The Arabs in Palestine
by Mitchel Bard
For many centuries, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated and widely-neglected
expanse of eroded hills, sandy deserts and malarial marshes. Mark
Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867, described it as: "...[a]
desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly
to weeds-a silent mournful expanse....A desolation is here that not
even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action....We
never saw a human being on the whole route....There was hardly a tree
or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast
friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country."
As late as 1880, the American consul in Jerusalem reported the area was continuing its historic decline. "The
population and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last
forty years," he said.
The Report of the Palestine Royal Commission
quotes an account of the Maritime Plain in 1913:
The road leading from Gaza to the north was only
a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts...no
orange groves, orchards or vineyards were to be seen until one
reached [the Jewish village of] Yabna [Yavne]....Houses were all of
mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen....The ploughs used were
of wood....The yields were very poor....The sanitary conditions in
the village were horrible. Schools did not exist....The western
part, towards the sea, was almost a desert....The villages in this
area were few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were
scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria,
many villages were deserted by their inhabitants.
Lewis French, the British Director of Development
wrote of Palestine:
We found it inhabited by fellahin who lived in
mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent
malaria....Large areas...were uncultivated....The fellahin, if not
themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these and
other criminals. The individual plots...changed hands annually.
There was little public security, and the fellahin's lot was an
alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the
Bedouin.
Surprisingly, many people who were not sympathetic
to the Zionist cause believed the
Jews would improve the condition of Palestinian
Arabs. For example, Dawood Barakat, editor of the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram,
wrote: "It is absolutely necessary that an entente be made
between the Zionists and Arabs, because the war of words can only do
evil. The Zionists are necessary for the country: The money which
they will bring, their knowledge and intelligence, and the
industriousness which characterizes them will contribute without
doubt to the regeneration of the country."
Even a leading Arab nationalist believed the
return of the Jews to their homeland would help resuscitate the
country. According to Sherif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic
Holy Places in Arabia:
The resources of the country are still virgin
soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants. One of the
most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian
used to leave his country, wandering over the high seas in every
direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though
his ancestors had lived on it for 1000 years. At the same time we
have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine
from Russia, Germany, Austria, Spain, America. The cause of causes
could not escape those who had a gift of deeper insight. They knew
that the country was for its original sons (abna'ihilasliyin),
for all their differences, a sacred and beloved homeland. The
return of these exiles (jaliya) to their homeland will prove
materially and spiritually [to be] an experimental school for their
brethren who are with them in the fields, factories, trades and in
all things connected with toil and labor.
A Population Boom
As Hussein foresaw, the regeneration of Palestine,
and the growth of its population,
came only after Jews returned in massive numbers. The Jewish
population increased by 470,000 between World War I and World War II
while the non-Jewish population rose by 588,000. In fact, the
permanent Arab population increased 120 percent between 1922 and
1947.
This rapid growth was a result of several factors.
One was immigration from
neighboring states — constituting 37 percent of the total
immigration to pre-state
Israel — by Arabs who wanted to take advantage of the higher
standard of living the Jews had made possible. The Arab population
also grew because of the improved living conditions created by the
Jews as they drained malarial swamps and brought improved sanitation
and health care to the region. Thus, for example, the Muslim infant
mortality rate fell from 201 per thousand in 1925 to 94 per thousand
in 1945 and life expectancy rose from 37 years in 1926 to 49 in 1943.
The Arab population increased the most in cities
with large Jewish populations that had created new economic
opportunities. From 19221947, the non-Jewish population increased
290 percent in Haifa,
131 percent in Jerusalem and 158 percent in Jaffa.
The growth in Arab towns was more modest: 42 percent in Nablus, 78
percent in Jenin and 37 percent in Bethlehem.
Jewish Land Purchases
Despite the growth in their population, the Arabs
continued to assert they were being displaced. The truth is from the
beginning of World War I, part of Palestine's land was owned by
absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut. About 80
percent of the Palestinian Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads
and Bedouins.
Jews actually went out of their way to avoid
purchasing land in areas where Arabs might be displaced. They sought
land that was largely uncultivated, swampy, cheap and, most
important, without tenants. In 1920, Labor Zionist leader David
Ben-Gurion expressed his concern about the Arab fellahin,
whom he viewed as "the most important asset of the native
population." Ben-Gurion said "under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them." He advocated helping liberate them from
their oppressors. "Only if a fellah leaves his place of
settlement," Ben-Gurion added, "should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate
price."
It was only after the Jews had bought all of this
available land that they began to purchase cultivated land. Many
Arabs were willing to sell because of the migration to coastal towns
and because they needed money to invest in the citrus industry.
When John
Hope Simpson arrived in Palestine in May 1930, he observed:
"They [Jews] paid high prices for the land, and in addition they
paid to certain of the occupants of those lands a considerable amount
of money which they were not legally bound to pay."
In 1931, Lewis French conducted a survey of
landlessness and eventually offered new plots to any Arabs who had
been "dispossessed." British officials received more than
3,000 applications, of which 80 percent were ruled invalid by the
Government's legal adviser because the applicants were not landless
Arabs. This left only about 600 landless Arabs, 100 of whom accepted
the Government land offer.
In April 1936,
a new outbreak of Arab attacks on Jews was instigated
by a Syrian guerrilla named Fawzi al-Qawukji,
the commander of the Arab Liberation Army.
By November, when the British finally sent
a new commission headed by Lord Peel to investigate,
89 Jews had been killed and more than 300 wounded.
The Peel
Commission's report found that Arab complaints about Jewish land
acquisition were baseless. It pointed out that "much of the land
now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated
when it was purchased....there was at the time of the earlier sales
little evidence that the owners possessed either the resources or
training needed to develop the land." Moreover, the Commission
found the shortage was "due less to the amount of land acquired
by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population." The report
concluded that the presence of Jews in Palestine, along with the work
of the British Administration, had resulted in higher wages, an
improved standard of living and ample employment opportunities.
In his memoirs, Transjordan's King Abdullah wrote:
It is made quite clear to all, both by the map
drawn up by the Simpson Commission and by another compiled by the
Peel Commission, that the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their
land as they are in useless wailing and weeping (author's
emphasis).
Even at the height of the Arab
revolt in 1938, the British High Commissioner to Palestine
believed the Arab landowners were complaining about sales to Jews to
drive up prices for lands they wished to sell. Many Arab landowners
had been so terrorized by Arab rebels they decided to leave Palestine
and sell their property to the Jews.
The Jews were paying exorbitant prices to wealthy
landowners for small tracts of arid land. "In 1944, Jews paid
between $1,000 and $1,100 per acre in Palestine, mostly for arid or
semiarid land; in the same year, rich black soil in Iowa was selling
for about $110 per acre."
By 1947, Jewish holdings in Palestine amounted to
about 463,000 acres. Approximately 45,000 of these acres were
acquired from the Mandatory Government; 30,000 were bought from
various churches and 387,500 were purchased from Arabs. Analyses of
land purchases from 1880 to 1948 show that 73 percent of Jewish plots
were purchased from large landowners, not poor fellahin. Those
who sold land included the mayors of Gaza, Jerusalem and Jaffa. As'ad
elShuqeiri, a Muslim religious scholar and father of PLO chairman
Ahmed Shuqeiri, took Jewish money for his land. Even King Abdullah
leased land to the Jews. In fact, many leaders of the Arab
nationalist movement, including members of the Muslim Supreme
Council, sold land to Jews.
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