1930s: The British Mandate over Palestine

1931: There are 174,610 Jews living in Palestine in 1931.

Mohmsen Mohammed Saleh: 483,000 Jews migrated to Palestine during the British Mandate period and by 1948 they were 646,000 (31.7% of the population) and controlled 6% of the land, holding 291 settlements.

All the land the Jews purchased was sold by Arabs or Ottomans. Every large landowner knew he was making his tenants, the long-term clients of his family, landless. The fellaheen had already been steadily losing "their" land due to debt, drought and poor farming practices. The patron-tenant relationship was an exploitative, one-way power relationship. It was profitable for the effendi class to sell land to the Zionists at inflated prices and use the funds to finance their lavish urban lifestyles, pay off existing debt and invest in more productive assets that generated more wealth than could be gouged out of the peasants. Landless peasants also supplied cheap wage labour for commercial agriculture such as orange groves.

The "Wailing Wall" Riots (1929) from MUSLIM WORLD - Avraham Sela: As of the early 1930s, the land problem reached a crucial point as a result of several consecutive years of drought that impoverished small Arab landowners and forced them to sell their land at a time when the Jewish institutions had more funds for land purchases. The result was more sales of small plots on which relatively large number of landowners had been dependent.53
 
By 1930, the average annual income of a fellah family that owned its own land was only about P£35, which nevertheless was much higher than a tenant farmer's. Interest on loans averaged 30 percent a year.7 Peasant farmers remained at the mercy of rents, which took roughly 30 percent of the income from cultivation, and other production costs, including taxes, seed, animal fodder, food, clothing, and fuel, leaving them with meager net incomes and liable for additional burdens in taxes and debts. In the early 1930s, successive poor harvests, droughts, cattle diseases, plagues of locusts and field mice, and a global depression caused prices and cereal-production levels to collapse. Peasants commonly defaulted on loans, rents, tithes, and taxes. Peasant farms remained mere subsistence units (the rural surplus, depending on the crop and region, varied between 20 and 30 percent), but fellahin dependence on merchants, moneylenders, and landowners in an increasingly monetarized economy placed them in an extremely vulnerable position.8 - Khalaf Issa

The notables encouraged mobs or riots or 'uprisings' attacks on Jews through their control of the ulema but provided no real support. The violence caused the British to respond with commissions of investigation but curtailing of immigration or land sales was not implemented due to Zionist political lobbying. The regular introduction of new regulations trying to prevent land sales demonstrated their ineffectivenes as the sellers colluded with the buyers and brokers.

In 1929 the Johnson-Crosbie Committee investigated peasant incomes in 104 villages.

Gross income
912,670
Cost of production
268,747
23%
Nett Income
643,923
77%
Taxes (actual)
81,449
12.6%
Cost of living-
547,716
Balance
14,758
Interest on debt averaging £P. 27 per family at the rate or £P. 8 per family.
168,528

The total number of villages in Palestine according to the census of 1922, was 844. The rural population, excluding tribal areas, numbered 389,534. Vital statistics based on that census figure show a total rural population at the end of 1929 of 481,828 or an increase of 23.7% over the recorded census of 1922, including recorded immigration, while replies to the information requested in the Committee's questionnaire show an average increase in the rural population of 33 ⅓ per cent. ** evidence required ** Less than a quarter of the value of the produce produced remains in the hands of the fellah while more than double this, 48.8 goes into the hands of the moneylenders, letters of land, tax collectors and the heads of the villages.

The British government responded to the massacres of 1929 with a Commission of Enquiry. London dispatched a delegation to investigate. Released in October 1930 the Hope-Simpson Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development stated land could not support a larger population and there was scarcely any land left for Jews to buy. Without improvements in Arab farming methods, further Jewish purchases could create a serious landlessness crisis in the Arab peasantry.

By 1930 Sir John Hope Simpson observed that it has been shown that while an area of at least 180 dunums is required to maintain a fallah family in a decent standard of life in the unirrigated tracts, the whole of the cultivable land not already in the hands of the Jews would not afford an average lot in excess of 90 dunums. … It also appears that of the 86,980 rural Arab families in the villages, 29.4 per cent are landless.41 … The withdrawal of 180,000 hectares from the native rural economy at a time when all resources were needed to meet a crisis of gigantic proportions compounded the suffering needlessly. - Dynamics of Land Alienation John Ruedy

AI: By 1930, Jewish ownership in Mandatory Palestine amounted to approximately 1,250,000 dunams roughly 312,500 acres. This accounted for about 4.8% of the total land area of Palestine and around 15% of its cultivable land. therefore cultivable land is 8,350,000 dunams, total land is 20,000,000 dunams therefore 25,570 families landless and 61,410 families with land 8,350,000 / 61,410 = 136 dunams per family on average

The Hope-Simpson Report estimated the value of the fellah's farm at between £P. 51 and £P. 62.38 The annual income of the fellah who cultivated 100 dunam of land was £P. 11.80, according to the same Report. A tenant farmer who cultivated an area of similar size had an average annual income of £P. 3.60. 30% of his gross income went for rent to the landlord, taxes, and other levies, so that he and his family had very little to live on.Arieh L. Avneri

On October 20, 1930 the British Government issued the Passfield White Paper. It severely restricted Jewish immigration and blamed Jewish land purchases for Arab landlessness and the Histradut "Jewish-only" labor policy for poor Arab economic development. Lord Passfield was the (in)famous anti-semite Socialist Sidney Webb. There are now 15 million people living in "Palestine."

Journalists and writers (sons of the elites) wrote about Jewish dispossession of their sacred land and called for Jihad Filastin al-Arabiyah while fellaheen were going to the Jewish areas looking for paid work. Filastin and Al-Karmil frequently published reports accusing Zionists of wishing to and actually attacking and defiling Arab women.

Parallel with this growth of Arab prosperity, however, grew an urban industrial proletariat, a far less welcome sight to the tourist's eye. Previously, Arab poverty had been hidden inside the windowless, one-room mud huts (housing parents, children and donkey) of the villages, which looked picturesque and unreal from a distance. Now it was displayed in the slums of industrial towns like Haifa, where a whole suburb of shacks built of rusty petrol tins dismayed and shocked the visitor. Inevitably in Arab Palestine, as in other parts of the world, a slow drift had set in from village to town, from farming to industrial employment, from the monotony of rural life to the cinema and cafe. But this was not a consequence of any forced displacement caused by the Jews, nor even directly connected with the founding of Jewish industries, which did not employ Arab labour. It was simply the industrial age slowly dawning on Palestine, and was only indirectly connected with Zionist colonization which, through influx of capital and competitive example, inspired the beginnings of Arab industrialization. - Arthur Koestler
 
Even official statistics proved that of the 1,481,000 dunams in Jewish hands, 350,000 were swamp, and 500,000 were tracts never before cultivated. The entire Yishuv held only 6.3 percent of the land considered to be arable. - Howard M. Sachar

The White Paper was issued by the Colonial Office. Intense Jewish lobbying of British politicians - who actually make the decisions that the Colonial Office has to obey - using influential figures like Churchill, Herbert Samuel, and Lloyd George pressured Ramsay MacDonald, Britain's politically vulnerable first Labour prime minister. On 13th February MacDonald released the text of the Black Letter to Weizmann. The government did not intend to prohibit further land sales and large-scale immigration could continue. The Mandate's commitments were "solemn international obligations," and Jewish settlement was the Mandate's "primary purpose."

The British received much vitriol for the "black letter" but little if any gratitude for replacing the oppressive Ottoman Law as to imprisonment for debt, which weighed heavily upon the fellahin, with the Imprisonment for Debt Ordinance which required proof of means to pay before imprisonment was ordered and reduced the maximum term of imprisonment from 91 to 21 days.

Sir Arthur Wauchope Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope was appointed and Commander-in-Chief for Palestine and TransJordan on November 20, 1931. He was a member of the British upper class, born to bear the White Man's Burden, a duty he took on willingly and with the best of intentions. He appeared to have no prejudices against Jews, took the Balfour Declaration as a binding commitment and was dedicated to improving the lot of the Arab peasants, the fellaheen. A commitment and dedication like those could destroy a lesser man and, indeed, his health suffered. He retired in 1938.

From about 600,000 in 1918, the Arab population had risen to 850,000 in 1933, … Continued enforcement of Islamic inheritance law (i.e., equal shares for the sons) at a time that the Arab extended family was multiplying rapidly increased the number of owners and progressively broke the land into ever smaller plots. Further,bigger proprietors bought into musha' (communal tenure), and some of the better-off peasants gained larger shares."1 - Khalaf Issa
 
I want to assure your Excellency,” wrote Musa Kazem al-Husseini, the president of the Arab Executive, to the high commissioner on February 19, 1931, “that Prime Minister MacDonald's letter has ruined hope of a policy of cooperation between Arabs and Jews, if there existed such a hope, and has rendered the possibility of understanding between the two parties absolutely impossible.”
The Arabs had reason for their intractability. For one thing, their numbers in Palestine had grown to 960,000 by 1935, an increase of 67 percent in less than two decades, and an absolute growth over the Jews of nearly 500,000. Their urban population had risen from 194,000 in 1922 to 398,000 in 1936. Additionally, the infusion of Jewish capital- in payments for land, for agricultural produce, building materials, wages, rents, and services-profoundly stimulated the Arab economy. So, to a lesser extent, did the services and construction projects furnished by the mandatory. The most dramatic change was among the Arab upper and middle classes. Their investment in citriculture quadrupled between 1918 and 1935. Arab manufacturing by then had branched out from traditional soap, olive oil, and textile cottage products to a wider variety of consumer goods. Arab funds went now into trade and transport and supported their community's first two banks. By 1935 no fewer than seven hundred Arab cooperatives were functioning. New opportunities were opening out in medicine, law, government employment, journalism, and teaching. The number of Arab children attending schools had grown from less than 2 percent in 1920 to about 13 percent in 1936.
Here, then, were the classical ingredients for a burgeoning nationalism: rising literacy, a growing middle class, larger numbers of white-collar workers and professionals. If the Arabs hardened their position in the 1930s, moreover, it was because their leadership fell increasingly into the hands of the Mufti, who was emerging as a considerably stronger figure than his relative, the aging Musa Kazem al-Husseini. Indeed, Haj Amin's prestige and patronage lent Arab nationalism an additional ingredient of religious xenophobia. - Howard M. Sachar
 
On January 30, 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. On March 31 the Mufti arranged a meeting in the German Consulate:
"Today the mufti told me that Muslims inside and outside of Palestine greet the new regime in Germany, and hope for the spread of Fascist and anti-democratic state authority to other lands," the consul cabled Berlin, and Amin was ready to promote any anti-Jewish boycotts the Nazis may lead.… Several weeks later the consul again met the mufti and other Palestinian notables, this time at the desert shrine at Nebi Musa. They proclaimed their admiration for the new Germany and sympathy for Hitler's anti-Jewish measures. They asked one thing: that the government do all it could to keep Jews from Palestine. - Oren Kessler

August 31, 1933: Cultivators (Protection) Ordinance forbidding the eviction of any tenant who could prove one year’s statutory tenure.

In 1933 30,000 legal immigrant Jews arrived with another 22,000 illegally. In October, the notables called for a rally and a strike. The wrath of the Palestinian Arab Nation unexpectably struck the British, not the Jews. Protesters swinging clubs and throwing stones discovered that the British would not tolerate such actions against themselves. The strike lasted a week and 26 Arabs were killed and 200 wounded. This time, there was no Commission of Enquiry.

demonstrations that took place in October 1933 in the cities of Jerusalem and Jaffa, leading to violent clashes between demonstrators and British policemen.

Peel Commission Report 1937 on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development

In secret testimony to the Peel Commission in 1937, the former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George strongly defended the Mandate policy:

'The Palestinian Arabs fought for Turkish rule,' he emphasised, disregarding the 2,000 who had joined the British-sponsored anti-Ottoman revolt led by Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, and his son Feisal. Through Mark Sykes (of Sykes-Picot fame) and T.E. Lawrence ('of Arabia'), he said, Britain informed Hussein and Feisal of the planned Declaration.[11]

'We could not get in touch with the Palestinian Arabs as they were fighting against us. The Arab leaders did not offer any objections, so long as the rights of the Arabs were respected,' Lloyd George explained. 'There was a twofold undertaking given to them, that the establishment of a Jewish National Home would not in any way, firstly, affect the civil or religious rights of the general population of Palestine; secondly, would not diminish the general prosperity of that population. Those were the only pledges we gave to the Arabs.'

The ex-premier challenged any critic of Britain's Palestine policy to point to an instance in which non-Jewish civil or religious rights had been compromised, and he marshalled statistics on revenue, exports, wages, land prices, public health and a half-dozen other indicators of the land's newfound prosperity. 'There can be no doubt that the Arab population of Palestine has profited enormously by the Zionist enterprise.'[12]

Despite the appearance of parties, organisations and conferences, the Palestinian national movement remained composed of a leadership without an organised following. It was a movement of traditional notables with feudal family support who were deeply divided among themselves, whose policies were governed by short-term self-interest, and who were incapable, as events were to prove, of facing up to the tasks of the national independence struggle. - Musa Budeiri

The peasantry was particularly disillusioned with urban notables, rural landowning families, merchants, moneylenders, and village heads, some of whom sold land to the Zionists even while publicly condemning such transactions."5 Those who asserted themselves as voices for the Palestinian Arabs had for decades helped perpetuatehe peasants'perennialndebtedness throughsury, dispossession, and burdensome taxation. They had made possible, moreover, the Zionist land purchases that so aggravated the long-standing internal socioeconomic processes that were undermining the peasantry. - Khalaf Issa

At the end of the British Mandate period only 25% of the land was registered for private ownership

  • 12% of the land was owned by Palestinian Arabs
  • 7.5% of the land was owned by Jews

Imperial Perceptions of Palestine: British influence and Power in Late Ottoman Times - Lorenzo Kemal

Arab nationalists express their utmost gratitude to Your Excellency [Adolf Hitler] for having brought up the issue of Palestine on many occasions. […] I take this opportunity to delegate my Private Secretary to the German Government in order that, in the name of the largest and strongest Arab organization and in my name, he can begin the negotiations required for sincere, loyal cooperation in all fields.3

The connivance of Hajj Amin with Nazism should be read in an anti-Zionist perspective, infused with anti-Semitic prejudices (he did not hesitate to cite on several occasions The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and anti-British stands. His intransigence towards Jews had deep roots.

3. Al-Husayni to Hitler, 20 Jan. 1941. The following year the Mufti congratulated the 'Führer' for his victories in North Africa, speaking on behalf of the entire Arab world: 'Das arabische Volk wird daher an Ihrer Seite gegen den gemeinsamen Feind bis [zum] endgültigen Sieg weiterka¨mpfen [The Arab people will continue to fight by his side against the common enemy until the final victory]." CZA L35/59-4. Berlin, 4 July 1942. The position of Amin al-Husayni is particularly problematic considering that he wrote in his private diary the intentions outlined by Hitler during a meeting that they held on 21 November 1941: 'The objectives of my fight', Hitler explained, 'are clear. Primarily, I am fighting the Jews without respite […] I am resolved to find a solution for the Jewish problem, progressing step by step without cessation.' JMA - Box 7005 - Mishpacha Husayni ('Husayni Family').

A History of the Arab Peoples - Albert Hourani

By the middle 1930s, it was becoming more difficult for Britain to maintain a balance. The coming to power of the Nazis in Germany increased pressure from the Jewish community and their supporters in England to permit larger immigration; and immigration in its turn was changing the balance of population and power in Palestine. In 1936 the opposition of the Arabs began to take the form of armed insurrection. Political leadership lay with an association of urban notables, with Amin al-Husayni, mufti of Jerusalem, as the dominant figure, but a popular military leadership was beginning to appear, and the movement was having repercussions in surrounding Arab countries, at a moment when the threat to British interests from Italy and Germany made it desirable for Britain to have good relations with the Arab states. Faced with this situation, the British government made two attempts to resolve it. In 1937 a plan to divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab states was put forward after an inquiry by a Royal Commission (the Peel Commission); this was acceptable to the Zionists in principle, but not to the Arabs. In 1939, a White Paper provided for the ultimate establishment of a government with an Arab majority, and limitations on Jewish immigration and purchase of land. This would have been acceptable to the Arabs with some changes ….

Abu Lughod Ibrahim ed. The Transformation of Palestine

Even in years of general prosperity, immigration had its attendant problems such as the increased infusion of capital via the new settlers. This was especially noteworthy in the years between 1932 and 1936 when over 20 per cent of the Jewish immigrants and their dependents fell into the capitalist class. Most of these were Germans escaping the menacing shadow of Nazism.59 The capital infusion from this source alone was equal to about one-tenth of the total expenditure of the Palestine government for the same period.60 By 1936, the nucleus of the Jewish national home was unquestionably a brilliant technical and social achievement, but economically, its very success had ensured a permanent gap between the Jewish and Arab communities. In that year the average income per capita of Arab rural population was about £7, and for the Jew it was about £34. Evidently, the technical success of the Jewish national home was due, in large measure, to the vast investment capital upon which it could draw (plus, of course, the European expertise), while, at the same time, the higher standard of living enjoyed in the Jewish settlements was of only indirect benefit to the Arab community.61

George Rendel was a two-decade veteran of His Majesty's Diplomatic Service. In 1937 he and his wife journeyed through Palestine and into Saudi Arabia where he was particularly impressed by Ibn Saud who showed Rendel and his wife great courtesy. A devout Roman Catholic anti-semite, Rendel believed that Britain's future lay with the king and with the Arab and Islamic civilization he embodied. Its endorsement of Zionism had been a profound blunder.65

Notes:

  • The "Wailing Wall" Riots (1929) from MUSLIM WORLD - Avraham Sela
  • The Effect of Socioeconomic Change on Arab Societal Collapse in Mandate Palestine - Khalaf Issa
  • A History of Israe from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time - Howard M. Sachar
  • PALESTINE 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict - Oren Kessler
  • Promise And Fulfilment Palestine 1917-1949 By Arthur Koestler
  • The Claim of Dispossession - Arieh L. Avneri