pappe 2008: 94)."
- Shlaim 2009, p. 56, "That most Zionist leaders wanted the largest possible Jewish state in Palestine with as few Arabs inside it as possible is hardly open to question."
- Ben-Ami 2007, p. 50, "The ethos of Zionism was twofold; it was about demography–ingathering the exiles in a viable Jewish state with as small an Arab minority as possible–and land."
- Pappé 2006, p. 250, "In other words, hitkansut is the core of Zionism in a slightly different garb: to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible."
- Morris 2004, p. 588, "But the displacement of Arabs from Palestine or from the areas of Palestine that would become the Jewish State was inherent in Zionist ideology and, in microcosm, in Zionist praxis from the start of the enterprise. The piecemeal eviction of tenant farmers, albeit in relatively small numbers, during the first five decades of Zionist land purchase and settlement naturally stemmed from, and in a sense hinted at, the underlying thrust of the ideology, which was to turn an Arab-populated land into a State with an overwhelming Jewish majority."
- Morris 2001, pp. 676–682, "Zionism was a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement ... Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily and elementally expansionist ... Zionism was politically expansionist in the sense that from the start, its aim was to turn all of Palestine (and in the movement's pre-1921 maps, the East Bank of the Jordan and the area south of the Litani River as well) into a Jewish state ... The Zionists were intent on politically, or even physically, dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs; their enterprise, however justified in terms of Jewish suffering and desperation, was tainted by a measure of moral dubiousness ... Zionism had always looked to the day when a Jewish majority would enable the movement to gain control over the country ... Palestine would not be transformed into a Jewish state unless all or much of the Arab population was expelled."
- 1 2 Kark, Ruth (1984). "Changing patterns of landownership in nineteenth-century Palestine: the European Influence". Journal of Historical Geography. 10 (4): 357–384. doi:10.1016/0305-7488(84)90069-0.
- 1 2 Jonathan R. Adelman (2008). The rise of Israel: a history of a revolutionary state. Taylor & Francis. p. 58. ISBN 978-0-415-77509-0.
- ↑ Ocak, Murat (2002). The Turks: Ottomans (2 v. ). Yeni Türkiye. ISBN 9789756782590.
Even though the Ottoman government was disturbed by this decision, it was compelled to take it, in order to close all doors to the Jews in 1891 and to prohibit the sale of Palestinian land to Jews, even if they were Ottoman citizens, in 1892.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Porath (1977), p. 81.
- ↑ "Land Ownership in Palestine/Israel".
- ↑ Avneri, Aryeh L. (1982). The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land-Settlement and the Arabs, 1878-1948. Transaction Publishers. p. 117. ISBN 9781412836210.
... the High Commissioner promulgated an edict forbidding the sale of more than 300 dunams of land or the sale of land worth more than 3000 Palestinian Pounds (LP.), without his prior permission.
- ↑ Hallbrook 1981, p. 364.
- ↑ Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Jewish Problems in Palestine and Europe, J. V. W. Shaw, General Assembly, Special Committee on Palestine, United Nations (1991). A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December, 1945 and January, 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. Vol. 1. Institute for Palestine Studies. ISBN 0-88728-211-3.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ Wright, Clifford A. (2015). Facts and Fables (RLE Israel and Palestine): The Arab-Israeli Conflict. Routledge. p. 38. ISBN 978-1-317-44775-7.
- ↑ "Report of the Palestine Royal Commission — July 1937". Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved 31 October 2022.
- 1 2 3 Porath, pp. 87–88.
Bibliography
- Dershowitz, Alan (2003). The Case for Israel. New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons.
- Porath, Y. (1977). The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion. London, UK: Frank Cass and Company Ltd.
- Hallbrook, Stephen P. (Fall 1981). "The Alienation of a Homeland: How Palestine Became Israel" (PDF). The Journal of Libertarian Studies. V (4). Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 October 2023.