Betrayal of Palestine The Story of George Antonius - Susan Silsby Boyle

The Shaw Commission recognized the problem facing cultivators and raised the point that they had moral rights to remain on the land. The fact that Zionists were evidently proceeding with their plans regardless of the violence done to local cultivators and villagers was particularly disturbing. Tenants and cultivators were excluded from land transactions, and no thought was given to their resettlement or to the social costs. Evidence of the Zionists' unequal advantage and the failure of government to protect the vulnerable prompted a revision of British policy.

Land Ownership

Between 1918 and 1929-1930, Zionists had accrued some 500,000 dunums (1 dunum is equivalent to approximately 0.6 acre) out of an estimated 6,544,000 dunums of cultivable land in Palestine.7 What this seemingly small percentage masked was the fact that almost 90,000 rural families were landless and that even if all cultivable land were distributed to Palestinian Arabs, there would be a shortfall of 8 million dunums needed for all to gain "a decent livelihood."8 Whereas Ottoman laws protected cultivators from displacement, displacement became a problem when Zionists insisted that the land they purchased be free of occupants; hence the pressure to get rid of local villagers and cultivators by force. Beyond land sales, factors contributing to scarcity of land included natural population increases and redistribution of land among family members, which resulted in increasingly smaller plots.

The Shaw Commission found the immigration of Jews between 1925 and 1926 excessive. Through immigration, the Jewish population in Palestine nearly doubled, rising from 83,790 in 1922 to 156,481 in 1929, which contributed to the rise in unemployment in Palestine in 1927 and 1928.9 The commission's concern with Zionist acquisition of land was twofold: It learned that little unoccupied land was available for Zionist purchases and that past sales by absentee landlords had created a growing number of landless Palestinians due to the eviction of peasant cultivators. From 1917 through 1929, Zionists concentrated on acquiring the fertile coastal land. Although most land along the coast (80 percent) was divided among a large number of smallholdings, only 10 percent of land sales to Zionists were by smallholders.10 Many Palestinians leveled charges of disloyalty and greed against Arabs who sold land to Zionists. In contrast, Antonius expected the British government to protect local people against expropriation, and he emphasized that the problems began with the dismemberment of Greater Syria after the war.

The vast majority, 70 percent if not a good deal more were people not living in this country and who have become foreigners in the country in which

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they lived then. After the war owing to the partition of Syria, those very people became foreigners to Palestine, and that created an entirely new factor. Difficulties of passport and other restrictions made their lands lose a great deal of value they might otherwise have had.11

When the absentee landholders sold off Palestinian land to Zionists, earlier protective ordinances were evaded. With the sale being contingent upon cultivators and villagers being off the land, cultivators were pressed from both sides to be gone. Cultivators and villagers had little protection from dispossession, and little experience and help with legal defense of their rights to remain on the land and in their villages. Although the British never completed a cadastre of landholding and the majority of land was registered as communal mushaa holdings in the early 1920s, attempts were made to support the privatization of communal lands in areas where Zionists were keen to expand. Registration of land under mushaa tenure was pursued less to secure tenure for cultivators than to prepare the way for Zionist land acquisitions. Zionist settlement and survey operations appear to have gone hand-in-hand "by the fact that their country-wide settlement and survey operation, designed to break up mushaa tenure and settle title on individuals, concentrated mainly on the areas in which there was most Jewish land-buying and also the greatest concentration of land in mushaa tenure."12

For the most part, the British discouraged mushaa landholding because it was viewed as inferior to private landholding. As a form of economic property right, mushaa landholding was inferior to exclusive private ownership, but not as inferior as assumed. As mushaa land was communal property, it was not as inefficient a use of an economic resource as common pool property. On a land-use management continuum, mushaa land was somewhere to the right of center, between common pool land on the left end of the continuum, and private property on the right end of the continuum. Excessive common pool losses were not the rule, in fact, they seemed to be the exception. mushaa landholdings "probably acted for a time as a kind of safety net which temporarily retarded the effects of market mechanisms for those peasants still living near the margins of subsistence and unable to respond positively to the market."13

What was missing from the equation and what might have facilitated economic growth en sitio was a state working to enable cultivators by improving on the outmoded fiscal and administrative systems left by the Ottomans. British mandatory government's failure to respect and then to correct the property rights of villagers and cultivators who were being forced off their land was not only a moral or ethical failure but also a matter of unsound economic policy. Those who failed to see this did not consider the social cost of their failure to protect what amounted to rea-

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sonably efficient, existing local property rights of mushaa tenure, The Shaw and John Hope-Simpson commissions appeared to recognize this. In the early 1920s, before adjustments in the tax code, Palestinians paid three major taxes: The Osher (ushr) was a kind of land-cum-product tax on gross product resulting from economic activity on the land. This meant that cultivators were taxed regressively in bad times, when income was low. There was also an animal tax and a tax on immovable property.14 According to Douglass North's simple wealth-maximizing model of the state,15 payment of these taxes entitled Palestinians at a minimum to protection and justice from their government, neither of which was forthcoming. There is little doubt that the payment of taxes entitled Palestinians to a number of "rights," such as access to formal credit and policies to improve yields and incomes; but even before these "technical rights" can be considered, taxation also entitled them to a set of fundamental rights-namely, protection and justice under the law. To make matters worse, the revenues collected by mandatory government from Palestinians went primarily toward defense, internal security, and the operating costs of the British-run mandatory government. In effect, taxes were essentially paying for very little protection and practically no justice; in fact, Palestinians were paying for their own economic and social dislocation.

Throughout the 1920s, land transactions ignored the fact that cultivators had traditional rights to remain on their land, as cultivators and as residents of age-old villages. Where cultivators agreed to sales, Antonius and other Palestinians believed that the cultivators should be compensated not only monetarily but also in kind; that is, they should receive land at least equal in value to what was taken away, with value being calculated as both sociological and economic benefit. Antonius knew that this very principle was being applied elsewhere in the British empire: A series of articles in the Palestine press in 1930 described the passage of the British "Native Lands Trust Bill" guaranteeing Kenyans against dispossession. Apparently, where some British territories were concerned, the Colonial office supported the provision "that where land was taken for public purposes other land of equal area should be given in exchange." Although this principle had been established by the time of the British investigation of the land question in Palestine, and despite the finding that "not enough security was provided" to protect Palestinians from dispossession, the principle was never applied there.

The European element, the British settlers, in Kenya fought the Kenya Bill to this effect very hard, but in spite of that strong opposition the Colonial Office put it through. The British settlers made a proposal to make an offer of cash compensation, but the Colonial Office came down and said, "No, we

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cannot allow that. Then there would be no security for the natives of Kenya," and they rejected it and insisted on the principle that wherever land was taken for any reason, equivalent land should be provided.16

Although Zionists had acquired a small fraction of the total land mass in Palestine by 1929, it was part of the land mass most suitable for agriculture or animal husbandry. Land purchases were not friction-free, strictly market-based transactions. Through the 1920s the British had failed to conclude a comprehensive cadastre of landholding arrangements or install a credible land management and information system.17 Title deeds could be bought and land purchase arrangements manipulated to favor a privileged few. Zionists manipulated the market and lobbied for special trade and tariff arrangements, and for the withholding of public assistance to Palestinian cultivators. They spearheaded the interpretation of mushaa holdings as inferior to private holdings, portraying the former as a common pool resource rather than a communal one that minimized losses due to inefficient common usage of the land resource.

Shaw and High Commissioner Chancellor were disturbed by the evidence of forced displacement of Palestinians and the increasing numbers of homeless and landless Palestinians whose villages and homes had been destroyed through uncontested Zionist transactions. Backed by British soldiers, Zionists had managed to force thousands of Palestinian villagers out of their homes, and the villagers had nowhere to turn for legal redress to defend their customary rights as cultivators or as longstanding residents.

By 1929, in the coastal area of Tulkarem's subdistricts, where prior to 1920 Zionists had no holdings, as much as 100,000 dunums were acquired by Zionist associations and Zionists such as Lord Melchett.18 Absentee property owners of the Tayan family in Beirut sold a tract of over 30,000 dunums (Wadi al-Hawareth) in the Tulkarem subdistrict to the Jewish National Fund.19 The commission learned during its visit to Wadi alHawareth on November 30, 1929 that the 1,200 occupants-long-standing cultivators of melons and owners of 2,000 to 3,000 head of livestockhad been given eviction notices. By the time the commission left Palestine in December, the villagers were still in Wadi al-Hawareth because the police "did not know of any locality to which they could move the present occupants and their flocks."20

In the interior, the commission found additional evidence of this pattern in the Jewish acquisition of more than 200,000 dunums in the Plain of Esdraelon from another absentee landholder in Beirut.21 This area had accommodated twenty-two Palestinian villages and a population of 8,730. All of the villagers, except a few in Mahloul, had been forced to

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leave their land and homes by the time the commission reviewed the sale.22

After reviewing the Zionist-Palestinian violence and its underlying causes, the Shaw Commission concluded that the Palestine problem was rooted in politics and resulted from the British government's adoption of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Although the commission declined to review past British pledges to the Arabs, considering such an investigation beyond its purview, the commissioners found that the creation of a Jewish national home conflicted with the underlying purpose of mandatory government-namely, the facilitation of Palestinian independence,23 To avert future conflict, they recommended that the government redefine and clarify "the meaning they attach to the Balfour Declaration as a whole" and redirect attention to the protection of Palestinian rights.24

Snell believed that "the greatest danger at the present time is that Arab resentment may become permanent," and he therefore encouraged Jewish leaders to help remove Palestinian apprehension by declaring publicly "that they do not desire to create a landless Arab proletariat."25 Jewish leaders never did make this declaration. The commission also urged that concrete measures be implemented to protect Palestinian cultivators from expropriation and dispossession, and thereby to show the Palestinian majority in Palestine that the government was not supporting the subordination of their rights and goals to the interests of Zionist immigrants. The commission rejected the Zionist claim to "full and undiminished expression in the conduct of the administration in Palestine," and encouraged the government to adopt some measure of popular representation.26 Finding that immigration had been excessive, the commission called for the establishment of appropriate machinery to regulate and when necessary to restrict future immigration.27

As for the question of Zionist land acquisition and the consequent dispossession of Palestinian cultivators, the commission asserted that "the plain facts of the case are, so we are advised, that there is no further land available which can be occupied by new immigrants without displacing the present population."28 Perhaps even more importantly, they went beyond technical issues of absorptive capacity to note that Palestinians had "strong moral claims to be allowed to continue in occupation of their present holdings." The commission strongly urged the government to send a second commission to review the problem in depth, so that it could redefine its policy and take steps to stop the alienation of land and the dispossession of Palestinians.29 In the interim, in light of the scarcity of land and the perceived injustice of Palestinians being evicted and made landless, the commission advised the government to move rapidly to check further dispossession by "(1) reintroduction of the 1920-21 Land Ordinance, which gave cultivators the right to retain sufficient land for the

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maintenance of themselves and their families in the event of a sale; (2) introduction of legislation that could restrict Zionists from acquiring cer- tain tracts; (3) adoption of legislation based on Egypt's Five Feddan Law, which could protect cultivators from eviction,"30

Notes

• 1. Great Britain, Parliament, Parliamentary Papers (Commons), 1930, and. 3530, "Palestine: Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1939" [hereafter, Shaw Commission Report], p. 158.
• 2. Ibid., p. 172.
• 3. Ibid., pp. 174,178.
• 4. Ibid., p. 125.
• A Moment of Hope 181
• 5. Gary D. Libecap, Contracting for Property Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 1.
• 6. Snell signed the final report but added a note that he did not believe that the absence of measures of self-government "contributed in any degree to the outbreak" (Shaw Commission Report, p, 178).
• 7. Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 20-29,105.
• 8. Great Britain, Parliament, Parliamentary Papers (Commons), 1930, cmd. 3686, "Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement, and Development … " [hereafter, Hope-Simpson Report], p. 16.
• 9. Shaw Commission Report, p. 165; A Survey of Palestine, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies), p. 141.
• 10. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, p. 26; Shaw Commission Report, p. 114.
• 11. Antonius, Presentation to the Peel Commission, January 1937, Israel State Archives, Hakirya [hereafter, ISA], record group 65, file 2869.
• 12. Sarah Graham-Brown, "The Political Economy of Jabal Nablus, 1920-48," in Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twenti-
• eth Centimes, ed. Roger Owen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. 123.
• 13. Graham-Brown, "The Political Economy of Jabal Nablus," p. 125.
• 14. Ibid., pp. 95-96.
• 15. Actually, North's simple model of the state specified three essential charac- teristics. The first two are relevant to the Palestinian case but the third is not, be- cause there was no substitute to the monopoly power of the British at the time. The first characteristic of the state is that it trades a group of services, which North called protection and justice, in return for revenue. Total income in the so- ciety would be higher as a result of economies of scale in the organization special- izing in these services. The second characteristic is that the state attempts to act like a discriminating monopolist, separating each group of constituents and de- vising property rights for each so as to maximize state revenue. Neither of these essential characteristics obtained in the case of Palestine. For more details, see Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 23.
• 16. Antonius, Presentation to the Peel Commission, January 1937, ISA, record group 65, file 2869.
• 17. Roger Owen, "Introduction," in Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, p. 3. 18. Great Britain, Parliament, Parliamentary Papers (Commons), 1930, col. 48, "Evidence to the Palestine Commission on the Disturbances of August 1929," vol. 2, pp. 567-568.
• 19. Ibid., p. 568.
• 20. Ibid.
• 21. Shaw Commission Report, p, 118.
• 22. Ibid.
• 23. Ibid., p. 131.
• 24. Ibid., pp. 119,139.
• 25. Ibid., p. 182.
• 182 A Moment of Hope
• 26. Ibid.
• 27. Ibid,, pp. 161,165.
• 28. Ibid., p. 123.
• 29. Ibid., p. 120.
• 30. Ibid., pp. 124,166.