The Peasantry of Late Ottoman Palestine
Author(s): James Reilly
Source: Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Summer, 1981), pp. 82-97
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2536390
Accessed: 02-03-2016 18:36 UTC

The Peasantry of Late Ottoman Palestine

JAMES REILLY*

INTRODUCTION

During the final seven decades of Ottoman rule in Palestine' the country underwent significant changes. Urbanization, the growth of commerce with Europe and foreign colonization, phenomena which were interrelated, all left their mark. But alongside these changes there was one major constant from the 1840's till 1914: throughout these years the vast majority of Palestine's people were Muslim Arab peasants living in villages. As late as 1922, when the country had come under British rule and urbanization had already become noticeable, the proportion of rural to urban inhabitants was nearly 2:1. 2

In the middle years of the nineteenth century most Palestinian villages were located in the hills and mountains that run like a spine through the middle of the country, from the Galilee in the north to Jabal al-Khalil (Hebron) in the south. This was in spite of the fact that Palestine's plains, such as Marj ibn 'Amir (Esdraelon) and the coastal plain, are more fertile than the hills The hills and mountains had two advantages over the plains, however: they were healthier and safer. On the plains, Bedouin raids were

frequent and malaria was also a danger. Therefore, villages which possessed both plain and hill land would be located in the latter, the villagers descending to the plains to sow and reap, sometimes erecting satellite villages in the plains. Thus, the hills always served as redoubts for Palestinian farmers when refuge was necessary, with the result that throughout the period under discussion the hills were densely populated in proportion to their resources. Although the absence of a strong Ottoman administration in Palestine in the middle third of the nineteenth century made certain plains vulnerable to Bedouin encroachments, not every plain was equally affected. For instance, W. M. Thomson, a British missionary who lived in Beirut, visited Palestine in 1859 and gave a glowing account of the prosperity of the southern part of the coastal plain between Jaffa and Gaza.3

In the latter part of the nineteenth century and continuing up to 1914, the population of the plains increased. Population pressures4 compelled peasants to emigrate from the hills to seek work elsewhere, and many gravitated to the plains where commercial agriculture was spreading due to European demand for Palestinian citrus fruits and barley. At the same time, the Ottoman government was steadily driving the once-powerful Bedouin tribes eastward across the Jordan River. This article will give a picture of Palestine's peasant society in the last 70 years of Ottoman rule. It begins with an account of Palestinian agriculture and village handicrafts, then moves on to consider the location and construction of Palestine's villages, their social organization, politics and religious practices.

AGRICULTURE: CROPS AND FIELDS

"The soil is wonderfully rich and fertile. After centuries of cultivation it is still capable of yielding an abundant harvest without the aids to agriculture used in other parts of the world."5 This 1905 description of Palestine's fertility was echoed by many other foreigners who lived or travelled in Ottoman Palestine. The country's agriculturists produced a wide variety of foodstuffs on their lands, taking advantage of Palestine's geographical and natural diversity.

For all of the period between the 1840's and 1914 wheat and barley were

the principal crops. The bulk of the grain crop was consumed by the cultivators themselves, who may have marketed some of it if their village were near a town. Despite the development in Palestine by the early twentieth century of an export-oriented agricultural sector, until the end of Ottoman rule Palestinian grain cultivation was designed mostly to feed those who grew it and not to provide crops for sale or export. At the end of the Ottoman period 75 percent of all cultivated land was given over to grain.6 Grain was most easily grown in Palestine's plains and in the northern part of the Jordan Valley, which one resident European called "inexhaustible graineries … Year after year, without any artificial manuring, crops are raised."7 The southern part of the coastal plain from Gaza to the 'Awja was heavily cultivated, more so than the portion extending from the river to Haifa. In 1859, W. M. Thomson described the southern part of the plain as "wheat, wheat, a very ocean of wheat." 8 Earlier, in 1849, the British Consul in Jerusalem, James Finn, had written of Ashdod: "I do not know where in all the Holy Land I have seen such excellent agriculture of grain [and other products]. The fields would do credit to English farming …9 The valleys in the mountains, especially in Jabal Nablus, were also rich grain growing areas. However Jabal al-Khalil yielded only "a poor return of wheat and barley,"10 and an American geologist, E. Huntington, observed in 1911 that "thousands of acres are cultivated [in Jabal al-Khalil], although the crops are so poor that the farmers of America or Europe would not deem them worth harvesting."11

But if parts of the mountains were unsuited for grain cultivation, the ubiquitous olive tree flourished in the terracing found everywhere throughout the hill country, and was found on the plains as well. Apart from their usefulness as food, olives were also used to produce olive oil and to manufacture soap. During the late Ottoman period olives acquired additional importance as sources of cash for peasants attempting to meet the demands of the Ottoman government's tax collectors.

The Hebron area was ideally suited for the cultivation of grapes, which grow best in upland valleys. Residents of the southern part of Jabal al-Khalil exploited the plateau's topographical differences to lengthen the ripening season of the grapes, attaining a six-month grape season every year. Vegetables of various kinds flourished where irrigation was possible. The coastal plain around Lydda and Ramleh was a noted garden area, as were the hill valleys watered by springs and streams, and the section of the Jordan Valley straddling Jabal Nablus. When relations with the Bedouins permitted it, peasants from Jabal Nablus would descend into the valley to sow and reap.

Fruit trees, especially orange trees, were grown on the coastal plain and in time became a principal cash crop for export. By 1894, citrus fruits accounted for just under a half of the total value of exports from Jaffa, Palestine's principal port, and the amount of land given over to citrus groves to meet European demand steadily increased. At the end of the 1870's there were about 400 citrus groves in the Jaffa area covering 468 hectares;12 by 1895 citrus trees were being cultivated on 660 hectares of land in the mutasarrifiya of Jerusalem, and by 1910 on 3,000 hectares."3 For fruit trees generally in Palestine as a whole, the area of cultivation expanded from 6,600 dunums in 1895 to 30,000 in 1915. By this time fruit orchards were found up and down the entire coastal plain from Haifa to Gaza, as well as in the Jordan Valley.14

A crop that was distinctive to northern Palestine and scarcely found elsewhere in the country was tobacco. An American consul in Jerusalem in 1881 attributed the scarcity of tobacco cultivation in central and southern Palestine to the heavy government tax on the crop,15 though this does not explain why the northern peasants were able to grow it profitably. A European resident of the country suggested one possible answer when he wrote that tobacco smuggling was widespread,16 presumably allowing illegal profits to accrue to those of its cultivators who did not report their crop.

WEATHER AND AGRICULTURE

The amount of grain harvested in a given year depended on the timing and volume of the winter rainfall. Too little rain, or too much of it at the wrong time, could severely reduce grain crops. "When the rain is uniform and ample this is a land of plenty; when they are cut off great hardship and suffering ensue and sometimes famine," reported the American vice-consul in Jaffa in 1870.17 American consular reports for the 1870's and 1880's show that poor harvests due to low rainfall occurred in the mutasarrifiya of Jerusalem in 1870, 1879, 1883 and 1886.18 The same despatches reveal the extremes to which agricultural fortunes could vary from year to year. After the bad harvest of 1870 there was abundant rainfall in the winter of 1870/71, and food prices consequently fell by at least 100 percent.'9

Likewise, as a result of the dry winter of 1882/83 the volume of the wheat crop in 1883 was 40 percent below that of the previous year, and the barley crop was a mere third of the previous year's harvest.20 A Palestinian writer cites figures from Ottoman sources to demonstrate that the grain harvest in the mutasarrifiya of Jerusalem in 1910, a bad year, was approximately a third below that of the previous year due to insufficient rain. The harvest of one variety of grain, sesame, was down by a half.2'

According to Nabil Badran, another Palestinian writer,22 the peasants distinguished three different rains in the winter months. The first were the early rains in November, the second the strong rains in December, January and February, and the third the lighter rains in April. The rainy season ended abruptly in the spring with the coming of the east wind from the desert, the khamsin, which dried up the land. An early kbamsin could be just as harmful to crops as an unusually dry winter.

The lack of precipitation during the summer months was ameliorated by the west winds in June and July from the Mediterranean Sea, which raised the humidity and deposited heavy night dews, helping to moisten summer crops. Nevertheless, during the winter peasants would repeatedly plow the earth to allow the greatest amount of moisture to enter it for the sake of the summer crops. 87

THE CULTIVATORS' TASKS

Badran gives us an idea of what the Palestinian peasants' different tasks were throughout the year. The following schedule applies chiefly to grain cultivation, and does not include the other chores which peasants also had to tend to, such as vegetable and tree cultivation and the household work of turning raw agricultural products into foodstuffs.

November/December: preparatory ploughing
December/January: ploughing, and sowing winter crops
February: first preparatory ploughing for summer crops (sesame and dura)
March: second preparatory ploughing for summer crops, sowing chick-peas
April: sowing dura, third preparatory ploughing for sesame
May: sowing sesame, uprooting grass and overturning earth near sesame seeds
June: barley harvest, bean and fenugreek harvest
June/July: wheat and chick-pea harvest
June through September: threshing wheat, barley and other crops
August: dura harvest
September: sesame harvest

September/October: threshing dura and sesame

July through October: scattering and sifting wheat

The time of the initial harvest varied depending on the altitude at which crops were being grown. The crops in the Jordan Valley, which lies below sea level, ripened about a month before those in the plains, which in turn ripened some four to six weeks before those in the hills. Thus, inhabitants of hill villages with crops in the plains or the Jordan Valley could harvest the low-lying crops first before turning their attention to those at higher altitudes.

Sometimes hill villagers would help harvest crops belonging to plains villages. C.T. Wilson, an English missionary, observed in 1906 that since the harvest in the plains around Gaza occurred earlier and was more abundant than that in the central Palestinian hills, hill villagers would go to the plains to help harvest wheat and barley in exchange for corn as wages.

kbirbas and nazlas became permanent villages in their own right as a result of population pressures in the nineteenth century; thus, on Palestine's plains one could find villages whose names were prefixed by the word kbirba or nazla.

Every able-bodied person would assist in the harvest, including women and children. Boys would be put to work harvesting at an early age, and gradually were given other, heavier responsibilities. Women, in addition to doing their own particular household chores, worked as men did. Thomson in 1859 described a harvest he saw in the spring while riding on the coastal plain from Ramleh to Lydda:

A thousand reapers, gleaners and carriers were abroad and busy when the morning sun shot his first rays down through the olive-trees upon the animated groups. The wheat and barley grew among the olive trees, which half-hid, half-revealed the merry harvester - men, women and children - the first reaping, the second gleaning and guiding the loaded camels, and the children at play, or watching the flocks and herds, which were allowed to follow the gleaners. But no description can reproduce such a tableau. It must be seen, heard and enjoyed to be appreciated.24

Idyllic moments such as these helped to compensate for the poverty and frequent hardship in the lives of the rural population. An idea of the standard of living in Palestine in the nineteenth century was provided in 1884 by Selah Merrill, the American Consul in Jerusalem. He estimated that the cost of feeding a farmer's family was 28 cents a day. Staple foods in a peasant family's diet included bread, olives and olive oil, yogurt, cheese and vegetables, with meat being a rare treat.25 The meat came from sheep, which along with goats were of utmost value to the peasantry. They provided milk from which butter, cheese and yogurt were made, their wool and hair was spun into thread, their horns were made into knife handles and their skins were tanned.

VILLAGE MANUFACTURES

As well as producing their own food, villages developed crafts to supply their own needs. "From the seventeenth century onward many villages had become increasingly autarkic, developing within themselves a great variety of manufacturing skills …"26 American Consul Merrill reported in 1899 that villages produced for their own use pottery, reed mats, goatskin flasks, glass 89

trinkets and thick cloth, the latter spun and woven "in rude hand looms."27 But villages in the vicinity of Palestine's towns were less autarkic than were the more remote ones. From an early period villages near towns would supply them with agricultural and dairy products, as well as poultry, in exchange for manufactured goods. As the towns grew wealthier and more important in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, village autarky was subjected to a gradual erosion and an urbanizing trend began to set in as villagers went to the towns looking for work.

LOCATION AND CONSTRUCTION OF VILLAGES

"The Fellahin [peasants] have a great love for their native place, and think it is a real hardship to have to settle elsewhere."28 Thus did Wilson, in 1906, summarize the centrality of the village in the life of the Palestinian peasant. Ranging in population from 30 to 1,000 inhabitants and from 20 to 100 houses, the village provided the social, political and economic context in which the majority of Palestine's inhabitants lived.

Palestinian villages were adapted to the conditions which prevailed in Palestine through most of the Ottoman period. They had to be self-sufficient because the absence of a strong central government combined with the ruggedness of the country to make long distance communications and trade difficult. Villages husbanded their resources, and in so doing often quarrelled with each other over water, land and grazing rights. Consequently, they had to be built with defence in mind to withstand forays by their enemies. Hill villages had a great advantage over plains villages in this respect. Writing in 1905, G.R. Lees observed that villages were built on top of or on the sides of hills, allowing them to command a view of the surrounding country and rendering them nearly impregnable in ordinary village-to-village warfare.29 An Israeli scholar, in a study of the Hebron area in the nineteenth century, notes that the preferred positions for villages on the Hebron plateau have been on the edges of spurs, thereby making access to them impossible from three sides.30 Villages were rendered defensible not only by their location but also by their construction; mountain villages were constructed of stone,

and Lees noted that their houses "are built like forts and close together."31 E. Grant, another early twentieth 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 a city …This compactness of the village became a fashion in times of insecurity, when feuds between villages led to raids and reprisals.32

He went on to observe that one could trace the physical development of a Palestinian village by finding its highest point, the burj, 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 geographical advantages for defence that the hill villages did, which explains why their prosperity could be easily undermined by Bedouin invasions. The houses of the plains villagers were less sturdy than those of their counter- parts in the hills; due to the scarcity of stones, especially in the coastal plain, houses were often built of mud and sand.

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF VILLAGES

Palestinian villages were inhabited by family groups (or hamulas) whose members were related to one another through a common ancestor on their father's side. There were usually four or five hamulas per village, and the constituent bamulas of a particular village remained the same generation after generation, lending stability and cohesiveness to village populations and allowing continuous exploitation of the soil by families whose rights to the land were based on custom, not written law.

So great was the importance of bamula kinship to village life that, as A. Granott observed, "only a small proportion of the population of a village does not belong by descent to one or other of the bamulas."33 Strangers who came to live in a village had to adopt a fictitious kinship relation with one of the established bamulas in order to be fully accepted and integrated into the village.

Granott summarized the principal and most characteristic features of the bamulas as follows. First, the families of a bamula lived in the same 91

residential quarter of a village; second, lands belonging to members of a particular bamula were next to each other; and third, all members of a particular bamula 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.34

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."35 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 reputations for doing one or another kind of work especially well. Or they are distinguished according to disposition …"36

Through its principles of collective responsibility for members' actions and collective defence of members' interests, the hamula served as a basic means of social control and village self-government. Each hamula was represented by a sheikh in its dealings with other bamulas in a village. 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 defence 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.

RURAL POLITICS

In the first half of the nineteenth century [e]ach district [of the central mountains] was domineered over by certain chieftains, or sheikhs, belonging to great families who by their skill in war, their wealth, or their traditional position, were able to keep themselves on top … The sheikh was first recognized by the people, and by accumulation of bribes and other emoluments, in time collected enough money to secure his recognition by the government as well. The office generally was hereditary.37

These men were known as nahiya (district) sheikhs, and they exercised authority over the sheikhs of villages in their districts. Central Palestine (Jabal al-Khalil, Jabal al-Quds and Jabal Nablus) was divided into no fewer than 18 districts (19 if one counts the town of Nablus itself as a separate district), each with its own ruling clan.38

In the Jerusalem region the leading family was the Abu Ghush. Based in the village of Qaryat al-'Inab, west of Jerusalem, their authority was recognized from al-Bireh to Bethlehem, and west to the coastal plain between Ramleh and Bab al-Wad. The Abu Ghush controlled much of the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, and levied a toll on travellers from which they enjoyed a considerable revenue. At one point the churches in Jerusalem were paying the Abu Ghush a large annual subsidy to allow pilgrims to pass through their district toll-free.

The Abu Ghush were perhaps the most important of the ruling families in Jabal al-Quds and Jabal al-Khalil, but they were by no means unique. Between Qaryat al-'Inab and Beit Jibrin, near Hebron, there was (in the words of James Finn, the British Consul at the time) "a continuous line of annoyance-giving shaikhs."39 The vicinity of Hebron (and at times the town itself) was ruled by the al-'Amrs of Dura. In Jabal Nablus, meanwhile, the principal contenders for power were the 'Abd al-Hadis of 'Aruba, southeast of Carmel, and the Tuqans of Nablus.

Although central Palestine was divided into a number of independent districts, each composed of autonomous villages, the region's inhabitants were politically linked to each other by their affiliation with either of the Qays or Yemen coalitions, which also had urban and Bedouin affiliates. The origins of this division into two coalitions are unclear, but it exercised a powerful influence on the loyalties of Palestinian Arabs. The effects could be dolorous. Following the collapse of a decade of Egyptian rule in Palestine in 1840, open warfare between the Qays and Yemen parties engulfed large areas of the central mountains and rendered commerce and travel unsafe.

But by creating a common political identity between people of different regions and backgrounds, the Qays and Yemen coalitions also contributed to social order. The coalitions were flexible, which added to their usefulness; villages and families changed their affiliations when their interests warranted it. Sometimes families of one camp were splinters of families in the other, and some villages became internally divided between the Qays and Yemen parties.

Because of the power of the rural sheikhs, the Ottomans had to govern through them, which in practice meant that the rural population was virtually self-governing. Before 1856, wrote Finn, "the yoke of subjection to Turkey did not press heavily upon the village population … The fellaheen of Palestine were, on the contrary, suffered to govern themselves pretty much as they liked."40 The Ottoman military presence in Palestine was very small, consisting of only one battalion of regular infantry for the whole district of Jerusalem. The Ottoman governed through local factions and by means of the local and native chiefs, civil and religious. Every tribe, clan, and village, had its ruling Shaikhs or Elders; these were confirmed in office under the Turkish Pasha for the time being, and continued their admin- istration of local affairs as heretofore, according to the local and native codes.4' The governorship of Jabal Nablus alternated between the Tuqan and 'Abd al-Hadi factions, with the Ottomans playing one off against the other. In Finn's words:

[t]he Turkish visible government at this time [1853] in the Nabloos district, was barely a mere scarecrow with scarce any terrors. There was just enough power for the levying of the taxes, and as for the rival factions, so injurious to the well-being of the peasantry, they were but as two scales, now up, now down, as the beam of the balance within the Seraglio at Jerusalem was sloped either way by means of bribery, or as the factions themselves were affected by the results of their sanguinary fightings.42

The Ottomans obtained "power for the levying of the taxes" only by offering to support one of the factions against the other in exchange for taxes.

The Galilee was dominated for nearly 30 years by Aqili Agha, a Bedouin chieftain of either the Hanadi or Hawwara tribe. Beginning in 1847 he was the officially recognized qa'immaqam (district chief) of the Lake Tiberias region, "seeing [in Finn's words] that [the Turks] could not hold even nominal rule there without him."43 His task was to guard the country against Bedouin incursions, but he took out an insurance policy of sorts by "forming a marriage bond with the [tribe of Bani Sakhr] in order that he might have them at his back in case of his becoming a victim of official treachery."" In fact he did fall foul of officials jealous of his power in 1853, but in 1855 he was reinstated in his official position, which he

continued to hold (except for a two-year lapse) until his death in 1866. Through such men as Aqili Agha, who "threatened the government with the Beduin, and the Beduin with the government,"4" the Ottomans ruled Palestine until the last third of the nineteenth century. But the power of the sheikhs and the Bedouin chieftains was a challenge to the Ottoman Tanzimat reform programme, adopted in 1839 and gradually implemented, which sought to turn the Ottoman Empire into a modern state on the European model. For this purpose the authorities had to wrest power away from the sheikhs and invest it instead in government-appointed officials. So in 1864 the office of village mukhtar was established. The mukbtar was supposed to supersede the village sheikh as the local representative of government authority. This happened in time, but the social status of the. village and nabiya sheikhs was preserved, and sometimes newly appointed mukbtars were bound to the sheikhs by kinship or economic ties.

Nevertheless, by the early twentieth century the independent power of the peasantry had been broken. Changes in land tenure brought about by Ottoman government policy, plus the growth of commerce with Europe, benefited the wealthy families of the towns, who became the dominant political force in late Ottoman Palestine. By 1907, wrote Grant, villagers were submissive to the city dwellers." Gone forever were the days when Yemeni peasants led by the Abu Ghush clan controlled the district of Jerusalem and levied tolls on travellers coming to the city.

PEASANT RELIGION

Religion played an important role in Palestinian peasant society. It gave meaning to the peasant's everyday life, sanctified village moral codes and provided hope and comfort to people whose existence and prosperity depended very much on the beneficence of natural forces beyond their control. Muslims formed the overwhelming majority of Palestine's rural population, though 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 ecclesiastical establishments based in the towns, especially Jerusalem. Muslim villages, however, kept their distance from the theologians of the towns and followed their own particular rural brand of Islam.

Shrines of saints and prophets were universal phenomena in the country- side. Virtually no village was without its saint's tomb (wali), a small, white-domed building. Isolated old 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, ploughs 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.

Almost every village had its holy man. "He may be a reputed descendant of Mohammed, a Hadji, a Mecca pilgrim with a green turban around his head… ."47 Sometimes these holy men gained a wide following. On a visit to the Galilean village of Tarshiha in 1859, W. M. Thomson reported that a holy man there had a following of 20,000, and his influence was felt as far away as Sidon.48 Sufi orders were also greatly respected by villagers.

Some of the maqams were held to bestow special honours on the faithful, and festivals for their saints were among the most important in peasant life. Two of the biggest were the festivals of Nabi Salih and Nabi Musa, held at Ramleh and at a site a little to the northwest 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. Travelling 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 5,000.49

Most of the Europeans and Americans who wrote about Palestine during the late Ottoman period were diplomats or missionaries, and almost to a man (and woman) they spoke incessantly of Muslim-Christian hostility in Pales- tine, usually expressing fears that the Muslims would massacre the Christians on the slightest pretext. These reports must be discounted, for there is no record of Muslim villages teaming up against other villages for purely sectarian reasons. While quarrels no doubt did occur between Muslim and Christian villages, inter-village quarrels were a way of life in Ottoman Palestine and did not have any special religious significance. In villages with mixed populations village solidarity seemed to be the rule, overriding

sectarian considerations. Laurence Oliphant, an Englishman who lived in Haifa during the 1880's and who wrote on occasion about sectarian discord in Palestine, admitted after a visit to the Galilean village of al-Buqai'a, home of Greek Orthodox, Druzes and indigenous Jews: "I was much struck by the apparent tolerance and amiability with which all the members of these different religions regarded each other."50 And E. Grant, writing in 1907, tells of a time when there was a squabble between Christians in al-Bireh and other Christians in Ramallah:

… The Bireh Moslems threw themselves into the question in favour of the Bireh Christians, and the united Bireh populace came over in a rage to take vengeance on the Ram Allah people. It was not that Bireh Moslems welcomed an opportunity to fight Christians even to the extent of assisting other Christians, but it was a pure case of neighbourliness with the nearer neighbour.5'

Though there were sectarian tensions in Palestine's towns, due to the transplantation of European rivalries there, Grant was probably correct when he spoke of the general Palestinian attitude towards religious differences: Most of the natives… believe in a division or allotment of religions to the peoples, that the gospel is for Christians and the Kuran for Moslems 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.52

Contemporary European observers often found rural Palestinian values baffling. Thus E. A. Finn, who lived in Palestine between 1845 and 1862 while her husband was the British Consul in Jerusalem, complained that the peasants "feel no patriotic attachment for Palestine as a whole. They know and care but little what passes in any other district than their own."53 It is true that links between Palestinian villages were formal and ceremonial, with their relations remaining those of potential enemies or allies, but at the beginning of the period under discussion it could hardly have been other- wise. We have already noted that the hill country, where most villages were located, was densely populated in proportion to its resources and that each village had to assert itself to guarantee access to the resources it needed. In such circumstances a value system requiring loyalty to one's own village was

both sensible and practical. "Each village has been in possession of its land from time immemorial," wrote G. R. Lees, "and no necessity for stepping over its boundaries ever seems to arise without the aggression being forcibly resisted at the expense of blood. Every man clings tenaciously to his freehold, and the village to its common land …"

Although their historical experience had taught them how to deal with rival villages and Bedouin tribes, Palestine's peasants were ill-equipped to confront the threat posed to their well-being by the movement of foreign Jewish colonization which began in the 1880's. The Zionist movement and its consequences were ultimately to destroy the peasant society which this article has described.

Notes

* This article has been abstracted from postgraduate research done by the author in the Department of History, American University of Beirut.

1 The word "Palestine," in this article, means those areas which were incorporated into the British Mandate of Palestine (1922-1948). In Ottoman times, "Palestine" as such did not have a separate administrative existence.

2 John Ruedy, "Dynamics of Land Alienation," in The Transformation of Palestine, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 121.

3 W.M. Thomson, The Land and the Book (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1870), p. 542.

4 The population of the districts which coalesced into Mandatory Palestine in 1922 rose from approx. 500,000 in the mid-nineteenth century to approx. 700,000 in 1914. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, "The Demographic Transformation of Palestine," in The Transformation of Palestine, supra, note 2, p. 41.

5 G. Robinson Lees, Village Life in Palestine (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1905), p. 1.

6 Khalil Abu Rujayli, "'Al-Zira'a al-'Arabiya fi Filastin qabla Qiyam Dawlat Isra'il" (Arab Agriculture in Palestine before the Establishment of the State of Israel), Sbu'un Filastiniya, No. 11 (July 1972), p. 134.

7 Philip J. Baldensperger, The Immovable East (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1913), p. 23.

8 Thomson, The Land and tbe Book, p. 556.

9 James Finn, Byeways in Palestine (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1868), p. 162. The other products include olive trees and fruit orchards.

10 Baldensperger, Immovable East, p. 24. It was less fertile than Jabal Nablus because it was not as well watered.

11 Ellsworth Huntington, Palestine and Its Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p. 84.

12 Nabil Badran, "Al-Rif al-Filastini qabla al-Harb al-'Alamiya al-Uwla" (The Palestinian Country- side before the First World War), Shu'un Filastiniya, No. 7 (March 1972), p. 126.

13 Abu Rujayli, "Al-Zira'a al-'Arabiya," p. 131. The mutasarrifiya of Jerusalem was an Ottoman administrative district which, when it assumed its final form in 1872, comprised 22,000 square kilometres of southern Palestine, i.e., 81 percent of the country.

14 A. Ruppin, Syrien als Wirtscbaftsgebiet (1916), cited by Abu Rujayli, "Al-Zira'a al-'Arabiya," p. 132.

15 US Consul in Jerusalem Gillman, November 21, 1887, Despatcbes from United States Consuls in Jerusalem, 1856-1906 (Washington: National Archives, Microcopy No. T-471), Roll 6.

16. Baldensperger, Immovable East, pp. 56-57.

17 US Vice Consul in Jaffa Hay, September 30, 1870, Despatches, Roll 3.

18 US Consul in Jerusalem Beardsley, September 30, 1870, Despatches, Roll 3; US Consular Agent in Jaffa Hardegg, October 8, 1880, Despatches, Roll 5; US Consul in Jerusalem Merrill, October 18, 1883, Despatches, Roll 5; US Consul in Jerusalem Gillman, December 16, 1886, Despatches, Roll 6.

19 US Consul in Jerusalem Beardsley, September 30, 1871, Despatches, Roll 3.

20 US Consul in Jerusalem Merrill, October 18, 1883, Despatches, Roll 5.

21 Abu Rujayli, "Al-Zira'a al-'Arabiya," pp. 131-32.

22 Badran, "Al-Rif al-Filastini," pp. 117-22.

23 Because villages which owned extensive tracts of land on the plains were often located in the hills, villagers found it necessary to erect satellite villages on the plains at times of ploughing, sowing and reaping. Farmers would live in these subsidiary villages (or kbirbas,) until they had finished their chores in the plains. In addition to kbirbas, peasants also built nazlas (camps), which served the same function as kbirbas but were not as developed. Some 23 C.T. Wilson, Peasant Life in the Holy Land (London: John Murray, 1906), p. 208.

24 Thomson, The Land and the Book, p. 525.

25 US Consul in Jerusalem Merrill, July 5, 1884, Despatches, Roll 5.

26 Ruedy, "Dynamics of Land Alienation," p. 123.

27 US Consul in Jerusalem Merrill, October 2, 1899, in US Department of State, Commercial Relations of the United States with Foreign Countries, annual vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900), pp. 1009-18.

28 Wilson, Peasant Life, p. 85.

29 Lees, Village Life, p. 75.

30 Yehuda Karmon, "Changes in the Urban Georgraphy of Hebron During the Nineteenth Century," in Studies on Palestine During the Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Ma'oz (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1975), p. 73.

31 Lees, Village Life, p. 75.

32 Elihu Grant, The People of Palestine (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1921), pp. 43-44. The book was first copyrighted in 1907.

33 A. Granott, The Land System in Palestine, trans. M. Simon (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1952), p. 216.

34 Ibid.

35 Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Press, 1979), p. 14.

36 Grant, The People of Palestine, p. 48.

37 R. A. Stewart Macalister and E. W. Masterman, "Occasional Papers on the Modern Inhabitants of Palestine," Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1905), pp. 345-46, 352.

38 For a list of these districts and ruling clans, see Macalister and Masterman, "Occasional Papers," supra, note 37, pp. 352-56.

39 James Finn, Stirring Times, 2 vols. (London: C. Kegan Paul and Co., 1878), 1:236.

40 Ibid., 1:217.

41 Ibid., 1:220.

42 Ibid.

43 Finn, Byeways, p. 79.

44 Macalister and Masterman, "Occasional Papers," supra, note 37, p. 287.

45 Walter P. Zenner, "Aqili Agha: The Strongman in the Ethnic Relations of the Ottoman Galilee," Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 (1972), p. 178.

46 Grant, The People of Palestine, p. 25.

47 Lees, Village Life, p. 40.

48 Thomson, Tbe Land and tbe Book, p. 299.

49 Macalister and Masterman, "Occasional Papers," supra, note 37, pp. 175-76.

50 Laurence Oliphant, Haifa, or Life in Modern Palestine (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1887), p. 112. Most Palestinian Jews lived in the four "holy cities" of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Saf ad. Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe began establishing agricultural colonies in Palestine in the 1880's.

51 Grant, Tbe People of Palestine, p. 159.

52 Ibid.

53 E. A. Finn, Palestine Peasantry: Notes on Tbeir Clans, Warfare, Religion and Laws (London: Marshall Brothers, 1923), p. 68.

54 Lees, Village Life, p. 71.