Whose Land? Land Tenure in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth- Century Palestine

Whose Land? Land Tenure in Late

Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-

Century Palestine

LORENZO KAMEL*

ABSTRACT The present article aims to uncover the different meanings attached

to land ownership in Palestine during the late Ottoman and British Mandate eras

and to show how a ‘modern’ understanding of ownership was imposed on the local

population, particularly the fellahin (peasants), without a consideration of their

needs and traditions. Many widespread claims are challenged, first and foremost

the one according to which, at the time of the partition of Palestine (1947), ‘over

70 percent’ of it did not ‘legally’ belong to the local Arab majority, but to the

British Mandate power, an assumption that has had political, cultural and social

ramifications that have lasted until the present day.

I. Introduction

In the Palestinian context, property ownership is a particularly important issue. It

was so in the initial phases of the British Mandate, when it represented one of the

first difficulties the government of London found itself dealing with.1 It was so the

year in which the United Nations decided to divide the Holy Land, when numerous

Israeli institutions and sympathisers claimed that ‘over 70 percent’ of Palestine did

not ‘legally’ belong to Arabs, but rather to the British mandated government. It is

so nowadays, as can be clearly demonstrated by the almost daily conflicts that

arise in the West Bank and in various neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, Sheikh

Jarrah first and foremost.

In this article, I will shed light on the diverse ways in which land ownership was

treated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to the entangled

cultural contexts that encompassed Ottoman and Western as well as local

understandings of land ownership, multiple meanings were attributed to this

phenomenon by different parties. The relatively slow infiltration of ‘Western’—or

what we perceive as ‘modern’—concepts regarding land tenure had far reaching

implications that have lasted until today. Those most directly concerned on the

*Lorenzo Kamel, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow at Bologna University’s History Department and a Visiting Fellow

(2013/2014) at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Email: lorenzo.kamel@mail.huji.ac.il

1 Norman Bentwitch (1883–1971), legal consultant to the British government, noted that the Turks took the

registers with them in the phases immediately following the fall of the Empire. He added that they were

rediscovered ‘after the fall of Damascus, and have been brought back to the districts to which they belong’. The

British Year Book of International Law (London, 1920–1921), Vol. I, p. 146. Bentwitch found clear irregularities

in the way in which the land had been registered; the transitions were suspended in the years 1918–1920.

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2014

Vol. 41, No. 2, 230–242, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2013.878518

q 2014 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

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ground—the Palestinian fellahin (peasants)—had no influence on these decisions,

and since they had no voice representing their interests, they were the easiest to

blackmail and the most exposed to possible abuse.

In the following section I will provide an introduction to land tenure

classifications in late Ottoman Palestine. I will explain how a complex system such

as the mushaˆ has often been simplified and outline the dangers of such an

approach. Then I will point out some of the most far-reaching (mis)representations

relating to the land and its local majority. Based on such analysis, I will

demonstrate that the still widespread claim that at the date of the partition of

Palestine (1947) ‘over 70 percent’ of it did not ‘legally’ belong to the local Arab

population but to the British mandated power, is based on an approach that does

not take on board the rights, needs and certainly not the traditions of the local

population. Such a misleading interpretation was first proposed to serve the selfinterest

of the British mandatory power.2 and then upheld by many organisations

such as the Israel Academic Committee on the Middle East.3 Today it is often used

by the Israeli authorities in legal cases (mainly in the West Bank and East

Jerusalem) and is supported by well-known scholars.4

II. Land Tenure Classifications in Late Ottoman Palestine

Up until 1858, there was no obligation in Palestine to register proprietary deeds of

any land. Moreover, before 1867, the first year in which foreigners were permitted

to purchase property in the Ottoman Empire (excluding Hija¯z), the only system

available to a foreigner intending to purchase property subject to the authority of

the Porte was attempted bribery and the use of fictitious intermediaries,5 practices

which, in fact, remained commonplace until the fall of the Porte. This means that

in 1854—the year in which Lord Ashley (1801–1885) acted so that Her Majesty’s

ambassador to Constantinople Stratford Canning (1786–1880) would persuade

the sultan to grant Jews the possibility to own land in ‘Great Syria’—the situation

in the field was at best poorly defined, though it had been ascertained, as noted by

Herman Melville (1819–1891), that ‘all those who cultivate the soil in Palestine

are Arabs’.6 The ownership and/or use of a given piece of land was divided into a

series of categories, which may be summarised as the seven described below.7

2 Government of Palestine, Survey of Palestine (London: British Government Printer, 1946), p. 257.

3 ‘In May 1948 [ . . . ] over 70% had been vested in the Mandatory Power and, accordingly, reverted to the State

of Israel as its legal heir’. Israel Academic Committee on the Middle East, Central Zionist Archive [hereafter

CZA] KKL 5/50125.

4 Mitchell Bard is just one of the scholars who recently proposed such an argument: ‘[ . . . ] more than 70 percent

of the land in what would become Israel was not owned by Arab farmers, it belonged to the mandatory

government. Those lands reverted to Israeli control after the departure of the British’. M. Bard, Myths and Facts.

A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Chevy Chase, MD: AICE, 2006), p. 29.

5 When, in 1850, the British Consul to Jerusalem James Finn (1806–1872) decided to purchase a home outside

Jerusalem he turned to ‘natives offering them to rent such a house if they would build it. But in every case their

demands were too high for me to entertain them. I therefore set myself to purchase a small piece of land through

my Dragoman, in order to build for myself, as several Consuls and other Europeans have done in these countries’.

Israel State Archive [hereafter ISA] RG 160/2881-P. Finn to Palmerston (1784–1865), Jerusalem, 10 July 1850.

6 H. Melville, Journals (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), p. 94. Melville visited Palestine in

1857.

7 The information on the categories that follow is mainly taken from the files of the Israel State Archive (ISA –

RG 22/7/3326), containing dispatches sent by various British employees charged with ‘mapping’ the use of land

in Palestine during the first years of the Mandate.

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Mu¨lk

The owners of the mu¨lk benefited both from the possession (raqaˆba) and the use

(tasarruf) of the asset. Most of the property in various cities, for example within the

walls of Jerusalem, fell under this category; this perception was rooted in the remote

past leading back to the Islamic conquest of the seventh century, when agricultural

land was considered a ‘spoil of war’ at the disposal of the Muslim community, while

‘les proprie´te´s baˆties dans les villes et les bourgs furent conside´re´es comme biens

prive´s’ (‘The properties built in the cities and towns were regarded as private

goods’).8 In the absence of heirs, the mu¨lk became state property (mıˆrıˆ). The

property deeds were more often than not registered by the Islamic religious courts.

According to Ruth Kark, themu¨lk was ‘to all effects private property, mainly located

in cities and villages’,9 so of little relevance to the agricultural context. Other wellknown

researchers, including Huri Islamoglu, have explained that in the Ottoman

context the categorymu¨lk ‘did not so much refer to absolute ownership as to a certain

kind of a claim over land revenues’.10 Beyond the various interpretations, in the rural

areas of the region the area of land falling under this category was insignificant, to

the point that the Hope-Simpson Report of 1930 defined it as ‘negligible’.11

Mıˆrıˆ

Property of the state, including all the land not defined as mu¨lk, or rather around 90

per cent of the surface area of the Ottoman Empire, was distributed by the Empire

itself for use, therefore without ownership, in exchange for a tenth of that which

was produced and a tax. New buildings or plantations could be created only with

explicit permission from the Ottoman authorities. When the land in question was

left uncultivated for more than three years, or the person who managed its use died

without any heir, the land became categorised as mıˆrıˆ mahlul (vacant), or rather

it was reconverted into property that was completely in the hands of the state.

Doreen Warriner noted that as far as use of the land was concerned, following the

laws introduced in 1858, the mıˆrıˆ and mu¨lk categories were in reality the same

thing.12 Haim Gerber, on the other hand, drew attention to the dangers of

associating mıˆrıˆ land with concepts more familiar to us:

State land, in the modern sense, is land that the state wishes to keep out of individual use,

such as forest land. Such a legal category did not exist in the Ottoman Empire and came

8 J. Weulersse, Paysans de Syrie et du Proche-Orient (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), p. 92.

9 Ruth Kark, interview with the author, The Hebrew University, 23 November 2011.

10 Islamoglu noted that the concept of raqaˆba ‘did not represent a title of ownership in the modern sense but an

ability on the part of the ruler, or the central government, to distribute rights to revenues from land and, in doing

so, to negotiate with different groups or individuals the conditions of their allegiance [ . . . ] mu¨lk did not signify

private ownership. Instead mu¨lk was a category of entitlement to tax revenues that the grantee held, as was the

case with revenues grants, by a berat [certified by the seal of the Sultan] or an official document of entitlement

from the ruler’. H. Islamoglu, ‘Property as a Contested Domain: A Re-evaluation of the Ottoman Land Code of

1858’, in R. Owen (ed.), New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Middle Eastern Monographs, 2000), pp. 17–18 and 27.

11 Hope-Simpson Report, Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development (London, 1930),

Vol. I, p. 29.

12 As noted by Warriner: ‘The owner of the land on miri title, in theory a tenant of the state, is in much the same

actual position as the owner on mulk tenure, since (except in Iraq) he pays no rent to the State and his title can be

inherited by his legal heirs: he can also sell the land’. D. Warriner, Land and Poverty in the Middle East (London:

Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1948), p. 16.

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into being only in the new states. Miri land was not state land in this sense. There was

never really a question of usurpation of such land; at the most it could be misused.13

Also in this case, beyond the different possible interpretations, it is noteworthy that

the increase of land held as private property (mu¨lk), to the detriment of ‘state

lands’ (mıˆrıˆ), was not infrequently perceived as a tangible threat by a significant

percentage of the local population. This is mainly explained by the fact that private

properties (mu¨lk) were excluded from the projects that the Porte could implement

for the benefit of the community.14

Mushaˆ

These were lots of land that were the property of the state (mıˆrıˆ) granted for use to

entire communities or families, therefore not to single individuals. The oldest

source traced to date describing the system in question—though not cited

explicitly—was written by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–

1817),15 although its origins are perhaps rooted in a much older tribal system. On

the eve of the First World War it is estimated that around 70 per cent of

agricultural land in Palestine fell under this category.16

Although different types of mushaˆ exist, some more egalitarian than others, it is

possible to state that in general it was a type of collective land holding—assigned

in accordance with a series of parameters, for example the number of males in a

given family—through which the farmers in a given village benefited from the use

of the land in question in rotation. This rotation occurred every one, two or five

years and was designed so that every farmer would have the possibility to work the

land that was considered to be most fertile.

Waqf

This refers to land or assets that in accordance with the Sharı¯‘a are at the service of

the ummah (community). The profits from such assets, managed exclusively by the

waqf (a pious Islamic foundation), were and are mainly destined for the support of

the most disadvantaged persons. The waqf fell outside the Ottoman administration.

Mawat

This was land owned by the state (therefore mıˆrıˆ), often uncultivated and not

reclaimed and because of this defined ‘dead’ (mawat). The lack of surveys carried

out at this time in Palestine makes it difficult to quantify the percentage of land in

this category. Going beyond exact numbers, it was in most cases located in areas not

well suited to cultivation, at a distance of a few kilometres from a given village.

Even without authorisation from the responsible authorities, more than a few

villages used the ‘dead’ land mainly for grazing purposes, but also for cultivation,

13 H. Gerber, The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994), p. 68.

14 This aspect is also stressed in a letter sent by the kaymakam (sub-governor) of Jaffa to the mutasarrif

(governor) of Jerusalem on 9 July 1907. See D. Kushner (ed.), Moshel hayiti be-Yerushalayim: ha’ir veha-mahoz

be-‘enav shel ‘Ali Ekrem Bey: 1906–1908 [I Was Governor of Jerusalem: The City and the District in the Eyes of

‘Ali Ekrem: 1906–1908] (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi, 1995), p. 63.

15 J.L. Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (London: Murray, 1822), pp. 291–309. In Iraq, a system of

‘shared harvest’ already existed during the first stage of Babylonian domination.

16 E. Sanbar, Il palestinese. Figure di un’identita`: le origini e il divenire (Milan: Jaca Book, 2005), p. 45.

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and in just as many cases it was land, at least in an ‘unofficial’ capacity, at the

disposal of those who benefited from it. Oren Yiftachel, a geographer at Ben Gurion

University, has warned the scientific community not to misinterpret the past,

showing, for example, that the Bedouin of the Negev (often victims of atavistic

cliche´s of the ‘Bedouin predator’17) were in reality owners of a large proportion of

‘dead’ land, on which they lived and from which they drew a large amount of their

sustenance. To claim that the Porte considered such land as ‘dead’ and that it was

therefore without any proprietary rights is challenged by Yiftachel:

The Israeli interpretation to the Ottoman Law, an interpretation formulated decades after the

Ottoman Empire ceased to exist. This was not the interpretation the Ottoman Government

itself gave to its own laws. [ . . . ] The Ottomans took care to purchase the land onwhich Be’er

Shevawas established.When you buy land you thereby acknowledge the ownership rights of

the seller from whom you bought it, and of the community to which the seller belongs. [ . . . ]

Abdul Hamid II respected the fact that the Bedouins were the owners and he had to pay them

for it. [ . . . ] Had he considered the land to be ‘Dead’, ‘Mawat’, under the law of 1858, that

would have given him the right to take it without paying [ . . . ] Bedouin society had a very

clear concept of land ownership, it was one of the most important things in their lives.18

Matruka

This was land belonging to the state destined for public use. Rivers, roads, valleys,

irrigation canals and forests also fell under this category.

Jiftlik (also called mudawwara)

This refers to mıˆrıˆ land, mainly located in the Jordan Valley, that had been held in

the name of the Ottoman sultan. The Ottoman authorities had the authority to

reassign these lands to new applicants.

III. The Mushaˆ System and the Dangers of a Simplifying Approach

Haim Gerber defined the mushaˆ as ‘a communal ownership of land’,19 while other

researchers, among them Jacques Weulersse (1905–1946), Gabriel Baer (1919–

1982) and more recently Ruth Kark, identified it as a collective form of use of a

given piece of land.20 Although the second definition is more accurate, the

distinction is more apparent than real, if we consider that the legal principle

underlying all mıˆrıˆ properties was based on the idea that the land was the property

of the community of believers represented by their Emir. Paraphrasing a pioneer

study on the theme produced in 1971 by John Ruedy:

Most rural land in the OttomanEmpire was not ‘owned’ in theWestern sense of the termbut

was held hereditarily on a usufruct basis known as miri. [. . . ] the ultimate owner, as

elsewhere in Islam, was deemed to be the umma muhammadiyya, as personified in this case

17 Bu¨ssow made reference to the cliche´ of the ‘Bedouin predator’, highlighting that after 1880, ‘the pastoral

nomads of the Negev began shifting towards a more intensive engagement with farming’. Not a new process, for

that matter: ‘In the late eighteenth century the Bedouins of the northern Negev were already involved in

agricultural activity’. J. Bussow, Hamidian Palestine (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 261.

18 Deposition of O. Yiftachel, District Court of Be’er Sheva, 6 March 2010.

19 Gerber, The Social Origins, p. 147.

20 Weulersse, Paysans de Syrie, pp. 99–108.

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by the sultan [ . . . ]The individual’s rights were always expressed as a fraction of thewhole.21

A detailed analysis of the documentation at the Center for Heritage and Islamic

Research of Abu Dis—a centre almost completely ignored by researchers

on the matter, even though it is to all intents and purposes the most important existing

Palestinian archive—confirms that the land subject to the mushaˆ was considered by the

local population as an inalienable asset at the disposal of entire villages.22

Although the mushaˆ system was routinely described throughout the years of the

BritishMandate by London experts as ‘an obstacle’ to the improvement of conditions

for the Palestinian fellahin, it is evident that thesewere captious and biased judgements.

The efforts of the mandate government and its on-site contacts were not aimed at

improving the agricultural system utilised by the natives, but rather at the confiscation

of asmuch land as possible.23 One of the beliefs underlying this hypothesiswas that the

majority of the fellahin were not interested in investing time and energy to improve

land that in the short or middle term would be at the disposal of other farmers.24

This notion, rational though it may have been, rested exclusively on considerations

connected to agricultural production and the economy, missing out the heart of the

mushaˆ system itself: ‘Mushaˆ’, the historian Birgit Schaebler clarified, ‘is obviously not

a function of economic progress, and its logic has to be sought in a realm other than

economics. Land in Mushaˆ communities clearly is more than ameans of production. It

is rather the very expression of the community’.25 Even leaving this aside, the attempt

to over-stigmatise themushaˆ was also deficient from a psycho-social point of view,26 as

well as from a purely economic perspective. Even with its limits, the system allowed

themore disadvantaged classes to count on ‘a way of coping with poverty’.27 The latter

is a particularly relevant factor if we consider that we are referring to a region

dominated by mountainous and arid areas that, except through use ofmassive external

capital which the fellahin could not count on, were difficult to cultivate.

IV. The (Mis)representation of the Land and its Local Majority:

Dynamics of Land Alienation

Until the introduction of the ‘Law of Tapu [title deed]’ of 1858, which made

registration of all lands located in a special file obligatory, registration was

voluntary. Up to that point, ‘tradition’, consolidated over generations, had been

sufficient to guarantee the claims of all. Moreover, the natives—often completely

unaware of the meaning of concepts such as ‘private property’28—feared

21 J. Ruedy, Dynamics of Land Alienation (North Dartmouth: Information Papers No. 5—Association of Arab-

American University Graduates, 1973), pp. 122–123.

22 When, for example, 73 people from the village of Tire (sub-district of Tulkarem) decided in 1929 to sell to the

waqf a part of the mushaˆ they had been cultivating, a sort of rebellion arose from the rest of the village. The

‘sellers’ were forced to give back the money collected and the agreement was nullified. Center for Heritage and

Islamic Research [hereafter CHIR] 10/10.1/29/10.

23 Z.B. Ghandour, A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine: Imperialism, Property and Insurgency

(New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 53.

24 Ruth Kark, interview with the author, The Hebrew University, 23 November 2011.

25 Schaebler in Owen, New Perspectives, p. 288.

26 As confirmed by Ruedy: ‘From a social and psychological point of view [ . . . ] and as a reflection of the

dependence of the individual upon the group for every security during a disorganised period of history, masha’a

represents an appropriate adaptation’. Ruedy, Dynamics of Land Alienation, p. 123.

27 R. Sayigh, The Palestinians (London: Zed Books, 2007), p. 30.

28 It is opportune to highlight that the fellahin did not have any direct access to the ‘rooms of power’ in

Constantinople. Moreover, to quote Rosemary Sayigh, these ‘did not grasp the meaning of the new laws, nor the

concept “ownership”, so foreign was it to their own concept of rights’. Sayigh, The Palestinians, p. 27.

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‘collateral effects’ that would follow registration: taxes and conscription in the

army. This mix of suspicion and hostility towards the newly introduced provisions

were recorded in detail by Samuel Bergheim in an article appearing in 1894 in the

Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration:29

The Turkish laws which have been introduced within the last few years in Palestine with

reference to land tenure, andwhich are being rigorously enforced, are changing all these ancient

laws and customs, much against the will and wish of the people. The lands are divided by an

Imperial Commissioner into various portions and given to individual villagers. They receive

title-deeds for individual ownership, and each one is at liberty to sell his portion towhomever he

pleases, either to a member of the village or to a stranger. The villager then sells his Hak el

Muzara’a (right of cultivation) in the land; not as mu¨lk, but as ameeriyeh (miri), and subject to

taxes as such; the object of the government being to break down the old custom of musha’a.30

The new regulations of 1858/1867, laid out in a European-style ‘complex bundle

of capitalist and pre-capitalist features’,31 were an integral part of a broader

process, which can be traced to the Tanzimaˆt and to the related efforts to centralise

and, to a certain extent, westernise the ever more fragile ‘Ottoman machine’.

Through these, as well as attempting to exploit the unused land, the Porte tried to

identify and therefore exercise its own direct control over the farmers,32 in order to

increase tax revenues, take control of as much ‘state land’ (mıˆrıˆ) as possible and

pay off a part of the debts incurred with European powers.

The registration process was carried out in an approximate manner—no system

of land mapping or measurement was foreseen, only descriptions connected to the

borders of the various parcels—and only starting in the late 1860s. The first on-site

surveys were carried out by a commission sent by the Porte on horseback in 1870.

The object of attention was agricultural land, which the commission members

were meant to divide into categories; ‘abandoned’ areas and areas of ‘public use’,

for example forests and roads, were not registered.33

Throughout most of the Empire—in the provinces of present-day Iraq, for

example, as well as in a large percentage of the Palestinian region (the area of

Jerusalem, also due to its specificity, represented an exception to the rule)—the

new regulations did not achieve the desired effects.34 On the contrary, the fellahin,

fearing self-exposure, decided in many cases to register their land using the names

29 Bergheim’s opinion was also confirmed by Phillip J. Baldensperger (1871–1958), an anthropologist born in

Jerusalem to a father who was an Alsatian missionary: ‘The villagers of the plains of Sharon and Philistia are

usually co-proprietors of all the lands, but when the new law to establish deeds was promulgated, the poorer

denied owning any land in order to avoid paying the cost of the deed, and thus became deprived of their lands; in

others they sold their rights for a trifle’. P.J. Baldensperger, Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration,

38 (1906), p. 192.

30 S. Bergheim, Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration, 26 (1894), pp. 191–199.

31 D. Quataert, ‘Rural Unrest in the Ottoman Empire, 1830–1914’, in F. Kazemi and J. Waterbury (eds),

Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East (Miami, FL: Florida University Press, 1991), p. 39. On the same

subject, Edmund Burke III noted that ‘private property on the European model was introduced and loosened the

bonds between cultivator and land and between cultivator and village community’. Kazemi and Waterbury,

Peasants and Politics, p. 29.

32 Regarding the implicit attempt in the reforms to create a connection and, therefore, as direct control as possible

between the central government and the single Ottoman subjects, see U.S. Barghuti and K. Tutah, Tarikh Filastı¯n

[A History of Palestine] (Jerusalem: Bayt al-Maqdis, 1923), pp. 235–236.

33 ISA RG67/439. J. Serapion (Secretary of M. Arutin, American Consul to Jerusalem) to T. von Mu¨nchhausen

(Prussian Consul to Jerusalem), 12 June 1874.

34 Karpat clarified that the Code of 1858 began as a measure aimed at reaffirming ‘the state’s right to land through

the establishment of a regime of state ownership and ended by enlarging the scope of private land ownership’.

K.H. Karpat, ‘Land Regime, Social Structure, and Modernization’, in W.R. Polk and R. Chambers (eds),

Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 86.

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of deceased relatives or noble residents of major cities.35 The new regulations

fixed two other particularly important aspects: the principle of property

transference through inheritance and the practice according to which whoever

used mıˆrıˆ land for more than five years, having paid the relative taxes, could

automatically hold it as their own.

In the short term the effects of such practices were not relevant. The farmers, in

fact, continued to cultivate their own lands. The long-term effects, on the other

hand, were destabilising,36 first of all because the registration of plots in the name

of single taxpayers undermined the very foundations of the mushaˆ, based, in fact,

on the annual redistribution of the land, and second regarding the loss of the

descendants of those same farmers of their right to use the land which had been

cultivated for so long, without interruption, for generations. This gave rise to a

paradox: those who cultivated the land did not own it and those who owned the

land did not cultivate it.37 In the words of Kenneth Stein:

Where owner-occupiers did not initially lose the right to use their land, they lost control

over their land’s future disposition. They became increasingly less independent and more

the wards of notables [ . . . ] In particular, the inhabitants of the coastal plain, who were

reckoned as the small proprietors of the country and who sometimes practice the musha‘

system, strenuously denied that they had any landed property whatever, simply to save the

cost of title deeds. Others parted with their property for a nominal sum to landowners. In

this way, many fellaheen lost legal control of their patrimony.38

Expedients in line with that which is described above were not completely new

to the history of the region. As early as the start of the 1700s, although in much

lower percentages, a similar process was seen. Even then, due to high taxes and

progressive indebtedness, some fellahin turned to local, rich nobles, losing the

ability to reclaim their lands over time. The extent of the phenomenon revealed

by the provisions of 1858 did not, however, have any historical precedent.39 This

was due first of all to the system put in place by the Porte and the related

pressures (taxes and conscription), but also to the new economic situation now

emerging in Palestine in those years—an economy founded on the export of local

products, starting with ‘increased grain exports for Europe, especially for

England’.40 The connection between the market and the agricultural system

contributed to creating ever more pronounced distinctions within local villages,

favouring the wearing away of the system at the base of the mushaˆ .41

35 This does not exclude the fact that there are cases in which the fellahin living in the hill and mountain areas, or

the areas in which the majority of them were concentrated, had registered the land in their name. The exact origin

of the phenomenon is in any case difficult, if not impossible, to estimate accurately.

36 See Polk on the impact of the regulations implemented in 1858: ‘Long before the Balfour Declaration, which is

often seen as the fount of all contention over Palestine, the inarticulate but ancient peasantry had slipped a rung on

the ladder which was to lead them down into the refugee camps in 1948’. W.R. Polk, D.H. Stamler and E. Asfour

(eds), Backdrop to Tragedy: The Struggle for Palestine (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1957), p. 236.

37 Weulersse, Paysans de Syrie, p. 121.

38 K. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine (Chapel Hill, NC: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 20–21.

39 Despite the fact that, as Doumani highlights, ‘the emergence of a market in land and the rise of an urban-based

large landowning class were rooted in long-term transformations that preceded the promulgation of the 1858

Land Code [ . . . ] the purchase and sale of nominally miri, or state land was taking place as early as the late 1830s’.

B. Doumani, ‘Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History’, in I. Pappe, The Israel/

Palestine Question (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 19.

40 ISA RG160/2881-P. Finn, 29 November 1851.

41 G. Baer, Population and Society in the Arab East (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 149.

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It is within this context that the choice made by many farmers to sell their rights to

cultivate the land, at nominal prices, should be considered; decisions often dictated

by the impossibility for them to honour debts incurred due to the taxes that their own

fellahin, contrary to the Bedouins and merchants in the cities, could not get out of

paying.42 Those to benefit most from these acquisitions were large ‘absentee’

landowners, or rather family clans not residing in the area.43 The presence of these

landowners, concentrated particularly in the fertile coastal area, facilitated the task

of whoevermay have had an interest in purchasing large plots of land. This permitted

them to avoid contracting with single farmers and the inevitable conflicts this would

have entailed. Although the large ‘absentee’ landowners were less numerous in

Palestine than in other regions of the Near East,44 it was they who sold the great

majority (between 80 and 90 per cent of the whole)45 of land purchased there by the

Zionist organisations, as well as the groups connected to the various Christian faiths,

in the subsequent years. Tibawi described this process in the following terms:

The peasants [ . . . ] were easily persuaded to sell their prescriptive rights to the land they

cultivated for nominal prices, to the rich who grew richer in the process. It was members

of this rich class of absentee landlords who made large profits by selling to the early

Zionists extensive land acquired in this way or by other means.46

The account given by Tibawi allows the introduction of an aspect often poorly

developed in analyses dedicated to the matter. The reference is to the perception,

as common as it is imprecise, that several historians showed in relation to the rural

Muslim population, or rather the same fellahin who sold the major percentage of

the land in the sphere of the effendi, ‘absentee’ or not. In fact, it is often taken for

granted that, being for the most part Muslim, the fellahin were in some way

protected more than the minorities present on site (for example, the Jews,

Christians and Protestants, including the Templers who reached Palestine in

1868).47 It is, in any case, a simplification that, in relation to the last decades of the

nineteenth century, primary sources tend to reject. When in the 1870s and 1880s

Palestine found itself dealing with a stagnation that could be felt in every sector of

the local population—aggravated further by famine, poor harvests, an exponential

rise in prices, as well as the mass conscription imposed on all available men in

support of the wars being fought by the Porte (starting with the Russo-Turkish War

of 1877–1878)—the fellahin themselves were the weakest links, the easiest to

blackmail and most exposed to possible abuse. They, who at the end of the decade

between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represented the strong majority of

42 The farmers were particularly exposed to the vexating Ottoman system of taxation. Contrary to the Bedouins,

they were connected to specific locations. Additionally, as opposed to the merchants in the cities, they did not

have the means necessary to bribe the appropriate officials.

43 Grossman noted that in judging the speculation of the ‘absentee owners’ it is worthwhile to keep in mind the

serious risks ‘that occasionally left them bankrupt’. D. Grossman, Rural Arab Demography and Early Jewish

Settlement in Palestine (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011), p. 89.

44 Warriner, Land and Poverty, p. 65.

45 Ninety per cent, according to the Shaw Report of 1930, which cited the sources of Keren Kayemeth le-Israel on

the matter. In the following years it fell to 80 per cent. Polk, Stamler and Asfour, Backdrop to Tragedy, p. 236.

46 A. Tibawi, Modern History of Syria, Including Lebanon and Palestine (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 176.

On the process that put large plots of land in the hands of the ‘absentee owners’, see W. Khalidi, Palestine Reborn

(London: Tauris, 1992), p. 70.

47 The arrival of the Templars in Palestine represented one of the most significant phenomena in the process

connected to European penetration in the region. In contrast to the European powers’ common methods of

operating, which were mostly focused on building churches, hospitals and schools, the Templars settled on site,

creating communities and colonies intended to take root quickly.

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the local population, were in fact the only ones to not have a great power backing

them to whom they could turn and on whom they could depend. Not only did the

fellahin not have any direct access to the ‘halls of power’ in Constantinople, but

what is more, due to their strange fragility, they were the first to suffer from the

corruption and despotism of the Porte.

Those directly affected were not the only ones to have a clear view of this. On

the contrary, one of the most accurate analyses on this matter was produced in

1879 by the British Consul to Jerusalem Noel Temple Moore (1833–1903). This

source deserves further exposition for clarity:

[ . . . ]Wheat and grain are at double their normal prices [ . . . ] instead of combating these evils

by remedial measures, the conduct of those in authority greatly aggravates them.The corruption

and endless abuses in every branch of Turkish provincial administration are too well known

[ . . . ] the greatest sufferers thereby are incontestably the Mussulman rural population, the bone

and sinew of the country, and whose numbers, as compared with that of the non-Mussulman

inhabitants is as four to one. Whilst every other community can, and does, in case of need,

appeal to the protection and sympathy of powerful advocates, theMussulman has no one to look

to. The actual governor Arifi Pasha is [ . . . ] deficient in energy and initiative [ . . . ] In strong

contrast with this inertia of the rulers of the country is the activity deployed by foreigners [ . . . ]

the several German settlements are prospering, whilst the influx continues of foreign Jews,

mostly Polish and German, who, availing themselves of the right now professed by foreigners

of holding real estate in Turkey, are buying land and building houses in all directions.48

With the passing of decades—in particular after the First World War—the same

types of purchases, carried out ‘in all directions’, alluded to by Moore, were

planned in a much broader and overall in a much shrewder manner. A large

percentage of the ‘Jewish Estate lands’ in Palestine—passing from 22,500 du¯num

(a du¯num corresponds more or less to 1000 square metres) in 1882 to 1,734,000 in

194749—were chosen, for example, in the areas in which there was, in the words of

Avraham Granott (1890–1962), director of the Keren Kayemeth le-Israel

(National Jewish Foundation; hereafter KKL)50 from 1922 to 1945, a ‘danger of a

political change in favour of the Arabs’.51 More specifically, the purchases were

made ‘precisely on distant frontiers to the east and the north’,52 with the clear aim

of creating ‘faits accomplis’53 in anticipation of the creation of a Jewish nation.

Often, for completely different reasons, some of the main Christian organisations

interested in purchasing land also concentrated on specific areas. One exemplary

case was that of the Palestine Model Farm (PMF), active from 1857—the year in

which the Porte issued an official invitation toEuropean citizens interested in settling

in the less populated regions of the Empire—which aimed to provide work to Jews

converted by the Protestant missionaries. Although many of the plots purchased by

the PMF were declared to be ‘not cultivated’, several dispatches show the attention

48 ISA RG 160/2881-P. N.T. Moore, Jerusalem, 30 July 1879, emphasis added.

49 A. Granott, La Politique agraire mondiale et l’expe´rience d’Israe¨l (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1957), p. 18.

50 The KKL, an organisation ‘incorporated in England and registered as a foreign company and having a

registered office in Palestine’, was committed to the support of ‘Jewish settlers in Palestine’. ISA RG 31/34/1-

PNK. A. Granott, 1 November 1934.

51 A. Granott, Agrarian Reform and the Record of Israel (London: Eyre, 1956), p. 37. Granott specified that ‘the

course of events subsequently completely justified these activities, which called for great exertion and accurate

foresight [ . . . ]. All those parts to which the Jewish settler had penetrated were included within the state, whereas

those where they were not strong enough, or did not have time to plant stakes, remained for the most part outside’.

52 Granott, Agrarian Reform, p. 37.

53 Granott, Agrarian Reform, p. 37.

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given by them to the lands ‘profitably cultivated by Arabs’, which, thanks also to the

fragile conditions of the sellers, could be obtained under favorable conditions.54 In

this regard, already in 1855, at the end of what can be considered the founding

meeting of the PMF, the following ‘declaration of intent’ was issued:

It appears advisable to purchase private property as a basis of operations [ . . . ] The

neighbourhood of Jaffa or Ramla seems to be most advisable for the commencement of a

moderate settlement. Near Cesarea, and on the plain of Esdraelon, are extensive and fertile

plans very profitably cultivated by Arabs, and also between Tiberias and Nazareth are very

useful tracts which it is believed might be obtained on favourable terms.55

Specifically, the plain of Esdraelon (Jezreel Valley), one of the main rolling plains

in the region,56 for centuries known as the ‘granary of Palestine’, was the area that

registered a consistent number of transactions by the ‘absentee landowners’,57 as

well as that which catalysed the majority of the efforts of the Palestine Jewish

Colonization Association (PICA),58 of the KKL and of the Palestine Land

Development Company (founded in 1908 by Arthur Ruppin under the World

Zionist Organization). A large percentage of land coming into the possession of

such organisations was located in this area.59 Although dozens of witnesses

passing through the area described it throughout the 1800s as ‘one of the richest

districts in the world’ (1854)60 and ‘a huge green lake of waving wheat’ (1887),61

the first British high commissioner for Palestine, Herbert Samuel (1870–1963),

depicted it in 1925 as an unused ‘desert’. A desert that became ‘a smiling

countryside’ at the beginning of the 1920s, thanks to the efforts of its new

inhabitants:

When I [Samuel] first saw it [Jezreel Valley] in 1920 it was a desolation [ . . . ]. The whole

aspect of the valley has been changed. [ . . . ] what five years ago was little better than a

wilderness is being transformed before our eyes into a smiling countryside.62

54 Interest was not focused only on the land cultivated by Arabs, but rather more generally on the plots that were

more easily adapted for this aim: ‘The work that could be most easily taken up—according to a report of the Free

Church of Scotland in May 1895—and that would be most likely to pay, is the cultivation of land. The soil is rich

in more than historic associations’. Bodleian Library [hereafter BOL] – CMJ – 63/8.

55 BOL – CMJ – D62/15, emphasis added. The meeting was carried out at the home of Samuel Gobat, in

Jerusalem. In addition to Gobat himself, the decision was signed by Rev. J. Bowen, Bishop in Sierra Leone at the

time.

56 The others are the coastal plain of Rafah and Mount Carmel (which includes the Plain of Sharon in the northern

portion), the Plain of Saint John of Acre (north of Haifa), the Valley of Hula (east of the Golan Heights) and the

Valley of Jordan.

57 In 1887 Oliphant described the Valley of Jezreel as an area ‘divided between two great proprietors, the Sultan

[ . . . ] and the Sursouks [a family settled in Beirut; among the more active speculators]’. L. Oliphant, Haifa: or,

Life in the Holy Land, 1882–1885 (New York: Harper, 1887), p. 74.

58 Although the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), founded in 1891 by Maurice de Hirsh (1831–1896) and

renamed PICA in 1924, was not a purely Zionist organisation, at the end of the 1800s it had already begun to

support this movement. A. Granott, Land Settlement in Palestine (London: Gollancz, 1930), pp. 21–22.

59 Ruppin wrote that between 1910 and 1936, 225,000 du¯num of land was purchased in the area. B.J. Smith,

The Roots of Separatism in Palestine (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993), p. 98.

60 B. Taylor, Lands of the Saracen (New York: Putnam, 1862), p. 99. Taylor (1825–1878), an American poet,

used the following words: ‘Our road, next day, lay directly across the Plain of Esdraelon, one of the richest

districts in the world. It is now a green sea, covered with fields of wheat and barley, or great grazing tracts, on

which multitudes of sheep and goats are wandering. In some respects it reminded me of the Valley of San Jose´,

and if I were to liken Palestine to any other country I have seen, it would be California’.

61 L. Oliphant, Haifa, or Life in Modern Palestine (London: Blackwood, 1887), p. 60.

62 H. Samuel in House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers (London, 1930), Vol. 16, p. 16. A memorandum

written in 1919 by the Zionistisches Zentralbureau (Berlin) clarified that it was ‘desiderable to make purchases of

land in the fertile valley of the Jezreel’. CZA Z3/7/16, Jaffa, 10 July 1919.

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Despite the efforts of the Zionist organisations and numerous private Jewish

individuals, as of December 1946, the year of the last official survey taken on the

matter, the amount of ‘redeemed’ soil63 of the former and of the latter was equal to

around six per cent of the total land subject to partition.64

V. Conclusions

In the light of the arguments presented above, the claim that, at the partition of

Palestine (1947), ‘over 70 percent’ of it did not ‘legally’ belong to the local Arab

population but to the British mandated power is clearly problematic. First, it is

based on the transposition of practices and customs that had little to do with the

particular local context, representing an approach which, in the words of Roger

Owen, tends to translate ‘Arabic and Turkish terms uncritically into their supposed

equivalents in a predominantly European legal vocabulary’.65 Second, it aims at

justifying a solipsistic thesis, according to which there is a right to exploit a land

without first dealing with the local majority: ‘[We request the] Sole right’, a

memorandum of 1919 traceable to the Universal Zionist Organization reports, ‘to

minerals including oil, valuable earth, mineral spring etc. belonging to the state

and the right to exploit them as well the natural forces of the country’.66 Finally, it

does not properly consider the fact that, across the entire Ottoman Empire, with the

exception of Egypt and Lebanon,67 there was a negligible amount (perhaps five per

cent) of ‘private property’ (mu¨lk). This means that a similar argument, should it be

held valid, should also be applied to the more than 40 countries that today make up

what used to be the Ottoman Empire, including some of those adjacent to the Holy

Land: ‘with regard to land ownership’, Avraham Granott noted in 1936, ‘Palestine

does not differ from its neighbour countries’.68 Following this line of reasoning,

the local populations of these countries should not have been considered ‘legal

owners’ of the land they farmed or grazed either. This means, for example, that

individuals in Iraq—where still in 1951 only 0.3 per cent of registered land (or 50

per cent of the total amount) was categorised as ‘private property’—should also

63 Geulat Ha-Aretz (the redemption of Palestinian land) was the expression commonly used by the employees of

the KKL. The latter’s objective was ‘to win a free soil for a free people’. In 1926 Granott, then director of the

KKL, wrote that ‘above all, the soil of Palestine awaits its redemption’. A. Granott, Land Problems in Palestine

(London: Routledge, 1926), p. 90.

64 In 1936, with the intent to demonstrate that the purchase of land by the Jews would not cause damage to

Palestinians, Granott clarified that ‘since the total extent of Palestine is 26,319,000 dunams, the sum of the Jewish

lands does not amount to more than 5% of the whole [ . . . ] only 917,495 dunams in Jewish possession are

cultivable’. A. Granott, The Land Issue in Palestine (Jerusalem: Goldberg, 1936), p. 46.

65 Owen, New Perspectives, pp. ix–x.

66 CZA A153/149/2. Specifically, the memorandum, directed at the Western powers, explained that in order to

achieve the goal ‘of making Palestine a Jewish land’, the National Colonisation Association, a body that was to be

created by the Universal Zionist Organization, should benefit from a series of guarantees, among which, besides

what is cited in the text, were ‘the sole right to organise and control immigration into Palestine’ and the possession

‘of crown, government, waste and un-owned lands’.

67 In Egypt, due to the influence of Muhammad Alı` (1769–1849), who in the second decade of the 1800s had

already given life to a cadastral mapping of lands, it is estimated that the mu¨lk land amounted in 1875 to over a

quarter of the total amount, to then reach almost all of it by the end of the century. Lebanon also reported a ‘semiautonomous’

status over the centuries within the Ottoman context, emphasised by the constant Christian

presence. It is estimated that around 65 per cent of the ‘Republic of Lebanon’ was mu¨lk. G. Baer, ‘Land Tenure in

Egypt and the Fertile Crescent’, in C. Issawi (ed.), The Economic History of the Middle East 1800–1914

(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 87. Excluding Lebanon, in ‘Great Syria’ it is estimated that

‘practically all agricultural lands’ were mıˆrıˆ. S.B. Himadeh, Economic Organization of Syria (Beirut: American

Press, 1936), p. 53.

68 Granott, The Land Issue in Palestine, p. 68.

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have been identified as simple ‘renters’ of land that was not theirs. But ‘the mıˆrıˆ

land’, as Moshe Ma’oz clarified recently, ‘belonged to the p

eople who lived on it. Supporting the contrary means to interpret the past using a

selective and ideological, as well as Western-centered, approach’.69

Certainly it would also be considered ‘Western-centred’ to support the idea that

the Palestinian people—and more generally the populations in the Eastern

Mediterranean area—cannot be equated with other peoples and territories within

the Ottoman Empire, just because they were subject to a sort of ‘Class A mandate

sui generis’70 imposed by the League of Nations. The inappropriateness of

referring to this organisation—which at the time did not have any Arab

representative71 and in its founding Charter rejected the inclusion of the clause for

‘racial equality’ proposed by Japan72—as an independent entity moved by

humanitarian interests is an aspect already developed in numerous academic

works.73 Here it is enough to note that in the text which assigned the mandate for

Palestine to British jurisdiction, the word ‘Arabs’ was never mentioned, although

they constituted almost 90 per cent of the total population, while the terms ‘Jews’

and ‘Zionists’ appeared 12 times in total. Also, in official dispatches between the

officials of Her Majesty in the months in which the mandate was being discussed,

Palestinian Arabs were almost always called ‘the rest of the native inhabitants’.74

That the approach set forth by the League of Nations, inspired by the ideology of

the ‘white man’s burden’,75 is enough to justify the attempt to depict Palestinian

Arabs as simple ‘occupants’ of the land in which they were living is, besides being

morally deficient, a historically questionable modus operandi.

69 Moshe Ma’oz, interview with the author, Jerusalem, 14 December 2011. Ruedy expressed a similar position:

‘On the eve of the proclamation of the state of Israel, 88 to 91 per cent of the cultivable soil was neither owned nor

leased by Jews. What was not vacant or publicly dedicated state domain was Arab under one form of right or

another’. Ruedy, Dynamics of Land Alienation, p. 135.

70 The Peel Commission clarified in 1937 that ‘the Syrian Mandate provided that the government should be based

on an organic law which should take into account the rights, interests and wishes of all the inhabitants, and that

measures should be enacted “to facilitate the progressive development of Syria and the Lebanon as independent

States.” [ . . . ] Article 1 of the Palestine Mandate, on the other hand, vests “full powers of legislation and of

administration,” within the limits of the Mandate, in the Mandatory’. Palestine Royal Commission, London,

1937, p. 28.

71 There was no Arab country among the members of the League of Nations when the mandate was ratified. The

way in which Britain tried to impose Faysal (1885–1933) and his father Husayn (1854–1931) as legitimate

representatives of the Palestinians (they were perceived by the local majority mainly as mere tools in the hands of

London) deserves a deeper analysis. Here it is enough to quote an excerpt from a letter written by Chaim

Weizmann (1874–1952) to his wife on 17 July 1918: ‘I made the acquaintance of Faysal [ . . . ]. He is not

interested in Palestine, but on the other hand he wants Damascus and the whole of Northern Syria. [ . . .] He is

contemptuous of the Palestinian Arabs whom he doesn’t even regard as Arabs’. In C. Weizmann and B. Litvinoff

(eds), The Essential Chaim Weizmann (London: Weidenfeld, 1982), p. 209.

72 While the founding charter of the League of Nations was being discussed, the Japanese delegates forcefully

fought for the inclusion of a clause validating the principle of ‘racial non-discrimination’, the same which, at the

end of World War II, became one of the pillars of the UN. Such clause was intended to secure equality of Japanese

nationals and egalitarianism among members of the League of Nations. It was, thus, far from being considered by

them as a universal principle. Nonetheless, it represented a meaningful step that the Japanese media of the time

stressed out in several occasions.

73 See L. Kamel, Israele-Palestina. Due storie, una speranza (Rome: Editori Riuniti UP, 2008), pp. 64–98.

74 The National Archives – FO 608/100. Forbes Adam to William Malkin, 29 April 1919.

75 See L. Kamel, ‘Israel Remains on the Right. The Historical Reasons Behind a Long-Established Political

Supremacy’, IAI Working Papers, 13(6) (2013), pp. 1–16.

LORENZO KAMEL