The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine - Ghassan Kanafani

THE PEASANTS

at the outbreak of the 1936 revolt. … It was in these rural areas that the struggle took on a manifestly national form. Jewish capital pouring into Palestine, together with the military forces of the British imperialists, and the immensely powerful English administrative apparatus had achieved pathetic results for the Zionist ambitions to create a Jewish state (a measly 6,752 colonizing settlers). They had, however, wrought serious damage upon the Arab masses: Jewish organizations' landownership rose, at the expense of both rural and urban property, from 300,000 dunams in 1929 to 1.25 million dunams in 1930. Though these 100,000 hectares were insignificant from the perspective of the mass colonization project (let alone the "solution to the Jewish question"), the expropriation of around one million dunams-about one-third of the arable land-entailed the impoverishment of the peasants and bedouin at an unprecedented scale and rate; the Zionists had expelled 20,000 peasant families by 1931.39 The key point here is that in addition to this systematic impoverishment, this immiseration was unmistakably being carried out along primarily national lines. The agrarian in the underdeveloped world generally, and in the Arab world in particular, is not only a mode of production, but also the deep-rooted social, religious, and ritualistic way of life, As such, this violent dispossession took on a form that appeared primarily as a purely national confrontation. Up until 1931, only 151 of every thousand Jews in Palestine worked in agriculture, while 637 of every thousand Muslim Arabs worked in this sector. So, of the nearly 119,000 agricultural workers in Palestine, no more than about 11,000 were Jewish.40 While agricultural workers comprised only 19.1% of the Jewish community, they made up 59% of the Arab community.

The economic basis for the intercommunal antagonism was, of course, critical. But to understand it properly we have to appreciate its national dimension. In 1941, 30% of the Arab peasants did not own any land, while 50% of the rest owned plots insufficient to sustain themselves. While 250 Arab feudal landowners owned four million dunams, 25,000 peasant families were landless, 46,000 peasant families were smallholders owning an average of 100 dunams per family, and 15,000 relied on waged agricultural labor for the landlords. A 1936 I study of 322 Arab villages revealed that 47% of peasants owned less than seven dunams, 53% owned less than twenty dunams, while the minimum amount of land required to sustain an average family was thirteen dunams.41

As the Arab peasant suffered the triple nightmare of Zionist colonization of the land, Arab feudal landownership, and the exorbitant taxation levied by the British Mandate government, the challenge that took center stage was the national one. In the Intifadas of August 1929 I and 1933, many of the Arab smallholders sold their lands to the large Arab landowners to buy weapons with which to fight Zionist colonia1ization and British occupation. Colonialism - which threatened a way of life that encompassed aspects of religion, tradition and honor- I enabled the feudal-clerical leaders to hold on to their positions of social leadership despite the crimes they continued to commit; in many cases, those same feudal elements buying the land from the smallholders went on to sell it to Jewish capital.

Between 1933 and 1936, 62.7% of the total land purchased by Zionists were lands owned by landowners who were physically present in Palestine, 14.8% were owned by absentee landlords, and 22.5% were the lands of smallholders. This was in sharp contrast to the 1920-22 period, when the proportion of Zionist land purchases were: 75.4% from absentee landlords, 20.8% from resident landlords, and 3.8% from smallholders.42

The laws passed by the Mandatory government were designed to serve the objectives of Jewish colonial settlement. Though these laws purported to include provisions guaranteeing protection for the Arab peasants against forced eviction and against being forced to sell, the reality was that no such protection was in place. This was clearly illustrated in the "case of Wadi al-Hawarith that had an area of 40,000 dunams, and the cases of the village of Shatta that had an area of 16,000 dunams, and many other such cases in which the Jewish settlers seized the lands and dispersed the Arab inhabitants. The result was that the 50,000 Jews living in agricultural settlements owned 1.2 million dunams, an average of 24 dunams per inhabitant. Arab peasants, in contrast, numbered 500,000 and owned less than six million dunams, averaging twelve dunams per inhabitant."43 Another instance was that of the 8,730 peasants evicted from Marj ibn Amer (240,000 dunams), which was sold by the Beiruti feudal Sursuq family. The peasants' formal attempts to reclaim their land remained suspended between the offices of the Mandate government from the conclusion of the land deal in 1921 until the Mandate's end in 1948.44

"Every plot of land the Jews buy becomes alien to the Arabs, as if it were severed from the body of Palestine and transferred to another country."45 Despite having expressed this moving sentiment, the major feudal landowner who uttered them, who would also play a leadership role in the Palestinian national movement, also stated that "the Jews say that 10 percent of the land they were sold was from peasants while the rest was from the major landowners." As if somehow irked by this, he goes on to assert that "the reality, however, is that 25 percent of the lands they were sold was from peasants."46 There is some basis for this feudalist's sheepishness; Jewish land expert Granot [Avraham Granovsky] has attested to the fact that the holdings of the three largest Jewish landowning companies in 1936 (accounting for about half of the land acquired by Zionist bodies) was composed of: 52.6% lands purchased from major absentee landlords; 24.6% from resident large landowners; and 13.4% from state lands, churches, and foreign companies; and 9.4 from individual peasants."47

The land purchases created a fast-growing class of landless peasants, who could only eke out a livelihood in the countryside from seasonal waged agricultural work. As a result, most of them headed for the cities where they became cheap unskilled labor. There was no case in which "a peasant removed from his land went on to secure another plot of land, not a single one. Compensation was most often very meager, and only generous when it was the village mukhtar [mayor] or its notables."48 The vast majority moved to the cities: "Most of the street cleaners in Yafa are from the villages (such as Barbara), and the Arab Tobacco and Cigarette Company in Nazareth reports that most of its workers are villagers, or of village origin."49 We get a clearer picture when we consider the following description: "We asked the [Arab Tobacco and Cigarette Company] about how many workers it employs, to which the answer was 210. We then asked how much it paid in total weekly wages, to which the answer was P£62. If we divide that amount by the number of workers, we get an average weekly wage per worker of 29 piastres."50 The weekly wage of a female Jewish worker in the tobacco industry at the time ranged from 170 to 230 piastres.51 This disparity in pay extended to public sector jobs: a landless Arab peasant who moved to the city and found a government job, at the department of public works for instance, would usually be paid less than half the wage of his Jewish counterpart.52

The Johnson-Crosby Commission estimated the Arab peasant's yearly pre-tax income in 1930 at P£31.37. The same report, which estimated a peasant family's subsistence income at P£26, showed that the average peasant paid three sets of taxes amounting to P£3.87. If we also factor in the P£8 that the average peasant paid as interest on his debts, we find that the average peasant family lived on P£19.5 per year, well below subsistence. "The peasant class was in fact the only class obliged to help raise all the types of taxes in Palestine… the policy pursued by the government aims to place the peasant in an economic position that ensures the establishment of a Jewish national homeland."53

The direct effects of Jewish immigration-as well as the important related process of transforming the "Palestinian" economy from an Arab agrarian economy to a Jewish industrial one-were primarily felt by the Arab smallholding peasant. The extortionist tax burden on these peasants was geared toward offsetting the government revenues lost to tax exemptions enjoyed by Jewish immigrants, as well as those designed to encouraging Jewish industry: high tariffs on retail imports and lowered import tariffs on raw materials, unfinished goods, coal, packaging materials, etc. Import tariffs on retail goods rose from 11% at the start of the Mandate to 26% in 1935, with a 100% increase on sugar, 149% on tobacco, 208% on petrol, 400% on matches, and 26% on coffee.54

A story told by Bishop Gregorius Hajjar to the 1937 Peel Commission sums up the condition of the economically beleaguered peasant in a succinct and symbolic way:

While in the village of al-Rameh in the Akka district one time, I heard the complaints of the inhabitants of the village and its surrounding area, which have the biggest harvest season for olives and pure olive oil. Long had the residents submitted complaints to the High Commissioner about the Shemen oil company's use of industrial oils. The company's operations were favored by the government in that they were exempted from paying customs duties on the peanuts from which they extracted oil that was then mixed in with olive oil and sold at extremely low prices. The villagers persisted in repeatedly submitting complaints, requesting that the oil they produced be protected. The government responded by forming a committee tasked with hearing the villagers' complaints. When the committee arrived at al-Rameh, the villagers were furious to find that the committee was headed by none other than the director of the Shemen company himself.55… It is not only sad, but outrageous, that the taxes in Palestine are imposed on the classes of the population as follows: a man whose annual harvest yields P£23.37 pays 25% in taxes, whereas the combined taxes for a merchant or member of the free professions whose annual income is P£1000 is 12%.56