The general history of the Palestine mandate (1920-1948) focuses on a main narrative of mutual enmity between Arabs and Jews - There was no mutual enmity. The Jews were harrasse and attacked by the Muslims fromthe very first Zionist arrivals and the Muslims attacked both Zinists and tradional Jews. This was not a mutual situation.
The mandate era is remembered today for the volatile relations between Arabs and Jews and the failure of the British to properly adjudicate the situation. This legacy is understandable given the increasing frequency of violence after 1929. - The increased frequency of violence came from the Arabs attacking the Jews and British. By using passive constructions the writer delberately misleads the reader
Muslims believe that the Prophet tethered his horse to the wall before ascending to heaven from the Dome of the Rock - It was not a horse, it was a mgicalsteed that could fly from Mecca to Jerusalem at incrdible speeds
turned into Arab-Jewish riots resulting in the death of 133 Jews and 116 Arabs - turned into attacks by Arabs on Jews. The Arabs were killed by police trying to stop the Arab violence

NOTABLES AND NATIONALISM: A HISTORY OF PALESTINIAN ARAB POLITICS, 1917-1939

Peter James Smith

The Land Issue

From the outset, the importance of land ownership in understanding the Arab- Israeli conflict is obvious. Jews and Arabs had competing visions of the future of Palestine. For the Zionists, control of the physical space meant credibility for their claim that the land was rightfully theirs, and created "facts on the ground" and a legally recognized reality of the Jewish presence which bolstered that claim. Like Jewish immigration, land purchase had already begun before the start of the mandate. According to one estimate, Jews had purchased 650,000 dunams of land before 1920.95 The two issues were also similar in their uneven distribution in the first decade of the mandate. In 1921 Jewish land purchase totaled 90,785 dunams; two years later it was only 17,493 dunams. In 1925 the figure rose to an unprecedented 176,124 dunams before falling to less than 20,000 in 1927, and rising again to 65,000 in 1929.96 By the end of the mandate in 1947 Jews had purchased 1.73 million dunams, amounting to roughly 24 percent of all cultivable land or 7 percent of the total land area. A survey in 1931 listed the total land area of Palestine as 26.6 million dunams. The amount considered cultivable was around 8 million, though this was the subject of some dispute.97

These statistics do not really convey the centrality of the land issue in the evolution of the Palestinian national movement and how it contributed to changes in the social composition of the Arab population. The specific circumstances of the land sales and the ways in which these circumstances changed over the first fifteen years of the mandate are crucial for understanding the struggle that transformed the political climate of Arab society in Palestine. One issue is why Palestinians would willingly sell their lands to Jews. In reality, before the 1930s the majority of land sales were made by non- resident Arabs who, as noted earlier, had purchased substantial amounts of land in Palestine during the late Ottoman era. During the long drought of the 1920s, inefficiency and lack of investment capital turned large landholdings into something of a liability. Groups like the Jewish National Fund and the Palestine Land Development Company could offer far more than the land was really worth and absentee landowners were eager to take advantage.98

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the vast majority of Jewish land purchases resulted from the sales by "several hundred" Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arabs who owned large parcels.99 For example, the Sursuq family of Beirut was the main seller of large tracts of land in the Jezreel Valley. The sales, which occurred from 1921-25 and totaled roughly 240,000 dunams, were to the Jewish National Fund and American Zion Commonwealth.100 The former was a successful outfit, purchasing 270,084 dunams by the end of 1930, 90 percent of which came from absentee landowners.101 Though most transactions involved less land, sales between absentee landlords and Jewish land agencies were typical. The best available data on land purchases covers just over half of all Jewish land purchases up to 1936. In the years preceding the riots at the Western Wall a trend is clear. Between 1920 and 1927 82 percent of Jewish land purchases were from absentee landlords.102 Between 1923 and 1927 large non-Palestinian landowners accounted for 86 percent of all sales; 12.4 percent of sales were from large Palestinian landowners, and 1.6 percent were from the fellahin.103 Also, between the 1880s and the late 1930s most sales were not in densely populated regions and Jewish-Arab clashes resulting from peasant evictions, though not unheard of, were rare and generally "devoid of any political character."104 The Zionists wanted to buy large, contiguous strips of land, with few inhabitants and no tenants. In this sense, working with absentee landlords was the best possible scenario and one that had seemed to work without inciting the Arab population before the 1929 riots.

The Shaw Report was both diagnostic and prophetic. It is true that the problems over land sales concerned Arabs during the 1920s. Yet few Palestinian Arabs were involved in or affected by Jewish land purchases compared to the seven years between 1930 and 1936. After 1929 the seriousness of the land issue deepened in three ways. First, Palestinians replaced the other Arabs as the primary sellers of land. Second, considerably more Palestinians were dispossessed as a result of land sales. This dispossession was the catalyst for a larger transformation in which unprecedented numbers of Palestinians took part in new forms of political participation, social interaction, and economic diversification. Finally, the land issue exposed the inability of the Arab leadership to mitigate public frustration effectively or to redress popular grievances with the British authorities.

Beginning in the late 1920s the percentage of sellers living inside Palestine rose swiftly. The data available from 1928-1932 and 1933-1936 reflect the changing distribution of sellers. Large non-Palestinian landowners accounted for 45.5 percent of sales in the first period and a mere 14.9 percent in the second, a significant drop from the 86 percent of 1923-1927. Large Palestinian landholders had been only 12.4 percent of sellers in the mid-1920s. Their share rose to 36.2 percent in the following four years and then to 62.7 percent in the mid-1930s. The share of the fellahin also rose, from 1.6 percent to 18.3 percent to 22.5 percent, indicating the Zionist purchasers' willingness to buy much smaller plots of land.105

The statistics are valuable for gaining an understanding of the history of Jewish land purchase, but they provide no explanation of why Palestinian landholders, large and small, would sell their land to Jewish immigrants whose presence they resented. Here it is useful to recall the land situation in Palestine in the late Ottoman era. The concentration of land in the hands of non-Palestinian Arabs or urban a'yan meant that most of those living on the land and in villages had no legal to right to the land on which they worked. Just as it had for the large non-Palestinian landholders, the entry of Jewish land purchasing organizations into the equation was an enticing prospect for the a'yan, most of whom were urban-dwelling absentee landlords. With the benefit of wealthy European backers Jewish interests were willing to pay more than the going market price. These sales meant that Palestinians who had worked the land for generations were evicted from the land and uprooted from their traditional homes. Sales by large landholders were devastating to the tenant farmers that had relied on the land for generations.

The fate of the small farmers who actually owned their plots was another matter. Large landowners often engaged in land speculation as a profitable business move and to maintain their standing relative to other a'yan. For small "owner-occupiers," the decision to sell was a matter of survival rather than profit. The fellahin, musha' shareholders and other owner-occupiers were crippled with debt incurred largely because of exorbitant interest rates. According to one source, by 1930 "30 percent of all Palestinian villagers were totally landless, while as many as 75 to 80 percent held insufficient land to meet their subsistence needs."106 Many small to medium size landholders sold off all or part of their plots to pay debts.107 The problem of debt was further compounded by a bleak agricultural economy and unfavorable tax policy. In 1928 new land taxes were introduced based on the crop prices of 1923-24, even though prices had dropped considerably since then.108 To make matters worse, there were a series of bad harvests from 1931-1934. The price of wheat fell from £P10.81/ton in 1929 to £P6.97/ton in 1931. Barley fell from £P7.66/ton to £P3.03/ton.109 In 1930 the government of Palestine investigated 21,000 fellah families in 104 villages, approximately 26 percent of the farming community. The investigation found that the average debt of a fellah family was £P27 pounds at an annual interest rate of 30 percent. Average yearly income was only £P25-30 pounds.110

Some fellahin living along the coastal plain near Jaffa or Haifa sold part of their land and converted their remaining holdings from vegetable or cereal production to citrus crops. In the 1920s and 1930s Jews and Arabs looked to a rapidly growing citrus industry to turn a profit. For the Arabs, selling part of their land provided the necessary capital for start-up costs like irrigation systems. The amount of land area devoted to Arab citrus groves grew more than fivefold between 1922 and 1935.111 But there was little hope of economic salvation in citriculture, as rapid expansion led to overproduction. Exports rose from 2.4 million cases in 1930-31 to 13 million in 1938-39 while prices reportedly fell by half.112 Arab growers also faced competition from Jewish planters who had access to more capital and advanced technology. Stein notes the impact of these changes on Palestinian society.

For at least the first decade of the Mandate, most of the large landowners were able to retain considerable socioeconomic influence over the fellaheen classes. Gradually, the ties between the fellaheen and the landlord-merchant-creditor were reduced. As land slowly came into Jewish ownership and occupation during the Mandate, Palestinian Arab social relationships were altered to the detriment of Palestinian Arab unanimity.113 Indeed, the increasing scope of land transfer significantly altered the social structure of the Arab community in Palestine. The newly landless Arabs, who by one estimate already amounted to 30 percent of all Arab villagers in 1930, were a catalyst for the changing power structure. The failure of the traditional economy meant that peasants were experiencing greater 'freedom' from the social network of the village and the political hierarchy that reinforced the power of the urban notables. Landless Arabs and those whose holdings were insufficient for their own subsistence began to seek new work opportunities in the growing urban centers. Urbanization and in-migration meant that the lower classes became part of more dynamic social patterns. This may have been to the detriment of unity, but that unity was based on a stagnant a'yan-fellahin relationship that could no longer provide security. As the mandate continued and the economic situation worsened, the influence of the notables began to wane. A British official observed that by 1927, two years before the Western Wall riots, the notables appeared apprehensive over the peasantry's "growing tendency to distinguish between national and Effendi [notable] class interests."114 The notables had reason to be nervous. The rural to urban migration of the lower classes was like shifting sand beneath their feet.

90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 142-43.
92 Ylana N. Miller, "Administrative Policy in Rural Palestine: The Impact of British Norms on Arab Community Life, 1920-1948," in Palestinian Society and Politics, ed. Joel S. Migdal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 127.
93 Roger Owen, "Economic Development in Mandatory Palestine: 1918-1948," in The Palestinian Economy: Studies in Development under Prolonged Occupation, ed. George T. Abed (London: Routledge, 1988), 15.
94 Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918-1929, 17-18; McCarthy, The Population of Palestine : Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate, 227.
95 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Jewish Problems in Palestine and Europe. United Nations General Assembly. Special Committee on Palestine, A Survey of Palestine, 3 vols., vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991), 244. A dunam is equal to 1/4 acre.
96 Ibid.
97 Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, 4. According to Table 1 there were 8.25 million dunams of cultivable area. Roger Owen cites a 1930s government estimate of 7.3 million with additional 'marginal land' in the Beersheba sub-district to the south. Owen, "Economic Development in Mandatory Palestine: 1918-1948," 20.
98 Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movmement: From Riots to Rebellion, vol. 2, 1929-1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 81.
99 Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, 178.
100 Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents, 122.
101 A. Granott, The Land System in Palestine : History and Structure (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952), 276.
102 Ibid., 277. This figure is based on data collected by the Statistical Department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine in 1938. In sum, it includes 55.4 percent of the Jewish land purchases between 1878 and 1936.
103 Also cited in Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movmement: From Riots to Rebellion, 83-84.
104 Ibid., 80-81.
105 Ibid., 83-84; Granott, The Land System in Palestine : History and Structure, 277.
106 Swedenburg, "The Role of the Palestinian Peasantry in the Great Revolt (1936-1939)," 182.
107 Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movmement: From Riots to Rebellion, 86.
108 Owen, "Economic Development in Mandatory Palestine: 1918-1948," 21.
109 Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, 143.
110 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Jewish Problems in Palestine and Europe. United Nations General Assembly. Special Committee on Palestine, A Survey of Palestine, 364; Owen, "Economic Development in Mandatory Palestine: 1918-1948," 21.
111 Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movmement: From Riots to Rebellion, 84.
112 Owen, "Economic Development in Mandatory Palestine: 1918-1948," 22.
113 Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, 33.
114 Report from Colonel Symes, governor of the Northern District to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. Nels Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism (London ; Boston: Kegan Paul International, 1982), 37.
115 Rachelle Taqqu, "Peasants into Workmen: Internal Labor Migration and the Arab Village Community under the Mandate," in Palestinian Society and Politics, ed. Joel S. Midgal (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 263.
116 Ibid.