The Necessary Background to Understanding

There is one thing, the most important thing needed to understand the Palestinian/Zionist conflict, that is virtually never mentioned in popular discussion. From the late 19th century through to 1948 there was no homogeneous Palestinian society.

The Palestinians were divided into two main groups. The peasants (known as fellah, singular - fellaheen, plural) comprised about 80% of the population, the bedouin about 10% and the elites - notables, effendi, a'yan families - were a small minority of the remaining 10% of the middle and upper classes.

The Palestinian Arab political elite from which the Mufti emerged as a paramount political leader was a tiny slice of the society, perhaps no more than 3,000 in number, less than one percent of the entire Palestinian population at any time during the Mandate. - Kenneth Stein

The agrarian methods

Using their position and insider information this group had used the mid-19th century Ottoman modernising legislation to take control of the majority of the cultivable land, charge exorbitant rents, collect the taxes for the Ottomans, control the merchandising, control the courts, control the religion, charge usurious interest rates

Before WW1 the fellaheen had already been perpetually indebted, the rents charged by the landowning/merchant/moneylending class were even higher than the usurious interest rates. The agrarian infrastructure had been destroyed in the war with the Ottomans not only taking everything, they even cut down the forests, orchards and groves to fuel the troop trains.

The notables (and their latter-day academic admirers) had a solution to the fellaheen woes. Firstly pay their debts so they could start again debt free. Secondly begin a Agrarian Credit Bank to loan them the needfull at low interest rates. Britain had been bankrupted by the world war, 1920 Paestine and in the 1930s there was the Great Depression

THe British and the Jews improved the geernal health of the area and the population exploded. Life in Palestine was so bad that Arabs in the adjoining countries illegally entered into Palestine to find work. As the British governor of the Sinai from 1922 to 1936 observed, "This illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria, and it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery.