When successive years of agricultural setback such as those from 1911 to 1920 and from 1930 to 1935 battered the Palestinian fellaheen, the burden of retaining "unproductive" land was weighed against the availability of unskilled jobs in the per diem labor market in many urban areas. Coincidentally, the influx of Jewish capital into Palestine acted as a magnet pulling economically weak Arab fellaheen away from lands they worked. 1930 Arab population 850,000 = 154,545 families Jews owned 1,250,000 dunams Average land size was 7.5 dunams 1,250,000/ 56 = 154,545 / 5.5 = 4,058 families 10 dunams per hectare; 4.04686 dunams per acre The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Kenneth W. Stein The ultimate official but inaccurate estimates of landless Arabs dis placed by Jewish land purchase were achieved through the efforts of the Development Department, which operated from 1931 to 1939. That estimate, based upon the narrowest of definitions of what constituted a landless Arab, found that less than 900 Arabs were displaced because of Jewish land purchase. There is little doubt that Jewish land purchase and Arab land sales forced a greater number of fellaheen from land they had traditionally cultivated and used for grazing. But in the absence of accurate information on the former status of cultivators, or of the inter mediary activities of Arab landlords, merchants, lawyers, and other indi viduals who acted as land brokers, no true assessment of landless or displaced Arabs could then, or now, objectively be made.103 1929: 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 1930 Johnson-Crosbie Commission invetigation: 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 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 1930: 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
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine-2020Update - Ghassan Kanafani
Jewish land purchased
1929: 300,000 dunums
1930: 1,250,000 dunums
1931 Zionists had expelled 20,000 peasant families by 1931.39
1931, only 151/1000 Jews in agriculture - 637/1000 Muslim Arabs in agriculture
119,000 rural workers: 59% of them Arab = 72,100;
only 11,000 were Jewish.40 = 19.1% of the Jewish community, they made up 59% of the Arab community.
start 1936 revolt: 100,000 hectares = 1 million dunams: the expropriation of around one million dunams about
3 million dunams arable land
Zionists had expelled 20,000 peasant families by 1931.39
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.
1936 (about half of Zionist land acquired) was composed of:
52.6% lands purchased from major absentee landlords
24.6% from resident large landowners
13.4% from state lands, churches, and foreign companies
9.4% from individual peasants."47
1941,
30% landless
35% owned plots insufficient to sustain themselves.
25% okay
While 250 Arab feudal landowners owned four million dunams,
25,000 peasant families were landless,
46,000 peasant families 1 were smallholders owning an average of 100 dunams per family
15,000 relied on waged agricultural labor for the landlords.
1936 study of 322 Arab villages
47% of peasants < 7 dunams,
53% >20 dunams
minimum amount 13 dunams.41
1920-1922 75.4% absentee landlords 20.8% from resident 3.8% smallholders.
1933-1936 14.8% absentee landlords 62.7% from residens 22.5% smallholders
42 Sayegh, Anis. The Hashemite & the Palestine Question. Beirut, 1966
50,000 Jews in agricultural settlements 1.2 million dunams = 24 dunams per inhabitant
500,000 Arabs owned < six million dunams = twelve dunams per inhabitant."43
The Johnson-Crosby Commission:
1930 Arab pre-tax income = P£31.37
subsistence income = P£26
three sets of taxes amounting to P£3.87 tax rate a very low 12.34%
interest on his debts = P£8
average income P£19.5
JOHNSON-CROSBIE COMMITTEE REPORT (1930)
debt per family = P27, = 1 year's income.
average cultivator = 56 dunums (14 acres; 6 ha)
75 dunums (18.5 acres; 7.5 ha) were required for basic economic maintenance.
Table 1
Jewish Land Acquisition by Period and Jewish National Fund Percentage of Total
At End Of
To Date From All Sources
To Date by the JNF
Total Held
SOURCE: Statistics for this table were culled from P. Gurevich and A. Gertz, Jewish Agricultural Settlement in Palestine,
Jerusalem, 1936, p. 36, and Minutes of the JNF Directorate Meetings from 1924 to 1948.
