Secret History of Israel Palestine

And that is how you get a complete picture of reality, and that's how you find all the dirty little secrets that no one wants to talk about. And that's where you can sometimes find new ways of thinking about problems that seem intractable. And so, with that said, let's start to look at Palestine before Zionism.

And I'm actually doing three episodes on Palestine before Zionism. This episode will focus on the peasants and the Bedouin. The next one will focus on a series of land reforms, which in my opinion set the stage for the big conflict to come, and for the big catastrophe that befell much of the population in 1948 and after.

And then the episode after that will focus on the lives of Jews in Palestine before Zionist immigration. And the reason I'm going to focus so much on the peasants is because when you're talking about the people of Palestine, this is the people, the peasants, the fellahin. They were about 70% of the population when Zionist immigration starts, versus 20% of the population that was urban, who are the ones that we always hear about, especially the top 1% or so who were the most powerful families.

And the other 10% were Bedouin that we're also going to talk about today. And the peasants are also very important because they're the ones who bore the major brunt of the conflict to come. They're the ones who were expelled en masse in 1948.

And it's them and their descendants who have been stuck in limbo with no citizenship, living in refugee towns and cities in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, West Bank, Gaza, and even Iraq ever since that time. And today we'll also be looking at the Bedouin because even if they were only about 9 or 10% of the population and they don't play a very big role in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Bedouin culture and social structure are very important to understand because the peasant culture and social structure are very close to that of the Bedouin. And the Bedouin culture is also the foundation of Arab culture in general, including the urban Arabs right up to the elite.

And this social structure and the values associated with it are very important to understand in regards to the Israel-Palestine conflict because certain alliances and choices that get made by the peasants and Bedouin and other people don't make any sense from a modern perspective, whether you're in the West or in the Arab world, which is based so heavily on nationality. And some of these choices include alliances with Zionists and with Israel. One of the shocking secrets of the conflict, which we'll look at later, is that in the 1948 war, the majority of peasants chose not to fight for Palestine and instead they made and kept explicit peace deals with their Jewish neighbors.

And while many Bedouin did fight for the Arab side, some Bedouin tribes actively fought on the side of Israel, and they still fight in the IDF today. These village peace agreements and the Bedouin fighting on the Jewish side of the war seem like treachery and cowardice from the modern nationalist perspective. And many Palestinians do see it as treachery and cowardice, which is why the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren of those Philohene who made those peace agreements often don't know anything about it, and their historians and partisans don't talk about this.

And while this behavior makes no sense from the modern perspective of nationalism and ethnic solidarity, it makes perfect sense from a traditional tribal point of view, where it is not cowardice and treachery, but rather bravery and wisdom, doing what's right for your tribe or your village. And on the Israeli side, the Israelis are often proud to show off their Bedouin trackers and fighters and generals who fight in their army, but the Israeli historians rarely talk about the peasant peace deals, because so many of these peasants who actually made peace with Israel before and during the 1948 war, well, they were the ones who were expelled by Israel in that war, which is a horrifying shame which Israelis know nothing about. They're taught that these people were a potential fifth column in this huge threat to the Jewish state.

And also, the majority of the Jewish soldiers carrying out these expulsions knew nothing about it either. They were lied to by their superiors that they were clearing out hostile forces. Like I said, the conventional histories are a politically motivated shitshow of half-truths, and we're going to fill in all the gaps and reveal a different story.

And this is what I mean when I talk about class. The leaders deceive their own people in order to attain their political ends. There's lots of wild stuff coming in this series, so hold on to your hats and let the cartoon begin.

So the name Palestine derives from the Philistines, a group of seafaring people who colonized and settled in the western parts of what is now Israel and Gaza. And Philistine cities were there in the Old Testament times, from about 1200 BC. And they're referred to in the Bible as neighbors and competitors of the Israelite tribes and their eventual kingdoms.

Over time, the Philistines are conquered by various empires, and they disappear as a culture entirely by the 4th century BC in what's called the Greek Hellenistic era. But that region was still referred to as the land of the Philistines for hundreds of years after the culture had disappeared. And then, a few centuries later, after the Roman emperor Hadrian crushed a major Jewish revolt called the Bar Kokhba revolt in the Roman province of Judea, which was named after the ancient Jewish kingdom, Hadrian exiles many or most of the Jews as punishment.

He bans the practice of Judaism in the province, and he renames the province Syria-Palestina, meaning Philistine Syria. And I don't think we have Hadrian's actual words on this, but the reason that's most often cited for this change of names is that it was like a fuck you to the Jews. Bye-bye Judea, and bye-bye to the Jewish religion.

Instead, we're going to name this province after your biblical enemies, the Philistines. And the province of Syria-Palestina lasts until 390 AD, when the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire reorganizes a bunch of its provinces and creates Palestine-Prima, Palestine-Segunda, and Palestine-Tertia, which together are a lot broader than the original Syrian-Palestina. Now, the Muslims take over in the big Arab expansion of the 600s AD, and they rename Palestine-Prima to Jund Philistine, the military district of Palestine.

And they rename the other Palestinians different military district names. And when the European crusaders take over in 1099, they establish the Kingdom of Jerusalem there. And after that gets conquered by the Arab Mamluks in 1291, part of it is called Jund Philistine again, but this time the Jund Philistine is a sub-district of the province of Syria.

Until the Turkish Ottoman Empire takes over in the 16th century, when they divide the former Jund Philistine between differently named provinces and districts, Beirut, Akre, Jerusalem, and Syria. But although there's no longer a political territory named Palestine, as of that time, historical records show that the name Palestine is still sometimes used for the region, kind of like New England isn't an official province or state or district, but it's the name of a region. Or the Alps isn't a country or district, but it is a region of Europe.

Now, a lot of people on the pro-Israel side have argued that the modern-day Palestinians were recent immigrants to the region. They argue that a lot of them immigrated to that region because they were attracted to the economic opportunities offered by the Jewish settlements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But genetic studies show us that while there certainly has been a bunch of immigration and population changes over time, including some migration due to Jewish settlements, much of the population has been there for a very long time.

A small number are descended from the original Neolithic-era Canaanite tribes, which were around at the same time as the ancient Hebrews and Israelite tribes. And then much larger numbers are descended from all sorts of Bronze Age waves of immigration and other immigrations until recent times, so still thousands of years ago. And all you have to do is just look at the people to see this.

They range from looking like East African black people to people with white skin and red hair and blue eyes from Crusader times. So, like I just mentioned, at the time that the Zionists first start arriving in the 1880s, the region of Palestine had been part of the Ottoman Empire, which is named after its founder, Uthman I, since 1299 AD, or CE, Common Era. And for most of this period, the region is part of the province of Syria, divided into a few sub-districts.

The northern part is included in the southern part of the Beirut district, the middle is the district of Jerusalem, and part of it is in the district of Damascus to the west. But sometimes the borders would change. And the Ottoman Empire is one of the world's big empires, which is based in Constantinople in Turkey.

And it's an Islamic empire that rules much of the Muslim world. And at its peak, under Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire spreads deep into Europe, up as far north and west as Austria, and in Africa as far west as Algeria, and as far east and south as modern Yemen. We tend to think of the Ottoman Empire as an empire of the East, or of the Orient, as we used to call it, because it encompassed most of the big cities in the Middle East, and because it was an Islamic empire.

But we tend to forget that the Ottomans also inherited most of the Eastern or Byzantine Roman Christian Empire, much of which was in Europe. So the Ottomans ruled Greece until the 1830s, and Macedonia and Albania and the Balkans, like Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, basically. They ruled this region right up until before World War I. And Bulgaria was part of the empire from 1396 until 1908, and Romania was an autonomous region of the empire until 1878.

And large parts of the Ottoman Empire in Europe were actually situated to the west of the early centers of European Zionism, which were in the Russian Empire, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus. So the Ottomans were an empire that straddled both east and west, southeastern Europe and Middle East and North Africa. And in the 1880s, when the first wave of Zionist immigrants came to Palestine, the Ottoman Empire is thought of as one of those great European powers, though a somewhat exotic one that included the mystical Orient.

And many of the Zionists came from parts of Romania that had been part of the Ottoman Empire less than five years before that first wave of Zionist immigration. At its peak, the Ottomans were actually the strongest military and economic power in all of Europe. But as the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism pick up in the West, the Ottoman Empire starts falling behind, and it enters a long period of slow decline vis-à-vis its northwestern and central European competitors.

And by the late 19th century, it's being referred to as the sick man of Europe, because not only is it having economic problems, but also because it's being pushed around and slowly gobbled up by the other European powers. As capitalism progresses and as the European powers exert their political and economic influence over the Ottomans, the Ottoman Empire found its role in the world economy as a third-world economy, exporting raw materials for the benefit of Europe. To quote Gershon Shafir from his book Land, Labour, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, on the abolition of government monopolies and the transformation of the Middle East into one of the lowest-duty areas in the world, meant the debilitation of its limited manufacturing potential.

At the same time, it encouraged the boosting of agricultural production to satisfy the rapid expansion of the European market. The Middle East became a producer of primary products and market for manufactured goods and colonial products, while European finance capital came to control all but one of the big banks, as well as shipping, imports, exports, railways, ports, power, water and supply, and mining in the region. And in the 19th century, you had various nationalist movements and several breakaway attempts by various parts of the European Ottoman Empire Greece, Armenia, Romania, Bulgaria, and these revolts or nationalist movements were usually fostered or supported in various ways by the great European powers.

The Russians, Germans, and British in particular. And according to the German Ottoman historian Alexander Schirsch, quote, the Eastern question in the 19th century revolved around the question of how much of the Ottoman Empire had to be preserved to protect the interests of the European powers. Unquote.

The Europeans weren't really in a position to just carve up the whole empire, but they were increasingly in a position to influence its policies in various ways. And one of those ways was intervening on behalf of oppressed minorities in the empire. Just like the U.S. uses the real oppression of women in Afghanistan or the Yazidis in Iraq as an excuse to seek out its economic interests, the Europeans in the 19th century would be intervening on behalf of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, in Armenia and the Levant area, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine.

And later on, as the Zionist movement starts picking up steam, some of the Europeans, particularly the British, start thinking of the Jews as a useful point of intervention as well. One of the signs of the weak bargaining position of the Ottomans vis-à-vis the Europeans at this point is what were called the capitulations. Initially, the capitulations start out as these trade agreements in the era when the Ottomans were the dominant power in Europe.

And the early capitulations allowed foreign nationals to have special trading privileges, but also to be subject to their own laws of their own countries instead of the laws of the Ottoman Empire. It's a bit like diplomatic immunity that many countries have today, except it was primarily for businessmen. It was a way of encouraging trade.

Now, while the Ottomans encouraged the presence of foreign traders in the empire, in Palestine, the presence of foreigners was always strictly limited for fear of European Christian reconquest of the Holy Lands. Basically, they were afraid of the Crusades 2.0. According to Alan Doughty in his book Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine, church bells, ram horns, were not allowed. Non-Muslim religious institutions that predated Islam were allowed to remain, but generally no new non-Muslim institutions were permitted.

And some of these restrictions are because of the Dahimi laws that made Christians and Jews second-class citizens that we'll talk about later, but these were enforced more strictly in Palestine until the 1830s. And at that time, as the Ottoman Empire weakens and the Western powers get stronger, the capitulations become another entry point for the European powers to squeeze out concessions from the Ottomans and intervene into various Ottoman affairs. Like when the Greeks fought a war of independence throughout the 1820s, the Western powers, the British, French, and Russian empires, all supported the Greeks, citing their obligation to protect Christians in the empire according to various capitulation agreements.

In regards to Palestine, the Western powers were very keen on having a presence there, as the Holy Land of the Bible sparked the imaginations of their home populations and ruling classes alike, while intervening on behalf of large Christian populations in the Levant area would be a great excuse to exert imperial influence in the core of the Ottoman Empire. By the 1840s and 1850s, as the power of the European empires grows relative to the Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans give in, and especially because the Ottomans needed the help of the Europeans to fight off the revolt of Muhammad Ali Pasha, who was the rogue governor of Egypt that we talked a bit about last time. And because of this, you start to have consular officials in Jerusalem for the first time since the Crusades, first for Britain, but eventually from all sorts of Western powers, Prussia, Austria, Spain, the United States, and Russia.

The capitulations and the phenomenon of Western powers gaining a grip on the Ottoman Empire, and in particular on the Holy Land, and foreigners running around not being subject to the same laws as everyone else, Europeans even had their own postal systems and banking systems in the Ottoman Empire at this time. This created a strong resentment against foreigners in this period, particularly among the educated classes, who after all were direct competitors with the foreigners in various fields, particularly in trade and politics. It also caused resentment against local Arab Christians, particularly the Greek Orthodox, because they were closely associated with the Greeks who'd gained their independence.

And these Christians had various privilege and immunities, and they could most easily appeal to Western powers to get advantages or to prevent having disadvantages. One example of the advantages that Christians had in this period is that in hard times, like during a crop failure, or if grain prices were unaffordable, Christians and foreigners had access to help and relief from the European powers, while Muslim peasants and other lower-class Ottomans were left to their own devices, either to starve or to get help from their elite Muslim patrons. We'll talk about the patronage system a little bit later.

In this context, the idea of another religious minority, Zionist Jews, coming straight from one of the big bully powers, the Russian Empire, with the goal of creating some kind of autonomous national home, well, this elicited enormous suspicion, though, as we'll see, the Zionists basically had no support from Russia, especially at the beginning. We can get a sense of what the local sentiment was towards foreign imperialist influence when we look at their reaction to the establishment of German Templar colonies. The Templar colonies were agricultural colonies in Palestine by a religious group of German Christians, who thought that by establishing a strong Christian presence in the Holy Land, they were helping to prepare for the return of Jesus.

According to Doughty, from the outset of their venture. Both Turks and Arabs regarded the Templars, as well as the Jews, as agents of European conspiracy. It was commonly believed that in any anti-Christian riots that might take place, the Germans would be the first targets of the mobs.

There were, in fact, frequent attacks and violence directed against the Templars, and Germany even dispatched gunboats off the coast in order to pressure the Ottoman authorities to protect them. The relations between Templar colonies and their neighbors are described as and the situation during the 1876 panic as a For its part, the Ottoman government put off registering land purchased legally by the Templars, despite international obligations to permit such purchases, until the 1877-1878 war with Russia, where once again Ottoman dependence on European support peaked, and forced it to submit to Germany's pressure on behalf of the Templars. So already this doesn't bode well for the Zionists who are about to establish colonies there just three years later.

Though we'll see next time that at first the capitulations and European influence actually brought the Muslims and Jews of the Empire closer together against the Christians for the first few decades. Now despite hostility to foreigners, one aspect of Ottoman society that made Palestine so interesting and so exciting for the Zionists was what was called the and millet basically meant ethnic group or nation. And the millet system was the way that the Ottoman Empire was able to deal with the reality of governing subjects and citizens from a whole patchwork of ethnic and religious communities.

Historically, a successful way to govern territories like this is to let those various communities run their own internal affairs. So in the Ottoman millet system, you have religious communities that are subject to their own sets of laws and courts, which are established by an ethnarch, a ruler appointed by the Ottomans for each millet or ethnic group. At first you have millets for the Greek Orthodox, for Jews and the Armenians, who were Christians but belonged to a whole bunch of different churches.

And later you get a bunch of different millets, 16 of them for all sorts of different Christian communities. And among the Jews, the millet is run by a Sephardic ethnarch and Sephardic customs. Sephardic meaning the Jews who are descended from the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition.

But you also have the Ashkenazi community starting in the 18th century that had been there for a couple of centuries already, trying to lobby for their own separate millet. The millet system is an interesting contrast to the nation-state model, where in a nation-state model, the will and the rights of various minorities can get swallowed up by a majority that might be hostile to them, which often results in civil wars and separatist movements, etc. One of the things that we'll see as we go is that the nation-state system, which was imposed on the Middle East by the imperial powers, has been a total catastrophe, just as it has in so much of Africa, where you also have a whole patchwork of tribal, ethnic and linguistic groups stuck into ill-fitting nation-state boxes.

But in the millet system, everyone is kind of oppressed by the Ottomans together, and the local Muslims have preferential advantages, but you could be a Jew living in Jerusalem, or a Jew living in Damascus, or Baghdad, or Salonika, and you were subject to the same rules and court system as Jews were in other cities. Meanwhile, your Muslim neighbors were subject to Ottoman rules and Ottoman courts, and your Greek Orthodox neighbors across the street were subject to their own rules. Now, this wasn't actually all that great for many Ottoman Jews and Christians, because they tended to be treated like shit in various ways, and the courts were stacked against them, as we'll see in a bit.

But this whole idea of the millet system was really exciting for European Zionists, because the millet system resembled, to some extent, what they were imagining as a model for the Zionist state. They wanted cultural autonomy within a greater empire, and the right to govern their own specifically Jewish affairs. But they wanted a democratic version of it.

This was very popular among European nationalists of all sorts. And I haven't seen anyone discussing it in my readings for this, but I suspect that the Zionists and other East European nationalists might have even gotten this idea from the Ottoman Empire in the first place, given that it was one of the great powers of Europe that they were surely familiar with, and that some of them actually lived in. Now, it wasn't just the millet system that made the Ottoman Empire interesting for European Jews.

It was also the fact that Jews were an important population in the Ottoman Empire as a whole. For example, the major cities of Baghdad and Salonika, modern Thessaloniki, they had Jewish pluralities or majorities at different points in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And in the late 1800s, the Ottoman Empire was generally a better place for Jews to live than the Russian Empire was, where most European Jews lived at that time.

And as nationalism in Western and Central Europe took hold, anti-Semitism took hold along with it, as we discussed last time. So despite legal discrimination against Jews, the Ottoman Empire was starting to look not so bad relative to the rest of Europe as well. Last time I mentioned that the Jews of Europe had a very unusual social structure.

In contrast to this European Jewish social structure, the social structure of the Ottoman and Arab society in Palestine was very hierarchical in a very traditional way, common to world empires, with the state elite milking the peasantry like cows, similarly to what many great civilizations and empires around the world had been doing for the past 5,000 years or so. At the top of the hierarchy, you had a Turkish Ottoman elite in the highest positions of the state administration. And then you had local elites appointed to various positions like mayors of cities or towns and religious positions like imam or qadi, which is a religious judge who ruled over most issues in the Muslim communities, as well as secular judges who ruled in matters regarding trade and crimes that weren't specified in the Quran.

And you had rural positions like tax collectors and village sheikh, which was a traditional rural tribal status which was incorporated into the state. And later you had the village headman or muhtars, which the state appointed to replace the sheikhs for reasons that I'll explain in a bit. When it comes to Palestine, you can't understand the Arab society without understanding the peasants, who are called the filahin in Arabic, who in the late 19th century make up about 70% or more of the population.

And just like in other parts of the world, we have to sort of guess or infer what the peasants were thinking when they were acting on the political and historical stage because we rarely hear their voices. We only hear them through the voices of other actors with opposing interests, be they the British, the Zionists, or the Arab elites and urban classes. Also keep in mind that what makes a peasant a peasant, as opposed to a traditional or indigenous subsistence farmer, like you might find in parts of North America or around the world, like Africa, Melanesia at that time, is that a peasant is someone who by definition is exploited by the state.

What makes people peasants is that they're subjugated by a state and they're basically farmed by the ruling class as the basis of the power and wealth of the ruling class. The ruling class of the state takes a big chunk of the peasants' produce every year and it nominally provides certain services like defense or courts, but basically it's mostly an exploitation relationship first and foremost with almost nothing in return. And the top religious, political, and legal institutions of the empires of the world have as one of their primary goals to keep the peasants subjugated.

So in that core structural way, pre-democratic Europe and the Ottomans were very similar, even if the details of their structures were rather different. Before the era of the democratic welfare state, where the general population grabbed some power for itself within the state to provide services for itself like healthcare, infrastructure, education, and protection from the more powerful predators in the society, before this era, peasants mostly hated the state, because all the state did was exploit them and give them nothing in return. And the state also worked together and protected other non-state actors who exploited the peasants, like local moneylenders and landlords who sucked up enormous parts of the peasants' labor.

And the reason that peasants are so universally exploited is because being dependent on farming means that you're stuck in one place and you can't escape from government tax collectors and other exploiters, like Bedouin raiders, landlords, and moneylenders, in the way that more mobile people, like pastoralists, nomads like the Bedouin, can escape. And we'll see that until the mid-19th century, the Bedouins mostly lived outside of the state. And Alan Doughty tells us again that, quote, Most observers distinguished three major segments of the Arab population, town dwellers, which included the local elites, villagers, and nomadic Bedouin.

The villagers, known as felahin, were the farmers or peasants who were in fact the mainstay of the economy but were looked down on by both townsmen and Bedouin. James Finn, a British consul, described the felahin as existing in a very low social condition, approaching nearly to barbarism, living in wretched dwellings with the fruits of their labor going mainly to landowners and tax collectors. Josiah Porter's handbook for travelers in Syria cautioned that felahin are scarcely less wild and lawless than the Bedouin.

They are a rough, athletic, and turbulent race, and he advised travelers to treat them with cool dignity, unquote. And in the early 1880s, one of the first Zionist settlers, Haim Hissen, who we talked about last time, he describes in his diary his shock at the material poverty of the felahin. Quote, The walls of their huts are made of clay, and the outer walls are coated with fresh dung, which becomes waterproof as it hardens.

The houses of even the wealthiest farmers have no windows, not a stick of furniture, not even a table, chair, or bed. A small earthen elevation inside the hut serves the master as a place for eating and sleeping. The rest of the hut is occupied by cattle, poultry, etc., and you must understand that there is no partition of the hut.

Man and beast live together in one stable, unquote. And we're going to come back to the peasants in a few minutes, but first, so that we can better understand the peasants, we need to understand a few things about the Bedouin. The Bedouin would travel in and out of the region at different times of the year, and there was no good way of counting them, but the estimates that I've read are that they comprised about 10 to 20 percent of the population of Palestine in the late 19th century.

We don't hear too much about them in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they're important nonetheless, because the Bedouin culture and values and social structure are the foundation of the culture of the Arab world in various ways. And that social structure is crucial to understand the peasantry and the peasantry's relationship to the state, and also to understand the nature of many pre-democratic empires. About the Bedouin, Alan Doughty says, quote, The unsettled Bedouin regarded themselves, and often were regarded by others, as true Arabs, who had remained bearers of the ancient heritage, and the label of Arab was sometimes reserved for the Bedouin alone.

Their reputation for lawlessness and plunder had been noted, and the European clerics or scholars who ventured into their domains seldom had kind words for them, calling them vulgar brutes, villainous-looking cutthroats, beasts of prey, land pirates, and insolent barbarians. And again they employed the Bible to make sense of what they encountered. The Bedouin were the sons of Ishmael, differing little in their appearance from their wild nomad ancestor.

Unquote. The Bedouin's reputation for being land pirates and cutthroats was not just racism. Robbing travelers, raiding towns and villages, making villages pay protection money, and sometimes amassing armies of thousands of people in order to extract payments from major cities, these were all a major part of how many of the Bedouin tribes earned their living.

And this is not specific to Arab pastoralists. This is common for nomadic, animal-herding people, pastoralists, around the world, for reasons that I'll explain shortly. As Doughty just mentioned above, the Bedouin are often seen as the pure form of Arab culture, and they were seen as such by urban and rural Arabs alike, including the most elite classes.

It was Bedouin raiders and nomads who conquered the Arab world to begin with in the 6th and 7th centuries, and it was they who became the ruling classes in those lands, while the pre-existing pre-Arab peoples were forcibly converted to Islam, and then they Arabized culturally slowly over time. The Bedouin social structure and value system is the archetype for the Levantine and Palestinian peasant social structure and value system. According to Philip Salzman, an expert in nomadic pastoralist cultures, and my former professor at McGill Anthropology, and actually, speaking of which, when I spoke earlier about reading books that you disagree with, well, here's a great example.

I'm going to read extensively from Salzman's book Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, and I disagree almost completely with the conclusions of the book. And I also disagree with most of Salzman's politics in general. He thinks the Iraq War was good, he thinks the Vietnam War was justified, he thinks climate change is fake, and his book ends up blaming the Arab-Israeli conflict almost entirely on Arab culture, which I vehemently disagree with.

And I used to have long arguments and debates with him in his office about all these things. But we bonded together because we both had a materialist understanding of culture. And we would laugh at all the postmodern drivel together which predominates in the humanities departments, in academia these days.

And we both understood that you might come to different conclusions based on the facts, but you can't just make up the facts or cherry-pick the facts to suit your ideology. Facts matter, and truth matters. And sometimes the facts contradict what you want to believe, and then you have to alter your conclusions or your beliefs to suit reality.

And these are things that are almost controversial nowadays in postmodernist academia. And materialism, the idea that culture and values and social structures are in large part an adaptation to practical realities and material realities, well, materialism had been associated with the political left and Marxism. But in college campuses, because of the postmodernist movement which became associated with the left, that's the exact opposite.

You're not allowed to think that. Thinking that cultures are shaped by their environments is almost seen as racist nowadays. And to me, that's just an indication that postmodernism is actually a right-wing movement in left-wing disguise.

But no matter who you are, right or left, you just cannot be an expert on nomadic pastoralist cultures without being a materialist. Because the practical causes for the social structure and so many of the values of the nomadic pastoralist cultures, the reasons, the material reasons for these are just so clear and so present. And they're also usually known and acknowledged by the people in those cultures themselves.

A postmodern, hyper-idealist perspective just can't survive studying pastoralists around the world. Anyhow, I'm reading extensively from Salzman's books, because Salzman understands, and he outlines it very clearly in his book, how culture emerges from the practical and material conditions, and he understands what we need to understand about the tribal structure and its cultural implications, and he explains it in a very clear and concise way. So if you're someone who identifies with being on the left, if you read Salzman's book and you read the conclusions, your head will explode and you'll be furious.

But if you can be an adult and you can get over the conclusions, you will gain enormous knowledge from the rest of the book, where he talks about the practical conditions that generate some of the fundamental aspects of Bedouin and Arab culture. Anyways, Salzman tells us that, quote, "...our map image of countries as large territories delineated by clear boundaries grossly misrepresents reality through much of history and in many parts of the world today. It is more accurate to think of state entities as centers of power functioning a bit like magnets, which control areas close to them, but which lose holding power as the distance increases.

Over time, for many reasons, state centers gain or lose power, and increasingly they bring under their control or lose control over more peripheral areas. Between state centers there are marginal regions, often quite large, not under the effective control of states, and thus areas of independent political groupings, commonly of a tribal nature. These independent regions usually actively resist intrusion by state power, but the struggle is always an ongoing one, with states sporadically, but repeatedly, trying to expand their control, and tribesmen consistently trying to gain or maintain independence." Unquote.

In other words, you have a state centered in the cities, and it's also the center of religious orthodoxy, and it exerts its authority directly in those cities, and also on the subjected peasant class, which provides most of the state's wealth. But the further you get from the urban centers and their ability to control what's happening, the more you have free, self-governing tribes who resist and sometimes reject state authority altogether. The 14th century historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun wrote about the political structure of Morocco, where the contrast between state-controlled and tribally-controlled areas was especially stark, with tribes fully controlling about 50% of the land claimed by the king.

You had tax-paying regions versus tax-resisting regions. Blad Mahzen, the land of the government, versus Blad Sibah, the land of dissidents. And this division was still apparent in the 1960s, when American anthropologist Clifford Geertz lived there and reported on it as well.

In rural 19th century Palestine, the rural areas were more integrated into state than in 14th century Morocco, but there was a similar dynamic. And from the early 19th century to the late 19th century, the region underwent a huge transition from tribal control to government control. Now, this is relevant because in areas where the government is in control, the social structure of peasant villages is different than in those areas of tribal control.

In tribal areas, the peasants had a tribal structure very similar to that of the Bedouin, which I'll describe shortly. In the tribal areas, it might be the Bedouin who exact payments from the villagers more than the state. And in these tribal areas, the peasants are less like peasants and more like free farmer tribesmen.

But in areas where the state is powerful, the state tends to oppose the tribal structure entirely, because the tribal structure can offer stiff resistance to the state because it can unify large numbers of villagers. And over time, the state and just the material realities of being an isolated peasant tend to break down the tribal structure so that each village becomes more and more isolated from each other. And sometimes each family gets isolated from each other within the village with mutual hostility and various resentments, breaking down social cohesion.

Again, none of this is unique to the Arab world. In Europe, at various times, you had the breakdown of tribal structures by the state as well, like in the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire and later the Catholic Church and also the Byzantine Eastern Orthodox Church. They all imposed various restrictions on cousin marriage, sometimes even up to the 7th degree.

And the point of this was to accelerate the breakdown of tribes and clans of various European peoples so that the church and the state could exert more direct control over the people without the people being able to organize themselves into these massive tribes to defend them from predation by the state. So, I mention all of this because when the Zionists and the Fellahin encounter each other in the 1880s, the Fellahin are on the one hand quite subjugated to the state and to the urban elite. They're getting crushed by huge taxes, tithes, rents and debt payments.

But at the same time, they tend to have a lot of the independent tribal structure that's typical of the Bedouin. And that tells us that their subjugation by the state, although very heavy, was also very recent. So, what is this tribal structure and where does it come from? Where it comes from is the practical realities of life as a pastoralist, meaning as an animal herder who constantly has to defend against other pastoralists and who also needs to defend himself against the state.

According to Salzman, quote, Pastoralism is a way of life that normally entails being great fighters and raiders, first because you're mobile and you can pillage and disappear fast, and more importantly, because pastoralists are always trying to steal each other's animals, so you have to be a good fighter to maintain your herd. When they stop stealing from each other and unite, they make fearsome warriors. And this is true of pastoralists around the world.

Great empires are often the result of pastoralists like the Bedouin or Mongols or precursors of the Roman Empire who managed to unite warring tribes and then expand out and conquer enormous territories, sometimes across vast continents with relative ease. Unquote. And when we look at monotheism in the ancient Hebrews and in early Islam, what's happening there is the union of formerly fractious and infighting tribes of nomadic pastoralists who join together under a single god in order to capture a small territory, in the case of the ancient Hebrews, but often they expand out to capture enormous territories, like with the Arabs.

Each family has animals that are your main property, your main wealth, and you constantly have to move around to new places to graze and feed your animals after they eat all the grass in one place to wait until it grows back. And since it's kind of easy to steal animals because they're running around in these large ranges where you can't see all of them all the time, other pastoralists are always trying to pick off and steal some of your animals, and you're always trying to steal everyone else's animals. Think of cowboy movies with cattle rustlers and everyone's branding their animals so that it's hard to steal them.

Now we saw in episode 7 of this show, the one on male dominance, that when you frequently need to defend yourself from outside attacks, one classic way to deal with that is that you organize your society around related men who grew up together and who have close bonds and who will fight well together. To avoid inbreeding, men and women need to marry people from outside families, so you can have different rules for who goes where, like will the women stay with their families and the husbands will come from the outside, or will the men stay and the women come from the outside, or whoever wants to will go and come according to whatever's practical, based on circumstances. But if snappy defense is really important to your society, you want to keep all the men together, because men are just physically stronger, and you want a cohort of close male allies who will fight well together.

And that means that women will marry in from the outside. And this fact that women are coming in to marry from the outside leads to male dominance, because all the men know each other and are allies, and all the women tend not to know each other, and they are more socially isolated. So they can't band together to defend their interests as easily.

Plus, their physically stronger fathers and brothers, who can physically defend them, are usually living further away. So women are at a general disadvantage and have a weaker bargaining position relative to the men. And that leads them to having less rights and less power, and it leads to them being stuck with the worst types of work, and they need to be more submissive and obedient to their husbands to get by.

This is not some kind of foreign, exotic thing. Think of being a worker in a modern capitalist workplace in the West. Workers have less rights and less power and worse working conditions when your bargaining position is low versus when your bargaining position is higher, and you get better pay, and you don't have to be as submissive to your boss, and you have better working conditions.

Because of the material realities of pastoralism, you end up with this weird situation, where on the one hand, you need the cooperation of related men for self-defense. But at the same time, everyone is trying to steal each other's animals, especially between closely related men, whose herds will be closer to each other, like brothers stealing from brothers. So you have this need to pull together, but you have also this social antagonism at the same time.

So you end up with this social structure, which on the one hand seems extremely fragmented. Like on the day-to-day, brothers' families are often antagonistic to each other and stealing from each other. But on the other hand, you also have an extremely high degree of solidarity in the face of theft or attack by outsiders.

So if one of the brothers is being attacked or stolen from by a more distantly related person, like their mutual cousin, the brothers will band together in solidarity against theft and attacks by their cousins. Or if a more distantly related person, like a second cousin, tries to steal from one of the brothers or one of the cousins, the brothers and first cousins will band together in solidarity against the second cousins. Hence you have the Arab saying, which I talk about a lot in this podcast, me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, my brother, my cousin, and I against the outsider.

And this saying really captures how tribal social structure works around the world, especially among nomadic pastoralists. You start from the nuclear family unit, and then your coalition, your identity group, unit that you owe and receive mutual defense from and to, well, that builds upwards from there to larger and larger groupings according to closeness of relation on the paternal line up until the tribal level. And it could be on the maternal line if you're in a matrilineal culture.

And what this looks like on a larger scale is that you have all of these more or less equal sized units of solidarity against all of these other relatively equal units of opposition. Each person will be a member of a family and then a clan, and then you have sub-tribes made up of a bunch of clans who are descended from a higher up common ancestor. And then you have the highest group, which is the tribe, who are all descended from a distant common ancestor, often a fictitious one.

So you owe loyalty to all of these groups whenever a member of a more distantly related group attacks someone from within one of those groups. Now, when I say the highest group is the tribe, it means that you don't ever have any obligation to join with other tribes when they're being attacked. That's one of the reasons that some of the Bedouin tribes joined Israel in the 1948 war, and why they still serve in the Israeli army today.

The leaders calculated the interest of their tribe and decided that a victory for the Israeli side was more advantageous to them for various reasons, and that it would be in their interest to join with the Israelis against the Arab armies, including other Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin, to whom they had no allegiance or obligations to whatsoever, because the obligation of allegiance and defense ends at the level of the tribe. Now, you will see sometimes in history tribal confederations that go beyond the tribal level. For example, over the centuries you've had some famous tribal confederations who unite against other confederations, like the Hadnessani versus the Wandat in North America, or like an Arab confederation versus a Baluchi federation of pastoral nomads, for example.

And it's been argued by Salzman, among others, that Islam is supposed to unite all Muslims as one giant tribe against the infidel outsiders. And while that concept may have been crucial in the initial Arab expansion, and while it might have been part of the intent or purpose of early Islam, the fact is that tribes just do not automatically unite by obligation on the basis of Islam or nationality or ethnicity or anything else. The obligation of mutual defense only extends as far as the tribe, and any larger alliance is made by choice, according to the interests of the tribal decision-makers, usually the male heads of households.

This social structure is called tribal, but because that's a term that ordinary people use in all kinds of incorrect ways, anthropologists will call it a segmented lineage system, because the society is divided into relatively equal segments. And there's also the term which some anthropologists like Salzman use, which I think is very useful, is the balanced opposition system, because all the segments are in opposition to each other, and they're balanced because they tend to be relatively equal over time in power, size, and wealth. And when the state isn't picking winners and losers, it results in a rather egalitarian distribution of wealth, because it's really hard to overwhelm anyone else militarily, and it's hard to steal much more than anyone else, because you have this whole system of other people backing you up.

And this results in a certain degree of political egalitarianism as well, where all male heads of families are equal in their generation, and they participate in all important decisions at the level of larger lineage segments. So you have an important measure of democracy, but you also have hierarchy on the gender level, and also in terms of gerontocracy, because the older men represent larger units of property holding and defense, so all the younger family members owe them deference and obedience. In terms of maintaining material equality and balance, for example, a larger group, like a sub-lineage or a tribe, might shrink over time versus another group by accident of fertility, and therefore they might lose power, creating an imbalance of equality between the groups.

But then they'll often end up merging with another smaller group, using a fictitious common ancestor as a justification, so that the groups will tend to maintain equal size and power over time, at least when the state isn't interfering. And we'll look at that a bit later. Another cultural effect of this tribal social structure is that it diminishes the identity of the individual in favor of collective identity, family, lineage, clan, tribe, religion.

And it also creates a very powerful honor system. And you need the honor system, absent an overarching authority like a state, to ensure that people will meet their obligations. It takes a powerful cultural force to make you go risk your life on a regular basis to go defend someone else, whom you're often in conflict with, no less.

So for the defense alliances to work, an attack against one has to be perceived and felt as an attack against all. This means collective identity over individual identity. And on a practical level, it means that if someone in your group kills someone in another group, anyone from the other group can avenge their loss by killing anyone in your group.

Everyone is equivalent in that sense. And honor is your reputation, which is gained when you fulfill your duties to your family and your other descent groups, and when you conform to the various ways that a human being is supposed to act in your society. And your honor is lost when you fail to do so.

Someone with honor can expect assistance and support from his clansmen and tribesmen, even from strangers, but someone without honor cannot. And that can mean the difference between life and death. And if your reputation is fouled, so is the reputation of your family and your lineage, etc.

So you're going to have relatives very eager to make sure that you behave correctly and also to correct yourself if you behave badly or to kill you, because that's one way that you can restore the honor of your identity group is to kill the person in your group who acts badly and brings shame to your group. And one important way of gaining honor is by acting as a successful mediator when you're in between two relatives who are equidistant from you having a dispute, and if you can get them to back down from their conflict without violence. Everyone values a good mediator because they always want to avoid violence which can spill out of hand and cause chaos for generations because of the honorable obligation for revenge.

On the one hand, the system is brilliant because it maintains equality and freedom and self-defense and military power and coordination among enormous numbers of people, sometimes tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. And in that way, people can successfully govern themselves and successfully resist domination by the state. But on the other hand, this system also has several huge drawbacks.

It reduces women to second-class status and results in extreme policing of women's sexual behavior, including honor killings to restore family honor when a woman has tarnished your family's reputation for real or imagined transgressions. While there's democracy between adult men, there's also dictatorship within the family and extreme deference to fathers and elder males. It results in collective identity which easily spills into intergenerational feuds as people keep killing each other for revenge and to restore their honor.

And all the competitiveness for resources coupled with collective identity and honor culture result in a morality where what's right or wrong is the equivalent of what's good or bad for your family or your lineage or your tribe. And that makes it hard to integrate into a nation-state model where you supposedly have individual atomized citizens voting for the common good, which is not real. People are just voting for their own self-interest.

Of course, in a capitalist class society, the idea of the common good is also a joke because you still have interest groups fighting one another for dominance within a state. But we'll look at that another time. And although Bedouins are seen as the keepers of the true Arab culture, when it comes to religion, while some Bedouins are very religious, in general they tend to be a lot less religious than urban people.

And often their religion tends to be less orthodox and more idiosyncratic. Centralized monotheic religion and the big, giant, great religions like Buddhism and Hinduism as well as the monotheistic religions are very much a tool of the state to control the peasants. The tribesmen and the villagers, the peasants, tend to do religion their own way.

The famous anthropologist E.E. Evans Pritchard, writing about the Bedouin of eastern Libya, says, the obligations and privileges of Islam and its unity and strength. Moreover, although they are negligent Muslims themselves, they respect piety in others. It is very necessary for the well-being of the community.

But the Bedouin has its own affairs to see to. Perhaps the Bedouin make up for their shortcomings by their enthusiasm for jihad, holy war against unbelievers. They consider that they have fulfilled their obligation under this head in ample measure by their long and courageous fight, formally declared a holy war by the Caliph of Islam against the Italians, the French, and the British.

A Bedouin once said to me when I remarked how rarely I'd seen a Bedouin at prayer, ???? ? ????? but we fast and we wage holy war. Unquote. Now that we know something about the pure Bedouin social structure, now we can look at the Felahim, the peasants of Palestine, and we can see how their social structure compares and when and why it differs.

Peasants lived in villages ranging in population from 30 to 1,000 inhabitants and from 20 to 100 houses. Each village was made up of closely related patrilineal clans, meaning descent is traced from your father, not your mother, belonging to the same tribe. A clan, also known as a lineage or in Arabic Hamula, is a group of families who descend from a common ancestor and in the case of the Arab Felahim, a common male ancestor.

In Bedouin culture, the clan is usually the Hamsa, five generations, but in the villages, it varied. When I say the different clans of the village were closely related, usually that means that the founding members of the village were all each other's brothers. Each clan will have a patriarch, the leader of the clan, and this patriarch would usually be an older man who was chosen by the clan because he is the most respected man among his generation.

And he would mediate disputes and represent the clan in dealings with other clans or with other authorities and other villages. According to scholar James Riley, quote, So great was the importance of Hamula kinship to the village life that strangers who came to live in a village had to adopt a fictitious kinship relation which one of the established Hamulas in order to be fully accepted and integrated into the village. Unquote.

And he goes on to list three principal characteristics of the Hamula. Quote, First, the families of a Hamula lived in the same residential quarter of a village. Second, lands belonging to members of a particular Hamula were next to each other.

And third, all members of a particular Hamula were responsible for a wrong committed by any one of them. And likewise, all were entitled to receive compensation or exact punishment for a wrong committed against any one of them. Unquote.

And this follows from the balanced opposition tribal system that I just described, the honor system. And of course, this isn't just in the Middle East. You had this same phenomenon among the Americans in Appalachia, like the intergenerational rivalry between the notorious Hatfields and McCoys, as well as the Hatfield and McCoys pastoralist ancestors in Scotland, the McDonald's versus the Burger Kings, as well as in tribally organized societies worldwide.

Riley continues, quote, ordinarily, marriage was restricted to within Hamula limits, reinforcing the Hamula structure and social cohesion. A village was a family of families closely linked by a common history and continuous intermarriage. Unquote.

Another important feature of village life in this period and an important difference from the Bedouin is that the outlook of the Falaheen tends to be very local. Peasants are usually illiterate, except for maybe a few people in the Sheikh's family. And unlike the Bedouin, they don't get to move around a lot, and it's harder to invoke tribal connections from other villages far away who can't just run over and abandon their own villages to defend their far-off relatives.

So villagers tend to be mostly concerned with what's happening in their own village and on their own plot of land. And their connection to the outside world mostly involves trade relationships that they'll have with Bedouin or with other villages or with urban traders or else with their own urban patrons, which I'll talk about later. And also via various religious ceremonies that will unite various villages several times a year and which will take rural peasants to urban holy cities.

And all these celebrations and these markets are occasions for hearing news and gossip that might impact you. Now, the idea of a nation is something that's not even really emerging yet in most urban areas of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the 19th century. And it's certainly quite alien to Falaheen life, which is very much oriented around the village.

And while peasants and urban people alike had many overlapping collective identities, including the Muslim ummah, meaning the world community of Muslims, and the tribal and clan identities, down to the family, the village identity was central to their lives and their ideology, with each village having its own reputation and personality. Quote, Village traditions were passed on by both mothers and fathers to their children, encouraging village particularism, which was culturally expressed in embroidery styles, dialects, songs, folk sayings, and dishes. As E. Grant observed, different villages and their inhabitants get reputation for doing one or another kind of work especially well, or they are distinguished according to their disposition.

Unquote. So each village is composed of related clans, slash hamulas. Each hamula is made up of related families.

Each hamula has a patriarch who represents the hamula and who mediates between different hamulas, and each village has a sheikh who mediates between different villages and who generally represents the village in its dealings with the outside world, in particular with the state, the government. And the sheikh was usually chosen from the more powerful or wealthy hamula of the village. This position wasn't hereditary and didn't have to stay within any particular hamula, but it tended to.

And being a sheikh would tend to cement the power of your family in hamula, making it sort of hereditary. Because until the first few decades of the 1800s, the sheikh was integrated into the state apparatus. So here you have an example where the egalitarian ethos of the tribal culture gets distorted or corrupted by the state, which gives one family or hamula advantages that become permanent thanks to the state's continued patronage.

Later in the century, after some big reforms that we'll talk about, where Ottomans were trying to break the power of the rural elites and to consolidate their own power, they stopped using sheikhs as intermediaries and instead created a new position called the village headman, or mukhtar, who was appointed by the state and whose loyalty to the state was basically more secure than the sheikhs, whose primary loyalty was still to his clan and village. So the mukhtar was basically a government representative, the administrative leader of the village, involved in keeping government records, implementing government policies, telling the village about the government policies, representing the village to the authorities, and also lobbying the authorities on behalf of the village. He would also come from the prominent hamula, and in smaller villages the mukhtar often was the sheikh of the village as well.

So I've talked about the segmented lineage system of balanced opposition among the Bedouin, and I talked about the obligations of mutual defense. The fellaheen of Palestine were similarly organized, though like I said earlier, the primary focus of organization that was invoked was usually at the village level. According to Reilly, through its principles of collective responsibility for members' actions and collective defense of members' interests, the hamula served as a basic means of social control and village self-government.

Although intra-village feuds between hamulas were not uncommon, even feuding hamulas within a particular village were expected to close ranks and present a united front to the outside world, both in diplomacy and war. It was obligatory that every son of the village respond instantly to a call for defense or attack. This spirit was useful in the petty wars which villages waged with each other.

When feuding broke out into open warfare, the cost in lives was usually light. More trees and crops were uprooted than people killed, and time was always taken out during the sowing and reaping seasons." And the reason why people targeted property more than other people was that, according to the honor code, if someone gets killed, you have to kill someone back, and this creates a horrible cycle of violence that everyone desperately wants to avoid. In the early 1800s, when the Ottoman state was weak, villages frequently fought each other, and they also had to defend themselves against nomadic Bedouin raiders, and the villages were built accordingly.

According to Riley, quote, "...villages husbanded their resources, and in doing so often quarreled with each other over water, land, and grazing rights. Consequently, they had to be built with defense in mind to withstand forays by their enemies. Villages were rendered defensible not only by their location, but also by their construction.

Mountain villages were constructed of stone, and Lise noted that their houses are built like forts and close together. Grant, an early 20th century observer, likened Palestinian villages to fragments of a city. The houses of a small village are oftentimes just as closely packed as the buildings in a city, so that a village will look like a fragment knocked off of a city.

This compactness of the village became a fashion in times of insecurity, when feuds between villages led to raids and reprisals. He went on to observe that one could trace the physical development of a Palestinian village by finding its highest point, the Buri, around which the early village clustered. The location of villages built in the plains and valleys was determined by their accessibility to springs.

These villages did not possess the natural geographic advantages for defense that the hill villages had, which explains why their prosperity could be easily undermined by bedouin invasions. Unquote. Now, something that will be very important later is that the peasants in Palestine, like peasants everywhere else in the world, were deeply attached to their specific parcels of land.

Often their families had been working these plots for centuries, but even when their occupation was more recent, they knew the land intimately. They were on it and with it day in and day out, usually since childhood, and they needed to know every intricacy of it in order to make it as productive as possible. In general, it was very difficult to get anyone to leave their land, both because of emotional and social attachment, but also because usually, if you were leaving your land, it meant an enormous step down in terms of lifestyle.

There are some exceptional periods where people would move on purpose because better land or conditions were newly available, but normally, the only land that wasn't already occupied was land that's suboptimal for a variety of reasons, like the land has malarial mosquitoes, or it's not productive, or it's vulnerable to raids, etc. And just as importantly, moving away from your land generally meant being pulled away from your social context and your communities, who are the allies which you depend on to defend you from enemies and predators. Moving away from your land and community meant entering the lowest rungs of the pecking order in some other area, where everyone is stronger than you are because you have no allies.

Or else later, when we get to the 20th century, it means that you're moving into the urban slums, where people are completely socially uprooted and dislocated and lost in fundamental ways. According to Afif Tainous, in an article written in 1944 about Arab peasants in general, quote, One of the strongest ties exists between the Arab fella and his land. Its significance to him and his attachment to it cannot be explained in cold economic terms.

For land is one of the few main pillars of village life, involving a deep-rooted complex of behavior and sentiment. For countless generations, it has been the only source of life for him and his ancestors. Year in and year out, he has depended upon it to sustain him.

And it did. He refers to it with reverence. He calls it Blessed Earth, and he has worked on it since he was a child.

And so did his ancestors before him. He inherited it from them as they in turn inherited the same land. The attachment is so strong that the fella resorts to migration or to selling his land only under extreme circumstances.

One example of this is the great difficulty which the Egyptian government has encountered in its attempt to settle some of the fellaheen on newly reclaimed land, with a view to relieving high population pressure. They are offered all sorts of facilities and inducements, yet they are reluctant to leave their ancestral communities. Another illustration is afforded by the early emigrants from the villages of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.

Under extreme population pressure, they began to emigrate to the Americas around 1880 or 1890. In practically all cases, they intended to save some money as soon as possible, and then return to their original homes. Very few of them indeed were willing to sell their land when they emigrated.

The first money many of them were able to send home was for the purpose of rebuying the land that they had to sell, or releasing it for mortgage. Some of them who are now married and established immigrants in this country, meaning the United States, still own land in the old village. It is a bond they do not like to sever, although they know very well that they will never go back." In the 1980s and 1990s, Palestinians put together memorial books for their villages that were lost in the war of 1948.

And these types of books are something that you'll also see from Holocaust survivors for their homes in Europe and other communities where there have been large-scale ethnic cleansing or displacements. And the memorial book about the village of Kalunya starts off. Quote, My village, Kalunya, is part of the divine creation of this earth, inviting the mind and attracting the soul to contemplate its natural beauty.

It is surrounded by green earth and full of fruit, and made pleasant by a refreshing climate and moderate weather most months of the year. It is watered by springs of fresh, pure water, Salsabil, a spring in paradise, whose vigor and purity clarify the mind, heart, and soul. Its mountains are covered with the trees of blessing, figs and olives.

The figs are loved by people and birds, and they have a distinct taste that has not changed since their appearance. The olives are the loftiest mark of God in beauty, decorating the mountain faces." Unquote. Unquote.

So now we're going to talk a bit about male dominance in Bedouin and Falaheen culture and traditional Arab culture. And it's not because it has anything in particular to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict, but because it has to do with themes that we've been talking about a lot on this show, and that is how practical conditions, material conditions, create different types of cultural values and social structures, and also how differences in bargaining power creates differences in status and rights. So like I mentioned earlier, among the Bedouin, as among all nomadic animal-herding societies, male dominance arises because women marry into the community from the outside, and men stay together with their natal clan.

Women are more socially isolated. Plus, when you raise a girl, you're raising someone whose adult labor and children will enrich people from a different clan, and it's someone that you won't see very much after they're married. And we saw this in episode 7.1 among Chinese farmers as well.

Now I'm going to talk about the Bedouin here again, because these aspects of Bedouin culture explain very similar aspects of traditional Falaheen peasant society. And because, as far as I know, you don't have the same kind of quality texts describing these aspects of life in the Falaheen villager context. So understanding the Bedouin really is essential to helping us understand the broader society.

Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod writes about a group of Bedouin in the deserts of Western Egypt, and she tells us that parents will love their boys and girls equally, but that the birth of a boy is a cause for celebration, while a birth of a girl is a general disappointment. According to a midwife that she spoke with, quote, To give birth to boys is better. Everyone present rejoices.

They run to tell the father that he has a son. If it is a girl, everyone is upset. Those who delivered her, those in attendance.

They don't go tell the men. No one eats dinner. Even the tent goes into mourning.

When it is a boy, the tent is happy. The father is happy. The uncles are happy.

And the mother, I can't tell you how happy she is. Unquote. And we saw similar dynamics in episode 7.1 about the Chinese farmers.

And Abu-Lughbod tells us that, quote, When women visit a new mother, they enter yu-yu-lating. And yu-yu-lating is like an expression of joy and celebration. And I can't do it, but it's like that the women do at any kind of celebrations, weddings, bar mitzvahs, whatever it is.

Quote, When women visit a new mother, they enter yu-yu-lating, and they eagerly offer their congratulations if she has delivered a son. If she has given birth to a girl, they offer the phrase, Thank God for your safety. People generally greet the birth of a girl with a philosophical statement, Whatever God brings is good.

One father, hearing that his wife had delivered a daughter, her fifth daughter out of seven children, commented, It's all the same. But his 15-year-old daughter was less neutral. She responded to the news with a disappointing rhyme, A little girl may she have cramps.

For which the older women immediately rebuked her, saying, Shame on you. Girls are nice. Unquote.

Now, these attitudes aren't just prejudices or bad culture. They reflect practical realities. And Abu-Lughod explains that, Tribal segments can only grow through the addition of males.

Strength is measured in the number of men. It is therefore not surprising that men unequivocally prefer sons. And while women form close relationships with their daughters, they often prefer boys as well, because their daughters will be gone at marriage, and it breaks their hearts.

Quote, One woman explained, A daughter will leave. She'll marry and abandon you. She won't even get news from you.

But if you are fortunate, a son will support you, and look after you when you're old. Girls may be more tender, but they leave. That is unless they marry within the camp.

Unquote. And therefore, the ideal form of marriage for Bedouin, as for many tribal villagers around the world, including 19th century Palestine, is to marry your cousin on your father's side. That way your clan doesn't lose any members, and you get to keep your daughters close by, and her kids contribute to your clan instead of a rival clan.

Meanwhile, Abu-Lughod tells us that sexuality is a dangerous force in Bedouin society, because so much of the Bedouin honor code and cultural values are based on self-control and restraint, where sexuality is a very powerful force that is hard to control, and also because sexuality and the needs and demands of a wife and children competes with the men's loyalty to their clan, and with the authority of their elders. The clan is strong when the men are united, but it's weak when the men focus on their individual families, which is what their wives usually want. They're not invested in the clan.

They're not from the clan. Abu-Lughod tells us how these attitudes are reflected in the popular wedding ditties sung about the groom on the wedding night. Quote, When he shuts the door behind him, he forgets the father who raised him.

He reached your arm stretched on the pillow, forgot his father, and then his grandfather. She continues, The challenge to the hierarchical relationship between providers and dependents, or elders and juniors, is at the heart of Bedouin attitudes about sexuality. When a woman leaves her kin's residential sphere at marriage, their control over her must thenceforth be shared with her husband and his kin.

When she bears children, her attachment to her husband's group grows, competing with her loyalty to her own natal group, despite her continued membership in her own patrilineage and tribe. Unquote. So, women remain part of their father's clan, not their husband's clan.

Now, even though Islam itself, as a religion, does not have anywhere near as much of an anti-sexual attitude as Christianity normally does, in traditional Bedouin culture, as in many pastoralist cultures, sexuality is considered to be extremely dangerous and divisive. And speaking of the authority of elders, tribal systems, whether patrilineal like the Arab Bedouin and Valahin or Chinese farmers, or matrilineal systems like the Haudenosaunee and other people around the world, you almost always have some sort of gerontocracy and obedience to elders. And that's because your whole society, all your alliances, and also often the management of your property, is organized around your lineage.

Your ancestors on your paternal line, or your maternal line in some societies. In particular, the common ancestor that defines who's a member of your clan or who's a member of your sub-tribe or tribe in the first place, and that person's memory, even their fictitious memory, all members of a lineage will venerate and say special prayers to that person. And for an example of common ancestors, Arabs and Jews are supposed to be descended from Abraham, but all the Jews are supposed to be descended from Isaac, and all the Arabs are supposed to be descended from Ishmael.

And so ancient traditional competition between Jews and Arabs was conceived of in this tribal segmented lineage system way. So elders in the community are living ancestors who can mediate disputes between their children and grandchildren. And given that there's a lot of competition, even between brothers, you need some kind of authority to prevent chaos.

And who better to get that authority than the common living ancestors of the people who might be squabbling and quarreling? Now, about gender relations in the Palestinian village, Alan Doughty tells us that, quote, The village division of labor was set in stone. Men worked in the fields and women did the rest, fetching water and fuel, grinding grain, tending animals, caring for children. The subjugation of women remained a principal feature of Palestinian society in both cities and villages.

A woman traveler in 1858 noted that throughout the region women, quote, are the abject slaves of the lords of creation, unquote. Male visitors were hardly less caustic. William M. Thompson, a missionary writing in 1859, wrote that the treatment of women was justified, quote, by the tyrant's plea of necessity, unquote, and that, quote, hence they literally used the rod upon them, unquote.

He was particularly struck to see, quote, small boys lorded over both mother and sisters in a most insolent manner, unquote. The missionary C.T. Wilson wrote in 1906 of the degraded position of a woman, quote, looked on upon as hardly a human being, soundly thrashed whenever she displeases her lord and master and liable to be divorced at any moment, unquote. Now, I'm always a little bit skeptical when I hear some of these reports from Westerners about the treatment of women or, as we'll look at later, about the treatment of Jews and Christians, because they're often from missionary or government officials who want an excuse to get in there and intervene in the country's affairs or to convert the savages, etc.

But, whether their descriptions are colored by racism and self-interest, Ottoman Palestine was a very male-dominated society, from the nomad to the village to the city. Interestingly, in many ways, women in the country had a lot more freedom and bargaining power than the wealthier women in the cities. In the country, or in the Bedouin camp, despite their lower bargaining power than men, women still had a good degree of bargaining power because their labor was absolutely essential to the survival of the group.

Meanwhile, they needed some freedom to act because they needed to be able to walk around and sometimes travel for work. And finally, while they were more isolated from their allies and relatives than men were, the village women often had to work together, and thus they could form social alliances with each other and exercise bargaining power that way. Thus, all in all, village women and even nomadic Bedouin women had a lot more bargaining power than many wealthy urban women did because the urban women's labor was far less crucial to the continued success of their husbands, who often got their wealth from commerce and rents and who could hire servants to do all the work.

So wealthy urban women tended to be treated to more severe restrictions in terms of mobility and dress codes, especially in religious families. So, even in the 19th century, fellaheen women would often not be expected to wear veils, while the wives of wealthy men normally did wear veils. And one of the reasons that fellaheen women didn't wear veils, even though they were very religious, was because it just wasn't practical given the heavy work that they did.

And as we head into the 20th century, you have increasing secularization and currents of feminism that improve the position of women in the cities in the middle and upper classes. Now notice how important class and bargaining power are when it comes to how much freedom people have and what rights they enjoy. And the social structure of a society reflects the differential bargaining power of different people in that society.

And the reason for this is so that people don't constantly enter into conflicts that they will ultimately lose and which will disrupt society for everyone in all ranks of the hierarchy. So values are a way of having us internalize the bargaining power reality of the situation that we live in, so that we don't stand up for ourselves. So we don't cause conflicts that we can't win.

Speaking of subjugation, slavery still existed in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century as it did in the United States until 1860 and in the British Empire until 1834. Doughty tells us that, quote, In 1830, European pressure had finally forced the Ottomans to emancipate, at least in theory, all slaves of European origin. You had a lot of Circassian slaves in the empire who are an ethnic group from the Caucasus region, for example.

In 1858, the Ottomans banned the slave trade in black African slaves, though they did not emancipate existing black slaves. In 1871, they enforced the slave trade ban, finally, by imposing a penalty on violators. In 1880, the Ottoman government signed a treaty with Great Britain eliminating all slavery, meaning that slavery was formally outlawed just as Jewish settlement in Palestine was about to begin.

But the provisions of the treaty were not enforced until 1889. And in reality, slaves were a feature of Jerusalem households well into the 20th century. Unquote.

Interestingly, whereas slaves in North America were considered property, in the Ottoman Empire they had legal rights and could even sue their owners in Islamic courts. In the bibliography, there's an article by Ehud Toledano about a Circassian harem slave in Egypt named Shemsigul, who successfully sued her wealthy owner for trying to sell her after getting her pregnant. And she won her case and ended up being freed from slavery by the court, as for the law.

Now, in one of the passages I quoted earlier, the author refers to an overpopulation crisis in the 1880s and 1890s in different parts of the Levant, which caused many villagers to go emigrate elsewhere, around the region and around the world. Many of the Lebanese-American communities in the United States and Argentina date back from that time. This overpopulation crisis is beginning to happen in Palestine just as we approach the 1880s when the first Zionists start immigrating.

And this overpopulation crisis for peasants is also happening around the world in different places, like we saw with our episode about the Russian Revolution. And globally, this had to do with improvements in medicine and hygiene. And in Palestine, in particular, and the surrounding regions, you had the same factors, plus some factors that were specific to the region.

From the 1500s to the early 1800s, you had a serious depopulation in terms of the number of peasants and towns in agricultural areas due to malaria and chronic bedouin raids. And also because the government and its agents were trying to collect heavy taxes. And all of this resulted in peasants moving to defensible hilltop areas where they could defend against bedouin and fight off tax collectors and military conscription.

Sometimes they would still keep villages in the plains area, but they would only work in them part-time, while living in the hilltops, or else these plains villages would be entirely abandoned. And basically in this period, the Ottoman government had very little control over many of the rural areas of the Levant, and these were run by the tribes of the region, a bit similar to the way that Ibn Khaldun had described about Morocco in his day. The Ottomans managed to collect some taxes via the village sheikhs, and they got some payments from tribes, but the local village elite were pocketing huge chunks of it, and Ottoman control more or less ended there.

So the countryside had more freedom from government, but less security from things like bedouin raids or violent conflict between neighboring villages. But starting in the early 1800s, the government starts to reassert control vis-à-vis the bedouin, and it becomes safe again to farm in plains areas. So fellahin start returning to the plains and the alluvial valleys, meaning valleys near rivers which bring rich soil nutrients, and people started repopulating formerly depopulated villages, or else they were going back to live in those plains villages full-time.

Meanwhile, rich people were buying land as part of this big capitalist land reform that we'll look at in the next episode, and they were encouraging peasants to go farm this land as tenants. So by the later 1800s, much of the fertile land that isn't plagued with malaria, or that wasn't too rocky to farm properly, had been repopulated. And then from that point on, with the developments in medicine and sanitary practices, population density quickly started getting higher and higher.

Peasants in this region did not have any methods for birth control, and that's probably because until the mid and late 1800s, they had very high childhood mortality rates. So you balance that off with very high birth rates, and the population wouldn't grow very quickly. But in the mid and late 1800s, childhood mortality begins to decline rapidly with the new hygiene and medical practices.

So you have this huge population explosion, which initially gets absorbed by the expansion into plains and fertile valleys, but pretty soon, the villages are starting to get overpopulated relative to the available land. And then you get a lot of immigration out of Palestine and Syria and Lebanon to the United States and South America and other places. And this population crunch is beginning in the 1880s, when the first Zionists show up, but it basically continues through most of the period before the establishment of the State of Israel.

And we'll see how that plays into the eventual conflict between Zionism and the Palestinian Felahim. One thing you'll read about if you start researching Levantine Felahim is the Mushaa al-Balad communal land distribution system. Mushaa means shares, and al-Balad means the land, and it's a form of collective land use and distribution where certain lands are used by everyone in the village, and the rest of the lands were divided equally among the villages each year, usually distributed periodically by a lottery system within each village.

Now it's very common all around the world for peasants to own land in common, and to divide it equally between families. In medieval Europe, for example, you had what were called plow lands in England, or manses in France, or roule in Poland. What made Mushaa a bit different was that the plots of land were redistributed each year between the families according to each family's number of ownership shares in the land.

Basically, Mushaa lands were lands that were publicly owned, but held in trust by the State. And in each village that operated in the Mushaa system, all the common arable land was redistributed every year or two if the land was poor, or up to every ten years if the land was very fertile. And the amount that you got depended on the number of shares you had in the land.

And the number of shares held by each family was determined by various criteria, like how long they lived in the village, the number of plows that they had access to, or the number of adult working males that they had. And there was variation in how this all worked from region to region or village to village. Now, unless you're reading specialist literature, specifically on Mushaa, about 90% of what you're going to read will tell you that the backwards, retarded Mushaa system was one of the major obstacles to economic progress among the Felahim.

And they'll tell you that it was one of the main things that were keeping the peasants poor, and preventing them from modernizing. You'll read that the Mushaa system so thoroughly disincentivized investment in the future, that the stupid peasants wouldn't even bother fertilizing their land, because doing so would only help their neighbor next year, and not themselves. And basically, Mushaa is commonly blamed for keeping Arab Levantine agriculture at a Stone Age level of productivity, well until the 20th century.

And this reminds me very much about when you read about rent control today, where 95% of economists, and actually they say 95%, but it's more like 80% now, of economists think that rent control is just obviously this terrible, horrible thing that disincentivizes building new apartments, and it disincentivizes renovations and upkeep, and it makes your city look like it's been bombed in Dresden in World War II, or in Gaza today. And they'll often show pictures of World War II in Dresden and say, see look, this is rent control. And all these people are just fucking wrong.

They're basing themselves on very simplistic Economics 101 courses, without any real world experience or understanding of how this actually plays out in real conditions. Where in reality, unless you're upper middle class, or rich, the very real downsides of rent control are far, far outweighed by the incredible benefits that it brings in allowing you to have a stable, dignified human life, instead of being a tumbleweed in a tornado of constant stress and chaos, being blown around from apartment to apartment every year, watching your quality of life slip through your fingers, making community impossible, and watching everyone just get poorer and poorer and more miserable except for landlords. In the real world, what you actually want is rent control laws and institutions that are crafted to counter the drawbacks of rent control, but which also incentivize building new units and building upkeep.

And I'm going to talk about housing in the modern world in the future and what the solution is to the housing crisis. But, back to the Felehin. So, 95% of the stuff that you're going to read will tell you how awful the communal Mushai system was because it violates the holy laws of capitalism.

And then the other 5% of the stuff that you read will tell you that Mushai was this idyllic, natural, communist smurf village system of communist anarchist peasants which was destroyed by evil white people and their imperialism and capitalism and Zionism. And that's also wrong. So, almost everything you're likely to read about this, except if you're reading specialist literature specifically from experts in peasant farming techniques and land use.

It's all crap, written by people who haven't really looked into it properly and don't know what they're talking about, and they're just basing their ideas on economics 101 tropes or on utopian wishful thinking fantasies. Now, subsistence farming communities around the world have had egalitarian communal social systems resembling communist smurf village ideology. However, the Mushai al-Balad land co-ownership system as it existed in the 19th century Levant was not an ancient traditional system, but rather it was a system built around the power imbalances of the 19th century rural village that existed in that time and that place.

And the system was also an adaptation to and the result of various realities of that time and place, from Bedouin raids to government intervention to market fluctuations. Researchers aren't actually sure how the system developed, but researchers have elaborated on why the system existed in terms of what purpose it served and what benefits it provided in the context of that time. First of all, if land had been owned and administered individually the way that all the Ottoman officials and later British officials all wanted it to be it would have led to endless conflict and chronic crop damage at harvest time.

Because without coordination of farming and harvest periods some farmers' animals would be grazing on other farmers' unharvested crops. Villages also had deals with Bedouin to let them graze on the leftover stubble after a harvest. But if you had individual ownership and then each field was harvested at a different time, the Bedouin animals would just end up eating the actual crops instead of the stubble.

All of this would result in people choosing earlier and earlier harvest times, which would end up forcing all of the villagers into some kind of communal arrangement, which is exactly why the communal arrangement existed in the first place. When you see a certain system that's been there for a long time it usually exists for a reason. In bad years of famine or epidemics, communal ownership helped ensure the economic viability of all the families.

And then in good years, when there was a lot of rain, the amount of fertile land increased a lot, and some families didn't have enough people to work all that land. So again, communal administration made sure that everyone got the labor that they needed and that the land was more efficiently farmed and used. Also, in these abundance times, fellaheen also got help from neighboring villages from their tribe or sub-tribe, and this required the village to act in a coordinated manner, which was easier under cooperative systems than it would have been in a system with a bunch of individual owners all squabbling with each other about every stupid little thing.

Cooperative ownership also helped people have stable access to food staples regardless of market fluctuations or inflationary periods, and it basically acted as a form of social security and economic security. Another benefit of the musha'a system that specialists refer to is that it enabled the fellaheen to present a common front when dealing with outsiders, like the government and the urban merchants and tax farmers and moneylenders. On the flip side, it also made tax collection easier for the government, and we see the same thing in Russia in the czarist times, where the Russian government actually encouraged villagers to have communal administration at one point in time for that very reason.

Cooperative management also helped people pool resources together in order to acquire capital goods that would benefit the entire community, but that no one would be able to afford individually. So in all of these ways, collective ownership was actually more efficient, not less efficient, than individual ownership. In terms of musha'a reflecting an egalitarian ethos, however, the musha'a system was actually not all that egalitarian.

It reflected inequalities of wealth and power in ways that seemed to me, at least, to have been caused by government interference in terms of elevating some families over others. We saw earlier how some families amassed wealth and power relative to others in the same village because the Ottoman government would grant them special privileges and opportunities, as a sheikh, for example, or later as a government-appointed mukhtar, or tax collector. And this contrasts with the fierce equality that exists among the nomadic Bedouin and other tribal agriculturalists around the world.

The musha'a distribution rules reflected this power imbalance, favoring the wealthier families and wealthier clans who, not coincidentally, tended to be the ones making, or at least applying, the distribution rules. To quote from Kark and Grossman from their article, The rural community used the musha'a as an instrument to divide up the burden equally among all members of the community, and as an instrument to protect the weaker members economically. But it did not concern itself with equalizing the distribution of the means of production or of the income from agriculture.

Some people had no rights, while others could get more than a single share. And there were cases where a village minority controlled much of the village's land. The most likely persons in the latter category belonged to the political or religious leaders, particularly the family hamula heads, the tax collectors, or the rich traders, who were not very common because the commercial sector consisted largely of urban notables.

In some villages, the amount of land that you got depended on how many draft animals you had, which of course reflected your family's wealth. In those cases, villagers not possessing oxen were even threatened with evacuating their village house. An anecdote illustrating this tells of a peasant from the Palestinian village of Qaibaba, near the present-day town of Rehovot, who faced eviction because he had no draft animals.

He eventually went to the market of Ramleh, purchased a yoke of oxen, and drove them home. In approaching home, he placed his turban on the ox's head. He explained this strange behavior to the curious passers-by by saying, the ox was evidently the most respected person here.

Without the ox, no home, and because of the ox he was permitted to live in his house." Now, in a lot of the British, and Zionist, and even Palestinian leftist literature, you'll read about how the peasants were too backwards and too stubborn and too conservative to adopt new, awesome, advanced European agricultural techniques. Or else you'll get complaints that the communist Mushah system was such a horrible disincentive that it made the Felehin too lazy to fertilize their fields because they didn't want to invest any labor in a field that would pass on to someone else's use next year, or in two years. Well, the real reason for peasant aversion to new techniques, and for their conservatism and this applies around the world, not just in Palestine, the reason for that conservatism is not stubbornness or laziness or ignorance, but it's simply because it's just too risky to adopt techniques that are unproven.

Thanks to the enormous burdens imposed on the Palestinian Felehin by the moneylenders, landlords' rents and taxation, and then later compounded with overpopulation, peasants lived on extremely thin margins of subsistence. Adopting new techniques and methods is extremely risky. A new technique might look promising at first, and yield good results in one context, like it being imported from Europe, but then you might have some unexpected drawbacks several years down the line, and those benefits might not apply in the Palestinian context.

And new techniques and methods might also disrupt key social relationships and alliances, or it might disrupt the balance of powers in various ways that could cause so much conflict that they can entail more economic loss than the new technology might bring in. So a wise peasant is first going to want to see someone else adopt a new technique, and then he's going to want to wait for a few years to see if it works well over the long term, before he starts adopting it for himself and his family. And we see the Falahin doing exactly this in the next episode, or in two episodes, when the Zionists start moving in next door.

And eventually the Zionists and the Falahin teach each other various farming techniques and technologies, some of which the Falahin adopt and others that they don't. And the idea that communal ownership and changing plots of land regularly somehow disincentivizes basic investments like adding fertilizer is just completely ridiculous. This is called a collective action problem by economists.

And these upper-middle class economists' unconscious assumptions are that everyone is a brain-dead upper-middle class economist who is living in social isolation from one another, in their university offices, all alone with their AI girlfriends, and having a three-second long attention span, and they can't assess their own well-being five minutes into the future. In the real world, peasants are part of tight-knit communities who have had hundreds of years to adapt to their conditions, and who are subject to very strong social pressures to behave against their short-term self-interest. Their entire value system, the honor code, and all of their other various customs and ethical and religious norms, are based on making people act in ways that benefit society as a whole over the long term over individual short-term interest.

Like the reason that you go to a battle to defend your cousins that could risk your life and which takes time away from economic and social activity is because even if it sucks, and it's dangerous and a waste of resources in the short term, it will benefit you in the long term when your cousin will come to your aid when you're being attacked, which you inevitably will be. The whole reason that you treat a traveler with hospitality, even when you might not have much food for your own family, is because several times a year, you yourself will be a traveler, and you will not be able to survive the journey without the same hospitality. You refrain from sex in the wrong times, you refrain from violence, you refrain from expressing anger, you refrain from eating at the wrong time, in front of the wrong people.

Arab Bedouin and village life was a life of self-mastery and self-control, prioritizing long-term interest over short-term interest. So the idea that peasants weren't fertilizing their lands because they didn't benefit from it immediately, is completely idiotic. It would not have been difficult at all to create social norms and customs that would obligate you to fertilize your field every year.

And every farmer who isn't in a coma is able to understand that next year, you'll depend on your neighbor fertilizing his fields this year, and vice versa. And we see peasants solving collective action problems like this all over the world for thousands of years. And sometimes Palestinian peasants did use fertilizer, but much of the time, the land actually didn't require any fertilizer, because in this period that we're talking about, much of the agricultural land was extremely fertile, so it didn't even require fertilizer in most places.

Ultimately, the Mushah system was an adaptation to poor conditions and underdevelopment, not a cause of them, the way that the British keep telling us in many of their reports, and the way that many of the Israeli sources and historians keep repeating over and over. And many of the drawbacks of the Mushah system were the result of government creating and perpetuating inequalities by favoring some families and individuals over others on a permanent, long-term basis. In contrast, in Russia around the same time, where the government wasn't choosing sheikhs or mukhtars, you saw wealth inequalities in the village communes cyclically even out from generation to generation.

You're poor when you start a new family, and you get a new plot of land, and you don't have many workers, because you only have zero kids. And then when you're older, and you have more kids who can work your land, you become more wealthy. I talked earlier in one of my episodes on the Russian Revolution about the role of religion in empires when it comes to relations between peasants and the state.

Religion was something that was promoted to the peasants from above, by the state, from the cities, as sort of a centralizing force to help control the countryside. In Russia, the czar was seen as appointed by God, and in the Ottoman Empire, the sultan was more of a secular figure, but he was also the caliph of Islam, the highest religious authority, though not the highest religious expert. And he was respected as the leader of the Muslim world, and as the protector of Islam.

And like in Russia, Ottoman peasants often respected and revered the head of state, while hating the state itself, and often blaming the exploitation and abuses of the state on local figures, like the tax collector, or local government officials, who they saw as acting against the wishes of the sultan. And we saw the same attitudes in the 1381 English Peasant Revolt that I talked about in episode 8, where the peasants loved the king, but they hated the nobility, even though in the real world, the king and the nobility were all acting together against the peasants. In the Ottoman Empire, since the sultan wasn't divine, the peasants were more ready to be critical of him, and blame him for state abuses than they were in Russia, but they still looked to him for protection against the abuses of local authorities.

And while peasants are usually very religious, their versions of religion are usually different from the official urban state versions of the religion. Where urban religious officials and preachers try to homogenize religion in order to help centralize authority, peasants have very localized versions of religion, with emphasis on venerating local saints and relics. And this is true all around the world, and also in Palestine.

According to Reilly, quote, Shrines of saints and prophets were universal phenomena in the countryside. Virtually no village was without its saint's tomb, a wali, a small white-domed building. Isolated oak trees on mountaintops, where it was assumed a saint had once preached or lived, were also considered sacred, as well as certain stones or springs.

All of these maqams, or sacred places, were covered with rags and threads put there as votive offerings. In addition, plows and other agricultural implements were often left at these places for security, for no one would dare steal items placed under the protection of a saint. Unquote.

And it would be common for urban religious figures to complain that peasant versions of the religion were corrupted, and that peasants needed to learn the proper form of Islam. And you have similar situations all around the world. You had a similar situation with Judaism in the rural areas of the Arab world, where Jews also venerated rabbis and wise men and local saints in ways that more urban rabbis and religious scholars considered to be paganistic, and violating the spirit of monotheism.

Riley contrasts the localism of Muslim fellaheen in the Ottoman Levant to the greater centralization and integration of Christian fellaheen. Quote. There were some Christian villages as well, mostly Greek Orthodox.

As the European powers intensified their struggle for influence and supremacy in Palestine in the closing decades of the Ottoman era, Christian villages increasingly felt the influence of the powerful ecclesiastic establishments based in the towns, especially Jerusalem. Muslim villages, however, kept their distance from the theologians of the town and followed their own particular rural brand of Islam. Unquote.

And we'll see shortly that the reason for this difference was that for Muslim peasants, the city was a source of exploitation and oppression, while for Christian peasants, the urban centers of their religion connected them to Europe and offered them the patronage and protection of the powerful European countries. For all peasants, religious festivals were a big portal to the outside world, and that was where they would get to visit urban areas and meet and exchange with people from around Palestine and beyond. Riley tells us that, quote.

Festivals for their saints were among the most important in peasant life. Two of the biggest festivals were of Nabi Salih and Nabi Musa, held at Ramleh, and at a site a little to the northeast of the Dead Sea, respectively. Most such festivals were held in the summer after the spring harvest, and they were held not without political and commercial significance.

For days on end, delegations from many different villages mixed and met, allowing people who did not often see each other to exchange visits and information. Traveling merchants would also take advantage of the assemblies of people to sell their wares. In Ottoman times, the Nabi Musa festival often drew about 7,000 people, and Nabi Salih about 5,000.

Unquote. Nabi means prophet, and Musa is Moses, who is revered as a prophet in Islam, as well as being the most important prophet in Judaism. And Salih is Shelah from the Old Testament, who was the son of Judah, who was the founder of the tribe of Judah.

And he's a minor figure in Judaism, but in Islam he's an important prophet who preached monotheism to the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. Riley also notes that religious tolerance seems to have been the norm in the rural areas of Palestine. Quote, Lawrence Oliphant, an Englishman who had lived in Haifa during the 1880s, and who wrote on occasion about sectarian discord in Palestine, admitted after a visit to the Galilean village of al-Bukhaya, home of Greek Orthodox, Druzes, and indigenous Jews.

Quote, I was much struck by the apparent tolerance and amiability with which all the members of these different religions regarded each other. And he continues to tell us that, though there were sectarian tensions in Palestine's towns due to the transplantation of European rivalries there, Elihu Grant, author of the 1907 book The People of Palestine, was probably correct when he spoke of the general Palestinian attitude towards religious differences. Quoting Elihu Grant, most of the natives believe in a division or allotment of religions to the peoples, that the gospel is for the Christians and the Quran is for the Muslims, and that this is a very proper arrangement.

The lack of interest on this subject is probably the result of centuries of habit and sentiment. Unquote. Now, everything wasn't kumbayasamur village in terms of sectarian relations with the peasants, but sectarian violence by peasants tended to be precipitated by outside intervention.

So, for example, from 1831 to 1840, Muhammad Ali Pasha, the governor of Egypt, which is actually part of the Ottoman Empire, well, he went rogue and he tried expanding his rule into Syria, and he took over Palestine as part of that campaign. And under Egyptian rule, the status and rights of Jews and Christians improved in Palestine, reflecting their position in Egypt at that time. And that meant that the Jews and Christians tended to be big supporters of the Egyptian occupation.

But meanwhile, the Muslim Falaheen of Palestine hated the Egyptian occupation because it subjected them to more onerous taxation as well as to conscription in the army. And eventually, this led to a big rebellion in 1834, which was rare in that it united Palestinian peasants and elites alike against the Egyptians. The peasants were very angry about the extra taxes and conscription imposed on them by Egypt, and the elites were upset that the Egyptians were usurping their status and their privileges to exploit the peasants.

And in one of the rebel attacks, the peasants invaded Jerusalem and killed Jews and Christians for being supporters of the despised Egyptian government. And then when the Egyptian troops came in to suppress the rebels, they also looted and killed Christians and Jews. And, like I mentioned earlier, this was the big event that allowed the Europeans to get a big foothold into meddling into Ottoman affairs because it was the European powers who helped the Ottomans defeat Muhammad Ali Pasha and push him back into Egypt and Sudan.

And the price for that aid was that they were now allowed to send in all of their consuls to Jerusalem, something which had been forbidden since Saladin had taken it back from the Crusaders. And we'll see how this entry of consuls into Jerusalem affects the lives of Jews and Christians and everyone else in the Empire in a couple of episodes. But first, on the next episode of the Secret History of Israel-Palestine, we'll be looking at a series of major political and economic changes that the Ottoman Empire underwent in the 19th century, which inadvertently set the stage for extreme exploitation of the Palestinian peasantry by the Palestinian urban elite.

And these reforms also set the stage for the later dispossession of large numbers of the Palestinian peasantry at the hands of Zionists and Arab elites, working together against the majority of the peasants and also, I'd argue, against the long-term interests of the majority of future Zionist immigrants. We'll also look at the rise of the new urban elite class in the 19th century, and we'll look at the early formation of a Palestinian identity among urban literate classes in the 19th century. Until then, please support me via the links in the show notes.

I purposefully don't monetize my channel for a whole bunch of reasons, but I very much rely on your support to do this program, so please click on the links for one time per episode or monthly support. And as usual, there will be a bibliography and transcript in the show notes, so you can know everything that I know. And if you're listening to this on podcast, you can watch it on YouTube, which usually has a lot of images and graphs and article clippings that add a lot of info to the vocals and text.

And if, like me, you don't have a lot of time to watch huge, long episodes of things on YouTube, you can listen in podcast format. And until next time, see ya!