I
It is a commonplace that history is written by the victors. And it follows that it is more likely to be written about the strong than the weak, and that the views and exploits of those able to read and write are perhaps naturally more frequently recorded by historians, with their tendency to favor written records, than those of the illiterate.
All of these inherent historical biases have complicated the modern historiography of Palestine. Their effect has been magnified by the fact that over the past five decades, much source material for writing the modern history of the Palestinian Arabs has been lost, destroyed, or incorporated into archives in Israel, where it was long inaccessible to many Palestinian and Arab historians. The unsettled situation of the Palestinian people since 1948, whether under occupation or in the diaspora, has meant that when Palestinian archives, research institutions, and universities could be created, they were often denied the stability, continuity, and possibilities for long-term planning necessary to provide the requisite support for sustained research and scholarship. Also harmful has been the absence or weakness of unifying central Palestinian national institutions, and the support such institutions can provide for education, research, scholarship, libraries, and state archives.
The PLO’S Palestine Research Center and the independent Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS), both founded in Beirut in the mid-1960s, amassed considerable library and documentary collections and produced some significant research, until Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon disrupted their functioning, and indeed much Palestinian intellectual production. The Center’s historical archives were seized by occupying Israeli forces, and although they were returned as part of the November 1983 prisoner exchange with the PLO, for more than a decade they could not be reopened. The IPS archives were moved to safety after the 1982 war, and some of them are still inaccessible. The 1982 war also disrupted a UNESCO project for a Palestinian Open University, as well as the academic atmosphere at the five Beirut universities where many Palestinian scholars had become established since 1948. Similarly, the Israeli occupation has caused severe problems for the six West Bank and Gaza Strip universities, which were exacerbated by the Israeli closure orders which were in effect in most of them throughout the Palestinian intifada, from 1987 until 1992, and afterwards in some cases.1
Partly in consequence of these circumstances, there has been a dearth of sound historical scholarship by Palestinians.2 Most writing about modern Palestinian history has been done by non-Palestinians, who have by and large lacked an intimate familiarity with the indigenous sources, the individuals concerned, and the social and cultural context of Palestinian politics. Irrespective of any bias such foreign scholars may have had, this situation has naturally had a major effect on what has been written, and particularly the perspective from which it is written. While a cross-cultural approach is often extremely valuable, and can provide insights otherwise unavailable, obviously nothing can substitute for people writing their own history, and indeed the two processes can and should be complementary.
Thus, the purview and perspective of much work on the history of Palestine has paid more attention to certain sources and subjects than to others. One example is Yehoshua Ben Arieh’s Jerusalem in the 19th Century: The Old City, much of which treats the city’s Arab population (according to Ben Arieh, Arabs were a majority of its population during most of the period he covers) relying mainly on European traveler’s reports and European Jewish accounts, but using no Arabic or Ottoman sources.3 Similarly, Isaiah Friedman’s The Question of Palestine 1914–1918, subtitled A Study of British-Jewish-Arab Relations, in practice deals only with the British and Jewish sides of this triangle, again using no Arabic or Ottoman sources.4
Further, even when the Arabs have been the primary focus of a work, the urban and literate sectors of the population have perhaps naturally tended to be the focus of attention, as in the respected works on Palestinian political history during the 1920s and 1930s by Yehoshua Porath and Ann Mosely Lesch, which depend on a judicious selection of Arabic, Zionist, and Western sources.5 In other works of history, more use has been made of Zionist sources than Arab ones. This is true even with examples of sound scholarship and great originality focusing primarily on the Palestinians such as Neville Mandel’s The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, which relies mainly on press reports preserved in the Central Zionist Archives, rather than on the Arabic newspapers themselves, for an analysis of the Arab press.6
There are justifications for some of these apparent methodological and historiographical weaknesses. As has already been pointed out, Israeli and Western archives contain more material and tend to be better organized than many existing Arab ones. In other cases, accessibility and convenience have perhaps wrongly determined which sources were used. The problem is made more difficult by the fact that the population of the countryside was poor, illiterate, and largely inaccessible for much of the modern era, and as such left few records of its own. Moreover, it is to be expected that the Arab urban population, which was the most visible and politically active, and the most extensively represented in the existing written record, would be the object of the most intense scholarly scrutiny. All of this is aside from any biases in favor of a focus on the elite that might have affected historians.7
But regarding issues crucial to the modern history of Palestine like the overall economic and social effects on the Palestinians of land sales to Zionist purchasers, the scope of peasant dispossession and resistance, the degree of politicization of the rural population, and the impact of Zionist settlement on the Palestinian Arab rural majority, some of these justifications ring hollow. While the British and Zionist records are necessarily central sources for any such analysis, and while attention must be paid to the newspapers and activities of the elite Arab urban population, in looking at issues such as these, what happened at the village level should be the primary focus, and sources that reflect this local reality should be sought out. It is possible to follow developments at this level utilizing nontraditional sources, as did Ya’kov Firestone in his pioneering work using material from outside the formal archives,8 or through using these archives with special attention to the rural areas, as did Ylana Miller in her Government and Society in Rural Palestine, 1920–1948.9
Such an approach is essential in any work dealing with demography, land, and the peasantry in Palestine. It is absent in many popular works, such as Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, which makes sweeping and unsubstantiated assertions regarding all these subjects, with the aim of proving the nonexistence of the Palestinian people. A book like this, which is based on the selective and tendentious use of sources, systematic misquotation, and other unscholarly methods, would not deserve mention here, but for the prominent figures who praised it, the noted scholars whose aid was acknowledged by the author but who refrained from disassociating themselves from it, the respected publications that reviewed it but failed to reveal its shoddy scholarly underpinning, and the impact it has had in reinforcing crucial stereotypes regarding Palestine in American public discourse.10
Such an approach is absent as well in nominally more serious works that reiterate Peter’s themes. Thus, Arieh Avneri’s The Claim of Dispossession, subtitled Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs 1878–1948, purports to show that there was no dispossession of Palestinians, in large part because the “Palestinians” did not exist in the commonly accepted sense of the word.11 He asserts rather that much of the Arab population of the country drifted into it in recent times, an old and persistent canard which has been disproved by all recent demographic research.12 Slightly more coherent than Peters, Avneri too treats this subject using Western and Hebrew sources, to the exclusion of Arabic or Ottoman ones. In three hundred pages, moreover, he never dignifies the indigenous population or the sovereign authority until 1918 with so much as a single quotation from a source generated by them.
It is clear that in works such as Peters’s and Avneri’s, the society being described is an object rather than a subject of history. It can be described by others, but cannot describe itself. For the assertions of polemicists such as these are tenable only from a perspective that denies any credibility to the sources produced by the society being studied. In the words of Edward Said, for such writers the Palestinians do not have “permission to narrate.”13 From these authors’ perspective, of course, such a denial is rigorously logical, since the Palestinians don’t exist!14
While it is impossible at this temporal remove, and in the absence of much essential data, to record in detail what took place between Arab peasants and Jewish settlers in the Palestinian countryside before 1914, what follows is an attempt to reconstruct certain key interactions from a variety of sources, with the objective of providing a perspective too often absent. Far from being “history from below” or subaltern history for its own sake, however, it constitutes an attempt to suggest that these scattered early incidents were important not only in defining the terms of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, but also in the genesis of Palestinian identity.
II
According to a once widely held view, Arab opposition to Zionism began only some time during the Mandate period, and since then this opposition has been artificially fostered by a succession of self-interested protagonists for a variety of reasons.15 In fact, both a relatively widespread Arab awareness of Zionism and a fear of its potential impact on the Arabs of Palestine go much further back in time, and are much more deeply rooted, than this view would have it. During the pre-World War I period, Zionism became the subject of extensive journalistic comment and public controversy in Palestine and other Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire, and ultimately became a major issue in both local and Ottoman politics. Some of this has already been briefly described in the discussions of the growth of the press in chapter 3, and of the 1911 parliamentary debates in chapter 4.16
The extent of the opposition within Palestine itself to Zionist immigration before 1914 has been examined by several studies.17 Less attention has been paid to the effect of developments in Palestine during this period on the thinking of the elites of the rest of Syria, Egypt, and the other Arab lands under Ottoman sovereignty, at a time when Arabism, the forerunner of Arab nationalism, was developing into an effective political movement.18 This took place against the background of the flourishing of political, intellectual, and journalistic activity throughout the Empire beginning with the reimposition of the Ottoman Constitution in 1908 and continuing until 1914, during which time, as we have seen, there was a major expansion of the Arabic language press in Palestine and other parts of greater Syria.
Simultaneous with these developments, the Arabs of Palestine were dismayed by the impact of increasing Zionist colonization, as the mounting persecution of Eastern European Jews sent large numbers of new settlers to Palestine in the second aliya, or wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine, from 1905 to 1914.19 From around the turn of the century to 1914, the Jewish population of the country appears to have doubled, from about 30,000 to 60,000, during which time the total population grew much less quickly.20 Besides increasing Jewish numbers significantly, most of these newcomers were more deeply imbued with political Zionism than earlier Jewish settlers, and more intent on creating a new, purely Jewish society in Palestine. As we shall see, many of them also had other beliefs, which made friction with the Arab peasantry all the more severe.
The Palestinian reaction to this increased Zionist activity was strong, particularly during the years from 1908 to 1914 when it could express itself more freely, and was encouraged by the activities of political leaders like Ruhi al-Khalidi and Sa‘id al-Husayni, and by articles in newspapers like Filastin and al-Karmil. For the first time, many Arabs realized that Zionism aimed ultimately to create a Jewish polity in Palestine in place of the existing Arab one. This realization was intensified by the fact that in the Palestinian countryside after the turn of the century, increased land purchases and the replacement of Arab wage-laborers on Jewish estates by Jewish workers angered many fellahin. The intensity of these reactions, combined with the new political and press freedoms, helps explain the impact of the Palestine question on Arab politics at this time. And while it was understandably the response of the literate urban Palestinian upper and middle classes as expressed in the press, in the Ottoman Parliament, and elsewhere, that most affected thinking in other Arab countries, we shall see that at the root of the fears of many of these urban Palestinians about Zionism was the experience of the fellahin who were the first to clash with the Zionist settlers.
As Roger Owen and Charles Issawi have shown, economic and social change in the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean was increasingly rapid in the late nineteenth century.21 Underlying many of these changes was the gradual expansion of the market economy over a long period of time, and the tendency it fostered toward the privatization of land ownership and its concentration in fewer hands. This was particularly the case after the promulgation of the Ottoman Land Code in 1858, which was put into effect in Palestine very slowly, over a period of decades, and appears to have had a differing impact on different regions.22
In the hill regions of Palestine, where small plots and individual ownership and/or usufruct had long been common, the law seems to have had considerably less effect as far as alienation of peasants from their land and the concentration of landed property in a few hands.23 In lowland areas favorable to grain cultivation, however, the new law facilitated registration in the name of individual owners of agricultural land, most of which as state land, or miri, had never previously been privately registered and most of which had formerly been treated according to traditional forms of land tenure, generally musha‘, or communal usufruct.24 The new law meant that for the first time a peasant could be deprived not of formal title to his land, which he had rarely held before, but rather of the right to live on it, cultivate it, and pass it on to his heirs—rights that had formerly been inalienable if taxes on miri land were paid regularly.
Under the provisions of the 1858 law, as it came to be implemented, communal rights of tenure were often ignored, particularly in lowland and musha‘areas, as many peasants with long-standing traditional rights failed to register out of fear of taxation and other state exactions, notably conscription. Instead, village shaykhs, tax-collectors, and urban members of the upper classes, adept at manipulating or circumventing the legal process, registered large areas of land as their personal property.25 As far as lands in Palestine were concerned, three areas were most affected: the fertile central coastal region; the Marj Ibn ‘Amir, a broad, extremely rich valley running southeast from Haifa to Beisan (also known as the Plain of Esdraleon and the Jezreel Valley); and eastern Galilee, all of which were less heavily populated than the hill regions, since they had suffered most from the depredations of nomads in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before the Ottoman government reestablished its authority.
The biggest beneficiaries of this process of consolidation of land ownership through registration were the newly prosperous merchants of the coastal cities of Beirut, Haifa, Jaffa, and Gaza. Their new wealth was a byproduct of the incorporation of the region into the world economy, with the attendant opening up of new means of communications, and the growth in trade and in agricultural production related to the improvement in security in the countryside in the 1870s and 1880s. They invested much of this new wealth in land in Palestine, as happened in other parts of bilad al-Sham, with the difference that in Palestine the market for land was soon to be fundamentally transformed by the demand produced by Zionist colonization. In the middle of this new situation lay the peasantry, in some cases with long-standing traditional rights as cultivators which were swept away by the new laws, and in other cases with grazing and other rights which were equally in jeopardy under the new legal dispensation.
Given these rural trends, and such indicators as the growth of the press and the spread of education, it is clear that the society within which Jewish immigrants settled around the turn of the twentieth century was far from stagnant, and indeed was changing rapidly. Although the most visible changes could be found among the urban notables and a small but growing middle class, change was taking place as well among the peasant majority of the Palestine population. Some scholars have argued that “for all practical purposes the masses were politically, socially and intellectually non-existent,” and that it was “the reactions of the political elite among the Arabs to Zionism, . . . and not those of the peasant masses, which was significant.”26 Contrary to these views, it can be argued that from the beginning, the reaction of the peasantry was central to the struggle over Zionist colonization in Palestine.27
Although most peasants were illiterate, they were aware of events in their immediate region and often farther afield. Certainly land sales involving the physical removal of the traditional Arab cultivators in favor of newcomers, a process that became increasingly frequent after the turn of the twentieth century, would have been widely noticed by the rural population in a given locality. The illiteracy of the peasants nevertheless meant that in order for them to have an effect beyond their own district, others would have to record their responses. We are thus left with little direct record of these responses, except as they were passed on by the literate urban members of the community (who rarely perceived them first-hand), or via the paper trail left by outbursts of peasant violence against Jewish colonists. From a study of both sets of reactions, and the interaction between them, it is clear how and why events in the Palestinian countryside aroused such widespread concern in the rest of the country and farther afield in the Arab world.
III
There are no precise or reliable figures regarding the population of Palestine just before World War I, which the best estimates—those of Justin McCarthy, based on official Ottoman data—place at over 720,000.28 According to studies based on contemporary Zionist sources, the Jewish population of the country was by then about 85,000, but McCarthy’s estimates, based on the careful examination of all the available Ottoman and western statistics, indicate that a figure of about 60,000 is more likely.29 According to all sources, before 1914 the great majority of the Jewish population of Palestine lived in the cities and towns, notably the four “holy cities” of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safad, and Tiberias; only 10,000–12,000 lived on the land, nearly all of them in the more than forty agricultural colonies that had been established since 1878.
It is this rural minority of the Jewish population that concerns us most, however. Unlike most of the urban majority of Jews in Palestine at this time, who were generally religiously-oriented and apolitical, a great many of those in the countryside were committed Zionists with explicit political objectives. Additionally, it was this rural settler population which came into the closest contact with the majority of the Arab population of Palestine, the peasantry. This naturally occurred because, as can be seen from any map showing the location of the Jewish colonies established before 1914,30 these were sited mainly in the fertile lowlands of the coastal plain, in the Valley of Jezreel, or in eastern Galilee. By and large these areas were already fairly heavily populated by Arabs, although often less so than the hill regions.
The situation in the different lowland areas where the main collisions between Arab and Jew first took place must be explained. In the coastal plain, running from Gaza north to Haifa, much of the soil was sandy and was not easily brought under grain cultivation, while in other areas there were marshes and swamps, and much of the region had therefore been relatively sparsely populated before the mid- to late nineteenth century. With sufficient investment, however, it proved ideal for the citrus culture for export made possible by rapid steam navigation and the growing incorporation of Palestine and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean littoral into the world economy. This labor- and capital-intensive form of agriculture, which expanded rapidly in the decades after the 1850s, drew workers to these areas, and by 1914 was producing Palestine’s most valuable export crop. In the best pre-war year, 1913, 1.6 million cases of oranges, valued at nearly £300,000, were shipped from Jaffa, figures not exceeded until 1923–24.31 American consular officials in 1880 estimated that there were about 500 orange groves between two and six acres each in the Jaffa region, an overall area of about 2,000 acres, and that the land devoted to oranges had tripled since 1850.32 It increased rapidly in the following years, reaching about 30,000 dunums (or 7,500 acres) by the outbreak of World War I, most of it owned and cultivated by Arabs.33
Meanwhile, in the years after the 1860s, the same processes of population growth and expanded cultivation also took place in fertile lowland regions such as the Marj Ibn ‘Amir and eastern Galilee. This came about as the imposition of strong central government control, which limited both bedouin depredations and factional fighting, allowed the more stable neighboring hill villages to expand regular cultivation into the lowlands, where previously they had been able to grow crops only in those periods when the precarious security situation permitted it. In many cases, of course, the peasants’ “title” to such land, in the modern western legal sense of the word, was unclear.
Prosperous urban merchants from Beirut, Damascus, Haifa, and Jaffa were quick to realize the opportunities resulting from the expansion of cultivation made possible by the greater degree of security in Palestine, combined with the increased possibilities for establishing ownership over land in this category after passage of the 1858 land law.34 In the succeeding decades, many of them managed to acquire title to large areas of these fertile lands. In some cases they settled new Arab cultivators on them, and in others they established their new rights at the expense of the claims of peasants who cultivated the land or nomads whose livestock grazed on it, turning the former into tenant-farmers. Soon afterwards, Zionist land purchase and settlement bodies were drawn to these same regions because of their fertility, because they were less heavily populated than the hills, and because ownership of large parcels was often in a few hands, facilitating transfer of title.35 The resulting N-shaped pattern of Jewish settlement—running north up the coast, southeast along the Marj Ibn ‘Amir/Valley of Jezreel axis, and then north along the shores of Lake Tiberias—was pointed out as early as 1907 by Arthur Ruppin, later to be the senior official of the Zionist movement in Palestine. This pattern of settlement in effect created the strategic and demographic backbone of the yishuv in succeeding years, and of Israel since 1948.36
By 1914, therefore, Palestine’s Arab population of more than 650,000 was spread relatively densely over most of the fertile and cultivable parts of the country, in the hills as well as the lowlands, as a result of a process of rapid population growth, and the expansion and what Schölch calls the “filling” of existing villages starting in the 1860s.37 Thus from a very early stage in the process of Zionist colonization, the establishment of a new Jewish colony frequently led to confrontations with the local populace. The process would begin with the purchase of land, generally from an absentee landlord, followed by the imposition of a new order on the existing Arab cultivators—sometimes involving their transformation into tenant-farmers or agricultural laborers, and sometimes their expulsion—and finally the settlement of new Jewish immigrants.
There were some exceptions to this pattern when the land concerned had formerly been sparsely populated or uncultivated (though, even in such cases, it may have been subject to customary grazing rights which the inhabitants were naturally unwilling to surrender). But most of the land purchased, especially after the turn of the twentieth century, was fertile and therefore inhabited, and fellahin with long-standing traditional rights of tenure frequently stood in the way of the close settlement of Jewish farmers on the land. The fellahin naturally considered the land to be theirs, and they would often discover that they had ceased to be the legal owners, and/or that they no longer had rights of usufruct on the land, only when the land was sold by an absentee landlord to a Zionist settlement agency. The situation was particularly acute if the agency concerned did not require their services as hired laborers or tenant farmers, and intended to replace them with Jewish settlers, as was increasingly the case after the turn of the century.
If the land were purchased or otherwise acquired by an Arab landlord, the result was much the same insofar as title was concerned, but very different in other respects, since both the old and the new Arab landlords needed the fellahin to cultivate their land. As Charles Kamen points out, when the purchasers were Arabs, “the effects of such purchases were almost identical with those resulting from Jewish acquisitions. The principal difference was that the Jewish owners would sooner or later evict the Arab cultivators in order to settle Jews on the land, while Arab owners would retain them as tenants.”38 With the creation of Zionist land purchase and settlement agencies, committed to the principle that land purchased became the inalienable property of the Jewish people, and could not be purchased or leased by Arabs, these distinctions grew even greater, and the impact of land sales more acute.
This entire process, and the difference between earlier sales, which rarely involved expulsion of the Arab cultivators, and those after about 1900, which often did, can be seen from examining three sets of conflicts following land purchases, the first at Petah Tiqva in 1886, which will be briefly recounted, and two others which we will look at more closely, one in the Tiberias region running from 1901 to 1904 (which had a bloody sequel in 1909), and the incidents at al-Fula in 1910–11, which have been alluded to in previous chapters.
In the Petah Tiqva incident, which was settled by the intervention of Ottoman troops and the arrest of many fellahin, a Jewish settler was killed and several others wounded in an attack launched by peasants from the neighboring Arab village of Yahudiyya who were aggrieved because land they considered theirs had been sold to the colony after they forfeited it to Jaffa money lenders and the local authorities.39 According to one source, the money lenders “had sold the Jews more land than was actually theirs to sell,” while another indicates that “the Arab tenant farmers were very likely entitled to the possession of 2,600 dunams” of the entire parcel of 14,200.40 As Mandel’s account makes clear, it was only some years after the purchase had taken place that “for the first time some of the peasants were confronted with the fact that they no longer owned the land.”41
The example of Petah Tiqva in 1886 confirms that there was a pattern stretching back to the early years of Jewish colonization in Palestine. Mandel mentions four similar incidents during the same period involving disputes over ownership. These culminated in settlers at Gedera being “harassed for years” from 1884 on; in a raid on Rehovot in 1892 “reminiscent of the attack on Petah Tiqva,” followed by another attack in the following year; and in lengthy property disputes at Nes Ziyyona and Hadera. However, Mandel notes that in most of these early cases, Arab animosity eventually died down when the fellahin were able to lease back some of their lands from the new owners, and obtained permanent or seasonal work in other parts of their former properties.42
It is important to note that after these initial clashes during this early period of settlement, in most areas the pragmatic and relatively un-ideological settlers of the first aliya (1882–1903) in effect came to treat the fellahin little differently than had their former Arab landlords. They disappropriated the fellahin, but in most cases they did not fully dispossess them, as they integrated them into plantation-style colonies, characterized by a large number of Arab laborers and a few Jewish overseers. This uneasy, but at least temporarily manageable, situation changed definitively with the second aliya starting early in the twentieth century. This involved a new wave of immigrants, many of whom had fled Russia after vicious pogroms in Kishniev in 1903 and all over the country in October 1905. The newcomers brought with them the more radical socialist and nationalist ideas of the “conquest of labor”—which in practice meant replacing Arab workers with Jewish ones—and the “conquest of the soil,” and a much greater willingness to take arms in defense of newly acquired lands, which translated into a more aggressive, forceful attitude to the Arabs. With these new immigrants and their novel ideas, a new, more exclusivist form of colonization began.43
The twentieth-century incidents in the Tiberias region and at al-Fula, especially the latter, are significant because of the major effect they were to have in the context of Ottoman and Arab nationalist politics and in the coalescence of Palestinian identity. Moreover they were also apparently the first cases where the replacement of Arab laborers with Jewish ones and the dispossession of the former was a major source of friction—for as we have seen, such a complete displacement of Arabs had not generally occurred in earlier cases. Both incidents are unusual in that they became the subject of serious disturbances and major public controversy at the time, and are among the few for which sufficient data are readily available from a variety of sources (there are very few Arab sources for the incidents before the turn of the century). Although they mark an escalation of the process, they nevertheless appear to form part of a clear existing pattern of peasant resistance to Zionist colonization, as the clash at Petah Tiqva and the four others just mentioned indicate, and as will be apparent from some of the details of these two incidents, cited below.
In the early years of the Zionist movement, many of its European supporters—and others—believed that Palestine was empty and sparsely cultivated. This view was widely propagated by some of the movement’s leading thinkers and writers, such as Herzl, Bialik, and Mandelstamm, with Herzl never even mentioning the Arabs in his famous work, The Jewish State.44 It was summed up in the widely-propagated Zionist slogan, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” However, whatever Zionists in Europe may have chosen to believe, things looked different on the spot. There was little doubt in the minds of most Jewish settlers and of the officials responsible for purchasing land for settlement that the actual situation in Palestine was quite different from what this slogan indicated. And a brief visit to Palestine usually sufficed to show even the most ardent Zionist abroad that reality was more complicated than the movement’s propaganda might lead some to believe. In the words of the famed writer Ahad Ha-Am in an essay entitled “Truth from the Land of Palestine,” written after a three-month visit to the country in 1891:
We abroad are used to believing that Eretz Israel is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed, and that anyone who wishes to purchase land there may come and purchase as much as he desires. But in truth this is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed. Only sand dunes and stony mountains that are not fit to grow anything but fruit trees - and this only after hard labor and great expense of clearing and reclamation—only these are not cultivated.45
The situation Ha-Am described had inevitable consequences in terms of what had to be done with the Arabs who tilled land the Zionists coveted after the principle of the “conquest of labor” was slowly established as a basic element of Zionist ideology in the years following 1900. For this principle carried with it the necessity not simply to disappropriate the tillers of the land by moving in Jewish farm managers to supervise Arab fellahin who did the actual work (in the traditional colonial pattern that had generally obtained in the earlier settlements) but also to dispossess utterly the fellahin in order to make room for Jewish tillers of the soil. This harsh reality was clearly perceived by Dr. Arthur Ruppin, the foremost land expert of the Jewish Agency, who declared: “Land is the most necessary thing for our establishing roots in Palestine. Since there are hardly any more arable unsettled lands in Palestine, we are bound in each case of the purchase of land and its settlement to remove the peasants who cultivated the land so far, both owners of the land and tenants.”46
We have seen that “removal” of the owners of the land was usually accomplished quite easily since, as a result of the accumulation of title to much fertile land in the hands of a small number of urban merchants and notables in the later nineteenth century, the tiller of the land was often different from the owner, and the latter often regarded land as no more than a commercial investment. But the resistance of fellahin to being uprooted from the land on which they and their ancestors had often worked and lived for generations was not so easily overcome. In their eyes, the transfer of formal, legal ownership—under a new system of property relations in land which they may or may not have comprehended or accepted—did not mean they could be deprived of what they believed were inalienable rights of usufruct. Given their understandable perspective, neither abstract legal principle, nor compensation, which was offered at times, were very convincing.
Sometimes, the fellahin accepted compensation from Jewish settlement bodies, presumably feeling themselves unable to stand up to the new owners of the land and their official backers. But at other times, they resisted their dispossession, on occasion with violence. In such cases, it was necessary for the purchasers to depend on the power of the state, whether the Ottoman, or, later on, the British Mandatory authorities, to enable them to take control of the land. In this new situation, lingering resentments remained, often expressing themselves in continuing acts of violence against the new settlements which, unlike the incidents of the 1880s and 1890s already described, did not dwindle as the former Arab cultivators found work as laborers or tenants on Jewish-owned land.
Starting in 1901, the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) attempted to “remove the peasants who cultivated the land so far” from tracts totaling about seventy thousand dunums in the Tiberias district which it had purchased beginning in 1899 (the largest area of land thus far bought for Jewish settlement in Lower Galilee). These efforts met with stiff resistance from the Arab inhabitants of the villages of al-Shajara, Misha, and Malhamiyya, who were to be dispossessed by this purchase, and other neighboring villages such as Lubiyya and Kafr Kanna, which lost some of their land as part of the transaction. Of the total area, more than 60,000 dunums had been purchased from the big Beirut merchant family of the Sursuqs, and their business partners, the Twaynis and Mudawwars. Some 700 dunums had been bought from local landlords, and 3,000 from some of the fellahin themselves.47
From the beginning, there was trouble. In 1901, fellahin from several villages, alarmed by news of the purchases, “molested JCA’s surveyor on a number of occasions when he came to measure lands for sale.”48 According to the account of Chaim Kalvarisky, an official of the JCA, in the first stages of the dispute in 1901–1902, the fellahin not only refused to be removed from their lands after “Mr. Ossovetsky, who acted as agent, and the landlords paid no regard to the fate of these tenants, and insisted on their eviction, as the land had already been bought and paid for.” Thereafter, “Ossovetsky was shot at; troops were brought and many tenants were arrested and taken to prison.” Through the forcible intervention of the authorities, lands cultivated by inhabitants of the Arab villages were seized and they were prevented from tilling them.49 Between 1901 and 1904, the Jewish agricultural settlements of Sejera, Kfar Tavor, Yavniel, Menehamia, and Bet Gan were set up on these lands, and others were established there later.50 Expansion by these settlements in 1903 into lands purchased in 1899, but temporarily leased to Arab villagers from Lubiyya, led to further clashes, resulting in the death of a Jewish settler in 1904.51
Although this was ostensibly a routine conflict between new landowners and the traditional occupants of the land, with the state naturally intervening decisively on behalf of the possessors of legal title, there were several unusual factors involved. The first was that the new owners of the land were seen by the fellahin as foreigners and strangers, rather than just another set of local or absentee landlords whom they knew how to deal with. Secondly, the new settlers were increasingly motivated by the radical ideologies that animated immigrants of the second aliya, and fully intended to supplant the indigenous tenant farmers. Finally, these newcomers were supported by a regime that many among the local population were beginning to see as alien for the first time.52
Thus, in a situation where an Ottoman government that was beginning to be seen as Turkish-dominated forced Arab peasants to accept the sale and transfer of their land to Zionist colonists, it was of some significance that the Arab qa’immaqam of the Tiberias district, Amir Amin Arslan, should oppose the transaction on nationalist grounds.53 This he did, Kalvarisky noted, in spite of the indifference to the issue’s national aspects of his Turkish superior, Ruşdi Bey, the Vali of Beirut. Ruşdi Bey acted according to the letter of the law in ultimately seeing to it that the new owners of these lands were able to take possession of their property. But the opposition of an Arab government official presaged Arab opposition in the years that followed to both Zionist settlement endeavors, and to a Turkish-dominated government which took no apparent interest in a question of vital and growing interest to the Arabs of the Empire.
According to Kalvarisky’s account, even after implementation of the Vali’s orders, Arslan continued to “resist the de-Arabization of the district”; he perhaps also gave discreet encouragement to the small bands of peasants angry at the loss of their land who afterwards harassed the new settlers.54 For the time being there was little else he could do besides insisting that compensation be paid to the evicted tenants, whose will to resist had been broken by the Ottoman government’s repression on behalf of the JCA. Within a few years, such aggrieved fellahin, who had found their former Arab landlords, the Ottoman state, and the new Jewish settlers backed by influential and affluent settlement bodies like the JCA, all ranged against them, were to find public advocates for their mute resistance.
The Ottoman Revolution of 1908 precipitated the change. Among the deputies elected to represent the Beirut vilayet in the Ottoman Parliament after the reimposition of the Constitution was the former qa’immaqam of Tiberias, Amir Amin Arslan, who won a 1909 by-election. In the Ottoman Parliament he became an active member of the large group of deputies representing the Arab provinces, who as time went on grew increasingly sensitive to the questions of Zionism and Arab nationalism, as we saw in the last chapter. At the same time, with the lifting of press censorship, and the flowering of the Arabic-language press, ideas that had long been long suppressed came to the surface and spread. The issue of Zionism soon became a subject of extensive comment, and a focus of criticism of the Ottoman authorities in the newly free press.55
Perhaps encouraged by the atmosphere of greater freedom, and the lifting of the heavy hand of the previous government, after 1908 there were more attacks on Jewish settlements, particularly those in the Galilee around al-Shajara which had been the scene of the 1901–4 incidents involving Amir Amin Arslan. Here new problems arose in the spring of 1909 as disputes over land which had “persisted for years” erupted, and the Arab former cultivators, perhaps emboldened by the Revolution, “challenged boundaries which had been agreed upon a decade earlier.” In the resulting clashes in April 1909, four people were killed, two Arabs and two Jews, and several wounded on both sides over the course of a few days. In the aftermath, although two had been killed on each side, eleven Arabs were arrested by the authorities.56
The increased tension led to a consequence of great import for the development of the yishuv and for Jewish-Arab relations. In response to the escalating violence, in April 1909, a secret Jewish organization called Bar Giora, founded in 1907, publicly established a paramilitary organization called Ha-Shomer (“the guardian”), which was sent to guard the fields of these new Galilee settlements after the settlers received permission from the Ottoman authorities to arm themselves. Bar Giora was “a self-selected elite group in which ‘Hebrew Labor,’ settlement, and guarding all occupied pride of place,” which “expressed a tendency to respond with force to clashes with the Arabs.”57 Its offspring, Ha-Shomer, combined an aggressive ideology with a swaggering addiction to weapons, ammunition belts, and Arab dress, as if in emulation of both their current Arab antagonists and those of the past, the Cossack oppressors of the Jews in Russia.58
The formation of this public paramilitary organization in April 1909 was the culmination of a process that had been going on for several years, and also fell under the rubric of the “conquest of labor,” whereby the more assertive Jewish immigrants of the second aliya had gradually been taking over duties as armed watchmen at Jewish settlements, replacing the Arabs who had formerly performed these jobs. One of the first sites where this had occurred was in 1907 in the settlement of Sejera, on the disputed former lands of the village of al-Shajara. There, Mandel notes, as a result of this takeover “the former watchmen were disgruntled, and another source of friction had been created.”59 In taking over these jobs, Jewish settlers were not just signifying their empowerment after long years of powerlessness in the diaspora, nor merely depriving the Arab watchmen of their livelihood. Most importantly, they were taking on the defense of newly acquired land against its dispossessed former cultivators, many of whom firmly believed they still had rights to it: this incident and others like it can thus be seen as representing the conflict in Palestine in microcosm.
On both sides, the patterns established by these early clashes were lasting ones. In The Making of Israel’s Army, Gen. Yigal Allon describes Ha-Shomer as the nucleus of the Haganah, itself the forerunner of the Israeli armed forces.60 This is a consistent trope that runs through the self-presentation of the Israeli military down to the present. The roots of the military institution which has been central to the Zionist enterprise throughout most of its history therefore lie in the active defense of newly acquired lands against those who still claimed rights over them. While much has been written about the founding of Ha-Shomer and what it signified, the simmering armed peasant resistance to Jewish settlement on land the fellahin stubbornly persisted in considering theirs was necessarily mute, inarticulate, and unsung. It was considerable enough, however, at least in areas of extensive land purchase from absentee landlords like the lands around al-Shajara in 1901–1904, to necessitate the creation of what Ze’ev Schiff, in his history of the Israeli army, calls a “highly disciplined” armed force, and like Allon describes as the precursor of that army.61
And on the Palestinian side, later armed movements, whether in the 1930s or the 1960s, harked back to what was described as the heroic resistance (muqawama) of these first fellahin to confront the newcomers with arms. Both the peasant headdress (the kaffiyya) and the term “resistance” were picked up by these later movements as symbolic of their continuity with these first armed opponents of Zionist settlement in Palestine.62 Although we do not know the names of most of those involved on the Arab side in these incidents, and although there are few Arab records of them, we can attempt to read between the lines of the sources based on the ample contemporary Zionist and Western records, and discern something of their aims, motivations, and outlook.63 In doing this we must take account of the fact that in these sources their actions are generally portrayed in a highly uncomplimentary and distorted light, often colored by both ignorance and hostility.
Important as had been the al-Shajara incidents in 1901–4 and their bloody sequel in 1909, which repeated the pattern of the earlier clashes in Petah Tiqva and elsewhere while taking the conflict to a higher level, a far greater impact was created by events in al-Fula, which were touched on in chapters 2 and 4. The village of al-Fula was only some fifteen miles away from al-Shajara in the neighboring district of Nazareth. There, as in al-Shajara a few years earlier, an Arab qa’immaqam supported fellahin threatened with dispossession, and unsuccessfully resisted his Turkish superior in opposing the transfer of land legally sold by an absentee landlord to the Zionists, and there too the Sursuq family of Beirut were the vendors of the land. Although the end result for many of the fellahin involved was the same—dispossession and homelessness—the al-Fula purchase marked the beginning of an overt and articulate anti-Zionist campaign, which was based on the widely publicized details of this case of dispossession. This campaign developed over the next two years until it had encompassed the provinces of bilad al-Sham, the Arabic press, and the Ottoman parliament.
The details of the al-Fula transaction are simple. The village lands totaled under ten thousand dunums situated in the middle of the fertile Marj Ibn ‘Amir. Halfway between Nazareth and Jenin, al-Fula was only a small part of the vast ownings in various parts of this broad valley of the Sursuqs of Beirut, who in 1872 had purchased some 230,000 dunums from the Ottoman Government for the paltry sum of £T 20,000, and altogether seem to have owned well over a quarter of a million dunums. According to one source, the family’s annual returns from its properties in Marj Ibn ‘Amir equaled their original purchase price, while another put their annual income from these properties in 1883 at $200,000.64
In late 1910, Elias Sursuq agreed to sell the lands of al-Fula to the Keren Kayemeth Leisrael, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a new institution of the Zionist movement devoted to land purchase and headed by Arthur Ruppin.65 According to Mandel, this was “some of the best agricultural land in Palestine,”66 and the JNF set about immediately occupying and settling its new property. There was strong resistance, however, from the fellahin of al-Fula, their resolve apparently stiffened by the changing mood in Palestine and other parts of the Empire regarding Zionism, and by the effect of earlier examples of dispossession in nearby parts of Lower Galilee over the preceding years. In addition to the first five settlements established between 1901 and 1904 on the land whose sale Amir Amin Arslan had opposed, another five had been set up in the same area between 1905 and 1910, and all were settled mainly by immigrants of the second aliya.
Another factor encouraged the resistance of the peasants of al-Fula: this was the support of the Arab qa’immaqam of Nazareth, to which we have already had occasion to refer. Shukri al-‘Asali was a member of a prominent Damascus family who had received his higher education at the Mülkiye in Istanbul, and had thereafter held a number of government posts in different parts of bilad al-Sham. He was also an accomplished orator and an experienced journalist. Upon hearing of the sale, al-‘Asali refused to hand over the title deed to the property to the new owners, in spite of a directive to comply from the Vali in Beirut, where the transaction had been arranged. The qa’immaqam’s refusal to go along with the sale led to further representations in Beirut, this time by Ruppin himself, and to a renewal of the order from the Vali to hand over title of the al-Fula lands to its new owners.
At this point al-‘Asali went much further than had Arslan a few years earlier: he took advantage of the new opportunities opened up by the Constitutional era by writing an open letter bitterly critical of Zionism under the pseudonym of “Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi” (Saladin), which was published in two parts in the important Damascus opposition paper al-Muqtabas in December 1910.67 This and succeeding articles about al-Fula by al-‘Asali published in February 1911 accused the Zionists of separatist objectives in Palestine, and hinted strongly that they were prompted by motives incompatible with loyalty to the Ottoman Empire. All three articles had a large readership, as they were reprinted in the Haifa paper al-Karmil, and in the Beirut dailies al-Mufid, al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, and al-Haqiqa, where they helped fuel the ongoing controversy over Zionism. In these and other articles on the subject by al-‘Asali, the issue of peasant dispossession was prominently featured and linked to patriotic themes: there are historical connections linking the people to the land going all the way back to Saladin, and thus expelling its original peasant tenants and replacing them with foreigners is treason, al-‘Asali wrote in one of his articles.68
Shukri al-‘Asali’s next step was even more radical. He was informed that at the orders of the local agent of the JNF, Yehoshua Hankin, a band of thirty armed members of Ha-Shomer had been sent to occupy the lands of the al-Fula villagers. This was part of what Shafir describes as “a new method of Jewish presence through ‘conquest groups’ that initially settled and prepared newly purchased land until it had been handed over to its permanent Jewish owners.”69 The qa’immaqam immediately sent a large body of troops to the scene to drive them away. This was all he could do, for the new owners had both the law and their potent financial capabilities on their side, and the Turkish Vali in January 1911 overruled al-‘Asali’s insubordinate actions and expelled the fellahin, allowing the establishment in that month of the settlement of Merhavia on the disputed lands.
The resistance of the dispossessed peasants of al-Fula, whose land and homes had been sold out from under their feet by the Sursuq family in Beirut, continued even after the sale had been completed. Attacks on Merhavia by the former cultivators of the land were frequent. In the words of an authority on Zionist land purchase, Alex Bein, these attacks were due to “the natural resentment of the former cultivators.”70 In an armed clash in May 1911, an Arab was killed near the settlement by a Ha-Shomer watchman, provoking angry elements of the local population to lay siege to Merhavia for two days until the local authorities moved in and jailed several of the settlers.71
Shukri al-‘Asali’s role did not stop there. Basing his election campaign on the al-Fula affair (which in the press was often referred to as the “ ‘Afula affair,” in reference to the neighboring town of ‘Afula), he ran for and won a seat for Damascus in a hotly contested January 1911 by-election. His electoral platform pledged him to fight Zionism “to his last drop of blood,” on the basis of his experience in the al-Fula case. Once elected, al-‘Asali was to play a key role not only in the opposition to Zionism in the Ottoman Chamber and outside, but in galvanizing members of the Arab parliamentary bloc in its opposition to the nascent Turkish nationalism of the ruling CUP.72 He had all the more impact because he was one of the editors and part-owner of the Damascus newspaper al-Muqtabas, one of the most influential Arabist journals of its day thanks to his efforts and those of its other co-owners and editors, Muhammad and Ahmad Kurd ‘Ali.
In large part as a result of al-‘Asali’s actions, the al-Fula incident became a cause célèbre in bilad al-Sham, with dozens of articles appearing in newspapers in Damascus, Beirut, Haifa, and elsewhere over a period of over a year. In the press and during debates in the Ottoman parliament after al-‘Asali’s arrival there, it served as a striking illustration of charges regarding the ruling CUP’s failure to take into account Arab concerns made by Arabs restive over what increasingly seemed like Turkish domination of the Empire. From the press accounts and descriptions of al-‘Asali’s speeches during the election campaign and later on in the Ottoman Parliament, it is clear that it was the spectacle of Arab peasants resisting expulsion from their homes and lands to make room for foreign colonists which gave this incident its potent impact for most Arab audiences.
Again and again in the press coverage, the voices of the illiterate fellahin who cultivated the land come through in descriptions of the al-Fula affair. This is true even in an article defending his actions in ordering the handing over of the land to its new owners by the Vali of Beirut, Nur al-Din Bey. He stated that after Elias Sursuq began proceedings to sell the land, the peasant proprietors begged him to urge the government to exercise its right of eminent domain, or failing that to “sell it to the inhabitants of the villages for a similar price.” This was refused by higher authorities in Istanbul, he stated, on the grounds that Sursuq had the absolute right to dispose of his property as he chose.73
Similarly, the lasting bitterness caused by the expulsion of these fellahin is visible in small local news items in the following months in al-Muqtabas, noting that settlers in the Tiberias area, including those of al-Fula, had sent telegrams to the authorities, accusing the local inhabitants of being motivated by a spirit of hostility, accusing the government of weakness, and demanding action.74 Another article, in al-Karmil, argued that it was only because the government failed to do its job in resisting foreign colonial penetration that hostility to the settlers had developed among the Arabs of Palestine. When the Zionists took over lands, it added, there was naturally resistance to this, with the peasants fighting back, and the colonists killing them in the resulting clashes and then sending telegrams of protest to the authorities.75 The peasants’ continuing resistance to their dispossession is visible in other incidents reported in al-Karmil, such as one in June 1911, months after the al-Fula transaction had been completed, in which settlers there accused the inhabitants of a neighboring Arab village, which included some fellahin who lost their homes and lands as a result of the sale, of destroying crops and property to the value of 3,100 Turkish pounds.76
The sharp, continuing controversy sparked off by the al-Fula sale, an otherwise minor incident, underlines the importance of the dispossession and consequent resistance of the Palestinian peasantry in making the issue of Zionism a central one in Arab political discourse before 1914. As has been shown by Mandel and others, there were many other reasons for this strong response to political Zionism among the Arabs of Palestine and neighboring lands. But the intensity of the post-1908 reaction can be explained only by the cumulative effect of a series of land purchases from absentee landlords involving expulsions of fellahin and ensuing clashes. This is what brought important elements among the Arab urban elite to a realization of the full import of Zionism: not only was land being purchased, but also its Arab cultivators were being dispossessed and replaced by foreigners whose ultimate political objective was the domination of Palestine.
This phenomenon was particularly important in Galilee after the turn of the twentieth century, where twelve of the fifteen Jewish settlements established in Palestine between 1901 and 1912 were located. We have seen that in this fertile region much land had recently come into the hands of absentee landlords, most of them newly prosperous Beirut merchants, for whom land was an investment, and who were willing to sell when the price was right. Tension rose also because of the new freedom of expression in the Empire after 1908, which encouraged open expressions of hostility to Zionism, and to the Ottoman authorities for their laxness in dealing with it. It also increased after 1904 with the arrival of immigrants of the second aliya, committed to the “conquest of labor” and the replacement of Arabs by Jews in as many occupations as possible. The coalescence of all these factors made the al-Fula clashes between Arab fellahin and Jewish settlers more significant than the many others that preceded it and that involved a few of the same elements.
Nur al-Din Bey had stated in his response to al-‘Asali over the issue of al-Fula that “property which is at the disposal of someone can be used by him as he wishes, if there are no legal obstacles; this right is guaranteed by the basic laws of all states.”77 For the Ottoman state, this was a simple matter of property rights: Elias Sursuq had the absolute right to dispose of his land to whomsoever he pleased. The fact that the Ottoman citizen he was selling the land to was an intermediary for the Zionist movement, and that many of the settlers who would occupy it were not Ottoman citizens was in effect not the business of the state, any more than was the fate of the dispossessed peasants, or the alleged historic nature of the parcel in question (we have seen that al-‘Asali had quoted medieval Arab historians to the effect that al-Fula was the site of a fortress erected by Saladin after his defeat of the Crusaders at nearby Hittin in 1187).
All of these considerations combined with mounting concern among the elite of Palestine and other Arab regions of the Empire over the growth in the power and coherence of the Zionist movement in Europe (there was intensive coverage in the press in bilad al-Sham and Egypt of the Zionist congresses, particularly the tenth held at Basle in August 1911).78 The result was a volatile mix, made all the more incendiary by the growth of Arabist sentiment among that elite. Zionism, it was charged, was being tolerated and even encouraged by the Turkish-dominated CUP because of the CUP’s lack of concern for the Arab provinces. These charges may or may not have been justified: some leaders of the CUP, such as Cavid Bey, the Minister of Finance, were apparently sympathetic to the Zionists, while others were less so. However, they were widely believed, and constituted a potent weapon in the conflict between the Arabist tendency among the Arab elite and the CUP.
IV
To conclude an assessment of the significance of peasant resistance to land sale and dispossession, it is necessary to attempt to establish some facts about land sales to the Zionists before 1914. The majority of sellers are often described simply as “absentee landlords,” and a controversy marked by fierce polemics has grown up around this point. A table listing land purchased according to former owners (the most authoritative published source extant) is contained in The Land System in Palestine by the eminent Zionist land expert, Dr. Avraham Granott. He was Managing Director of the JNF (the main land purchasing agency for the Zionist movement) from 1922 until 1945, after which he became Chairman of its Board of Directors. Based on incomplete Jewish Agency figures, the table gives details regarding 682,000 dunums purchased to 1936, or about half of Zionist land purchases in Palestine until 1948.79
As for the period before 1914, which concerns us here, Granott’s table provides figures regarding 245,581 dunums purchased between 1878 and 1914 (59 percent of the total of 418,100 dunums acquired by Jews in Palestine by World War I). Granott divides the purchases into four categories according to “previous owners,” as follows: 25% from “large absentee landlords,” 25% from “large resident landlords,” 37.5% from “various sources” (such as the Ottoman Government, large foreign companies and churches) and 12.5% from the fellahin.80 For the entire period covered by the table (1878–1936) the figures are even more heavily weighted toward absentee and large landowners: in the same four categories the percentages are 52.6, 24.6, 13.4 and 9.4 percent respectively.
It would appear that for the period until 1914 the trends indicated by Granott were even more pronounced, and more heavily weighted toward non-Palestinian absentee landlords. This emerges from parcel-by-parcel pre-World War I land sale figures in a table in the unpublished work on Zionism written by Ruhi al-Khalidi, which was referred to in the previous chapter. Covering sales to Jewish institutions from 1878 to 1907, it can be supplemented by data from newspapers of the period, and other published sources.81 The resulting figures are considerably more detailed than Granott’s. They list by name the vendors of a total of 247,466 dunums, or 60 percent of all the land purchased to that point, and the twenty-two Jewish colonies established on this land, including many of the oldest and largest ones, and every one of those which were the scenes of the cases of peasant resistance discussed in this chapter. These sources yield the following results regarding those selling land:
Non-Palestinian absentee landlords: 143,577 dunums (58%).
Palestinian absentee landlords: 88,689 dunums (36%).
Local landlords and fellahin: 15,200 dunums (6%).
The first group includes foreigners, foreign diplomats, Beirut merchants, as well as Turkish government officials. This and the second group sold 94 percent of the land that changed hands before 1914 for which we have detailed figures. If these figures are representative (and Granott’s similar figures strongly indicate that they are), they show that a far higher proportion of land sales were undertaken by absentee landlords, both Palestinian and non-Palestinian, than some scholars have indicated. It would furthermore seem that the role of non-Palestinian absentee landlords was decisive in this regard in the pre-1914 period.
Extrapolating from the two sets of partial pre-1914 figures on land sales presented above, and adding to them further figures for the succeeding decades, it is possible to come to tentative conclusions about land sales for the entire period to 1948. In his book The Land System in Palestine 1917–1939, Kenneth Stein lays particular stress on sales of land to Jews by Palestinians, particularly notables who often played a prominent role in nationalist opposition to Zionism. There can be little doubt that under the kind of economic pressure combined with financial inducements that Stein describes, Palestinian landlords, both absentee and resident, as well as fellahin cultivators, often sold land. Nevertheless the overall picture is in fact more complex than he paints it.82
Stein himself notes that “during the 1920s more than 60 per cent of the land purchased by Jews was bought from Arab absentee landlords residing outside of Palestine.”83 The actual proportion is very likely much higher, as more than 240,000 dunums, or nearly half of the total of 510,000 dunums sold during the period 1920–29, was made up of an enormous piece of land encompassing most of the fertile Marj Ibn ‘Amir, which was sold by the Sursuq family of Beirut and a number of their Lebanese partners in 1924–25. Together with the other lands in the Marj Ibn ‘Amir (such as al-Fula), sold to the Zionists before 1914 by the Sursuqs and their business partners in a few Beirut families related to them (such as the ‘Aryans and the Twaynis), this single bloc in one region amounts to 313,000 dunums, or more than 22 percent of all the land purchased by Jews in Palestine until 1948. This would seem to contradict Stein’s assertion that the Marj Ibn ‘Amir sale had “important significance, but certainly not the political value given it by many writers.”84 And these figures on the size of this sale do not even touch on the purchase’s vital importance in terms of the territorial continuity of Jewish settlement in Palestine, which was first pointed out by Ruppin in 1907, and is correctly emphasized by Gershon Shafir.85
More importantly, for the more than 400,000 dunums sold before 1914 and the more than 500,000 thousand dunums sold in the 1920s, the available figures (which, it must be repeated apply to only a portion of these totals) suggest that well over 60 percent of the land acquired by the Zionists before 1930 was sold by non-Palestinians. Inasmuch as these 900,000 dunums are the bulk of the total of 1.39 million dunums purchased and registered by the Zionist movement until the end of the Mandate,86 these partial figures have major implications for the whole question of land sales from the beginning of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine and until 1948. Although it is true that many Palestinian landlords and fellahin sold land, whether out of greed and lack of patriotism, or because of need and without knowing who would ultimately control it, the conclusion is inescapable that the great bulk of land would indeed seem to have been sold by non-Palestinian absentee landlords, for whom these were no more than straight-forward commercial transactions.
V
In light of the evidence presented in this chapter, it is clear that opposition to land sales to the Zionists, particularly sales by absentee landlords (both Palestinian and non-Palestinian), was an important shared element in cementing the link between members of the Palestinian elite who opposed Zionism on grounds of principle, and the fellahin whose resistance caught the popular imagination and thereby played a vital role in mobilizing opinion both in Palestine and the Arab world. This opposition united the peasants, who tried desperately to cling to their land, or retaliated against the Zionist settlers in a violent fashion if they lost it, together with the urban intellectuals and notables, some of whom realized what Zionism implied only when they beheld the dispossession that Shukri al-‘Asali, Ruhi al-Khalidi, Najib Nassar, ‘Isa al-‘Isa and others decried.
The result was a new shared urban-rural perception among Palestinians of a new type of Zionist settlement, beginning with the second aliya, which for the first time witnessed Jewish settlers taking over not just ownership, but also cultivation, of the land on a large scale. This new phenomenon not only was the basis for the first systematic, public expressions of anti-Zionism in Palestine and Arab world. It also constituted an element of shared identity between those in the cities and towns of Palestine and those in the countryside, who now felt that in some way they shared the same fate, face to face with an external force whose power at this stage they may perhaps have overestimated, but were genuinely afraid of.
We can see that many of those in the cities who warned against the dangers of Zionism made a conscious effort to build this shared sense of destiny between city and countryside, city-dweller and fellah. One example of such an effort is the initiative of the editors of Filastin, mentioned in chapter 4, to distribute their strongly anti-Zionist newspaper to every village in the hinterland of Jaffa—a region which was one of the prime targets of Zionist colonization. This initiative was motivated by an explicit sense that it was essential for the peasantry to be aware of events throughout the country, particularly those related to Zionism on which Filastin focused. Another example was cited in the last chapter, in the reference to one of the last passages of Ruhi al-Khalidi’s unfinished manuscript on Zionism, which stresses the negative impact of the Zionist movement both on “the influential people in the country” and on the peasantry, as “they take possession of their land, village by village.”87 Similarly, Najib Nassar focused intensely on events in the rural areas in his newspaper al-Karmil, and is described in Zionist sources as being personally involved in helping the fellahin to resist the al-Shajara sale of 1909.88
Such a pattern of interaction between rural resistance and urban opposition to Zionism has already been established for the Mandatory period. Thus, the funeral in Haifa in November 1935 of the first articulate public apostle of armed rural resistance, the Syrian Shaykh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam, who lived and worked for fifteen years among landless fellahin who had migrated to the Haifa slums, and died in combat with British troops, became an enormous public demonstration.89 This in turn helped to spark the 1936 general strike and the 1936–39 Palestinian Arab revolt. In the words of the author of the best study of al-Qassam, Abdullah Schleifer, his death “electrified the Palestinian people.”90 Al-Qassam appealed in particular to the uprooted landless peasants who drifted from Galilee into the northern port city of Haifa. These first recruits to organized armed resistance were in many cases the same people who had been dispossessed or displaced by earlier Zionist colonization activity in Galilee. In Schleifer’s words: “Many of his followers were former tenant farmers recently driven off the land by the land purchases and Arab labor exclusion policies of the Jewish National Fund.”91 At the other end of the social scale, urban leaders of the secular nationalist Istiqlal Party like Akram Zu‘aytir were deeply affected by al-Qassam’s huge funeral procession, as he recorded in his diary at the time.92 We have now seen that this pattern of fellahin resistance affecting the rest of Palestinian society, and of the latter in turn having an impact on the peasantry, already clearly established for the Mandatory period, in fact stretches back before 1914.
Because those we have focused on could not speak for themselves in the sources which are left to us after nearly a century, we have seen their actions through a glass darkly, largely via records left by foreigners who did not speak their language or understand their culture, who had little sympathy for them, and who often were their enemies. As for their countrymen, the urban elites of Palestine, they too have left us with all too little that can help us to establish a full picture of what was happening on the land in Palestine at the very outset of the conflict between Zionist settlers and Palestinian Arabs. Even regarding some issues where more information should be available, such as land purchase, we are forced to use fragmentary and incomplete data.
But it has been possible to discern a broad pattern of alienation of land from its cultivators, sometimes into the hands of Arab absentee landlords, and sometimes from them to Zionist land purchasing agencies. A largely mute process of resistance arose, particularly where land alienation and disappropriation was followed by dispossession. In the older Jewish colonies which were initially less affected by political Zionism, as the settlers were transformed into gentlemen farmers employing Arab labor, some Arab resentment had been appeased as the fellahin found jobs or were able to rent back the lands that had previously been theirs as tenant farmers. But a new and more serious process began with the second aliya in 1904 and the concomitant effort to establish an exclusive Jewish economy in Palestine.93
After 1908, peasant resistance was echoed by members of the urban upper and middle classes, many of whom were newly conscious of their identity as Arabs, chafing at what some increasingly were coming to perceive as Turkish control, and newly able to express themselves in the press and in party politics. This potent mix thus established a pattern that was already firmly set by 1914. All the elements were already in place for the bitter and protracted disputes over the questions of land sales and peasant dispossession and the resulting violence, which were the main features of the Mandate period.
Although only further research in the Ottoman, British, and Israeli archives and in Palestinian and other Arab sources can produce conclusive results as far as some of these questions are concerned, there is ample evidence to show that Arab attacks on early Jewish settlements were more than just “marauding” or “banditry” as some writers would have it (although banditry there surely also was on occasion).94 Frequently, they were rather the result of a real process of dispossession which, in the cases for which we have evidence, can be conclusively documented not in the words of the victims but rather on the basis of contemporary Zionist sources and recent research based on them. We are forced to tell their story, like that of many of the powerless in history, in the words of those who victimized them. This does not make it any less vivid, or less valid as a picture of what was happening in Palestine before 1914. In the next chapter, we will examine in detail how this newfound sense of solidarity and of common identity between different segments of society in the face of a common external threat was expressed, reflected, and shaped in the press in the years after 1908.