Hope-Simpson Report

from The British Mandate and the Crisis of Palestinian Landlessness, 1929-1936 - Charles Anderson

The condition of the fellaheen

Anderson is extremely pro-Palestinian whose language nears the excessive

If Zionism had harmed the interests of the Arab majority, the Palestinians were not spared their own dose of criticism. Echoing earlier appraisals, Hope Simpson's report found that Arab agriculture was 'eminently backwards'. The land regime required urgent changes, at the core of which was the need to make private property (secured by written, legal titles) its universal, normative unit. The primary obstacle athwart this goal was the Arab commons (musha^c), which some surveys had suggested might comprise 40-50 per cent of the country's arable lands and which was (mistakenly) believed to be a major impediment to productive investment. These lands would be more profitably and efficiently utilized if partitioned and converted to private domains.⁶⁰

In spite of his catholic appraisal of its causes, Hope Simpson largely placed the onus for the crisis afflicting the Arab rural sphere on the colonial state and imperial policy. The central agrarian tax, the tithe (^cushr), was sapping peasant producers, claiming well over 20 per cent of their net income. As Hope Simpson learned, peasants were so indebted that tax collection caused them further losses. To pay the tithe peasants sometimes took out loans, usually from moneylending merchants who charged exorbitant rates that ran up to 50 per cent interest for a single season (the official maximum annual rate of 9 per cent being a 'dead letter'). Poor peasants had liens placed against their produce that stripped them of the ability to optimally market their goods (interfering with the timing of their sales and hence the prices they fetched) while forcing them to pay for guards posted to secure the crops.⁶¹ Consequently, the tax was contributing to the shrinkage of average holdings, as cultivators sold portions of their lands in order to discharge their obligations.⁶² The overhaul of the tithe in the late 1920s had unintentionally made matters worse. By fixing 'redemption prices' for crops at rates considerably above actual market values, the reform had actually increased taxation. The pincer effect for agriculturalists as they were caught between the tax and the late 1920s crash in commodity prices (following the global depression) was withering. Where previously the average annual net income of owner-cultivators and sharecropping tenants had been respectively estimated at 35.2 Palestinian pounds (£P) and £P20, with current values in 1930, these sums were slashed to a mere £P11.8 and £P3.6, bringing agrarian proceeds to what Hope Simpson aptly called the 'vanishing point'.⁶³ Given that the average family's debt was put at £P27, the result for smallholders was penury and disaster.⁶⁴

Noting that 'everywhere there is the complaint that many of the cultivators have lost their land', Hope Simpson cited the recent work of the Johnson-Crosbie commission, which had found in an examination of 104 villages believed to accurately serve as a cross section of the agricultural population that 29.4 per cent of families owned no land and subsisted as laborers. This did not include those whose primary income derived from sharecropping, who also tended to be legally landless.⁶⁵ The Johnson-Crosbie commission had found an average holding (counting sharecroppers and owner-cultivators together) of 75 dunams and that no family in possession of less than 120 dunams was able to get by without selling labor power on the side.⁶⁶ Recalling the Shaw Commission's estimate that the minimum measure of land needed to maintain an agricultural family, known as the 'lot viable', was 160-320 dunams, depending on soil types, Hope Simpson underscored his own conviction that the minimum was 130 dunams on dry-farming land.⁶⁷ Based on his questionable calculations - which undercounted the number of rural landowning families - he found that the average holding among Arab cultivators was 91.1 dunams.⁶⁸ This meant that 'the average fellah holding is insufficient to maintain anything like a decent standard of life' and that the landless crisis would spread as more families found it impossible to pay their debts and taxes and to sustain themselves.⁶⁹

Hope Simpson's answer to the troubles he catalogued was to recommend a large-scale development program to be headed by a new department of the Palestine government. Only by pursuing an active agenda of agrarian development could Britain's dual obligation to Jews and Arabs be fulfilled. Such a policy held out the potential for creating common ground between Arabs and Jews, and would afford the ability to reabsorb the landless population by resettling them on new lands acquired for such purposes where they would practice intensive (that is, irrigated) agriculture in place of the ubiquitous dry farming of Arab Palestine. The transition to intensive cultivation would free up land, thus reconciling the otherwise conflicting imperatives of the Mandatory government to seek the 'close settlement' of Jews on the land while preserving the 'rights and position' of the Palestinians. Combined with other reforms such as the abolition of the tithe and the partition of the Arab commons, the Arab countryside could be rescued from its straitening circumstance and the status of the British Mandatory secured.⁷⁰

Hope Simpson was not as averse to Zionism as has sometimes been depicted,⁷¹ and was favorably impressed by a number of Jewish settlements he toured, but he remained persuaded that the Arabs were 'economically powerless against such a strong movement' and thus needed protection.⁷² He was also wary of the gulf between Zionist rhetoric and practice, observing that 'The most lofty sentiments are ventilated in public meetings and in Zionist propaganda' but that the JNF and other organs of the movement did not uphold or embody a vision of cooperation or mutual benefit with the Arabs.⁷³

The 1930 White Paper

The White Paper's treatment of land and agricultural development were central to its orientation and closely followed the findings of High Commissioner Chancellor, the Shaw Commission and especially Hope Simpson. It affirmed that given present cultivation techniques, there was no land available for Jewish colonization outside of the uncultivated areas already held by Zionist organizations, and suggested that the only path forward for substantial new flows of agrarian colonists would lie in moving toward intensive cultivation. State lands were equally unavailable for colonization, and were there unoccupied parcels in the government's possession, they would not be opened to Zionists but rather would serve to resettle the landless Arab population. The White Paper adduced the Johnson-Crosbie committee's estimate of landlessness (29.4 per cent, not counting sharecroppers) and Hope Simpson's calculations regarding the average Arab holding (90 dunams) and the lot viable (130 dunams). The shortage of land meant that just as intensive agriculture would be necessary for the expansion of the yishuv, so too the Palestinians required it in order to ameliorate prevailing conditions and uplift the lives of the fallahin. On this note, the White Paper also suggested that peasants would benefit through occupancy rights for tenants, regulation of land rents, the creation of rural cooperatives (to provide affordable credit), the partition of musha^c lands, and the universal registration of individual deeds.⁸²

Just as its intellectual and ideological predecessors throughout 1930 had done, the White Paper rejected the notion that the dual obligation of the Mandate was and should be hierarchical, privileging the Jewish National Home over the Indigenous Arab population. It also rebuffed the associated settler developmentalist contention that Zionism and the yishuv alone would produce prosperity throughout the country. In a sharply worded passage it suggested that Zionist claims that Jewish land acquisition ipso facto benefitted the Arab community were an 'unconvincing, if not fallacious' representation of the situation. Given the shortage of land and the emergence of Arab landlessness while Zionist authorities held substantial lands in reserve, the White Paper endorsed the idea that Chancellor had originated of putting the government in Jerusalem in charge of the land market.⁸³ The country's immigration system was also faulted as an economic stress and cause of political antagonism:

So long as widespread suspicion exists, and it does exist, amongst the Arab population, that the economic depression, under which they undoubtedly suffer at present, is largely due to excessive immigration, and so long as grounds exist upon which this suspicion may be plausibly represented to be well founded, there can be little hope of any improvement in the mutual relations of the two races.

Pointedly, the AE's statement linked the growth of communal tensions within Palestine not to the emergence of Zionist settlement, but to the transition from Ottoman to British rule. Under the first High Commissioner alone, the British built a state structure that was allegedly eight times the size of its predecessor, the purpose of which was the advancement of the Jewish National Home. On this argument, the price for the radically enlarged state apparatus - itself conspicuous in its costly defense and police outlays that were integral to securing British rule -was paid by the agricultural majority.⁸⁸ The countryside suffered from 'heavy taxation' and a welter of policies that pushed peasant producers toward bankruptcy and dispossession. Using calculations the basis for which was not fully elaborated, the brief claims that peasant taxation was roughly two-thirds higher under the British.⁸⁹ It repeated Hope Simpson's conclusions on landlessness and the Arabs' insufficient land base (that is, holding sizes beneath the lot viable) and added that under colonial rule, peasants were being completely dispossessed and removed from the land for the first time (since in the past legal ownership between Arabs could change but tenants would remain in situ).⁹⁰ State lands had been opened to Jews but not to Arabs, though the latter needed them to reabsorb the landless. Moreover, the state had arrogated lands to itself illegitimately in uncultivated areas and by disregarding the customary claims of Arab agriculturalists (those who lacked written titles). Among laborers unemployment had reached unprecedented proportions.⁹¹

The greatest novelty of the AE's critique of policy regarding agricultural affairs and landlessness concerned its analysis and explanation of the causes of land sales by Arabs. Following the catastrophic conditions of the First World War, the country had sunk into deep economic crisis under British control. Agriculturalists searched in vain for much-needed credit amid the 'depression' they weathered, while their earnings were crippled by tariff policies that flooded the market with commodities already produced in the country (such as wheat and olive oil), thereby slashing their prices. Peasants were driven into debt and the hands of moneylenders, and for many, the end of the road was selling their land. The ultimate responsibility for this situation was not the moneylenders or their usurious interest rates, but rather the Zionist policy of the government, which saddled the agricultural population with crushing levels of taxation.⁹² Land sales that had transpired under these conditions were, the AE averred, illegitimate. Jewish land acquisition on the scale it had attained was in contravention of Article 6 of the Mandate charter (the 'rights and position' clause), ergo the Arabs were entitled, as their delegation had done in London, to press for the reversion of recent land transfers and the restoration of said lands to their former owners. The White Paper's call to vest the control of land transfers in the office of the High Commissioner was seen as both unwarranted interference in Arab commerce and inadequate as a palliative to land sales. Circling back around to the issue of peasant impoverishment, the AE opined that 'If the Government … are really anxious to improve the condition of the Fallah, they should settle the debts problem before anything else'.⁹³