Life in Palestine had been difficult and worsening through the second half of the 1800s as the fellaheen tried to avoid Ottoman law reforms and the power of the notables over them increased. The First World War devastated Palestine, literally destroying its orchards, olive groves and forests and thousands were conscripted into the Ottoman Army. There was starvation, disease epidemics and a locust plague. There was even a cruel Pharaoh, Ahmed Djemal Pasha the Butcher of Jerusalem.

British Mandate Palestine - An Overview
pages 28-34 from The Palestinian People-A History - Kimmerling and Migdal

Once the war ended, it was the new British mandate that primarily absorbed their attention, the years of British rule witnessing an economic transformation in Palestine beyond what any nineteenth century inhabitant could have imagined. Trade quickly surpassed its prewar level, restoring links to the world market. The British built a modern port at Haifa that included a refinery and facilities to export British oil pumped in Iraq. They also expanded Jaffa's port facilities and added new airports, roads, and railroads.60

Imports skyrocketed. The value of imported goods quadrupled in a dozen years, and with growing imports came increasing trade deficits. This negative trade balance was offset by an influx of Jewish capital, especially during the 1930s, which dwarfed the earlier Zionist efforts.

Agriculture played a central role in the new economic growth as production expanded rapidly in vegetables and other crops.61 Even more important, citrus orchards continued expanding after the Great War, rising sevenfold in twenty years.62 Citrus growing-most notably of the desirable Jaffa orange-so dominated the economy that Palestine was in danger of becoming a monocrop society, dependent on one dominant buyer, Great Britain.63

For the small Arab farmers of Palestine, much of the boom brought bitter results. Cash crops lay at its heart, farming as an exclusive source of income thus now becoming simply unviable for most smallholding subsistence peasants and their families.64 Many Arab peasants seemed on a treadmill. Even as some devoted a portion of their acreage to truck crops, such as vegetables, they found themselves falling farther and farther behind the Jews and the most advanced Arab sector.65 Unlike cereal production, the more profitable cultivation of citrus fruit and vegetables demanded intensive irrigation and fertilization of the soil, hence considerable investment and new skills. New orchards required about five years of investment before the fruit could be marketed. All this was beyond the capabilities and resources of most small farmers.

The peasantry also had to fight against other powerful forces. More and more, it was becoming difficult for village families, even in the mountainous regions, to hold onto land. The profitability of

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the newer sectors and the shortage of additional unused land in the plains and valleys made peasants' tracts increasingly desirable, which compounded the high land prices already resulting from active Jewish landbuying.66

If all this were not enough to batter Palestinian Arab village society, the village population grew by over 40 percent between 1922 and 1936. The Arab population as a whole expanded two to three percent yearly in this period-one of the fastest rates in the world. Although there was a significant movement from the distant hill settlements into the maritime cities, many hill villages continued to grow quite rapidly. A British survey indicated that more than half of Arab households did not have enough land for subsistence.67 The fellaheen, for the most part, were unable to cover their expenses or keep up payments on their debts, which had reached alarming proportions-the average total debt was more than three times the average annual household income.

The boom years of the mandate, then, brought increasing desperation to Palestine's peasants. Whole families abandoned their villages for opportunities in Jewish ventures (at least until the mid 1930s), British public works projects, or new Arab enterprises. Others sent their sons to large agricultural estates or the port towns of Haifa and Jaffa, or went themselves, leaving wives and children behind. Cities swelled with peasants from the mountains. During World War II, British use of Palestine as a rearguard base created tremendous economic activity in the urban areas, particularly striking because it came in the wake of the Arab Revolt, which had temporarily driven many laborers back to their villages in the late 1930s.

Britain's Failure among the Peasantry Through the thirty years of British rule over Palestine, mandate officials were well aware of the battering of village life. The Palestinian high commissioner received report after report decrying the effects of the restructured Palestinian economy on the Arab population.

Various British commissions collected direct testimony and other

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evidence demonstrating the competitive squeeze on peasant agriculture and land as well as the formidable pressures working to create a landless underclass of Palestinians. For all their concern-and even their good intentions-British officials did little to ameliorate the situation. In the end their policies simply hastened the crumbling of the oldest sector of Palestinian life.68

The mandate turned out to be full of contradictions. Governing in a period of unsurpassed economic growth following the already momentous Ottoman transformation, the British tried to clamp a lid on social change, taking a markedly conservative stance regarding the question of Palestinian leadership. From the beginning, they aimed to win over and work through the major families of the ayan, and despite all the conflicts eventually developing between them (see chapters 3 and 4), the result would be to crown this group officially-with its Jerusalem branches at the head-as leader of the Arabs. This leadership extended beyond the Arab nationalist institutions that proliferated during the mandate; the ayan's participation in the mandatory state itself, for all their opposition to its purposes, offered a useful platform for boosting their power. The British rulers handpicked members of important Arab families, for example, to form a small corps of prestigious district officers for the government.69 The British were frustrated at the disproportionate number of Christian Arabs ending up in such positions, despite the care they gave to such appointments. Still, those district officers who did come from important Muslim families further cemented their dominance over the rural population.

The group thus used both British support and, ironically, its opposition to the British to consolidate its position at the top of Palestinian society. At times, the notables took on the cause of villagers struggling with the mandate authorities and the Zionists; at other times, the split between peasants and the ayan led to violent clashes within Palestinian society, especially during the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s.

British rule also affected the peasantry more directly. The mandate's goals regarding village society were often the same as those of the Ottomans. In fact, the British openly adopted nineteenth cen

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tury Ottoman legal precedent-specifically, the Ottoman Vilayet Law of 1913-as its benchmark for governing Palestine. Like the Turks, they sought more tax revenue, a more efficient land registration system, a breakup of co-owned musha land, enhancement of the mukhtar as the official arm of government in the village, and more productive agriculture generally.70

What differed was the greater British efficiency in carrying out its rule. To be sure, there were gaping holes in the administration that allowed peasants-who by necessity were experts in such matters-to circumvent rules and regulations. But compared to what the fellaheen had known previously, the British bureaucracy they encountered in the 1920s quite fully penetrated village life. In Ottoman times, the execution of law at the village level was often a haphazard affair and sometimes nearly nonexistent. Also, the Turkish hand stretched over provinces on three continents while the British mandatory state was a small, tight affair.

Reflecting their wider state policy, the British aimed for three often clashing goals within the village. First, they sought to be as nonintrusive as possible, preserving Ottoman laws where they could, respecting village custom, and working through established leadership. Second, like governments everywhere, they tried to increase their revenues. In practice, peasants faced demands for endless tithes and taxes that only accentuated their indebtedness, which had already begun to expand in the Ottoman period. Much of the growing rural debt was owed to urban moneylenders, who were usually charging 30 percent per year.

Finally, while anti-British sentiment did grow substantially during the course of the mandate, the ill feelings did not result from total disinterest by the authorities in the plight of the villagers. The British made efforts to improve their situation, and to ensure that the nearly uncontrolled economic growth did not claim them as its victims. Unfortunately, genuine British dismay failed to produce a comprehensive economic plan. Instead, British officials created programs piecemeal-cooperative societies, small loans, seed loans, and so forth-that together lacked the strength and coherence necessary to protect the fellaheen.71

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In effect, British mandate rule pulled hard in separate directions. The mandate tried to strengthen the village leadership, but through active economic intervention reduced its importance instead. British officials worried that peasant debt would create an army of landless laborers displaced by Jews and Arab notables, but its tax policy seemed only to add to the peasants' woes. While the Department of Education created a generation of literate men in the villages (the expansion of education for rural Muslim girls was much slower),72 government officials held to the delusion that this would have a negligible influence on day-to-day life. Mandate officials wished to keep the peasants on the land and prevent the creation of huge numbers of landless laborers; but at the same time-especially during World War II-they sank significant sums into public works in Palestine's western section, drawing thousands of peasants from their homes in the eastern, hilly regions. Given such a confusing mix of policy, it is not surprising that the peasantry became an important hub of activity and agitation during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, which temporarily crippled the British administration in the rural areas (see chapter 4).

In addition, the ferocious pace of change had jarred even the remotest villages out of whatever autonomy they had managed to preserve during the Ottoman period. As their horizons changed from the village-and beyond that from local and even regional markets-to a larger market system and a growing national movement, the peasants looked for more government action to address their special circumstances. Instead, they found a British-run state neglecting their need to make progress in their agriculture.73 The fellaheen did prosper momentarily from the rise in construction opportunities and agricultural prices during World War II.74 Many were even able to pay off their onerous debts. At the same time, their farming was becoming less competitive, and those who abandoned it for the cities were relegated to the lowest-paying, unskilled jobs. Government schools had been established by the British in about half of Palestine's villages, and rural illiteracy had declined from 90 percent to 70 percent of the male population. Still, these numbers indicate that the bulk of the villagers were woefully unprepared to deal with

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the demands of the new life on the coast, or even the changed life in their villages, as they encountered the increasingly sophisticated agriculture of the country, except on the very lowest rungs of the social ladder.