Palestine Under the Ottomans a'yan, effendi and notables refer to the ruling elites
Ottoman Palestine was not a prosperous or healthy area. Peasants were dirty, illiterate, ignorant, desperately poor, permanently indebted, violent, ridden with lice, fleas and other parasites and malaria was endemic, epidemics were not uncommon. Muslim infant and child mortality was 30%. In villages in the Hebron subdistrict, average life expectancy was 37.2 years for men but only 30.2 years for women. Women in the countryside were much more at risk than men due to malnutriion and childbirths. 0 to7 years and 15 to 35 were particularly high risk ages. Half of the population died before their mid-thirties. Very few people lived beyond the age of 70. Ottoman Palestine was not a peaceful area. Peasant villages were built on hilltops and surrounded by walls for a reason, the wealthy built castles they could defend, travellers went in caravans with armed guards for protection. The early Zionist Jews were so incompetent at defending themselves that they often hired Arab guards to protect them from the very villages that were attacking them.
During the Tanzimat era (1839-1876), the Ottoman Empire's grant of legal equality to non-Muslims provoked violent backlash. This shift, which eliminated the traditional dhimmi status of superiority for Muslims, fueled resentment. Consequently, riots and attacks by mobs on Jewish and Christian communities occurred in several provinces. In Syria the worst occurred in Damascus and Aleppo. Though illegal under Ottoman and Sharia law these riots and mob attacks continued into the 20th century and are now often termed 'uprisings' when they occurred against Jews under British rule.
The Tanzimat reform Land Code of 1858 allowed purchase of land. The Arab a'yan, the effendi, 'notables' - the elites and merchants and local Ottoman beys and pashas took the opportunity to gain legal ownership of property while the peasants, the fellaheen, became tenants, always in debt, of these absentee owners.
The Ottomans must have been doing something right though: "From the early 1850s to the early 1880s the population increased from some 350,000 to 470,000 persons, a rate and scale unmatched since the reign of Suleyman the Lawgiver" - Anderson. Suleiman, otherwise known as, the Magnificent reigned from 1520 to 1566
New Ottoman laws that aimed to promote equality amongst citizens and more efficient administration of land ownership and tax collection exacerbateded a highly inequitable distribution of wealth and power. The elites collected fellaheen taxes for the government, took legal control of fellaheen land, charged fellaheen exorbitant interest rates when they needed loans, controlled the courts and the religious institutions. Society became more unequal and this process continued. Luckily for the notables, at this time, a scapegoat for the terrible state of fellaheen society arrived, the Zionists. This was a role the Jews had perfected for 2,000 years. When Zionist Jewish immigration began in the late 19th century life in Palestine was already so bad that large numbers who could afford to leave were emigrating from the Levant and the poor farming practices were affecting the rental returns from land ownership and making sale to Jews attractive. Things only got worse. In World War I, the Ottoman army's scorched-earth policy and military requisitioning stripped Palestine of resources and caused famine. The Ottomans destroyed infrastructure and literally felled the orchards, olive groves and forests for firewood and fuel.
From the begining, the response to Zionist Jewish immigration into Palestine was so extremely negative, violent and criminal that one suspects/expects the Jews must have been doing terrible things. But in the period up to WW1, the new legal immigrants had very little effect on the local population. Arab and Jewish communities lived separate lives and by 1914 only a small percentage, if any, of the fellaheen had been dispossessed by Jewish purchase of land while more work was available because of Jewish capital investment. By 1914, Jews had only secured about 2% of Palestine land, mostly in the coastal plains and the Galilee and their population had doubled to more then 50,000, 15% of the population. According to Mohsen Mohammed Saleh 55,000 European Jews had emigrated to Palestine between 1881 and 1914 and the first armed attacks by peasants on Zionist settlers ocurred in 1886. In 1914 there were 80,000 Jews in Palestine but the numbers fell to 55,000 by 1918.
Why did the Muslims hate the Zionist Jews so much, so immediately? They had the 1200 years of Muslim history: a 1200 year tradition of despising the Jews as beneath them: Jews rejected Muhammed and Muhammed replied with the treacherous killing of the Jews of Yathrib and of Khaybar. Islam legalised the Jews as despised dhimmis, the sons of apes and pigs, etc. Jews had lived under the oppressive rules of the "Pact of Umar" and now there were all these New Jews arriving every day and buying land and starting settlements, expanding towns, creating businesses, schools, hospitals and a university, making money and they believed they were better than the Muslims. It was unacceptable. The elites who had maintained wealth and power as middlemen to the Ottomans, merchants, oppressive landowners and usurious moneylenders could see their position and power might disappear which is part of the reason they regularly stirred up the lower classes to religious anger.
The Zionists were Jews but a different type of non-submissive Jew, outsiders, feranghi, Crusaders, Europeans, Russians, etc. The people of Palestine were not famous for their welcoming atitude, they hated everyone, the effendi despised the fellaheen, the fellaheen hated the effendi, they all hated the Ottoman overlords. The Palestinians quickly developed a paranoid fear that the Zionists would replace them even before they had reached 10% of the total population. This reflected either paranoia or a deep understanding of their social and cultural weakness. Replacing the dominant Muslim and Christian 90% was clearly impossible …
- unlesshe Russian Tsars oppress their large Jewish population and allow frequent 'pogroms,' random murderous attacks on Jews in Russia and Poland
- unless there was a World War and Turkey chose the losing side which finished off the Ottoman Empire
- unless a desperate Britain promised the Middle East and millions of pounds to an Arab pretender who could assemble a few thousand tribesmen to go looting
- unless a desperate Britain promised a Jewish homeland for Palestine in a forlon fantasy
- unless a newly created world body, th Leagueof Nations, approved this Jewish homeland
- unless a crazed dictator ruled Germany and forced hundreds of thousands of Jews to flee Europe
- unless the Arabs of Palestine began a rebellion against the British and lost
- unless the Arabs supported Germany in the Second World War and Germany losts
- unless inter-ethnic violence forced the British to leave Palestine in a hissy fit
- unless the Arabs started a war against the Jews and lost
but what are the odds that that chain of events could occur …
Palestinian Society and Politics - Joel S. Migdal
Just as the security furnished by government forces was minimal, so too was any investment in an economic or political infrastructure in the area. On the contrary, port facilities, for example, deteriorated badly in the latter centuries of Ottoman rule. … Ottoman neglect forced the fellahin to use their own communal devices in order to survive. By no means did this type of insulation make village life idyllic. The Ottoman policy of alliances in the province was a major factor leading to internally harsh conditions on a local basis. … Ottoman rulers began shifting their alliances, leaving the village shaykhs and joining with more powerful city dwellers. Tax-farming, with collection rights now going to the highest bidders instead of automatically to the shaykh, was increasingly in the hands of urban forces, and war powers and judicial powers were also passing from the hands of the shaykhs.
The new position of mukhtar (village leader) was mandated, creating weaker and more accountable village chiefs. New patterns of political alliance by Ottoman rulers with town notables (a'yan) and local mukhtars resulted in subtle but critical changes in stratification patterns in Palestine. These changes included the predominance of a single, more cohesive leadership group (urban notables displacing rural shaykhs); more interdependence among different elements of the society; and greater social gaps between the layers of society. Most obvious was the accrual of broad, autonomous powers throughout the countryside by the rising, tax-farming townsmen.7 Slowly, there was a drift away from a pattern characterized by wanton intervillage warfare …
Rural Change and Peasant Destitution: Contributing Causes to the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936-1939
By Kenneth W. Stein
More than half a century before the outbreak of World War I, these groups legally and informally amassed land areas that were peasant-owned, vacant, or previously vacated. In many villages of Palestine, former peasant proprietors evolved into a class of agricultural tenants or agricultural laborers. Because of growing indebtedness, peasants who had owned moderate amounts of land (perhaps 500 dunams or more) were regularly alienating lands to willing buyers. (A dunam was a quarter of an acre.) According to the 1931 census for Palestine, two-thirds of the Muslim Arab population of Palestine, or 465,000 earners and their dependents, relied upon ordinary cultivation or pasturing of flocks for their livelihood. Of the 115,913 earners, 50,552 were owner-proprietors; 29,077 were agricultural laborers; 12,638 were agricultural tenants; 15,419 raised flocks or grew fruit, flowers, and vegetables; 2,000 were orange growers; 43 were estate mangers; and the remainder hunted, fished, or raised small animals.4
The bureaucratic reform of the Ottoman Empire ultimately concentrated more political and economic power in the hands of urban landowning interests at the expense of the rural peasantry.5 After World War I, urban landowning interests in Palestine maintained an economic and financial grip on the rural population. Like their counterparts in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, the peasantry in Palestine lived at a level of bare subsistence. The reasons for rural economic stagnation or decline were many, and none ultimately related to Ottoman or British governance or Zionist presence: poor soil quality, drought, intense or sporadic rains, a long or severe sirocco, not enough knowledge or use of intensive methods of cultivation, lack of access to means of irrigation and mechanized equipment, insufficient secondary roads between villages and towns for crop transport, irregular marketing arrangements, dumping of Syrian and Egyptian wheat on the Palestine market, meager agricultural yields or complete crop failures, short-term rental agreements, insecurity in land tenure, and wide abuse and fraud in tax collections The incentive to increase production was low, since a major portion of the agricultural yield inevitably ended up in the hands and pockets of others: the tax collector, moneylender, landlord, or other agricultural laborers who worked on either owner-occupied or tenanted land. In rare years of fair agricultural output, barely 20 percent of a cultivator's gross yield remained after others had taken their shares. Until the late 1920s, lease payments were usually in kind, from one-sixth to two-fifths of the gross yield. Rarely were lease agreements made for a period longer than one year, and usually they were made for only the winter or summer cultivating season, or for both seasons. Agricultural tenants were regularly moved from field to field by their landowners or estate managers, usually corresponding directly to the two- or three-year crop rotations of Palestinian agriculture. Short-term lease agreements contributed to a wide-spread sense of personal insecurity and almost total reliance upon those who controlled land use and its distributions.
Two additional factors significantly contributed to tying the peasantry to perennial financial struggles: ceaseless indebtedness and a debilitating system of land use. Perhaps no single factor limited the economic development of the Palestinian peasant more than the musha' system of landownership and land tenure.8 Its use throughout Palestine impeded agricultural output, retarded agricultural development, enhanced peasant indebtedness, led to rural insolvency, and generated village apathy and desolations By contributing to the atomization of Palestinian society into village units, the musha' system also hampered the development of Palestinian national integration and identity
A History of the Arab Peoples - Albert Hourani
CONTROL OF THE LAND
The other groups whose interests were associated with those of the new governments were the landowners. Both in the main body of the Ottoman Empire and in Egypt the legal basis of landownership was changed in the middle years of the nineteenth century. In the empire, the Land Law of 1858 defined the various categories of land. Most cultivated agricultural land was regarded, in accordance with long-standing tradition, as belonging to the state, but those who cultivated it, or undertook to do so, could obtain a title which enabled them to enjoy full and unchallenged use of it, and to sell it or transmit it to their heirs. A purpose of the law seems to have been to encourage production and to strengthen the position of the actual cultivators. In some places it may have had this result: in parts of Anatolia, and in Lebanon where smallholdings on silk-producing land increased, partly because of remittances sent back by emigrants to their families. In most places, however, the results were different. In regions near the cities, engaged in producing foodstuffs and raw materials for the cities or for export, land tended to fall into the hands of urban families. THey could make better use of the administrative machinery for registering title; they were in a better position than peasants to obtain loans from commercial banks or mortgage companies, or from the government’s agricultural bank; they could advance money to the peasants to enable them to pay their taxes or finance their operations; in areas producing for export, urban merchants having links with the foreign markets could control production, deciding what should be grown, advancing the money to grow it, and buying the produce. Some were in a position of monopoly: the purchase of silk and tobacco throughout the empire was the monopoly of concessionary companies with foreign capital. In these ways a class of absentee owners, essentially city-dwellers, was created, who were in a position to call upon the government to support their claims to a share of the produce; the peasants who cultivated it were either landless labourers or sharecroppers, obtaining enough of the product to survive. Of these private estates, perhaps the largest, and among the best administered, were those of the Sultan Abdülhamid himself.
In the more distant countryside, beyond the effective control of the cities, another kind of large landowner appeared. Much of the land, particularly in areas used for grazing, had always been regarded, both by the government and by those who lived on it, as belonging collectively to a tribe; now much of it was registered by the leading family of the tribe in its own name. If the area was large, however, effective control of the land might lie not with the tribal leader but with an intermediate group of agents, closer to the land and the process of cultivation than a city landowner or a large tribal shaykh could be.
These new landowners included Christian and Jewish merchants and money-lenders, but few foreigners in most parts of the empire still ruled from Istanbul. The main exception to this was Palestine, where from the 1880s there was growing a Jewish community of a new kind: not the long- established oriental Jews but Jews from central and eastern Europe, and not coming to Jerusalem to study, pray and die, but coming in accordance with a new vision of a restored Jewish nation rooted in the land. In 1897 this aspiration was expressed in the resolution of the first Zionist Congress calling for the creation for the Jewish people of a home in Palestine secured by public law. In spite of opposition from the Ottoman government, and growing anxiety among part of the local Arab population, by 1914 the Jewish population of Palestine had increased to approximately 85,000, or 12 per cent of the total. About a quarter of them were settled on the land, some of it bought by a national fund and declared to be the inalienable property of the Jewish people, on which no non-Jews could be employed. Some were living in agricultural settlements of a new kind (the kibbutz), with collective control of production and communal life.
Notables And Nationalism: A History Of Palestinian Arab Politics, 1917-1939 - Peter James Smith
The rise of the a'yan was made possible by the Tanzimat reforms, an ambitious set of administrative laws under which Istanbul sought, with varying degrees of success, to bring the provinces under tighter central control. A particular objective of the Tanzimat reforms was to systemize land ownership and increase revenue from tax collection. Under the 1858 Land Law all grain-producing agricultural properties were to be formally registered and their owners held liable for the agricultural taxes. Many peasant small landholders feared that land registration would result in higher tax burdens and conscription in the Ottoman army. Attempts to evade registration were widespread. Some allowed their land to be registered under the name of a powerful local figure, ceding official title to the land while assuming that they were retaining cultivation rights. Others did not register their land at all. The Ottoman authorities often claimed rights over unregistered lands and sold large tracts of land to urban notables at very low prices.5 Wealthy individuals living in nearby cities like Beirut also purchased substantial tracts of land. The seized and sold land was still worked by the peasants, but they were not the official owners of the property.
In addition to being economically lucrative, the new situation was politically advantageous for the a'yan. They controlled tax collection and had largely superseded the village shaykhs as the local executors of Ottoman law. The a'yan and the families they represented competed with one another for key administrative posts in Palestine. Although power might pass from one family to another, it mostly stayed within the elite, wealthy ranks of society. A'yan gains came at the expense of the fellahin, whose success in avoiding Ottoman taxes would later prove costly. They had relinquished legal control of their property and in doing so had become sharecroppers at the mercy of either the local a'yan or of non-Palestinian Arabs who owned their land.
Some fellahin kept ownership of their land under the musha' system, a form of communal land ownership in which each farmer was allotted a parcel of land which was redistributed periodically so that the best parcels were not monopolized. Plots were farmed intensively but constant redistribution tended to discourage more advanced cultivation methods. Musha' holdings were generally inadequate for subsistence and many farmers began to take out loans in order to meet their needs. By the early twentieth century, perpetual indebtedness, at interest rates of anywhere from 10 to 50 percent, was a way of life for many musha' farmers.6 Many forfeited their property after defaulting on loans. One estimate shows that by 1923 75 percent of musha' holdings had come under the control of absentee landlords living outside the villages.7 Although this figure was compiled after the Ottoman era, it indicates the longstanding trend of land acquisition by absentee owners, a trend that began during the later Ottoman period.
The fate of the fellahin varied in different regions of Palestine, but it suffices to say that by 1914 a large proportion of the rural population of Palestine was in a precarious position. They were dependent on absentee landlords, either the urban a'yan or an outside proprietor. Many fellahin who still owned land were only able to do so by incurring large debts. The result was a highly inequitable distribution of wealth. Small and middling landholders survived on credit. Farmers who cultivated land belonging to urban notables or other absentee landlords were secure only as long as that land was not sold. In general, the Ottoman reforms resulted in the consolidation of the position of the a'yan, and the erosion of that of the fellahin. Migdal summarizes the key changes of the middle and late nineteenth century.
Peasants increasingly found the basis of their self-subsistence and autarchic communities slipping from under them … the Ottoman authorities shifted the emphasis of their policies in Palestine. Political alliances were forged with a less localistic, urban-based Palestinian elite. Local councils established as part of the reforms came to be dominated by these urban notables. Preeminent families consolidated their influence, controlling critical municipal offices in the towns and gaining control of huge tracts of land in the countryside.8
Righteous Victims: A History Of The Zionist Arab Conflict-1881-2001 Benny Morris
Many of the villages fought a continual if low-key battle against the Bedouin, who periodically sortied into the settled areas of Palestine from the desert east of the Jordan, from the Negev, and from the Sinai. There were also protracted land and water disputes between villages and sometimes between clans within villages. These feuds, and rivalries between leading urban families and between various towns, such as Jerusalem and Hebron, were to serve as continuous elements of division and weakness in Palestinian Arab society.
Agriculture was primitive, with little irrigation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, land was usually owned by the villagers privately or collectively. The second half of the century saw the growing impoverishment of the villagers, in large part owing to more efficient Ottoman taxation, and a great deal of rural land was bought up by urban notable families (in Arabic, a'yan), who had accumulated their new wealth as Ottoman agents, especially in tax collection, and through commerce with the West. By the early twentieth century, villagers in dozens of localities no longer owned their land but continued to cultivate it as tenant farmers.
Almost all the large landowners (effendis) were urban notables, some of them living outside Palestine, many in Beirut, Damascus, and Paris. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Zionist land purchases from effendis contributed to the roster of dispossessed villagers. The second half of the century witnessed the rapid growth of citrus cultivation, mainly in the humid coastal plain, the produce destined for highly profitable export to Europe. Land became a more attractive investment, and the concomitant price rises led to further sales by impoverished fellahin.
In practice, however, the dhimmi remained second-class citizens of the empire until its collapse in World War I. As part of the reaction to growing European influence, the Ottoman authorities-in an effort at "Islamization"-transferred tens of thousands of Muslims from the empire's northern and Balkan peripheries (Bukhara, the Caucasus, Albania, and Bosnia) to its Levantine core, including Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. This increased the Muslim proportion of the population and, perhaps, intensified Islamic consciousness as well.22 The history and tradition of Muslim attitudes and behavior toward the Jews was to affect profoundly the unfolding of Turkish-Zionist and Arab-Zionist relations in Palestine.
The view of the Jews as objects, unassertive and subservient, was to underlie to some degree both the initial weak, irresolute Ottoman and Arab responses to the gradual Zionist influx into Palestine - Why bother, the Jews could achieve nothing anyway! - and the eventual aggressive reactions, including vandalism and murder - the Jews were accursed of God and meant only harm; their lives and property were therefore forfeit. And the traditional view of the Jews as inconsequential weaklings was for decades thereafter to stoke the fires of resentment and humiliation. In the course of the twentieth century the Arabs of the Levant were repeatedly to be humbled by the Jews, and none more so than the Palestinians, ultimately transformed into a weak minority in their own land. Such slights the Muslim world found difficult to countenance; such a situation could not be allowed to endure.
I.F. Stone: This is Israel
Life for the first settlers in the 1880s - and for many years after - was like life on the American frontier. The early pioneers developed men whose prowess as fighters became legendary. The respect they evoked among the Arabs gave way to contempt when in the course of time the Jews began to depend on Arab guards as well as Arab labor. In some of the older settlements, Arab workers and Arab guards sometimes outnumbered the Jews. The settlements began as clients and ended as prey. Powerful sheiks fought among themselves for the lucrative privilege of "protecting" Jewish settlements.
Further Information:
- Mortality and Life-Course Patterns in Late Ottoman Palestine: Insights from the Hebron Region
- Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine- - Alan Dowty
- Infant Mortality in Palestine - Benno Gruenfelder
- Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era-1908-1914 - Louis Fishman
- Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948 - Jacob Norris
- Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 - Gershon Shafir,
- One Palestine Complete, Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate - Tom Segev
- The Palestinian Issue - Mohsen Mohammad Saleh
- The Tanzimat: Secular reforms in the Ottoman Empire - Ishtiaq Hussain
- Village Life in Palestine - G. Robinson Lees
- Zionism and the Palestinians - Flapan Simha
Notes:
- 1. The Effect of Socioeconomic Change on Arab Societal Collapse in Mandate Palestine - Khalaf Issa
- 2. The Agrarian Question in Palestine - T. Cliff
- 3. From Petition to Confrontation - Charles Anderson
WW1 and the Balfour Declaration