As Rashid Khalidi has observed, the most salient division in Palestinian society at this time was not that between feuding Jerusalemite notables (which has absorbed so much scholarly attention), but between the conservative politicians and their challengers from below.8 The new social forces took a dim view of the elite leadership of the national struggle, who youth in particular increasingly castigated as self-interested, ineffectual and sluggish. Their criticism escalated after the quashing of the 1930 White Paper - which contained limitations on Jewish immigration and land purchasing - at the behest of Zionist lobbying.9 As immigration boomed while the Arab countryside suffered severe economic crisis and the British rebuffed the Palestinians' demands and spited their aspirations, the mood grew bleak. Youth, workers, and peasants began to push for a strategy of confrontation and direct challenge to the colonial power, and after 1933 insurrection was not long in coming.

For example, From Riots to Rebellion provides an incongruous view of peasants, at points reiterating their ostensible ignorance and apolitical disposition while at others emphasizing that their creeping dispossession and loss of lands contributed directly to the choice of many to take up arms or to support the 37- revolt.73

From Petition to Confrontation

From Petition to Confrontation:
The Palestinian National Movement and the Rise of Mass Politics, 1929-1939

by Charles W. Anderson

Abstract

This dissertation provides a history from below of Palestinian national movement and Arab society during the tumultuous decade of the 1930s. It argues that the influence and authority of the small group of factionalized and disunited notable politicians that are conventionally understood to have monopolized the leadership of the national struggle during the era of British Mandatory rule has been greatly overstated. This is especially so for the restive and rebellious middle period of the Mandate (1929-1939), during which the movement turned from a conciliatory and quietist strategy of gentlemanly diplomacy preferred by elite politicians to confrontation, mass mobilization and armed struggle, culminating in "the Great Revolt" (1936-1939), a prolonged anti- colonial rebellion against both British rule and the Zionist project it sponsored. By examining the political practices, organizing, self-understanding, and leadership capacities of "youth" and peasants, the dissertation explicates the eclipse of elite preeminence within the national movement and the rise of the new, horizontally- organized social forces that reshaped and radicalized Palestinian politics in the 1930s. The dissertation first explores the proliferation of youth associations in the early 1930s and illuminates how the rise of youth as an assertive, ambitious, and politically frustrated element had profound ramifications for the tactics, strategy, and trajectory of the national movement. The narrative then turns to track the decomposition of the Arab rural order from the late Ottoman era to 1936, paying particular attention to the crisis of the countryside under the British, who fecklessly intensified pre-existing tendencies

viii- towards peasant destitution, bankruptcy, and dispossession, thereby helping to create a disaffected class of uprooted ex-peasants. The final section analyzes the Great Revolt, focusing on the critical roles of youth, peasants, and workers in initiating and propelling it and on the popular and revolutionary institutions that organized and sustained it against great odds for over three years. This section also interrogates British counterinsurgency, highlighting the role of specific forms of colonial violence, especially collective punishments, in ending the rebellion, and with it the ascent of popular forces within the national movement.

Contents Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv Abstract vii Acronyms and glossary xi

Introduction 1

Part I: The rise of youth

1. The inception of youth activism and the twilight of elite hegemony, 1928-1931 68

2. The Youth Congress, the Istiqlal Party and the anti-British turn, 1932-33 163

3. In search of popular sovereignty: youth and direct action, 1934-36 254

Part II: The peasant question

4. Peasants, the new notability, and peripheral capitalism in the late Ottoman era 344

5. British rule and the decline of the rural social order 402

6. The Palestinian peasantry between marginalization and mobilization 498

Part III: The Great Revolt

7. The Great Strike: from colonial order to anti-colonial rebellion 591

8. A tense truce: the Peel Commission interregnum 756

9. Rolling back the colonial regime: state formation from below and the ascent of the rebellion 851

10. Counterinsurgency, counterrevolution, and the demise of the revolt 1014

Conclusion 1126

Bibliography 1168 xi Acronyms and glossary
AE: Arab Executive
AG: Attorney General
ADC: Assistant District Commissioner
AHC: Arab Higher Committee
AOC: Air Officer Commanding
ASP: Assistant Superintendent of Police
AWC: Arab Women's Committee
AWS: Arab Workers' Society
CCJ: Central Committee for the Jihad
CID: Criminal Investigation Department
CO: Colonial Office
DC: District Commissioner
DDSP: Deputy District Superintendent of Police
DIG: Deputy Inspector General of Police
DIG-CID: Deputy Inspector General of Police; head of the CID
DP: Defense Party
FO: Foreign Office
GOC: General Officer Commanding
HC: High Commissioner
IPC: Iraq Petroleum Company
JA: Jewish Agency
JCA: Jewish Colonization Association
JNF: Jewish National Fund
LTO: Land Transfer Ordinance
MCA: Muslim Christian Association
NC: national committee
OAB: Ottoman Agricultural Bank
OAG: Officer Administering the Government; Acting High Commissioner
PAP: Palestine Arab Party
PAWS: Palestinian Arab Workers' Society
PLDC: Palestine Land Development Company
PLL: Palestine Labor League
RPT: Rural Property Tax
SMC: Supreme Muslim Committee
WO: War Office
YC: Youth Congress
YMMA: Young Mens' Muslim Association
ZO: Zionist Organization

'alim (pl: 'ulama): religious scholar; man of religious learning
'ayn (pl: a'yan): notable
bayan: communiqué; announcement
xii
bilad al-Sham: geographic or Greater Syria
fellah (pl: fellahin): peasant
hamula: clan; extended family network
iltizam: tax farm
majlisi: adjective referring to the faction of the mufti and the Husayni family
majlisiyyin: members or followers of the mufti's faction and the Husayni family
mu'arida: the Opposition faction
mu'aridin: members or followers of the Opposition faction led by the Nashashibi family
mukhtar: loosely, mayor or chief
multazim: tax farmer
simsar: land broker
Shami: Syrian or Greater Syrian
Qassami (pl: Qassamiyun): follower of shaykh 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam
qirsh (pl: qurush): piaster
'urf: customary law
yishuv: the pre-statehood Jewish community in Palestine

Introduction

On 27 October 1933 thousands of Palestinian Arabs gathered in the streets of the port city of Jaffa for a raucous demonstration against the immigration policy of the British Mandate government. The mobilization showcased the energies and increasing clout of the youth activists that had pressed to bring it about, including the Youth Congress, the leading organ of the younger generation. Turnout was strong. The government estimated 7-10,000 people thronged in downtown Jaffa that morning, making the assembly the largest civic protest of its kind in the history of British rule in Palestine. The crowd was full of workers, peasants and youths and studded with politicians and members of the upper and middle classes, visible in their distinctive headgear, the tarbush. Delegations came from far and wide. They arrived from Huleh in the Upper Galilee, from the Bedouin community of Wadi al-Hawarith in the coastal plain where embattled inhabitants were being evicted by Jewish colonists, and from other points in Palestine. Small groups from Transjordan and Syria attended. A group of women from Jerusalem took part under the auspices of the upper class Arab Women's Committee (AWC), one of whose leaders, Matiel Mughannam, delivered a rousing speech to the assembly.

The Jaffa protest was the second in a what was intended to be a series of popular processions expressing the Arab public's adamant opposition to the rapidly swelling numbers of Jewish settlers arriving to Palestine's shores. As the United States and

Britain closed their doors to those fleeing the anti-Semitic regimes of central and eastern Europe, the tide of Jews turning to Palestine as a refuge showed no signs of breaking. Annual immigration rates rose exponentially in the early 1930s from around 4-5000 before 1932 to over 37,300 in 1933 after the ascent of Hitler to the Chancellorship in Germany, before climbing yet higher in 1934 and 1935.2 The Zionist dream of building a Jewish society - and ultimately a Jewish sovereignty - in Palestine had long been fervently rejected by the indigenous Muslim and Christian Arab majority. From its very origin, the Palestinian national movement had decried Jewish immigration as part and parcel of Great Britain's policy, enunciated in the Balfour declaration of 2 November 1917, of seeking to build a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine.3 The Arabs feared that mass immigration would foster their demographic and political displacement at the hands of Zionism and its British patron, and as immigration surged in the first half of the 1930s and the yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community) grew by leaps and bounds while the Arabs weathered sustained economic and political crisis, these anxieties appeared more founded than ever.

The first demonstration, smaller but still sizable, had transpired two weeks earlier at Jerusalem and resulted in non-lethal clashes between crowds and the police. It had been called by the Arab Executive (AE), the staid elite forum that had been the center of 3- the Palestinian national movement for over a dozen years, after weeks of mounting pressure from below and after the Arab press assailed its torpidity in the face of the immigration boom. The government tried to no avail to prevent the Jeruaslem protest, underscoring its illegal character as a procession without a permit. After the announcement of the Jaffa demonstration the Palestine administration again warned of the potential consequences of holding an illegal protest. At a meeting on 25 October a member of the AE explained its discomfited position to the High Commissioner: "We have never in the past resorted even to peaceful demonstrations; now we have been pushed to it by the people themselves. Being so pushed, we hope that Government would help us and not force us to lead people to more serious trouble." As neither side gave ground, confrontation loomed.

Anticipating further clashes after the Jerusalem protest and reflecting the refractory mood spreading throughout Arab society, some men came to the Jaffa demonstration armed with clubs and sticks of wood and metal. Following speeches at the Great Mosque and other locations the assembly marched on Clock Tower Square, where its path was blocked by a police cordon of some 100 officers. When the police attempted to disperse the marchers with mounted baton charges the protestors fought back by stoning them. After regrouping, the commanding officer on the scene, J.A.M. Faraday, broke the police into three squads, one for each of the three principle streets off of the square. On his order the squads advanced and opened fire. As many as 19 Arab protestors and one Arab police officer were killed in the deadly melee that ensued, and over 70 protestors and 25 police were injured. Word of what was called "the Jaffa 4- massacre" spread rapidly and brought on further skirmishes between outraged Arabs and the police. An Arab general strike was called almost immediately. Crowds assaulted the railroad terminal and police station at Haifa and barricaded the city's streets and in Jerusalem the police were attacked with home-made bombs and government targets were sniped at night. Protests spread to other areas of the country and the colonial authorities quickly deployed troops into four cities, including Jerusalem, to hold the line. Suppression of the most vigorous unrest at Haifa, Jerusalem and Nablus cost the Palestinians another 7 dead and over 100 wounded.4

The local risings didn't last long but the colonial state was determined to avoid further conflagration. A number of critical organizers and leaders were arrested on 27 October while planning the next demonstration. More subtly, with the connivance of the Grand Mufti of Palestine, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the much-delayed third protest in the series, held at Nablus in January 1934, was all but stage-managed by the colonial authorities. Its tepid character signaled the end of the protest cycle. The 1933 demonstrations mark several turning points. The first concerns the strategic orientation of the Palestinian national movement. For the first time in the Mandate's history Arab unrest was directed at the British regime. Prior incidents of collective violence - in 1920, 1921, and 1929 - had all been aimed at Jews and Jewish communities and settlements. Where previously Arab frustration and anger at their political and economic marginalization was manifested at the settler movement staking a competing claim to the Palestinians' homeland, in 1933 the protestors laid the blame at 5- the feet of Zionism's British patron. In doing so, the demonstrations illuminated a new trajectory for the Palestinian movement, one that named British rule the primary obstacle to Arab independence and held the colonial regime responsible for the economic and demographic gains made by the Zionist movement and the corresponding dislocations suffered by the Arabs.

The second turning point was evident in the changing bases and dynamics of leadership within Palestinian society. The elite circles that had dominated local Arab politics for most of the Mandate were not enamored of mass mobilization, street protests, or confrontation, each of which they had long considered coarse, undignified, and counter-productive. They preferred to practice what Ann M. Lesch has aptly referred to as the "politics of petition": a strategy of gentlemanly diplomacy that was thoroughly reminiscent of Ottoman models of personalized politics and elite intermediation on behalf of the population.5 The plaintive note members of the AE sounded before the Jaffa protest, at once pleading and cajoling, was not political theater but a genuine warning about the strength of roiling public opinion. As attested to by the intelligence branch of the colonial police, the Criminal Investigation Department, the AE was compelled to call the national protests in response to the upsurge of popular fervor and for fear of being upstaged by newer, more stalwart political forces, namely the pan-Arab Istiqlal Party and the Youth Congress. The latter were recent entrants to the political field, yet they were part of a deepening current of radicalization and militancy that was reshaping the national struggle. In place of the older leadership, whose star had dimmed 6- by 1933, an amalgam of organizations comprised of increasingly autonomous and assertive youth, peasants, workers, and women arose. The new associational culture that they forged was mass-based and promoted forms of mass mobilization and collective action designed to defend Arab interests and the "homeland."

The willingness of organizers to risk a serious confrontation with the colonial state at Jaffa highlights a third and final turning point attained by the demonstrations. The push from below that produced the street protests was part of a larger search for new tactics capable of responding to the sharpening colonial dilemma of the Palestinians and the straitening conditions they faced after a decade and a half of British occupation. The broad eclipse of elite leadership within the national movement was inseparable from the discrediting of its pacific mode of politics. Since its founding in 1920 the AE had lodged numerous entreaties with government, held meetings with officials, and sent several delegations to London, all to no avail. Its quietist diplomacy had produced neither significant change to the Jewish National Home policy nor any tangible step towards self-rule and independence. Leading organs of the popular constituencies that had gathered in the streets of Jaffa were increasingly attracted afterwards to direct action, for instance mounting campaigns to fight the evictions of Arabs at Zionist hands. While the British stymied their initiatives, the growing mobilization and tactical innovations of the early 1930s ultimately culminated in what Palestinians call "the Great Revolt" (al-Thawra al-kubra) from 1936-1939, the longest anti-colonial Arab rebellion of the interwar era.

The constitution of a vibrant and militant anti-colonial politics in the 1930s was 7- predicated on tectonic shifts within Arab society and the economy. These shifts - the results of both peripheral capitalist development in Palestine since the nineteenth century and a host of British policies favoring Zionist enterprises and the development of the yishuv - destabilized the ancien régime in Palestine, unsettling its class structure and diminishing the influence of the vertical networks of family and clan (hamula; pl: hama'il) that had organized society. Although the British desired to retain the existing socio-economic structures and internal balance of forces among the Arabs, imagining themselves to be conserving the Arab social order and preventing the growth of a restive lumpenproletariat, their regime added greatly to the strains already wracking Arab society. Peasant poverty and indebtedness, which had spiked during World War I, were exacerbated by a welter of factors: the award of major economic concessions to Jewish firms; the erection of protectionist policies for Jewish industry; discriminatory wage scales; alterations to the land tenure system and other aid to Zionist colonization; regressive agrarian taxation; and the absence of affordable credit. Compounded by poor harvests in the early 1930s, Arab landlessness greatly increased. Many dispossessed peasants became part of a "peasantariat," left struggling to eke out a living as wage- laborers and not fully integrated into either the countryside or the shantytowns of the port cities between which they lived. Ironically the dislocations produced by British policy and the intensifying economic development of the Zionist project played essential roles in reconfiguring Arab society and its politics, leading to the emergence of a new and increasingly vociferous and multitudinous mass politics.

As I will explore herein, youth were a bellwether of the restructuring of Arab 8- society. "Youth" was a broad and elastic category which in many respects came to represent an ideal and a set of nationalist dispositions as much as it designated generational difference. Beginning in the late 1920s with the founding of the Young Men's Muslim Association a new current of self-organization began to coalesce among Arab youth. They formed sports clubs, cultural and religious organizations, village associations, and scout troops in increasing numbers throughout the country, many of which were interested in social reform and the protection and promotion of Arab identities and collective rights. By doing so, the nascent youth trend helped to forge a new horizontal model and ethos for the organization of Palestinian politics.

The rise and consolidation of a new horizontal associational culture within Arab Palestine, in which youth were instrumental, produced and enabled new forms of social mobilization, new subjectivities, and new articulations of collective identity. These developments were driven for the most part from below. Elite women established the first women's association in 1929.6 Workers in several professions and sectors had begun to come together to form unions and workers' syndicates since the mid-1920s. Peasants joined in the youth societies and unions and formed their own village and migrant associations. These various fora, which bloomed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, highlight a growing impulse towards horizontal affinities and self-organization.

Individually they often became dynamic spaces of social and political engagement and platforms for autonomy from dominant social elements; collectively they transformed

the shape and practice of local Arab politics. In place of the patriarchal and patrimonial leadership of elites, more participatory, polycentric and inclusive configurations of politics emerged in which the lower classes and non-elites were increasingly assertive and irrepressible.7

The Great Revolt is arguably the seminal event of Palestinian politics during the Mandate. Consisting of two primary phases, a half year general strike and armed insurrection beginning in April 1936 and an insurgency from fall 1937 until the eve of

World War II in 1939, the revolt was the largest mass mobilization of the territory's Arab populace in its history and engaged the participation in various forms of great swathes of the Arab population throughout the country in both urban and rural areas. Both the general strike and the insurgency emanated from below and it was largely the energies, determination, and leadership of popular social forces that propelled the revolt in each of its principal phases. Although they were caught off guard by the rebellion, elite leaders were quick to try to retake the reins of the national struggle, forming the cross-factional Arab Higher Committee (AHC) to coordinate overall policy. But despite a partial reassertion of their authority, perhaps foremost in their preexisting capacity as brokers and mediators between the British colonial state and the bulk of the Arab population, neither the strike, nor the subsequent insurgency (when a new supervisory body, the Central Committee for the Jihad, was created) can properly be said to have come solidly or steadily under elite control.

In spite the leading roles played by popular forces in generating the momentous upheavals of the 1930s much of the historical and scholarly work on Palestinian national movement under the Mandate and on the Mandate itself has privileged Arab elites and their forums, presuming them to be the guiding forces of Arab society and politics. Concentrating on the diplomatic history of Palestine, which almost by definition telescopes in on elites and the realm of the state, many older works (and some newer ones) have lavished attention on the AE, the AHC, the mufti, and the internecine conflicts of the elites, most especially the inveterate schism between the al-Husaynis and the al-Nashashibis and their respective allies. Together these bodies, the mufti, and elite

factionalism have been presented as the keys to understanding Palestinian history under British rule.

The limitations of this top-heavy focus are clear. As Rachelle Taqqu put it long ago, "the preoccupation with the traditional elites of Palestine has placed the history of the Arab community in a one-dimensional framework."10 In spite of the undoubted importance of elites and the insights to be found in the works that have examined them, the tumultuousness of the 1930s - so antithetical to the upper classes - suggests that common assumptions about leadership, political practice, and social power during the decade need to be reexamined. On this point James Gelvin has suggested in a trenchant critique of the elitist fixations of the literature on Arab nationalism in the Levant that histories that elide "the domain of popular politics" fail to grapple with and illuminate the dynamic and dialectical character of the nationalist movements of the interwar era.11

The notion of a dialectically constituted nationalist formation is scarcely present in most of the work on the Palestinian national movement during the Mandate.

Although many accounts do concede some recognition of non-elite initiative and agency during the revolt (and particularly during the insurgency phase which was undeniably and overwhelmingly peasant-based), the popular social forces that were in fact critical to the radicalization of the Palestinian national movement and its course are not well considered, explained, or understood in most of the existing scholarship.12 This owes

greatly to elitist bias that denies non-elite agency and the importance of non-elite actors.

As well it derives from another basis: the lack of apprehension that a new mode and ethos of politics - mass politics - arose within Arab society in Palestine in the period between 1929 and 1936. Produced through a complex and somewhat amorphous mesh of factors (discussed below), the ascent and arrival of mass politics as a phenomenon and as a category for the analysis of the transformation in Palestinian politics and society between the decades of the 1920s and the 1930s has long eluded conventional scholarly approaches.

The occlusion of attention to the social forces and the denial of their role in remaking Palestinian politics during the 1930s has led to a deficient understanding of the era and its momentous upheavals. This is all the more problematic in light of the weight which is attributed within the scholarly literature to the Great Revolt in bringing about internal Palestinian disorganization and external repression, paving the way for national "failure" and collapse a decade later, culminating in the dispersion of the bulk of Palestine's indigenous Arab population.13 In this view Palestinian politics and society is diagnosed as fundamentally and fatally lacking - at turns unity, organization, discipline, and concerted vision - and these inadequacies are traced back significantly to the period of the revolt. While it is beyond the scope of this project temporally and thematically to fully explore the relationship between the revolt and the nakba, the mass dispossession

of the Palestinians in 1948, it is clear that the failure narrative has cast a long historiographic shadow back upon the events of the revolt. What is also clear is that more than the teleological leaning detectable in accounts which tend to give the 1940s short shrift, the view of Palestinian society as essentially lacking presents a counter- factual analysis centered around absences in place of a proper historical examination into the activities of broad sectors, if not the majority, of the population. This dissertation departs from the narratives of failure and lack that have so commonly been put forward to explain the travails of the Palestinians.14 It examines the political practices, organizing, self-understanding, and leadership capacities of popular social forces, particularly youth, peasants, and workers, in Mandatory Palestine. As a history from below of the 1930s era it challenges the conventional elitist paradigms that have dominated much of the scholarship and left the Palestinian majority in the shadows. By engaging the broadening and deepening political and social activism, nationalism, and struggle of popular constituencies, it provides a new look at the pivotal middle decade of the Mandate and the dynamics that brought the Palestinian national movement from the realm of genteel diplomacy to the path of armed struggle.

Elitist paradigms of Palestinian history under the Mandate: the origins Much has come before to obscure the ascent of popular leadership during the 1930s and the social classes from which it emerged. The absence or slighting of inquiry

14- into the social classes comprising the bulk of Palestinian Arab society in the Mandate era, until relatively recently, owes greatly to what I will call the effendi thesis. Here I follow and elaborate upon the work of Haim Gerber.15 The effendi thesis posits that Palestinian society and its politics were rigidly hierarchical in organization such that only the upper classes, mislabeled the effendiyya (a malleable category more closely analogous to "intelligentsia"), possessed real social agency.16 As Gerber relates, Zionist scholarship that does acknowledge the existence of the Palestinians as a people has tended to conclude that only the educated upper class members of society were capable of intellectually grasping and digesting the nation as a form of collective political identity. This stratum, described simplistically and reductively as "corrupt" and "greedy" are held to have been the beacons of nationalism, which in Palestinian history consisted of little more than noxious anti-Zionist agitation that the Arab elites spread for their own selfish and acquisitive purposes.17 Thus a corollary to the effendi thesis within Zionist scholarship understands Palestinian nationalism as less a derivative discourse (ala Chatterjee's argument) than a negative conception.18 As Gerber elucidates: "One basic claim [made by this literature] is that the Palestinians lacked positive values in their nationalism, their ideology being confined to a fundamental hatred of Zionism, an

15- alien and dangerous force."19 Palestinian nationalism is little more than a kind of revanchism, intended to cloak and promote elite interests, including the exploitation of the popular classes. In this wooden, if not robotic view of social relations and social life in Arab Palestine the masses are mostly inert and passive. They alternate between acting as vessels of the upper classes and lingering in a kind of Orientalist timelessness, constitutionally impervious and hostile to social change. They are not seen as active social forces capable of free thought or independent decision-making, organization and action. Taken together, this set of notions has served to replicate the classic Labor Zionist narrative explaining the encounter with the effendiyya and Palestinian society: "But for the incitement of these social elements the common folk of Palestine, too 'primitive' for exalted feelings such as nationalism, would have embraced the liberal and benign cause of Zionism, and joined forces with the Zionists against their own corrupt leadership."20

The effendi thesis is not solely attributable to Zionist thought. The core proposition concerning hierarchical authority and the elite's monopoly on social agency can be found, in somewhat different forms and renditions, in Palestinian, Arab, and Anglophone scholarship as well as in Zionist works. This has greatly to do with many of the sources available for writing Palestinian history. The British officers and administrators that governed Palestine, almost to a one, were big proponents of the thesis. Given their entrenchment in Orientalist knowledge and its peculiar and stultifying notions, they were, generally speaking, scarcely able to conceive of the depth

16- and character of the dynamic changes which Palestinian society underwent both before their occupation and during it. The Zionist movement was similarly steeped in Eurocentric and Orientalist notions and demonstrated a great propensity to see Arab politics and anti-colonialism as conspiracies run by elites, if not foreign powers. As for the Palestinians themselves, many of the available written sources that we have to work with - newspapers, memoirs, document collections, chronicles - were authored by members of the middle and upper classes. Not surprisingly they tend to reflect some of their biases and self-conception, as well as a sense of the exigencies of the times they lived through. Before turning to look at the effendi thesis's effects on the historiography of the middle period of the Mandate with which we are concerned here, I will briefly limn some noteworthy ideological, discursive and contextual aspects of the sources in question, in order to shed greater light on the proclivities of the different scholarly

corpuses. To begin with the Palestinian and Arab sources, a number of tropological features stand out. Many memoirs and books from the Mandate era put forward a kind of national unity narrative, where internal social divisions and class tensions were denied and hidden from view.21 With regard to publications there is no doubt that this was intended to promote social solidarity in difficult times, or in the case of memoirs, to promote positive reconstructions of Mandate-era Arab society. The evocation of Palestine as possessing an idyllic past in which social harmony prevailed and class distinctions were immaterial was a hallmark of nationalist discourse and the middle and

17- upper classes' collective self-image. This type of view perdured long after the Mandate was dead and gone and the nakba had uprooted the majority of the Palestinians. In interviews conducted in the 1970s for Bayan al-Hut's magnum opus, al-Qiyadat wa-l- mu'assasat al-siyasiyyah fi Filastin, 1917-1948, her respondents, former members of the Mandate-era leaderships she examines, repeated over and over again that Palestine had no social classes under the British. They rejected any comparison of their former society with feudalism (a common charge made by the British, Zionists, and Arab Marxists alike) and asserted that there had been no "extreme maldistribution of material wealth." Some landowning families went so far as to claim, without irony, that their closeness to the peasantry in the old country had been manifest in their breaking bread with them during feasts and holidays.22 As the sampling she collected revealed (and as will be explored at length in the following chapters), there was a tremendous denial of the salience of class and class difference within Palestinian society on the part of elite and middle class elements.

The images and conceptions of political leadership that emerge from some Arabic sources are remarkable. Memoirs commonly evince their authors' perceptions, perhaps sometimes refashioned post hoc, that the Palestinian movement cried out for strong, charismatic leadership. Almost unconsciously this is seen to have necessitated a single unparalleled figure to shepherd the nation through its trials and travails. The mufti, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, is inevitably cast as the only Palestinian of such stature, despite his immensely divisive and destructive leadership and legacy. Rashid al-Hajj

18- Ibrahim, a prominent Haifan businessman and ardent nationalist, exemplifies this attitude. His memoirs illustrate the belief that the movement needed a single leader to cohere around and lend it direction. Perhaps not without a certain ambivalence, writing after the fall of his city and of Arab Palestine in 1948, he affirms that the mufti was the most logical candidate for the task.23 In evincing such a position and elevating the mufti to the status of point de capiton (quilting point)24 for the nationalist struggle, al-Hajj Ibrahim is joined by numerous other figures and works, including important youth activists like Akram Zu'aytir and Ahmad al-Shuqayri, each of whom transitioned from opposing the mufti to seeing him as the obvious, singular and unquestioned leader of the Palestinian struggle.25 Through such seemingly sensible rereadings of the past al-Hajj Amin's historical role is stripped of its more ambiguous, convoluted, and complex dimensions. Instead the image of the mufti as the stalwart nationalist icon is reified and the controversial leader is converted - misleadingly and reductively - into the ostensible personification of the Palestinian struggle and Palestinian history. In its most emblematic renditions, such representations of the mufti substitute iconography for history.

19- Zionist sources bear some similarities to Palestinian and Arab sources with regard to the centrality of the mufti and of the political agency of the effendiyya, but differ starkly in their view of Palestinian society as a social whole. Where Arab sources and accounts have tended to elide class differences, their Zionist counterparts have, for reasons both epistemological and political, often emphasized internal fractures and cleavages. They often betray a paradoxical approach, accentuating or exaggerating what are taken to be disintegrative aspects of Arab society while simultaneously presuming that social and political authority - and more broadly, social agency - within it was highly concentrated at the top among the elite.

Since the earliest days of Zionist settlement and land purchases, Jewish colonists discerned a fundamental distinction between what they called the effendis and the bulk of the Arab population, who were poor and middling peasants. Convinced of the righteousness of their cause, they dismissed the protests of the indigenous population, believing them to be little more than the histrionics of a "highly volatile, easily excitable people" that would die out with time, after the strength, benefits, and permanence of the Zionist enterprise had come to be appreciated.26 Incapable of seeing the harm they did to uprooted communities and unaware of the seismic reshaping of Arab society since the nineteenth century, peasant resistance was chalked up to a fear of social change. For the most part, however, the bulk of the population was considered to be apolitical and really only genuinely concerned with their daily bread and standard of living.27 The effendis, on the other hand, had a deeper grievance with Zionism. They were aggravated,

20- according to the settlers, because the higher wages of Jewish agricultural workers set an example that inspired demands by their Arab counterparts.28 The emergence of a voluble anti-Zionist press after the 1908 Young Turk revolution29 only reinforced the idea that it was the men of letters and the paymasters of Arab society, rather than the grassroots, who were the real opponents of the Zionist enterprise.

The early period of colonization yielded a set of formative images of Palestinian society that were not easily dispelled despite their shallow basis and their tendency towards oversimplification to the point of distortion. A key misconception underlying them, which cast a great shadow over later views of the Palestinians, was their conflation of economic with social power within Arab society. The possession of wealth and economic influence were understood simplistically to equate to an almost total power over the lower classes. This was aided by the presumption that as a largely preliterate society, most Palestinians were not capable of free thought. The elites, in this view, became caricatures of venality, their sole motivation being self-adulation and aggrandizement. Social bonds in Arab society were seen as rudimentary and sedimented around chains of exploitation. The primitive quality of social relations was mirrored in this Orientalist imaginary by technological and cultural backwardness.30 Chaim Weizmann, master diplomat of the Zionist movement until the late 1930s and longtime 21- head of both the Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency, illustrated this attitude well.31 In 1918 he wrote to Balfour that "the fellah was at least four centuries behind the times and the effendi… is dishonest, uneducated, and as unpatriotic as he is inefficient."32

Labor Zionism - the shifting bloc of parties that gradually attained dominance over both the yishuv and the external apparatus of the Zionist movement - revised and in some cases dressed up the views of the early settlers without departing from their basic themes. As Zachary Lockman has pointedly explored, for the socialist leanings of Labor Zionism the existence of an Arab majority residing in Palestine raised thorny questions. Since socialist Zionism did not identify with imperialism and colonialism, the displacement of the indigenous population by a Jewish majority had to be explained in conceptual terms that would both show that Zionism was a progressive force and that the establishment of its aims would not necessitate the denial of Arab self-determination. One of the means by which this was accomplished, ironically, was by recourse to Orientalist notions of the Levant as an area of such great social mixture that the local population in Palestine could not properly be considered home to a distinct people.

Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, an important Labor movement ideologist and activist, argued in 1921 that there was no Arab national community in Palestine since it lacked a singular "racial" background. Local identity was religiously delineated and parcelized. Having 22- defined any notion of Palestinian identity out of existence, Arab nationalism (whether Palestinian or pan-Syrian) could only be a hollow, mimetic force.33 According to such thinking, the Palestinian nationalist movement that arose under the Mandate was little more than the ill-conceived machinations of "self- promoting politicians, greedy landowners, [and] obscurantist clerics" who desired to manipulate and misdirect the impressionable Arab public in order to perpetuate their class dominance. Consequently, the Labor movement concluded that the Arab movement was "a fraud which had to be fought, not merely for the sake of the Jews but also for the sake of the guileless and oppressed Arab masses themselves." In doing so Labor Zionist strategists hypothesized in the early 1920s that their quandary as a minority population could be resolved through an alliance of Arab and Jewish workers that would create a new society, eventually to have a Jewish majority, which would liberate the Arab peasantry from its feudal bonds to the Arab upper classes. The contest, as the Labor movement understood it before 1929, was over which party, Zionist workers or the Arab elite, would capture and harness the loyalties of the Arab masses.34 The 1929 rebellion35 led David Ben-Gurion, the powerful Labor movement leader and future first Prime Minister of Israel, to realize that Arab opposition to Zionism was nationalist in character, though he continued to see the Palestinians as generic, lacking a specific identity and essentially interchangeable with other Arabs

23- throughout the Levant.36 Mapai, the Israel Workers' Party (Mifleget Po'alei Eretz Yisrael) of which Ben-Gurion was a principal, grudgingly saw that an Arab (not Palestinian) national movement existed, but believed it was xenophobic, superficial, not sincerely anti-imperialist, and intended as a vehicle for the advancement of the native Arab intelligentsia that desired hegemony over the political and economic spheres within the country.37 The dismissal of Arab anti-imperialism and the misperception that indigenous nationalism was merely a masked form of careerism remained throughout the 1930s. As Yehoyada Haim poignantly observes, these attitudes were rooted in Labor Zionism's self-image: "Since… Zionists found the notion that Zionism represented an imperialist invasion absurd, they could not believe such notions were anything more than rhetoric."38

By the time of the 1936 revolt Zionist leaders and thinkers of all stripes had mostly abandoned any idea that common ground could be found between the Arabs and their movement. Their view that Arab society was immanently hierarchical was as adamantly held as ever. Chaim Weizmann told British PM Stanley Baldwin in May 1936, one month into the general strike, that "Arab discontent was not really deep 24- seated; the Arab peasant was not interested, but he was terrorized into it."39 Sounding an old note, left-wing Zionist parties like Hashomer Hatz'air (the Young Guard) and Po'alei Tziyon Smol (Zionist Workers - Left) contended that the effendiyya had caused the revolt in fear of the rapid economic development of the yishuv.40 The elites, and most especially the mufti, were blamed almost universally for the rebellion and foreign powers like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were constantly argued to be the hidden hands pulling Arab strings.41 Palestinian nationalism (or Arab nationalism) was increasingly equated with Nazism.42 The fact that the mufti and a small smattering of his colleagues did go over to the Nazi camp during World War II only confirmed, retroactively, the truth of prior allegations that the Palestinian national movement was a cat's-paw for Hitler and Nazism.43

A great variety of Zionist sources (in Hebrew and otherwise) show a striking uniformity in insisting on the primacy of the mufti as the man behind the Great Revolt. Intelligence reports of the Haganah and the Jewish Agency's Arab Bureau, minutes of the Histadrut's executive committee and those of other national bodies, public and 25- private statements by political parties and Zionist representatives, and memoirs, diaries and works of key figures all repeat the mantra that the Grand Mufti was a nefarious mastermind and the hidden hand animating the resistance to Zionism. At the center of the spider's web, the terror and revulsion he evoked led to frequent overestimations of his power and influence in the world. To take one outrageous example, Zionist authorities passed on information to the British military at the peak of the revolt in 1938 purporting that the mufti had acquired submarines from Germany, though in reality this was sheer phantasm.44 The power of the mufti myth is hard to overstate.

In counterpoint to the peerless political sway and mobilizational abilities of mufti, Zionist sources often read Palestinian society through a disintegrative lens that exaggerated divisions between different groups and communities. Religion and family were believed to be the bedrock of the social formation and were understood as primordial categories commanding the population's loyalties. These features are a constant theme of contemporaneous sources and reflected an epistemological blockage which prevented the recognition of any sense of underlying community binding the indigenous Palestinian population. This view was buttressed by Eurocentric and essentialist apperceptions of the depth of primordialism within Palestinian society. Ezra Danin, a pioneer of Zionist intelligence, wrote not long after the revolt that it laid bare the Arab "mentality," comprised of unflattering tendencies to feuding, jealousy, and treachery, which traced back to the divisiveness of village life.45 The editorial comments

26- that he and fellow Haganah intelligence official Ya'acov Shimoni lace throughout the volume of captured documents and rebel communiqués from the revolt that they published in 1944 illustrate the great attention that Zionist intelligence gave to the theme of primordial difference and discord within the uprising.46 Shimoni's well known work, Arvei Eretz Yisrael (1947), maintains much the same framework of approach to the Palestinians, as even a cursory glance at the book's organization (by religious community and region) illustrates.47 In it the Arab masses are portrayed as having fallen prey to "extremism" and "incitement" against Zionism, spurning the benefits that the Jewish national movement offered them and sowing conflict in place of peace.48

Although Zionist perceptions that the Palestinians were a house divided were overblown and led to distorted assessments of the revolt49 these themes are common to documentation from the period. They coexist somewhat incongruously with equally present ideas of elite manipulation of other social elements, at the apex of which stood the image of the mufti.

In many respects the British echoed the disintegrative ethnographic impulse of Zionism, first seeing the Palestinians as fragments and emphasizing the social agency of elites and the absence of such in the rest of the population. The British arrived in Palestine with decades of experience ruling over Arabs, most prominently in Egypt, and with an intellectual apparatus, Orientalist thought, that had become part and parcel of the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University and Magnes Press of Hebrew University, 1981 [originally Tel Aviv: the Hebrew Defender, 1944]), p. viii-ix. I have maintained the spelling of the editors names as it appears on the English title page to the work.

27- mission of imperial expansion. As Martina Riecker points out, compared with India, colonial administrators in the era of the New Imperialism considered Arab societies to be relatively simple and straightforward. Lord Cromer, Egypt's viceroy for nearly a quarter century, believed that its "social organization [wa]s not complicated" and that "the needs of the population ought to be easily learned."50

In Greater Syria such conceits were overlain with additional notions about the identity, or really identities, of the population inhabiting it. The primary feature of the Syrian lands in British Orientalist thought at the time was what was perceived to be a sharp distinction between the sedentary, settled population and the Bedouin. According to prevailing conceptions the Bedouin were the authentic Arabs, lineal descendents of an ancient racial stock. They exemplified noble and "martial" traits nurtured by their closeness to the desert, to nature, and to primeval ways of life that had remained unchanged and uncontaminated by the outside world. Their hardiness was contrasted dichotomously with the dissolute village and town dwellers. Unlike their nomadic brethren, the settled population were "Levantines," a category designating "racial impurity, moral obliquity, corruption, degeneracy, and parasitism."51 The binary view of the indigenous community in what became the Palestine Mandate, the vast majority of which was settled, represented a blunt denial of local identity. That foundational denial,

28- and the lowly estimation of the worth of those inhabiting the land, was plainly inscribed in the imperial discourse that shaped the horizons of British administration and policy. In the Balfour declaration, the cornerstone of Britain's avowed mission in Palestine, the Arabs, constituting some 93 percent of the total population, are referred to as "non-Jewish" communities. Reference to the indigenous majority through negative euphemism continued throughout the 1930s, although it was not universal parlance and the category Arab proved impossible to fully suppress.52 The discursive elision of the Palestinian Arabs and their effacement as a political entity was not limited, of course, to matters of semantics. Admission of the category Arab did not imply any recognition of rights and claims, as Lord Balfour again illustrated famously and unambiguously in 1919 when he proclaimed: "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."53 The official non-recognition of the Arabs, derivative of the pretenses of Orientalist knowledge about the region and of race-thinking, was also intertwined with an older ideological investment identifying Jews as a proxy for British interests in "the Holy Land." During the nineteenth century, as other European powers aligned themselves with local Christian denominations in the Levant, the British found themselves, owing to the meager Protestant presence in Palestine, choosing to seek out local Jewish communities as agents for the projection of British influence. As Alexander Schölch puts it, the "Gentile> 29- Zionists" of the nineteenth century "carried out the ideological advance work" for the subsequent "convergence" of the Zionist movement with imperial Britain during World War I.54

With the establishment of British rule over the Palestinians, some of the easy verities of ideology and Orientalist ethnography were challenged. As indigenous resistance to policy presented itself and quickly mounted, boiling over in two early episodes of mass violence successively in 1920 and 1921, the prior dismissal of the Palestinians was contested. Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner and a Jewish Briton chosen for his closeness to the Zionist movement, held contradictory views towards the Arabs. But even before the bloody events during the Nabi Musa festival in 1920 (and prior to his appointment) he warned that Arab nationalism was "very real and no bluff."55 The question as to whether the local Arab movement was truly national and authentic or, as in the Zionist view, a minority trend bent on the political and economic self-promotion and acquisitiveness of "the effendis," was much debated.

Suppression of the 1921 rising, in which urban street fighting and attacks in Jaffa led to rural paramilitary mobilization in the locality and threatened to spread, set down a parallel logic through which Arab collective action was apprehended. Paradoxically, while Arabs were denied salience as a political collectivity, they were recognized as a corporate community for purposes of repression. The 1921 rebellion resulted in the enactment of a set of collective punishments in the form of heavy fines on villages,

30- Bedouin groups, and the town of Tulkarm. The pretext for this draconian response and for the blithe disregard of liberal jurisprudential principals and the hallowed notion of individuals as rights-bearing legal subjects was supposedly drawn from local cultural practice. In reality the British seized on the existence of collective sanctions that pertained in cases of inter-clan conflict while ignoring and distorting the norms governing them to inflate the field of their application to much larger units (villages, cities, and entire administrative districts). Critically, this set of maneuvers was said to be of a piece with indigenous ideas of "collective guilt." The British weren't imposing any cruel novelties, they claimed, just using local normative practices legible and intelligible to the colonized.56

Although the 1920s passed quietly for the most part until the 1929 uprising, the Orientalist concept of collective guilt became integral to the colonial regime, and was greatly manifest in its responses to Palestinian resistance to the state and to Zionism after 1921. Especially after 1929 the pull of approaching the Palestinians through the lens of collective sanctions became ever more potent. This had the important ancillary effect of displacing or undermining the apprehension of the Palestinians as political claimants in the struggle over their patrimony and rendering them and their movement objects of a criminalizing discourse that recognized and treated them as a recalcitrant and obdurate mass requiring disciplinary action.

By 1929 the administrators in Palestine and the officials in London that together governed the Mandate saw the Arab public as split between "political circles" and the 31- great bulk of the population. Arab leaders, by which it was meant elite spokesmen, were presumed to be the fountainheads of political opinion and sentiment, as High Commissioner John Chancellor's nervous cables to London after the 1929 rebellion make clear.57 HC Chancellor, criticized by Zionists for his reappraisal of their movement and for his supposed partiality to the Arabs,58 described the latter in an extensive memorandum in January 1930 as a mostly ignorant and fanatical rabble, capable of being stirred into a frenzy by religious passion.59 While the Shaw Commission's inquiry into the 1929 events cleared Arab elites of culpability it succinctly depicted the rise of Palestinian nationalism as an emanation of elites: "Step by step the whole Arab people become [sic] identified with their leaders in opposition to the Jewish National Home and, in consequence, united with them in a demand for self- government."60

As the decade progressed, the effendi thesis rigidified. The Peel Commission, dispatched to investigate the causes of the 1936 uprising, advanced it further. Although stopping short of directly attributing elites with the insurrection the commission's report portrays the AHC as presiding over a movement that demonstrated a "centralization of 32- control… as fully effected as is possible in any Arab country."61 This view was then revised as a consequence of the later phase of the rebellion, from its resumption in late 1937 until the outbreak of World War II. Its members and a wide group of associates were rounded up when the insurgency was renewed and deemed culpable for it. Consequently, the 1946 Survey of Palestine represents the Great Revolt as directed by al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, first through the AHC and then after its banning through his concert with fellow political exiles.62

As the present project underscores, the effendi thesis wasn't just a contention about leadership; its effects were ramified. One notable consequence was a marked tendency to overlook the salience of the popular social forces that reshaped the Palestinian struggle in the 1930s. For instance the Shaw Commission report argues that neither the AE nor the mufti had any substantive connection to the "deliberate agitation" that helped foment the uprising, gesturing instead to "various Moslem associations" whose members both "desire[d] to see the adoption of more violent methods" and promoted such among "the more ignorant [segments of the] Arab people."63 These unnamed figures, or most of them, likely belonged to the YMMA, which as a youth society of little presumed importance was rendered invisible by the focus on elites and the allegations made against them by the JA and Zionist representatives. By the time of the Peel Commission the youth trend was no longer invisible, though characteristically its significance was still underappreciated. The commissioners, and perhaps the sources

33- they relied on, couldn't keep the youth forces straight, confusing the YMMA with the YC when discussing the 1933 demonstrations, which in a further error they erroneously depict as having been led by elites. The report does acknowledge to a certain extent the role of youth as a pressure group, noting that they are "quick to denounce the official leadership of their cause when they think it too slow or timid." However, their influence is ultimately seen as limited, especially when compared with their Egyptian peers (who in 1936 secured the reinstatement of the abrogated constitution). Absent a charismatic leader at their head, Palestinian youth are judged to remain second tier to the elites.64 The above is only the most rudimentary outline of the British and Zionist subscription to the effendi thesis, as this dissertation will show. Norman and Helen Bentwich, the first Attorney General of Palestine and his wife, make an apt summary comment - in hindsight - on the extent of the idea's circulation and hold over both colonial parties in Palestine:65

English statesmen and Zionist leaders equally underestimated in those years the strength of Arab nationalism. It was a fallacy that is was the work of a few agitators. It was a movement of whole peoples who were subject to foreign rule, and it had a religious intensity. Jewish settlers in the land, with some notable exceptions, were often blind to it, as forty years later the French colons were blind to the nationalist Arab movement in Algiers. The effendi thesis and the historiography of the early Palestinian national movement The effendi thesis has had wide repercussions on historiography and scholarship concerned with the Palestinian national movement during the Mandate era. Two general

34- versions of its propositions appear in the literature. The broadest depicts the national struggle as the fruit of elites and its course as determined by their activity. Other social forces, when acknowledged to have a role, are seen as adjunctive and subordinate to the elites. The second version of the effendi thesis is a sub-variant of the first. It retains the propositions of its epistemic parent, but adds a concentration on the figure of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who is seen as the true guide of the national movement, responsible for its direction and especially for its radicalization, even during his long years of tenure in service to the Mandatory regime.

With respect to the scholarly literature the thesis has ample exponents and defenders, especially among older works, many of which became standards in their respective languages. Although the thesis has been challenged, or more modestly nibbled away at, particularly with the accumulation of social history contributions since the 1990s, it is far from discredited and has appeared in recent works and even those styling themselves as revisionist accounts of the period or the Mandate era. Furthermore, those studies taking issue with the thesis often still fall back on elitist propositions and tropes or underplay the centrality of social transformation and popular mobilization in the 1930s. I will review them in turn, with an eye in particular to the treatment of the question of leadership during the revolt.

J.C. Hurewitz's The Struggle for Palestine (1950) was one of the earliest works to treat the national movement. It first argues that the movement's leadership was "almost exclusively… landed gentry," before going on to claim that it was a "virtual 35- preserve of the Husayni clan."66 The political sphere is limited to the circles of gentry and is generally portrayed as clannish and hobbled by disunity.67 The origins of the 1936 revolt are treated obliquely but elites are presented as at the helm of the strike while the second phase is more narrowly tied to the mufti's faction, with the rebels in the field acting as the "Husayni military arm."68

For decades the works of Yehoshua Porath have been among the most comprehensive and detailed studies available on the early Palestinian movement. Published in Hebrew in 1971 and translated into English in 1974, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918-1929 is one of the first academic Israeli works to explore the history of the Palestinians. It is remarkable both in its unprecedented detail and depth and for breaking with the then-reigning Israeli orthodoxy denying that the Palestinians were a separate national community. Trailblazing as it was, The Emergence is a picture portrait of Gerber's negative conception argument (that the lifeblood and fons et origo of Palestinian nationalism was opposition to Zionism) and of the effendi thesis model of Palestinian society. It argues that the Palestinian majority lacked a modern education and found nationalism an alien conceptual terrain and idiom.69 What moved the public was the physical appearance, comportment, and "strangeness" of the Jewish settlers, all of which created in the Arab masses a "hatred for Zionism."70 This xenophobia is what Porath deduces to lay at the core of Palestinian 36- nationalism, which emerged as a kind of ideological shadow and antithesis of Zionism.71

The Arab leadership, drawn from the landed class, were essentially hypocrites with a low degree of "national consciousness." They found relations with Zionism financially profitable (i.e. from selling land), but, in two-faced fashion, attempted to propagate opposition to Zionism among the general public. This didn't produce much in the way of results since the ignorant villagers were devoid of "political consciousness" or sensibilities.72 The schema of the work rotates greatly around the factionalist narrative of the majlisiyyin (supporters of the Supreme Muslim Council, or SMC, and the mufti; the Husaynis and their allies) and the mu'arada (the Opposition) and by ending at the 1929 revolt, underscores its author's subscription to the mufti thesis.

In his second work, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1929-1939, Porath takes the narrative forward without much revision to his prior framework. Unlike his first volume, this study does entertain a (brief) foray into sociology, looking at of a sampling of the fighters during the Great Revolt, but this type of lens is generally missing from the work which, rather than excavating the dynamic changes of the era, tends to reinforce a static view of Arab society. The result is a rather contradictory picture. For example, From Riots to Rebellion provides an incongruous view of peasants, at points reiterating their ostensible ignorance and apolitical disposition while at others emphasizing that their creeping dispossession and loss of lands contributed directly to the choice of many to take up arms or to support the 37- revolt.73 The explosion of activity among youth groups in the first half of the decade is surveyed, and their propensity to challenge the Arab elites in the AE rather than support them is noted, yet a significant segment is held to have come under the sway of the Istiqlal Party, which was predominantly led by a group of elite dissidents and youth.74

Overall, the narrative is saturated with the elite factionalist struggle, which is held, along with the cruelty, zealotry, and disunity of the rebels themselves, to have caused the downfall of the rebellion.75 At the work's center stands al-Hajj Amin, who is telologically portrayed as the man behind the curtain and secret heart of national movement and struggle long before the revolt, even as he is recognized as opposing or restraining violent and armed resistance beforehand.76

Within the Arabic historiography Bayan al-Hut's work is analogous in standing to Porath's. Her monumental al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat (1981) traces the rise and fall of what she regards as three leaderships during the Mandate, the second of which followed the dissolution of the AE in 1934 and lasted through the revolt. Although it does put forward some criticism of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni,77 this is all but drowned out by his consistent lionization as a man of great "political cunning" and unstinting nationalist ardor. This heroic narrative is unruffled by the his close association with the colonial state for most of his tenure as president (1922-37) of the Supreme Muslim Council, a parastatal religious bureaucracy created by the British, since he was, in this

38- telling, able to turn the SMC into a vital base of nationalist resistance.78 Mirroring Porath (if with a different inflection), she teleologically represents al-Hajj Amin as a permanent antagonist of British colonialism as well as Zionism, and attributes him with precipitating the 1929 uprising and leading the Great Revolt.79 Popular social forces are acknowledged to have initiated the general strike, which itself is seen as a moment of unparalleled mobilization and social unity, but the narrative residually slides back to highlight the place of elites and spends relatively little time on popular elements.80 For all of its considerable depth, her account plays scant attention to the ramifications of class distinctions among the Palestinians, and other than the elite schism between the Husayni and Nashashibi camps, it presents Arab society, somewhat like her interview subjects' answers, as generally united by mutual solidarities. The epic contest of the Jerusalemite factions is, it may be further noted, represented as a conflict between the patriotic heart of the movement (the Husayni faction) and elements loyal to the British (the Nashashibis and company) - in other words, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat is a majlisi history, par excellence.

Also published in 1981, Herev mi-bayit, Yuval Arnon-Ohana's study of the Palestinian national movement between 1929-39, rotates, as its subtitle broadcasts, around what the author calls "the internal struggle" that afflicted the movement. In several respects Arnon-Ohana's account comes to grips more forthrightly with the rise of new social forces and the contests they unleashed than does Porath, yet this advance is

39- marred by its modernization theory framework and its tendency to represent the national movement as a failure of its own making. Almost half of the work is devoted to the majlisi-Opposition divide ("the traditional camps"), but it subsequently moves on to survey what are called "urban extremist" forces in the 1930s (youth, the Istiqlal Party, the AWC, and the press). These forces broke with the hamula-based organizational framework of "the traditional camps" and challenged their leadership, though they never sought to directly unseat them.81 They became sources of initiative within the movement, brought it to oppose British rule, and are credited with precipitating the revolt.82 The modernization of Palestinian society and politics was ultimately blocked by the stubborn persistence of the hamula structure (partially in the form of familial factionalism), which remained the organizing principal and idiom of the countryside, and by the figure of the mufti, whose basis for authority was religious (i.e. unmodern).83 The revolt is represented as unremittingly violent and thuggish, its course doomed by the criminals and backwards peasants fighting in the fields, who all too quickly turned their weapons on their fellow Arabs, falling prey to the consumptions of the "internal struggle." The "internal terror" they unleashed was so virulent that it effectively extinguished the Palestinian national movement until its rebirth in the 1960s.84

In a review of some of the other Arabic works on the movement during the Mandate that are contemporaneous with al-Hut, Ted Swedenburg has argued that they

40- yield a dualistic view according to which "Palestinian peasants were always ready and eager to resist imperialism" but "they required guidance because they lacked political awareness." Their courage was paired with provincial and localist tendencies and a predisposition to demagoguery.85 Rural conservatism still required, in the final analysis, a more refined leadership. Several decades later one of the most comprehensive volumes on the revolt in Arabic, that by Shahada Musa, reiterates many of the themes critiqued by Swedenburg. Musa's sociological study, Thawrat 'am 1936 fi Filastin, offers a detailed and insightful look at the organization of the rebel movement and is sensitive to shifts in the positions of different social groups with respect to it. Its nuance is lost by the second phase of the revolt, when the deficient rural culture of the rebel commanders is credited with impeding the revolt's development and it is presumed that a competent military strategy was beyond their grasp.86 Its arguments about leadership in the revolt are conflicted, but the overarching proposition is that the "traditional leadership" was able to reimpose itself for want of an alternative during the first phase, only to clash, to a certain extent, with the tribalistic and provincial field commanders during its second phase.87 Like al-Hut's al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, Musa's study is

41- also majlisi history, naming the mufti as "spiritual father" and prime mover of the revolt in spite of the fact that its own narrative gainsays this.88

Among recent non-Arabic works purporting to offer revisionist histories of the Palestinians and the Mandate a surprising number simply recycle versions of the older narrative about the revolt. Some still unconsciously replicate the biases of their sources, presuming that the mufti and the elite organs represented the movement's leadership.89 Others substitute diminutive thumbnail suggestions and characterizations in place of serious analysis. Tom Segev, for example, describes the origins of the revolt as a "wave of violence" which angling elites then endeavored to give "the appearance of organized nationwide protest."90 Ilan Pappé, in what he styles as a fresh and unblinkered take on the Husayni family and the mufti, al-Hajj Amin, winds up reifying the standard narrative of the latter as the invisible hand behind the movement and of the family as the leadership of the Great Revolt.91

Not surprisingly, most survey histories show little interest in questioning the elite-driven paradigm of the national movement.92

42- The pat narratives in much of the literature that present Palestinian society as immanently hierarchical and captive to fractious cultural institutions and norms and its national movement as a top-down machine have long been subject to dissenting views. George Antonius, a former government officer who resigned and participated in the events of the revolt on the diplomatic side, wrote an eloquent and accurate riposte to the effendi thesis proponents during the uprising itself, which was unfortunately mostly ignored:93

One of the most prevalent misconceptions is that the trouble in Palestine is the result of an engineered agitation. It is variously attributed to the intrigues of the effendi class, to the political ambitions of the Grand Mufti…. The moving spirits in the revolt are not the nationalist institute leaders [sic]… but men from the working and agricultural classes…. Far from its being engineered by the leaders, the revolt is in a very marked way a challenge to their authority and an indictment of their methods.

One of the first subsequent works to provide an alternative accounting of the national movement during the 1930s was that of the famed Palestinian activist and litterateur, Ghassan Kanafani. In 1972 Kanafani published a short study of the Great Revolt, originally circulated as a pamphlet. In it he describes the national movement as headed by a "feudal-clerical" leadership that was initially pushed from below into the rebellion, but then managed to wrest control of it once it was underway.94 While the band leaders of the insurgency were peasants, they gave their loyalties, for the most part, to the mufti.95 Relying on a version of stagist Marxism in vogue at the time, Kanafani's broader argument deduces that Arab society's weaknesses owe its insufficient

43- advancement towards industrialization. This left it with a fledgling bourgeoisie and a small workers' movement, which, given the failure of the Arabization of the Communist Party, left no force substantial enough to displace the old "feudal-clerical" order and topple its elite.96 The two-dimensional view of Palestinian society as divided between an archaic leadership and a narrow segment of wage-laborers is complicated somewhat by his attention to an oppositional intelligentsia from the petit bourgeoisie and an illuminating discussion of insurgent popular culture before the revolt.

While Kanafani's Marxist teleology has not stood the test of time, numerous works have mirrored his supposition that the revolt began from the bottom up only to be commandeered by elites.97 In each the argument to varying extents holds that restive social forces were incapable of effectively institutionalizing their power and therefore gave way to the practiced hands of the elite. Kanafani's attention to Palestinian society as a class society has been followed by other examples, opening a fruitful new line of inquiry which at the very least complicates the standard depictions of the effendi model. Salim Tamari, in a 1982 study contrasting factionalism and class formation, echoes some of Kanafani's conclusions, arguing broadly that factionalism deflected and retarded the advance of class politics common to bourgeois societies.98 The Arab bourgeoisie's weakness, a function of its lack of control over the state and stiff Jewish competition,

44- along with the general impact of the Zionist challenge to Palestinian society, slowed and "thwarted" this process.99 The Arab movement was stunted by its elite leadership, which feared mass mobilization would threaten its own privileges and predominance.100 Counter-models to factionalist political mobilization existed (the Istiqlal and the Communist Party) but they were too weak to alter the balance of forces.101 Against this framework, moments such as the 1936 general strike and peasant upsurge during the insurgency in 1938 constitute unusual episodes in which "class 'intrusions'" broke through the factional matrix organizing Palestinian society and its politics.102

The model of a blocked dialectic regarding bourgeois development that is evident in Tamari's essay is present in a range of other works. Taqqu's examination of the labor movement in Palestine (1977) takes class formation as a framework for assessing the growing "imbalances" within Palestinian society produced by the Mandate and the changes they caused to its social structure, rearranging the relations of the "traditional elites" and "the mass of the population."103 The dislocation of peasants and their conversion into wage-laborers was a highly fraught process full of alienation and social ambivalence but early labor unions and activism was small in relative scale and thus did not break the power of elites.104 A proper working class only emerged in the 1940s.105

Prior to this labor mobilization played an "essentially negative" role politically, as 45- witnessed by its contribution to the "inarticulate and primitive rebellion" of 1936-1939, which she reads as representing widespread opposition to social change.106

Most other examinations of class formation similarly conclude that given the small scale of organized labor in the 1930s, it wasn't until the 1940s that the process of proletarianization had proceeded far enough to yield a vital working class element within society. Issa Khalaf, for instance, argues that Palestinian society was "on the brink of disintegration" by the late 1940s as its agrarian social economy was eroded by large landowners, the Mandate, and Zionism, yielding "disjointed urban-working-class development" and centrifugal tendencies.107 Arab labor emerges as a cohesive force only in the 1940s, but its place in the insurgent movement in the 1930s is noted and the rebellion's social context as a reaction to "peasant destitution and political and social tension in Arab society" is acknowledged, as is its subaltern character as a peasant revolt.108 Older scholarship is, at times, even more skeptical of substantive class transformation before the 1940s.109

To summarize, a good deal of the literature on class formation highlights the absence of a large, urbanized organized labor movement in the 1930s and uses organized labor as a barometer of social change, thereby marginalizing the much larger 46- disorganized quotient of the nascent proletariat and underestimating the extent of transformation. Almost all of the texts noted here see class as generating significant political change, and many see class effusions in the revolt. Only Khalaf and Tamari, in varying respects, see lower class challenges to elite power as critical developments in examining the rebellion.

A second set of narratives that revise and the classic effendi thesis propose that Palestinian society did undergo extensive social change under the Mandate, as a result of which the middle classes and/or elites (the political class) lost control of the movement during the revolt. These works tend to distinguish between the strike phase of the revolt, which they narrate as initiated or quickly commandeered by politicians, and the insurgency phase, in which the peasant fighters and their lower class allies exceeded the control of the elites. Ann Lesch offers an exemplary illustration, setting out broad arguments that I have taken up here. Dividing her account of the national movement before 1940 into two phases, that of mobilization from above and that from below, she distills the emergence of the latter with great clarity:110

At the end of the 1920s, the nationalist movement shifted from organization and mobilization from above - by the elite - to mobilization from below. Youth, labor, scouts, and middle-class groups pressured the elite to act more militantly. These groups responded to the considerable disruption in Palestinian society by drawing support from the dispossessed farmers living in shantytowns around the main cities, the artisans and traders who feared Jewish competition, and the under- and unemployed educated youths. They challenged the established leadership, prodded it into increasingly militant tactics by the mid-1930s, and formed the backbone of the 1936 general strike and 1937-1939 revolt. 47- Narratively, however, Lesch spends little time exploring the new actors whose importance she emphasizes, and the chapter on mobilization from below turns largely back to elites after its first seven pages.111 She accords responsibility to the popular social forces in managing the quotidian affairs of the strike, but depicts it as a venture of politicians who then lose control of the movement during the second phase of the insurrection from 1937-1939.112

May Seikaly's social history of Haifa under the Mandate follows along much the same lines. Focused on one of the key port cities it is attuned to the depth of displacement taking place in the countryside since peasants migrating in search of livelihoods came to dwell in slums there, from which a serious current of unrest emerged, most famously around shaykh 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam.113 Seikaly's sociological lens also draws out the increasing prominence of youth in the Haifa region, providing a fascinating and unique account of the context of the wider youth trend's origins and acknowledging its political influence on the eve of the revolt.114 The rebellion's inception lay with "radicalized urban politicians" who attempted to reunite society under the banner of "civil disobedience" on a magnum scale. While only tentatively producing an elusive social unity (via the AHC) it did succeed in upsetting the traditional factional 48- camps in Palestinian society and "flung the social order into upheaval."115 By its second phase the revolt was "hijacked by rural-based activists and sometimes makeshift leaders" and "lawlessness" and "fratricide" came to prevail as less sophisticated and more conservative social elements predominated.116

In a third sample of this variety, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal's The Palestinian People, some of the contradictions of simultaneously straddling the effendi paradigm and seeing past it are on display. Like the other texts in this group, the prominence and militancy of youth is recognized and they are held to be a fiery nationalist vanguard.117 On the other hand, they resurrect the classical understanding of the Palestinian politics when they declare: "Palestinian Arab political leadership during the mandate was the province of the Jerusalem ayan [a'yan: notables]."118 The rebellious undercurrents are discussed as having their own genesis and as challenging the social order and the elite leadership but at the same time the notables are said to have unparalleled influence: "none rivaled their ability to fashion a popular national movement out of a rapidly changing population."119 Adding to the confusion, the mufti is seen as playing a role as a pillar of the colonial order and, again undermining the view of the popular movement of the early 1930s that they develop, as single-handedly able to "determine the character of the emerging Palestinian political framework."120 The strike is attributed to the AHC, which usurped the popular energies that initiated it, but after

49- the exile of major components of the nationalist movement from the middle and upper classes (in 1937), their influence over events was eclipsed. Their enforced distance from events left the peasant formations to conduct themselves as "traditional rural gangs."121

This body of texts engages with the sociology of change in Palestinian society beyond the agrarian sphere and the working classes. It does so in varying depth, but represents works broadly cognizant of multi-faceted social change that see a new politics developing in the 1930s. It generally accepts the notion that the AHC represented the rebel movement's leadership in the strike phase of the uprising, and that as it was banned by the colonial state in 1937, this entity faded from view and peasants, whom each work deprecates or slights to some extent, gained significant control of the struggle. The final group of critics of the effendi thesis more or less take it on head-on and cleave to analyses of the 1930s that emphasize the popular ferment of the era and the popular leadership of the revolt. Rather than recapitulating their individual arguments, I will point here to some lingering problems with their depictions of popular politics. Mustafa Kabha, in a 2003 study of the Palestinian press during the 1930s, sheds a good deal of light on the emergence of the youth trend and the inversive dynamics that had upended the position of the elites and rendered them subject to the will of popular forces. In spite of this the work flirts with the idea that the uprising in 1936 was spontaneous and disconnects the radical activism in the first half of the 1930s from the revolt.122

Instead, unduly privileging its subject, it posits that the press was the only agency of 50- Palestinian society capable of inducing mass cross-class mobilization, and also argues (without proof) that members of the press came to play directive roles during the strike through acting on the national committees that superintended over it in their respective locales.123 The exaggerated role accorded to the press terminated after 1936, when it came under new pressures from both the colonial state and the peasant rebels.

Weldon Matthews has argued in his study of the Istiqlal, the first political party based on ideology rather than family, that the popular politics and upsurge of the 1930s has much to do with its brand of strident nationalism and ardent opposition to British rule. The party was itself a small, vanguardist formation that skillfully used the press, dialogically engaged the public, and attentively cultivated the younger generation. The problem with this narrative, much as with Kabha's study, lies in the excessive weight and influence attributed to its subject, which was a tiny, closed and mostly elite, if very vocal and energetic, group. Developments in the 1930s were more myriad than Matthews's argument allows and the Istiqlal was not the only example, or the fountainhead, of militancy during the period, but one of several. The party's short institutional life (1932-33) and splintered activity after its demise also weighs against the notion that the revolt was Istiqlalist in provenance.

Finally, Haim Gerber's Remembering and Imagining Palestine is a unique study, thoroughly iconoclastic towards the effendi thesis to which it and other works by the same author have called attention. Gerber adopts Gelvin's argument (see below) that pursuant to world market integration, capitalist development, and administrative 51- centralization during the late Ottoman era, Palestine gave rise to a populist mode of politics in the interwar period.124 Strangely, however, the work does not pick up on Gelvin's stress on horizontal social mobilization. Thus while staunchly critical of elitist histories, Remembering and Imagining Palestine gives curiously short shrift to the development of the youth trend in the first half of the 1930s while at another moment attributing Akram Zu'aytir, an indefatiguable youth partisan and Istiqlalist, with the lion's share of the credit for activism in the same period.125 Even more askance from its theoretical leanings, Gerber depicts elite social influence as largely undisturbed, even as their leadership was challenged, and at other points inadvertently presents Palestinian society as stagnant, rather than dynamic, ignoring the effects of the restructuring it had undergone since the late Ottoman period.126 The coup de grace of contradictions within the work is its evaluation that the factional schism of the Jerusalemite elites, manipulated by the British in the 1920s, became the resounding "tragedy" of the Palestinians before 1948 and "the major political issue of the… Mandate period."127

Appreciative of the many works that have challenged the effendi thesis this dissertation takes a novel approach to the question of social and political leadership in Mandate Palestine. As a study intent on mapping the interactions between different 52- socio-political constituencies within Palestinian society, it strives to develop a rigorous understanding their interrelations with one another. I have taken inspiration in this endeavor from both the Subaltern Studies school of historiography (in its original Gramscian mode) and the relational paradigm in studies of the Mandate that has argued that the Palestinians and the yishuv were co-constituted political communities.128 In this light the present inquiry argues for the need to rethink conventional notions of leadership within Palestinian society and its national movement. It proposes that leadership should be seen less as an attribute or possession of certain individuals or classes, and more as a shifting and dynamic process of complex social interaction based in contingent factors and changing circumstances. It holds, in other words, leadership to be relational, existing between different groups in a fluid state, ever capable of changing hands. Political leadership, for purposes of clarity, is further understood herein to pertain to the capacity to alter or maintain the strategic orientation, tactics, tempo, and resolve of the movement. The framework for the contestation of political leadership, as set out here, is mass politics, to which we now turn.

Mass politics as a category of analysis

As Manu Goswami compellingly argues in Producing India, studies of nationalism have long been beset by a significant array of methodological blinders. 53- Although her concentration is on the presupposing of the nation-form, and particularly its key constituent elements, national space and national economy, her argument for a rigorous understanding of the sociohistorical production of such taken for granted and naturalized components of nationalist fields applies as well, I believe, to the development of national politics as a mass vocation and site of horizontal social mobilization.129 Just as conceptions of national space and national economy attained the status of preconceived, self-evident categories for nationalist movements, and subsequently for scholars of nationalism, mass politics is usually treated as another piece of the nationalist template, undeserving of more careful scrutiny and largely invisible as a novel development within the production of nationalisms. Thus in the case of Palestinian Arabs, histories of the Mandate sometimes narrate a bulge of new actors (labor, women, youth) or old actors in new roles (peasants) in the 1930s, but their altered place and increased prominence within politics is not seen as worth much consideration, other than as measures of the deteriorating circumstances and rising desperation of the community. Moreover, their entry is certainly not seen as part of the birth of a new mode of politics. This is not solely or primarily an effect of the elitism discussed above, but also of a pronounced tendency to see nationalist politics as an inherently expansive, even inclusive field in which new actors or new social roles were steadily accreted and integrated in a semi-automatic fashion, without substantive changes, other than in scale, to the field itself. This tendency to presume and naturalize the expansion of the nationalist field mistakes an inherent capacity for its historical actualization. In doing 54- so, it leaves the quality of that actualization - its effects on the wider political field - underspecified, and thus fails to register the magnitude of the transformations wrought by mass political participation.130

Few works in the literature on the Arab Middle East during the late Ottoman era take mass politics as an analytic category, historically specific in its formation. Many see mass political participation as a transparent, preconstituted given of modern politics. The few studies that do engage it more directly as a category tend to equate it with new forms of social and political activism that rely on large or increasing numbers of persons and expand the political sphere beyond the realm of elites and notables. Rashid Khalidi, for instance, provides an example of this, writing that: "From 1908 until 1914, bilad al-sham, for the first time, was the scene of press freedom, hotly contested election campaigns, active political parties and secret societies, and public speaking before meetings, rallies, and private groups - in short, the beginning of the era of modern mass politics." This new milieu created by the Young Turk revolution weakened the notables' classic role in political mediation and opened space for new voices, Arabist in tenor, to challenge them.131 Joel Beinin has tied the phenomenon to a more expansive list of factors: new forms of labor organizing and activism (unions, syndicates, and strikes); the growth of street protests; the spread of new modernist discourses, norms, and social forms (among them nationalism, liberalism, women's liberation, socialism, and 55- secularism); novel understandings and ideological appropriations of the peasantry as a social force; and the reshaping of subjectivities to which these developments gave rise.132 More recently, and as noted above, Weldon Matthews has lent great weight to the public sphere and to the use of the print media by the Istiqlal Party to sway the Arab public against the British regime.133

While each of these three descriptions clearly adduces elements of a new political framework, James Gelvin's work relating the emergence of mass politics to capitalist development has been the closest point of departure for the analysis pursued here. More explicitly than the preceding authors, Gelvin has argued that the social architecture for the mass political activity that characterized the post-Ottoman era in the region required the erosion of pre-existing vertical networks of social power and influence (the notable families) and their replacement by the growth of horizontal identities, affinities, and organization. This signal development - key to engendering new modes of politics and political sociability - was by no means absolute, and in fact in Syria, Palestine and elsewhere it was manifestly incomplete and partial, leaving older vehicles for the organization of political action competing with a new ethos, the basis of which accumulated more weight, density, and significance as the class transformation of society progressed. Gelvin further locates the move towards horizontal social organization within the modernization of state capacities during the Tanzimat period of the late Ottoman empire. The institutional developments undertaken over many decades 56- to bolster the central state gave rise to "disciplinary and representational regimens" that were conducive to novel forms of ideological and discursive organicism. From this milieu a "culture of nationalism" took root that was distinct from and an essential precursor to the nationalisms that subsequently arose in the remainder of the empire. These sociological and ideational shifts laid the groundwork for the simultaneous emergence in the Syrian case of mass politics and territorial nationalism (wataniyya).134

The popular resistance to the looming French invasion of Syria is of great interest for the study of later events in Palestine, and as Gelvin has argued, the two bear some significant likenesses. In the Syrian example, anti-colonialism did not take the form of the "reactive collective actions" (e.g. tax strikes, village abandonment, etc.) examined by Charles Tilly.135 The assembly and proliferation of popular committees taking up the banner of "national defense" against imperialism relied on cross-class networks of those who were not the primary beneficiaries of capitalist development - middling merchants, 'ulama, artisans, workers, and others. The popular committees drew on pre-existing community networks and relationships within urban quarters and villages to produce "a formal structure that was congruent with daily practice."136 The discourse of the resistance was shot through with "traditionalizing" themes and symbols whose outward appearance belied their novel employment as components of a nationalist field that 57- melded older and newer idioms and discourses of identity and community to yield what Ted Swedenburg has described in the context of the Great Revolt in Palestine as a "fairly unified ideological discourse, such that each element fulfilled a role of condensation with respect to the others and each one operated as a symbol of all the others."137 The strong sociological and ideological bases of the resistance promoted widespread organization and mobilization and direct opposition to the quiescent agenda of the Faysali government.138 In both this and the Palestinian case, as Gelvin underscores, the crises bearing down on the Syrian and Palestinian societies brought about the coalescence of popular movements, unmoored from elite control, that not only sought to defend their communities against colonial encroachment, but aimed to reshape them and revivify their bonds of mutuality and social solidarity.139 They were, in other words, properly social as well as political movements.

In Palestine the coming of the Great Revolt has often been narrated in one of two fashions: either as a spontaneous explosion of popular discontent140 or as the culmination of a series of "popular movements" since 1929 that believed in the cause of revolutionary violence and strove to raise an insurrection.141 The former erroneously 58- disconnects the revolt from the intense ferment of the years between 1929 and 1936 and ignores or misunderstands its bases in the growing mobilization of popular social forces. It also fails to adequately explain how a rebellion lasting roughly three years and passing through a complex series of phases could spring to life and be sustained for such a prolonged period, despite the tremendous human and economic costs entailed. The second narrative outwardly holds some greater degree of plausibility, stringing together various currents and moments to reveal the continuous pulse of a revolutionary core within the Palestinian community. It is rather reductive, however, collapsing the prior history of the popular currents that drove the revolt into a predilection for violence and armed struggle. This teleological reading elides the diversity of mobilization and activism that preceded the rebellion, which moved through several phases and trajectories and cannot easily be compressed into a unilinear narrative of marching toward revolutionary violence.

Informed by a host of historical and sociological work on the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as my own archival work, this dissertation argues against both of the above explanations for the Great Revolt. Inspired by innovative scholarship on the Mexican Revolution, I suggest that the uprising is less accurately apprehended when it is discussed and approached as merely an event or series of events in the conventional sense. Instead, this project contends that the revolt should be seen as the crystallization of a set of ongoing social processes.142 Beyond the contingent events that sparked the 59- first and second phases of the revolt, its origins lay in the broad interrelated developments that characterized the 1930s: class formation and reformation (the dispossession of the lower peasantry and the expansion of the peasantariat), the growth of the new horizontal associational culture, the discrediting of the diplomatic strategy of elites within the national movement and the consequent radicalization of the anti- colonial struggle, and an impulse towards the embodiment of popular sovereignty.143 Much like the developments that undergirded the popular resistance to the French conquest in Syria, these processes forged the basis for protracted rebellion in Palestine, driven from below.

I argue in a further departure from the literature that the revolt was not a singularity. There are at least three senses in which this is so. For obvious reasons the Great Revolt has generally been portrayed primarily in its anti-colonial dimension, however this has been understood (i.e. as anti-Zionist, anti-British or both). This was indisputably the clearest and most agreed-upon cause of the uprising as its partisans saw it. Yet the turmoil it caused and the ardor it provoked provided openings for a second directionality within the rebellion, shaped by the social circumstances of the popular forces. This second axis within the rebellion spoke to the desires of the marginalized for social justice, for the amelioration of their oppressions, and for their social, cultural, and economic elevation. It was this impulse that lent the revolt its distinctive social coloring - essentially a peasant rebellion for much of its life - and animated simmering 60-insurrectionary tendencies against the class order of Arab society that manifested, late in the revolt, in a nascent social revolution.143

On the last see chapters 3 and 7-10. What can be said for the moment is that a shift took place from attempting to negotiate sovereignty to attempting to take sovereignty, or symbolic quotients of it, through novel forms of direct action.The second sense has to do with the notion of the revolt as a cohesive phenomenon. Again, for reasons that are plain - the consistent upheaval and its dramatic scale and means - the different phases of the rebellion have been considered parts of a unity. While this certainly makes sense, it somewhat occludes the fact that the revolt didn't take a stable, consistent shape. It was, rather, manifold in its dimensions and its several phases weren't self-identical or uniform. The three most easily identifiable sub-periods within the revolt accord with the general strike in 1936, the interregnum during the Royal Commission's inquiry, and a renewed and expanded insurgency from 1937-39. Each of these sub-periods in turn is further divisible into more discrete moments. The insurgency phase (1937-39), for instance, consisted of an initial interval of rebel reorganization, followed by a period of rebel ascent when the uprising's partisans took over much of the country, and finally its conclusive moment during which the British regained the upper hand and beat back the revolt. The point in illustrating the fractal or discontinuous nature of the revolt is to suggest that attention to its internal diversity yields a richer, deeper view of the composite. Each of the phases and moments were based in different tactical repertoires and, to varying extents, consisted of different, interrelated cycles of contention and collective action. Each also mobilized or relied on the resources of different constituencies within the population in changing combinations. The approach taken here is to attempt to disaggregate the Great Revolt in order to both probe the contours of the phases and their sub-periods more 61- closely and to understand more fully how they interrelate with one another.144

Finally, attention to the changing dynamics of the revolt's different phases and sub-components raises questions concerning its motive forces and the relations between the shifting constellation of actors shaping the rebellion and pushing it forward. The effendi thesis presents the revolt as something on the order of a well-ordered machine where the nationalist elites more or less controlled or directed the rest of society, with dissent only coming from the Opposition faction and perhaps from other elites or merchants outside the nationalists' circle. This dissertation presents an altogether different picture. In place of the (implicit and explicit) portraits of unity offered alternately by colonialist and nationalist histories, it excavates class, generational, and geographic tensions that cross-cut the uprising. My intention, lest there be any confusion, is not to reinforce older images of the revolt as a kind of bottomless pit of chaos and disorder, or of the Palestinians as hopelessly and fatefully divided among themselves. Rather, as set out above, it is to take up a mode of approach similar to the early Subaltern Studies school and to critically examine the internal sociology of the nationalist movement and the interactions between elites and non-elites within the nationalist field.145

62- In reexamining the 1930s era through the lens of mass politics this study aims to bring to light some of the hidden and occluded dimensions of the movement's history during the period. This work would not be possible without the prior contributions to the field of Palestinian social history that have ranged over peasants (Rosemary Sayigh; Ted Swedenburg; Munir Fakher Eldin), workers and labor (Rachelle Taqqu; Zachary Lockman), the women's movement (Ellen Fleischmann), popular politics (Weldon Matthews; Rana Barakat), the press (Mustafa Kabha), and intellectual culture (Salim Tamari).146 This rather partial and incomplete list underscores the flowering of an alternative perspective on Palestinian society that does not read its elite cast of politicians and their varied careers of interactions with the British as the sum of Palestinian history. By exploring the voices and experiences of non-elites these works broaden our sense of the diversity, complexity, and richness of Palestinian society and history. In advancing the optic of mass politics and by tracking the trajectories of youth, peasants, and the peasantariat this dissertation aims to help push scholarly inquiry farther

63- down the road away from what Sherene Seikaly has referred to as the "flattened topography" of a society all too frequently imagined to be composed of only a self- obsessed wealthy upper stratum and groveling indigent masses.147

Sources, methodology, and plan of the work

This dissertation is based primarily in archival research conducted in Israel and Britain, supplemented by published documents collections, memoirs, diaries, chronicles, and secondary sources. Palestinian Arab documents, usually captured by British or Israeli forces during the revolt and in the latter case during the 1948 war as well, appear in virtually all of the archives I utilized though very much as minor collections within their holdings. Even with published Arabic-language materials added to these the balance of the primary materials used here are British and Zionist, the dual colonial forces that thwarted the Palestinians' drive to self-determination. This poses some obvious and much-commented upon problems for the researcher.

Each broad group of primary sources - Palestinian, Zionist, and British - raises issues that must be considered in thinking about historical investigation and writing, as has already been broadly noted above. My method here has drawn in the first place on the techniques of reading the colonial archive against the grain advocated by the first incarnation of Subaltern Studies scholarship.148 The current study is, however, not a study of consciousness or forms of thought, but of political practice and of the social, 64- political, and economic transformations shaping such. I have also drawn on Edward Said's model of "contrapuntal reading" across discrepant experiences, discourses and histories. The latter stresses two operations: first, the need to read contrasting and discordant accounts together and against each other, dialectically; and second reading for the excluded terms and contexts silently animating and shaping any text.149

I have tried to muster these approaches to handle the various sources here both with care and as an ensemble, none of the components of which are individually unproblematic and each of which assists in opening up the others to reveal more about the contexts in which they were produced than they would alone. That being said, I have not wanted to write a history of the Palestinians without the Palestinians themselves and have, to the best of my ability, used Palestinian sources whenever they have been available from the archival work underlying this research. This has not in any way been a foolproof process and has inevitably led to some gaps that I hope to work to fill in the future.150 I have tried to be as mindful as possible about this given the limitations of the research I have conducted.

The work is broken into three segments. In the first I trace the coalescence of what I call the youth trend, which became the most numerous and arguably most influential constituency within Palestinian society in the first half of the 1930s. Chapter 1 looks briefly at the pre-history of the youth trend and the Palestinian national movement before 1928, when the Young Men's Muslim Association was formed. It 65- examines youth initiative before and after the explosive 1929 uprising and narrates the death of the elites' agenda of honorable cooperation with the government. Chapter 2 rotates around the Youth Congress and the Istiqlal Party, both of which were established in 1932 and both of which played integral roles in turning the national movement's attentions from Zionism to the British regime backing it. The chapter looks at the growing interest in the plight of the fellahin and at the first fruits of anti-British mobilization in 1933. In chapter 3 the narrative delves deeper into the changing sociology of the youth trend, surveying its diversity and exploring the effects of the proliferating new models of youth on subject formation and nationalist culture. It also traces a series of tactical experiments youth embarked on after the 1933 demonstrations, illustrating their increasing pull on the national field and their drift towards continued confrontation with British authority and colonial rule.

The second segment of the project looks at the plight of the countryside and the agrarian majority. Breaking from the chronology of the first segment, chapter 4 rewinds to establish the basic context from the late Ottoman era, excavating the deep and systemic changes within the political economy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the attendant changes in social relations. It narrates the effects of world market integration, administrative centralization, and the origins of capitalism in Palestine, which gave rise to accelerating class differentiation and stratification, the reshaping of the elite (via the political and economic ascent of merchants), and the coarsening of bonds between segments of this new elite and the peasant producers. In chapter 5 the narrative turns to look at how the British advantaging of Zionism and

66- assumptions about the backwardness of Palestinian society and Ottoman-era social structures exacerbated the indebtedness of the peasantry and produced, contrary to all intents, a burgeoning, alienated landless class. In chapter 6 we turn to examine how peasants handled the dislocations and stresses of British rule, which led them to oppose the colonial order and the Jewish National Home policy and stimulated deep disaffection towards their erstwhile elite patrons, whose social standing slid as the conditions of the agriculturalists deteriorated. Complementing chapter 5's analysis of growing rural dispossession chapter 6 looks at the transformation of the peasantry through the lens of the peasantariat, following their struggles with the precarious conditions of life in urban slums and outlining the persistence of chronic un- and underemployment among Arabs. It ends with a look at the emergence of al-Qassam's revolutionary underground network as a product of this milieu.

The final segment of the dissertation examines the Great Revolt. Chapter 7 illustrates how the initiative of popular forces consistently outpaced and outmaneuvered the elites by 1936, bringing about the general strike and the formation of a new organizational infrastructure for the national struggle, the contours of which were shaped by popular militancy. Under the banner of the movement's desiderata popular forces progressively escalated the conflict with colonial rule. The colonial state's repression helped to engender urban and especially rural insurgency, but its augmentation and repurposing of preexisting practices of collective punishment - its principle counterinsurgency tools - failed to break the movement. Chapter 8 surveys the return of elites to influence during the Peel Commission inquiry, the intensification of the

67- factional schism brought about by the prospect of the country's partition (which the Opposition largely backed), and the continued anti-colonial mobilization of elements related to al-Qassam's network. The government's approval of the Royal Commission's recommendation for partition and the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine led to a renewal of the uprising under more difficult conditions than pertained in 1936 and with less initial support. Chapter 9 investigates how rebel institutions - comprising a nascent counter-state - were critical to the survival, spread, and intensification of the insurgent movement. It highlights the place of the rebel regime's intelligence, taxation, and judicial branches, probes the relationship between the rebel movement and its exilic backers (the CCJ and the mufti's network), and assesses the social revolutionary turn that accompanied the apex of rebel influence in late summer and early fall 1938.

Chapter 10 provides an accounting of the movement's suppression and retreat beginning in late 1938. It tracks how a series of escalating pressures arrayed against the revolt, including the doubling of security forces and the development of a novel regime of rolling mass incarceration (tied to search operations in villages and urban centers), diminished the rebel movement's ability to take sanctuary from the colonial state's burgeoning offensive while increasing the costs to the population of the insurgency. External pressures amplified disorder and tensions within the rebel formations and led to the contraction of the counter-state and increasing chaos within society. In the midst of this decline, the British government's return to diplomacy (via the 1939 roundtable talks with Jews and Arabs) helped break popular resolve and pushed the beleaguered movement towards its final end.

Notes

1 For citations pertaining to the account of the 1933-34 demonstrations related here, see chapter 2. Mughannam's speech is noted in Ellen Fleischmann, The Nation and Its "New" Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 122. 2 Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1929-1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), p. 39.
3 For close accounts of the early years of the national movement, see Abdul-Wahhab Kayyali, Palestine: A Modern History (London: Croom Helm, 1978); Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat al- siyasiyyah fi Filastin, 1917-1948 (Acre: Dar al-Aswar, 1981); and Sahar Huneidi, A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001). See also Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1918-1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974) and Ann M. Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917-1939: The Frustration of a Nationalist Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
4 See chapter 2 for a more detailed explanation of the casualty data.
5 Lesch, Arab Politics, p. 107.
6 This was one major exception to the grassroots directionality of the new horizontal formations, and owing to both entrenched patriarchal cultural norms and the enduring social distance between the founders of the women's movement and the non-elite majority, particularly that of the countryside, it remained an elite bastion and did not replicate the mass forms of sociability and membership seen by the other social forces considered here.
7 Elites competed over and attempted to coopt the new horizontal associations, but the changes in political sociability and the scale of horizontal organization were too great for them to fully subordinate or gain mastery over. See chapters 1-3.
8 Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), p. xl.
9 These issues are treated in chapter 1.
10 Rachelle Leah Taqqu, "Arab Labor in Mandatory Palestine, 1920-1948," Ph.D. dissertation (Columbia University, 1977), p. 4.
11 James Gelvin, "The Other Arab Nationalism: Syrian/Arab Populism in Its Historical and International Contexts" in Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 233.
12 See below.
13 Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement; Lesch, Arab Politics; Ylana Miller, Government and Society in Rural Palestine, 1920-1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Harvard UP, 2003 [1994]); Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure" in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), p. 12-36; Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Khalidi makes the most concerted and robust argument in this respect.
14 I am indebted to the insights of Sherene Seikaly and Munir Fakher Eldin on failure narratives. See, for instance, the critique in Seikaly, "Meatless Days: Consumption and Capitalism in Wartime Palestine, 1939-1948," Ph.D. dissertation (New York University, 2007), p. 1-25.
15 Gerber does not refer to an effendi thesis or even to any general thesis binding the works he critiques. Nevertheless I think this is precisely what he analyzes and my argument here is indebted to his historiographic and epistemological interventions, particularly "Zionism, Orientalism, and the Palestinians," Journal of Palestine Studies v. 33, n. 1 (Fall 2003), p. 23-41, and Remembering and Imagining Palestine: Identity and Nationalism from the Crusades to the Present (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
16 On the definition of effendi in the Palestinian context Adel Manna' has usefully referred to them as "intellectual capital holders": "Scholars and Notables: Tracing the Effendiya's Hold on Power in 18th- Century Jerusalem," Jerusalem Quarterly v. 8, n. 1 (Autumn 2007), p. 6.
17 Gerber, Remembering and Imagining Palestine, p. 1
18 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Press, 1986).
19 Gerber, Remembering and Imagining, p. 4.
20 Ibid., p. 1. The quote is Gerber's but the genealogical attribution made here is my own.
21 Ylana Miller has described several works, including that used here by 'Isa al-Sifri, as cleaving to such a narrative: Government and Society, p. 21.
22 Bayan N. al-Hout [al-Hut], "The Palestinian Political Elite During the Mandate Period," Journal of Palestine Studies v. 9, n. 1 (Autumn 1979), p. 100-01.
23 Walid al-Khalidi, introduction to Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, al-Difa' 'an Haifa wa-qadiyat Filastin: mudhakkirat Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, 1891-1953 (Beirut: Mu'assasat al-dirasat al-Filastiniyya, 2005), p. xl.
24 Also sometimes translated as "anchoring point," this is a concept drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis which describes a point that unifies and stabilizes meaning within an ideological field. Lacan summarized it as "the point of convergence that enables everything that happens [within a given] discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively." See Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-56, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), p. 258-70 (quote from 268).
25 For the evolving positions of Zu'aytir and al-Shuqayri towards the mufti see chapters 2 and 7-9.
26 Walter Lacqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. 244.
27 Ibid., p. 232, 247.
28 Ibid., p. 232, 245-46. This narrative, predicated on disdain for the lower living standards of the Arab masses and for the ostensibly feudal bonds between Arab lords and peasants, ignores demands made to secure the fellahin against dispossession, such as circulated in pamphlets around the time of the Arab conference in Paris in 1913 (ibid., p. 225).
29 See Kayyali, Palestine, p. 22-42 and especially Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (NY: Columbia UP, 1997), p. 119-75.
30 For a review, see Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 21-57.'
31 The Zionist Organization was the parent of the international Zionist movement and the Jewish Agency was the pseudo-government of the yishuv in Palestine, often dubbed a "state within the state" that was empowered according to the Mandate charter to run a host of affairs. It took its name in 1929 and was previously known as the Zionist Commission and the Zionist Executive. On the establishment of a Jewish role in governance under the British, see the Mandate charter, articles 2, 4, and 11, reproduced in: Walter Lacqueur, ed., The Israel-Arab Reader (New York: Bantam Books, 1971 [1969]), p. 35, 37.
32 Quoted in Huneidi, A Broken Trust, p. 31.
33 Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, p. 61-63.
34 Ibid., p. 63, 78-79. This is not to say that organizing with Arabs was popular. As several scholars have shown, the Labor movement refused to get "joint work," as it was sometimes called, off the ground, much less prioritize it. Lockman provides the most extensive discussion of this in Comrades and Enemies. See also Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 118-31 and David de Vries, "Proletarianization and National Segregation: Haifa in the 1920s," Middle Eastern Studies v. 40, n. 4 (Oct 1994), p. 860-82.
35 See chapter 1.
36 Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 18. Tempering his recognition of the Arab movement as nationalist, he distinguished between its "moral" quality, which he deemed inferior, and that of Zionism, which exhibited noble ideals (ibid.). For more on the thinking of Ben-Gurion and other Labor leaders in this period see Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881- 1948 (Stanford UP [Oxford UP], 1992), p. 173-94 and Avraham Sela, "The 'Wailing Wall' Riots (1929) as a Watershed in the Palestine Conflict," Muslim World v. 84, n. 1-2 (Jan-April 1994), p. 83-92.
37 Lacqueur, History of Zionism, p. 247. See also Lockman, Comrades and Enemies.
38 Yehoyada Haim, Abandonment of Illusions: Zionist Political Attitudes Toward Palestinian Arab Nationalism, 1936-1939 (Westview, 1983), p. 133.
39 Quoted in Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), p. 6.
40 Shapira, Land and Power, p. 227; Haim, Abandonment, p. 35. Hashomer Hatz'air went even farther and blamed the British for stirring up the revolt. These parties were among the only that still insisted that Arab and Jewish laborers had common interests.
41 Shapira, Land and Power, p. 231-33. Labor Zionism had rhetorically championed the anti-fascist cause, hence in the increasingly dichotomous atmosphere of the 1930s, the Arabs were quickly analogized to fascism. This was not so much the case with the Revisionists, however, who sometimes adulated and even sought to emulate fascist leaders and politics. Among the many works on the subject, see Lacqueur, History of Zionism, p. 338-83; Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators: A Reappraisal (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books [Croom Helm], 1983) and idem, "Zionist-Revisionism: The Years of Fascism and Terror," Journal of Palestine Studies v. 13, n. 1 (autumn 1983), p. 66-92; Colin Schindler, The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud, and the Zionist Dream (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), p. 7-35
42 Masalha, Expulsion, p. 19
43 Philip Mattar provides a useful discussion of the mufti's eventual turn to Nazi Germany in The Mufti of Jerusalem: al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), p. 86-107.
44 Todd (WO) to Downie (CO), 9.9.38, PRO - CO 733/366/4. Oddly, the War Office vouched for this fabrication to the Colonial Office.
45 Ezra Danin, Introduction to the first edition, in E. Danin and Ya'acov Shimoni eds., Te'udot u-demuyot mi-ginize ha-kanufiyot ha-'Araviyot ba-me'ore'ot 1936-39 (Jerusalem: Harry Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University and Magnes Press of Hebrew University, 1981 [originally Tel Aviv: the Hebrew Defender, 1944]), p. viii-ix. I have maintained the spelling of the editors names as it appears on the English title page to the work.
46 Te'udot u-demuyot.
47 Ya'acov Shimoni, Arvei Eretz Yisrael (Tel Aviv: 'Am 'Oved, 1947).
48 Gerber, "Zionism, Orientalism," p. 24.
49 Haim, Abandonment, p. 38.
50 Quoted in Martina Rieker, "Reading the Colonial Archive" in Enid Hill, ed., New Frontiers in the Social History of the Middle East (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2001), p. 140.
51 Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917-1929 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1991 [1978]), p. 12-14, quote from ft. 44, p. 13. See also, for comparison and context, Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Priya Satia, Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: the Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford UP, 2008).
52 Two decades later Arab spokesmen complained about the euphemism's negation of Arab identity and the implications of the semantics of colonial discourse before the Peel Commission in 1937, none of which stopped the commission from continuing to employ the language itself. See chapter 8.
53 Quoted in Khalidi, The Iron Cage, p. 36.
54 Kayyali, Palestine, p. 13; Alexander Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882: Studies in Social, Economic, and Political Development, William C. Young and Michael C. Gerrity, trans. (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993), p. 47-75, quote from p. 48.
55 On Samuel and his tenure, see Huneidi, A Broken Trust. On his views of Arab nationalism(s), see especially p. 90-94. Quote from p. 35.
56 On the 1921 rising see chapter 6. The development and deployment of collective punishments, and its associated ideological notions, are discussed in chapters 6-10.
57 HC to Colonial Secretary, 12.10.29 (#245) and 19.10.29 (#264), CP 343 (29), PRO - CAB 24/207.
58 E.g. Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press 1984) and idem, "One Hundred Years of Social Change: The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" in Lawrence J. Silberstein, ed., New Perspectives on Israeli History: The Early Years of the State (New York: NYU Press, 1991), p. 70. Chancellor's place in the reevaluation of policy after 1929 is discussed in chapter 1.
59 HC to Colonial Secretary, p. 45, PRO - CO 733/182/9.
60 Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929, Cmd 3530 (London: His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1930), p. 152, 158-59. Quote from p. 152. (Hereafter: Shaw Commission report).
61 Report of the Palestine Royal Commission, Cmd 5479 (London: HMSO, 1937), p. 132. (Hereafter: Peel Commission report).
62 Survey of Palestine, v. 2 (Palestine: Government Printing Office, 1946), p. 950. See also, p. 598-99.
63 Shaw Commission report, p. 156.
64 Peel Commission report, p. 84, 134.
65 Norman and Helen Bentwich, Mandate Memories, 1918-1948 (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), p. 99. Not atypically, but certainly ironically, the Bentwichs were themselves subscribers to the mufti thesis! See p. 189-200, especially p. 193.
66 J.C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine (New York: Schocken Books, 1976 [1950]), p. 57-58.
67 Ibid., p. 60-63.
68 Ibid., p. 71, 83.
69 The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918-1929. 306-07.
70 Ibid., p. 60.
71 Ibid., p. 39-42.
72 Ibid., p. 39, 306.
73 Ibid., respectively p. 52-54, 81 and 81-82.
74 Ibid., p. 122-23, 125-26.
75 Ibid., p. 301.
76 Ibid., especially p. 116-18.
77 The political murders of the revolt era, many of which were hits ordered by the mufti's camp, occasions the sharpest critique of al-Hajj Amin in the period with which we are concerned. See al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, p. 402-05.
78 Ibid., p. 175-79; 287; 293-96…
79 Ibid., p. 230-31; 287; 331-409.
80 Ibid., p. 31-348. See chapter 7 for more detail.
81 Yuval Arnon-Ohanah, Herev mi-bayit: ha-ma'avak ha-panimi ba-tnu'a ha-Palastinit ha-le'umit, 1929-39 (Tel Aviv: Yariv Heder w/ the Shiloah Institute, 1981), p. 240-255, especially p. 253, 297.
82 Ibid., respectively p. 240, 254; p. 298; p. 240, 253, 275. Without providing any reconciliation of the competing explanations, the followers of 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the pious, revolutionary shaykh, are also argued to have caused the revolt (p. 265).
83 Ibid., p. 296.
84 Ibid., p. 275-88, 299.
85 Ted Swedenburg, "The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier," Anthropological Quarterly v. 63, n. 1 (Jan 1990), p. 26. Regarding Abdul-Wahhab Kayyali, included in the group of works in question, the critique is a bit unbalanced, since more than most of his generation Kayyali accords greater autonomy to popular forces, including peasants.
86 Shehada Musa, Thawrat 'am 1936 fi Filastin: dirasa susiyulujiyya (Beirut: Bahith al-Dirasat, 2004), p. 228, 230-31, 241-42. See chapter 9 for more and for a rejoinder.
87 Ibid., p. 180, 236-38; see also 240-42. Musa's arguments on leadership during the strike are detailed in chapter 7.
88 Ibid., p. 238-41.
89 E.g. Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows. To its credit, Army of Shadows takes a more nuanced view of the hamula structure and demonstrates that extended kin units were diverse in their political opinions and inclinations. It thus doesn't fully replicate the all of the dimensions of the effendi thesis common in its Zionist/Israeli mode.
90 Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Henry Holt Publishers, 2000), p. 368.
91 Ilan Pappé, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis 1700-1948, trans. Yael Lotan (London: Saqi, 2010; in Hebrew 2002), p. 8, 246-303. In its very choice of subject this work is hardly a challenge to the established historiography, regardless of its original intent as a corrective for an Israeli audience.
92 Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004); Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri, Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2006).
93 Quoted in Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, p. 121-22.
94 Ghassan Kanafani, Thawrat 1936-1939 fi Filastin: khalfiyat wa-tafasil wa-tahlil (n.p., n.d. [PFLP, 1972]), p. 55-56.
95 Ibid., p. 63.
96 Ibid., p. 19.
97 Taggar, The Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine Arab Politics, 1930-37 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986; this study is a published Ph.D. dissertation from 1973), p. 359-465; Al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l- mu'assasat, p. 331-409; Nels Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism (London: Kegan Paul International, 1982), p. 47-49, 51-52; Haim, Abandonment, p. 34, 124-25; Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, p. 111 (for the strike phase of the revolt only); Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 368; Musa, Thawrat 'am 1936, p. 93, 180; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, p. 90.
98 Salim Tamari, "Factionalism and Class Formation in Recent Palestinian History" in Roger Owen, ed., Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the 19th and 20th centuries (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1982), p. 178.
99 Ibid., p. 179, 199.
100 Ibid., p. 191.
101 Ibid., p. 192.
102 Ibid., p. 194.
103 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 4.
104 Ibid., abstract.
105 The schema of the dissertation breaks the Mandate era into a prehistory (1917-39) and the period of the working class's emergence thereafter.
106 Ibid., p. 157.
107 Issa Khalaf, "The Effect of Socioeconomic Change on Arab Societal Collapse in Mandate Palestine," International Journal of Middle East Studies v. 29, n. 1 (Feb 1997), p. 93.
108 Ibid., p. 103, 107.
109 Shulamit Carmi and Henry Rosenfeld, for instance, repeat the common argument that the Palestinian working class coalesced in the 1940s during the war, contending that earlier proletarianization was driven by the "backwards" farming techniques and organization of Arab villages. This did not yield significant urbanization since circuits existed for reabsorbing those without adequate lands for sustenance. The political ramifications of these developments are assessed to be nugatory because peasant migrants and the urban poor were powerless and crushed by their circumstances. (Shulamit Carmi and Henry Rosenfeld, "The Origins of the Process of Proletarianization and Urbanization of Arab Peasants in Palestine," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences v. 220 (March 11, 1974), p. 470-85).
110 Lesch, Arab Politics, p. 82-83.
111 Popular mobilization is also treated in another chapter ("The Political Use of Violence") but three other thematic chapters focus on the diplomatic arena and the overall balance is with the elite field and elite actors, despite the laudable framework the study establishes.
112 Ibid., p. 115-16, 124.
113 May Seikaly, Haifa: Transformation of an Arab Society, 1918-1939 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995). Aspects concerning the transformation of the peasantry and urban migration appear in many places in the work.
114 Ibid., p. 217-62, especially 246. On the origins of the youth trend, which Seikaly does not name as such, p. 200-04.
115 Ibid., p. 156-57.
116 Ibid., p. 156, 253, 255.
117 Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, p. 106-108, 110.
118 Ibid., p. 98.
119 Ibid., quote p. 98; contrast with p. 97, 106-07.
120 Ibid., p. 90.
121 Ibid., p. 114, 125-26.
122 Mustafa Kabha, The Palestinian Press as Shaper of Public Opinion, 1929-1939: Writing Up a Storm (Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007; original published in Arabic in 2003), p. 235.
123 Ibid., respectively p. 235, 167. The first notion is in fact a contemporaneous British view with which Kabha agrees.
124 Remembering and Imagining Palestine, p. 10, 119.
125 Ibid., p. 122-23, 134. The point about Zu'aytir is, I believe, a prime example of the effect of the existing sources, as the youthful radical left behind nearly a 1000 pages of published diaries and a large edited documents collection, each of which are of great historical value.
126 Ibid., p. 125. Regarding the overly conservative vision of Palestinian society, which is left implicit and appears to be unwitting, the Istiqlal, for instance, are said to have failed because they were too modern in their conception and ouvre.
127 Ibid., p. 107-08.
128 Key studies informing my thinking, the latter having established the paradigm it describes, are respectively: Shahid Amin, "Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2," Subaltern Studies v. 3 (Delhi: Oxford, 1984), p. 1-61, and Lockman, Comrades and Enemies. A useful periodization of Subaltern Studies, distinguishing its first period from the postcolonial studies turn it later took, is provided in: Sumit Sarkar, "The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies" in Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000), p. 300-323.
129 Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 4.
130 The lack of specification, in turn, leaves prevailing elitist historical narratives and explanations safely unquestioned. Hence, for instance, Porath's narrative, which offers more detail than many about the new nationalist forces from below, remains untroubled in its elite-centered focus.
131 Rashid Khalidi, "Ottomanism and Arabism in Syria Before 1914: a Reassessment" in R. Khalidi, L. Anderson, M. Muslih, R. Simon, eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), p. 64. Khalidi maintains this view in The Iron Cage, p. 65.
132 Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (UK: Cambridge UP: 2001), p. 71-98.
133 Weldon Matthews in his very important and groundbreaking work on the period in question here: Confronting an Empire, Constructing a Nation: Arab Nationalists and Popular Politics in Mandate Palestine (I.B. Tauris, 2006), especially chapter 5.
134 James Gelvin, "The Social Origins of Popular Nationalism: Evidence for a New Framework," International Journal of Middle East Studies v. 26, n. 4 (Nov 1994), p. 645-661; idem, "The Other Arab Nationalism," p. 231-248; idem, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); idem, "'Arab Nationalism' Meets Social Theory," International Journal of Middle East Studies v. 41, n. 1 (Feb 2009), p. 10-12. Quotes from last, p. 11.
135 Gelvin, "The Other Arab Nationalism," p. 237-38, 241.
136 Ibid., p. 239; Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, p. 113. Quote from Divided Loyalties.
137 Gelvin, "The Other Arab Nationalism," p. 241-42; Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Fayetteville: U. of Arkansas Press, 1995), p. 79.
138 Gelvin, Divided Loyalties.
139 Gelvin, "The Other Arab Nationalism," p. 241; idem, "The Ironic Legacy of the King-Crane Commission," in David W. Lesch, ed., The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), p. 23.
140 This has been a very common trope in the literature, appearing in some form or other in numerous texts: Kayyali, Palestine, p. 189; al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-al-mu'assasat, p. 331; Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Meaning, p. 47; Mattar, The Mufti, p. 71; Khalaf, Politics in Palestine, p. 67; Black and Morris, Israel's Secret Wars, p. 5; Seikaly, Haifa, p. 246; Basheer Nafi, Arabism, Islamism, and the Palestine Question, 1908-1941: A Political History (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1998), p. 193; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, p. xxii; Kabha, The Palestinian Press as Shaper, p. 235.
141 Musa, Thawrat 'am 1936, p. 246.
142 Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, Introduction in Joseph and Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 5.
143 On the last see chapters 3 and 7-10. What can be said for the moment is that a shift took place from attempting to negotiate sovereignty to attempting to take sovereignty, or symbolic quotients of it, through novel forms of direct action.
144 My thinking in taking this tack has been influenced by some of the work done on social movements and social movement theory, and in particular: Doug McAdam and William H. Sewell, Jr., "It's About Time: Temporality in the Study of Social Movements and Revolutions" in Ronald R. Aminzade, ed., Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), p. 89-125.
145 A brief word is in order on this schema. It should go without saying that summary categories like "elite" and "popular" elide all manner of salient internal distinctions, differences, and oppositions. Further, as Sarkar instructively notes, Guha didn't see elite and subaltern as separate domains, but rather as given to "interpenetration" and "mutual (though obviously unequal) conditioning" ("The Decline," p. 305). Nonetheless, in the Palestinian instance discussing elites en masse or en bloc makes a certain sense in light of their typically shared diminutive approach towards the majority of the populace, which they believed was incapable of or unfit for autonomy from their class and status superiors. This view was clearly not without consequence, both for elites (who clung to their sense of entitlement to lead) and for the popular forces (which demonstrated a growing attraction to new forms of political sociability and organization).
146 In the above order: Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Press, 1979); Ted Swedenburg, "The Role of the Palestinian Peasantry in the Great Revolt (1936-1939)" in The Modern Middle East: a reader, Albert Hourani, Philip S. Khoury, and Mary C. Wilson, eds., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 [1988]), p. 467-502; idem, Memories of Revolt; Munir Fakher Eldin, "Communities of Owners: Land Law, Governance, and Politics in Palestine, 1858-1948," Ph.D. dissertation (New York University, 2008); Taqqu, "Arab Labor" and idem, "Peasants into Workmen: Internal Labor Migration and the Arab Village Community under the Mandate," in Joel Migdal, ed., Palestinian Society and Politics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), p. 261-85; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies; idem, "Arab Workers and Arab Nationalism in Palestine: A View from Below," in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, p. 249-72; Fleischmann, The Nation and Its "New" Women; Matthews, Confronting an Empire; Rana Barakat, "Thawrat al-Buraq in British Mandate Palestine: Jerusalem, Mass Mobilization, and Colonial Politics, 1928-30," Ph.D. dissertation (U. Chicago, 2007); Kabha, The Palestinian Press as Shaper; Salim Tamari, al-Jabal didd al-bahr: dirasat fi ishkaliyat al-hadatha al-Filastiniyya (Ramallah: Muwatin, al-Mu'assasa al-Filastiniyya li-Dirasat al-Dimuqratiyya, 2005).
147 Seikaly, "Meatless Days," p. 3.
148 For the former Ranajit Guha's programmatic pieces, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India" and "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency" have informed but not defined the investigation here: Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), p. 37-44 and p. 45-86.
149 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. xxv-xxvi, 32, 52, 66-67.
150 The most obvious here is the lack of use of the Arabic language press, a good deal of which is available on microfilm/fiche. The press has been used to marvelous effect in other studies, viz. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity and Matthews, Constructing a Nation.

344

Chapter 4: Peasants, the new notability, and peripheral capitalism in the late Ottoman era

In the early twentieth century Palestine's elite lacked little in the way of human comforts. At Nablus, a bustling center of commerce and part of the olive country's heartland, the homes of the wealthy were packed with copperwares, crystal, and the finest specimens of carpentry. Two Ottoman civil servants dispatched during World War I to survey Beirut province regarded such treasure troves as characteristic of a culture of acquisitiveness that had taken root among Palestine's elite. They considered the dedication to materialism and ostentation to be an "illness" and a "defect" pervading the well-to-do, not just in Nablus, but elsewhere in the urban centers of Palestine. In Haifa they encountered an upper class that viewed its surroundings, as they put it, as something to consume, adding for emphasis that the appetites they witnessed were, to their thinking, voracious and immoderate. They describe the rich families of Jenin as caring for little other than the pursuit of coin and material reward, allowing their town to fester in poverty so long as their own domains were not violated.1

At the other end of the social pyramid, the rural producing classes were divided between a middling peasantry and an increasing number who were impoverished, destitute, and landless. Many lived in conditions of penury, hardship, and material deprivation. While elites lived in luxury and wanted for little, a defining feature of the second half of the nineteenth century for the peasantry was its progressive loss of control over the fruits of its labors. A range of actors - the central Ottoman government, local 345- Ottoman governors and officials, provincial shaykhs and notables, and the producers themselves - fought over the surplus derived from the agrarian production that was the region's economic mainstay. Increasingly, over the course of the nineteenth century the non-producing claimants were able to wrest larger portions of the surplus from producers, building the great fortunes that were in evidence by the early twentieth century and, conversely, helping to lock a significant segment of the population into squalor. The social world that was remade in the late Ottoman period had profound ramifications for the predicaments of Palestinian society and its national movement under the Mandate.

Thus far we have followed the burgeoning youth wing of the Palestinian national movement. Many of the problems that youth were struggling with in the years from 1929 to 1936 were intimately related to the conditions of the rural majority. Palestinian nationalists of all stripes, from youth on up to the elite politicians, betrayed a striking tendency to attribute the visible and palpable crisis of the rural social order under the Mandate to Zionism and to British colonial policies that were generally geared towards the flowering of the yishuv and the settler enterprise. The AE's official response to the 1930 White Paper, written by the able 'Awni 'Abd al-Hadi, is exemplary in this respect. Over 70 pages long, a large portion of the statement is devoted to land affairs and to the terrible straits of the peasantry under British rule. It variously decries the heavy taxation of the fellahin, the calling in of debts to the government, the closure of untitled lands to traditional modes of reclamation (i.e. converting mawat lands to miri),2 the

346- government's reservation of tracts deemed to be state lands for the yishuv (and refusal to do the same for Arab cultivators), and the closure of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank, a source of affordable credit.3 The results were cataclysmic: for the first time in their history peasants were being fully dispossessed, deprived even of access to land as sharecroppers by sales to Zionist interests that demanded their acquisitions be free of tenants. Since the Balfour declaration "tens of thousands" had been separated from their ancestral lands.4 At the root of the trouble lay the government's Zionist policy, which necessitated heavy taxation that in turn drove the peasantry into the arms of moneylenders who fleeced and bankrupted them, forcing them to sell their landed properties.5

While there is much truth in many of the AE's claims concerning the deleterious effects of government policy on the rural producing classes, the idea that debt, bankruptcy and dispossession were solely or primarily the result of the Jewish National Home and the British administration is rather far from the mark. On the contrary, the dynamic of peasant destitution and alienation from landownership had been growing, by most estimates, since at least the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Its development initially had nothing to do with Zionism and everything to do with shifts in the political economy, the basis of social power, and dominant patterns and strategies of economic accumulation. The struggles of the peasantry against the indebtedness and 347- impoverishment that left them at risk of becoming landless, both during the late Ottoman period and under the British, had much to do with momentous changes that transpired in the final decades of Ottoman sovereignty.

Both elites and peasants experienced great transformation in the nineteenth century, which was marked by a set of critical institutional developments, including the commodification of land, Palestine's integration into the world market, and the local emergence of capitalist social relations. For the peasantry, these developments had decidedly mixed results. The structural transformation of the political economy greatly accelerated changes in Palestine's social economy that often left peasants more vulnerable to external events and forces. Class stratification advanced, and while some were able to maintain or better their position many lost ground. The hegemony attained by merchant capital and its substrate, usury capital, fed preexisting tendencies towards debt-based accumulation. Social bonds and ties of solidarity were loosened and as social relations coarsened, peasant insecurity and poverty increased. The power of urban centers, and particularly the coastal cities of Jaffa and Haifa, grew over the countryside. And, as the flipside to the riches amassed by wealthy urban elites, a portion of the lower peasantry (of unknown size - see below) was dispossessed, becoming sharecroppers or landless laborers.

This chapter charts and assesses these transformations. The first section sketches the old regime, surveying the contours of relations between merchants and peasants and the gradual reformation of the elite by merchant capital. In the following sections, the consequences of the Tanzimat era and its successors are examined, including the 348- establishment of a regime of private property in land and Palestine's integration into the world market. The last portion of the chapter turns to look briefly at the early conflicts over land between Arabs and Zionist settlers that studded the late Ottoman era and their role in stimulating changes in the social meaning and significance of land and in conceptions of Arab collective identity.

Autonomy, unequal exchange and the foundations of the ancien régime

As elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, the areas that later became Palestine enjoyed a great deal of autonomy from the imperial center.6 Local forces proved adept at avoiding or limiting taxation, conscription, and provisioning imperial troops, as well as blocking political appointments made at Istanbul. In the push and pull of relations between the center and the periphery, provincial forces benefited from the distance they acquired from imperial extractions and impositions. Local notables and shaykhs who acted as intermediaries for the Porte used a variety of strategies, from outright resistance to all manner of foot-dragging, to bend the Ottoman system to their advantage while retaining the legitimacy conferred by the imperial order. Peasants, in turn, sought to establish their own autonomy from regional strongmen and confederations that had their own designs on surplus extraction.7

349- Local identities and the political economy were both shaped by the dynamics of autonomy within the empire. Regions like those in Palestine produced both distinctive attachments to place and powerful commercial networks that drew the surplus of rural areas towards urban centers. Strong regional, village and hamula identifications characterized the population and reinforced their investment in maintaining autonomy from the imperial center. As Beshara Doumani has emphasized, these loyalties were intimately tied to the social spaces that grew around trade networks at regional and sub- regional levels, and were essential elements of local politics. They were mobilized in local (village), regional and inter-regional power struggles as well as in resisting invasion or tax collection.8

Villages were typically associated with specific plots of land, the disposition of which was integral to local social relations and relations of production. Although prior to the 1858 Land Law private property in land was rare and highly limited within the Ottoman Empire, locals tended to look on and treat the lands they cultivated, the possession (raqaba) of which was usually vested with the state (i.e., they were miri lands), as their own private holdings. Peasant claims to land were almost as a rule customary and not based in formal legal title, yet peasants typically succeeded in retaining tenancy and in making it heritable. Holdings in land were commonly passed down from fathers to their offspring and many jurists came to support the view that peasant tenancies amounted to possession of the lands they planted.9 This sense of legal possession was strong enough that not only were the lands heritable, but during the 350- eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (prior to the 1858 Land Law), peasants could effectively dispose of their lands by selling the usufruct rights (tasarruf) attached to them.10 Peasant claims on land were also buttressed by corporate forms of identity, as represented by hamulas.11

The hamula, a unit of community based in extended kin, was a central feature of village life. Usually several hamulas existed in each village and the great majority of individuals belonged or affiliated to one or another group. Hamulas were flexible formations, not exclusively based in lineal descent, whose memberships could include fictive kin. They existed in significant measure for the "collective defense of members' interests" and were bound by "principles of collective responsibility for members' actions." While they have been understood by outsiders as emanations of a "primitive" tribalism and sources of internecine conflict, they are better understood as socio-cultural units for the collective management and minimization of risk.12 Though feuds and rivalries between hamulas were common, the village normally superseded the hamula in terms of loyalties, and village defense was based on inter-hamula unity. Regarding land, 351- the hamula served to bolster continuous utilization of its members' holdings, which was critical for maintaining rights in miri lands.

In part because of the rugged country prevailing in many parts of Palestine (especially the hills of the interior) and the difficulty of transportation, in the period before the consolidation of the region's integration into the world market many villages strove for and enjoyed self-sufficiency in good measure and were assertive about protecting local means of livelihood and subsistence.13 In spite of their pursuit of autonomy, villages became increasingly interconnected and ultimately subordinate to urban centers and cities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The thickening of ties between town and country owed to the growth of urban-based merchant networks which wove a dense web of economic, social, and cultural bonds between rural peasant producers and urban traders while economically linking villages and peasant households to urban, regional, and transregional markets and market forces. The merchants who built these networks emerged as a group around the mid-eighteenth century as part of a new "middle class" composed of traders, entrepreneurs, and middle peasantry. They vied for command over the rural surplus with the a'yan, the shaykhs who collected taxes for the Ottoman state (shuyukh al-nawahi, or subdistrict chiefs), and the heads of the powerful urban and rural hamulas. Over time the merchants were able to gain the upper hand in this contest. In the nineteenth century the growth of merchant power culminated in the arrival and ascendancy of a new class: the creation of "a different breed of urban 352- notable" whose power derived from merchant networks, merchant capital, and moneylending.14

The rise of merchant capital and what William Roseberry calls "usurers' capital" fundamentally reshaped Palestinian society and dramatically altered the nature of social relations between the producing classes and those trading in their produce or otherwise making a claim on the rural surplus.15 The remaking of the elite and the changing basis of social power were at the heart of these transformations. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the composition of the elite profoundly shifted throughout the Ottoman Empire at the hands of merchants at roughly the same time.16 In view of this, Albert Hourani's classic argument concerning the notables, which has long informed understandings of the provincial elite in the period after the mid-eighteenth century, stands revised.17 While Hourani pointed to the notables' involvement in trade as a source of wealth, his primary focus was on their position as intermediaries with the Ottoman Porte and not on their role in local political economies.18 Additionally, 'Adel Manna' has critiqued Hourani's description of the "secular" notability - the primary 353- category of the three varieties he lays out (which also include the 'ulama and military functionaries) - as vague and imprecise.19 He shows that during the Tanzimat reforms newly prominent families, empowered by merchant capital, emerged to contend with or displace the preexisting elites. The notability was recast by the entry into its ranks of the powerful and wealthy merchants who were the foremost beneficiaries of expanding trade, administrative centralization and reform, and the privatization of land.20 The new mercantile-based notability contained many families who went on to become leading political and economic figures and men of influence during the British Mandate. In the Gaza region members of the Shawa, Tayyan, al-Bitar, Baydas, and Abu Khadra families joined the elite; around Nablus the list included the patriarchs of the Shak'a, al-Masri, Hammad, and Zu'aytir families; and in Jerusalem, the Nashashibis broke into the circle of the notability.21

The reformation of the elite transpired over several generations and required the displacement of the structural position of the shaykhs and the diminution of the other elite elements' socio-political standing and influence. The success of merchant capital in redefining the social hierarchy was evident in the amalgamation of a portion of the shaykhs and other prior notable strata into the mercantile and moneylending fold, which they joined in an effort to maintain their status as well as to tap into the amassing of riches at which merchants were proving increasingly adept.22 The 'Abd al-Hadi family 354- is exemplary in this regard, representing a shaykhly family with strong connections in the Jenin hinterlands that adapted to the changing socio-economic circumstances, with its leading lights urbanizing and incorporating themselves into the bureaucratic and mercantile circles that gained influence by the mid-nineteenth century.23

Doumani, whose work on the Jabal Nablus region illuminates these manifold transformations in depth, has demonstrated that the construction and reproduction of merchants' trade relations relied as much on what he calls "cultural capital" as it did on economic means.24 In this the merchants stole a page from many of the shaykhs, who prior to the Tanzimat often built their own clientage networks through offering a litany of services: mediating peasant relations with towns and urban centers, acting as commercial guarantors, resolving disputes by applying 'urf and flexibly interpreting Islamic law, and, in times of need, offering sanctuary to those involved in hostilities.25 Erik Freas has argued that like the merchants who succeeded them, the shaykhs' genuine interest in the welfare of the agricultural producers helped legitimate and strengthen the shaykhly order that predominated in the countryside.26 The merchants took the model 355- provided by the shaykh-peasant interchange and developed it further and in new directions.

Operating in a decentralized milieu where a premium existed on autonomy from surplus extractions by the state or other external forces, "The most effective way to sustain movement and exchange across space and time… was through multiple layers of negotiation based on commonly held assumptions and on accountability between the actors." Most fundamentally, merchants needed to build credibility and earn the trust of peasant producers. Many pursued this through the most obvious path: gaining religious affiliation and standing, which they attained via education, marriage into a known religious family, charity, association with a mosque, or membership in a Sufi tariqa (order or brotherhood). This is not to suggest that religious avocation or connections were instrumental; rather, an elective affinity appeared between religion and business. Religious standing was a marker for upright conduct and a "medium of communication" between parties, helping to assure individual reputation and rectitude. Also vital to the success of aspiring merchants was the creation and growth of a shared history with peasants, sometimes extending over generations. Shared experience and time created familiarity between merchants and peasants and, properly managed, vouchsafed a record 356- of honesty and honorableness that reinforced the strength and dependability of the social as well as economic ties binding the parties.27

In forming a partnership with a merchant, a peasant not only gained vitally necessary credit, but also a range of other valuable social and economic services. Merchants acted as brokers for their peasant clients, introducing them to contacts, giving assurances and interceding on their behalf with other parties. They provided peasants with accommodations and food during their visits to the local town or city, offered them small scale banking (accepting deposits of produce or savings and keeping accounts of withdrawals against these assets), and of course opened their shops for purchases of necessary goods. These services were paired with social calls by merchants to peasants in their villages, the offering of gifts, and attendance (and bankrolling) of peasant family weddings. As Swedenburg broadly puts it, the social aspect of ties between peasants and lords was "expressed in such terms as 'honor,' gift-giving, kinship." The complex of social interactions and ties that grew between merchants and peasants thus attained a strength and vitality that underwrote and secured their economic relations, while in tandem helping to knit town and hinterland, agricultural producers and urban entrepreneurs, together in a single social formation.28

The nature of relations between peasant producers and their lords has often been discussed as a patron-client system. As a range of authors have pointed out, the concepts of patronage and patron-client relations are immanently ideological, and should be 357- approached with caution.29 By posing relations between lords and peasants as a set of ongoing exchanges between patrons and clients, the inequality between parties is obfuscated or masked. In the Palestine case, the notables styled themselves paternalistically as caretakers of the peasantry, presenting themselves as aiding peasants economically and otherwise looking after them. For services rendered they received in turn the loyalty of the agrarian toilers as a just and fitting recompense.30 Peasants were mobilized in armed conflicts between competing lords, especially in the central hill regions where ties between lords and peasants were strongest.31 Some performed corveé labor ('awna).32 Perhaps most importantly (and as discussed below), contracting with peasants secured flows of primary commodities that were elemental to merchants' trade networks and thereby helped to expand the power of urban merchants.

While the claim to patronage must be distinguished for its ideological character, peasants were not passive participants in their relations with merchants and notables, but fought to obtain terms of "fair and just exchange."33 Especially before the consolidation 358- of the new notables' hegemony and the onset of serious peasant indebtedness, both of which took root in the nineteenth century, peasants had options when faced with difficult or disagreeable relations with a lord: they could switch patrons, resist debt payments, relocate to a different area, or even resort to violence.34 While peasants sought the best terms for themselves and their families from lords, ultimately the latter needed to ensure the reproduction of a stable client base and to preempt the potential for disruption. Within limits, peasants were able to turn the merchants' reliance on agricultural produce and labor into a modicum of security for themselves while fashioning an unwritten ethical guarantee of sorts to what James Scott has referred to as the "right to subsistence."35

As should be clear from the preceding discussion, the socio-cultural dimension of merchants' self-marketing to peasants - their preference of establishing themselves as honest and decent business partners capable of offering a range of services, and their concern for peasants and commitment to their subsistence - acted to obscure or deflect the fact that economic interaction between merchants and peasants was based in relations of unequal exchange. At the root of the merchants' networks among peasants was the former's pursuit of economic accumulation through carefully calibrated exploitation of rural producers. The core and anchor of economic relations between fellah and 'ayn, and the key to unequal exchange and its development, was the latter's role as the peasant's source of credit. Before 1858 merchants sought steady supplies of 359- rural produce foremost, and to help secure the desired flows they extended peasants cash advances, loans, and lines of credit (as well as providing seeds, stock, and other factors of production). In the process they used debt as a snare to bind peasants to their operations.36 Over time, credit became a principle avenue for organizing the exploitation of the peasantry and the advancement of capital accumulation. A common instrument for the provision of credit was the salam, or forward- purchase, contract. As Doumani explains:

The underlying principle of a salam contract is the immediate advance of money by the first party for the future delivery by the second party of movable collateral - usually foodstuffs - at a reduced price fixed at the time of the agreement. The key provision is that the agreed-upon amount of, say, oil must be delivered to the first party in kind regardless of what the market price of this commodity happens to be at the time of the harvest.

By fixing the price of the commodity in advance, the merchant assured a rate of profit irrespective of fluctuations in the actual market value of the good at harvest time or thereafter. While interest, or more specifically usury (riba), was illegal according to Islamic law, salam contracts were not, and Hanafi jurisprudence in particular had long recognized them. Merchant accumulation occurred through the manipulation of purchase prices, which were commonly calculated against the duration of the waiting period before receipt of the goods - the longer the wait the lower the unit price and the higher the merchant's return.37 Although the contracts were for advanced purchases, and were not technically loans, their terms were often highly disadvantageous to producers, and the declining position they caused in peasant accounts has led to their perception as 360- instruments bearing interest. It is perhaps safer to conclude, however, that the terms of the contracts were often usurious, regardless of what one concludes about the claim they contained interest, in that the debts which peasants took on were, over time, onerous under the common terms and impossible to repay.

Use of salam contracts became widespread in the olive country of the interior hills. Their proliferation was facilitated in part by the Ottoman tax calendar, which was keyed to the grain harvest, months ahead of that for olives. For those peasants whose income was more dependent on olive cultivation, this meant that short of holding reserves with which to pay taxes, they often turned to salam arrangements. By the middle of the nineteenth century the practice was so ubiquitous that entire villages regularly relied on salam contracts to pay their taxes.38

Usury became a defining feature and structuring principle of the changing political economy by sometime in the early nineteenth century. The ramifications of this development were manifold: "the processes of peasant differentiation, urban-rural migration, commoditization of land, and monetization of the rural economy - all increasingly driven by pervasive moneylending practices - came to dominate everyday life."39 The precedence of usury capital in articulating local social relations and ordering the political economy advanced as merchant networks gained economic hegemony. The 361- expansion of commercial agriculture, the transition to a money economy,40 and the new administrative and legal framework created through the Tanzimat reforms all benefited the rising class of merchants considerably, eventually allowing them to either intermix with or marginalize rival claimants on the rural surplus and to create a new stratum of mercantile elites.41

The Tanzimat, the commodification of land, and world market integration

The Tanzimat reforms, initiated in two waves in the middle of the nineteenth century, were intended to augment the Ottoman state's control in the provinces and to curb local autonomy from the center while bolstering state revenues. The reforms included the amplification of Ottoman administrative presence and a more rigorous application of the legal apparatus in the provinces, and although their local effects were multiple and at times contradictory, they generally expanded and reinforced the new power of merchants. The Advisory Councils (majalis al-shura) which had been established during the period of the Egyptian occupation of Greater Syria in the 1830s were expanded and given renewed stature. Commercial courts were erected and the local Islamic courts were extended beyond cities and towns to rural areas. Both of these developments served merchants well. The councils, which were used in part to lure local notables into alliance with the Ottoman center, became bases for the expansion of merchant power and influence. Likewise the augmentation of the court system served to 362- displace the adjudication of disputes involving rural parties from the terrain of customary law ('urf) to the Islamic courts, which further advanced the integration of rural areas into the urban sphere.42

The added influence that the Tanzimat brought merchants propelled important shifts in local social relations and hierarchies. As merchants gained access to political offices via the Advisory Councils, and as the armature of the law penetrated deeper into rural society, capital was rendered "less fettered with personal ties." Merchants and their allies and partners used their seats on the Advisory Councils to shield moneylending practices and the growing indebtedness of the fellahin from any unwanted scrutiny by the Porte. At the same time, the augmentation of the legal infrastructure was used to render peasants increasingly visible and subject to the will of wealthy merchants while depriving them of avenues of potential refuge from onerous debt. At the Islamic court at Nablus, by the 1850s the majority of cases between lords and peasants involved salam contracts and moneylending arrangements. Although Doumani does not fully explore the point, it stands to reason that merchants' recourse to courts to prosecute their economic interests against struggling peasants could only have damaged the personalized bonds which they had so carefully constructed, and with them, the fabric of social relations which fortified the growth of merchant power. The fissures which the court records have exposed subsequently grew, as will be returned to below.43

363- The increasing circulation of usury capital and the power it brought the merchants also provided them entrée into elite circles of ruling and religious families. In the highlands merchant usurers first broke into the ranks of the lucrative soap producers (in Nablus) and of tax farmers (multazims) in the 1830s, and then completed their arrival as the new and dominant element among the notability in the 1850s, by which time they amalgamated with the leading political and religious families.44 The consolidation of the new elite came at the expense not only of indebted peasants, but also, as noted above, of the older stratum of subdistrict chiefs (shuyukh al-nawahi) and local rural leaders, who were progressively overshadowed by merchant lords and by the Ottoman center's new will, especially after the end of the Crimean War in 1856, to rein in previously troublesome local potentates and bring them under greater state control.45

The texture of relations between lords and peasants was further altered by the promulgation of the Ottoman Land Law of 1858. The Land Law has been the subject of wide debate, in part because it has been seen as an attempt by the Ottoman center to retake control of provincial lands in general, and in particular to restrain the power of 364- notables in the provinces by distributing legal titles (kushans) to smallholding peasants.46

It is now fairly accepted that a key motivation in mooting the new land code derived from the empire's perennial interest in increasing its tax revenues.47 Under the new law, land ownership was to be registered formally with the state, and the de facto practice of private, heritable and saleable landholding would be made de jure. The majority of lands throughout the empire, designated by the legal category miri, were previously held by the state and leased to cultivators who paid a tithe (known in Arabic as the 'ushr); henceforth, as titles were designated and created, the lands in question remained taxable as miri but otherwise became private property. The assignment of title would not only make lands and their disposition more legible to the Porte, thereby aiding tax receipts and reducing leakage due to intermediaries' sticky fingers, but was also intended to incentivize production.48 A less broad purpose of the law, but one germane to Palestine, 365- was to eradicate and "settle" (through parcellation) collectively held lands, known in Greater Syria as musha'.49

Among the most contentious aspects concerning the law in Palestine is its place in cementing the rise of large landed estates, built on the lands of fellahin formerly held under customary title. While the extent of the law's role in prompting the construction of large landed estates has been disputed,50 there is no question that it created the conditions for such to occur, and that its provisions empowered the formation of unprecedented stratification in land-holding and ownership. Against the heritage of consideration for customary claims, article 23 of the Land Law declared that actual occupation of lands was irrelevant to questions of ownership; what mattered was juridical possession.51 Duration of tenancy was irrelevant to a proper claim to ownership.52 If a tenant in possession of lands did not register them, they were open and liable to be legally claimed by others. The emphasis on the legal mechanism for ownership, and its displacement of customary practice and claims, set the stage for large scale acquisitions by well-placed individuals and families.53

366- Although merchants had not previously been interested in accumulating land, the 1858 law soon initiated a frenzy of consolidation and peasant dispossession.54 The effects of the law varied by region within Palestine, and its implementation occurred over decades, fundamentally transforming land tenure in vast areas of the country. The most dramatic changes occurred in the lowland plains, which were less heavily populated than the hill regions and more given to musha' holdings. As Khalidi notes, in these areas customary title was disregarded and vast stretches were acquired and registered by urban elites, rural shaykhs, and tax collectors.55 Where peasants worked the lands in question, they typically remained, but became tenants instead of (customary) owners. Large estates were amassed in the areas of Marj Ibn 'Amir,56 the Eastern Galilee, and the coastal plain, all of which were fertile regions that had been less inhabited in part because of Bedouin raiding.57 With the land law's passage and the transfer of titles to wealthy merchants, many Bedouin found the tables increasingly 367- turned, however, and instead of putting the squeeze on local residents and travelers, they became subject to exactions themselves, in the form of rents owed to new, urban absentee landlords.58 Others joined in the expansion of cultivation, seeking new opportunities in the increasing commercialization of agriculture.59 Many of the leading families of the Mandate era profited handsomely by the 1858 law: the Husaynis, al- Nashashibis, al-Dajanis, al-'Alamis, 'Abd al-Hadis, Tuqan, al-Sa'id, and al-Shawa, for instance, all accumulated estates. In some cases the holdings they amassed were enormous. The 'Abd al-Hadis, by way of example, took possession of some 200,000 dunams in the Jenin area.60

The wealthy found two other primary methods of acquiring new lands in addition to filing directly for title on cultivated lands. Soon after the law's enactment the Ottoman center took the unprecedented step of selling large plots of land which were uncultivated, or deemed to be uncultivated, throughout the country, particularly in the North. Large purchasers were thus able to take possession of sizable or even immense plots and reclaim them, or to engage in speculation, with relative ease. A famous case is that of Sursuq purchases in the Marj Ibn 'Amir, where in two transactions in 1869 and 1872, lands belonging to 22 villages, including Nazareth, were sold to a group of Beirut-

368- based investors, chief among them the Sursuq family.61 The lands, totaling an estimated 230,000 dunams and situated in a vast steppe home to some of Palestine's most fertile tracts, were reputedly auctioned for a song, to the tune of £20,000. Indicative of the trouble that such massive transfers could cause, a group of Nazarenes protested the sale and succeeded in having some of the lands initially alienated in 1869 returned to them. Nevertheless the Sursuqs soon became the newest lords of the Marj Ibn 'Amir, and were credited by contemporary observers with bringing the meadows of the plain under the plow. The Sursuq family also obtained the tax-farming rights (iltizam) to the area, a factor which may have helped them eventually acquire lands to entire villages that were later infamously sold, along with the steppe, to Zionists. As the Sursuq case demonstrates, the Ottoman center's interest in boosting its revenues by auctioning uncultivated lands (or those without title), and subsequently collecting the tithe on reclaimed plots, acted to facilitate elite land acquisition with little regard for the consequences for peasant tenure.62

Large holdings were also accumulated by elites as peasants sought to escape the pressures of tax and debt. Some sales occurred as the result of major macroeconomic 369- and imperial factors, such as a succession of poor harvests in the late 1870s and the stresses of the Russo-Ottoman war (1877-78).63 More endemically the peasantry continued to struggle with the twin burdens of surplus appropriation by the state and local financiers. For some individuals and villages these exactions weighed so heavily that they opted to trade away titles to land, personally and collectively, in order to have their debts, including tax arrears, cleared.64 In other individual cases, where peasants were dependent upon credit for both their consumption needs and their operating budget, they lost their lands in collateral forfeitures.65 Though it has sometimes been discounted, the trend towards peasant land alienation on account of indebtedness grew as the "entire urban political and legal apparatus" - the Advisory Councils, the Islamic courts, muftis, governors, and tax collectors - all fell under the hegemony of usury capital.66 The law's repercussions differed in the hill country. In some regions that have been examined in depth, such as the environs of Jerusalem, alienation of peasant lands was less prevalent.67 In other areas, such as Jabal Nablus, myriad forms of sharecropping sprang up,68 indicating that smallholders had lost their lands, probably

370- through collateral forfeiture.69 Although it remains unclear, it appears that the 1858 Land Law may have been the primary stimulus behind the emergence of the complex array of sharecropping arrangements that became an enduring feature of the political economy in the highlands.70 While the fact that many or most peasants who lost their hold over the lands they inhabited and worked were not removed from them may have palliated the blow and helped to contain potential insurrection, the rise of new forms of dependency, like sharecropping, often meant that peasants were even more likely than before to be trapped in penury and subject to the will and domination of lords.71 Indeed this has left many scholars to contend that Palestinian peasants were reduced to the status of "serfs" (aqnan) serving a "semi-feudal class."72 As I will presently argue, this is a category mistake, as what was taking root in the Levant was not a variant of feudalism, but of peripheral capitalism.

Throughout the Levant peasants struggled mightily against the erosion of their position, fighting to maintain themselves on the land, preserve their livelihoods, and 371- avoid conversion into wage-laborers.73 In Palestine they turned variously to the central government and to the courts, and in the process their efforts shed light on new dynamics of class formation from below. Already in the middle of the nineteenth century peasants in the highlands petitioned Ottoman authorities for relief after merchants utilized the resources at their disposal, including the Advisory Councils and the deployment of cavalry, to collect on peasant debts.74 At court and in their representations to the center (intended to bypass the new Tanzimat institutions that had been captured by the moneyed classes), they invoked modern notions of citizenship and tax-payers' rights and objected to the untrammeled power of capital. As Doumani argues, "a nascent class consciousness could be detected in peasant petitions and lawsuits against their own traditional leaders, not to mention against the urban merchants."75 Their increased propensity towards self-representation, and their self- identification as distinct from the wealthier classes which they saw as bent on their oppression, underline this novel development.76

372- The Ottoman state was drawn into the tangle of escalating tensions caused by deepening peasant indebtedness from both ends: by peasants seeking refuge from debt peonage and by provincial elites who saw themselves as extensions of the state and contended that the peasants' resistance to debt bondage impugned imperial authority.77

During the ongoing tug of war peasant invocations of justice and propriety typically fell by the wayside in imperial calculations. The Ottoman center periodically reminded local notables of their duties, such as protecting and expanding the landed area under cultivation, and warned them against driving peasants into flight, levying illegal taxes, and cheating peasants out of fair prices for their goods.78 It also officially tried to block debt-based land seizures by creditors through several orders and measures in the 1870s, but as Gad Gilbar puts it, "market forces overpowered government orders" and peasants themselves remained at the mercy of moneylenders for credit in an increasingly monetized economy.79 Moreover, the center's hands were largely tied by the notables' purchase on the Tanzimat institutions and beyond scolding them for their more egregious conduct, it demonstrated little will to tackle the problems caused by the spread of usury capital and to answer peasant cries for redress.80

The scale of the Land Law's effects on peasant control of their means and relations of production is both difficult to track with precision and hard, ultimately, to overestimate. The devaluation of customary possession in favor of legal possession guaranteed by formal, registered title was, as suggested above, little short of devastating,

373- both for many peasants and, over the long-term, for the rural-based social order. As the law was brought into implementation, peasants in vast areas of the country were dispossessed of lands they regarded as their own. Estimates of the extent and pace of peasant land alienation vary widely and should be approached with caution. Some contemporaneous observers regarded the dispossession and proletarianization of the peasantry as beginning in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.81 Others suggested the process was advancing much more rapidly. One cited by Schölch believed that at the outset of the twentieth century a mere 20 percent of lands in the Galilee remained in peasant hands under formal title, while in the hill country some 50 percent was thought to still be held by primary producers.82 There is evidence of dramatic change by the World War I era, at least in some locales, although a more precise and detailed look at the scale of alienation before this period has yet to be undertaken.

Bahjat and al-Tamimi's well-known travelogue throughout Beirut province (including portions of Palestine) provides a wealth of data and perspective on the social life of the towns and villages it surveys and on the transformation of the social order, but their tour was conducted during World War I, when the area suffered immense strains from escalating Ottoman demands on men, money and all manner of material resources, as well as weak harvests and epidemics of plague diseases (typhoid and malaria chief among them). They paint many striking portraits of the class order in Palestinian society and of the decay of bonds between the wealthy and the impoverished, whom they

374 describe as the majority. In Tulkarm, for instance, a modest town on the edge of the coastal plain region, the majority of its 2000-3000 inhabitants, many of whom were peasants or former peasants, were destitute wage-laborers said to own little but the clothes on their backs. A middle class existed above them, living comfortably with assets worth £T 1000-5000 and often its members were more educated than the wealthy, who imitated the ways of the Nabulsi elite, enjoyed annual incomes equal to the net worth of the middle strata, and had accumulated £T 20-40,000 in assets.83 The two travelers recorded that they saw much the same elsewhere, describing the districts they visited, save for Haifa, as "tantamount to a fount of poverty," mixed in, as the Tulkarm description makes clear, with islands of wealthy and middle class elements.84 Some areas they visited did not fit this schema, such as the village of al-Jadideh in the Galilee, a mostly Christian village from which a good deal of the population had emigrated to North America, Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere. Perhaps in consequence, its lower classes, consisting of tradespeople and petty shop owners, constituted approximately 30 percent of the population, with the rest of the Christians enjoying higher standards of living.85 For the most part, however, the depiction of wretched masses to which they repeatedly call attention prevailed in many locations, although the wartime circumstances and the nature of their inquiry obscure the reconstruction of a longer view of land alienation and proletarianization.

375- Abraham Granott, longtime managing director of the JNF during the Mandate period and a student of the land regime in Palestine from the late Ottoman era forward, compiled statistics showing that by the early twentieth century some 144 families owned approximately 3,130,000 dunams, and if the circle was widened to the next 100 landed families, that their total ownership equalled that of the rest of the population.86 However, some 2,000,000 dunams of the first 144 families' possessions were in the south, concentrated around Gaza and Beersheba. Additionally this 3.13 million figure also subsumed imperial lands held in the name of the Sultan (as mudawwara or jiftlik, which were governed similarly to miri). The concentration of ownership in the south meant, as Owen rightly points out, that if the figures were accurate it was "unlikely that much of the hill country had, as yet, been incorporated into large estates."87 And in fact this surmise could be extended to much of the territory in Palestine north of Jaffa and Beersheba. Adding further cause to the view that mass dispossession took time to gather steam, Granott logically enough underscored the role of debt as a means of divesting peasants of land, but two analysts from the Mandate period suggested that this avenue really accelerated under the British, though they acknowledge that it began in the late Ottoman era.88 What can tentatively be concluded from the preceding is that the Land Law helped to propel class stratification to new heights and dimensions in Palestine, though the dispossession of the peasantry, which was advanced in some zones by the 376- World War I era, appears to have accumulated over many decades, proceeding more rapidly in some areas and less so in others.

The notables who came to possess great quantities of land, on the other hand, moved towards assuming the role and status of an aristocracy. Many chose to become absentee landlords, moving to urban centers and especially to the coastal cities, while leaving the affairs of their estates in the hands of trusted underlings.89 As Manna' points out, the new aristocracy progressively separated itself from the producing classes on which its strategies for accumulation depended, holding itself aloof from the masses of society.90 This sharpening sense of class distinction, embodied in the physical withdrawal of the elite from the countryside and its embrace of the urban sphere (which had often been viewed with suspicion by rural denizens), did not always translate into wide regard. Unlike the older elite, whose preeminence was generated variously through status hierarchy affiliation, government employment, and playing a mediatory role with the Ottoman center, as described by Hourani, newer elites did not have the same ties to the public. Since they didn't see as much necessity in actively cultivating links to the productive classes and the public, they didn't always enjoy the same social regard as the old elites had, despite their great fortunes.91

By the turn of the twentieth century at least three distinct general models of land exploitation emerged within the local political economy beside the shrinking regime of smallholders. The large estates that formed in the plains and the hills were distinguished 377- form one another by the forms of labor common to the respective zones and, correspondingly, in the quality of relations between notables and peasants. In the central highlands, save for the Jerusalem area, "a resident landlord class with strong patrimonial relations to its peasant base" existed. The growth of sharecropping in these regions, as much as it indicated the diminished status of peasant autonomy, represented a relative conservation of the ideal of reciprocal bonds between lords and fellahin. Lords still acted to shield peasants from taxation and afforded them necessary lines of credit, while peasants rendered their due loyalties and services to lords, which by then typically included labor on the notables' lands as well.92

The familiar fabric of 'ayn-fellah relations which was observed in much of the hill country was not in evidence in the estates in the lowlands and coastal regions. Two divergent models of accumulation appeared in these latter areas, one based in the erection of capitalist plantations (bayyarat; sing: bayyara) and the other, based in speculation in land, was characterized by "the emergence of a pure rentier class of absentee landlords." The bayyarat, which arose in Gaza, Jaffa, Lydda, Jericho and other areas, relied on a regime of wage-labor. On these estates workers provided only their labor, while all factors of production and capital investment came from the notable owner. As Salim Tamari observes, the bayyarat were "the opposite of a smallholder's regime," and in sharp contrast to the hill country, were marked by the "relative absence" of notions of patronage. The reliance on wage-labor and the absence of personalized bonds mediating relations between laborers and lords drew migrant workers from Syria 378- and Egypt, especially in the coastal areas, as well as Arabs from Palestine. The other mode of accumulation that appeared in the lowlands exemplified the arrival of land as a commodity. The notables holding lands in these areas, when not involved in plantation agriculture, tended to engage in speculation and rentierism, both of which paid handsomely. Speculation was fed by the continually rising land values while rentierism, though not judged as profitable as commerce, moneylending, or soap making, still produced a significant return. As with the bayyarat, personal relations or ties did not much enter into the calculus of lords' management of their holdings and any peasants resident on them. Consequently a kind of hollowed-out form of social relations between owners and tenants existed on such estates, with the former operating as rentiers collecting land rents and disposing of the estates at their pleasing.93

World economic integration and peripheral capitalism

The wider context for the divergence in models of land and labor organization on large estates pertained to the growing integration of Greater Syria into the world economy. As Alexander Schölch has explored at length, the quarter century following the Land Law witnessed the growth of substantial agricultural exports from Palestine to Egypt, Lebanon, and Europe. The ports of Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre conducted brisk business in shipping wheat, barley, dura (sorghum), sesame, olive oil, soap, cotton,

379- oranges, and other fruits and vegetables abroad. Summarizing the broad growth of Palestine's increasingly export-oriented economy prior to 1882, Schölch observes that "Palestine experienced a remarkable economic upswing in the two and a half decades following the Crimean War."94 By some measures the expansion of trade was breathtaking. According to incomplete figures and estimates collected by the British consulate the value of exports from Jaffa might have grown as much as 50-fold between 1825 and 1875 before mushrooming a further 160 percent by the eve of World War I.95 By another evaluation, Jaffan exports rose from £ 250,000 per annum in the late 1880s to £ 750,000 in 1913-14.96 The thickening of trade links to Europe decisively consolidated the primacy of the cities within the political economy and further intensified their hold over the hinterlands.97 Moreover, market integration gave further stimulus to two processes critical to the changing development of the social order in Palestine: the development of large estates and the expanding grip of merchant capital, including that of a "commercial bourgeoisie," over agricultural production.98

Though Schölch contends that Palestine's boom and its increasing production for export markets did not fuel economic restructuring or significantly alter existing methods of production in manufacturing and agriculture, he understates the importance 380- of market integration's effects.99 This is perhaps most pertinent and visible in areas of citrus production. Between 1850 and 1880 citrus plantations grew to encompass one- third of the lands in the Jaffa region, while the yield of the fruit grew over almost the same time period by over 75 percent.100 By 1881 it was regarded as the most lucrative commodity in which to be invested, with net returns of approximately 10 percent per annum, and by 1904 citrus replaced wheat as Palestine's chief export.101 The orange harvest of 1879 in Jaffa was estimated to require 5000 workers to complete picking and packing, a number equal to half the town's population.102 Though such work was seasonal, the sheer quantum of labor drawn to the plantations, which typically operated on the basis of wage-labor, represented a step in the direction of partial proletarianization among peasants (and other migrant laborers) and towards the institutionalization of agrarian wage work. On the other end of the valorization chain, the profits derived from citrus production and exports appear to have reinforced the interest of wealthy merchants and other notables in the bayyara production model, who not only fueled the sector's growth, but reinvested part of the proceeds back into the business in the form of improvements in the production process.103 The plantations thus entailed considerable flows of wage-labor (at least some of which was provided by the dispossessed), the dedication of the majority of the produce to exports (i.e. generalized

381- commodity production),104 the extraction of surplus value through economic means, the steady conversion of lands to private citriculture estates and the expanded reproduction of capital - all of which were directly related to world market integration. Taken together these features made the bayyarat, contrary to Schölch's conservative reading, microcosms of capitalist development and rendered citrus production a vital foothold for its expansion into other segments of the economy.105 It is worth considering and explicating more precisely what kind of capitalism developed at this time in Palestine.

Since the advent of Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems theory and the interrelated dependency theory school of analysis, capitalism outside of Western Europe has often been seen as marked by morphological distinctions, or specific deficiencies and limitations that prevented it from developing along the lines of the European progenitors. Paul Baran, for instance, argued that industrial development was precluded in the colonized regions of the globe (described as the Third World) through the destruction or diminution of local capital stock and the elimination of indigenous industry or proto-industry through exposure to ruinous competition with the industrial centers of Western Europe. At the same time, by deepening commodity production for market (generalized commodity production) and tying local actors to wider circuits of

382- exchange and consumption, world economic integration diminished local self- sufficiency and strengthened economic as opposed to extra-economic forms of surplus extraction. These dynamics in turn fed peasant dispossession, proletarianization and the concentration of land in fewer hands while making the colonies into producers of primary agricultural products.106 Hamza Alavi, whose scholarship develops rigorous models distinguishing capitalist, feudal, and what he calls colonial modes of production, largely agrees with Baran. Alavi argues that under the conditions of colonialism two of capitalism's key features, generalized commodity production and the expanded reproduction of capital, encountered critical blockages. Echoing Baran, he posits that "peripheral capitalism… brought about a disarticulated form of generalized commodity production, as contrasted with the integrated form in metropolitan capitalism," meaning that capital goods and industry were organically part of capital formation in the metropolitan core countries while this was preempted in the colonial lands. With respect to capital's expanded reproduction, the articulation and subordination of the colonial economy to the imperial center and the siphoning of surplus capital from the colonies to the former combined again to assure that the "productive powers" of the metropole steadily developed while leaving those of the colony to languish without capital improvements in a state of underdevelopment.107

As James Reilly has suggested, the optic of peripheral capitalism arose from debate over the relative disinterest or neglect by world systems theory and the 383- dependency school in the internal social and economic dynamics and structures within the colonial world. Studies of peripheral capitalism strive to examine and analyze both local and global scales and frameworks together, attending to local specificity and agency while maintaining the macroeconomic context of global capitalism's hierarchical and differential development.108 Reilly's own inquiry into capitalist development in Damascus and its hinterlands between the Egyptian occupation and the First World War utilizes this approach and stresses, in part, the deindustrialization of Syria through the decomposition of its textile industries during its incorporation into the world economy. The spread of capitalist social relations within Palestine did not, however, follow an identical course and it must be observed that the Palestine case does not entirely conform with the template of peripheral capitalism developed by Alavi and others.

Curiously, the textile sector in Palestine, present in Safad, Nazareth, Nablus, Hebron, Majdal, Gaza, and the village of Bayt Jala, by some accounts survived world market integration in far better shape than its more developed northern neighbor. This may have had to do with its production of coarser fabrics and products than Damascus, aimed primarily for local consumption.109 Palestinian handicraft industries and the artisan sector likewise proved "for various reasons… completely beyond the reach of European competition."110 The destruction of traditional enterprises like the mother-of- pearl mementos made at Bethlehem transpired later, under British rule.111 And of course the soap industry, Palestine's leading (light) industrial business, prospered mightily 384- during the Tanzimat era and afterwards, before the British Mandate, with outputs booming over 400 percent between 1860 and 1907.112 Local industry, to the small extent and in the limited forms that it existed, was not uprooted as market relations deepened. On the other hand, as noted directly above, the citrus plantations encouraged some degree of expanded reproduction. Besides the looms of the spinning sector, some of the first industrial machinery in Palestine remarked on by observers consisted of water pumps and irrigation equipment employed in the orchards of Jaffa.113

So why might peripheral capitalism still be an apt description for Palestine before the fall of the Ottomans? To answer this question we can turn for comparison to Egypt. In a survey of Egyptian agriculture in nineteenth century Roger Owen concludes that "a distinct form of capitalism resulting from the integration of a precapitalist economy into the world capitalist system" arose by the twentieth century. It was a peculiar late- developing version of capitalist relations, externally-driven by the wider world system, which produced property markets in land, wage-labor markets, and expanding commodity production, yet which paradoxically lacked capitalists themselves, i.e. those who would productively invest in improving the means of production.114 In this description lies much of the key to understanding the nature of peripheral capitalist development in Palestine, though unlike Egypt, if Owen's description is fair, it can't be said to lack capitalists or expanded reproduction. In fact, as Schölch emphasizes world

385- economic integration gave rise to a commercial bourgeoisie in Palestine, one that like the other elements of Owen's description, grew in tandem with external markets and the forces shaping global capitalism. Although we may regard it as a bourgeoisie it retained a very agrarian cast, deriving its income mostly from international commerce (in agricultural commodities), land rents and the land market, tax-farming, and moneylending, and only engaged limitedly, as a whole, in industrial enterprise. The limited industry of Palestine was not in serious competition with Europe, and its elite evinced only tentative interest in broadening its economic base past rent-seeking and mercantilism. Hence not unwarrantedly Shafir regards the Arab bourgeoisie as compradors.115

The crystallization of capitalism in Palestine in the late Ottoman era was, like Egypt and elsewhere in the region, the product of a wider constellation of forces, intimately related to the world market and the dominant capitalist powers of Western Europe. Beyond the preconditions established during the Tanzimat (such as the commodification of land), its development was keyed to, and crucially, subordinate to, those external forces. This is not to say that local actors weren't central to its emergence. The profits that could be made from the export trade encouraged local entrepreneurialism, and the new mercantile elites who were already transforming agriculture and social relations within Palestine found it further in their interest to pursue the deepening of market relations. Yet as Schölch argues, the development of land stratification and landed estates and the dominance of the commercial elite over agrarian

386- production were the "preconditions for a peripheralisation of the economy." The new elite and its accumulation strategy pushed Palestine "along the path towards that predominantly outward orientation of 'undeveloped' economies which results in foreign control and in the increased emphasis on the import of luxury goods" in place of broader economic development.116 Like other peripheralized territories, Palestine remained overwhelmingly a producer of primary agricultural products with its earnings subject to the rise and fall of increasingly competitive global commodity flows, while the development of a more diversified economy did not much interest its elite until the Mandate era.

As suggested above, world economic integration and the emergence of capitalist social relations accelerated the processes of social transformation and restructuring that were already underway in Palestine. Their dynamic effects were apparent in the dramatic growth of the population and of urban centers. From the early 1850s to the early 1880s the population increased from some 350,000 to 470,000 persons, a rate and scale of increase unmatched since the reign of Sulayman the Lawgiver.117 The urban population grew at approximately the same rate during the same time period, after which the twelve biggest cities and towns nearly doubled in size between 1880 and 1922, well above the healthy overall rate of growth throughout the country.118 The deepening power of the urban centers could be seen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

387- centuries in their swelling gravitational pull on labor, as they attracted larger flows of peasants from the villages and urbanization deepened.119 The coastal ports of Jaffa and Haifa grew the most rapidly, considerably outpacing the other urban centers, and testifying to the crowning role of external commerce, the former became the economic and cultural center of Palestine before the British conquest.120 The conspicuous prosperity and clout of the notable classes who benefited from the expansion of market relations and the export trade was not restricted to the orange regions. Though the lords of the hill country relied on regimes of sharecropping and did not exclusively adopt the wage-form, their access to the world market and command over the local relations of production served them well, and there is little reason to believe that any major distinction in income or relative stature developed between the economic elites of the interior and those of the coast.121

Contemporaneous witnesses remarked that in spite of the heavy extraction of local potentates, tax-farmers, and the state, the peasantry gained financially from world market integration, either investing their earnings in women's adornments, jewelry or arms, or stowing their cash by burying it.122 Purchases of consumer goods as well as imports (which were likely skewed towards the wealthy) indicate that living standards 388- were, at least in some areas, elevated over previous levels.123 The rural population also benefited from the improvement of security throughout the country and the expansion of areas for cultivation and settlement.124 Not surprisingly given the shift in the economic center of gravity to the cities, it appears that urban households faired better over the long-term. Bahjat and al-Tamimi found horrible poverty in many rural areas, brought on by debt as well as the terrible circumstances of the Great War and poor harvests. In Nablus, on the other hand, even the most modest homes were not without copperware while Haifa was described as having the look of "paradise" compared to Nablus, Tulkarm, and the far lowlier Jenin.125

Nevertheless, on balance increasing integration into the world market was accompanied by what Mike Davis has aptly described in other contexts as "downward mobility" for much of the peasantry.126 Spikes in incomes proved short-lived for the most part, as the process of class differentiation continued. A portion of earners became or maintained a middle class status as owner-cultivators of some means. But for an increasing segment of the agricultural population, the gains derived from market expansion appear to eventually have left their hands, appropriated by the elites through the familiar channels of lending, debt, and advance purchase contracts.

389- By the turn of the twentieth century usury capital had fractured the landscape of Palestine, alienating and dividing peasants from the aristocracy while providing merchants opportunities to accumulate great wealth and power. Bahjat and al-Tamimi's chronicle catalogues the dissension wracking the social order during World War I. Their findings were an indictment of the regime of unrestrained moneylending which, in the words of a peasant from Dayr Istiya near Nablus, "set brother against brother."127 Such sentiments were commonplace in areas of the highlands, where the familial idiom of (broken) fraternity was employed to convey the understanding that the bonds of social solidarity were being sundered and replaced.128 In the hinterlands of Jabal Nablus the city had become an image of corruption, its avarice blamed for poisoning relations in the district. The peasants declared themselves "prisoners" of the urban elites who exploited them and benefited from their toils. The Nabulsi notability, for its part, continued to vocalize notions of noblesse oblige and even to claim to be doing the indebted and dispossessed peasants a good turn.129 This it did while charging annual interest rates of some 60-70 percent.130 For its power and riches, the elite of Nablus became the source of emulation for proximate urban zones, such as Tulkarm.131

While the relations between peasant producers and elites in the environs of Nablus appear to have been particularly charged, it wasn't the only area subject to the 390- manipulation of salam contracts. The practice existed in other regions of modern-day Syria, and the well-known Syrian intellectual Muhammad Kurd 'Ali opined several years after al-Tamimi and Bahjat's tour that salam contracts had been the undoing of the local peasantry in the nineteenth century.132 Elsewhere, such as Haifa, other lending instrumentalities were used to the same effect, creating debt peonage and dispossession while benefiting the international trading class that acted as the agriculturalists' creditors. Mahmoud Yazbak, who has studied the Islamic court records of Haifa, has noted that they contain hundreds of contracts for loans against landed collateral.133

There is little doubt that similar practices unfolded in other corners of Palestine over the final decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. It is little wonder then that, taking stock of the situation, al-Tamimi and Bahjat commented, not without a note of modernist disdain, as Doumani suggests, that "loans and lending are the path to enslavement in our constitutionalist country."134

Moneylending was not a new feature of the economic life of Palestine, but after the privatization of land began to be institutionalized with the 1858 Land Law, it held newly potent ramifications. The combined effect of the commodification of land and world market integration was to vastly strengthen the upper classes, whose burgeoning fortunes were recirculated in part as usury capital, the valorization of which grew in proportion with the increasingly onerous terms exacted from rural borrowers. This self-

391- reinforcing circle of mercantile prosperity-usury-peasant destitution did much to reshape social relations in Arab society. The older ethos of clientage, formed by peasant struggles for equity, dignity, and subsistence, began to unravel. Where marketing and surplus-extraction networks had been built on social capital and reciprocal if unequal bonds between producers and elites, money capital increasingly intruded, muting concerns for the producers' livelihoods and injecting new antagonism into sharpening class relations. As the cultural and socioeconomic solidarities that had held together the fabric of local Arab society came unwound, elements of Palestinian society experienced a deep anomie and what Ylana Miller calls "a search for social values that would secure the survival of an Arab communal structure." The Arabs were "suspended between cultural unity and social division."135 The nascent search for a kind of social code that would ensure the collective integrity of Arab society was spurred from another direction by Zionism and the contests over land and ownership that accompanied its entry to Palestine. The social meaning of land, which had begun to qualitatively change after the 1858 Land Law, was subject to new pressures and stimulus that in turn helped steer the search for values towards nationalism and the emergence of nationalist identity.

Articulating a nationalist ethics of land

It has long been a conceit of nationalist histories that the forging of nationalist precepts and imaginaries is often the work of the more articulate classes of a population. 392- Poets, soldiers, politicians, literary figures, and others all might put their stamp on the new national entity's identity and aid in the discovery, or more commonly "rediscovery" of its "roots." Some such figures may not be from the most educated ranks, but the task of calling forth the nation - providing its intellectual and discursive architecture, elaborating its tropes and its storied history, setting forth its emotive and affective armature - is generally a restricted enterprise. In the peasant-based societies of Egypt and the Levant, this charge was taken up largely by groups of educated middle class intellectuals.136 Their work, as recent studies by Michael Gasper on Egypt and Munir Fakher Eldin on Palestine have shown, entailed the parallel project of reforming the local peasantries, raising them from their benighted condition of ignorance, destitution, and "backwardness" while making them into national subjects who collectively exhibited the "cultural traits of modern nationhood."137

In Palestine some of this intelligentsia called itself the "men of the Nahda," referring to the Arabic literary and cultural revival of the late 19th century in areas of Greater Syria, or the "men of the pen and morality."138 I will use the more common term, effendiyya. Educated in liberal institutions, the effendiyya reflected the intellectual

393- spirit of the era, becoming "enthusiasts for the idea of the nation." They styled themselves as flag-bearers of the national cause and its men of letters. Occasionally they were also dynamic activists and genuinely popular leaders. As beneficiaries of the Tanzimat and world market integration, they viewed themselves as above the fellahin, who they took to be "raw material" for the national project. According to this conception, the fellahin were bearers of Arab culture and the fundaments of corporate identity, but they were primitive, given to unruly sentiments, and in need of instruction and direction by the more modern and "patriotic" elements of society - a role that would naturally be fulfilled by the effendiyya. As Fakher Eldin succinctly explains, they imagined that the peasantry "had to be taught how to remold their 'essence' into the ideal social forms of the modern nation." The project of nation-building and social reform thus reconceived preexisting forms of rural community and identity to match key aspects of the European liberal ideal for a polity: "popular senses of solidarity and practices of mutual support were de-contextualized and re-imagined into new forms of sociability and collective belonging based on individual membership in (civil) society, of which private property in land is an essential expression and substance."139

Nahda ideology deeply marked Palestinian nationalist discourse throughout the Mandate era and helped fortify the economically liberal approach to land to which the late Ottoman period had given rise. As an arriviste class, the effendiyya were not only patronizing towards the peasantry, but actively disinterested in arresting the acceleration of social stratification and the concentration in land ownership, let alone in reversing 394- such trends. In effect, the views of this assertive middle class intelligentsia shaped and underwrote the conservative nationalism and ethos that the notables came to adopt, furnishing it, at least in the early years of the Mandate, with a modern political vocabulary and an articulate intellectual class.

Although the effendiyya were early explicators of nationalism, and, as such, are well positioned to be seen as its progenitors and its "founding fathers," Rashid Khalidi has convincingly demonstrated that early resistance by peasants to Zionist colonization had significant impacts on the changing self-identity and self-conception of the Arabs in Palestine. It was the repeated struggles of the lower rural strata that brought intellectuals and elites to recognize that Zionism posed a threat to the corporate existence of the Arabs, or less grandiosely, to understand that it represented a fervent challenge to their presumption that Palestine, as the land they had inhabited for generations, was part of their patrimony.140 Almost from the outset, Zionist land purchases became a cause of contention among the peasantry. In consequence, the value of land, already transmogrified by the Tanzimat, underwent substantive transformations during the early Mandate and the period immediately preceding it, accruing powerful new national connotations. Events at Petah Tiqva, the first Zionist colony, founded near Jaffa, are illustrative of subsequent dynamics.

395- The land upon which Petah Tiqva was established was obtained after peasants forfeited it as collateral on their debts. The land was sold to Zionist colonists and several years later, in 1886, peasant resistance occasioned Ottoman military intervention and led to the death of one of the colonists. Part of the dispute owed to the fact that the seller had reputedly disposed of more land than was in his possession, but the core of the events appeared to be peasant discontent at their dispossession, and probably no less so considering that it derived from debt-induced forfeiture. When they were offered leases and work on some of the alienated lands the issue was mitigated, but similar controversies, some accompanied by open hostilities, plagued other early colonies in the 1880s and 1890s, including Rehovot, Gedera, Nes Tziona, and Hadera.141

As Schölch points out, contention over land sometimes had as much to do with Arab perceptions and fears of serving European masters as it did with dispossession and eviction. At the village of Abu Shusha, in the Ramle area, Melville Bergheim, a German banker and investor, was able in 1872 to purchase much of the community's lands by paying its tax arrears. After the transfer, years of discord with both Arab notables and peasants ensued, until a member of the Bergheim family was murdered in 1884. Noting similar dissension pertaining to the German Templar colonies and to Yazur, an Arab village upon whose lands a Jewish agricultural school, Miqve Yisrael, was erected, Schölch concludes that foreign colonization was ab initio fertile ground for conflict.142 Purchases in the Tiberias subdistrict at the turn of the century by the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), a Zionist land company, set the stage for further

396- conflicts. The plot acquired was almost 70,000 dunams in size, some 60,000 of which was obtained through the Sursuq family. Attempts to take possession of the parcels brought resistance from several area villages that would be dispossessed, including al- Shajara, Misha, and Milhamiyya. The JCA official who had contracted the purchases was shot at by local peasants, and, as at Petah Tiqva, Ottoman troops were sent in to quell the villagers' unrest, carting many off to prison. Some years later in 1909, al- Shajara was again the scene of local Arab resistance. The 1909 episode, which involved boundary disputes, was more severe than the earlier 1901-02 trouble, and resulted in attacks on the nearby colony of Sejera that left three dead.143

The reception of such incidents was greatly amplified and transformed following the 1908 revolution of the Young Turks (the CUP), which lifted press censorship and reinstated the 1876 Constitution that protected freedom of speech. Soon after the establishment of the first regular Arabic newspapers (i.e. al-Karmil in 1908 and Filastin in 1911) the nascent Palestinian press began to warn of the dangers of land sales to organs of the Zionist movement, and to suggest that such sales constituted treason.144 The strident warnings against land sales and Zionism, which became a regular feature of the Arabic press, followed on the heels of another important land conflict at 'Afula. In 1910 Elias Sursuq disposed of a quantity of land in the Marj Ibn 'Amir to the JNF. The lands sold included those of the village of 'Afula, amounting to some 10,000 dunams. The villagers there promptly resisted their eviction at the hands of the new

397- owners, and were assisted in their efforts by the qa'immaqam (district governor) of Nazareth, Shukri al-'Asali. Al-'Asali used his station to block transfer of the title deed to the JNF while sending troops to defend the villagers from the Jewish paramilitary organization, Hashomer (the Watchman). Though al-'Asali was overruled by his superiors, he wrote in the press of the lands' historical importance to the Arabs, invoking their connection to Salah al-Din's reconquest of Palestine, and declaring that their alienation to 'foreigners' was treason. After their dispossession peasants from 'Afula continued to harass and attack the colony of Merhavia which arose on their former lands. Zionist settlers responded with force to the repeated attacks, and in 1911 killed an Arab, stoking further tensions. For his part, al-'Asali continued to pursue the matter of Zionism and local dispossession and, after his election in early 1911 to the Ottoman parliament, raised the case of 'Afula in the highest imperial circles as exemplary of the threat posed by Zionism.145

After the 1908 revolution land disputes and attacks by Arab fellahin on Zionist colonies multiplied.146 The Galilee, where 12 of the 15 colonies founded between 1901 and 1912 were built and where Arab peasants were overwhelmingly bereft of formal ownership of land, was the preeminent site for such contention, but Arab-Jewish clashes also occurred in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem after 1908. As Walter Lacqueur has written, for the Arabs, the aforementioned Zionist purchases in the Tiberias subdistrict gave rise to the "slogan" of the "danger of denationalization."147 The stiffening Arab resistance

398- under the Young Turk regime "brought the urban elite to a realization of the full import of Zionism: not only was land being purchased; its Arab cultivators were being dispossessed and replaced by foreigners who had overt political objectives in Palestine."148 While it is an exaggeration to claim that this was a universally shared perspective - among any strata of Palestinians - it is clear that the struggles of the fellahin against Zionist encroachment did make the threat of future "denationalization" a prominent and growing concern among segments of the middle classes and the elite. The contest between Arab senses of patrimony and Zionist aspirations to build a new society in Palestine, represented most sharply in peasant resistance to Zionist settlement and dispossession, began to infuse the territory of the region with new symbolic meanings and national connotations for the Arabs. As a correlate of the creeping discursive nationalization of land, its sale to Jews became "the archetypical act of treason."149 Press attacks on sales grew more vehement with time. Filastin, for instance, branded those who disposed of lands "human devils" and "enemies of the homeland" in 1921.150 For the first several years following the British occupation, the issue of land sales was raised more so by journalists and Arabic newspapers than by Palestinian politicians, who were, until the ratification of the Mandate in 1922, overwhelmingly preoccupied with mounting a vigorous diplomatic campaign against it and against the Jewish National Home policy. Yet as early as 1921 the national 399- movement demanded that the British halt land transfers from Arabs to Jews.151 This position was subsequently supported by resolutions at the fifth and sixth Palestinian Arab Congresses in August 1922 and June 1923.152

By the middle of the 1920s, the flow of land transfers began to attract the attention of Muslim jurists and 'ulama. The first fatwa (legal ruling or finding) forbidding land sales to Jews was issued in 1925 by the mufti of Gaza, Hajj Muhammad Sa'id al-Husayni, but had little effect.153 During the period of rising tensions over the Haram al-sharif in 1928-29, the use of an Islamic idiom to combat land transfers was revisited and, owing to the circumstances, found a wider audience. At a conference convened in Jerusalem in November 1928 to organize support for Muslim claims with respect to the Haram compound, some 700 persons from Palestine and abroad attended, and under the presidency of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, issued as part of their resolutions a call to their countrymen against land sales to Jews, and to support Arab land-buying companies. This was followed by a second convention almost a year later in October 1929, after the uprising and bloodshed in August, during which attendees swore an oath 400- that enjoined them to "conserve lands and keep them Arab" and not to sell lands either directly or through intermediation.154

As noted in chapters 1 through 3, the issues of land sales and peasant dispossession quickly attracted the attention of the youth trend in the late 1920s. Branches of the YMMA actively opposed land sales, first in the press and in literature (handbills) it produced, and then in an early version of later land campaigns, visiting areas of ongoing transfers and warning against the jeopardy they posed to individuals and to society.155 Similarly, when the Youth Congress was established in January 1932 its charter declared Palestine to be sacred land and roundly condemned land transfers to Jews as treasonous, while the organization became a major organizing center for activist campaigns on the land issue.

As is evident from the sketch above, the meaning and significance of land underwent a fundamental transformation among Palestinians in the late Ottoman era which carried over to and intensified under the period of British rule. Where the marketization of land in the late Ottoman period put a premium on individual ownership, by the turn of the twentieth century new associations were beginning to reconfigure its social and symbolic resonance and to accentuate its collective importance. Peasant resistance to Zionism and eviction, Arabic press attacks on land transfers, the discourse of the effendiyya, Islamic condemnations, and the activism and discourse of the two

401- premier youth societies all marked land as essential to communal identity and survival. Together they form a genealogy of land's nationalization within Palestinian discourse, and indicated that its importance transcended individual or class perquisites and ownership rights. The nationalization of land's social significance represented a substantive and wide-reaching shift in its cultural meaning. The development of an ethics or normative discourse that imbued land with national value recoded its primary discursive association within Arab Palestinian culture. Where land had been a source of personal or familial honor, it became the baseline of collective, national honor.156 According to this powerful discourse, the country and its lands became sacred ground. The precise symbolic or religious devices employed in creating the normative discourse on land were of less significance than the general character of collective indigenous claims to the country, repeated with increasing frequency over time, and the growing understanding that the struggle over land and dispossession lay at the heart of the conflict with the Zionist movement.
402

Chapter 5: British rule and the decline of the rural social order

In 1930-31 the Palestine administration began to put together a new scheme for
the reform of the Arab peasantry. Drawing on imperial experience in India, the plan
called for the creation of rural cooperative societies that would both serve as a means of
accessible and non-usurious credit and, more subtly, as instruments for reshaping
peasant consciousness and instilling "character" in their members. The cooperatives
initiative took three years to move from the drawing board to implementation, during
which the colonial authorities squandered whatever possibility may have existed for
trying to recuperate their position after the suppression of the 1929 uprising. Beginning
in 1930 peasants weathered a string of poor harvests that only let up in 1934. Although
in response the administration began to remit a substantial portion of rural taxes in 1930,
in 1931 the High Commissioner described the prevailing mood in the countryside as one
of "sullen distrust" towards the government.1 As the Commissioner of Lands reported
the same year, agricultural officers seeking to promote their department's agenda
commonly received a chilly reception from the rural population: "they are met with
silence or caustic remarks on the futility of Government officers tendering advice to
people whose financial situation, the Government must be aware, is such, that they have
no means of raising money for their ordinary requirements, or for the payment of
taxes."2
1 Quoted in Lesch, Arab Politics, p. 70. The issue of taxation is discussed in detail below.
2 Memorandum, Commissioner of Lands to Acting Chief Secretary, 12.5.31, PRO - CO 733/207/6.
403
Given the extent of peasant impoverishment, the cooperative scheme was
woefully under-capitalized, and only slowly began to bear some fruit in the years before
peasants rose in mass insurrection during the Great Revolt. As a plan for the
revivification of the Arab countryside, it can only be regarded as having made a belated
and very modest contribution towards alleviating the penurious misery that had spread
with increasing speed under the Mandate, while as a project for the colonial
improvement of the fellahin as individual subjects, it was an abject failure.3 More to the
point, its tardiness after successive years of terrible harvests illustrated the colonial
state's distance from the concerns and welfare of the country's Arab peasant majority, in
spite of the fact that High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope prided himself on
supposedly being a "friend of the fellah."4
Small-scale programs like the cooperatives venture and piecemeal relief from the
burden of heavy taxation characterized the British approach in the 1930s to what
amounted to a major crisis in the countryside. The most visible sign that the rural social
order was undergoing serious decomposition was to be found in the growth of
landlessness and agricultural dispossession, which affected some 40 percent or more of
the rural population.5 Although the question of landlessness in Palestine during the
Mandate has spawned much debate, it has largely been circumscribed to arguments over
whether Zionist colonization - on a mere fraction of the soil of Palestine - took place at
the expense of Arabs who were dispossessed, and whether or not this contributed to the
3 The cooperatives plan is returned to below.
4 As will be discussed here, this appellation, which Wauchope never tired of reiterating, is deeply ironic in
view of his actual record.
5 See below.
404
Palestinians' plight in 1947-48.6 An alternative and broader framework for analyzing
the effects of economic change on Palestinian society during the period of British rule
puts the development of capitalism and its preconditions front and center. Talal Asad's
well-known essay critiquing Abner Cohen's work on border villages in Israel puts
forward an early, Marxist-structuralist version of this argument.7 It contends, in brief,
that the British Mandate served to implant and promote the growth of a capitalist mode
of production, represented by Jewish colonization, within the existing indigenous, non-
capitalist economy, and to siphon off surplus capital from the Palestinian Arab
population and direct it to Zionist interests.8 Here I will suggest that both of these
approaches to what can be called "the agrarian question" inadequately address the
predicaments faced by the peasantry under British rule before 1936.
In this chapter I argue that the study of the landlessness problem during the
Mandate requires attention to the cumulative effects of British rule over the peasantry
and the countryside. Specifically, this chapter traces how British policies in a variety of
fields, including land tenure, taxation, customs and trade, and credit provision, greatly
6 See, for instance: Kayyali, Palestine; Aryeh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land-
Settlement and the Arabs, 1878-1948 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984); Stein, The Land
Question; Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity.
7 Talal Asad, "Anthropological texts and ideological problems: an analysis of Cohen on Arab villages in
Israel," Economy and Society v. 4, n. 3 (Aug 1975). A more recent and less theoretically invested
rendition of this line of argument can be found in Farsoun and Aruri, Palestine and the Palestinians, p. 57-
93.
8 "Anthropological texts," p. 263. Although Asad's argument raises provocative questions and does
gesture towards some of the inequities which British rule advanced, its emphases, at least as concerns the
countryside, are much misplaced. For instance, his contention that the system enacted under the Rural
Property Tax Ordinance (RPT) favored Jewish agriculture by allowing its higher labor costs to be
deducted from taxable revenues (through calibration of the tax to net rather than gross incomes) hardly
stands as an explanation for increasing Palestinian indebtedness (ibid.). By the time the RPT was
instituted in 1934, indebtedness and dispossession had already reached voluminous proportions, as will be
explored below.
405
undermined the position of the peasantry and bankrupted a significant segment of the
rural Arab population. While this dramatic transformation was already partially
underway before the Mandate, as will be shown here British policies critically
consolidated and exacerbated its effects.
The specific parameters of the colonial state's economic interventions were often
tied to the Mandatory obligation to advance Jewish colonization and promote the Jewish
National Home policy, and some of them were worked out in direct consultation with
Zionist representatives or as the consequence of their lobbying. Nonetheless, the British
approach to the Arab countryside was not solely crafted in service to Zionism, but was
also shaped by several other factors. The ethos of strict budgetary conservatism that
predominated in the British empire in the interwar period acted as an important general
constraint on the formulation of policy, tending to clip the wings of large-scale plans for
economic development.9 Still, British administrators in Palestine were torn between
conflicting conservative and transformative impulses. On one hand, officials were
driven by preconceived notions concerning the purported superiority and rationality of
"Western" and British forms of economic organization and administration, and contrary
presumptions that local socio-economic systems and the behavior of the population at
large were suffused with irrationality, disorganization, and dysfunction. Such
perceptions underwrote various schemes and efforts to reconfigure the economic sphere,
as will be surveyed below. On the other hand, the temptation to intervention was
counterbalanced not only by fiscal questions, but by concerns for maintaining social and
9 Smith notes that ultimately it was the Ministry of the Treasury in London that maintained fiscal
stringency and debarred a variety of development oriented initiatives (Roots of Separatism, p. 8).
406
political stability, especially after the violence of 1929. While seeking to spur and
deepen economic growth, the countervailing trend emphasized the need to "control and
limit changes in the Arab countryside," believing that perpetuating the rural social
hierarchy would make the regime influential allies, foster quiescence and serve the cause
of order.10 While the tug of war between the competing policy orientations played out
over almost two decades (1918-36), havoc was wrought on the rural social order.
Ironically, British rule brought about what London and Jerusalem wished most to avoid:
the creation of a landless, disaffected class.11
The argument advanced in this chapter has several further ramifications. First, it
buttresses the long-standing plaint made by some observers, particularly among
Palestinians, that the British doctrine of "dual obligation" was unworkable. Despite the
attempts of successive administrations in Palestine and London to reconcile the
objectives of the Zionist movement with the interests of the indigenous population, its
application did grave injury to Palestinian society while on the whole aiding the Zionist
enterprise. By demonstrating the manifest negative consequences of British rule for
Arabs in the countryside, this chapter also seeks to put paid to arguments attributing the
mounting malaise within Arab society primarily to the Palestinians themselves. Kenneth
Stein, for instance, offers a typical rendition of such contentions when he claims that
"The reasons for rural economic stagnation or decline were many, and none ultimately
10 Miller, Government and Society, p. 164.
11 Graham-Brown, "The Political Economy of Jabal Nablus," p. 99-100. See below.
407
related to Ottoman or British governance or Zionist presence."12 As will be shown here,
the distressed state of the rural sphere was intimately related to colonial policy and to the
advancement of the Zionist project. It should be clear then, that the present findings
further serve to illustrate the falsity of the claim made by proponents of Zionism, most
especially the Jewish Agency itself, that the advent of Jewish colonization was a net
boon to the Arab population, who misguidedly turned their backs on the prospects of
prosperous coexistence.13
The early Mandate and the "attack" on the land tenure system
When the British occupied Palestine they considered it, like other colonies within
the empire, a territory that had been subject to misrule and mismanagement. Unaware of
the extensive social transformations of the late Ottoman era, officials in the Palestine
administration and in London typically perceived the countryside as a social, cultural,
and economic backwater, mired in timeless and stultifying "backwardness." Although
this view stemmed from ignorance of the penetrating social and economic effects of the
Tanzimat and the steady incorporation of Greater Syria into the world economy, it also
derived from racial conceptions concerning the Arabs, and "Levantines" specifically. As
12 Stein, "Rural Change and Peasant Destitution: Contributing Causes to the Arab Revolt in Palestine,
1936-39" in Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East, p. 146. The litany of reasons which Stein
adduces is long, but wholly exonerates both the British and the Zionists from having any role in the matter.
13 As noted in the introduction, this is a time-worn argument, central to the Zionist movement's self-image
as a progressive force. It served an important ideological function of dispelling concerns that Zionism of
necessity did injury to the indigenous Palestinian population, and is still in circulation today both in
historical work and regarding the present conflict. A classic rendition of this claim from the period of the
current study appears in the Jewish Agency's testimony and evidence before the Peel Commission, which
was accepted without question or caveat by that body, as summarized in the report's sub-section on "Arab
Progress" (especially p. 128-29). For scholarly versions of the contention, see, for instance Haim,
Abandonment, p. 69-71; Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of
Zionist Politics (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, U.C. Berkeley, 1983), p. 49, 145.
408
noted in the Introduction, the British believed that the Bedouin were the "true" Arabs
while the settled majority was seen as dissolute and corrupt and hence lacking the vigor,
disposition and capacities necessary for autonomously-driven modern economic
development. Emblematic of this view, British officials saw Arab agriculture - the
bedrock of the Palestinian economy - as marked by slackness and technological
underdevelopment. In turn, as Zeina Ghandour has observed, they further interpreted the
state of local agriculture as symptomatic of the purported moral decay in Arab society.14
The supposed deficiencies of local culture and knowledge were abetted in this view by
Ottoman law and the "antiquated" land tenure system, which taken together revealed
local Arab society's "quasi-feudal" nature.15
Palestine was first put under military administration from 1917-20. The territory
had been devastated by the Great War and was in a state of catastrophic disrepair when
General Allenby's forces conquered it. During the war up to a quarter of its population
had fled the area, been conscripted, or been evacuated. The Ottoman military had drawn
heavily on local human, financial and natural resources. In addition to conscription,
locals performed corvée labor, particularly during the Ottoman army's retreat, moving
materiel often with nothing more than there own bodies. The tithe rose to almost three
times its pre-war rate, or almost 40 percent, before the final period of Ottoman rule
during which peasants were left only with shares calibrated to guarantee their family's
sustenance while the Sultan's forces claimed everything else. The country's forests were
14 Zeina Ghandour, A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine: Imperialism, Property, and
Insurgency (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 44-45.
15 Peel Commission report, p. 44.
409
depleted up and converted into fuel for the railroad. Locusts added to the shortages of
foodstuffs and inflation hit 400 percent on what remained of marketable produce. As
elsewhere in bilad al-Sham these conditions produced famine and the spread of plague
diseases such as typhoid, malaria, and typhus, which took a horrible toll on the
population. After the end of the war, many residents who had left returned and the
population rebounded, placing further strains on the beleaguered territory.16
The military administration generally acted to restore many local institutions
which had ceased functioning during the war, including the courts and schools, while
repairing wartime damage (such as to roads), fighting disease, and undertaking some
limited public works development (such as water provision in the Jerusalem area).17
Although alterations were made to the organization of both city government and the
courts, as an occupation regime the government was prohibited by the Hague
Convention of 1907 from interfering with or substantively changing the legal system.18
As Palestine's first Attorney General, Norman Bentwich, wanly described, this put the
Balfour declaration and the Jewish National Home policy temporarily on ice.19
Although the Mandate wasn't formally conferred until 1922, and was only ratified in
1923, the occupation was seen by the British to have ended in 1920, and with it the prior
16 Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, p. 2; al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, p. 55-56.
Comparatively, Palestine seems to have fared better than other regions of Greater Syria, especially
Lebanon (Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in
French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), p. 21, 23), though this should not be taken
to diminish the scale of hardship afflicting the territory. Its population is estimated to have fallen from
perhaps 790,000 before the war to a low of 600,000, before returning in 1922 (when the first British
census was taken) to 752,000 (Wasserstein, op. cit., ft. 5, p. 2).
17 Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 86-87.
18 Ibid., p. 86; Bentwich and Bentwich, Mandate Memories, p. 23.
19 Bentwich and Bentwich, Mandate Memories, p. 23.
410
restraints on transforming the local legal order and implementing the Jewish National
Home policy.
Against the supposed degeneracy of Arab society, the early regime under the first
High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel, envisioned the creation of a new economic order
in Palestine that combined efficient and interventionist state management of resources,
foremost among which was land, with the virtues of the market and capitalist economy.
Their partners in this endeavor, though not universally approved of or well-liked by all
British administrators and officials, were the Zionists. As is well known, Zionism was
generally seen by the British as a modernizing, energetic force, especially when
compared to the putative primitivism of the Arabs.20 Barbara Smith summarized the
approach of the early Mandate with admirable clarity:
The European [Jewish] settlers, with their superior education, technological know-how, and
capital, would bring material benefits to the 'natives' and provide the 'backward' Arabs with an
example to which to aspire; the injection of Zionist 'yeast' would produce a 'cake' to be shared
with the Palestinian Arabs. As long as it was assumed that the settler movement brought
unequivocal gain to the local population, the problem of a dual obligation could virtually be
dismissed; the welfare of the non-Jewish population was assured, it could be argued, simply by
facilitating the establishment of the Jewish National Home.21
With the able and determined Zionists as local vessels of modernity and beneficiaries of
colonial rule, the British imagined they could make all boats rise at once: while helping
build the Zionist dream the benighted indigenous population would reap the benefits of
20 The Peel Commission, sent to investigate the 1936 general strike and Arab unrest, offered a typical
rendition of such ideas, notably contrasting Arab backwardness to Jewish vitality: "…if in 1925 a new era
of progress had evidently begun [under the Mandate], the Arabs were still living in the atmosphere of the
past, still separated, almost, it might seem, by centuries, from the educated, resourceful, Western-minded
section of the Jews now entering the country…" (p. 46).
21 Roots of Separatism, p. 7.
411
both British tutelage and Jewish industriousness. The key to the road ahead in an
agrarian colony such as Palestine, as the new imperial masters had it, lay in the fruitful
exploitation of land.
Somewhat paradoxically for a regime advocating the virtues of private property,
the Samuel administration's first priority with regard to the countryside was to take
control of as much land as possible. This was to be achieved first and foremost through
seizing what colonial officials simplistically and inaccurately considered state domain
according to Ottoman law (see below).22 Several priorities motivated this course of
action: securing revenues, advancing productivity, and, importantly, serving the aims of
the Jewish National Home.23 As a matter of general policy the British undertook to aid
the Zionist quest for land. Under article six of the Mandate covenant, the British regime
committed itself to promoting the "close settlement by Jews on the land."24 This would
be accomplished in part by using state domain, again as per article six, to reallocate land
to Jewish settlers.
The chief executors of the initial British drive to build the territorial base of
Zionism were High Commissioner Samuel and Attorney General Norman Bentwich,
both of whose dedication to advancing the project of Jewish colonization in Palestine
was no secret.25 Together they embarked on a program not only of attempting to open
22 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 30, 43.
23 Ibid., p. 30; Smith, Roots of Separatism, p.
24 The Mandate charter, in The Israel-Arab Reader, p. 36.
25 Samuel wrote in his memoirs that his selection was made "With full knowledge on the part of His
Majesty's Government of my Zionist sympathies, and no doubt largely because of them" (quoted in
Kayyali, Palestine, p. 78). He also had the distinction of being the first to propose to the Cabinet that
Britain conquer Palestine and erect in it a Jewish state, which he did in 1915 while serving as Postmaster
412
what were deemed state lands to Jewish settlement, but also of facilitating the transfer of
private lands via the market. As will be discussed below, this early orientation of the
state towards active promotion of Zionist land acquisition was predicated on degrading
and denying Arab rights to lands they inhabited, especially those under customary title.
This was ostensibly balanced, in the case of the market transactions, by measures
safeguarding that transfers of land did not create a landless class. The appointment of
officials who regarded themselves as Zionists to critically important state positions,
however, helped set the administration's tone and prevent Arab demands from receiving
favorable consideration by the state. Indeed, as Stein argues, "There is no doubt that in
the 1920s Bentwich's Zionist sympathies neutralized administration opponents to the
Jewish national home concept." As concerns land, this meant that the Attorney General
acted such that "the Palestine administration neither prohibited land transfers [from
Arabs to Jews] nor contemplated prohibitions."26
In the British conception, the commitment to Zionism also dovetailed with the
colonial obsession with productivity. From early on the British evinced apprehension
over what they saw as low productivity and poor use of lands, including the existence of
sizable plots that were perceived to be, or actually were, uncultivated. One month after
taking office in 1920 High Commissioner Samuel entrusted a Land Commission (also
known as the Land Settlement Commission), led by Albert Abramson, the British
governor of the Southern District and later head of the Lands Department, to assess the
General (Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 33). For the most thoroughgoing treatment of Samuel's
administration see Huneidi, A Broken Trust.
26 Stein, The Land Question, p. 46.
413
status of state lands and determine candidate plots for "close settlement." Demonstrating
the state's closeness to the Zionist project, Haim Kalvarisky, an agent of the Palestine
Jewish Colonization Association (PJCA) and a chief land expert of the Zionist
movement, was also seated on the commission.27 While serving as a kind of prospector
for Zionist expansion on state-claimed domains, the Land Commission likewise
concluded that the local land regime was loaded with inefficiencies, including the
underutilization of holdings by Arabs. As a remedy for this supposed problem, it
advocated the increased marketization of land, stating that "every encouragement should
be given to landowners to sell their excess areas and that there should be no restriction
on sales."28 The unfettered transfer of land, it was assumed, would tend to move
underutilized land from "unenterprising" hands to more dynamic owners.29
Unsurprisingly, the indigenous Arabs, perhaps particularly the owners of large estates,
were seen as inefficient users of land, while Jewish colonists were lauded as sedulous,
modern farmers.30
The emergent foci of state land policy - the acquisition of state domain, support
for the Jewish National Home, the expansion of the land market, and improving
productivity, utilization and yields - were not well served, in the British view, by the
Ottoman land system. Formally the British agreed as part of the framework of the
27 Geremy Forman and Alexandre Kedar, "Colonialism, Colonization, and Land Law in Mandate
Palestine: the Zor al-Zarqa and Barrat Qisarya land disputes in historical perspective," Theoretical
Inquiries in Law v. 4, n. 2 (July 2003), p. 512. Faydi al-'Alami, a former mayor of Jerusalem was the
commission's third member.
28 Quoted in Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 60.
29 Ibid.
30 The state's budgetary strictures led the Land Commission further to endorse Zionist settlement for the
capital it would bring to Palestine and the expenditure that would therefore be saved (Bunton, Colonial
Land Policies, p. 174).
414
Mandates to act to preserve the bulk of the legal infrastructure which they inherited from
the Ottomans.31 Yet, as Martin Bunton points out, colonial administrators made little
effort to comprehend the intricacies and logics of the complex system of Ottoman land
tenure on its own terms, preferring to "assume a juridical vacuum wherever they thought
they could."32 The prevailing British hostility towards the Ottoman land code was well
summarized by Ernest Dowson, a preeminent imperial expert on land, who, when
brought in to conduct a review of policy in 1923, argued that the land regime was
deserving of nothing less than "a comprehensive attack."33 In actuality the "attack"
desired by Dowson proved more difficult to mount than anticipated, and faced
substantial push-back from the Arab population. Land law was consequently applied
and amended under the Mandate less in accordance with a grand colonial overhaul, than
in an ad hoc fashion as "Ottoman laws and practices inherited in Palestine were
translated, studied, reformulated, and institutionalized (or dismissed) in ways that
primarily addressed specific problems demanding the immediate attention of colonial
officials."34
The colonial drive to reconfigure the land system was presented by departing
Ottoman forces with a situation that was at once a unique opportunity for opponents of
the ancien régime, and equally a lasting predicament for an administration basing itself
in law. In an effort to thwart the British occupiers, Ottoman personnel removed or
31 Ibid., p. 32.
32 Ibid., p. 38.
33 Quoted in Ghandour, Discourse on Domination, p. 60.
34 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 38. In an incisive analysis of the presuppositions of British
discourse and practice regarding land, Ghandour concludes that colonial officials, perhaps especially in the
1920s, tended to think that the optimal approach to the land regime would be to treat it as a tabula rasa
and dismantle or disregard the existing system (Discourse on Domination, p. 42-82).
415
destroyed many of the land registers for the area before their exit.35 Records pertaining
to much of the country's lands were thus lost or absent, leaving the ultimate legal
disposition of many parcels in the shadows. From the British perspective the absence of
records posed a massive, nearly intractable problem of properly evidencing ownership
claims, for which written documentation was seen as the sine qua non. The missing
registers had grave repercussions for Palestine's peasantry, who were consequently often
left without what was deemed adequate proof of their rights to usufruct. As the Attorney
General saw it the Ottoman saboteurs did the administration and the Zionist movement a
great favor, opening the gates to more radical possibilities.36 In the absence of a paper
trail, the colonial state soon arrogated to itself wide latitude to determine the disposition
of lands throughout the territory.
During the period of the military administration the land registries were
temporarily closed, blocking legal recognition of transactions in landed property.37 This
move stemmed not only from the disrepair of the land registries, but also out of concern
to forestall the growth of a landless class and the social and political disruption that
would follow.38 The position of a great portion of the fellahin was greatly compromised
by wartime conditions, and a rash of land forfeitures and dispossessions were
imminent.39 Many landlords were also indebted by the war.40 The ban on land
35 Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 91; Ghandour, Discourse on Domination, p. 57. Ottoman officials in
what became Iraq similarly "took all the records they could with them" as they made their exit (Dodge,
Inventing Iraq, p. 74).
36 Ghandour, Discourse on Domination, p. 57.
37 Smith, The Roots of Separatism, p. 91.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid. Smith notes that after the war "It was impossible for cultivators to redeem their mortgages, and
foreclosure would have meant ruin." In this vein, Kenneth Stein has observed that peasants used
416
transactions offered momentary respite to the weary population, but when the civil
administration took over in 1920, it soon retreated from the concern for peasant tenancy,
acting both to curtail what it saw as peasant encroachments on lands claimed by the state
and to reopen the land market.
In spite of its great ideological and economic interest in agrarian productivity,
after World War I the state tended to see the postwar return to the land of peasants who
had fled during the war or been conscripted with a very distrusting eye, presuming that
they were deviously taking advantage of the unsettled postwar circumstances to
wrongfully enlarge their holdings. As peasants resumed stewardship of their lands, or
exercised their rights under the Ottoman land code to bring new lands under cultivation
- through provisions which bestowed title on those reclaiming miri mahlul (vacated miri
land) and mawat (wastelands or "dead" land) - the British authorities perceived the state
to be losing land.41 In response, by 1921 the High Commissioner articulated the aim for
the state of claiming and appropriating as much land for itself as possible, ostensibly to
serve the public interest.42
The conflict which the state precipitated with peasants over postwar land
dispositions was partially rooted in the colonial miscontrual of miri lands as state lands.
As reviewed previously, miri lands were held by the Ottoman state under a system in
mortgages during the war to purchase exemptions from conscription ("Legal Protection and
Circumvention of Rights for Cultivators in Mandatory Palestine" in Joel S. Migdal, ed., Palestinian
Society and Politics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), p. 238).
40 Stein, "Legal Protection," p. 240.
41 Smith argues that much land was left fallow during the war because of peasant impoverishment, and that
postwar, peasants were not making new acquisitions, but simply reclaiming lands on which they had
temporarily been forced to cease cultivation (The Roots of Separatism, p. 100). However, where peasants
did bring new areas under the till, as surely must have occurred, this would have been perfectly within
their rights so long as the lands were uncultivated miri or mawat.
42 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 43
417
which they were increasingly equated with and disposed of as private property. Usufruct
was conferred on tenants who paid the tithe ('ushr) so long as the parcels did not lie
fallow (without good cause) for three consecutive years.43 The state's ownership of miri
lands was often nominal, except in cases of their reversion to the Porte as mahlul. The
miri construct was principally concerned with synchronizing access to land and state
revenue generation. The British, operating from a legal tradition that saw de jure
ownership as paramount, demonstrated little grasp of or interest in the Ottoman
tradition's rather different linkages between usufruct, possession, and incentivization.
They instead opted to understand miri lands simply as state domain, initially with no
firm sense of binding obligation to tenants in situ, and to issue legislation which negated
peasants' rights to take possession of new miri and mawat lands.44
The colonial state's revision of the land code began with a set of laws in 1920
and 1921. The Land Transfer Ordinance (LTO) of 192045 reopened the land market, but
did so in a tightly regulated manner. It stipulated that transfers must be approved by the
state and that they would only be accepted on transactions of 300 dunams or less in the
country and 30 or less in the city, the value of which was not to exceed £P 3000.
Initially the ordinance was intended to avert speculation in land, and in addition to the
price ceiling, it mandated that transferred properties had to be brought into immediate
cultivation or use. In an effort to preserve the social order and prevent landlessness, it
43 Miri lands could also be claimed after ten years of undisputed possession and cultivation (Bunton,
Colonial Land Policies, p. 36-37).
44 Ibid., p. 36, 42-43.
45 The sketch here of the 1920 and 1921 LTOs is derived from: Porath, The Palestinian Arab National
Movement, p. 99-100.
418
was also stipulated that owners, and where applicable, tenants, had to have adequate
lands for their provision elsewhere, before a plot could be sold.
Despite the uncertainty clouding land rights and ownership, the British viewed
the land market as essential to fostering economic growth. The LTO was an attempt to
square the circle and resuscitate a functioning market, under conditions that would allow
the state to act as adjudicator of proper and agreeable transfers. Importantly, the High
Commissioner was an avid advocate of the legislation, seeing it as a vital means through
which the state could aid in the enlargement of the territorial base of Zionism. Its
promulgation followed his consistent pressure on the Foreign Office, the department
then supervising the Mandate in London.46 Arab elites did not look on it with favor.
They protested that the LTO contravened the freedom to dispose of their private
property, while contending that it was intended to hold down market values to aid
Zionist purchasers.47 The following year, in 1921, the provisions against speculation
were dropped,48 and the amended ordinance retained only the stipulation that owners and
tenants must have access to "sufficient land" for their needs elsewhere. This provision,
46 Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, p. 91. In five weeks HC Samuel telegraphed seven times to push
for the 1920 LTO.
47 Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 94. It has often been surmised that Arab elites' resistance to the LTO
was hypocritical because they opposed Zionism but wished to cash in on sales to Zionists (e.g. Stein, "One
Hundred Years," p. 71-72). Yet the majority of land transactions throughout the course of the Mandate
were intra-Arab sales (Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 3). Hence there was little reason for Arab
owners to be happy with administrative limitations placed on the value or disposal of their property.
Along with the rest of the population, Arab elites were hit hard by the war and afterwards suffered from
the state's policies. Colonel George Symes, Governor of the Northern District, diagnosed a litany of
troubles facing Arab elites in a report in 1922, noting that Arab business was in decline, the prices of
goods had fallen, credit was hard to come by, large landowners were in debt, and, in the north, the transit
trade in grain with Syria had been wrecked by new customs barriers (Memo by G.S. Symes, 5.2.22, CP
3921, PRO - CAB 24/136).
48 Smith notes that the anti-speculation provisions were a failure, as scholars and before them the Shaw
Commission and Hope Simpson inquiry revealed (Roots of Separatism, p. 94).
419
repeated in later legislations, proved to be easy to sidestep. Tenants were often simply
induced to leave or were ejected from lands before a sale was contracted, obviating the
law's intent on preserving peasant tenancy.49
In a major departure from the Ottoman tenurial practice and law, the state also
took action against what it conceptualized as "squatting." In 1920 and 1921 it passed
ordinances barring peasants from reclaiming mahlul and mawat lands and declared these
domains as state holdings.50 Any peasants found on such parcels were to be treated as
trespassers, and village leaders who failed to inform on peasants so reclaiming lands
were also subject to punishment. While no precise numbers are available, mawat lands
were variously estimated by the authorities to comprise an enormous portion of
Palestine, perhaps 2-3 million dunams, or by some projections, even larger sums
equating to a third of the country.51 The radical alterations to the land regime contained
in the mahlul and mawat ordinances would have prevented impoverished (or other)
fellahin from accessing these vast regions, and from bettering their own position through
expanded cultivation, an option which had at least theoretically always been available to
them under Ottoman suzerainty.52 As it happened, these ordinances rather
unsurprisingly drew the ire of Arab elites, who rejected the wholesale meddling of
49 Shaw Commission report, p. 115; Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 100; Smith,
Roots of Separatism, p. 97. A telling description of this process, and of villages whose populations
vanished before transfers from Arabs to Jews, is provided by the Commissioner of Lands, quoted in the
Shaw Commission report (p. 115).
50 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 43-45.
51 Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory, p. 37; Ghandour, Discourse on Domination, p. 63. The arable
lands of Palestine were estimated in 1930 by the Director of Lands, probably conservatively, at 8,044,000
dunams (Hope Simpson report, p. 43).
52 Forman and Kedar write that "Prior to 1921, Mawat had served as an important and legitimate source of
auxiliary land for rural agricultural expansion" ("Colonialism, Colonization, and Land Law," p. 514).
420
British administrators in land affairs as traducing the "sacred rights of citizens."53 Arab
political representatives also took issue with the colonial state's drive to expropriate
uncultivated lands in Arab possession.54
While the notion that peasants reclaiming lands were "squatters" engaged in
lawless behavior remained part of British discourse, the concerted opposition of Arabs
on the ground, combined with elite representations against colonial innovations in land
policy, stymied many of the state's broader aspirations to dispense with key components
of the Ottoman land regime. In 1924, the Acting Chief Secretary, Ronald Storrs,
remarked that the mawat ordinance had only been used once, on a small plot in Haifa.
The state's right to seize continuously uncultivated miri land (as mahlul) also went
untapped by the mid-1920s, as, to paraphrase Lord Allenby, tenants and claimants
always appeared out of the woodwork when a plot's ownership was deemed in
question.55
The curious case of musha'
Probably the most notorious and contentious "reform" of the land regime
proposed by the British concerned musha' lands, which were collectively held by
peasants. Like mawat lands, no hard figures exist regarding musha', though some
53 Quoted in Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 46.
54 Ibid., p. 43-46.
55 Ibid., p. 47-48. Storrs's claim is debatable, as the state's ruling that certain lands were mawat at Barrat
Qisarya, discussed below, proved detrimental to the Arab inhabitants' claims to rightful tenancy and
usufruct. Unclaimed mawat land was also reclassified as miri after the Land Settlement Ordinance of
1928, indicating that the colonial administration continued to desire to separate this land from the Arab
population and curtail its customary rights to reclaim it (Geremy Forman, "Settlement of Title in the
Galilee: Dowson's Colonial Guiding Principles," Israel Studies v.7, n. 3 (Fall 2002), ft. 13, p. 79).
421
evaluations indicate a very significant portion of cultivated lands were held collectively.
In 1923, for example, musha' was estimated by an official commission established for its
study to comprise 56 percent of the lands in 753 villages.56 Musha' lands were
collectively-owned plots, subdivided into smaller lots based on shares of ownership, and
periodically redistributed every year or two between owners of the shares.57 In Palestine
the collectivities holding musha' were usually not entire villages, but sub-groupings.58
The origins of musha' in the Levant are unknown, but collective ownership had many
advantages for peasants, including distributing taxation, aiding the cultivation of new
lands, pooling knowledge of farming techniques and methods, increasing labor
efficiency, distributing risk, and decreasing conflict and disputes over inheritance.59
Although dissension could arise from disagreement over issues pertaining to musha', in
general it acted as an instrument for building communal solidarity and spreading an ethic
of mutual support. For the Mandatory authorities musha' quickly became symbolic of
the old regime's archaism and recalled the commons in Britain, with all of that
institution's negative associations within the discourse of liberal political economy. As
Bunton points out, however, musha' was not a relic or a specter from capitalism's early
days, but a "self-consciously designed property rights system" - one that was suited to
56 Hope Simpson report, p. 24; Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory, p. 32. Nadan notes the unreliability of
such figures by pointing out considerable disparities between separate inquiries (The Palestinian Peasant
Economy, p. 272).
57 There were two general types of musha': "open-ended" and "closed" or "fixed." In the former, shares
accrued to eligible male members of a collectivity, such that families or groupings with larger numbers of
men received greater portions of land. In the latter form, each sub-unit of the collectivity (usually by
household) received an equal portion. For further detail, see Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p.
262-66.
58 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 265.
59 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 11; Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 275-76.
422
its historical, legal, political and economic contexts.60 Regardless of this, the practice of
musha' was perceived with great uniformity by the state and colonial experts as a central
impediment blocking the development of the agrarian economy and the spread of more
efficient, modern methods and units of farming.61
Almost from the inception of colonial rule, musha' was targeted for elimination.
The collective model of land ownership which it embodied stood at odds with the
cardinal value placed on individual landholding in British economic thought, but perhaps
even more odious in colonial eyes was the practice of reapportioning lands and
subdividing the entirety of the holding into numerous smaller parcels. The rotation of
lands was universally deprecated by British officials and consultants like Dowson, who
saw it as an abiding disincentive to productive investment. The overarching
presumption, shared by British and Zionist observers, was that no holder of a stake in
musha' would be willing to contribute capital to improve any of the lands within the
holding since the parcel or parcels in which the capital was sunk would soon rotate away
from their possession into another stake-holder's hands. This notion has been proven
erroneous by researcher Amos Nadan, who found more flexibility in the system than
colonial observers ever grasped. Regarding investment in musha' Nadan's interviews
with individuals who lived as peasants during the Mandate era revealed two means for
60 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 9, 11.
61 E.g. Hope Simpson report, p. 24, 105. This assessment, which was popular among Zionists as well as
the British, has been reproduced in a variety of the scholarship on land, political economy, and colonial
rule in the countryside, most notably among scholars or works that are generally partial to Zionism.
Kenneth Stein has almost undoubtedly been the greatest proponent of this view in Engligh-language
scholarship. See, for instance: Stein, The Land Question, p. 14; Stein, "Rural Change," p. 148; Naomi
Shepherd, Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine, 1917-1948 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1999),
p. 103.
423
increasing capitalization. The planting and cultivation of trees which were collectively
held and collectively cared-for was one manner in which productive investment
occurred. In other cases, peasants with capital could request a non-rotating plot within
the holding, which would still be considered musha' but would not conform to the
redistribution schedule. They could then invest on a specific parcel or set of parcels.62
Aside from the presumed disincentive to investment, the subdivision of lots held
as musha' was another practice which the British assumed was economically damaging
and retrograde. The resulting "over-parcellation" was seen as reducing economies of
scale, creating inefficiencies in labor and time (by disaggregating and physically
separating an individual's lots), and as a cadastral nightmare, since parcels could be in
many long thin strips or irregular shapes.63 Yet parcellation and the shapes it took were
commonly keyed to distribute the lands of the holding according to soil type and
suitability for different crops, so that each shareholder received a mixture of areas
appropriate for both summer and winter crops, while assuring a more even distribution
of the lands by quality. As Nadan astutely puts it, "A shareholder was entitled to diverse
categories of land."64
The quantity and character of colonial misapprehensions concerning the
operations and utility of musha' lands mirrors many of the authorities' confusions
regarding the land tenure regime in general, and miri lands more specifically. In both
cases colonial officials, including the most vaunted experts, were woefully ignorant of
62 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 9-10; Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 275.
63 Strickland, the registrar of cooperatives (whose work will be discussed below), wrote of finding musha'
parcels that stretched for 2150 meters, but were only 4.5 meters wide (Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant
Economy, p. 269).
64 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 266.
424
even the most elementary characteristics and functions of the holding. Very few state
officials in fact had any significant grasp of the legal environment or customary practices
attendant to either category, yet these critical facets were largely treated with derision.65
And in each instance of the colonial state's encounter with indigenous and preexisting
land systems it sought to maximize its own control while diminishing the institutions and
avenues through which peasants negotiated and improved their circumstances. The
blithe disregard for Ottoman law and local practice as concerns the units of the pre-
occupation land regime illustrates the radical ambitions that underlay the new colonial
regime. As with its grand designs concerning miri and mawat lands, the state's desire to
abolish musha' outstripped its capacity and brought unforeseen and unintended
consequences.
Dowson, who crafted the system of "land settlement" implemented in Palestine,
needed only three days to draw up a blueprint for "rationalizing" the land regime which
included the break-up and partition (ifraz) of musha' lands.66 He left little doubt that the
abolition of musha' in favor of individual rights was a primary goal.67 The program that
he devised combined the cadastral survey of lands with the registration of formal title,
and was intended to create a sound basis for the credit system and the land market.68 It
also aimed at apprehending the scale and taking greater control of lands claimed by the
65 Shepherd, Ploughing Sand, p. 76. See Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 261-98 and
Bunton, Colonial Land Policies.
66 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 268.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., p. 267; Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 102. Dowson saw a new land regime as essential in
part because he believed that only then could the inequitable tithe system be abolished (Nadan, The
Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 267). As we will see, the government only belatedly scrapped the tithe,
which was more onerous under the British than it had been under the Ottomans, after the crisis in the rural
sphere could no longer be ignored, and after it had greatly damaged the lower strata.
425
state as public domain, including mawat and mahlul lands, thereby helping to prevent the
peasantry from accessing and utilizing them as per customary practices.69
Formerly director general of surveys and a financial advisor to the colonial
government in Egypt, Dowson briefly served as Commissioner of the Lands Department
in Palestine in 1926 and it was after his appointment that the land settlement scheme got
underway.70 The primary law designed to aid the state's survey and registration
operations, the Land Settlement Ordinance of 1928, gave settlement officers, who were
not judges by training, wide powers to settle ownership disputes and to partition musha'
lands if such was regarded as being in the "public interest."71 A staff was assembled and
grew continuously, yet from the scheme's inception in 1927 through 1936, the Lands
Department succeeded in completing the process of survey and title settlement,
including adjudication of disputes, on only 1,491,877 of the 13,592,306 dunams
registered as taxable rural properties, or 11 percent, over the course of a decade of
work.72
The process of surveying lands and settling titles was laborious to begin with, but
it was slowed further by the growing penchant of peasants and villagers to gum up the
works legally through asserting and disputing ownership claims. The arc of
"outstanding actions" - contested claims - ascended in the early 1930s from 535 in 1932
to 803 in 1933, to 1139 in 1934 before the process ground to a near halt in 1936 with the
69 Ghandour, Discourse on Domination, p. 63.
70 Peel Commission report, p. 224; Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 267.
71 Ghandour, Discourse on Domination, p. 74-75.
72 Peel Commision report, p. 229-30. The rural property tax (discussed below) applied to roughly half of
Palestine's land area of over 27 million dunams (Peel Commission report, p. 234), which meant that the
survey and settlement work had only covered some 5 percent of the total territory after a decade.
426
revolt, when the total number of unresolved briefs reached 7,843 by year's end.73
Quoting from the Commissioner of Lands in 1935, the Peel Commission observed that:
"Whereas at first disputed claims were about 10 per cent. of the total submitted to the
Settlement Officers, there is now reported 'a growing tendency to dispute every claim
where there is a shadow of a case, and often where there is not.'"74 In 1933 the state
tried to nip this tendency in the bud by forcing claimants in land proceedings to pay
certain fees and expenses at court, but to no avail.75
In pushing the registration process colonial administrators opened a Pandora's
box of popular anxieties which took the form of a flood of occupancy and property
claims. As land rights claims proliferated the state presumed that some large portion
must of necessity be fraudulent or "frivolous." Dowson suggested as much based on his
reading and experience of land questions in Egypt.76 Regardless of official presumptions
of peasant impropriety, peasants themselves were either fearful of dispossession and
hardship or hopeful of gaining a legal foothold on their parcels, and flocked to the legal
machinery established to grant title. Given that the settlement of title aided Jewish
colonization by legally preparing properties for transfers and that the state's scheme was
carried out mostly in coastal and plains areas of Zionist interest,77 not to mention the
distrust with which peasants had already come to view the colonial state and British
intentions in Palestine, many fellahin surely viewed the process with great skepticism.
73 Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 47; Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 48; Peel
Commision report, p. 230.
74 Peel Commision report, p. 230; Ghandour, Discourse on Domination, p. 71.
75 Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 46.
76 Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 49; Peel Commission report, p. 230; Ghandour, Discourse on
Domination, p. 59. The quote appears in both of the first two sources.
77 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 287-88.
427
However, especially in the midst of the agrarian crisis of the early 1930s and the
increased flow of sales by Palestinians that accompanied it, the peasants' and villagers'
recourse to the land courts may well have served as a legal route through which to slow
or stop prospective transfers or attempt to dissuade Jewish purchase in an area.78
Notable in the state's struggle to create a new land regime through settlement of
individual title was the virtual absence of musha' from settlement operations. This was
so in spite of the increasingly strident opposition to the institution that was enunciated in
official reports, such as those of the Johnson-Crosbie and Hope Simpson inquiries, as
well as from Dowson himself.79 Although there are no composite statistics, musha'
made up less than 8 percent of the areas where survey and registration was completed in
1933 and 1934, and the lack of any mention of the subject in the 1935 Report to the
League of Nations leaves one to believe that the quantity was equally small if not smaller
in the final year before the revolt.80 The proportion of musha' which was thus subjected
to compulsory ifraz and converted into individual plots was much smaller than its
estimated incidence, by any official account. Explaining the continued existence of
musha', the Peel Commission channeled the frustrations of both the Zionist movement
and many British officials by insinuating that the Palestine administration had gone soft
when confronted with Arab sentiment, avoiding the exercise of its legal prerogative to
78 The sheer profusion of claims and the effect these had on slowing the overall schema for settlement of
title would also seem to belie the idea that peasants were generally eager for, or not predisposed against,
sales to Zionist purchasing agents.
79 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 268-69; Hope Simpson report, p. 24; Ghandour, Discourse
on Domination, p. 75.
80 Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 47; Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 48; Report to the
League of Nations, 1935, p. 58-62. In 1933, 29,498 dunams of 334,139 settled were musha', or 8.8
percent; in 1934, 19,668 of 283,464 dunams settled were musha', or 6.9 percent. Cumulatively, 7.96
percent of final land settlements for the two years were musha'.
428
invalidate the institution by simply declaring it unlawful. The relatively minor progress
of the survey and settlement operations in partitioning musha' lands had more proximate
and practical causes, however, not least of which were the difficulties inherent in the
partition process itself. In areas where partition was contested there could, for instance,
be up to 30 claims on a single parcel, each of which had to be evaluated before any
judgment could be rendered, which itself would then be open to appeal. Certain forms
of musha', such as lots with indefinite numbers of shares, also posed problems which the
settlement program did not have an easy time resolving. Although it is ambiguous from
the annual reports relied on here, it appears probable that the penchant of peasants for
disputing the partition of musha', or certain types of musha' holdings, may have led
settlement officers to steer clear of such entanglements.81
Though the Peel Commission intimated that the Palestine government had caved
in to the unreasonable and stubborn attachment of Arabs to the institution, "destructive
as it is of all development," it is difficult not to conclude that as with its prior "reforms"
of mawat and mahlul lands, the state could not ride roughshod over the population and
expect the law to be abided. While the commissioners ventilated that an executive
solution was all that was necessary to squelch the hated bastion of collective property,
the lack of popular assent to any fiat declaring musha' invalid would likely have
rendered the measure dead on arrival. In the event, the rural population overwhelmed
the settlement operations that were undertaken, whether by design or incidentally. Faced
with an avalanche of claims and the unanticipated complexities of expunging musha',
81 Peel Commission report, p. 219; Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 49-50. The fact that a special
officer was deputed to make a preliminary assessment of such lots in 1934 supports this contention.
429
the administration and the settlement officers had to be content to nibble away at the
institution, while the fellahin and Arab society continued to see it as a bulwark of the
rural social economy and a "safeguard" against the creeping spread of Zionist
settlement.82
British rule and "close settlement" of the land
The stubborn persistence of peasants in pursuing claims to ownership and
tenancy proved to be a recurrent thorn in the side of colonial administrators, and created
unexpected difficulties for the state in implementing its various plans with regard to
reshaping the land regime. Nonetheless, throughout the 1920s the colonial state with
great consistency asserted rights to determine the disposition of lands that it claimed
were state domain. Its most sizable ventures in this respect were intended to benefit the
colonial state and the territorial aspirations of the Zionist movement. Two examples
briefly adduced here will serve to illustrate the state's efforts and the resistance of local
Arab populations that such plans provoked.
One of the state's first attempts to assert a prerogative to reassign possession of
lands pertained to a vast stretch of lands in the region of Beisan in the north. As noted in
passing in chapter 3, the Beisan lands, an expanse in the northern Jordan valley between
the town of Beisan and Lake Tiberias, were seen by Zionists and the British as one of the
two most valuable pieces of real estate in the state's possession. The area, comprising
over 300,000 dunams, was held prior to British rule as jiftlik (also known as
82 Peel Commission report, p. 219.
430
mudawwara), a designation for certain estates belonging to the former Sultan. Jiftlik
lands were a form of miri, which led administrators to presume that they were state
domain.83 Although the Zionists were eager to obtain rights to colonize the area, local
Arabs were adamantly opposed to the state's claims over their lands. As discussed at
length in Fakher Eldin's study, the local population protested that the prior conversion of
their lands into Sultanic estates had been illegitimate and that the colonial state therefore
had no legal standing over their disposition.84 During a visit to the area in 1921 HC
Samuel was greeted by a demonstration. The public show of force made an impression
on him and he was taken aback at the "sullen and hostile" reception he received.85
Afterwards, the Land Commission concluded that the residents should be offered long-
term leases as a means of creating incentives for boosting agricultural production.
Residents rejected the commission's findings and the leases, insisting that the lands were
not within the state's purview.86 After continued opposition to its assertions, the
administration reached a compromise with the local population. The state conceded that
the local residents had a moral claim on the lands, but did not accede fully to their legal
claim. The Ghor Mudawwara agreement, as it was called, recognized the local
claimants as owners of miri plots, but effectively deferred full conferral of ownership
rights until receipt of a payment of £E 1.25 - 1.5 per dunam to the state which was to be
collected in installments over 15 years.87
83 Smith, The Roots of Separatism, p. 90; Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 71.
84 "Communities of Owners," p. 49-80.
85 Quoted in Smith, The Roots of Separatism, p. 106.
86 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 73.
87 Smith, The Roots of Separatism, p. 106. This was later renegotiated to a 30-year term (ibid., p. 107).
431
The state mitigated its concession on the lands' disposition by treating the
agreement as a sale, although the actual settlement avoided such terms since the Arabs
refused to recognize that the state had any ownership or right of sale.88 The settlement
of title was officially given a positive spin as a necessary precursor to facilitating the
land market.89 Even after the agreement, however, Arabs continued to cast suspicion on
the state's motives, alleging that the delay in the official demarcation of properties
(necessary for the settlement of title) was meant to give Zionist agents time to scare
elements of the population into selling their lands.90 Though their immediate fears may
have been overblown, the terms of the settlement subsequently did prove too costly for
many peasants, and by the end of the decade a rash of sales was underway and the earlier
victory in preserving their habitation had given way to the advance of Jewish settlers.91
At roughly the same time as the contention over the Beisan lands, the colonial
administration awarded a concession agreement to the PJCA for the drainage and
development of swamp areas and dunes at Barrat Qisarya and Zor al-Zarqa. The two
areas were part of a marshland, lying roughly between Haifa and Tulkarm, situated on
the coast, and were inhabited and used by a collection of semi-nomadic Bedouin groups,
the 'Arab al-Ghawarneh, 'Arab al-Dumayri, 'Arab al-Kabbara, and the 'Arab Barrat
Qisarya. These groups numbered together around 800-850 persons and most (save the
'Arab al-Dumayri) lived on the lands. A small portion of the area was cultivated, while
much of the population's livelihood stemmed from animal husbandry, wood harvesting,
88 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 74.
89 Ibid., p. 76.
90 Smith, The Roots of Separatism, p. 109.
91 Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 107-109; Fakher Eldin, "Communities of Owners," p. 82-115; 130.
432
and mat-making. The PJCA had reached a tentative agreement for development of the
area with the Ottomans, and after the British occupation the Land Commission
forwarded a revived PJCA proposal for purchase and development. Believing it had
rights to the land, the state preferred to retain title (on the advice of the commission) but
rapidly offered the PJCA a 100-year lease on approximately 40,000-50,000 unsurveyed
dunams in the area in the form of a concession which mandated the lands' development.
The agreement, known as the Kabbara Concession, reached in November 1921, came as
a surprise to the resident Arabs, who discovered it only when the PJCA attempted to
prevent members of the 'Arab Barrat Qisarya from accessing their grazing lands. Local
Arab resistance to the agreement and to the joint claims of the British colonial
administration and the Zionists over the area led to a protracted and complicated legal
struggle, elements of which lasted until the end of the Mandate.92
From the outset the state had presumed that the lands at Zor al-Zarqa and Barrat
Qisarya were mawat or mudawwara and therefore, after the Mawat Ordinance, state
property. Successive commissions of inquiry were dispatched to ascertain their status
and determine the Bedouins' rights to them, but as Forman and Kedar note, the primary
question was not whether the government had standing, but how to secure the
expropriation of the Kabbara lands. Colonial calculations weighed heavily against the
local Arabs, especially as they were not a fully sedentarized population but lived in tents,
and as their customary rights were greatly attached to grazing and usufruct unrelated to
cultivation. Exemplary of their unimportance before the state, the local Arabs were
92 Forman and Kedar, "Colonialism, Colonization, and Land Law," p. 506, 508, 511-513, 515.
433
absent from the terms of the Kabbara Concession itself, save for a single reference to
their potential employment on the properties under the new proprietors. During the
process of assessing claims which followed the locals' rejection of the concession, the
Bedouin were found to have moral rights in the Zor al-Zarqa and Barrat Qisarya lands,
but in contrast to the Beisan case, this was seen as insufficient to maintain their
continued residency and usufruct. The Colonial Office hedged at the Palestine
administration's initial haste to be done with the Arab residents, but it subsequently
granted approval for expropriation as a last resort. However, after the third commission
of inquiry (in December 1922) found that the Arab residents had rights pertaining to
those lands that had been cultivated and recommended their excision from the Kabbara
Concession, the locals dug their heels in and their representatives called in writing for
the agreement to be scrapped. Short of voluntary agreement to the new dispensation, the
state then moved to intimidate the residents, warning that compensation would be greater
in the cases of those who acceded to the concession and minimal otherwise. By mid-
1924 the government began to make good on its threats and, after initiating
expropriation measures, the 'Arab al-Ghawarneh capitulated and agreed to a negotiated
exit. The following year the 'Arab al-Kabbara also cut a deal that acquiesced to the
state's reallocation of their lands. The 'Arab al-Dumayri and the 'Arab Barrat Qisarya,
on the other hand, refused to relent, and their continued resistance to dispossession and
compensation kept the 32,000 dunams of Barrat Qisarya largely out of the PJCA's hands
until 1948.93
93 Ibid., p. 514-32; Bunton, Colonial Land Policy, p. 175. See also the full discussion in Bunton, p. 171-
434
While the administration's assertions of state domain met opposition from the
local Arab inhabitants, the land market proved an easier arena in which to advance its
dual agenda of aiding Zionist colonization and promoting intensive development.
Again, two exemplary cases will illuminate the dynamics that colonial rule set in play
concerning the erosion of Arab tenancy, in spite of nominal efforts by the British to
prevent landlessness.
Immediately following the reopening of the land registries in 1920 Zionist
purchasing organs went in search of big game, which they quickly found in the form of
the vast Sursuq lands.94 An initial agreement for a sale of 70,000 dunams in the Marj
Ibn 'Amir to the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC), an arm of the JNF,
was followed by subsequent agreements that by 1925 amounted to over 200,000
dunams. The settlements that the Zionist movement subsequently built there were
regarded by Arthur Ruppin, a member of the Zionist Executive and a leading figure in
land acquisition, as the movement's "crowning achievement," and served as the core of
agricultural colonization in the 1920s.95 Collectively the lands were home to 22 Arab
villages which paid one-fifth of their annual yields as rent, though none of them had a
written contract with their Lebanese landlords.96 Ruppin later testified before the Shaw
Commission that the purchases in the Marj Ibn 'Amir displaced some 700-800 tenants -
a figure accepted by some scholarly works.97 However, the expert witness for the Arab
190.
94 See the previous chapter for background.
95 Alex Bein, The Return to the Soil, trans. Israel Schen (Jerusalem: Youth and Hechalutz Dept. of the
Zionist Organization, 1952), p. 308. The quote is Bein's, not Ruppin's.
96 Shaw Commission report, p. 117.
97 Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 88.
435
Executive before the Shaw Commission, Salim Farah, an agricultural engineer, put the
number of families displaced by the purchases at 1746, with the total number of
individuals affected at 8730.98 The JNF and the PLDC were careful to try to make the
transfer agreeable to tenants and afforded them monetary compensation, with the
exception of one village, Ma'lul, where residents were left 2000 dunams by the Sursuqs
and given a lease with option to buy on 3000 dunams by the JNF.99 Again, the rosy
scenario which Zionists communicated to the administration concerning the transfer of
the marj was punctured by Mr. Farah's testimony, who contended that many of the
region's residents had not resettled in the district, as Ruppin claimed, but had dispersed.
Some emigrated abroad, some "scattered" elsewhere in Palestine, while others worked
temporarily in construction. He also noted that the Bedouin who were accustomed to
using lands in the vicinity were cut off by the new owners.100 Although the mass
dispossession of the 22 Arab villages was arguably illegal under the LTO, which forbade
mass evictions, the Arab Executive's objections to the transfer were dismissed and the
state, rather remarkably, saw no reason for concern for peasant tenancy in the matter.
On the contrary, in a logical non-sequitur, both the state and the Shaw Commission were
taken by the JNF's compensation package, amounting to £P 30,000, regarding it as
98 Shaw Commission report, p. 118; al-Shuqayri, 'Arba'un 'aman, p. 121.
99 Porath states that the tenants were given temporary leases by the JNF, but none of the supporting
documentation he cites dates to the first half of the 1920s. He quickly passes on to discussing how the
tenants preferred monetary compensation, so the status of any short-term Arab tenancies under the JNF in
the Marj Ibn 'Amir is obscure. By 1930 if not earlier the JNF was working to rid itself of remaining Arab
tenants in the area, such as at Ma'lul (The Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 88-89).
100 Ghazi Falah enumerates at least nine different Bedouin groups which frequented the marj. See The
Role of the British Administration in the Sedentarization of the Bedouin Tribes in Northern Palestine,
1918-1948 (Durham, England: Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, U. of Durham, 1983), p. 6.
436
generous and viewing it, as the JNF no doubt intended, as effectively extinguishing any
concern for tenancy or customary rights.101
The second purchase that may serve as an example here, that at Wadi al-
Hawarith, has already been discussed in chapters 2 and 3.102 It may be recalled that the
Wadi al-Hawarith lands on the Palestine coast were bought by the JNF after a forced sale
at auction in 1929. As at Zor al-Zarqa and Barrat Qisarya, the native inhabitants were
Bedouin, who, in the eyes of the colonial state, were the not most efficient users of their
real estate. Their considerable resistance to the sale and the eviction proceedings which
began the same year became a cause célèbre in the Palestinian press and in activist
circles and occasioned the involvement of nationalist activists (especially between 1931-
33) in the Bedouins' struggle to remain on their lands and to resist eviction. The state
and the JNF worked anxiously to quiet the unrest raised by the eviction threat and find
some way of ameliorating the situation, including through provision of a segment of the
wadi to the Bedouin tenants under lease (from the JNF), but these moves did little to
keep the controversy from turning into a political firestorm which dragged on for four
years until the final evictions were completed in late 1933. As the Shaw Commission
vividly observed, even resettlement options, were they available, would probably be
inadequate and moreover would make it "likely that the tribe will lose its identity as a
tribe and become a scattered community." It was precisely such a fear, as the
101 Shaw Commission report, p. 117-18; Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 96-97; All That Remains, p. 347.
Making matters more complicated, it appears possible that the only recipients of the compensation
package were the 700-800 tenants cited by Ruppin, leaving the balance of the plain's population, who
were not counted as displaced by Zionist authorities, likely to have received nothing, or perhaps a short-
term lease on their former lands or some other parcel in the plains. None of the existing secondary
accounts sufficiently clarify this matter, and I am without primary materials that would do so.
102 See chapter 2 for primary background.
437
Commission also noted specifically in relation to the Marj Ibn 'Amir and Wadi al-
Hawarith purchases, that resounded throughout the Arab countryside and led in the early
1930s to increased resistance to the state on the part of dispossessed villagers and
peasants and consequently to increased deployment of force by authorities in carrying
out eviction proceedings.103
The state's commitment to building the land base of the Zionist movement had
indirect knock-on effects, chief among which was skyrocketing rents, which accentuated
financial pressure on those lacking legal title. Although the British regime passed an
ordinance in 1921 barring the raising of rent, this statute went ignored and unenforced.
As seen above in the case of the Marj Ibn 'Amir, rent on the Sursuq lands was 20 percent
of the crop. By 1930 the most common rent found by the Johnson-Crosbie Committee
was 30 percent of the crop, with the tenant paying the tithe. An alternate arrangement
was to deliver 40 percent of the crop to the landowner, who was then responsible for the
tithe. The monetization of rents didn't help the tenant's position. Hope Simpson
calculated that at a median rate of 150 mils per dunam rent would equal nearly half (47
percent) of gross income at then-current prices. Most startling of all was the rise in rates
for areas near Jewish colonies. The value of lands adjacent to Zionist settlements grew
rapidly, and this was reflected in the increased rents that were demanded from tenant
occupants. Rents escalated in some cases by as much as 100 percent over a three year
period. This rate cited by Hope Simpson is from the period 1927-30, which preceded the
period of widespread smallholder sales, exponentially increasing land values, and
103 Shaw Commission report, p. 119. On the changing nature of land struggles and the land question's
impact on Palestinian politics, see also chapters 2 and 3.
438
speculation that followed in the early 1930s. Given the paucity of data collected on the
swiftly changing rates, the picture we have is incomplete. But the strong upward curve
in rent under the British, and the fact that local sales to Zionist bodies accelerated in the
period directly following that covered by the Johnson-Crosbie and Hope Simpson
reports, indicates that the trend likely deepened.104
As soaring rents displaced peasants, lands proximate to Jewish colonies became
more attractive for Zionist purchase. The absence of tenants simplified the task of land
transfer for all parties involved by alleviating the obligation, nominal as it was, of
protecting peasant tenancies. More generally, the rising tide of rent meant a further loss
of position for those within the agrarian economy with the most tenuous connection to
land, and for an unknown number, precipitated their physical dispossession and possibly
their exit from the rural sphere altogether. Despite this, and the emergence of a trend
towards urbanization in the coastal ports that was clearly driven (in part) by a flow of
emigration from rural areas, the state did nothing to address spiking rents in the
countryside until introducing new controls in the amended Protection of Cultivators
Ordinance of 1933 (discussed below).
From the preceding accounts regarding purported state lands and the alienation of
lands to Zionist bodies through the market it is evident that the British fears of creating a
landless class had little actual impact on their handling of major property claims and
land transactions. While owing in large part to the tenacity of the rural population the
outcomes in each case may not have been what the state intended or what Zionists hoped
104 Hope Simpson report, p. 50; Peel Commission report, p. 224. Monetary rents were found by Hope
Simpson to range between 50-250 mils per dunam.
439
for, they demonstrate collectively the low regard of British administrators and officials
for peasant tenancy and customary ownership and the state's general preference and
support for Zionist land acquisition. This is arguably more so the case as concerns
Bedouin populations, whose means of livelihood and ways of life often appear to have
been scorned and derided more than the rest of the Arab public, owing to their slender
involvement in agrarian pursuits.105 Consequently their customary rights were treated as
even more disposable than those of other Arabs lacking documented land titles. It is
worth underscoring that in many cases peasants acted to defend their claims and
customary rights on properties without initial direction or involvement from national
elites or middle class nationalists, and that when other strata of Palestinian society
became champions of their struggles higher class elements did not simply take charge.
In the Barrat Qisarya case, for instance, the Arab attorney Wadi' al-Bustani who
represented the Bedouin attempted to convince his clients in 1924 to settle on
government terms for leases to fractions of their customary domains, but they rejected
his advice.106 Similarly, despite the solidarity exhibited by the Youth Congress,
communists, and nationalist activists, there is little evidence to demonstrate that external
actors had sway over the Wadi al-Hawarith Arabs, as much as they may have attempted
to assist them and fortify their will to resist eviction.
105 Given the colonial tendency to see Bedouin as "true" Arabs, in contrast to the settled population, this is
one of the many ironies of the British record vis-à-vis the countryside.
106 As Forman and Kedar discuss, al-Bustani was between a legal rock and a hard place at the time, being
prevented from going to court owing to a libel verdict against him (by an Arab newspaper) which he was
then appealing. His vulnerability was exploited by AG Bentwich and the state, which pressed to reach a
settlement during the period that he was incapable of fulfilling his clients' needs inside the courtroom
("Colonialism, Colonization, and Land Law," p. 525-27).
440
A primary source of resisting state claims to land and the Zionist project of
building a territorial base was the obstinate will of peasants who feared or faced
dispossession by foreigners. Just as in the early period of Zionist settlement, peasant
resistance during the early Mandate to encroachment on their customary lands and the
regions in which they were situated called the attention of Arab society to the state's
transformative and alien agenda, and proved to be a critical factor in the state's handling
of the land disputes that it helped touch off. This is not to say that peasant resistance
truly gave the state pause, though on occasion it did. Administrators were at least as
likely, however, to see the fellahin as wily thieves and "trespassers" intent on filching
"state lands" and infringing on the "public interest," which somehow, by another feat of
colonial prestidigitation and inversion, never substantively included the indigenous
population.107 The state continued, for example, to extend its claims to unregistered
parcels of land even when this impeded the growth and expansion of villages.108 This
curious definition of the public interest as principally concerning the state and the
Zionist movement was visible in the state's thrusts towards reconfiguring the Ottoman
land code and its selective adoption and rejection of elements of the old land regime. As
Forman and Kedar have insightfully noted, the colonial administration's specious
prosecution of the public interest put itself and the Zionist movement "on the side of
'law,' whereas the indigenous population-turned-trespassers were branded as obstacles"
107 Ghandour quotes Dowson articulating this view, after noting an estimate that up to one-third of
Palestine was potentially mawat land: "While the permanent retention in the hands of the State of a
considerable proportion of the land of the country is of questionable desirability, it is clearly a culpable
neglect of national interests to allow hundreds of thousands of acres of public land to be simply stolen" (A
Discourse on Domination, p. 63).
108 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 179.
441
to that interest.109 The inability of the state and the Zionist movement to treat Palestine
as a tabula rasa in terms of land, and the troubles which peasant resistance engendered
for their planning, did not alter their basic perceptions as to the weakness of peasant
claims to tenure. Nor did it affect their shared conviction that fostering Zionist
development was the most surefire way of raising the land's productivity and output,
which were seen not only as cardinal in importance, but integral to establishing proper
and rightful ownership.
Concerning the issue of Palestinian sales to Zionist entities remarked upon in the
preceding chapter, it should be noted that almost 86.5 percent of the land purchases
compiled by Granott for the period 1920-27 derive from a small number of transactions
in the Marj Ibn 'Amir, the Zebulun Valley (in the Haifa-Acre region) and Qusqus-
Tab'un (Haifa subdistrict). Most of these lands were alienated by foreign absentee Arab
owners, the Sursuq family chief among them.110 Though the inconclusive character of
the data available must hedge the extent to which firm conclusions can be drawn, the
comparison of foreign-owned to Palestinian sales in these early years under the British is
telling. Using the same figures, large Palestinian owners are recorded as selling 46,155
dunams at the time, while peasants were responsible for a mere 7160 dunams, or 15.2
percent and 2.4 percent respectively of the total for which Granott's data set covers.
These numbers offer some perspective on the scale of Palestinian land sales to Jewish
109 "Colonialism, Colonization, and Land Law," p. 528. The authors offer this comment in relation to the
specific dispute they discuss, but it is, as I have suggested here, more generally applicable.
110 Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 83-84, 88. In his discussion of land purchasing in
the 1920s Stein provides a useful table documenting title possession in the Marj Ibn 'Amir and associated
areas (including Qusqus-Tab'un) before the JNF acquisition (The Land Question, p. 60).
442
entities, which was probably smaller than has been suggested by Zionist-leaning
accounts.111
Though the short account here of the Marj Ibn 'Amir purchases is synthetic, I
believe it nonetheless provides grounds for an instructive revision of a Zionist
contention, articulated in representative fashion by Porath, that Zionist land acquisition
focused first on "desolate or half-desolate land," and only upon exhaustion of such
"sparsely inhabited parts of the country" turned towards more densely settled areas.112
That 22 villages had to be emptied of their inhabitants, whether immediately or over a
period of some years, illustrates precisely that there were no substantial tracts of
unclaimed arable land. As treated in the preceding chapter, Zionist colonization invited
opposition from the earliest years of colonial settlement by peasants and tenants who
were displaced by Jewish land purchasing entities. Under the British the contours of the
colonization process changed, and the Zionists found a supportive if overbearing ally in
their endeavors. The fact that in the marj tenants largely accepted compensation and
relocation, or simply recognized force majeure and departed to make their living
elsewhere, should not obfuscate the scale of the disruption entailed. Zionist possession
of this immense fertile plain meant that its Arab inhabitants had to be ejected, and this
was what transpired. Jewish settlements replaced Arab villages almost one for one
numerically, with 23 eventually dotting the same lands previously "sparsely inhabited"
111 Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 83-84. All calculations made here use Granott's
data in Porath, which he notes also resemble the figures of Arthur Ruppin. Stein is probably the biggest
offender in exaggerating the extent of Palestinian land sales. This is done mostly at a rhetorical as
opposed to statistical level, concentrating on the topic at length and repeatedly throughout The Land
Question, yet without adequate context for the sales other than the suggestion, noted previously, that
Palestinian nationalism was a weak basis for social action.
112 Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 80, 84.
443
by the indigenous population113 - and this is not to mention the Bedouin populations
which had frequented the area that now found it closed to them. In some areas, such as a
stretch in the Western region of the marj which became the Nahalal bloc, settlers even
moved into the homes of departing Arabs, taking them as habitations until later building
new homes.114 Although Zionist leaders, especially among the Labor parties, depicted
Jewish land purchase as an exercise of righteous liberation, securing the "deliverance of
the fellahin from their feudal lords,"115 a more sober portrait of the effects of
colonization is found in the removal and replacement of Arab inhabitants by Jewish
colonists.
Zionist purchasing, moreover, did not strategically prioritize less-inhabited lands,
so much as building, especially under the JNF, "a sort of skeleton of Jewish Districts."116
In other words, and as is well known, territorial contiguity became a central aim of
Zionist land acquisition, which proceeded irrespective of the existing geography of Arab
settlement and land use. The example of the Marj Ibn 'Amir purchases, regarded by the
British and by Zionists as a model of humane action and propriety, illuminates the
immanent conflict between the agenda of establishing territorial contiguity between
Jewish colonies and maintaining peasant tenure. It is little surprise that in succeeding
113 Ibid., p. 88.
114 Bein, Return to the Soil, p. 301. The same took place at the colony of Tel 'Adashim. Arab dwellings
were seen as unsuitable by the colonists, and the necessity of using them was regarded by the new
inhabitants as a substantial hardship.
115 Tamari, "From the Fruits," p. 83. This is Tamari's apt description of Granott's argument.
116 Abraham [Avraham] Granott, "The Strategy of Land Acquisition" in Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven
to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine
Studies, 1971), p. 391.
444
years, and especially during the revolt, the area was targeted by rebels, who harassed and
attacked its colonies with great regularity.
Funding the occupation regime: peasants, regressive taxation, and the state
Unlike the case of the land regime, the British occupation authorities were not
quick to disturb and revise the agrarian tax system that they inherited from the Ottoman
empire. The Ottoman tax code was a patchwork of separate imposts, largely based in
rural extraction, which had grown heavier in the last decades of the old order. Despite
the instability of the Ottoman system, which was tethered to fluctuating crop-yields
through the tithe, the British maintained and amplified it, increasing the strain it placed
on peasants by regularizing collections. By the end of the 1920s the heavy burden of
taxation, combined with several other factors including skyrocketing land rents, falling
prices for local agricultural staples, the absence of credit facilities, and tariff policies that
were favorable to Zionist industries and corrosive of peasant interests, led to the
economic ruin of a sizable segment of the peasantry.117 At such time, the tithe ceased
being collectible and was later replaced by a new land tax, while interest in customs
receipts, which had dwarfed other taxes almost from the start of the Mandate,
overshadowed prior concerns with managing rural sources of revenue.118 While the
117 As will be explored in the next chapter, peasants grappled with these obverse circumstances in a
number of fashions, including through participation in a myriad of sharecropping arrangements, increased
labor migration, and relocation to urban slums in the coastal cities of Jaffa and Haifa in search of wage
labor.
118 Smith writes that customs only came to play a role in state revenues equal to that had in other colonies'
budgets at the end of the 1920s (Roots of Separatism, p. 38), yet this is contradicted by figures provided in
the Peel Commission report (p. 206). Still, the numbers are not the whole story, and following Smith's
445
lodestone of regressive, direct rural taxation unwittingly helped bring about the growth
of a restive and desperate lumpenproletariat, the change in focus to customs had the
ironic effect of further isolating the colonial state from the concerns of the fellahin and
tying its operation more tightly to the financial growth of the yishuv, which proceeded
largely at the expense of the Arab peasantry. The 1929 uprising shook the colonial order
into recognition, in some quarters, of the slippery basis of rule in the rural districts and
of the problematic nature of orienting policy almost solely around the interests of the
Zionist movement. Yet British measures to alleviate the crises afflicting rural Arab
society proved too little, too late.
Making matters worse for the Arabs, state budgets not only relied on regressive
taxation during the first decade of colonial rule, but were continually weighted heavily
towards the security forces with miniscule allocations to social services, public works, or
development. Indeed, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill in 1922 brusquely informed
High Commissioner Samuel that his hopes for devoting significant capital expenditure to
development purposes (principally for the Jewish National Home) did not conform with
imperial priorities, and that the "people of Palestine should not be led to form any
exaggerated hopes of a large Government programme of cultural and economic
development."119 As a Colonial Office official bluntly minuted in 1923, for the
authorities in London raising tax revenues was of the utmost priority and all else was of
secondary importance:
suggestion it can be observed that great emphasis was placed on the tithe as a category of revenue until the
1930s.
119 Quoted in Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 51. On Samuel's early plans for development in Palestine,
see ibid., p. 51-53 and Huneidi, A Broken Trust, p. 122-24 and 192-229.
446
Expenditure must be worked out as a whole and must be brought down to the lowest possible
figure compatible with decent Government… the country must be taxed up to the hilt and if there
is anything beyond essential expenditure it must be decided on general principles whether the
burden of taxation is to be lightened, or expenditure which is not essential but which is desirable,
should be incurred.120
Although the fiscal conservatism of the British empire at the time led colonial
officials to exalt minimizing expenditure, according to the Arab Executive, the Mandate
built a behemoth in place of the Ottoman state, with an administration that was an
alleged eight times the size of its predecessor.121 To my knowledge we have no way of
verifying this claim, but it is clear that the modern state structure erected by the British
authorities was of an unprecedented scale. From its origin, the character of the Mandate
as a regime of foreign occupation and a colonial security state was readily visible in state
budgets. Expenditures on education and health were vastly outpaced by the allocations
devoted to "security" (military forces, police, and prisons). The colossal sums eaten up
by the postwar garrison of military forces only tapered off sluggishly over the decade,
remaining as high as £E 1.5 million in 1923/24.122 Nonetheless, the security component
of state budgets did decline over the 1920s from a post-war high of over £E 3 million in
120 Quoted in Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 54 (my emphasis). In the early years of the civil
administration the state was impelled by a revenue crunch, which certainly shaped its attitude towards the
battery of rural taxes inherited from the Ottomans (Smith, The Roots of Separatism, p. 54-55).
121 AE, Memorandum on the White Paper of 1930 (prepared by 'Awni 'Abd al-Hadi), December 1930, p.
3-4, PRO - FO 371/15326.
122 Peel Commission report, p. 186. Palestine was put on the Egyptian pound (£E) in January 1921 before
introducing its own currency in 1927. The Egyptian pound was slightly less valuable than the British
version, exchangeable at a ratio of £E 1: £.975 (or 97.5 piasters). The Palestine pound was introduced at
the value of the British pound. On currency questions, see Hakim and el-Hussayni, "Monetary and
Banking System," p. 445-457. The Peel Commission report does not distinguish in which currency the
expenditures were denominated, so I have used the time-appropriate specie.
447
1921/22 to just over £P 562,000 in 1929, after which it returned to an upward trend.123
In 1928 and 1929, when military forces were reduced to a minimum (before the 1929
events), security costs were equivalent to 17.4 percent and 26.3 percent of the annual
budgets, respectively.124 In comparison, combined health and education expenditures
amounted to 7 percent of total outlays in 1928 and 11.3 percent in 1929.125 Beginning in
fiscal year 1930, the allocations associated with security rose to around one-third of the
state budget and remained in this vicinity in succeeding years until spiking in 1936
during the revolt.126 Even in times of "quiet," it was clear that the budget was devoted
foremost to the police and prisons, which were typically its largest expense heading.
This reality was hardly lost on the Arab population, which viewed the state's "exorbitant
expenditures" on its repressive and military apparatuses as derivative of the imperial
commitment to the Jewish National Home.127
The practice of taxing the country "to the hilt" - really the countryside in the first
decade - and spending little in the way of social amenities was the state's hallmark in
the rural districts. The colonial emphasis on "preserving" the social order and avoiding
"unnecessary changes" led to inequity in expenditures and priorities, as services afforded
123 Peel Commission report, p. 185, 188. The nadir of spending was the 1926/27 fiscal year, during which
the heading consumed over £E 491,000 (ibid., p. 188).
124 Report to the League of Nations, 1932, appendix II, p. 146. It should be noted that the relatively low
percentages for security headings (and education and health) in 1928 owed to an unusually large payment
on the state's debt that year (over £P 820,000 compared to less than one-eighth of this sum in 1929),
which skewed the picture of recurrent finances.
125 Ibid. The combined total for both headings for 1928 was £P 235,696 and for 1929, £P 241,653.
126 Ibid; Kolinsky, Law, Order and Riots, p. 99.
127 Darwaza, Hawla al-haraka, p. 34; Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 58. Quote from Darwaza. I don't
mean to suggest here that Palestine's "security" expenditures were exceptional among the Mandates or
other colonial regimes, as they weren't, but rather that their presumed linkage to the Jewish National
Home policy made them and their outsize place within state budgets all the more conspicuous. For a
regional comparison, see Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East
(London: Routledge, 1992), p. 15.
448
by the state in urban areas were withheld from the countryside. This included the core
social components of the state budget, education and health provision, which rural
regions were often expected to finance separately on their own, while continuing to pay
the lion's share of direct taxes.128
In its first incarnation, British fiscal policy relied on the principal instruments
inherited from the Ottoman tax code, which was composed of three main levies: 'ushr,
the tithe on agrarian produce, werko, a tax on immovable property including land and
buildings, and the aghnam, a head tax on animals. While the rural majority faced up to
three annual levies, the smaller urban population paid only werko, the assessments for
which had lapsed prior to the war and were mostly outdated.129 This meant that not only
was the countryside subject to vastly higher rates of direct taxation, but since most Jews
lived in urban areas and the great bulk of the Arabs lived on the land, the latter bore an
unequal share of the direct tax burden in the first decade or more of British rule.130
The tithe was the centerpiece of the system and the most important category of
direct taxation until the latter 1920s. It consisted of a levy on the gross yield of
agricultural goods, traditionally equal, as the Arabic name denotes, to one-tenth of the
128 Miller, Government and Society, p. 72.
129 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 140. Bunton argues that the "poor functioning" of the werko, which
was not systematically reassessed by the British but only updated on properties being sold, left the tithe to
as the primary form of direct taxation (p. 141). The neglect of the werko is further indicative of the
imbalance between Arabs and Jews in terms of direct taxation, given that there is some evidence that
werko returns on Jewish properties had previously been of significant value. In the Ottoman district of
Haifa in 1909 (1327 A.H.), for instance, Jewish werko payments amounted to over 257,000 qurush
(piasters), a sum comparable to Haifa's municipal budget for the year of 300,000 qurush (al-Tamimi and
Bahjat, Wilayat Bayrut, v.1, p. 235, 241). Hence the lapsing of this tax under the British represented a
lowering of possibly the most significant direct levy on the Jewish population.
130 Owen notes that by the mid-1930s three-quarters of the Jewish population was urban, while the same
proportion of the Arab population remained on the land ("Economic Development in Mandatory Palestine:
1918-1948," in G.T. Abed, ed., The Palestinian Economy: Studies in Development under Prolonged
Occupation (London: Toutledge, 1988), p. 15).
449
crop; however, over the last decades of Ottoman rule it had been successively raised,
reaching a rate of 12.63 percent. Under the Ottoman regime collection of the tithe had
been sold as tax farms, which tended to allow the wealthier elements to control and
manipulate their own assessments while increasing those of the rest of the population.
The British attempted to streamline the tithe by eliminating the tax farming system,
thereby delivering a blow to the former multazims (tax farmers) and reducing a layer of
mediation between the state and the producers. Nevertheless, the colonial administration
remained reliant on local intermediaries. Crop assessments were conducted by
government agents in conjunction with local representatives, and it was then the job of
the mukhtars to deliver the receipts in cash, for which they were paid a 2 percent
stake.131
Collecting taxes on produce was not seen as an ideal system by the
administration, as state receipts were rendered dependent on highly variable agricultural
harvests and fluctuating commodity prices. From early on colonial administrators
evinced a strong desire to convert the tax system to one based in land, rather than on
crops. As it was commonly construed, this ambition would require settling title to the
whole of the lands of Palestine, a process which, as reviewed above, was laden with such
an immensity of challenges that by the latter 1920s and early 1930s, the state had come
to view taxation on the growing urban population as holding brighter prospects.132
The process of tithe collection was burdensome to all involved and turned the
avowed British aspiration for bringing efficiency and precision to government on its
131 Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 40-41; Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 141.
132 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 132; 158-59.
450
head. Far from establishing uniform standards and removing intermediaries, the British
method was intimately tied to personal, not impartial, evaluations, and was greatly open
to manipulation and irregularity. The greatest flaw was probably in the assessment
process, as the District Commissioner for the North bitingly intimated in 1926:
I have frequently invited the village representatives, the paid estimator, the paid inspector, and the
District Officer, and occasionally also the treasury expert, to estimate a given heap. In not a
single instance have the quantities guessed at been identical, while the percentages varied from 10
per cent to 70 per cent. Not only is estimation merely guess-work, but an estimator's guesses are
deliberately increased or decreased. An evening's entertainment by the village as a whole, by a
particular family or by an individual, is sufficient inducement to the estimator or to the inspector
to guess moderately in favor of his host.
Peasants also tried to evade and lower assessments by hiding a portion of their crops or
by arranging them in deceptive fashions (packing down the produce on the lower layers
of their piles). The utter lack of standardization and regularization in crop assessment
left the tithe wide open to corruption and rendered it a highly arbitrary system, one
which some administrators ultimately viewed as an immoral basis for revenue
generation.133
Despite the flawed assessment system, the machinery of tithe collection under
the Mandate allowed the state to inflate its claims on agricultural produce and to compel
peasants into uneconomic and damaging behavior. Before the institution of the
commuted tithe in 1928, the assessment process could last six months, and the delay in
bringing crops to market caused significant losses.134 For the great majority without
133 Ibid., p. 143-44, including the quote from DC-Northern.
134 Memorandum, Commissioner of Lands to the Acting Chief Secretary, 12.5.31, PRO - CO 733/207/6.
Peasants were compelled to pay for storage of their crops until assessments were completed, and if their
yields were placed under lien for debt, they were additionally responsible for paying guards to watch over
451
liquid reserves or savings, the necessity of paying the tithe after completion of the
assessment then trapped them into accepting lower rates for their goods, which they
disposed of while relative surpluses, including from imports, clogged the markets.135 In
spite of this, the government fixed redemption prices for its share of the crop at top
values, above their actual market rates at the time of sale, in effect increasing the
quantity of tax claimed by the state.136 The state's overstatement of prices could be quite
dramatic, as the Johnson-Crosbie Committee and Hope Simpson inquiry illustrated in
their 1930 reports. Taking a sample of 104 villages, the Johnson-Crosbie Committee
estimated their annual gross revenues from field crops at £P 483,600. Hope Simpson,
who carried out his study subsequent to the Johnson-Crosbie Committee, adjusted the
prices used in his predecessors' calculations to actual market rates, arriving at a
considerably lower figure of £P 306,043. The Johnson-Crosbie Committee, which had
been established to survey the state of the peasantry and agricultural conditions in the
country, ironically demonstrated the state's penchant for leaning on the fellahin and the
rural sector, overestimating the state's claim to the sample villages' income from crops
other than fruit trees by a staggering margin of 58 percent.137 By the late 1920s if not
the crop (Mahmoud Yazbak, "From Poverty to Revolt: Economic Factors in the Outbreak of the 1936
Rebellion in Palestine," Middle Eastern Studies v. 36, n. 3 (July 2000), p. 97).
135 On imports, see below.
136 After assessments were made, the government calculated the value of its claimed share according to
redemption prices - its official version of the going rates of commodities in the markets - that were set by
the Revenue Department (Smith, Root of Separatism, p. 40-41). The tax was then paid in cash, according
to the value arrived at not through actual market sales, but according to the government's stipulated and
artificially inflated rates for commodity prices.
137 It should be noted that both of these examinations were conducted after the tithe was reformed and its
replacement, the commuted tithe, instituted in 1928. As discussed below, this reform in fact did more
damage to the peasantry. Owing to the general slump in prices at the time, some fruit crops, including
olives, were also vastly overestimated in value. Hope Simpson notes that Johnson-Crosbie quoted a ton of
olive oil at £P 53, when the market rate at the time was £P 33 (report, p. 49).
452
earlier, however, the state's gaming of the tithe system reached a point at which its levies
were more fantasy than reality, as peasants repeatedly proved unable to pay the tax,
arrears mounted, and ultimately the state began to remit large portions of the tithe.138
Although taxation was often seen as an index of the state's authority, the tithe
was not universally viewed with favor. In 1924 the Director of the Agriculture
Department objected to it as a drain on the rural economy, referring to it as an
"insuperable obstacle" to development.139 As a tax on gross (rather than net) returns,
and with the colonial state's rampant manipulation of redemption prices and outsize
assessments of yields, the actual rate of the tithe was well above the formal percentage,
and as a function of net incomes it was substantially larger yet. By one evaluation, it
was estimated in the 1920s at approximately 35 percent of average net cash income.140
Later, in 1931 after the official tithe rate had been dropped to 10 percent, the
Commissioner of Lands estimated that it was still equal to 30-33 percent or more of the
fellah's net income.141
Owing to both its heavy burden on the peasantry and its symbolic meaning in
liberal democratic politics, taxation was quickly made the target of remonstrations by the
Arab population. In 1920 there was a tax boycott in Beisan.142 Several years later in
1923, after the Mandate had been ratified, a swell of antipathy to taxation crested in the
138 Yazbak, "From Poverty to Revolt," p. 97-98; Hope Simpson report, p. 49. On the death of the tithe, see
below.
139 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 144.
140 Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 41; M.F. Abcarius, "The Fiscal System," in Economic Organization, p.
516.
141 Memoranda, Commissioner of Lands to Acting Chief Secretary, 11.5.31 and 12.5.31, PRO - CO
733/207/6.
142 Fakher Eldin, "Communities of Owners," p. 90.
453
press, and the idea of a tax strike was seized upon by advocates of Palestinian rights as
preferable to continued representations to British authorities. At the sixth Palestinian
Arab Congress in June of the same year, Jamal al-Husayni argued at length for non-
payment of taxes, contending that Arab taxes were being funneled to the Zionist cause
and that the absence of government credit was crushing the fellahin. The slogan "no
taxation without representation" was raised, but internal disagreements over the
proposed policy sent the motion down to defeat.143 Kayyali notes that the opposition to
taxation and to the tithe was widespread, as various government reports from the time
attested to, and that Jamal Effendi's position was appreciated throughout the country.144
In 1925, after continued friction, the colonial administration dropped the tithe rate to 10
percent.145
Shortly after the tithe was lowered, in 1926, the committee overseeing its
operation recommended that a new system be implemented both in order to rid the
government of the cumbersome and expensive assessment process and to curb the losses
that the system caused peasants to incur. The new standard of agricultural taxation,
known as the commuted tithe, was approved in 1927 and implemented in most regions in
143 Kayyali, Palestine, p. 118-19. Some of the support for a tax strike came from Filastin and its editor,
'Isa al-'Isa, and other Christian middle class intellectuals and activists. Those who argued down the
proposal were likely to come from the wealthy landed class, which feared it would bear the brunt of the
administration's response (120). The charge by Jamal al-Husayni concerning credit must inevitably also
be taken with a grain of salt, since his family was a well-known beneficiary of the 1858 Land Law and had
amassed domains in the Jerusalem region, thereby making it one of the insufficient sources of local credit
about which he complained (Manna', Tarikh Filastin, p. 192).
144 Kayyali, Palestine, p. 120. Jamal Effendi had, previous to the sixth Congress, told the High
Commissioner that he was against a tax strike (p. 118).
145 Yazbak, "From Poverty to Revolt," p. 97.
454
1928.146 It was based on an average of the cash value of the four preceding years of
tithes, which was thought a reasonable means by which to arrive at a fixed assessment.
The commuted tithe was also officially billed as an incentive booster, since additional
production and higher yields would no longer add to the producer's tax bill. Though it
was seen as a reform and was reported by the High Commissioner to have worked
smoothly in its first years, in truth it represented a gain in state efficiency without
offering peasants substantial relief from the rate of taxation. As one District
Commissioner pointed out, the "guess-work" and arbitrary quality inherent in the former
tithe was preserved and retained in the commuted tithe, though it was camouflaged
within an average of previous rates. The commuted tithe quickly gave way to what
Yazbak identifies as a "sharper distortion" than the original tithe when agrarian
commodity prices dropped in the years after 1927. Between 1924 and 1927 they had
already declined, but in the succeeding years they went into freefall, plummeting
approximately 50 percent. With the commuted tithe in place, the rate of taxation on
agricultural produce held steady while collapsing prices led to lower cash returns for
peasants. As the administration's 1929 Report to the League of Nations explained: "the
fixed redemption prices of the tithe calculated on the natural tithes for the previous three
years exceeds the present market price of cereals, with the result that taxation is higher
in relation to income than it was in the previous year." This alarming trend deepened in
the years of the Great Depression, as commodity prices remained low and rural Palestine
146 Aside from Bedouin areas in the south, internecine disputes in Nablus, Tulkarm, and Jenin prevented
the commuted tithe's operation until 1929, after which only some of the southern Bedouin areas were
exempted (Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 146; Report to the League of Nations, 1929, p. 11).
455
was wracked by a succession of poor harvests from 1930-34. The scale of the gulf
between official redemption prices under the commuted tithe and actual market prices
and producer incomes has been alluded to above with reference to the Johnson-Crosbie
Committee's distorted calculations of taxable yields and gross incomes.147
Aside from exacerbating the tithe's already onerous and unrealistic levels of
taxation on the peasantry, the steep fall-off in market prices for common agricultural
commodities in the late 1920s brought peasant net incomes to what Hope Simpson
bleakly termed the "vanishing point." Where net incomes for owner-cultivators and
tenants (sharecroppers) had respectively been estimated on average previously at £P 35.2
and £P 20 per year, in 1930 with contemporaneous prices Hope Simpson found them
reduced to averages of £P 11.8 and £P 3.6. Given that during his inquiry he repeatedly
heard proposals such as that from a district officer at Jaffa to cancel outright all taxes on
those families making less than £P 30 per year net (estimated at over 50 percent in the
subdistrict), it is startlingly evident that both owner-cultivators and sharecroppers, with
average incomes approximately one-third and one-ninth of this minimum prescription,
were experiencing what can only be described as economic ruin.148
At about the same time as agrarian incomes fell precipitously, the tithe ceased to
be a functioning source of state revenue. The already meager and exhausted resources of
the bulk of the peasantry were further hit hard as the early 1930s witnessed an
unforgiving stretch of poor harvests, owing to climate conditions and pests (mice and
147 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 146-47 (first quote); Yazbak, "From Poverty to Revolt," p. 98
(second quote); Report to the League of Nations, 1929, p. 11. Hope Simpson provides an instructive table
charting redemption prices on six major Palestinian crops from 1924-27 and their market rates in 1930
(report, appendix 14, p. 174).
148 Hope Simpson report, p. 50, 52.
456
locusts), which lasted through 1934. In 1930, the colonial state began a series of
remissions of tithes that effectively eviscerated the tax and signaled its death-knell.
Over the course of 1930 and 1931 almost £P 300,000 were remitted.149 In 1932, of a
total assessment of £P 246,000, £P 173,000 (71.5 percent) was relinquished.150
According to Edward Keith-Roach, DC-Northern in the 1930s, during HC Arthur
Wauchope's tenure (beginning in 1931), the state relinquished some £P 600,000 in
tithes. In his memoir he wrote that the District Commissioners complained of this, but
"The whole structure of government was undermined and, eventually, we were unable to
collect any rural taxes worth mentioning."151 Keith-Roach's casting of blame on the
High Commissioner, however, omitted the obvious reality that the tithe had ceased being
collectable, not on account of the state's lack of will, but owing to the greatly diminished
earnings of agriculturalists. Its receipts in the early 1930s were proof of this. In 1933,
for instance, the total adjusted outstanding tithes (current and arrears, after remissions)
was £P 185,028, of which only £P 33,017 (17.8 percent) was collected for the year; and
in 1934, the final full year of the tithe, the total adjusted figure amounted to £P 247,208,
of which £P 81,349 (32.9 percent) was paid.152
Recognizing that the tithe had outlived its utility, the state moved to enact what
many in the administration had desired from the outset, a tax based on land, rather than
on crop yields. The Rural Property Tax Ordinance was issued in December 1934 and
149 Report to the League of Nations, 1931, p. 7.
150 Report to the League of Nations, 1932, p. 7.
151 Edward Keith-Roach, Pasha of Jerusalem: Memoirs of a District Commissioner under the British
Mandate (New York: Radcliffe Press, 1994), p. 131.
152 Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 49; Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 51. In 1933, of
the original assessment of £P 245,000, £P 193,500, or 79 percent, was waived (Report to the League of
Nations, 1933, p. 24).
457
extinguished both the tithe (including the commuted tithe and 'ushr) and the werko. In
their stead it imposed a tax on rural land according to a scale of 16 grades based on soil
fertility and on the "type of cultivation" (including the specific crops) employed thereon.
Sidestepping the ever-fraught arena of legal title, assessors valued rural plots and
categorized them according to the new taxonomy, producing a per dunam assessment of
annual dues which district officers were responsible for collecting.153 The new method
effectively ended the collection of an agricultural tax on gross yields, as the scale of land
grades was based on an assessment of net product specific to each category within the
system.154 According to the annual Report to the League of Nations for the first year of
its enactment, 1935, the new rural property tax reduced the assessments of cereals
cultivators by up to 70 percent as compared to their former rates under the commuted
tithe. Nevertheless, total assessments for the year under the heading were tabulated at
£P 220,376, a sum not dissimilar from previous years' tithes.155 At this point the tithe,
under British management, had done its damage, and any relief brought by the new rural
property tax was far too late in coming to halt peasant alienation from turning into
zealous support for the national rebellion which began scarcely a year after the tithe was
finally wound-up in March 1935.
153 Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 80. Urban property tax was calculated differently, according
to "a rate on net annual value" of properties (ibid.). A history of the RPT's origins and a short explanation
of its method of assessment appear in Report to the League of Nations, 1935, p. 55-58.
154 Graham-Brown, "The Political Economy of Jabal Nablus," p. 96. See also ft. 8 above.
155 Report to the League of Nations, 1935, p. 25, 57. The Rural Property Tax Ordinance was effective
from 1 April 1935 (p. 55).
458
Protection for Zionist industry: price shocks and Arab marginalization
The sharp fall in prices in the late 1920s was closely tied to the global economic
depression that hit around the same time, but customs and trade policies pursued in the
Mandate's first dozen years also contributed to price trends that had negative
consequences for the rural Arab population. Over the 1920s the colonial administration
gradually adopted a protectionist regimen of tariffs and policies favorable to nascent
Jewish industries, such that by the close of the decade Hope Simpson famously
observed: "The rest of the population is taxed in order that the proprietors of these
industrial concerns may be in a position to pay the wages of their laborers and to make a
profit for themselves." A number of key agricultural commodities were exempted from
import duties, including primary local crops like wheat and sesame and common
processed products such as olive oil and flour. These exemptions were instituted to aid
some of the largest local Jewish businesses, the Grands Moulins flour refinery and the
Shemen Oil Company, both based in Haifa, by lowering the price of necessary inputs.
Conversely, duties were raised on imports of certain commodities, such as salt and
cement, to shield Zionist producers from foreign competition. Hope Simpson concluded
that a number of the largest Zionist concerns, including Nesher Cement Co. and Shemen
Oil, along with other well-known businesses like the Rishon LeTzion and Zihron
Ya'aqov wineries, were dependent in absolute terms (i.e. for their existence) on the
special tariff schedules erected by the state at the behest of Jewish industry.156
In instituting a protectionist customs policy for Jewish industry the British
156 Hope Simpson report, p. 78, 81; Seikaly, Haifa, p. 89.
459
departed from the former Ottoman system which added a blanket ad valorem impost of
11 percent on imports. High Commissioner Samuel began by advocating lower duties
for imports of diamonds and industrial machinery and, by the mid-1924, a set of
exemptions to the tariff regime began to be effected as an aid to early Zionist industries,
which were conceived of as benefiting the overall economy. The exemptions to the
schedule of duties were augmented considerably in two ordinances in 1926 and 1927 and
thereafter through amendments, following consistent and vociferous campaigning by
Zionist agencies. Though aid to Jewish industry was first seen by British officials and
administrators as unrelated to the Arab agrarian sphere, Hope Simpson's report
subsequently forced them to acknowledge that the manipulation of tariffs played a
significant part in damaging Arab agriculturalists. As May Seikaly tidily sums the trade-
off up, "By 1930, when a Jewish modern industrial nucleus had taken shape, its corollary
was a deteriorating Arab agricultural sector."157
Warning bells concerning the negative impacts of tariff exemptions on the
fellahin were sounded considerably earlier, but were disregarded. Edward Sawer, the
Director of the Agriculture Department, pointed out in 1926 that the exemptions
allowing duty-free sesame and olive oil into the country contradicted his department's
initiative to increase local olive production and tree planting, and put sesame growers in
a bind.158 The flow of customs-exempt imports stimulated Zionist industry but had a
depressive effect on Arab agriculture. They brought down market prices for local crops,
157 Graham-Brown, "The Political Economy of Jabal Nablus," p. 97; Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 164-
66; Seikaly, Haifa, p. 89.
158 Graham-Brown, "The Political Economy of Jabal Nablus," p. 97.
460
reducing Arab peasants' incomes, while swelling the ranks of seasonal labor flows to
urban centers.159 Despite Sawer's objections, it wasn't until after the violence of 1929
and the agrarian downturn of the 1930 harvest season that the government moved to
reimpose a duty on sesame and to ban the importation without prior license of unrefined
olive oil, along with wheat, flour, and semolina.160 By that time, the value of olive oil
against its average 1923-27 redemption price had fallen 44 percent, sesame had lost
between 20-46 percent of its market value (depending on the district), and wheat prices
had dropped 48-50 percent.161 While the incomes of fellahin and large growers
producing these crops suffered great losses, the Shemen Oil Company, for which the
sesame duty had been dropped in 1925, attained viability through the tariff. According
to Hope Simpson, Shemen then overproduced oil for the local market, contributing to the
fall-off in the value of sesame.162 Shemen, which manufactured soap as well as oils, was
able during the five years of tariff exemption to build market-share in soap both
internationally and locally, competing with the renowned olive oil soap of Nablus.163 By
1931 Arab soap manufacturing was experiencing difficulties, and by 1933 and 1934 the
colonial state made proposals to ameliorate the situation, though these revolved largely
around notions of proper branding and improving quality, rather than addressing the
effects of prior industrial protectionism.164 The damage to the Arab soap business, the
preeminent proto-industrial concern of Arab Palestine before the Mandate and during its
159 Seikaly, Haifa, p. 89.
160 Report to the League of Nations, 1930, p. 15.
161 Hope Simpson report, appendix 14, p. 174.
162 Ibid, p. 74, 81.
163 Seikaly, Haifa, p. 107; Deborah Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in
Mandatory Palestine (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 119-120.
164 Seikaly, Haifa, p. 106; Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 15-16.
461
early period, sent Nabulsis emigrating to Haifa165 and symbolized again the colonial
state's wanton neglect of Arab interests and its propensity to undermine such in service
to Zionism.166
Special mention must also be made of the colonial state's trade policies
concerning wheat. In the fall of 1920, the colonial administration banned the export of
cereals and meat, and asserted military control and purview over relevant local contracts.
This move, heatedly opposed by grain traders, all but killed their business, which
depended on exports of Palestinian cereals, and importation of the same from Morocco
and the Sudan later in the year, buying cheap and selling dear. The administration
claimed that its purpose was to assure essential foodstuffs, including for a projected
influx of Jewish immigrants. In a matter of months the new strictures sent wheat prices
crashing to half their value, injuring peasant growers and merchant traders alike. At the
time, wheat was far and away the most widely grown crop in Palestine.167 Members of
the AE voiced their objection to the policy before Colonial Secretary Churchill in March
1921 in the following pointed terms:
165 Seikaly, Haifa, p. 107.
166 The soap business at Nablus was estimated by Hope Simpson to bring in £P 240,000 annually and to
employ 200 workers. The extent of Shemen's intrusion into Nabulsi markets is, as Deborah Bernstein
notes, difficult to ascertain. However, it is clear that this was Shemen's intent. Nabulsi soap was known
for its purity of craftsmanship and its high quality, and was mixed with dust residue from brick-making to
give it a distinctive reddish coloring. Emulating its well-reputed competitor, Shemen injected its own soap
with a red pigment to give it a similar appearance. Shemen's competition with Palestinian soap, including
that made in the other principle soap-producing areas in Jaffa and Ramle, extended internationally, as both
Arab and Jewish products vied for market share. The importance of the international dimension - which
may well have outweighed local competition since both Arab and Jewish products carried distinct
markings that may have impacted consumption in Palestine (Shemen soap was imprinted with an image of
a menorah) - is suggested by the fact that over half of Palestine's exports in 1927-28 were soap, and that
up to 40 percent of Shemen's annual production was exported. See: Hope Simpson report, p. 78-79, 83;
Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, p. 119-120.
167 Roger Owen, "Economic Development," p. 20-21.
462
Palestine is an agricultural country and depends largely on her export of cereals for a living. Now
Jewish immigration has raised the cost of living, and the government, in order to keep prices
down in the interest of the Jewish consumer has prohibited the export of certain cereals, with the
result that the granaries of the land are stocked with products and merchants cannot find an outlet
for trade. Consequently a financial crisis set in and hundreds of merchants were bankrupt[ed].
Later that year the controls were abandoned, but by that time the price of wheat in
external markets had also dropped off and many merchants still holding reserves were
forced to take further losses to dispense with their produce. The effect on peasant
owner-cultivators and tenants is difficult to ascertain, but given the steep decline in
prices and the damage absorbed by traders, it could hardly have been negligible. The
fact that this early debacle in colonial agrarian and trade policies was followed in
succeeding years by a broader, multi-faceted program of protectionist tariffs for Zionist
industries - induced by successful lobbying and by ample support from high officials in
the Palestine administration - speaks volumes about the marginality of peasant
livelihoods within the economic calculus of the Mandate.168
The absence of credit facilities
As has been noted above, World War I left much of the Arab peasantry in or
vulnerable to acute financial distress. The British acknowledged this when they closed
the land registries, reopening them later, as we have seen, upon encouragement from
High Commissioner Samuel. The peculiar situation regarding land records not only
168 Seikaly, Haifa, p. 105. Grain traders rebounded somewhat from the 1920-21 crisis, but Seikaly notes
that local production of cereals continued to decline and by the close of the decade wholesalers could no
longer make ends meet from their traditional business and were forced to diversify their enterprises (p.
106-07).
463
complicated peasant claims to land, but also dampened the likelihood of their receiving
credit facilities through the colonial state. As Bunton has pointed out, the colonial rulers
saw legal title as a necessary prerequisite for credit.169 The question of ascertaining
landed title was exacerbated by British standards of proof that all but invalidated
customary and oral claims, and, despite widespread illiteracy, privileged written title.
Those who were most in need of cheap credit were therefore most often deemed by the
colonial state and the authorities in London to be without adequate proof to the collateral
necessary for a mortgage or long-term credit. On top of the considerable hurdle of
proving and attaining creditworthiness, the state failed to carve out a proactive policy on
the provision of credit. Ironically, despite the manifest interest of the colonial authorities
in boosting agricultural productivity and efficiency, credit was not seriously factored
into British visions for stimulating agricultural development.
Government loans to Arab cultivators were unpopular with the Colonial Office
from early on, and were generally treated with a great deal of skepticism and handled
with reluctance and anxiety.170 The fiscal constraints upon the Palestine administration
and its need to provide its own budget almost exclusively from local sources likewise
contributed to rendering the extension of credit facilities to impoverished fellahin a low
priority. Consequently, in the first 10-12 years of the Mandate there was no institutional
development of credit facilities despite the palpable need for such. During this time
government extended limited credit in an ad-hoc fashion: it was provided grudgingly in
169 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 102.
170 Ibid., p. 110-12.
464
the aftermath of the war, in cases of drought, and under similar circumstances.171 The
sums distributed were thus not significant enough to alter the declining position of many
peasants living on the margins and were void of any broader design or intention to
address the rampant indebtedness of the fellahin. As Barabara Smith pointedly
concludes concerning the provision of credit, "The failure of the Administration in this
area was… tantamount to a total withdrawal of active efforts to aid the local population
in economic activity."172
British policy on credit represented a set-back for fellahin and rural landowners.
Under the Ottomans, a portion of the tithe (.5 percent) had been earmarked for the
Ottoman Agricultural Bank (OAB), which offered agricultural loans to the public at six
percent interest with a one percent initial fee. Like the land registries, the OAB's books
were missing after the war, and the British authorities decided to terminate what
remained of its operations and absorb its capital and accounts, which were subsequently
tallied, after years of piecing disparate records together, at just over £P 20,500 in cash,
£P 15,000 in property with another £P 66,000 outstanding from loans. Until the tithe
was adjusted downward to 10 percent the government continued to collect the portion
allotted to the OAB, the receipts for which equaled £P 76,000 cumulatively by 1925.
These were added to the general fund of the Mandate's treasury. Modest as the OAB's
operation was (the details of which we know little), its shuttering and lack of
replacement by the British could hardly have helped credit-strapped fellahin.173
171 Roza I.M. el-Eini, "Rural Indebtedness and Agricultural Credit Supplies in Palestine in the 1930s,"
Middle Eastern Studies v. 33, n. 2 (April 1997), p. 314.
172 Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 114.
173 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 103-05.
465
After it was realized that inaction on the provision of credit would hurt tithes
returns, the military administration began an ineffectual program of lending, based in
sales of mules to peasants on credit. Beginning in 1919, however, the military
government turned to the Anglo-Egyptian Bank for a loan of £P 500,000 in order to
redress the shortage of available credit. 174 A series of government loans, both long-term
(over £P 60, amortized over five years) and short-term (under £P 60), were subsequently
extended to fellahin and rural borrowers between 1919 and 1923. With much hand-
wringing on the part of officials about the prospects for repayment, a total of £P 576,319
was disbursed, mostly in short-term loans. Almost immediately, in 1920-21, the state
began to trim its lending while arrears increased, but by the end of 1923 over 16,000
loans had been extended.175 Although it took longer than the state planned or thought
desirable, most of the capital it lent in this formative stage was later recollected, with
only £P 38,211 (6.6 percent) outstanding a decade later in 1933. Aside from the
slowness of amortization, several other problems combined to cool the already fragile
enthusiasm for the business of direct lending. Some of the loans were misused, and in
the most egregious cases they were employed as capital for moneylending and
speculation. A thornier predicament was presented by the issue of defaults: if a peasant
had only land as collateral (which was required on any loan over £P 20) and was unable
to repay a loan, the state's sole recourse was seizure of the cultivator's land, but calling
in the collateral would then result in the even larger problem of dispossessing peasants.
Finally, where peasant budgets were tight, as they were for the majority, the necessity of
174 Anglo-Egyptian later merged with Barclays Bank.
175 Smith, Roots of Separatism, p. 114.
466
maintaining a loan repayment schedule could compete with or block payment of the
tithe, causing shortfalls in state revenue.176
The complications that arose from the state's loan program, enumerated in a
1924 report on the government's agricultural lending, helped give the Colonial Office
the ammunition it needed to argue strongly against the continuation of state involvement
in direct credit provision and to oppose the Palestine administration's ambitions for
opening an agricultural bank. Given the constraints on calling in collateral in land from
poor peasants, such a bank, backed first by HC Samuel and later by HC Chancellor, was
seen in London as little more than a fool's errand, and one that would inevitably redound
negatively on the administration's exchequer, which would be forced to cover
deficiencies in repayment. Any need for banking services on the part of the rural
population could, it was held in the Colonial Office, only be adequately met through the
channels of a proper, commercial bank. The Palestine administration's perceived lack of
the necessary capital with which to establish an agrarian bank sealed the argument in
London's favor, and Barclays Bank eventually came to play the role of private creditor
that the Colonial Office saw as most appropriate.177
While the question of an agricultural bank was being fought out between
administrations in Palestine and authorities in London, conditions in the countryside
continued to call attention to the need for additional supplies of credit. Beginning in
1927, following crop failures owing to drought, the Palestine administration succeeded
in gaining permission to issue small short-term loans to cultivators for relief. In 1927
176 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 106-07, 109, 111.
177 Ibid., p. 110-15.
467
and 1928 the government issued loans to the tune of £P 19,995 and £P 13,819
respectively.178 Barclays Bank at the time outpaced the administration, managing £P 40-
45,000 in annual short-term credit for the northern district.179 With the onset of a severe
agricultural depression in 1930, the government increased its short-term lending, but
effectively ignored popular sentiment among fellahin in support of the establishment of
an agricultural bank.180 The authorities in London also opposed a recommendation made
in the Johnson-Crosbie report (in 1930) for the disbursement of £P 100,000 in short-term
credit.181 Instead, in 1930 and 1932 government allocations for short-term loans totaled
£P 35,000 per year, though in 1931 only £P 14,000 was issued. But in 1933 the sum
rose to £P 106,000, falling off somewhat in 1934 to £P 80,000.182 Facing continued
crisis and short of any wider agreement with London for new lending facilities, the
Palestine administration turned to Barclays in 1933 to expand necessary lines of short-
term agricultural credit. Agreement was reached on a rate of nine percent interest and
two new bank branches were opened at Hebron and Gaza.183 By 1936 annual lending by
178 Report to the League of Nations, 1928, p. 13.
179 El-Eini, "Rural Indebtedness," p. 326. At the time the bank's three branches were all situated in the
center-north of the country, in Acre, Nazareth, and Nablus.
180 The public response in Tulkarm in March 1930 when word circulated of possible government interest
in opening an agricultural bank was likely generally representative. Members of the public were recorded
by the district officer as saying that if the government desired peasants to live, this institution must be
opened as quickly as possible (Political report, Tulkarm area district officer, 3.3.30, ISA (112) 5170 - 4m).
181 El-Eini, "Rural Indebtedness," p. 325.
182 Report to the League of Nations, 1930, p. 15; Report to the League of Nations, 1931, p. 7; Report to the
League of Nations, 1932, p. 7; Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 23-24; Report to the League of
Nations, 1934, p. 18-19. A previous study cited by other accounts, that of George Hakim and M.Y. el-
Hussayni ("Monetary and Banking System," p. 498-99) reports a considerably lower figure for the period
1930-34 (just under £P 190,000) than that derived from the annual reports to the League of Nations used
herein, but cites no sources to back up its lower tabulation.
183 El-Eini, "Rural Indebtedness," p. 326-27, 329.
468
Barclays Bank reached £P 248,000, serving over 16,300 borrowers in 420 villages,
though as Nadan notes, the bank actually targeted wealthier peasants.184
Though short-term lending by the government increased during the prolonged
downturn of 1930-34, and in 1935 it opened a £P 50,000 line of long-term credit for
applicants in the hill country,185 the government's lending can only be judged as
parsimonious in the extreme. Its own financial position throughout the agrarian crisis
was flush. It held an accumulated budget surplus of £P 773,069 as of 1 January 1930,186
and ran budget surpluses for the three fiscal years following the end of its first push into
lending from 1919-23. From 1923/24 to 1926/27 the annual surpluses ranged in value
from £P 301,961 (1924/25) to £P 716,677 (1925/26), and accounted for between 13.4
percent (1926/27) and 25.5 percent (1925/26) of government receipts. Although the
government ran a substantial deficit in 1928 (£P 797,676, equal to 30.9 percent of annual
receipts), a year as previously noted in which it paid an outsize portion down on its debt,
it still rounded out the decade in which the peasantry were brought to incomes at the
"vanishing point" with a substantial surplus. Moreover, after running small deficits in
1930 (£P 146,958) and 1931 (£P 40,972) equal to 6.2 and 1.75 percent respectively of
annual receipts, it ran a combined surplus for 1932-33 of £P 645,156 (17.6 percent of
receipts) before accruing an unprecedented surplus for 1933/34 of £P 1,280,636, equal to
32.1 percent of the revenues for the year. As of 31 March 1934, with the Arab peasantry
battered from three and a half years of terrible harvests, a decade or more of negative
184 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 217.
185 Report to the League of Nations, 1935, p. 25.
186 Report to the League of Nations, 1930, p. 13.
469
price movements, and over 15 years of crushing tithes and increasing costs, the colonial
state had accumulated a total surplus of £P 2,510,932, roughly equal to an entire year of
revenues. The sum of the surplus continued to grow geometrically in the years before
the revolt, reaching £P 6,267,810 on the eve of the revolt, at the close of March 1936. In
short, though the imperial Treasury, the Colonial Office, and segments of the Palestine
administration fretted over containing expenses, the colonial authorities all but left the
bulk of the country's population out in the cold while the state ran substantial surpluses
throughout most of the 1920s that grew to truly enormous proportions in the 1930s.187
This was so in spite of the spate of inquiries in the 1930s, beginning with the Johnson-
Crosbie commission, which documented many of the immense stresses and financial
burdens on the peasantry.188
While colonial authorities banked the state's surpluses and refused to utilize them
to alleviate the torments and insolvency of much of the fellahin, they were well aware of
the population's continual desire for credit facilities. Not only did Arabs support the
creation of an agricultural bank, but short-term loans were avidly sought out by
187 The Peel Commission (report, p. 207) attempted to suggest, after the surplus was diminished £P
1,460,000 on account of extra military and police expenditures in 1936, that the balance of £P 4,807,000
was largely already committed to future expenses. Its discussion is abstruse on the point, but critically
omits that any planned future expenditures reflected choices made by colonial officials and could hardly
explain the longer-term record of the administration.
188 Calculations herein are made from data provided in: Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 153.
The 1936 figure is from Report to the League of Nations, 1936, p. 46. The state's confidence in the health
of its fiscal position was evident in the tenor of its comments concerning customs revenues in its annual
reports. In its 1930 report it noted that: "Nothing testifies more highly to the country's powers of
sustained financial endurance and recuperation than the fact that the revenue from Customs in 1930
approached £P 1,000,000" (p. 13), while in 1932 it referred to customs dues as an "index of the sound
position of the country" (p. 12). In fiscal year 1932/33 (ending 31 March), when customs reached almost
£P 1,287,000, the government no longer felt a need to crow about the benefits of the income derived
(Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 149, 166). By this point it appears as a given that the financial
basis of the colonial regime was bound to customs, which itself was reflective of the rapid growth of the
yishuv in the early 1930s. A chart of customs receipts set against annual revenues and expenditures,
through the first year of the revolt, may be found in: Peel Commission report, p. 206.
470
agriculturalists of all classes.189 In the Tulkarm area, further evidence of a credit crunch
was apparent in 1930 as moneylenders ceased giving advances to their clients. Local
usurers further tightened the already inadequate supply of credit by refusing to lend
small sums, since default on repayment of minor sums was not punishable by
imprisonment.190 In 1930 the district officer succinctly summarized the early phase of
the crisis of 1930-34 by commenting that: "The financial situation continues to be
unbearable."191 Over time the government was forced to increase its lending to affected
peasants as the crisis intensified, so as "to keep them alive," as one Barclays Bank
officer put it in 1934.192
As credit tightened, and despite the ravaged state of the countryside,
arrangements to provide new channels for lending were slow to come to fruition and
inadequate. This was the case for long-term credit as well as short-term. After several
years of negotiations the colonial state finally opened an agricultural mortgage bank in
1935. However, after lobbying pressure from the Jewish Agency, the bank's projected
allocation of capital (from an initial pool of £P 100,000) was set 3:1 in favor of lending
to Jewish concerns.193 Zionist influence was thoroughgoing from the start, and the bank
was envisioned by the Jewish Agency as a means for shrinking Arab holdings and for
undermining the Protection of Cultivators Ordinance (discussed below). In 1935 a
Colonial Office official minuted that the bank could become a direct agent of Arab
189 Political report, Tulkarm area district officer, 23.6.30, ISA (112) 5170 - 4m.
190 Political reports, Tulkarm area district officer, 2.6.30 and 28.4.30, ISA (112) 5170 - 4m.
191 Political report, Tulkarm area district officer, 19.5.30, ISA (112) 5170 - 4m.
192 Quoted in Fakher Eldin, "Communities of Owners," p. 130.
193 Bunton notes this is where the £P 50,000 long-term loan fund for Arabs in hill districts, also opened in
1935, originated - thereby balancing the state's long-term credit allocation between the two communities
equally at £P 75,000 each (Colonial Land Policies, p. 127).
471
dispossession and Jewish colonization (selling Arab properties reclaimed for collateral at
auction to Jews). Needless to say, this was hardly the type of agricultural bank that
Arabs had in mind, and did little to arrest the decline which had swept through the Arab
countryside.194
Debt and dispossession
Perhaps the most conspicuous indicator of the weakened state of the Arab
peasantry during the Mandate period was its chronic indebtedness. As we saw in chapter
4, debt was used as an engine of mercantile growth and capital accumulation in the late
Ottoman era, and affected wide areas of the country long before British boots set foot
there. While precision concerning the growth of fellah indebtedness during the British
occupation is not possible to attain, it is safe to conclude that the problem deepened
significantly as burdens mounted on peasant shoulders. Evaluating the growth of
indebtedness one study concluded simply that "Before the [First World] War rural
indebtedness existed but to a much smaller extent than that which has accumulated since
the War."195 Ultimately, the increasing strains of debt and the declining prospects of
financial viability for agriculturalists led an increasing number of smallholders to sell
their lands and seek their livelihood as sharecroppers or wage-laborers, or probably most
commonly, through some combination of both. Though the British were loath to create
194 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 123-29.
195 Hakim and el-Hussayni, "Monetary and Banking System," p. 497. This is not to say that poverty and
landlessness weren't already widespread in certain areas, as noted in the previous chapter.
472
a class of uprooted, disgruntled peasants, this is exactly what their policies succeeded in
bringing about.
Signs of the depth and growth of indebtedness were abundant, and ranged from
the mundane to the alarming. One indication came in the form of manure sales by
peasants to citrus orchard owners. In the Galilee and the Nablus subdistrict, instead of
keeping manure produced by their livestock to use as fertilizer for their own plots,
smallholders regularly marketed it to those with capital to spare.196 In the Tulkarm
subdistrict government officers sent to repossess movable property from those in default
found their houses empty, already culled of any saleable items.197 Perhaps most
remarkably of all, arrests for lack of debt repayment skyrocketed by 1930. That year
Hope Simpson found that in only two months, the courts had handled 2677 warrants for
imprisonment for debt, of which 599 resulted in sentences. These figures did not cover
the districts of Jaffa and Haifa, but separate information for the latter only amplifies the
portrait of catastrophic destitution. In one year's time the Haifa subdistrict handled 8701
proceedings for debt, issuing 2756 orders for imprisonment. Though the figures were
not disaggregated between Arabs and Jews, we can be sure that they applied in the great
majority to the former, and as Hope Simpson observes, a whopping 64 percent of the
families of the subdistrict were subject to proceedings that year alone.198 The extent of
impoverishment that such figures revealed can only be considered crushing.
196 Yazbak, "From Poverty to Revolt," p. 96.
197 Political report, Tulkarm area district officer, 2.11.31, ISA (112) 5170 - 4m.
198 Hope Simpson report, p. 51.
473
Legally the colonial state had capped interest rates at nine percent, but there was
no attempt to enforce this statute and, without alternative avenues for obtaining credit,
peasants were compelled to turn to moneylenders, who flouted the law without
compunction. A common arrangement was the 'ashara-khamst'ash, or pre-harvest loan
of £P 10, repayable at the rate of £P 15 after the harvest, netting a 50 percent return often
for only a three-month period. At such a rate, interest could run as high as 200 percent
annually, though more commonly it ranged between 30-75 percent.199 Hope Simpson
calculated from the Johnson-Crosbie Committee's data that statistically the average debt
of a Palestinian family in the villages sampled amounted to £P 27. At a 30 percent
annual interest rate, this translated into £P 8 of service on the debt before touching any
of the principle. Given that his revised assessment of the average owner-cultivator's
annual net income was £P 11.8, debt service alone appears to amount to a gargantuan
share of household expenditure. This was all the more so for sharecroppers and laborers
who were hopelessly underwater. The inescapable prominence of debt was further
illuminated in Hope Simpson's closer examination of Bir Zayt as a somewhat
representative village of the hill country. Bir Zayt, located near Ramallah, was at the
time a relatively well-off village. Nonetheless its cumulative debt was estimated by
Hope Simpson at £P 7000, which meant that statistically each of its families held an
average debt of £P 39. The average debt of this comparatively prosperous village was
thus 44 percent higher than the average calculation for the 104 village sample from the
199 ESCO Foundation for Palestine, Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab, and British Policies (New Haven:
Yale UP, 1947), v. 2, p. 706; Hope Simpson to Colonial Secretary, 18.8.30, p. 3, appendix 2 to Hope
Simpson report. Hope Simpson estimated the average annual rate of interest at around 75 percent where
Johnson-Crosbie had found a lower average of 30 percent. The wide range between these figures suggests
great variability in the terms of credit offered by moneylenders.
474
Johnson-Crosbie inquiry, indicating that debt loads could easily exceed the already
unrepayable quanta which these examinations revealed.200
By 1930, after the state was shaken from its complacency towards the
countryside by the mass violence of 1929, its intensive studies successively illustrated
that rural Arab society was in tatters. It was known at the time to multiple departments
within the state that the government's own exactions on the peasantry subjected it to
further onerous borrowing from usurers. Both the Director of Education and the
Commissioner of Lands reported in 1930 and 1931 on the phenomenon of peasants
borrowing simply to be able to pay the tithe.201 Debt and the burden of taxation not only
drove further borrowing, they also led to land sales and shrinking Arab farm sizes, as
parcels of lots were alienated to cover the obligations saddling peasant families and to
afford them a living.202 As one fellah told the Director of Education: "We have been
struggling in deep water for several years, and very soon the water will close over our
heads."203
The Palestine administration developed a dual position towards the peasantry and
the issue of their declining position. On the one hand it saw them as the weakest
element of Palestinian society, prey to exploitative moneylenders. In spite of this view,
successive administrations took no action to restrain usury or enforce the 9 percent legal
limit on annual interest rates until 1930, when an ordinance was drafted to decrease the
sentence for imprisonment for outstanding debt. Gradually, the state sought to erect a
200 Hope Simpson report, p. 46, 49.
201 Ibid., p. 47; Memorandum, Commissioner of Lands to Acting Chief Secretary, 12.5.31, PRO - CO
733/207/6.
202 Hope Simpson report, p. 50.
203 Quoted in ibid., p. 47.
475
measure of protection for the indebted. In 1931 the Imprisonment for Debt Ordinance
was passed, which stipulated that a debtor could only be imprisoned if it could be shown
that they had at their disposal adequate means to discharge the debt.204 Only in 1934,
after the withering decade of the 1920s and the prolonged crisis of the early 1930s, was
the Usurious Loans Ordinance promulgated. This measure, which enhanced the powers
of the courts to handle claims of illegal interest rates as they affected proceedings
brought before the law, contributed to curbing the ubiquity of moneylending in the
countryside, but interest rates often continued to exceed the legal ceiling.205
While colonial administrations reckoned that peasants were taken advantage of
by the notables, they also saw the fellahin as irrational and short-sighted, generally
incapable of soundly managing their financial affairs. This view of the peasantry
licensed a project of reforming peasant social and economic practices, underwritten by a
moralizing discourse of spurring uplift. Its plainest manifestation lay in the push to
create Arab cooperative societies after 1929. In March 1930 Colonial Secretary
Passfield wrote to HC Chancellor favoring the rapid establishment of such organizations,
and arrangement was made to utilize the balance of the liquidated Ottoman Agricultural
204 As Nadan discusses at length, colonial administrators and experts were often convinced that peasants
had a propensity towards "strategic default," or refusing repayment on a loan despite having the necessary
capital to do so. In his treatment on the subject, Nadan falsifies this claim by showing that peasants were
on the contrary sometimes willing to take on debt from usurers in order to maintain access to official
channels of credit. See The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 212-60.
205 Report to the League of Nations, 1930, p. 15; Graham-Brown, "The Political Economy of Jabal
Nablus," p. 98; Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 64. As argued above, the state was reluctant to
make its own financial commitment to alleviating the peasantry's plight, in spite of its recurrent surpluses.
It thus narrated the outset of the 1930-34 crisis in language that intimated that there really was no
alternative to more usury and increasing debt: "Without seed for his summer crops, or funds for the winter
ploughing, the fellah could only turn to the money-lender and sink further into debt" (Report to the League
of Nations, 1930, p. 15).
476
Bank accounts, £P 20,500 held in escrow, as their start-up capital.206 To assay the
situation and make recommendations for how best to build a cooperative infrastructure,
the registrar of credit cooperatives in Punjab, C.F. Strickland, was brought to Palestine
the same year.
Strickland held that peasant indebtedness owed in great measure to "the lack of
control over the credit which he has received, at cruel rates of interest, from the
merchants and professional money lenders," but also to peasant illiteracy and lack of
frugality. As part of his recommended program to rectify the peasants' reliance on
moneylenders, he counseled that a registrar of cooperatives, such as existed in Punjab,
should be appointed. The enormity of the registrar's task was laid out in Strickland's
report in no uncertain terms: "He is not merely relieving the peasants from debt but is
undertaking a reconstruction of their lives and of the future of the country. He must aim
at adult education and at the teaching of citizenship in a community in which these ideas
are at present almost unknown."207
Strickland envisioned cooperatives as a kind of panacea for remedying the
peasantry's benighted condition, and forcefully opposed the opening of an agricultural
bank, which he claimed would be an inappropriate solution to the issue of indebtedness.
He based his argument in part on the difficulty of foreclosing on defaulters, but also on
the fellahin's ostensible ignorance of the necessity of timely and regular repayment of
their debts to a distant institution - a supposition which itself strangely ignored the fact
206 El-Eini, "Rural Indebtedness," p. 318-19. Support for cooperatives for Arabs was also written into the
1930 White Paper (ibid., p. 319).
207 Quoted in ESCO Foundation, Palestine, v. 2, p. 708, 710-11. Emphasis added in the second quote. El-
Eini notes that "Strickland was originally considered for the post, but was not chosen because the Treasury
distrusted his 'expensive' ideas" ("Rural Indebtedness," p. 321).
477
that peasants were already familiar with banking through their experience with the OAB,
and most of all with moneylenders. In lieu of an agricultural bank, cooperatives held the
benefit of both providing affordable credit and molding the supposedly deficient moral
fiber and financial knowledge of their memberships. Elaborating on this notion,
Strickland believed that it was a mistake to seek to wipe out peasant debts at a stroke
because peasants lacked the sense to keep themselves from borrowing again and falling
back into debt. Cooperatives, by contrast, would start by providing small loans, and
only after three years of membership, move on to extinguish an individual's debt. In that
time, the atmosphere of continued struggle was intended to instill vigor in the peasant;
the cooperative thus aimed to reshape peasant "character" while giving them the
"courage to defy the moneylender and boldly invite him to go to court," where
settlement would produce a write-down on the debt.208
The creation of a cooperative movement faced an uphill battle in Palestine.
Colonial schemes for improving cultivation had by that time grown to be something of
an irritant to many peasants. The situation was little different with respect to
cooperatives. After prolonged haggling over the position of registrar, the administration
was finally prepared to take action in 1933. Using most of the capital from the OAB,
loans of up to £P 500 for a three-year period would be made available to the members of
new societies at nine percent annual interest.209 Although the initial push to found
cooperatives in Arab villages was announced with considerable fanfare in the annual
report for the year, the results were hardly an auspicious start. In all, 14 credit
208 Hope Simpson report, p. 65-66.
209 Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 13.
478
cooperatives with a combined membership of 264 persons were established in 1933.
Two years later at the close of 1935, 61 cooperatives held 2422 members and drew on
combined assets worth £P 40,766. 210 Though growth of the societies was not as anemic
in 1935 as in the initiative's first year, their membership rolls were still modest. The
Peel Commission additionally discovered in its investigations in 1936-37 that Arab
cooperatives were typically comprised of more well-off peasants, who held smaller
quantities of debt than their peers.211 After several years the colonial authorities were
divided as to whether the cooperative movement in the Arab countryside had legs. The
Peel Commission heralded it as an important development, while in the annual Report to
the League of Nations for 1937 the Palestine administration itself cast doubt on the
results after four years.212 Regardless, it is clear that those cooperatives which were
established at the time, however much they aided their memberships, did rather little
collectively to alter the malaise and grinding poverty gripping rural society.213
Despite the belatedness of its measures addressing peasant indebtedness and the
prevalence of usury, and irrespective of their piecemeal quality, the Palestine
government was quick to publicly proclaim victory and to regard its efforts as a triumph.
In its 1935 annual report the authorities credited the Imprisonment for Debt Ordinance
(1931), the Usurious Loans Ordinance (1934), tithe remissions, and the provision of
credit through Barclays Bank, the Mortgage Company, and the Arab Bank of Co-
210 Ibid., p. 13-14; Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 226.
211 El-Aini, "Rural Indebtedness," p. 323.
212 Bunton, Colonial Land Policies, p. 122.
213 El-Eini is far too generous in her assessment of the cooperative initiative, regarding it as a guarded
success which helped spell the end of moneylenders' influence ("Rural Indebtedness," p. 323-24), yet
there is no evidence to back up this grand claim, the validity and scope of which is further vitiated by the
societies' tiny memberships.
479
operative Societies for curbing the thrall of moneylenders and relieving fellahin of a
significant portion of their debt. It drew particular attention to the northern district,
where it claimed to have engineered a very considerable 60 percent reduction in debt
loads.214 Some pause is due this assertion, however, not least because of the
susceptibility of authorities to gloss things for the sake of public reporting to the League
of Nations, but more so because payable arrears on tithes were hardly dented for the
year. Excluding the Beersheba subdistrict, the outstanding debt on the defunct tax
amounted to £P 171,021 in 1935, of which a mere £P 19,750 (11.5 percent) was paid.215
Such a paltry and unremarkable sum - one indistinct from previous years of repayment
on arrears - is not suggestive of any substantial reduction in outstanding peasant debts, a
significant chunk of which were owed to the state. While this is not conclusive evidence
that the state's belated campaign against usury was without effect, it hardly squares with
the authorities' rosier estimations, and without further evidence to corroborate the
official claims, the absence of repayment on tax arrears likely stands as a more
conclusive indicator of the peasantry's fiscal health.216
While the colonial state slowly assembled its response to the crisis of rural
indebtedness, portents of ongoing seismic shifts in landownership and of the growth of
landlessness became increasingly visible. Even before the state recognized debt and
214 Report to the League of Nations, 1935, p. 25. It is perhaps noteworthy that no further evidence or detail
is provided regarding this alleged remarkable achievement.
215 Ibid., p. 55.
216 It could be argued that the peasantry was quite possibly counting on official debts to be forgiven as they
had been in the past both through remissions and through write-downs, though it should be noted that the
latter were much less financially weighty than the former. If this were the case then the indebted may
have wagered it was a smarter bet to pay unofficial debts before those due the state. We have, to my
knowledge, no way of assessing such a hypothesis, though it does seem reasonable.
480
usury as issues which it needed to address, the Shaw Commission had warned in 1930 of
the danger of growing landlessness and the creation of a landless class of peasants. Like
High Commissioner Chancellor, the Shaw Commission judged that, barring an
improvement in cultivation techniques that would increase yields, there were no
remaining stretches of land which could be acquired by the Zionist movement without
prejudicing the position of the Arab cultivators in the country.217 In tracing the rise of
landlessness it pointed to the failure of existing legislation, including the Land Transfer
Ordinances and the Protection of Cultivators Ordinance of 1929 to protect peasant
tenancies, in spite of the express intention, especially of the former, to do so. It
concluded tersely that: "The position is now acute. There is no alternative land to which
persons evicted can remove. In consequence a landless and discontented class is being
created. Such a class is a potential danger to the country."218 Although the Zionist
movement succeeded in squelching the limitations proposed in the 1930 White Paper on
the Jewish National Home, the quandary of peasant landlessness weighed increasingly
on the Palestinian community and on the considerations of the colonial authorities.
As noted previously, contention surrounds HC Chancellor's recommendations to
reconfigure implementation of the Jewish National Home policy and his purported
influence on the Shaw Commission, Hope Simpson's work, and the Passfield White
Paper.219 Despite this, the Jewish Agency succeeded greatly in delimiting the
217 Yehoshua Hankin, a longtime purchasing agent for the PLDC, stated in a letter to Hope Simpson that
after acquisition of the 100,000 dunams of Arab land then on the Palestine market in mid-1930, Arabs tied
to any further purchases by Zionists would find it very difficult to resettle elsewhere, owing to the
shrinking base of Arab agricultural estates and their saturation with tenants (Hope Simpson report, p. 38).
218 Shaw Commission report, p. 162.
219 Stein, The Land Question, p. 76, 92-93. See chapter 1.
481
government's approach to the question of landlessness. It did so in good measure
through subverting the apparatus established to enumerate the landless. Following the
MacDonald letter, the government proceeded to enact a pared-down version of Hope
Simpson's recommendation to institute a development program aimed at modernizing
the country's agriculture. The intention behind the scheme was to remedy Arab
landlessness and provide room for further Zionist settlement220 by reducing the "lot
viable," or minimum estimated plot which a cultivator and their family required for
survival.221 For these purposes, a Development Department was created within the
Palestine administration in 1931. The Jewish Agency quickly exerted itself and
succeeding in controlling the appointment of the department's legal officer, who was
responsible for evaluating claims to landlessness.222 The leverage it gained through this
officer, A.H. Webb, a former district court judge at Nablus, along with the constricted
definition of landlessness used by the state, helped to minimize and distort the official
count of the landless.
Webb proved most agreeable to Zionism and made a mockery of the task with
which he was entrusted. He generally disregarded outright fellah judgments concerning
the sizes of their holdings, and in a further act of blatant bias, began his term by sending
each and every application for landless status he received to the Jewish Agency for
220 Again, see chapter 1 for detail.
221 A great debate swirled over the notion of a lot viable, the details of which will not be entered into here.
The concept became a political football and was intertwined with equally strenuous debates over
measuring arable land and potentially arable land, which were both pertinent to estimating the 'absorptive
capacity' of the country.
222 Stein, The Land Question, p. 149. The first suggested candidate for the post, R.C. Tute, a land court
judge, was opposed by AG Bentwich for his "imperfect sympathy with Zionism" and was consequently
not appointed (p. 148-49).
482
vetting before he himself even opened the files. Arab claims of dispossession thereby
became subject to adjudication by the JA's Legal Department as much as by the state
itself.223
The definition that was employed in ascertaining landlessness - derived from the
MacDonald letter - was highly restrictive, and included only those who "can be shown
to have been displaced from the lands which they occupied in consequence of the lands
passing into Jewish hands, and who have not obtained other holdings on which they can
establish themselves, or other equally satisfactory occupation." The narrowness of this
definition surpassed even that proposed by the JA, on which it was based, 224 but both the
state and the JA agreed that the primary focus of the count should be on tenants who had
lost their access to land through sales by absentee landlords or large owners. This
interpretation of the definition ruled out certain classes of claimants, such as persons
who had sold their own plots,225 and thereby discounted smallholders who were forced
to sell because of debts or taxes. Though the notion that attaining land elsewhere
mitigated any claim to dispossession could reasonably be debated, the inclusion of the
clause on labor (which was an addition of HMG and not the JA) obfuscated any
remaining semblance of arriving at a remotely accurate assessment of the scale of the
phenomenon. The insertion of a wholly extraneous criterion rendered the already
constricted definition of landlessness a flawed admixture and was guaranteed to shrink
the count further. The definition proffered by the colonial authorities illustrates that the
223 Ibid., p. 155. Webb later began to review the files first before sending them to the JA.
224 Ibid., p. 128-29; MacDonald letter quote from p. 129.
225 Ibid., p. 153.
483
government was inclined to downplay the tensions surrounding the Zionist enterprise
that had been revealed in the reports of HC Chancellor, the Shaw Commission, and those
of other official experts such as Hope Simpson. Its wish to obscure the emergence of a
growing landless population, and the JA's strong hand over the process of claims
evaluations, succeeded in producing an "official but inaccurate" estimation of 900
persons as rightful claimants to the status in the eyes of the state.226 Given the rampant
politicization of the landless inquiry, it is certain that this count, which is rightly
recognized even in accounts sympathetic to Zionism as short of the mark,227 is reflective
of little more than the conjoint British and Zionist interest in sweeping the issue under
the proverbial rug.
Despite the state's election by the time of the MacDonald letter to obscure and
deny the spread of landlessness, its officials commented internally on the problem and
official reports continued to track its development. Lewis French, head of the
Development Department, reported in a major survey in late 1931 that over the
preceding decade in one unnamed hill district, 30 percent of the region's lands had
passed from the hands of smallholders to large landlords.228 The remarkable
concentration of lands that transpired in this period, combined with the alienation of
parcels to Zionist purchasers, led to burgeoning landlessness. Indeed the 1931 census
226 Ibid., p. 110. The Peel Commission viewed this count as partial, stating that it "represent[ed] only a
portion of the displacement of Arab population resulting from Jewish land purchases" (report, p. 240).
The state's resettlement efforts were pathetic, and only somewhere over half of the officially designated
landless families consented to their relocation and resettlement on new lands courtesy of the state (ibid.).
227 E.g. Porath, Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 87-90; Stein, The Land Question, p. 110. The
former provides a useful sample of cases in which groups or claimants were discounted from being
considered landless. See also Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory, p. 113-15.
228 Yazbak, "From Poverty to Revolt," p. 104. Stein claims, on the basis of a citation to Arthur Ruppin,
that all of this land was subsequently alienated to Jewish purchasers, although the comprehensiveness of
the claim seems far-fetched ("One Hundred Years," p. 69 and ft. 45, p. 80).
484
conducted by the government found that of those deriving an income from agriculture
(calculated at 108,765 earners, supporting a rural population of 440,000), 42.8 percent
owned no land. Almost a third of those bringing an income to a family or to themselves,
29.9 percent (32,539 persons), were laborers - that is, without tenancies and without
access to land except as hired hands. Another 12.9 percent (14,000) were tenants. The
remainder were owner-cultivators (56,000) or rentiers (5,311).229 In spite of this, the
High Commissioner, who fancied himself a supporter of the fellahin, ignored this data,
offering a lower estimate of 20 percent of the population as landless in late 1935.230 In
contrast to the High Commissioner's sunnier, if inaccurate, evaluation, only a month
later Colonial Secretary J.H. Thomas envisioned the possibility in a paper to the Cabinet
that, barring some change to the situation, virtually all Arab smallholders could sell their
lands "until practically the whole of the agricultural land of the country which it is
profitable for the Jews to buy has passed into Jewish hands," thereby swelling the
landless population and driving labor migration and urbanization to unforeseen
heights.231 Though the 1931 census is probably the best hard data available for assessing
the true scale of landlessness in strict legal terms, it should further be remembered that
smallholder sales escalated in succeeding years while sales by large owners and foreign
owners continued, so the tally of the dispossessed doubtless grew further in the years
before the Great Revolt.
229 All figures from the census are taken from: Stein, "Legal Protection," p. 236.
230 HC to Colonial Secretary, 7.12.35 (Secret A), CP 3 (36), PRO - CAB 24/259. One might suspect that
the HC was trying to stay faithful to the official definition of the category, but the 20 percent figure
doesn't square with the final tally of 900 individuals. The High Commissioner's surmise suggests that the
official parameters were not only highly misleading, but that internally, state officials did not take them as
accurate.
231 Memorandum by the Colonial Secretary, 10.1.36, p. 2, CP 3 (36), PRO - CAB 24/259.
485
Before examining the government's legislative efforts to preserve peasant
tenancies, we must first turn to look at smallholder sales again in order to better grasp
peasant attitudes towards sales. It has been suggested as a general argument here that
many if not most smallholder sales were likely derivative of the accumulated pressures
on the middle and lower strata of the peasantry, and the financial straits they found
themselves in under the extractive and disadvantageous rule of the British. At least two
other considerations need also be born in mind in comprehending the profusion of
smallholder sales to Arabs in the 1920s and to Jewish entities in the early 1930s. The
first is that many fellahin were probably not interested in permanently alienating their
lands and likely regarded many sales as temporary since under Ottoman rule sellers
could claim certain rights of resumption if the land was sold to the holder of a debt.
According to such arrangements, several forms of which existed, the sale of the land was
considered a deposit on or surety for the debt, and upon its repayment, the land reverted
to its original holder.232 Given the predominance of transfers from Arabs to other Arabs
during the Mandate and the concentration of land that took place in the 1920s (as just
noted above), which surely owed a great deal to peasant indebtedness to their creditors,
it appears probable that many peasants were desirous of repossessing their former lands,
or at least saw this as a potential option. That is to say that peasant views of their sales
were quite different from the state's perspective in which sales represented the closure of
232 See Eugene Rogan's discussion of temporary sales cum lending arrangements: "Moneylending and
Capital Flows," p. 242-43. See also Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez Smith, Governing Property,
Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria (London: I.B. Tauris,
2007), p. 46.
486
a transaction and were not related to future dispositions of the same lands. The
permanency that English law brought to the practice of selling land was not only alien
and contrary to indigenous practices, but foreclosed yet another Ottoman safety net for
peasants by removing rights of resumption on applicable sales. This is certainly not
something that peasants could be presumed to have agreed to, nor would the reality of
the new colonial meaning of a land sale necessarily have been clear to fellahin until they
were barred from pursuing resumption. Given the difference in the mechanics of sales to
creditors between Ottoman and English legal traditions it is no surprise that this issue too
became fodder for conflicts over land in Palestine.233
The second consideration relates to Zionist purchases of musha' lands. Where
previously Zionist buyers had avoided shares in musha' lands since they were
communally-held and periodically redistributed, from 1921 on they took greater interest
in acquiring shares and in advocating, as the government did, for the permanent partition
and assignment of musha' plots under individual titles.234 In such cases where peasant
owners of musha' alienated their shares to Zionist entities, they typically presumed that
they would in fact remain on their lands until partition was carried out, especially as
Zionists would not or could not take possession of unpartitioned shares.235 Owing to the
slowness of the partition operations and their immanent legal contestability, many
peasants probably viewed these sales as without immediate or even definite
repercussions, and perhaps as temporary sales, where they would have the option of full
233 So far we know little about this in the Palestine case, but for one example, see the discussion of the
Sakhina population in Fakher Eldin, "Communities of Owners," p. 135-145.
234 HC to Colonial Secretary, 17.1.30, p. 51-52, PRO - CO 733/182/9.
235 Ibid., p. 52. See also: Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 286-88.
487
legal resumption. What is clear, as High Commissioner Chancellor reported to London
in January 1930, is that peasants had no interest in ifraz and presumed that in musha'
sales, they would remain on their lands for a period that would probably last years, with
the future undetermined.236 Again, the fundamental distinction between colonial and
indigenous assumptions regarding sales of this class of lands was pronounced, and does
not suggest that fellahin were eager to cash out of their attachment to their lands, as has
sometimes been depicted. Instead they may have been playing for time, hoping to
straighten out their own affairs in the interim, or more simply exploiting the ambiguity
of the situation and seeking to maintain access to land.
While peasants strove to remain on their lands using the legal and customary
tools that had been at their disposal prior to the British occupation, the advent of colonial
legal structures and principles, as we have seen, did not help their cause. This was the
case even with legislation aimed, ostensibly, at preserving peasant tenures. After the
failure of the Land Transfer Ordinances (1920/21) in this respect - which was known to
the government long before it was raised by HC Chancellor, the Shaw Commission, and
Hope Simpson237 - the authorities failed to take any appreciable step concerning the
issue until 1929, when the first Protection of Cultivators Ordinance was passed. As
Stein has emphasized, the series of legislations (including amendments) bearing this
name that were enacted from 1929-33, focused narrowly on Arab tenants. The amended
236 HC to Colonial Secretary, 17.1.30, p. 51-52, PRO - CO 733/182/9. Chancellor did not mention the
span of time that peasants presumed to remain, but owing to the legal obstacles to partition and given the
history of the state's pursuit of it, a measure in years seems the most likely. This may have changed
somewhat after enactment of the Land Settlement Ordinance of 1928, noted earlier in the chapter, but the
matter begs further research.
237 Shaw Commission report, p. 114-16.
488
ordinance of 1931, promulgated after the Wadi al-Hawarith affair had become a source
of Arab anxiety and state concern, broadened the protected category to include Bedouin
claims on grazing areas. Still, the number of those eligible for some form of protection
under the statutes before 1933 was no more than 20,000 persons, or 18.4 percent of the
agrarian income-earning population based on the 1931 census figures.238
From the beginning the utility of such legislations in protecting tenants was
restricted largely to attempting to ensure that they were monetarily compensated in the
event of their removal upon sale of the lands they worked. Since the Jewish Agency was
heavily involved in the drafting process for both the 1929 and 1931 versions of the law,
it made sure that compensation in land was ruled out. The Protection of Cultivators
Ordinance thus actually simplified and eased the process of Zionist land acquisition.
According to the provisions of the LTO, tenants as well as former owners were supposed
to have lands elsewhere to remove to, but this hurdle, long ignored in practice, was
written out of the Protection of Cultivators Ordinance in favor of simple cash payments.
Landlords also gained new powers from successive versions of the law which
paradoxically helped them to evict tenants. The 1929 law gave them the ability to serve
one-year notices on rent increases, which was then used to clear lands of tenants where
owners wanted to sell the properties to Jewish purchasers. The 1933 version of the law
instituted restrictions on raising tenants' rents, but it too gave landlords additional
238 Stein, "Legal Protection," p. 247-49. This estimate adduced by Stein includes both those who were
solely tenants and owner-cultivators who supplemented their incomes by serving as a tenant on other
lands.
489
powers, including the right to resume lands for purposes of development, upgrading, or
"close settlement," which amounted to new means by which to eject tenants.239
As with the LTO, the strictures of the Protection of Cultivators Ordinances could
be bypassed when sellers had the will to do so.240 But more profoundly, the new
protections offered to "statutory tenants" in the 1933 law - those with one year or more
of continuous residency on a plot - strained relations between landlords and tenants and
created perverse disincentives to production. So long as they maintained their lands and
paid rent, statutory tenants were generally to be shielded from dispossession and were to
be provided with alternative lands (proximate to their old demesnes if possible) in cases
of their removal. Landlords were aggravated by the law and fought against peasants
attaining the legal rights appertaining to the new category. Large landowners became
reluctant to lease for fear of new claims being placed upon them by peasants. Stein
asserts that rather than submit to this reordering of lord-peasant relations, some landlords
chose to sell their lands, including to the JNF. Many others used the powers of
resumption to evict tenants, or otherwise induced them to leave, usually through some
measure of surreptitious buyout. Yet other landowners chose to hold lands fallow. In
both the south and the coastal plain, large areas were left uncultivated, putting precarious
peasant existences and incomes in these regions under tremendous strain. By sowing
239 Ibid., p. 243-44, 247, 249-50.
240 Informal agreements with tenants were often used by lords to circumvent the law, whereby the former
were relieved of paying part of their rent and exempted from paying their share of the tithe in return for
exiting from the land (ibid., p. 250). Another ruse entailed paying peasants to claim that they had used
land without permission and thus were ineligible to claim statutory protection (Stein, The Land Question,
p. 190).
490
such discord the 1933 law may well have inadvertently caused an increase in
landlessness, even as it erected the strongest legal protections for tenants on the books.241
Although the problem of landlessness garnered official attention from 1929
forward, the recommendations of those who cautioned most against allowing its
development were largely disregarded. In 1931 with the MacDonald letter the British
authorities in London demonstrated their unwillingness to acknowledge that the growth
of the Zionist project had negative repercussions for Palestinian Arabs. In part owing to
Zionist access to the administration's statistical evaluation of landlessness and to the
process of forging legislative remedies, only in 1933, when the Jewish Agency was not
party to the drafting of the final Protection of Cultivators Ordinance,242 did landlessness
receive a remotely serious legal response. Yet the results of the law were hardly what
the authorities could have intended, and moreover, the law's strict focus on tenants left
the issue of smallholders' sales entirely unaddressed. Regarding the embattled smaller
owner-cultivators, the state had little to offer in the way of stemming their shrinking
numbers, and in fact mooted legislation in early 1936 that resuscitated the same
ineffectual clauses from the LTO stipulating that sellers must hold adequate lands for
their provision elsewhere.243 From their concentration on the issue of tenant
dispossession it appears clear that the authorities believed this to be the key to the
situation, though in actuality there is no evidence in support of this conception.
241 Stein, "Legal Protection," p. 239, 249-253; Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 11; Nadan, The
Palestinian Peasant Economy, p. 195. Several years later in 1941 a committee of the Palestine
administration concluded that the law was "contentious, uniformly unsatisfactory, consistently evaded, and
an obstacle to [economic] development" (quoted in Stein, The Land Question, p. 190-91, brackets are his).
242 Stein, "Legal Protection," p. 249.
243 Peel Commission report, p. 89-90.
491
Ultimately, in the field of contending forces and interests the British displayed
great fealty to the "hidden hand" of the market and to the Zionist movement. They did
so knowing that the market served to expand the ranks of landless Arabs while growing
the land base of Zionism. The contours of policy were thus shaped at the expense of both
the official commitment not to prejudice the interests of the "non-Jewish" population,
and the colonial power's concern over the creation of a dispossessed class.244
Conclusion:
Reading the Palestine administration's annual reports to the League of Nations
one would be hard-pressed to assay the scale of the crisis which plagued the rural order
and its social systems during the first decade and a half of British Mandatory rule. The
reports, fashioned of course to paint the Mandate in the best possible light, in fact
contain precious little that would signal the existence of crisis, other than noting several
years of weak harvests in the early 1930s whose causes appeared natural rather than
social or political.245 By contrast, the sparse moments in which officials captured the
interjections of Palestinian peasants reveal a world diametrically opposed to the
Mandate's public claims to be paving a way to universal progress. As the High
244 At least in public, the authorities opined that they were engineering a balance between protecting
tenants and stopping landlessness, on one hand, and facilitating the work of the market, on the other: "It is
believed that the [1933] Ordinance will prevent the creation of further landless Arabs by the eviction of
agricultural tenants without adequate provision in land for their subsistence, while at the same time it
places no obstacle in the way of the buying and selling of land where the transfer of ownership will not
adversely affect the tenant" (Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 11).
245 This is of course debatable, since the scale of natural disasters is always mediated by social factors. In
Palestine in 1931, for instance, peasant fields were laid to waste by a plague of field mice (Report to the
League of Nations, 1931, p. 7). Hope Simpson concluded the previous year that in the Marj Ibn 'Amir, the
mice epidemic had its origins in the lands held in reserve (i.e. uncultivated) in the region by Zionists
(Hope Simpson report, p. 13).
492
Commissioner reported to London in late 1935, the "grievance" "that the Jew is 'eating
up the land'[] is felt in every town and village in Palestine, and year by year with
increasing strength."246 The basis for the Arab view that Zionism was "eating up the
land" derived from the shrinking fortunes of the rural population, especially its
smallholders, tenants and agricultural workers, whose standing generally suffered greatly
from the environment produced by British colonial rule. Large landowners sometimes
also struggled, and as large- and smallholders were induced to sell, or, as argued here
vis-à-vis smallholders especially, were compelled to sell by force of economic
circumstances, the Zionist movement reaped the benefits.
Neither the British nor the Zionists regarded the market as the sole mechanism
through which the latter should acquire land. The British had agreed in the articles of
the Mandate covenant that state resources should be put at the disposal of the Zionists,
and considered in general that this would benefit Jews and Arabs alike. They also
believed that the key to squaring official support of the Zionist project with the interests
of the native Arab population lay in productive and remunerative development of the
country's agricultural and natural resources. To inject dynamism into what they
perceived was a stagnant system would require reconstructing or deconstructing the
Ottoman land regime, with its baffling peculiarities and, it was thought, unnecessary
complexities. Yet many of the state's ventures in this regard, such as asserting that miri
and mawat lands were public domain or the aspiration to extirpate musha' and
universalize private ownership, ran into firm and intractable Arab opposition. Efforts to
246 HC to Colonial Secretary, 7.12.35 (Secret A), CP 3 (36), PRO - CAB 24/259.
493
reserve and allocate purported state lands to the Zionist movement often sank into the
quicksand of competing claims, leaving Jewish colonists frustrated with the British, who
they pilloried for retreating in the face of resistance by Arab peasants who they regarded
as primitive, unproductive and undeserving of the lands in question. A similar
conclusion regarding the longevity of the Ottoman land regime was reached by the Peel
Commission, which castigated the administration's failure to put in place a system which
would "promote close settlement and intensive cultivation," as per the Mandate's
guidelines.247
For the colonial state, the consistent efforts of fellahin to contest its plan to
absorb vast areas into its possession led to a renewed concentration on models of
efficiency. Barbara Smith has aptly summarized the resultant contradictions in official
policy aims:
When it was realized that it would be impossible to offer the Zionist Organization much [state]
land that was viable for development because of such obstacles as the moral rights of Arab
cultivators, the Administration stepped up its efforts to encourage Arab agriculturalists to increase
productivity and thus decrease their land requirements. But it did very little to eradicate rural
indebtedness or to provide financial support to Arab farmers, which would have made such
intensification of production possible.248
Imperial rule was quickly caught in a trap of its own making, between the principles of
fiscal conservatism and economic liberalism, the material commitment to Zionism, and
its Orientalist vision of an inherently hierarchical Arab society whose leaders made for a
convenient pillar on which to rest British authority. The tendency of colonial authorities
247 Peel Commission report, p. 227.
248 The Roots of Separatism, p. 109.
494
to resolve the ensuing conflicts and remake the local political economy in favor of
Zionism affected the character of the state and its appreciation of the transformations it
catalyzed in the indigenous social economy.
Though purporting to erect a typical modern bureaucratic state and liberal
economy in Palestine the British were in fact embarked on a rather different mission:
balancing their aid to the Zionist movement, a colonial settler project, with the
maintenance and development of their own strategic interests in Palestine, which
required the passivity of the indigenous population. The cloak which the British empire
cast over its own interests was the doctrine of "dual obligation." The
incommensurability of British "obligations" to the two communities resident in Palestine
was always objected to by Palestinians, but first came under fire from inside British
colonial ranks after the violence of 1929. High Commissioner Chancellor was the first
senior official to contend that the Mandate had wrongfully accorded the Jewish settlers a
privileged position with respect to the Arabs. He maintained that the Jewish National
Home policy was not inherently pernicious towards the Arabs, but rather that the Balfour
declaration's pledge to preserve their civil and religious rights was systematically
ignored, to the detriment of British interests. Chancellor was also the first colonial
official to claim that there were no lands left for the Zionist movement to purchase
which would not entail the dispossession of Arabs.249 In the stream of committees of
inquiry that followed, the refractory mood and declining position of the Arab population
was continuously noted and evaluated, and Chancellor's warning of the danger of
249 HC to Colonial Secretary, 17.1.30, p. 26-27, 32-33, 56-57, PRO - CO 733/182/9.
495
creating a landless class was echoed by the Shaw Commission and Hope Simpson. The
notion that Zionism was growing at the expense of the Arab population was politically
unpopular in Britain, however, and successive governments and cabinets in London,
along with Chancellor's replacement in Palestine, HC Wauchope, endeavored to deflect
the reality that the interests of Zionism and the Arab population were mutually opposed.
In truth the colonial regime's reassessments of the situation in Palestine, even by
those counseling the need to reign in the dimensions of the Zionist project, only captured
part of the picture of social change in the countryside. After a dozen years of British
rule much of the rural Arab population was exhausted and financially insolvent. The
calamitous state of the rural sphere wasn't much ameliorated after World War I, despite
the state's early experience in direct lending from 1919-23, and had on the whole
declined further in its aftermath. In disregard of the battered state of the local economy,
the British built a modern bureaucratic state, vastly larger than the preceding organs of
government known to the country, which relied in part on an extractive and unequal
regime of direct taxation that saddled the countryside with heavy exactions which
villagers and peasants could ill afford. The enlarged gendarme state that the British built
was not only seen by Arabs as regressive and alien, but as in thrall to Zionism. It was
nearly constantly at odds with the rural population, seeking to hem in and shrink its land
base, and did little to ease the burdens of the fellahin, allowing tenants' rents to soar,
usury to spread, and preferential customs for Zionist industries to damage rural incomes,
while failing to create stable channels of alternative, affordable credit. Save for some
notable improvements in health care services, rural areas received little in return for the
496
privations they suffered. For many the state was an unwanted leviathan that had
escalated rural extraction and impoverishment, while turning a deaf ear to the struggles
of peasants.
When the tithe collapsed as a basis for state revenue, beginning in 1930, it
became clear that the great extent of peasant debt threatened the structure of the rural
order, which was itself seen as a key component of stable colonial rule. The coincidence
of weak harvests in the early 1930s exacerbated the situation considerably, but
emergency lending and tithe remissions did little to stem the crisis. The British were
aware that further economic deterioration was liable to accentuate the growing tide of
urbanization and political discontent. Yet the state's further motions at remedying the
situation, the stingily-funded endorsement of cooperatives and the legal effort to take on
the deleterious role of moneylending within the Palestinian community, arrived after the
feared withering of the social order was already well in motion.
The growth in Arab landlessness under the first 18 years of the Mandate was one
of the signal developments of British rule. Although as noted above there are no precise
numbers to track its exact scale, the 1931 census data revealed almost 43 percent of rural
households lacked legal ownership of any land, although almost a third of this number
(13 percent of households) retained access to land as tenants, predominantly on the
estates of larger landlords. The number of Arab landholders shrunk thereafter, and land
sales to Jewish concerns boomed in 1934 and 1935. In explaining the situation before
the Peel Commission, Arthur Ruppin argued that: "There is no tendency on our part to
oust Arab farmers from their holdings. The few cases where Arab tenants were
497
displaced… by Jewish purchases are negligible in comparison with the much bigger
number of Arab farmers who have become landless by foreclosure of their holdings
owing to debts to Arab creditors."250 In a manner of speaking, this was a logical
supposition that pointed out that most indebted Arab cultivators were in hock to fellow
Arabs, though as reviewed above with respect to the Marj Ibn 'Amir purchases, Ruppin,
like other Zionist spokesmen, dramatically undercounted the numbers of Arabs displaced
by Zionist land acquisitions. The key ingredient in the Arab rural order's deterioration,
however, was not who held the cultivator's debts, but what force or forces caused them
to accelerate and reach the point of foreclosure. The answer to that question, in the
main, is not the avarice of wealthier Palestinians, though they too must share some
portion of the blame, but the disastrous rule of the British occupation regime and its
economically invidious and ruinous policies. Indeed, by the time that landlessness
emerged as a major object of investigation and concern, popular alienation from the
colonial state had already begun to turn, in some quarters, into the unvarnished hostility
that powered the Great Revolt.
250 Peel Commission report, p. 241. He went on to falsely claim, in the face of obvious and well-known
evidence to the contrary, that Jewish purchasers had avoided the eviction of Arab tenants in the 1930s:
"We accept, and have accepted since the time of Sir John Hope Simpson, the formula that in all cases of
purchases of land by Jews the Arab cultivators should remain on the land and that their economic situation
should not be worse, and I hope it will be better, than it was before." Absurdly, even after the emblematic
case of Wadi al-Hawarith (that ended in 1933), as well as other lesser-known instances of forcible eviction
(such as at al-Harithiyya, discussed in chapter 3), this bald-faced untruth was admitted into the Peel
Commission report as a good-faith statement of Zionist intentions and conduct.

498

Chapter 6: The Palestinian peasantry between marginalization and mobilization

In late 1929 when the Shaw Commission traveled through areas of Palestine
gathering evidence as to the cause of the uprising in August, it repeatedly encountered
peasants who resented and opposed British policy. During its visit to the village of
Qabab in the Ramle subdistrict, a local resident, shaykh Sa'id Abu Ghosh, addressed the
commission in the following terms:
Trust, your grace Mr. President, that contrary to what you've been told, we understand well what
is intended for us by the Balfour declaration [wa'd], and we realize the dangers and catastrophes
which have befallen us and which will eliminate us. Even if the city-dwellers are silent, we the
peasants will resist it with all of our power and we will not be silent. If a peasant sells his land to
the Jews, he does so because of the abundance of taxes which are imposed upon him by the
government in support of the Balfour declaration and on account of the poor economic condition
to which this cursed declaration has given birth. Verily, we have come to reckon our presence
[dhill] an apparition of the Balfour declaration and to fear it for the great multitude of things
which with it has pained us.1
Although as a shaykh Abu Ghosh was part of the rural elite, his sentiments were echoed
by the population. Peasant discontent was evident in the black flags which greeted the
commission in some areas, but more commonly in the insistent calls by villagers for the
establishment of a representative government and cancellation of the Balfour
declaration.2 In lodging fierce critiques of the core of British policy shaykh Abu Ghosh
and his countrymen upended the imperial conceit that saw peasants and the rural
population as mute and inarticulate masses which strove for a simple existence and only
rose in rebellion at the instigation of notables and effendis. The rural sector and the
1 Quoted in: al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, p. 228.
2 Ibid.
499
fellahin were not docile, nor puppets of urban politicians, but bearers of their own
aspirations and politics.
While Shaw Commission failed to digest the rural opposition to British policy it
witnessed, and depicted agency within Palestinian society as the province of elites, to its
credit, it did develop a penetrating understanding of the origins of the 1929 rebellion.3
Ultimately, its explanation attempted to split the difference between attributing the rising
to incitement by "various Moslem associations" and examining the economic, political
and social contexts of the population's subordination to Zionism and the great fears that
this stoked.4 While the effendi thesis tempered its conclusions, there was no mistaking
that, unlike the vast majority of officials in the Palestine government and the Colonial
Office, the Shaw Commission was able to discern that Zionist colonization was not
greatly advantageous to local Arab society.5 The crux of its exploration of the negative
repercussions of Jewish colonization was most pointedly captured in its assessment of
the situation at Wadi al-Hawarith, where, several years before the final evictions of
Bedouin there were completed, it warned that the local tribe might lose its corporate
identity entirely and be dissolved by the act of dispersion from its traditional lands.6 The
3 The report summarized the general growth of opposition to Zionism thusly: "Step by step the whole Arab
people became identified with their leaders in opposition to the Jewish National Home and, in
consequence, united with them in a demand for self-government" (p. 152).
4 The report's structure, let alone its substantive findings, roughly follows these twin lines of inquiry. See
especially the concluding analysis (p. 150-57) and the sections on immigration, land and the question of
self-rule (p. 96-131), the grievances concerning which it regarded as "immediate causes of the
disturbances" (p. 96). The unspecified "Moslem associations" gestured to (p. 156) in the concluding
section would seem to be an oblique reference to the YMMA's more radical wing.
5 It should be emphasized that the reigning notion among British officialdom which saw Zionism as
universally beneficial was, after all, always based more on an ideological notion (originating from Zionist
thought) than in empirical examination. Nevertheless, as will be returned to below, it attained the quality
of an idée fixe, much to the detriment of the Arabs.
6 Ibid., p. 119.
500
"extreme apprehension" which this situation stimulated already in 1930,7 and its
conversion into a metanym for the Palestinian encounter with Zionism, was indicative of
broader transformations taking place among the peasantry and in the political economy
of Palestine.
As the pressures on Palestinian peasants under the Mandate accumulated and an
increasing number were pushed off the land, either in consequence of sales by landlords
or as smallholders unable to endure the burdens of tax and debt, Palestinian society
underwent a set of pivotal transitions. The social compact that had long existed between
the upper classes and the bulk of the population engaged in cultivation gradually lost
force, unwinding the bonds of peasants to elites and creating the conditions for new
horizontal identities to gain traction. The process of devolution was an uneasy one.
Many fellahin struggled fervently to maintain their access to land and to remain in their
rural communities. Their strategies for attempting to ride out what were seen as the
encroachments and depredations of Zionism, the colonial state, and wealthy Palestinians
varied widely. In some places innovations in land tenure arrangements reabsorbed some
of the dispossessed or marginal peasants, helping them to avert urban migration. In
other cases peasants resisted evictions and protested Zionist expansion by manipulating
the relevant legal statutes as best they could or by resorting to local forms of rural
warfare that were largely based in sabotage and the destruction of property. For an
increasingly significant number, however, the available means of adaptation and
resistance proved insufficient. The result was an ever-growing stream of migration to
7 Ibid.
501
Haifa and Jaffa, the port cities that had become the cultural and economic epicenters of
the Arab community. The British generally viewed Arab urbanization as destabilizing
and antithetical to their vision of ruling over a passive rural society, but as with the
intertwined issue of landlessness, their policies propelled the very outcome they set out
to avoid.
In the cities, peasant migrants faced a different set of challenges. The alienation
they already suffered from dispossession and the loss of a way of life was compounded
by new predicaments. They confronted rising Zionist assertiveness and campaigns for
Hebrew labor, often lived in squalor in some of Palestine's first shantytowns, and
constantly struggled to find adequate employment and make ends meet. The neglect
they had experienced at the hands of the government while in the countryside continued
on in their new urban environs. Despite its growing budget surpluses in the first half of
the 1930s, the colonial state failed to ensure access to decent housing. Critically, it also
refused to acknowledge, much less alleviate, the crisis of Arab under- and
unemployment which gripped the cities and the countryside alike. Rural migrants who
had been marginal residents of their former village communities found themselves
marginalized again in the burgeoning cities. But just as they had struggled against the
deteriorating conditions of life in the countryside, the oppressive circumstances of their
new surroundings soon proved fertile ground for new solidarities and increasingly
militant forms of social and political activism, from trade unionism to clandestine
paramilitary organization.
502
This chapter examines the social, political, and economic transformation of
Palestinian society that flowed from the growth of landlessness. In doing so, it
endeavors to highlight the ways in which fellahin, in both the rural and urban spheres,
attempted to negotiate the mounting crises which beset their lives. The subject of
peasant politics, broadly construed, has been rather minimally attended to within the
existing scholarly literature on Arab society under the Mandate. The treatment it has
received has typically reinforced images of peasants as passive, thoroughly subordinated
to the notables, or inclined to compromise with Zionism, the British, or both.8 Here, in a
broad overview beginning with the first decade of the British occupation (during which
the landless crisis began to reach fruition) and continuing through the first half of the
1930s, I will suggest that such depictions are misleading and ignore strong currents of
peasant antipathy towards British rule and Zionist colonialism. Further, depictions that
emphasize peasant quiescence have buttressed the assumption that Palestinian society
was almost inherently vertical, and have detracted from our understanding of the shifting
dimensions and dynamics of peasant agency. The progressive erosion of the ancien
régime in the countryside led, on balance, to the amplification of peasant autonomies and
to new forms of horizontal self-organization characteristic of the age of mass politics.
This chapter will attempt to put these developments into their broader context,
8 Porath, Emergence, p. 309; Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 52-54; Ken Stein, "One
Hundred Years of Social Change," p. 68; Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, p. 67-101;
Cohen, Army of Shadows. See also below. Some histories are ambivalent on the issue in the period prior
to the revolt, e.g. Farsoun and Aruri, Palestine and the Palestinians, p. 57-93. Exceptions to the dominant
trend include: Swedenburg, "The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier" and Memories of Revolt;
Khalidi, "Palestinian Peasant Resistance," and Palestinian Identity. Khalidi's subsequent volume, The
Iron Cage, has little to say on the subject. On Arabic historiography, see the useful discussion in "The
Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier," p. 26-27.
503
particularly in their urban setting, and to shed some light on the new subjectivities and
political activism to which they gave rise before the Great Revolt.
Peasant politics in the first decade of occupation: a rural peace?
In histories of the British Mandate peasants often feature as marginal actors. As
noted above, they have commonly been perceived to be passive vessels, capable on
occasion of being roused from their agrarian indifference by social superiors but
otherwise disinterested in political questions. Arab villages have been depicted as
populated by uneducated men and women whose way of life, usually represented as a
timeless, unchanging struggle connected more deeply with the natural environment than
with social systems, has often been held, implicitly or explicitly, as somehow
responsible for their ostensible apolitical condition. Such arguments are typically vague
and trade in broad generalizations bereft of serious empirical evidence or analysis. Tom
Segev, for instance, describes rural Arab communities in the 1920s in the following
manner:
The daily routine of the Arab village went on in its sleepy way, in keeping with a tradition that
was stronger than time…. The cycles of nature and religious ritual would prescribe their days of
rest and celebration and mourning… Locals would seldom venture to the city; some never left
their villages. National politics reached them slowly, if at all.9
Porath, in a somewhat more dressed-up rendition of the stereotype of the fellah as
existing outside politics, has contended that villagers in the 1920s generally "lacked any
9 One Palestine Complete, p. 271. Miller offers a similar Orientalist description of the Ottoman period as
a time when the "relationship to life was neither active nor passive, but was predicated on the search for
harmony with irrevocable conditions" (Government and Society, p. 168).
504
political consciousness" and were "a long way from being able to comprehend" the
nation-form. Their purported distance from politics under the Mandate was bound up
with their lack of formal education and their presumed ignorance, as well as with the
changing intellectual conception of political community that nationalist discourse
instantiated: "The ideology of national self-determination anchored in separate historical
and linguistic identity was a revolutionary innovation in Palestine in the 'twenties, and it
is highly doubtful if it could have been grasped by the less educated section of the
community."10
Other scholars have similarly depicted the fellahin as lacking political
sophistication and devoid of the means to identify, let alone organize against, the
challenges besetting them. Miller writes that: "What Palestinian Arab villagers sensed
but could not articulate was the strain of responding to two very different threats to
tradition at the same time," namely "European government and Jewish settlement." Her
study, the most thorough of British policy towards the countryside, holds that while Arab
villagers "may often have been powerless… they did not passively accept loss of control
over their own lives." However, despite this acknowledgement of peasant agency, she
concludes that "they did ultimately lose confidence in their ability to control either the
nature or the pace of change in their lives." Consequently, peasants were reduced, over
time, to leaning on the state for support, yet their capacities to do so were compromised
by the fact that they were "largely illiterate and often inarticulate." Thus, in a double
10 Emergence, p. 39, 307.
505
bind, "Villagers found themselves growing more dependent on the Palestine government
while they were less effective in communicating their needs to officials."11
Reading such accounts one runs repeatedly into the notion that peasants, because
they were mostly illiterate and without a modern education, were incapable of either
adequately assessing their changing situation or of doing anything of their own volition
related to political matters. If they were political at all, it was in the most local and
"traditional'" of senses, pertaining to feuds between families or to the divisions and
tensions between the urban centers and the hinterlands.12 Yet, in stark contrast to such
inward-looking portrayals of village life and peasant society, shortly after the occupation
began British intelligence pointed to the fellahin as a potential source of volatility. In
August 1919, one of the heads of the military regime that preceded the civil
administration, General H.D. Watson, commander of the Occupied Enemy Territory
Administration (OETA), South, noted that: "The antagonism to Zionism of the majority
of the population is deep-rooted - it is fast leading to hatred of the British - and will
result, if the Zionist programme is forced upon them, in an outbreak of a very serious
character."13 Both British and Zionist intelligence sources believed "it was apparent that
the peasants were more prone to action and to revolt entailing self-sacrifice than other
groups of society."14 Religious fervor was seen as one reason for this inclination, but a
host of other economic and political matters were named as factors, including the
Hebrew labor program, the threat of dispossession and eviction owing to Zionist land
11 Government and Society, p. x, xiii, 79, 118.
12 Stein, "Rural Change," p. 152.
13 Quoted in: Kayyali, Palestine, p. 72.
14 Ibid., p. 72.
506
purchasing activity, and the Zionist movement's opposition to an agricultural loan
program that the colonial state was considering.15
British naval intelligence found that peasants and villagers were eager consumers
of political news and opinion, listening in public venues (such as cafés) to newspapers
being read aloud.16 Far from displaying apathy, naval intelligence found that fellahin
perspicaciously argued as early as 1919 that the Zionist movement derived a host of
privileges and advantages from the British administration, and that the situation
represented a threat to their own existence.17 Peasants, in other words, critically
analyzed the relationship between Zionism and the British from its earliest days, and
concluded pointedly - before the Mandate was formally conferred and before the civil
administration had come into existence - that the new rulers had effectively become a
sponsor of the Jewish colonial movement. Their apperception is hardly a surprise given
the constant tensions between Arabs and many Jewish colonies in the late days of the
Ottoman empire, surveyed in the chapter 4.
Demonstrating the continued efficacy of vertical bonds and the class order of
Arab society in the early years of the British occupation, the peasantry was mobilized by
elites in order to add breadth and depth to the new nationalist creed. James Gelvin has
illustrated that popular frameworks were always prone to moving in directions that
might jeopardize elite power and dominance, and therefore carried great risks to the
15 Ibid., p. 72-73.
16 Ibid., p. 73; Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, p. 57; Matthews, Confronting an Empire, p. 147; Kabha, The
Palestinian Press as Shaper, 27.
17 Kayali, Palestine, p. 74.
507
upper classes.18 In the period surrounding Faysal's rule in Damascus, it was the younger
ranks of the aspiring national political class in what became Palestine that showed the
greatest interest in mass mobilization as a tactical means for attaining nationalist goals.
The younger politicians, many of them inside the Damascus regime at the time, are
credited with orchestrating an attack on British military forces in April 1920 by up to
2000 Bedouin from the Hawran in Syria and the Beisan valley in Palestine.19 Their
hopes of igniting a wider rebellion did not come to pass, but supporters of the Faysali
regime in Jerusalem quickly succeeded the same month in turning the annual Nabi Musa
festival into a violent display of resistance to Zionism. Rising young politicians like al-
Hajj Amin al-Husayni (before his conversion to religious dignitary) and 'Arif al-'Arif
gave speeches extolling the Hashemite state in Syria, and were joined in doing such by
Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husayni, then the mayor of Jerusalem. The crowds, including
peasants from surrounding villages, stirred by the uncertain future of the Arab national
regime to the north, rampaged through the Old City and attacked Jews at random. Five
Jews were killed in the carnage and another 242 were injured, while police caused the
death of four Arabs and wounded another two dozen during their efforts to suppress and
control the crowd. The Palin Commission, which investigated the Nabi Musa events,
described the position of the population preceding the violence as without exception
18 Gelvin, Divided Loyalties.
19 Muslih, The Origins, p. 150. The assault was organized by the Palestine Youth Society (Jam'iyyat fatat
Filastin), a spin-off of the Palestine Arab Society (al-Jam'iyya al-'Arabiyya al-Filastiniyya), itself a
grouping in which 'Izzat Darwaza, 'Awni 'Abd al-Hadi and Rafiq al-Tamimi all played a part and which
derived from al-Fatat.
508
united "in a condition of active hostility at once to the Zionists and the British
Administration."20
As Swedenburg observes, the notables were not keen on mass mobilization,
which aside from appearing crude and threatening in method stood in contrast to their
preference for diplomacy and belief in the efficacy of cultivating personal relations and
influence.21 Nevertheless, while they struggled to regroup after the Nabi Musa "riots"
and assert their claim to leadership, further collective violence occurred the following
year. In 1921 an altercation between Muslims and Zionist May Day marchers in
Manshiyya, a Jaffan neighborhood adjacent to Tel Aviv, touched off rumors of Jewish
attacks on Arabs which led to further demonstrations and fighting between Arabs and
Jews, with British forces intervening to suppress the Arabs. Over a number of days
some 48 Arabs and 47 Jews were killed, and 75 Arabs and 146 Jews were injured. Word
of the violence at Jaffa precipitated a massive peasant mobilization on 5 May 1921 for
an assault on Petah Tiqva, about 16 kilometers from Jaffa. A reported 3000 Arabs
gathered to the north of the colony, and another several hundred to the south, but their
offensives were beaten back by British forces, which inflicted heavy casualties on the
Arabs, killing 60. The colonies of Rehovoth, Hadera, and Kfar Saba were also
attacked.22
20 Swedenburg, "The Role of the Palestinian Peasantry," p. 477-78; Kayyali, Palestine, p. 75-77. Gerber,
in a dissenting account, disputes common views of the violence as an Arab riot and avers that its specific
origin is unknown (Remembering and Imagining, p. 94).
21 Swedenburg, "The Role of the Palestinian Peasantry," p. 478.
22 Kayyali, Palestine, p. 92-93; 95-97. Wasserstein gives the former number as total for all casualties (The
British in Palestine, p. 103).
509
Although Zionist accounts have ascribed these events to a conspiracy, usually
traced to al-Hajj Amin, such explanations are of doubtful provenance since the future
Grand Mufti was in exile at the time. Gerber has further incisively pointed out that this
argument depicts the Arab public as Janus-faced, at once controlled or instigated by
elites yet at the same time pushing elites into radical confrontation and violence.23 The
official assessments of the "disturbances" offered by both the Haycraft Commission
(organized to investigate the incidents) and the High Commissioner concluded against
any premeditation, and noted that antipathy towards Zionism was widespread.24 HC
Samuel went so far as to commend the leaders of the "Arab Nationalist Movement" for
their aid in quelling the state of unrest and acting to support the restoration of public
order.25 The rural sector, however, was treated quite differently, as it was the 1921
events that gave birth to collective punishment in Palestine.
To check the potential for further insurrection in the countryside and to punish
the peasants and Bedouin who mounted attacks on Jewish colonies, a group of towns,
villages, and populations were subject to collective fines under a new statute, the
Collective Responsibility for Crime Ordinance. Tulkarm, Qaqun, Kafr Saba (the Arab
village), and the tribes of Wadi al-Hawarith and Abu Kishk were each hit with colossal
levies totaling some £P 6000 per village/population group. The success of these massive
fines in stifling further violence caused the provisions for imposing collective fines to be
23 Gerber, Remembering and Imagining, p. 99.
24 Peel Commission report, p. 51; Kayyali, Palestine, p. 97-98.
25 Kayyali, Palestine, p. 97-98.
510
included in the subsequent Prevention of Crime Ordinance, which became the premier
legal instrument used to suppress unwanted political activity in the early 1930s.26
For HC Samuel, the foiled offensives on Jewish colonies and the bloodshed in
Jaffa were eye-opening and caused him to revise his view of Arab politics and society.
The older Arab elites were in a precarious position, generally looking with disfavor on
popular violence and standing on the side of "order," while at the same time seeking to
lead the national movement and society, elements of which were much more willing to
express fervent and total rejection of the emergent status quo under the British.
Peasants, Bedouin and the bulk of the population were not only politically active and
aware, but had found in themselves, as the High Commissioner subsequently cabled to
Colonial Secretary Churchill, the ability to hinder colonial policies.27
In the months after the Jaffa events, the Arab countryside became an incipient
battleground between the more strident wing of the national movement and the Zionist
movement. When the AE delegation that left Palestine after the Jaffa "riots" became
bogged down in months of negotiations with the colonial authorities in London, activists
and educated nationalists in Palestine surmised that it would return empty-handed.
Radical members of the movement believed that this demonstrated the need to escalate
the national struggle by organizing further attacks on Zionist settlements. To this end
they acted to build links between rural partisans of the national cause and the formal,
urban-based leadership. Secret meetings were convened at Tulkarm, Ramle, Hebron,
26 Porath, Emergence, p. 132. On the Prevention of Crime Ordinance, see: Kolinsky, Law, Order and
Riots, p. 110-11 and PRO - CO 733/209/17. See also: chapters 1 and 9.
27 Kayyali, Palestine, p. 97-100.
511
and Lubya (in the Tiberias subdistrict). The meetings were each attended by small,
discreet groups of 30-50 townsmen and villagers, and sought to lay the groundwork for a
coherent, integrated plan, to be developed over months, for attacking nearby Jewish
colonies. Fellahin were to be the backbone of the Arab offensive, and were reported to
be (according to Zionist intelligence) weary of political struggle but willing to move
forward so long as the Zionist targets were not as well armed as they were reputed to be.
In the event, the young militants' initiative was not carried out, but by this time the
Zionist movement already perceived a need prior to quash the popular resistance which
it had encountered and to spread its own perspectives among the population of the
countryside.28
Just after Nabi Musa in 1920, the Zionist Executive in Palestine presented the
Zionist Organization with an action plan aimed at squelching Arab resistance to their
cause. Its prongs addressed rural Palestine specifically by suggesting that the Bedouin
be separated from other Arabs, and that leaders of the Opposition faction, many of
whom were not militantly opposed to Zionism and some of whom supported it and
sought its financial or political support, should be encouraged and bolstered. The Arab
Department of the Zionist Executive, headed by Haim Kalvarisky, first sought to put the
plan into motion by allying with local Arab partners to create a foil to the Muslim-
Christian Association. The National Muslim Association (NMA), as it was called, was
intended to introduce a more sectarian element into the national movement's midst,
while appearing to be another national organization. It attacked the MCA and the
28 Kayyali, Palestine, p. 104-06.
512
Palestinian national movement as unrepresentative of the population in telegrams and
petitions to the colonial authorities, and it voiced support for Zionist immigration.
Consequently, the NMA, the first formal organization established and led by Opposition
figures, was not very popular and was quickly branded a traitorous association and cat's
paw for Zionism.29
The second effort to create a viable Palestinian organization that would blunt and
redirect the national movement focused expressly on the countryside. Beginning in
1924, a cluster of village shaykhs and notables, in alliance with the Zionist movement,
began to form what were called Farmers' Parties (Ahzab al-zura'). Such parties
appeared in different regions, including those around Nablus and Jenin (the hill country
north), Hebron (hill country south), and Nazareth (the Galilee), and were invariably led
by prominent shaykhs such as Faris al-Mas'ud (of Burqa, Nablus subdistrict), 'Abd al-
Latif Abu Hantash (from Qaqun, near Tulkarm), and Musa Hudayb (of Dawa'ima, near
Hebron). For the most part, the parties were not animated by issues pertaining to the
fellahin (such as indebtedness), but rather were driven by shaykhly "bitterness" at their
marginalization at the hands of urban notables and politicians, dating back to the
nineteenth century. The politics of resentiment that they gave voice to brought them in
league with urban sympathizers from the Opposition faction and left them searching for
means to strike back at the dominant urban elements. Their quest to diminish their rivals
led them to the Zionists' doorstep, as Porath explains: "Not infrequently they were
willing to express their opposition to the urban élite by supporting Zionism or at least by
29 Cohen, Army of Shadows, p. 16-19; Kayyali, Palestine, p. 106. See also Porath, Emergence, p. 214-16;
al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assassat, p. 180.
513
demurring from the anti-Zionist movement [i.e. the nationalist movement] directed
against it." The parties' programs were in fact partially authored by Kalvarisky and
included provisions supporting cooperation with the government on a constitutional
basis (in contrast to the AE's successful 1923 boycott of the first legislative council
proposal), retaining a village role in the management of waqf (against the statutory
power of the SMC), and the reform and development of rural government, such as by
building schools and, importantly, canceling the tithe. The parties were backed by the
Zionist movement, so much so that when depression struck the yishuv in 1926-27 and
funds dried up, they ceased to function.30
Though the Zionist Executive had been intent on using the Farmers' Parties as a
wedge with which to divide the Palestinian national movement, the peasantry does not
appear to have been much taken in by their appeal. On the contrary, in the hill country
around Nablus and Jenin, the party was prevented from including in its platform a clause
approving the Mandate precisely because of fellahin disaffection from such a posture.31
This sentiment, which surely stemmed from the general apprehension over the Balfour
declaration and the Jewish National Home policy, hardly seems to have been limited to
the northern hill districts, and only two years after the parties ceased functioning
peasants across the country assaulted a barrage of Jewish colonies during the bloody
events of August 1929.
30 Porath, Emergence, p. 227-30.
31 Ibid., p. 229. While the peasantry may have been reluctant to lend its favor to the Farmers' Parties,
many shaykhs may have had no such qualms. Cohen cites Haydar Tuqan, a leader of the Nablus-area
party, as claiming to have lined up 200 villages behind the new outfit, already in 1924. The claim, as he
notes, was doubtless exaggerated and illustrates that the shaykhs were not immune from gaming their
patrons while trying to forward their own anti-urban agenda (Army of Shadows, p. 20-21).
514
Despite the early attacks by peasant-based forces on Zionist settlements and
British forces, and in spite of their hostility to a variety of state policies, colonial
administrators often put the best face they could on matters. For example, in a gloomy
report on local affairs in the north that noted seething Arab discontent at colonial
economic and political policies, G.S. Symes, Governor of Haifa district, opined that "by
showing keen and practical concern for the welfare of the fellahin, we may be able to
prevent" their "total alienation" from the state.32 Although Symes saw some prospect of
building support amongst the peasantry, his reference to "total alienation" demonstrated
that the feared process was already underway. As has been suggested in chapter 5 and
will be returned to below, the administration displayed anything but a "keen and
practical concern" for Arab peasants and the countryside as a whole, and its policies
were variously reviled or disregarded. The state's tax collectors, for instance, could
hardly have been in the dark about rural Arab antipathy and disaffection. Edwin
Samuel, a district officer in the 1920s and son of the first High Commissioner, traveled
with a retinue of 14 men when he began his duties collecting taxes and acting as a
magistrate in the countryside.33 Laws and policies regulating the land regime were also
flouted with great frequency and deeply resented. While its public representation of
Palestinian affairs and, at times, its internal imperial communications, downplayed or
ignored peasant discontents, some officials were well aware that the rural population did
not accept state policies. More to the point, the colonial authorities were seen as alien,
and for some, as Naomi Shepherd observes, "The administration… was seen as the
32 Memo by G.S. Symes, 5.2.22, CP 3921, PRO - CAB 24/136.
33 Shepherd, Ploughing Sand, p. 101.
515
enemy."34 For much of the 1920s the government preferred to disregard indications that
its rule was despised, but in 1929 it was forced to recognize that the "tranquility" it had
publicly reported as prevailing in the country masked roiling rural fears about the future
of Palestine, the growth of the Jewish National Home, socio-economic displacement,
and the survival of the peasantry.35
The peasantry, the notables, and the state after 1929
The impoverishment of the peasantry during the first decade of the Mandate had
great ramifications for the politics of the notables. Although Arab elites were slow to
fully grasp the magnitude of the changes taking place, as peasant fortunes declined so
too did the political standing and powers of representation long enjoyed by elites.
Several studies have noted that when peasants became landless and lost access to
usufruct in land (i.e. they did not become tenants) or had to seek work in the cities, their
bonds to former landlords dissipated.36 Yet it has not been fully appreciated that what
was lost as poverty swelled and land alienation continued was much more than the
individual ties between discrete groups of fellahin and a'yan. The shocks to which the
rural order was subjected under the Mandate dealt the already shaky ideological and
material foundations of the ancien régime profound blows. The entire social edifice of
the countryside, and its painstakingly constructed networks of merchants and peasant
producers, hung in the balance. Although landlessness was the most visible sign of the
34 Ibid.
35 Report to the League of Nations, 1927, p. 3 and Report to the League of Nations, 1928, p. 6; quote from
the latter.
36 Stein, "One Hundred Years," p. 66; Musa, Thawrat 'am 1936, p. 56.
516
rural order's weakening health, the problematic posture of the notables vis-à-vis the
fellahin was evident all around: they neither repelled the intensified exactions and
crippling trade policies of the British regime, nor offered their peasant partners
substantive relief from the debts they held. As notables proved incapable of or unwilling
to afford protection to peasants from the manifold crises afflicting their livelihoods,
sourness spread among segments of the peasantry, along with distrust in elite intentions.
Peasants didn't have to be dispossessed wantonly or everywhere for the impression to
grow that the old social compact had begun to unravel and, worse, that some were
profiting off of their tribulations.37 The tensions which accumulated between the
surplus-appropriating classes and the struggling and the dispossessed exploded during
the Great Revolt, but frictions were evident earlier on.
Even before the 1929 uprising, British reports indicate a growing distance
between fellahin and elites. In 1927 Ronald Symes, the Officer Administering the
Government, reported to London that a rift existed between peasants and elites on the
national question.38 Though his observations betrayed the hallmarks of the effendi
thesis, he noted that peasants were increasingly inclined to distinguish between what
they perceived to be national and elite interests.39 In subsequent years the uneasy
position of the peasantry within the national movement, and the distance of urban
37 As Khalaf observes: "Economic insecurity among a rising number of destitute peasants explains why
during the Mandate they held urban landowning interests responsible for their frustrations" (Khalaf, "The
Effect," p. 96).
38 While High Commissioners were on leave and during interludes between commissioners, the Palestine
administration would be run by an official, often the Chief Secretary, temporarily holding this rank.
39 Miller, Government and Society, p. 80. Symes characterized the national movement as led by effendis
who were interested in following the lead of the Egyptian national movement's tactics, while he surmised
that such was less attractive to peasants.
517
politicians from the rural population and the challenges it faced, became increasingly
visible.
The formal leadership of the national movement, overwhelmingly urban in
origin, demonstrated little capacity to develop institutions and power-sharing that would
encompass and integrate the bulk of the population, which was rural. The AE and what
still functioned of the MCA network both represented the urban political class. National
politicians also displayed a tendency to exclude rural elements from important national
conferences or bodies, such as the delegation to London in 1930, which rankled some of
the rural notables.40 The rural field was hardly unitary, it is worth recalling, and was
split along multiple political as well as class lines. Nonetheless, the weakness of the
national leadership's representation of rural interests, including the bulk of the country's
population of agricultural producers, led many peasants, like youth, to take their own
initiatives after 1929 which betrayed their variance from the urban leadership, politically
and tactically.
While some rural notables displayed their continued openness to collaborating
with Zionism against their urban enemies,41 the general trend among peasants in the
40 No rural representative was included on the 1930 delegation, nor did the 1931 Islamic Conference
feature rural leaders (Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 53, 58).
41 With the aid of the Jewish Agency, some rural notables from the Jerusalem and Hebron areas who
resented both being passed over for posts in the SMC and the all-urban composition of the AE's 1930
delegation tried to resurrect something akin to a Farmers' Party in 1930. The effort, led by former
associates of the mufti from the Darwish family (from Maliha, south-west of Jerusalem), members of the
Abu Ghosh family (from the Bani Hasan nahiya), and others, came to naught after the AE and the mufti
mobilized their supporters and took over the group's founding meeting. Although the mufti had previously
dispatched a youthful lieutenant, Tahir al-Fitayani, to watch over the Darwishes and to urge them to come
to the AE with their grievances, the exercise may have had more to do with intimidation or surveillance
than bridging the divide between rural and urban notables, as al-Hajj Amin's much-vaunted Islamic
Conference in 1931 repeated the pattern of neglecting rural participation and inclusion. It is worth noting,
518
period after the Buraq revolt was towards increasing opposition to the Zionist movement
and British rule. In 1929 peasants turned out in force to attack Jews and Zionist colonies
and thereby vigorously and violently express their discontent at the political and
economic marginalization they suffered for the sake of Zionism and British policy.
After the brutal British suppression of Arab communities in 1929, the rural population,
like their urban brethren, increasingly saw the colonial power as a force of oppression
and as the Zionists' shield.42 The propensity of peasants to use or support violent means
of resisting the dual colonial order put them at odds with much of the national
leadership, as it had during the 1929 attacks.
An early indication of the growing antipathy of peasants to Zionism and British
rule may be seen in the popular support given to the armed band led by Ahmad Tafish
after the 1929 events. The core of Tafish's group, al-Kaf al-khadra (the Green Hand),
was composed of 27 men who had "participated conspicuously" in the 1929 attacks in
Safad. The band operated in the Safad and Acre subdistricts and in Safad itself. Police
estimated the group's strength at as many as 80 members at times, owing to the avid
interest of local villagers and some Druze from Syria in the Green Hand's mission of
attacking Jewish colonies in the Safad region as well as the population of the Jewish
quarter of the city itself. After its formation in October 1929 the band harassed the
Jewish quarter of Safad with sniper fire, later mounting a full-scale attack on it that was
repelled by police. The District Commissioner severed the Green Hand from its base of
as Porath points out, that despite their deep anger at the mufti, the rural leaders above did not turn to the
Nashashibis as allies, since they saw their patriarch as part of the AE's political machine (Porath, The
Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 52-53, 58; Report, A.H. Cohen to Joint Bureau leadership, 4.3.30,
CZA J/1 - 310).
42 Kayyali, Palestine, p. 145-46. See also chapter 1.
519
support in Safad by threatening its Arab population with collective punishment, but the
Green Hand continued to assault police patrols in the Acre subdistrict and, with the aid
of "sympathetic" villagers, to outwit the authorities until military reinforcements
succeeded in suppressing it in early 1930, dispersing or arresting its partisans.43
In his report on the situation, HC Chancellor suggested that the band's familiarity
with its environs and the popular support it received from area villagers helped it to
survive as long as it did. As part of their countermeasures, police and military forces
mounted "raids" on a host of area villages. Although the High Commissioner suggested
that the Green Hand was a test-case initiated by Arab politicians of the potential for
wider guerilla struggle, the band does not appear to have had support from within the
primary organs of the nationalist movement, with the exception of possible links to
Subhi al-Khadra. Tafish was widely seen as a hero by many Palestinians, and, given the
Green Hand's independence from elites its precocious effort at armed insurrection
served as a public reminder of the gulf that had come to exist between many elite
nationalist leaders and the rest of the public.44
Much as they had after the popular explosion of 1929, elites struggled to keep
abreast of popular sentiment in the countryside. While preoccupied in 1930 with the
delegation and the White Paper, in 1931 the AE moved to reassert its authority in the
rural sphere. Following receipt of a petition (mazbata) from a'yan and mukhtars
objecting to the growth of certain peasants' associations (some of which may have been
Zionist-aligned), the AE agreed in March that it would only recognize those rural
43 HC to Col Sec, 22.2.30, PRO - CO 733/190/5; quotes from p. 2 and 9.
44 Ibid.; Kayyali, Palestine, p. 156; Lachman, "Arab rebellion and terrorism," p. 56.
520
societies which had earned its stamp of approval.45 It is difficult to say exactly what the
AE was reacting to, but its insistence on controlling the political representation of rural
interests is unmistakable. More sympathetically, in August 1931, after several seasons
of disastrous harvests, the AE voiced opposition to the heavy burden of the tithe regime.
In a full session that month it passed a resolution calling for the 'ushr to be cancelled
completely and for werko assessments to be lowered.46 After first considering
negotiations with the Palestine administration over the latter's plan to substitute a rural
property tax for the tithe, the AE subsequently hardened its position, resolving in early
1932 to demand cancellation of the tithe and to reject the imposition of any substitute.47
Although the AE belatedly returned to the issue of agrarian taxation which it had
raised almost a decade earlier, there were other signs that urban leaders were aloof from
the realities of the countryside. This was so even for populist leaders and those
immersed in organizing with new horizontal social forces. The Istiqlal party, for
instance, had precious little to say about the peasantry and in spite of the rising
prominence of individual and collective dispossession as a major political issue did not
make the championing of peasant interests a rhetorical or organizational touchstone.48
As we saw in chapter 3, while the Youth Congress and other youth associations involved
in land tours and campaigns displayed concern for struggling fellahin, they still typically
45 AE minutes, 14.3.31, ISA (65) 984 - 5pe; Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 53-54.
46 AE minutes, 16.8.31, ISA (65) 984 - 5pe. The motion, first suggested by 'Abd al-Qadir al-Muzaffar
and seconded by Fahmi al-'Abbushi, came in the midst of debate over the administration's development
scheme.
47 AE minutes, 17.2.32 and undated session (appears to be March 1932, and may be the 6th), ISA (65) 984
- 5pe. Shortly afterwards, at its 3 April 1932 session, the AE resolved in favor of a tax strike unless the
government voluntarily cancelled the tithe and the werko, though no action seems to have been taken
(ibid.).
48 Matthews, Confronting an Empire, p. 156.
521
did so in a fashion which placed the onus of national responsibility for land sales on
those very peasants, rather than on their exploitation by elites and on the corrosive
effects of usury. More egregiously, there are reports that lawyers contracted to defend
land rights claims and fight legal dispossession and eviction sometimes asked for
exorbitant fees from their clients. For example, at Qusqus-Tab'un, where a land claims
case was taken to court, the lawyer's payment in the event of a victory was reputed to be
half of the lands in question, or over 4600 dunams.49
While elites and urban youth began to pay more attention to the countryside and
its ordeals, peasants moved in the early 1930s to step up resistance to dispossession and
the spread of Zionist colonization on their own terms. The most common means of
expressing their discontent were forms of sabotage and trespass that had long been
staples of local warfare. In the early 1930s there was a spike in what the colonial
authorities called "agrarian crime," which usually meant uprooting trees or maiming
cattle. As colonial reports also noted, a pattern emerged in which the familiar peasant
mode of petty warfare50 through attrition and property damage was aimed at Jewish
colonies. This was most marked in the Tulkarm subdistrict, where not coincidentally
land sales had picked up and new Jewish colonies were regularly being erected in the
coastal region between Tel Aviv and Haifa that was targeted by Zionist purchasing
organs. Acts of peasant subversion escalated in 1932, and by 1933 the situation was
such that the state subjected the entire subdistrict to penalties under the Collective
49 Shepherd, Ploughing Sand, p. 110 and ft. 80, p. 264. The size of the stake is calculated from Stein, The
Land Question, p. 60.
50 This phrase is adapted from James Reilly's description of peasant conflicts in the late Ottoman period as
"petty wars" ("The Peasantry," p. 91).
522
Punishments Ordinance. The government explained to the League of Nations that: "The
District Commissioner was satisfied that nothing short of scheduling all the villages in
the Sub-District [for collective punishment] would provide the means to deal promptly
and effectively with this form of destruction of property." The 206 Arab villages that
comprised the area were thus hit with unspecified fines en masse. This drastic measure
went some way towards the desired end, ostensibly lowering agrarian crime by 50
percent for the year. Examination of the statistics collected by the state on such offenses
reveals a significant pattern of peasant protest, tapering off somewhat after the
deployment of collective punishment, with 906 cases in 1932, 559 in 1933, 340 in 1934
and 230 in 1935. Noting the phenomenon, the Peel Commission later commented that
the years between 1930 and 1933 presented a deceptive appearance of calm, but "under
the quiet surface Arab antagonism was still fiercely smouldering."51
Peasant resistance precipitated a dynamic with the state that at once crystallized
the disparity between the Jewish and the "non-Jewish" populations before the law, and
paved the way for further conflict. The state's draconian response to peasant resistance
to colonization stood in diametric contrast to its disinterest in protecting Arab lives. In
his unpublished memoir H.P. Rice, who became head of the CID in 1932, offers a useful
counterpoint to the collective punishment of the Tulkarm subdistrict in 1933. He
describes his surprise at the order of business within the police department on his first
day at work thusly:
51 Report to the League of Nations, 1932, p. 4; Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 7; Report to the
League of Nations, 1935, p. 7; Peel Commission report, p. 80. In his memoirs, Hugh Foot, Assistant
District Commissioner at Nablus, took credit for the collective fine scheme and related it to resistance to
"what amounted to a gradual transfer of the fertile [coastal] plain from Arab to Jewish ownership": A Start
in Freedom (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), p. 45, 47.
523
I soon discovered that everything of importance got a political 'slant'. Ordinary murders, for
instance, did not seem to disturb the situation unduly. These were mainly family feuds…. I
remember that on my first day we looked at no less than six murder reports. I was astounded.
K.H. [Kingsley Heath] said that this was quite ordinary. In any other country of which I had
experience such a state of affairs would have 'raised the roof'…. Killings which were important,
however, were those of Jews by Arabs (and there had been a series of these over the last two
years before I took over) or the murder of a British resident.52
Similarly, the district officer of Tulkarm reported in late August 1931 that: "The
situation of the Sub-District is normal. Two murders took place during the last week."53
The colonial inequity in the state's priorities was plain: the murder of Arabs, so long as it
was suspected or known to be attributed to other Arabs, was of little consequence,
whereas interference with the mission of promoting "close settlement of the land" by
Jewish colonists struck at the state's foundational commitments and could not be
brooked.
The manner of the state's response to peasant recalcitrance created a template for
what followed during the Great Revolt. What was tellingly called a "punitive police
post" was established in the Tulkarm area in 1932 in order to "bring the unruly district
under closer police surveillance." This was a billet erected and funded at the expense of
villagers, designed as a both a deterrent and a financial disincentive to unwanted
behavior. Rather than conduct any investigation, however, such as would occur in the
instance of any serious crime, the colonial state escalated the use of collective
punishment, first on selected villages in 1932 and then on the entire population of the
52 Quoted in: Kolinsky, Law, Order and Riots, p. 100; brackets in the original. A.J. Kingsley-Heath was
head of the CID prior to Rice's appointment.
53 Political report, Tulkarm area district officer, 31.8.31, ISA (112) 5170 - 4m.
524
subdistrict in 1933. Peasants and villagers thus saw the legal rights that the Mandate had
allotted to them, including the right to defend themselves in court, summarily obviated
by collective punishment.54 Further, by deploying collective punishment in the early
1930s for property crimes (as opposed to its use in 1921 in response to attacks on
persons as well as objects), the state signaled a coarsening in its treatment of the fellahin.
Implicit in its actions was a view of the rural population as an indistinct and volatile
mass, which required surveillance and was best treated through collective and not
individual sanctions. This perspective was subsequently generalized and expanded
during the revolt, when punitive police posts and collective fines became the order of the
day for confronting a rebellious Arab public.55
The shift that occurred in the late 1920s and early 1930s towards increasing
domestic sales of land to Jewish purchasers, including a growing portion of total
transfers alienated by smallholders, was gradually accompanied by a stiffening of
peasant resolve to remain on the land and retain its usufruct while resisting Zionist
encroachment, by hook or by crook. After a rise in the volume of disputes over
boundaries and customary rights between Arabs and Jews the state enacted an ordinance
in 1932 designed to quell the increasing signs of friction. The Land Disputes
(Possession) Ordinance was meant as a remedy to a spate of violent altercations between
54 Palestinians were not unaware of the extralegal aspect of the treatment they received from the state, and
sought redress not only from collective punishments, but from the method of their imposition. In one such
protest, Sabri 'Abdin, a religious leader from Hebron, contested in mid-1932 the assignment of collective
fines on families from the city for the uprooting of trees in its vicinity, arguing that an investigation should
be carried out before any such fines were levied. 'Abdin's motion was supported by the AE, but little
seems to have come of their protests ('Ovadia reports,' 5.5.32, CZA - J/1 - 205/1).
55 Report to the League of Nations, 1932, p. 4; Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 7; Report to the
League of Nations, 1934, p. 5.
525
Jewish settlers, Bedouin and other Arabs, some of which involved firearms. According
to the new statute, District Commissioners were empowered to determine the disposition
of any piece of contested land that was deemed liable to cause a serious breach of the
peace. This new power, which circumvented the land courts, was aimed at unlawful
trespass, which referred in the main to Arabs. However, there are some indications that
the law backfired and encouraged peasants to continue or perhaps expand their claims.
According to one account, "Jewish purchasers complained that the Palestinian peasant
believed that, if he seized land purchased by Jews, he could somehow manage to keep it;
or, failing to keep it, he could at least blackmail the Jewish purchaser for payment to
vacate the land."56 Though the state broadcast that the ordinance was instrumental in
preventing major eruptions of violence from 1932-34, it does not appear to have
alleviated the spread of land struggles and their tendency towards escalation and
violence, as discussed in chapters 2 and 3.57
But conflict with settlers was not the only or even the primary method through
which peasants strove to maintain themselves on the land. In all probability the largest
factor in augmenting peasants' access to land was through an array of tenurial
arrangements. The continuing integration of the agricultural sector into the world
market, combined with the pressure of Zionist land acquisition and the regressive tax
and trade policies of the British Mandate, produced increasing differentiation within the
peasantry. This differentiation was visible in the variety of tenancy and sub-tenancy
56 Stein, "Rural Change," p. 159-60.
57 Report to the League of Nations, 1932, p. 4; Report to the League of Nations, 1933, p. 7; Report to the
League of Nations, 1934, p. 5.
526
practices that came to characterize segments of the country. In the interior hill country,
where bonds between lords and peasants remained stronger than in the coastal areas
where bayyarat and wage-labor had arisen, those with land often employed the landless
or those short on land through co-farming or sharecropping arrangements. The content
of agreements made between landed parties and subcontractors depended on both the
availability of land and on whether they had only their labor power to offer, or whether
they supplied stock (seed) or capital. In the most common model of sharetenancy,
known as muraba'a, the landless or near landless were contracted as ploughmen, turning
the soil three times annually and tending to the owner's orchards, receiving in return
one-quarter of the net yield. Generally the more assets a sub-tenant could provide the
more beneficial the terms they could obtain. Those with seed to contribute could enter
into joint-farming (sharikat muzara'a) agreements, and in some orchards one variety of
joint-farming (sharikat mugharasa) actually provided for the eventual redistribution of a
share of the land to the subcontractor (see chapter 4). Those with capital as well as seed
and labor to employ could engage in share-rent farming and would typically, in a further
round of subcontracting, hire a labor force of ploughmen to work a plot.58
As Tamari notes, sharecropping was a broad category comprising a wide variety
of practices that cut across several different strata within the peasantry.59 It was not
simply another mechanism for surplus extraction from the rural poor, though its financial
benefits did of course accrue differentially. Some sharetenants may have been better off
58 Tamari, "From the Fruits," p. 77-78, 80, 82.
59 Ibid., p. 76.
527
than smallholders.60 Others were smallholders themselves, supplementing their
incomes.61 Sharecropping's importance within the rural social order was considerable,
allocating labor and resources across a changing distribution of land ownership. As
Graham-Brown explains with reference to the Jabal Nablus region, the complex weave
of tenancies and sub-tenancies in evidence there afforded forms of "access to land which
were instrumental in preventing a large proportion of the Palestinian population from
being rapidly converted into either a rural or an urban proletariat."62 The welter of
sharecropping arrangements acted as a buffer, refracting the tremendous social, political,
and economic changes transpiring in the rural order and retaining many of the landless
and the less well-off on the land. As a "highly adaptive"63 system for correlating land
and labor, it acted as a bridge between the old regime populated by smallholders and the
new, more market-driven, more stratified and more unequal order.
Although sharecropping provided a kind of social safety net for part of the rural
population in the hill country where it was prevalent, in general the relations between
peasants and landlords as classes were embittered by the 1930s and were shrouded in
distrust. The position of many was doubtless summed up by one fellah quoted by
Filastin in 1930: "I sell my land and my property because the government forces me to
pay taxes on it while I cannot even get the basic needs for my own and my family's
60 Ibid., p. 75.
61 According to the 1931 census, roughly one quarter of agricultural earners received incomes from more
than one economic activity, and doubtless some of these were smallholders doubling as tenants (Stein,
"Legal Protection," p. 236). The Johnson-Crosbie Committee found that 65 percent of landowners
performed some manner of labor on lands owned by others (Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, p.
286).
62 Graham-Brown, "The Political Economy," p. 114.
63 Tamari, "From the Fruits," p. 76.
528
sustenance. So I am forced to go to the rich people for a short-term loan at 50-per cent
[sic] interest."64 Saddled with the state's exactions and bereft of avenues for procuring
affordable credit, smallholders were pushed into repeated rounds of usurious borrowing,
until some were compelled to sell as landownership became a net drain on their
livelihoods. Since world market integration and the commodification and marketization
of land the previous century the moneylenders' accumulation strategy had been aligned
against the long-term interests of the fellahin - a reality of which the latter were well
aware. The affront that many bankrupted agriculturalists suffered in the 1920s and
1930s was severe. Their way of life was diminishing, and large landowners were often
partners to their dispossession. The magnanimity of merchants and elites common to the
old regime dwindled and was replaced with something more akin to cost-benefit
analysis. The disintegration of the old order of social relations was manifest in the ironic
effects of the Protection of Cultivators ordinances (especially the 1933 version), which
inspired many landowners to put the screws on their tenants.
The erosion of the social guarantees protecting producer subsistence which had
underwritten the ancien régime led to the decomposition of the rural order. James Scott
has described this process with regard to the ties between sharecroppers and their
patrons:
If and when the terms of trade deteriorate sufficiently to threaten these social rights which were
the original basis for attachment and deference, one can anticipate that the bond will quickly lose
its legitimacy. The patron may still be able to extract services from the client but clients will
increasingly consider the relationship unjust and exploitative.65
64 Quoted in Yazbak, "From Poverty to Revolt," p. 103.
65 "Patronage or Exploitation?", p. 30.
529
As peasants were pushed off their lands, and as relations between tenants and their lords
grew more acrimonious, the large Arab proprietors and the wealthy merchants who still
dominated the changing rural scene were more and more likely to be seen in the eyes of
the former as agents of dispossession and exploitation.
As discussed in chapters 2 and 3, uproar among nationalist activists and
politicians over the danger confronting the embattled peasants did not focus internally on
moneylending, onerous debt, or the wealthier classes more generally, but more often on
land brokers (samasira). Brokers often made their business by aggregating small plots
together, simplifying the purchase process for Jewish acquisition bodies while reaping
hefty profits from the transactions.66 Their emergence as intermediaries in the land
market was indicative of the spread of land sales among smallholders, and thus
symbolized the further weakening of the rural social order. Land brokers and property
speculators were a persistent object of vexation for nationalist activists like Akram
Zu'aytir, who enjoined the press in 1932 to go beyond blanket condemnations of land
transfers and to publish the names of actual brokers.67 The issue of land transfers, and of
brokers' roles in the crisis, gained increasing attention over time in the press and
arguably also in the representations of the AE and national politicians to the
government.68 After youth popularized the concept of land tours, some members of the
press, such as Munif al-Husayni, the editor of al-Jami'a al-'Arabiyya, took part in them,
66 Stein, The Land Question, p. 178-79.
67 Kabha, The Palestinian Press as Shaper, p. 114.
68 Ibid., p. 115. On the AE's approach to the issues involved, and the state's response, see for instance:
Memorandum by the AE to the High Commissioner on immigration and land, 1.12.34, in Watha'iq al-
muqawama, p. 357-59; Official communiqué #39/34, 1.12.34, ISA (2) 566 - 4m; HC to Colonial
Secretary, 8.12.34, CZA - S/25 22789.
530
and the SMC launched its more well-known venture to ostracize land dealers and preach
steadfastness on the land among the village population.69 For all the invective poured on
the samasira, 'Izzat Darwaza later concluded that they were hardly to blame for the
yishuv's growth, having only sold a fraction of total transfers, much less of the country's
lands.70
The activities of Arab elites and the press, like the youth tours begun before
them, do not appear to have done much to slow the ongoing erosion of Arab land
holdings. Indeed, remarkably enough Chaim Weizmann himself complained in late
1934 about the exceedingly rapid pace of land acquisitions, and decried the speculation
to which this gave rise.71 HC Wauchope concluded similarly at the time that "the
transfer of land is proceeding far too fast," adding that all things remaining equal it
would be left to the state to "put on the drag."72 No such "drag" was forthcoming,
however, and registered sales to Jewish parties rose to 135,019 dunams for 1934 and
1935, as compared with 118,453 dunams over the preceding fours years, 1930-33.73 The
clear escalation in transfers that followed the sustained agrarian downturn in the early
69 Kabha, The Palestinian Press as Shaper, p. 116-118; Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement,
p. 94-98.
70 Hawla al-haraka, p. 60. From a completely different perspective Joseph Weitz, director of the JNF,
wrote that: "Speculators are moving about the villages and the Arabs mock them. They [the Arabs] sell
their lands three and four times and in the end don't hand over their land at all… The Arab waits for a
further rise in prices" (quoted in Stein, The Land Question, p. 176).
71 HC to Colonial Secretary, 21.12.34, PRO - CO 733/257/12. Prices by all accounts rose phenomenally
in the early 1930s. Per dunam rates for lands the PLDC and the JNF desired climbed from £P 3-4 in 1931
to £P 15-45 in 1933 (Stein, The Land Question, p. 176) which is corroborated by state registration figures
showing that the average price per dunam sold was £P 23.16 in 1933, £P 26.53 in 1934, and £P 23.31 in
1935 (derived from: Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 45; and Report to the League of Nations,
1935, p. 58).
72 HC to Colonial Secretary, 21.12.34, PRO - CO 733/257/12.
73 Figures for 1934 and 1935 are from: Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 45, and Report to the
League of Nations, 1935, p. 58, while that for 1930-33 is from: Memorandum by the AE to the High
Commissioner on immigration and land, 1.12.34, in Watha'iq al-muqawama, p. 357.
531
1930s was accompanied by an increase in smallholder sales. From June 1934 until
September 1936, 75 percent of transfers to Jewish concerns (2174 of 2781) were for
parcels under 100 dunams, the average size of which was 15.5 dunams.74
Even before youth and elites took up the issue of land transfers, some peasants
had already reached the conclusion that the national movement, and especially the AE,
was incapable of going beyond mere rhetoric.75 Swedenburg has pointed out in a later
context that "The figure of the fallah is employed not to rally an actual peasantry to the
national cause, but to constitute a unified people-nation and endow it with an authentic
history and culture."76 This astute observation pertained to the early 1930s as well,
when elite nationalist leaders were forced to acknowledge the seriousness of the crisis
confronting the Arab countryside by enunciating a nationalist discourse in which
peasants had pride of place, but which bore all of the hallmarks of the familiar
paternalism of elites. Though the subject is deserving of closer study, it is unmistakable
that national elites clung to their class privilege even as they sought to style themselves
as close to "the people." By the time the peasantry became central to the discourse and
concerns of elite nationalists, however, mass dispossession was well under way, and
many of the displaced chose increasingly to move to the two coastal ports, where they
seeded the growth of new varieties of Palestinian politics.
74 Stein, The Land Question, p. 180. Conversely, at the same time, about 75 percent of the lands alienated
in the period were from the 25 percent of transactions over 100 dunams in size, though some of these were
in all probability bundled smallholder stakes, aggregated by brokers. Stein does not clarify the exact
source (i.e. which Zionist body) for the data he provides on this point, other than the file number at the
ISA.
75 See for example, the excerpt from al-Jami'a al-'Arabiyya from 29.10.31 quoted in: Stein, The Land
Question, p. 182.
76 Ted Swedenburg, "The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier," p. 19.
532
Urbanization, political economic transformation, and unemployment
As British policy accelerated and intensified political-economic change in
Palestine, one of its most prominent effects was the development of selective
urbanization. The growth of urbanization, like the spread of landlessness, was an ironic
result of British rule, and one which colonial administrators rued considerably.
Although the empire's experiences elsewhere had taught its helmsmen that cities were
breeding grounds and focal points for nationalism and political unrest, the ensemble of
economic policies and conditions which the Mandate regime set in motion over its first
dozen years lent a hand to furthering the trend in Palestine.
The geographic effects of British polices were uneven, and so was the resultant
urbanization. The two censuses conducted in 1922 and 1931 indicate that overall Arab
population growth was stronger in the countryside than in the cities. The rural
population increased by 28 percent, edging out urban centers, which saw a 24 percent
bump over the same period. These aggregates conceal highly variable local rates of
population growth. Many cities of the central highlands had the lowest rates of increase:
Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jenin, as well as Nazareth in the north. Gaza alone
experienced negative growth. By contrast, Jerusalem, at the heart of the country's
mountainous zone, saw its Arab population climb 37 percent over the decade. In the
salient between Jerusalem and Jaffa the populations of the citrus town of Ramle shot up
a remarkable 43 percent, and its sister city, Lydda, nearly matched it at 39 percent. The
greatest spikes in Arab urbanization were, however, in the two dominant coastal port
533
cities: Jaffa's Palestinian population swelled by 63 percent while Haifa's nearly doubled,
increasing by 87 percent.77
The distribution of Arab demographic growth under early British rule correlated
with the advance of Palestine's integration into the world economy and was affected by
the preferential customs and trade policies conferred on the Zionist movement. Trade
through the two principal ports formed a major component of the territory's economy,
and was important for both the indigenous community and the yishuv.78 While almost
all of Palestine's major towns and cities had benefited from the economic expansion
brought by increased trade on the world market in the nineteenth century, under the
Mandate internal trade took a back seat to external trade.79 This dynamic reinforced and
intensified population growth and economic development in Jaffa and Haifa, which had
begun in the previous century. Aside from trade, each had additional impulses to
growth: the Jaffa subdistrict was a major citrus-growing region, and Haifa was an early
industrial hub, filled with local and international companies and home to major public
works installations, including the railroad headquarters and associated workshops.
Centers of craft industries, such Nablus and Gaza, did not fare well by comparison.80
More broadly, Rachelle Taqqu has suggested an inverse relationship between the
development of the coastal regions and those of certain interior districts in the period
77 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 57.
78 Owen, "Economic Development," p. 19-20. Foreign trade was equal to 1.35 times the output of local
agriculture and industry in 1935, which as Owen notes, implies that "movements in the terms of trade
must have played an exceptionally important role in Palestinian economic life."
79 The categories "internal" and "external" trade referenced here were of course new designations,
reflecting the rerouting of preexisting regional trade relationships. Formerly internal trade between Safad
and the Syrian hinterland to the north, now became external and was subject to new burdens of customs, as
suggested in the previous chapter. The emphasis on external trade under the Mandate may in part have
represented a response to this reconfiguration of trading channels and transaction costs.
80 This is despite their nominal promotion by the state. See below.
534
preceding the Great Revolt. Reports compiled by the Commissioner for Migration and
Statistics in the 1930s "consistently indicated unemployment in the Nablus and Tulkarm
subdistricts during the period of prosperity in the coastal area." Nablus and Tulkarm
were hardly the only inland centers to suffer as the Arab rural order was buffeted by
British policy, the world market, and agrarian blight. As fortunes rose in Haifa and Jaffa
while declining for the rural populations of much of the country, the former continued to
act as magnets for migration, both temporary and permanent. The burgeoning port cities
captured elites who shifted their residences as well as poor fellahin searching for means
to provide for their families' daily bread. Haifa, for example, absorbed prominent
families from Acre, Umm al-Fahm, al-Tira, Shafa 'Amr, Nazareth, and Nablus, as well
as professionals from towns like Safad.81 Jerusalem was the major exception to the
larger pattern of Arab population movements: it grew not from commerce alone, but
rather as the Mandatory government's administrative seat, and as an effect of its political
and symbolic importance.
Labor migration during the early Mandate was centered principally around the
citrus sector. As discussed in chapter 4, oranges became a major commodity within
Palestine's export portfolio in the late Ottoman era, and the profitability of citrus as an
export led to the conversion of suitable lands in the coastal plains into bayyarat. During
high season (picking and packing) before the turn of the century, the flow of laborers
migrating to the Jaffa region was estimated at 5000, equal to half the town's population,
81 Ibid., p. 107; 'Abbasi, Safad fi 'ahd al-intidab, p. 92.
535
and exports reached 145,000 cases of fruit.82 By the time of the Mandate, approximately
19,000 dunams of Arab orange groves existed, which, with another 10,000 dunams in
Jewish hands, produced 830,000 cases of citrus in 1920/21.83 New planting was
minimal until around 1925, but the area of citrus then doubled by 1928, before doubling
again to total approximately 125,000 dunams in 1931.84 By 1930, Jewish owners had
outpaced Arabs, giving them the majority of the sector for the first time.85 In the 1930s,
when the high season workforce swelled to 30,000 or more, Arabs composed something
like 75 percent of the total, monopolizing Arab groves and accounting for roughly half
the labor in Jewish groves.86 This proportion remained fairly constant, although Jewish
grove owners faced a series of campaigns for Hebrew labor between 1927 and 1934.87
Although masses of Arabs came to labor in the citrus groves between October
and March each year, these migrations were largely temporary. The majority did not
remain around Jaffa or other citrus towns but returned to their villages during the off-
season. By the 1930s the balance of forces changed, and as state and Jewish capital
were directed towards development projects and building and construction in the coastal
cities while the Arab rural economy fell into deep disrepair, rural-urban migration
82 Schölch, "European Penetration," p. 38, 57, 58.
83 Nahum Karlinsky, California Dreaming: Ideology, Society, and Technology in the Citrus Industry of
Palestine, 1890-1939, trans. Naftali Greenwood (New York: State University of NewYork Press, 2005), p.
13.
84 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 55; Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 105. See also Karlinsky,
California Dreaming, p. 13, 15.
85 Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 105.
86 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 55-56. Bein laments that despite an expanding area under cultivation, the
Jewish citrus workforce grew feebly from 1933 to 1935, when it reached 6000, less than half of the Jewish
groves' total, estimated around 14,000 (Return to the Soil, p. 451).
87 See Steven Glazer, "Propaganda and the Histadrut-sponsored pickets for 'Hebrew Labor,' 1927-1936,"
Ph.D. dissertation (Georgetown University, 1991).
536
intensified.88 The British viewed the growth of urbanization as anathema to maintaining
the traditional social order they imagined to exist in Palestine, and desired to separate
rural areas from "the contamination of urban politics."89 To this end, the state promoted
the existing, pre-occupation light industries of the Arab sector under the banner of
supporting "village industries."90 Support for "traditional" enterprises, it was thought,
would contribute to the country's stability by building on the preexisting bases of the
Arab economy, thereby shielding Palestinian society from abrupt social and economic
change. Yet paradoxically, the craft industries, whose capacities to absorb the disruptive
effects of ongoing crisis and decline in the rural social formation were overestimated,
were not given incentives for investment, nor were they protected from rising
competition.91 In consequence, rather than growing, many pre-occupation industries
greatly diminished in output and employment under British rule. At Bethlehem, known
for its mementos and souvenirs made with mother-of-pearl, only 150 workers were left
in 1937 of what had been a 1500 person workforce in 1925. The soap industry at Jaffa,
which had boasted 12 factories at its peak and nearly rivaled the output of Nablus,
dwindled to four factories in 1937 while the value of the city's soap production declined
between 1930 and 1935 by 62 percent.92 In another of many ironies of colonial rule, the
economic bases of the small industries of Palestine were nearly wiped out by state
88 Graham-Brown, "The Political Economy," p. 144-45.
89 Miller, Government and Society, p. 117.
90 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 60.
91 Ibid., p. 61-62.
92 Testimony of George Mansur, secretary of the Arab Workers' Society, before the Royal [Peel]
Commission, in Watha'iq al-muqawama, p. 592. The output of soap factories at Nablus was reckoned in
1930 by Hope Simpson at £P 240,000 (Hope Simpson report, p. 79), while Jaffa's was put by Mansur at
£P 206,259 the same year. In 1935, Jaffa's product had declined to £P 79,000.
537
policies while simultaneously being officially advanced as the one site for local Arab
development that was deemed politically safe.
As a corollary to the relegation of Arab development and capital to "village
industries" the colonial state approved a policy of separate development for Arabs and
Jews. While the British Mandate nominally sought the creation of a unified citizenry or
polity in Palestine, it condoned and advanced a separatist policy in the economic realm
which established different standards for Arabs and Jews. This was reflected in a host of
policies and unofficial practices, not least of which was the endorsement of differential
wage rates for Arabs and Jews in and outside of government employment, justified by
the idea that most Jews in Palestine required a "Western" standard of living that was
considerably above that of the "Oriental" natives. Jewish daily wages for unskilled
agricultural labor from 1931-33, for instance, averaged 150-200 mils, while those of
Arabs remained at 80-120 mils. Skilled labor in the same field during the same period
netted Jews 200-300 mils/day, while the comparative rate for Arabs was 100-150 mils.
The differentials were yet more acute for unskilled labor in construction, where over the
same three years Arabs earned 100-150 mils per day while Jews were paid 250-400 mils.
Calculated at hourly rates, the disparities in pay were even larger than these various daily
rates reveal, as Jews typically worked 8-hour days while Arabs often worked between 8
and 12 hours.93
Although wages grew in the first half of the 1930s as a heavy influx of Jewish
capital from abroad drove local economic growth, even by the government's debatable
93 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 74; Glazer, "Propaganda," p. 27, 30-31.
538
calculations, real wage growth for Arab labor was minimal, and was significantly
outpaced by rises in Jewish real wages in the same industries. An examination of seven
types of manufacturing reveals that Arab real wages rose 10 percent in 1934 and 1935
when compared with 1931, before declining 12 percent in 1936 and a further 10 percent
in 1937 to below the 1931 level.94 Jewish real wages in the same boom period in 1934-
35 vaulted up 30-35 percent, and Jewish workers retained a net pay increase by 1937,
when economic growth had cooled under the impact of the Arab revolt.95
The essential difference purported to exist between Arabs and Jews - crystallized
in their supposedly different needs with respect to standards of living96 - underwrote
discrimination in the state's hiring practices. Informally in employment and contracting
Jews were preferred for skilled work, while Arabs were mostly seen as fit for unskilled
labor. This disparity was evident across a range of government departments. Although
the state buttressed its argument for racial hierarchy by maintaining that it was
preserving existing standards of living within the Arab community, Arabs greatly
resented the discrimination they encountered in the official labor market, which they saw
as blatantly preferential treatment for Zionism.97
94 These were woodworks, metal works, oil, soap, textiles, tobacco, and cigarettes, although the first two
categories also included those involved in building and construction, which were not separately counted.
95 Sa'id Himadeh, "Industry" in Economic Organization, p. 286. As Himadeh observes, the state's
estimate for cost of living adjustment was based in a general index of retail prices rather than an
assessment of actual family consumption.
96 For an extended discussion of this subject concentrating on the World War II period, see Sherene
Seikaly, "Meatless Days," especially chapter three.
97 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 84, 99, 102. A manifold and representative critique of government bias in
favor of Jewish workers, which put the onus for the poor state of Arab laborers in the mid-1930s on the
state and its management and not on the Zionist movement, was made during the Peel Commission
hearings by George Mansur, secretary of the AWS (an Arab union noted in chapter three and discussed
below) (Testimony of George Mansur, in Watha'iq al-muqawama, p. 586-594).
539
For purposes of cost containment, labor management, and preventing political
mobilization, the colonial state encouraged the casualization of Arab labor on public
works and in other government departments. The majority of wage-labor among Arabs
was already casual, and in the Public Works department, where Arabs were employed on
projects in part to mitigate seasonal unemployment, casualization was seen as a wedge
against the development of proletarianization and labor organizing. As with other
considerations surrounding labor affairs, the state distinguished between the labor
organizing of Jews and Arabs, the former being deemed acceptable if not inevitable,
while the latter was frowned upon and seen as little more than a front for political
agitation. The common incidence of casual labor in government hiring thus had a
distinct political connotation. In departments other than Public Works, Arabs could be
employed on a casual, renewable short-term basis for years, with no job security. Within
Public Works there were two primary categories of work, short-term relief projects,
aimed primarily at ameliorating the half year between orange seasons, and longer-term
projects and ongoing concerns, such as operation of the port and associated facilities at
Haifa. Relief projects often centered on road building, and were casual almost by
definition. But many laborers in the more permanent divisions of Public Works
responsible for the railroads and ports were also denied long-term employment. Porters
employed at the docks of Jaffa and Haifa, for instance, relied on workforces prior to the
revolt in which approximately 25 percent and 8 percent respectively were permanent
employees, while the rest were daily hires.98
98 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 85, 87, 88, 90, 95; on the state's distinction between Arab and Jewish labor
540
Employment within the Public Works Department represented the state's most
significant response to the chronic un- and underemployment experienced by Palestinian
wage-laborers in the 1930s. Taking a view that largely equated its short-term relief
projects with charity, the state overestimated their capacity to stem social change and
political ferment, and underestimated the significance of its acceptance of sizable
permanent underemployment among Arab laborers. As mentioned above, work on relief
projects was keyed to seasonal unemployment and was seen as a means for averting a
"rural exodus." By providing indigent villagers with some measure of income between
the growing seasons (for both citrus and other crops), it was hoped that they would see
no need to migrate permanently to the cities and that the structure of the rural economy
would be left intact. As late as 1932 the government feared that instituting a minimum
wage would disrupt "Arab social organization" and bring on a wave of urbanization in
search of remunerative wage-labor, well after such urbanization was underway in the
port cities. For his part, the Director of Public Works opposed a proposal for a 150
mils/day minimum wage mooted in 1934, and fought wage increases as much as
possible, even to the point of slowing down projects in order to deflate wage demands.
To further discourage Arabs from following the example of Jewish unionization, hiring
for public works projects was conducted through mukhtars and clan heads, who
garnished the wages of those they recruited while reinforcing the vertical model of social
organization that the colonial authorities saw as a hallmark of local Arab society. The
organizing: p. 70, 81. Of up to 400 porters at Jaffa, who were under the Department of Customs, Excise,
and Trade, 100 were permanent, while at Haifa demand could hit 760, of whom 60 were permanent (p.
95).
541
annual sum of workers engaged in relief works fluctuated, but often outstripped those
working on the railroads and ports, who numbered some 3000 in the first half of the
1930s. For example, in April 1934 the High Commissioner wrote to the Colonial
Secretary that 8000 laborers were in the employ of the Public Works Department on
relief details, stressing that unemployment was such that government could "easily get
many times that number."99
While the government aimed unsuccessfully at using Public Works employment
to palliate the growth of urbanization and proletarianization, its stop-gap approach failed
to address the seriousness of Arab unemployment. Indeed, as with the growth of
landlessness, which contributed to the swelling pool of wage-laborers, the government
demonstrated a penchant for consistently downplaying the significance and scale of Arab
unemployment. Hope Simpson tried to sound the alarm that the situation of Arab labor
was precarious. His report conveyed that in 1930 district offices "expressed an [sic]
unanimous opinion that Arab unemployment is serious and general." Unemployment at
the time was accompanied by falling wages for those professions that were suffering the
most, such as stone-dressers and carpenters, skilled laborers whose wages fell by 50
percent that year.100 Such warnings of spreading malaise - issued at the outset of the
four-year agrarian crisis - had little effect.
Again, as with the landless inquiry, government did little to gauge the shortage of
employment opportunities for Arabs and the extent of Arab unemployment. Hope
Simpson noted the absence of an apparatus capable of tracking and measuring the
99 Ibid., p. 78, 86-87, 90-92; HC to Colonial Secretary, 14.4.34, p. 7, PRO - CO 733/257/12.
100 Hope Simpson report, p. 95.
542
latter.101 Reporting on Arab unemployment subsequently fell to the Commissioner for
Migration and Statistics, who for a time produced monthly statements detailing
unemployment for Arabs and Jews, though for Arabs especially these were considered
rough estimates. Complicating matters further, the state had no accurate assessment of
the size of the wage-labor workforce. In 1934, after overhauling its machinery for
assessing unemployment (see below), government statistics were based against an
impossibly high 214,000 Arab wage earners.102 Where this hulking number came from
is a mystery, as the combined Arab and Jewish workforce five years later in 1939 was
measured at 203,900.103 One author writing for the Palestine News Service, a Tel Aviv-
based center that published economic reporting and analysis, estimated in 1936 that the
size of the local Arab wage-labor force was 40,000 (11,000 in agriculture and 29,000 in
industry and services), along with another 20,000 seasonal migrant laborers from
neighboring Arab states.104 This appears to be an obvious undercount of Palestinian
agrarian labor (and possibly an exaggeration of the foreign Arab component105), given
that the 1931 census enumerated 32,500 rural earners without land, being paid in wages
or in kind.106 Some of these laborers may have joined the urban proletariat in the
intervening years, but a return for February 1934 showed 12,500 Arabs engaged in citrus
labor, counted another 6050 unemployed agriculturalists, and provided no estimate of
101 Ibid., p. 94.
102 Calculated from: Report to the League of Nations, 1932, p. 76.
103 Survey of Palestine, v. 2, p. 731. The 1939 count excludes artisans and members of the liberal
professions.
104 Quoted in: Musa, Thawrat 'am 1936, p. 52.
105 RAF intelligence estimated there were 15,000 Hawranis in the country in 1934 (RAF headquarters
(Jeru.), 21.9.34, resume of operations (August), PRO - Air 5/1247).
106 Cited in: Stein, "Legal Protection," p. 236.
543
those wage earners in the countryside not working in citrus.107 The Palnews tally also
discounts state employees and contractors, the former numbering 10,700 and the latter
1300 in 1935.108 Adding these to the Palnews count, and adjusting for the discrepancy
in agricultural laborers (assuming a sector, based on the 1934 figure above, of at least
twice the original 11,000 estimate) gives a base figure of 63,000 wage earners (including
those earning on contract labor).109 Although this number is hardly exact, it may provide
some sense of scale for considering estimates of unemployment.110
As surveyed in chapter 2, official tabulations of Arab unemployment varied
widely from 1931-33, between 11,000 and 35,000. The state's definition of
unemployment, it must recalled, originally included the underemployed (those with less
than three days of work per week) as well as those altogether without waged income.
Data collected by the Department of Migration and Statistics demonstrates that by the
early 1930s unemployment no longer corresponded greatly with the citrus harvest,
suggesting that the industry's capacity to absorb excess laborers had been surpassed and
that the labor market was dependent on a wider array of factors. Between January and
April 1934, for instance, straddling the end of the orange season, monthly estimates kept
within a fairly consistent range between 13,300 and 15,500, down somewhat from the
107 Memorandum on employment conditions in Palestine at the end of February 1934, by Commissioner
for Migration and Statistics, PRO - CO 733/249/8
108 Musa, Thawrat 'am 1936, p. 49. The author cites figures provided by the Government of Palestine to
the Peel Commission.
109 This estimate does not include those in the liberal professions working outside of government, for
which no estimate is available.
110 Working inductively, taking the Palnews figure of 40,000 and adding the 12,000 government-related
workers and the 25,000 whom George Mansur estimated as unemployed in 1935 gives a higher total of
77,000. There are no reliable figures, but the range of 63-77,000 would appear to be a reasonable
estimate. Mansur's figure, given in evidence before the Peel Commission, is cited in: Musa, Thawrat 'am
1936, p. 54-55.
544
same months during the previous year, in which some 16,500 to 18,500 persons sought
work. These numbers may well also have been undercounts. In April 1934, when the
High Commissioner wrote that Arab unemployment was such that the government's
relief works (for 8,000) could be multiplied "many times" over, the official return
showed an estimate of 14,000.111
As imprecise as the monthly assessments of unemployment may have been, the
state subsequently redefined unemployment almost out of existence. Dissatisfied with
the fuzziness of the measurement apparatus it had in the Department of Migration and
Statistics, the government decided to separate urban from rural unemployment. Urban
data would be handled by the Department of Migration and Statistics while rural
estimates were left to the Agriculture Department. In his letter to the Colonial Secretary
explaining the new system, HC Wauchope seemed to surrender the idea of assessing
agricultural employment and unemployment, stressing that "no system can be devised
which will approach accuracy or exactness."112 The new assessments provided by the
Department of Migration and Statistics, shorn of the ambiguities of measuring seasonal
labor flows, presented a dramatically reduced portrait of unemployment. Rather than
combining the split assessments from the departments of Migration and Statistics, on one
hand, and Agriculture, on the other, the colonial authorities proceeded to present only
the former as the new measure of unemployment in official reporting, including to the
League of Nations.113 Where in mid-1934 unemployment returns under the old system
111 Monthly memoranda on "employment conditions in Palestine," January through April 1934, prepared
by Commissioner for Migration and Statistics, PRO - CO 733/249/8.
112 HC to Colonial Secretary, 23.8.34, PRO - CO 733/249/8.
113 Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p. 104.
545
showed between 13-17,000 individuals without adequate work, the figure for August of
that year, the first under the new definition, showed only 3000. Lending further
incredulity to the situation, the High Commissioner used the erroneously high estimate
for the size of the wage-labor workforce noted above (214,000), arriving at the
conclusion that a mere 1.4 percent of Arab laborers were unemployed.114 Rather than
find some means of ascertaining the level of unemployed agricultural workers, which as
observed above, decreased in elasticity in the early 1930s, the government decided to
ignore them altogether.
The timing of the new system for measuring unemployment may not have been
coincidental. Just the previous fall (1933) the country had witnessed the furor of the
anti-immigration protests - the first Arab protests aimed directly at the state - which had
touched off days of insurrection and skirmishes between the Arab public and state
security forces. These protests were driven not only by palpable Arab fears of being
reduced to a minority, but by the ongoing conflicts with the Zionist movement over land,
labor, and livelihood. Although it was not made known to the Arabs, one of the results
of the 1933 demonstrations was to undermine support for Hebrew labor at the Colonial
Office, which was already declining. By March 1934 the Colonial Secretary had
instructed that Arab unemployment was to be considered a factor when drawing up the
immigration schedules for Jewish laborers,115 though to what extent was left at the
114 HC to Colonial Secretary, 23.8.34, PRO - CO 733/249/8; Report to the League of Nations, 1934, p.
104.
115 Those defined as "capitalists," bearing £P 1000 or more, gained automatic entry and were not
restricted, as they were presumed to be adding "absorptive capacity" to the economy.
546
discretion of the High Commissioner.116 The consequent reform of the unemployment
count may well have signaled the High Commissioner's disinterest in putting any
damper on the burgeoning swell of immigration, which he believed was helping to create
employment for both Jews and Arabs, while providing a steady stream of revenue to the
state (via customs).
The new system for tallying Arab unemployment was not seen as entirely
credible even by elements of the British bureaucracy. The Department of Overseas
Trade compiled a report on Palestine in July 1935, for instance, that noted previous
estimates of Arab unemployment (including the 3000 figure) and the change in
definition, before opining that "it is difficult to fix a basis for assessment" and hence, it
held, no estimates for Arab employment and unemployment could be furnished.117
Although the Commissioner for Migration and Statistics decried the "statistical bases"
for the final assessments under the old system as "most unsatisfactory," their merit
declined further in the aftermath.118 In January 1936, while supplying the latest
estimate, the Commissioner derided it as without "any statistical value." Moreover, not
only was it unsystematic (as evident in part, it was suggested, by a reliance on the
estimations of mukhtars), but the return only showed assessments for seven cities and
116 Memorandum by the Colonial Secretary, 28.3.34, CP 95 (34), PRO - CO 733/257/12. The directive to
take account of Arab unemployment, the Colonial Secretary pointed out, was written into the MacDonald
letter of 1931, but the provision appears not to have been given serious application.
117 Economic Conditions in Palestine, July 1935, report by C. Empson (British Commercial Agent at
Haifa), p. 76, available in Palestine and Transjordan Administration Reports, 1918-1948, v. 5, compiled
by Robert L. Jarman (Slough, England: Archive Editions, 1995). The 1935 Report to the League of
Nations similarly refused to offer any estimate of Arab unemployment (p. 117). In spite of this, an official
estimate for early 1935 put the figure at 5565, while claiming unemployment was almost nil at the close of
1934 (Commentary by Foreign Office on 2.5.35 PAP petition to League of Nations, no date, PRO - FO
371/18957).
118 Commissioner of Migration and Statistics, 17.8.34, PRO - CO 733/249/8.
547
towns and little backing was given to the figures gathered.119 Six years after Hope
Simpson's report the government still had no effective system for evaluating Arab
unemployment.120
As indeterminate and tentative as the available figures are, however, there is no
mistaking that unemployment and underemployment for Arab wage-workers were quite
considerable, possibly ranging at times up to 50 percent or more of the workforce (e.g. in
September 1931), though typically less severe.121 Core unemployment (i.e. not
seasonally-related) was probably in the neighborhood of 20 percent for Palestinian wage
workers.122 By comparison, at its zenith in 1927 Jewish unemployment during the crisis
that afflicted the yishuv from 1926-28 reached something on the order of 25 percent.123
Lacqueur notes that in 1927-28 Zionists were "more despondent than ever before" and
that "Only a few optimists believed that the movement could recover within the
foreseeable future."124 Although the state had no precise measure for Arab
unemployment, Palestinians appear to have periodically or even regularly endured rates
in the 1930s comparable to those suffered by the Zionist movement in 1927.
119 Commissioner of Migration and Statistics to Chief Secretary, 26.1.36, and addendum, Note on the
returns of urban Arab unemployment supplied by the district officers, PRO - CO 733/269/6. The
mukhtars estimates shown in the Note, which are taken to be inaccurate, were, it could be added, often
quite a bit higher than the district officers' estimates.
120 Indeed in 1946 the government still represented that distinguishing between wage-laborers and other
income earners was an insurmountable task, especially given the migrant labor factor. It still had no
apparatus for reliably estimating unemployment, contenting itself as it had previously with using Histadrut
statistics for the Jewish population and effectively ignoring the Arab sector. See: Survey of Palestine, v. 2,
p. 731-34.
121 The September 1931 figure of 35,000 unemployed appears in Report to the League of Nations, 1932, p.
77.
122 This is in view of the 1933 and 1934 figures pre- and post-citrus harvest, cited above. Estimates from
previous years show even higher unemployment during the same time of year. See chapter 2.
123 Bein puts peak unemployment at 8450 of an estimated workforce of roughly 33,800 (Return to the Soil,
p. 338). Calculation of the total Jewish workforce's size is based on the Histadrut membership for 1927,
which Glazer notes accounted for approximately three-quarters of workers ("Propaganda," p. 44).
124 History of Zionism, p. 315.
548
In spite of this, Arab unemployment was treated by the British as a given of the
economic landscape, almost as if it were a natural feature, the remedy for which was
short-term, low-paying relief work, available only to a portion of job-seekers. The
official position vacillated between preposterous understatements (the 3000 count of
August 1934) and admissions such as that by the High Commissioner that many
thousands could be absorbed in relief works, but in general the issue lost what little
traction it had as the yishuv's growth exploded. No doubt the dismissal of
unemployment owed in part to British images of Arab peasants as hardscrabble by
nature, existing on meager means. Probably more importantly, it stemmed from the
trickle-down theory that held that Zionist capital imports would inevitably stimulate
higher living standards and greater employment among Arabs. The notion that Arab
employment would follow Jewish growth proved erroneous, however. During the fourth
'aliya (1932-36), stimulated by the rise of anti-Semitic regimes in Eastern Europe,
capital did pour into Palestine at an unprecedented scale, along with Polish and German
immigrants, but Arab employment by Jewish businesses remained modest. In two
evaluations based on Jewish sources, between 9500 and 12,000 Arabs found work in
Jewish concerns from 1930-36.125 The vast majority labored in agriculture in unskilled
positions,126 with a smaller number, perhaps 1500 though possibly more, in industry.127
125 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 58-59; Glazer, "Propaganda," p. 32-33.
126 Bein holds that 8000 Arabs were employed in Jewish citrus in 1935 (Return to the Soil, p. 451), though
an official return for February 1934 showed only 2500 Arabs working in Jewish groves in the Jaffa and
Ramle areas and another 1500 in the plain north of Tel Aviv, known in Hebrew as the Sharon
(Memorandum on employment conditions in Palestine at the end of February 1934, by Commissioner for
Migration and Statistics, PRO - CO 733/249/8).
549
These figures controvert any claim that Jewish capital could or would provide Arabs
with enough employment to meet the needs of the growing ranks of the landless and the
destitute. Nonetheless, the colonial administration continued to believe, irrespective of
the evidence available to it, that Arab economic prospects were irrevocably tied to the
success of the Zionist project. Even obvious countervailing factors, like the
intensification of the drive for Hebrew labor - which began in the late 1920s and sparked
further polarization between the yishuv and the Arab majority - could not disabuse the
British of this conception.
Hebrew labor and rising Arab-Jewish contention
The Histadrut, the institutional nexus as well as the muscle of Labor Zionism,
was of two minds with respect to Arab labor in the 1920s. On one hand, various parties
that constituted its membership, particularly those on the left, were partial to visions of
socialism, internationalism, and working class solidarity. On the other, the supervening
goal of the federation was to fulfill the Zionist dream of building a self-reliant Jewish
society and independent state in Palestine. The historical competition between socialist
and nationalist imperatives which played out among the Histadrut's affiliated parties was
reflected in the federation's contradictory stance toward Arab labor.
127 The figure is from Taqqu, "Arab labor," p. 58. Glazer cites a study which notes that this was in
comparison with some 70,000 Jewish employees of the burgeoning industrial base of the yishuv
("Propaganda," p. 33).
550
After years of hedging on the issue, in 1927 the Histadrut voted to organize Arab
workers.128 The federation's aims were multiple, seeking at once to "liberate" Arab
proletarians from the abusive grip of the "effendis" who were held to be responsible for
Palestinian nationalism, while at the same time reducing inter-communal labor
competition by raising Arab wages and helping to "Europeanize the Oriental
economy."129 Yet the Histadrut was never very enthusiastic about expending its
resources to organize workers who were seen as the national competitors to Jewish
labor, and although some of its officials and some partisans of the left within the Labor
camp (Hashomer Hatza'ir, Po'alei Tziyon Smol) continued to struggle over the next
decade or so to promote "joint organization" in various guises, the separatist impulses of
the labor federation prevented that slogan from having much embodiment.130
Consequently, Arabs organized by the Histadrut were not permitted to acquire the full
benefits of membership, and rather than being united within one body alongside Jewish
workers, were shunted into separate unions and clubs affiliated to the federation. The
Histadrut's diffident embrace of what was called "Arab work" left most Arabs
nonplussed and affiliated Arab labor unions small and unstable, though on occasion
Arab workers still proved willing to try to use the Histadrut's sporadic interest to their
advantage in specific labor disputes.131
128 On the preceding period and for general background on Zionist relations with Arab labor, see
Lockman, Comrades and Enemies.
129 Quoted in Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 121.
130 For the most detailed and nuanced view of the conflicted relationship between the Histadrut and Arab
workers during this period, see Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, p. 179-239.
131 E.g. during disputes with Nesher's Arab subcontractor (Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, p. 207-10).
551
At the same time, the Histadrut launched a new wave of efforts to institute and
spread Hebrew labor. In 1927 it initiated an open-ended campaign targeting the citrus
sector's employment of Arabs, calling for them to be replaced with Jews. Within several
years, the pickets for Hebrew labor in the citrus colonies gained great prominence within
the yishuv, much to the advantage of the Labor Zionist camp, whose leadership prospects
had been dealt a set-back by the mid-1920s economic depression within the
movement.132 After years of rolling campaigns in the citrus belt, and as the economic
boom that accompanied the fourth 'aliya attracted labor to the cities, the Histadrut took
its pickets for Hebrew labor from the plantations to the mixed urban centers (especially
Jaffa and Haifa),133 where they helped catalyze a new spate of Arab labor organizing
and, as seen in chapter 3, efforts by Arab elites to tap into and capture the emerging
constituency of wage workers.
From the outset, the Hebrew labor upsurge that began in the late 1920s provoked
violent confrontations with Arabs. The first groves chosen for the new campaign were
in Petah Tiqva and as Jewish picketers attempted to prevent Arab laborers from taking
up their work, brawls broke out and the police were called in.134 Protests and pickets by
Histadrut members didn't always result in violence, but the continuity of campaigns
between 1927 and 1934 throughout settlements of the citrus regions nevertheless
132 Lacqueur writes that the 1926-28 slump drove the temporary ascent of a business model for
colonization in place of Labor's utopian schemes, and led to the resignations of Labor representatives from
the Zionist Executive (History of Zionism, p. 316). As Glazer observes, the Labor parties looked on the
economic contraction, which was tied to increasing urbanization, as an opportunity to promote rural
colonization. This necessitated the expansion of employment opportunities in the colonies for Jewish
laborers ("Propaganda," p. 61-62).
133 Glazer, "Propaganda," p. 102-03.
134 Ibid., p. 68.
552
underlined the exclusivism of Labor Zionism, which was understood as seeking to
deprive Arabs from opportunities to work.135
As the Hebrew labor campaign continued over the years, stimulating conflict, the
government became somewhat more equivocal in its position on the issue. The principle
of Hebrew labor, including quotas for government employment of Jewish workers, had
gained broad acceptability among colonial officials, even from critics of the Zionist
movement like HC Chancellor.136 Though it was criticized in the 1930 White Paper, the
MacDonald letter of February 1931 reaffirmed the colonial authorities' approval of the
exclusion of Arabs from Jewish enterprises and served thereafter as the benchmark for
policy.137 In the disputes at Jewish orchards, the government generally acted to try to
ensure the freedom of grove owners to contract employees as they saw fit while
preserving the right of Histadrut members to peacefully protest.138 Yet over time, the
expanding and increasingly popular Hebrew labor campaign came to be seen as a
destabilizing force, threatening to ignite wider conflict between Arabs and Jews. Jewish
grove owners, who were also subjected to attack and intimidation by Histadrut members,
began in 1931 to call for Hebrew labor pickets to be made illegal, and recognized as
legally distinct from disputes over wages and conditions of labor.139 The Prevention of
Intimidation Ordinance, utilized in labor and industrial disputes, was amended and
strengthened, but even after HC Wauchope and Colonial Secretary Cunliffe-Lister both
135 It should be noted that protestors didn't always or even often actually want to replace the Arab workers
whose employment they protested (ibid., p. 20).
136 Ibid., p. 73-74, 97-98.
137 Ibid., ft. 48, p. 98.
138 Ibid., chapters 3-4: p. 54-171.
139 Ibid., p. 97. On instances of violence by Hebrew labor partisans against Jewish grove owners and
managers: p. 70-71, 80, 82, and other references cited by Glazer.
553
grew chary of Hebrew labor in 1934, picketing for the cause remained legal so long as it
avoided physical confrontations.140
In 1934, as the yishuv's increasingly urban labor-force showed little lasting
interest in acquiring the jobs of Arabs working in citrus groves, the Histadrut turned its
campaign for Hebrew labor to the cities. As Glazer describes, the urban phase of the
campaign was comparatively brief, petering out in early 1935, but considerably more
aggressive and violent. Coercion, intimidation and fisticuffs were the stuff of which the
urban 'flying pickets' were made. Pickets targeted construction sites and contractors
that employed Arab labor, imploring and threatening Jewish employers, and where this
failed to prevail, threatened or assaulted the Arab laborers themselves. The colonial
authorities quickly became concerned that the affrays that punctuated the urban push for
Hebrew labor, which were reported on by the Arabic and Hebrew media in equally stark
terms, would give rise to Arab counter-pickets, as indeed they did, and potentially set off
street-fighting. What they didn't anticipate was that the response of Arab trade unionists
to the Hebrew labor campaigns could help ignite a full-scale national rebellion.141
Arab labor organizing in Palestine long pre-dated the frenzied contests over
construction jobs in Haifa and Jaffa in the mid-1930s, but it was always informed by the
activity of the Histadrut and the Zionist Labor parties. Although interconnections
remained between Arab workers and the Histadrut up until the Arab general strike in
1936, by the 1930s a dynamic of competition with the Jewish federation and its
surrogates came to fuel and propel the small, independent Arab unions and their
140 Ibid., p. 155-163.
141 Ibid., p. 103, 148, 160-62.
554
organizing among laborers.142 In January 1930 the Palestinian Arab Workers Society
(PAWS), founded five years earlier by disaffected railway workers, pulled together a
congress in Haifa attended by 61 labor organizers whose collected constituencies
numbered some 3000. The congress was geographically uneven in its representation:
half of the delegates were from Haifa and many major cities and towns, including
Nablus, Tulkarm, Gaza, Hebron, and Safad, were not represented at all. Nevertheless, it
aspired to create a national network of organized labor. Though the effort was
unsuccessful, its resolutions marked the rising tide of nationalism among Arab workers,
favoring such positions as independence within a united Greater Syria, while also
attending to more direct economic concerns, such as demanding that government
employment be based on relative population size rather than, as Zionist arguments had it,
on taxation.143 In the ensuing years, Arab labor organizing gained in popular legitimacy
and efficacy as Arab unions and workers rose to oppose the Histadrut's designs on
playing a leading role in Arab labor struggles.
The Histadrut's primary vehicle for organizing Arab laborers and seeking
thereby to deflect them from nationalist involvement was the Palestine Labor League
(PLL; Ittihad 'ummal Filastin), an Arab labor union established and led by the
federation. The PLL's organizing among Arab workers met with some success and
quickly stimulated independent Arab unions and elite politicians to step up their efforts
to command the loyalties of the growing ranks of wage workers. According to Taqqu,
142 Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, p. 179-239; Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 144.
143 Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, p. 180-81; Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 140-41. On the origins of the
PAWS, see: Comrades and Enemies, p. 145-47.
555
the PLL provided the impetus for Fakhri Nashashibi's creation of the Arab Workers'
Society (discussed in chapter 3) and for the Youth Congress's interest the same year
(1934) in organizing port workers at Jaffa. But its greatest opponent was the PAWS.
The PAWS took on the PLL as no other Arab party did,144 and eventually came to derive
some of its strength from usurping PLL ventures: "Between 1932 and 1935, the
Palestine Arab Workers [sic] Society grew neck and neck with the Histadrut's Labor
League. It frequently took over strike efforts and labor organizations which had been
initiated by the League." The PLL was handicapped politically by the Histadrut's
support for Hebrew labor and the wider goals of the Zionist movement, and practically
by strictures from the federation which limited its remit to responding to requests for
assistance (rather than actively soliciting new members and constituencies). Under
pressure from ascendant independent unions, its core membership in Haifa and Jaffa
dwindled by 1935.145
By 1934 the transformation of PAWS from an organ with outsized aspirations
into a budding force among labor was represented in a number of successful organizing
drives on its home turf in Haifa: at Shell Oil, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the
tobacco workers of Qaraman, Dik and Salti Co., and the harbor porters who worked for
the Department of Customs.146 Alongside the AWS in Jaffa, PAWS precipitated a
change in the social and political status of Arab workers and ushered in an
144 At Jaffa, the AWS and the PAWS together struggled to vanquish the PLL, and in particular to bring
dockworkers who briefly and loosely affiliated to the PLL into their fold (Lockman, Comrades and
Enemies, p. 225-29).
145 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 144, 151, quote from p. 144; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, p. 204-06,
228-29. Lockman also notes the Histadrut and the PLL were badly tarnished by the discovery of arms
bound for the Haganah at Jaffa in the fall of 1935.
146 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 145.
556
unprecedented wave of rising labor militancy. Strikes by Arabs had been almost
unheard of even in 1930-31, but 13 strikes were launched in 1932, and by 1935 the
newly buoyant spirit of Arab labor powered 21 strikes, totaling one-third of all such
actions for the year.147 This was a remarkable feat, given the small size and scanty
resources of the Arab unions in comparison with those of the Histadrut. The
assertiveness that characterized the protean Arab labor movement in the final years
before the revolt was built on the spread and coalescence of horizontal models of social
identification and mobilization among laborers, as had occurred among youth. As with
the emergence of youth, the arrival of Arab labor as a vital, primarily autonomous force
on the Palestinian scene was predicated on changing relations with elites and their
vertical modes of organization.
The Palestinian labor movement has sometimes been understood as hamstrung
by its continued ties to and dependence on elites and middle class professionals.148
Though this view exaggerates the role played by these groups, it is true that elite hands
did aid the development of the trade union movement. Fakhri Nashashibi's place as the
progenitor of the AWS has already been mentioned. While not an elite, the PAWS
under the direction of 'Abd al-Hamid Haymur, a veteran of the railroad union, plied a
socially and tactically conservative course more amenable to "traditional social
networks" and corporatist arrangements with employers than class struggle.149 The
PAWS in this incarnation imagined forging an autarkic Arab economy in which labor
147 Ibid., p. 148; Report to the League of Nations, 1935, p. 120. The latter source notes the proportion of
labor actions concerning Arabs, but does not clarify that they were Arab-led, though this is somewhat
implied.
148 E.g. Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 134, 155.
149 Ibid., p. 153. On Haymur, see also Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, p. 145-47.
557
unions would be flanked by parallel employers' unions, which would act in concert with
the working class to drive growth.150 Its spokesman was a young Haifa-based lawyer,
Hanna 'Asfur.
In the 1930s as the Arab labor trend struggled to find its legs, it often made use
of elite mediation to resolve strikes and labor disputes. The result was typically the
watering down of workers' aims and their acceptance of compromise positions which
were wrapped in nationalist rhetoric and invocations of Arab unity.151 Yet despite the
involvement of select elites and professionals in Arab union and labor activism, even the
critics of these movements recognize that by this point the Arab notables were generally
too weak and divided to dominate the representation of workers' political and economic
interests.152 They also had no power over the public sector, which limited their clout and
helped prevent the emergence of a patronage model for labor organization.153 As
Lockman points out, the relative weakness of the Arab labor movement led it to draw
whatever advantages it could from the interest of outside parties in workers' struggles,
yet without becoming pawns of the latter.154 Far from holding the movement as a whole
back, or placing it in the orbit of elites, Arab labor's escalation of both political and
economic struggles before the revolt testify to the strategic nature of its alliances and to
the ascendancy of horizontal identities over vertical networks.
The growth of labor into a prominent, if still fledgling constituency within
Palestinian politics was consolidated by the emergence of labor as a central arena of
150 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 153.
151 Ibid., p. 154.
152 Ibid., p. 137.
153 Ibid., p. 136.
154 Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, p. 205.
558
national struggle. Although the YMMA and the Youth Congress had each supported
Arab unionization and viewed support for laborers as integral to their shared mission of
social uplift, their intermittent efforts failed to generate momentum. Neither did the
slow ferment of the existing Arab unions themselves receive much public attention.
Though the Histadrut's dogged and fiery pursuit of Hebrew labor and the expansion of
labor migration and wage work among the Arab population in the early 1930s
undoubtedly contributed to raising the national profile of labor, according to Taqqu it
was Arab labor's vigorous opposition to the Histadrut that brought the issue widespread
social recognition and newfound political importance.155
With the struggle against the Histadrut, the question of Arab labor organization
ceased being limited to the workplace and became an axis within Palestinian politics. As
noted above, however, the colonial state looked on Arab labor organizing with a
jaundiced eye and, after its growth in the early 1930s did not grant its institutions
anywhere near the credibility conferred on the Histadrut, nor did it protect the principle
of the right of Arab workers to organize. This left recalcitrant employers the leeway
they needed to resist the new assertiveness of Arab laborers, and even to back out of
concessions they made during disputes with striking workers. Labor victories, or partial
victories, were thus sometimes vitiated by the state's unwillingness to vouchsafe their
gains. This was the case during a series of struggles with the Arab quarrying
subcontractor for Nesher, the Jewish cement firm, which occurred from 1932-36, and
during the momentous strike at the IPC in 1935 by some 600 mostly Arab workers. In
155 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 153.
559
each case, employers were able to wriggle free from concessions gained by the workers
during negotiations, at no cost to themselves.156 This state of affairs helps explain the
sometimes fleeting quality of Arab labor organizations, which were prone to appear and
disappear rapidly, and whose infrastructure never kept pace with the expansion of the
waged workforce.157
Several other structural impediments contributed to the weakness of Arab labor
organizing. The sheer number of unemployed Arabs acted as a check on would-be
unions, since activist employees could be fired and replaced with great ease. The
common use by both Arab employers and the government of casual labor proved another
impediment, posing all the difficulties of organizing among a discontinuous and tenuous
workforce. And just as they baffled the government, the itinerancy and migratory
character of much Arab labor, in agriculture and even in the urban sphere, also proved
obstacles to the nascent Arab labor movement. In sum, the structural constraints that
Arab labor activists confronted were formidable in the extreme.
Seen in this light, the growth of the PAWS and the AWS were rather remarkable
accomplishments, despite their modest scale. Both organizations grew in size - the
AWS boasted 4700 members in 1937158 - and at least equally as significant, both
contributed to shaping a new sensibility among Arab laborers, whose frontline
opposition to Zionist pickets in Jaffa, for instance, broadcast the image of a "positive and
156 Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, p. 207-10, 232-34.
157 This is a major theme of Taqqu's work, though she is more apt to chalk the result up to the
aforementioned links to elites and middle class elements than to the wider legal and policy terrain that she
so conscientiously charts. See: "Arab Labor," p. 138-39, 150, 152, and citations above regarding British
policy and the role of elites and middle class personalities within the labor movement.
158 Testimony of George Mansur, Watha'iq al-muqawama, p. 586.
560
dynamic role" for workers "independent from other classes in Arab society."159 In spite
of the obstacles in their path, Arab unions, and particularly the AWS under the astute
leadership of Michel Mitri, a Christian engineer who took the organization's helm from
Fakhri Nashashibi, instigated a surge of activism in late 1935 and early 1936. More
broadly, in assessing the growing weight of Arab labor within Palestinian society and its
politics, Zachary Lockman has argued that the multiplying struggles of workers for
greater dignity and security in the first half of the 1930s, the overtones of which were
increasingly political as well as economic, contributed to "prepar[ing] the ground" for
the "explosion of popular energy" which followed.160
The birth of Palestinian slums
The growing wave of peasant migration to the ports of Jaffa and Haifa, and to the
citrus belt, had a transformative effect on the physical and social geography of the two
cities and, to a lesser extent on areas like the Tulkarm subdistrict, which were proximate
to the orange orchards. Although the port cities and orange groves appeared to offer the
greatest prospects for weathering the agrarian crisis of 1930-34, the former were
inundated with new residents (both temporary and permanent) while the availability of
work and housing consistently failed to grow at the same pace. In addition, rents and
property taxes increased as the cities expanded, raising the cost of living in the migrants'
159 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 148.
160 Comrades and Enemies, p. 238.
561
new places of residence considerably.161 Edward Keith-Roach, who became District
Commissioner for the North in 1931, placed the spatial and demographic changes taking
place at the time in the wider context of the fourth 'aliya:
Despite intense building activity there was an acute shortage of accommodation in the major
towns and Arabs were being steadily pushed out of houses they had occupied for generations.
Large areas of shacks made from old petrol tins and sand sprang up. There was a good deal of
talk about government improving accommodation, but nothing tangible was started.162
The shantytowns which arose at Jaffa and Haifa were the most visible sign of the
socio-economic transformation which Arab society was undergoing as peasant
dispossession and proletarianization advanced. They were a prominent feature of each
of the two cities, and, from the limited data available, appear to have come to comprise a
significant portion of their Arab populations. In Haifa the shanty area largely east of the
city was know as ard al-raml (the sand land); in Jaffa, the several quarters became sites
of impermanent hovels: Manshiyya, Saknat Abu Kabir, Jabalya, Shaykh Murad, and
'Arab al-Dawudi.163 The population of the shanties at Jaffa was estimated in 1936 by
George Mansur, secretary of the AWS, at about 11,000.164 At Haifa the official estimate
the same year was 7-8000, although denizens of the slum put the number at 15,000 in
161 For Haifa see Keith-Roach, Pasha of Jerusalem, p. 143; Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam: preacher and
mujahid" in Edmund Burke III, ed., Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), p. 172.
162 Pasha of Jerusalem, p. 143.
163 Yazbak, "From Poverty to Revolt," p. 107; al-Sifri, Filastin al-'Arabiyya bayna al-intidab wa-l-
Sahyuniyya (Jaffa: Maktabat Filastin al-Jadida, 1937), book two, p. 98. The remnants of Manshiyya,
probably the largest recipient of the new urban poor in Jaffa, are now situated within the municipal
boundary of Tel Aviv, where they abut that city's oldest neighborhood, Neve Tsedek.
164 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 65.
562
1937, twice the state's estimate.165 By comparison, the total Arab population of Jaffa,
the larger of the two cities, was recorded in the 1931 census at just under 50,000
(approximately 47,600), while that of Haifa at the same time was slightly over 34,000,
reaching 50,000 by 1938.166 The Arab populations of both cities were supplemented
further by thousands of migrant laborers from outside Palestine, especially from the
Hawran region of Syria, most of whom doubtless lived among their poor Palestinian
brethren.167
As Keith-Roach described it, the shantytown at Haifa was a crowded zone of
impoverished migrants and the urban poor, lacking sewerage and water. It was given the
English nickname "tin-town," after the discarded petrol cans which were converted into
living quarters. Health conditions were, in his assessment, superior in the migrants'
home villages, and in 1937 rats suspected of carrying bubonic plague were found there
by the Health Department.168 By the time of the general strike Keith-Roach had come to
see the ard al-raml as "a disgraceful blot" on the Mandate, signifying the decomposition
of the rural social system and the gross neglect of the state in consigning former farmers,
165 Seikaly, Haifa, p. 224; HC to Colonial Secretary, 1.6.37, PRO - CO 733/351/1. Further indication of
the scale of the shantytown at Haifa was provided in 1937, when the government decided to tear down
much of the ard al-raml and resettle its inhabitants elsewhere. After commencing the operation, designed
to move some 3000 persons to grounds near the suburb Balad al-Shaykh, the High Commissioner reported
that "900 huts have been removed from the most insanitary quarters," leaving little question that the area
had grown quite vast (HC to Colonial Secretary, 11.8.37, PRO - CO 733/351/1).
166 Survey of Palestine, v.1, p. 151; Yazbak, "From Poverty to Revolt," p. 107.
167 I have found no estimate of Hawranis living in Haifa, but in Jaffa, where they were reported by police
to live on verandas and in orange groves, they were believed to number 3-5,000 persons in April 1935,
during the off-season for citrus (Deportation of Hawranis, 12.4.35, police [extract], CZA S/25 - 22735).
168 Ralph Poston (Palestine Govt) to Cosmo Parkinson (CO), 18.5.37, and HC to Colonial Secretary,
1.6.37, PRO - CO 733/351/1.
563
tenants and plowmen to live in squalor and deprivation.169 Such a view was not
widespread. Paradoxically, the growth of slums populated by uprooted peasants living
marginal existences attracted surprisingly little attention within the colonial
administration, even as it professed its determination to protect peasant tenants and to
prevent tidal flows of urbanization. The High Commissioner continued to profess that
unemployment wasn't an issue throughout the period preceding the revolt, and the Peel
Commission subsequently glossed the emergence of shanties as indicating "the growth
of an urban proletariat" which, it illogically held, betrayed no signs of "destitution or
degeneration."170
The prevailing official attitude of "see no evil, hear no evil" regarding
unemployment and the ballooning port slums didn't spare peasant migrants to the cities
their share of alienation. In their new urban environs, where they lived in the crudest of
abodes with no amenities, their lack of control over their living conditions was paralleled
by their distance from the village networks and lifestyle that had formerly supported
them. Some returned periodically to their villages of origin or residence. The economic
insecurity of the underclass left most dependent on a variety of menial and low-paying
jobs, which, by twist of fate, were sometimes obtained through the agencies propelling
their dispossession: the colonial state (via the Public Works Department) or Zionist
businesses. This was quite likely more so the case for Haifa, where the development and
opening of the port in the early 1930s provided new opportunities for labor, alongside
169 Recommendations on future policy, memorandum by DC Keith-Roach, 30.9.36, p. 6, PRO - CO
733/316/9.
170 Statement to Arab Leaders, no date (presented on 29.1.36), PRO - CO 733/297/1; Peel Commission
report, p. 127.
564
Shell Oil, the railroad, booming construction and building, and those Jewish enterprises
still hiring Arabs. Labor conditions have been largely alluded to above. Workdays were
long, sometimes twelve hours or more, six or seven days per week, and the pay was
generally low. The government's neglect of the migrants' plight was compounded by
the escalation of the drive for Hebrew labor, including for government jobs where
Zionists argued for quotas to be reserved for higher-paid Jewish laborers.
While the rolling campaigns for Hebrew labor added salt to the wound of
dispossession and charged the already competitive urban milieu with a further sense of
embattlement, the culture of the Jewish immigrants presented its own challenges to the
conservative mores of peasant migrants. The liberal manners of dress, including women
exposing their arms and legs, were scandalous by indigenous standards and doubtless
symbolized, in corporeal form, the Arab notion that Zionism was creating an alien and
immoral society which stood in contradiction to Arab ethics and social practices,
especially those of Muslims.171 Jewish immigrants were often assertive, as was Zionist
culture, and this carried over to other aspects of their presence in mixed settings, even
down to such prosaic actions as taking public space by walking in the center of roads.172
If the settlers' culture and deportment wasn't disconcerting enough to the peasant
lumpenproletariat, they also had to contend with the scorn and derision with which Arab
upper and middle class urbanites viewed them. Although as cheap workers they were
accepted into the cities, as villagers they were looked on as country yokels and subjected
171 Recommendations on future policy, memorandum by Keith-Roach, 30.9.36, p. 7, PRO - CO
733/316/9.
172 Ibid.
565
to verbal abuse and urbanite disdain as well as exploitative conditions of labor.173 The
introduction of growing flows of dispossessed and discontented peasants eventually
became a "source of disequilibrium" within the port cities, which by the mid-1930s had
become "a melting pot and fermenting cauldron for the frustrated and embittered peasant
city dwellers."174
In spite of the hostile environment in which they found themselves, peasant
migrants and the urban poor endeavored to foster a sense of community in their new
places of residence, and by doing so, participated in the formation of a new kind of Arab
urban culture. Where the state, through its labor recruiting and relief works, sought to
reinforce the village identities and hamula memberships of migrant laborers (by using
mukhtars), urban migrants joined together in associations which were not restricted or
organized by these corporate forms. While villagers did often retain connections to their
places of origin, these did not attain the same importance in their new setting.175 In
Haifa they joined benevolent societies, for example, which cut across hamula
divisions.176 They were also, according to Eliahu Agassi, a Jewish organizer with the
PLL there, drawn greatly to the growing effusion of youth groups and religious and
nationalist associations.177 Some of these societies were tied to branches of the political
and economic elite, and some, such as originally the case with the AWS, were formed
173 Seikaly, Haifa, p. 221; Yazbak, "From Poverty to revolt," p. 107.
174 Seikaly, Haifa, p. 224. Seikaly speaks only of Haifa, yet it appears safe to assume that the description
is similarly apt for Jaffa.
175 Taqqu writes that on occasion, urban migrants were reminded of their status as villagers by fellow, but
more skilled Arab workers of urban background, with whom they engaged in strikes and labor activism
(Taqqu, "Peasants into Workmen," p. 271).
176 Taqqu, "Arab Labor," p. 116.
177 Taqqu, "Peasants into Workmen," p. 271.
566
expressly for purposes of garnering the loyalties of the growing numbers of wage-
laborers to one or another elite grouping. Yet as previously suggested, the spread of
wage-labor, particularly that which was divorced from the land, created a new political
constituency. Wage-laborers often continued to be amenable to elite-led organizations,
but also sometimes struck out on their own and established organs based in mutual
solidarity. Part of the culture of this emergent horizontal sensibility was visible among
the urban underclasses in their willingness to organize together without respect to family
divisions. To be sure, this change did not mark an effacement of family's socio-cultural
importance, but rather its rearticulation as a component of identity and social action. By
periodically superseding or bracketing hamula and village identities, urban migrants and
the poor highlighted their shared class affiliation, which opened the way for increased
horizontal affiliation and mobilization.
The extent and rapidity of the transformation of the peasantry within the urban
sphere is subject to debate, and by no means occurred uniformly. What is certain is that
the intertwined processes of urbanization, the spread of wage-labor, and the development
of labor activism that increased significantly in the first half of the 1930s helped create
the conditions of possibility for new subjectivities to emerge among peasant migrants
and the urban poor. As May Seikaly observes, these subjectivities were the product of
migrants' newfound membership in horizontal strata within urban society that was
relatively independent from local elites and notables "whose monopoly over the
resources crucial to the life of the Arab worker and peasant had come to an end" as the
567
latter were pushed off the land.178 The severing of structural links to vertical social
networks left the rural and especially the urban dispossessed in uncharted territory,
where their marginality left them both prone to continued mobilization by elites, and
alternately, open to new styles and modes of political activity. It was this new state of
indeterminacy - a compound space of socio-cultural and geographic displacements, class
formation, and radical possibility - that afforded the charismatic shaykh, 'Izz al-Din al-
Qassam, his entrée for launching a campaign of armed struggle.
From the shanties: 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam and his network
'Izz al-Din al-Qassam, now perhaps most well-known as the namesake for both
Hamas's military wing and its crude rockets, has been the subject of numerous studies
and is discussed by essentially every scholar of the Mandate period and Palestinian
politics. For my purposes here I will follow the argument of Abdallah Schleifer that the
life and work of the famous shaykh "enable[] us to understand better the political
mobilization of the Palestinian peasantry and urban migrants."179 It is from the ranks of
the latter that al-Qassam assembled a clandestine network of mujahidin (holy warriors or
freedom fighters) that helped propel three tenacious years of insurrection against all odds
- the Great Revolt - and with it, the ascent of peasant rebels within the national struggle
and movement. Al-Qassam was hardly responsible for the totality of these
developments himself, but he was perspicacious in his reading of the problems afflicting
the Palestinians and their political movement, and demonstrated organizational ingenuity
178 Seikaly, Haifa, p. 225.
179 Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam," p. 166.
568
in shaping his paramilitary underground and in basing it in the social strata that were
most negatively affected by the dual colonial order.
Syrian by birth, 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam was the son of a shari'a court judge
whose family had connections to the Naqshbandi Sufi tariqa (order), which was
renowned for its anti-colonial orientation. 'Izz al-Din studied theology as a boy before
leaving his native town, Jabla (in the Ladhakiyya district), for the esteemed halls of al-
Azhar in Cairo, where he was a pupil of the salafi thinker Muhammad 'Abduh. Upon
his return to Jabla, al-Qassam put his salafi teachings into practice, spurring a local
Islamic revival centered on regular practice of religious rites and conscientious
observance of obligations. As Schleifer notes, 'Izz al-Din returned from Cairo with "a
heightened sense of the threats that faced Islam and of the moral struggle necessary to
preserve it." He saw the struggle of the individual to embody righteousness and
vanquish evil and immorality (jihad al-nafs) as the keystone of jihad. Without personal
reformation, he believed, jihad in its military context - the wider conflict with
colonialism - was impossible. Consequently he strove to exemplify and to attract others
to the values that he took to be integral to the proper cultivation of the self: piety,
humility, courage, self-sufficiency, and asceticism. From early on he evinced a modest
demeanor and an aversion to class hierarchy, choosing to spend his time among the less
privileged members of society, who were also receptive to his message of ethical and
religious reform.180
180 Ibid., p. 166-68, 173, quote from 167.
569
When Italy attacked Libya in 1911, al-Qassam collected funds and put together a
volunteer brigade to assist in repelling the encroachment, but the Ottoman regime
declined to deploy the force. After receiving some degree of military training during
World War I, he organized the local resistance in Jabla to the French invasion of Syria in
1920, including through the sale of his own property in order to purchase arms for the
town. He gained his first experience of guerilla warfare in the ensuing conflict, leading
cadres from Jabla in the vicinity of Jabal Sahyun. When the new colonial rulers
threatened large landowners who supported the rebels in the area with property
confiscation their enthusiasm ebbed, sinking the local insurgency and giving al-Qassam
his first cautionary lesson in the fragility of elite nationalism and anti-colonialism. 'Izz
al-Din subsequently threw his lot in with the Aleppan rebel leader Ibrahim Bey Hananu,
before that line of resistance was also broken, after which he fled to Palestine.
Sentenced to death in absentia for his role in the resistance to French rule, he settled in
Haifa, along with other exiles from French-occupied bilad al-Sham.181
In Palestine al-Qassam joined the staff of the Islamic School (al-Madrasa al-
Islamiyya), a salafi institution connected to the Muslim Society, the premier Muslim
social and political forum for Haifa and its hinterlands. He resumed his salafi preaching
and advocacy, arguing against syncretic and unorthodox practices within the faith.
According to one of his closest confidants from his time in Palestine, Shaykh
Muhammad al-Hanafi, al-Qassam was inducted in the 1920s into the Tijaniyya tariqa by
one of its itinerant personalities, Muhammad bin 'Abd al-Malik al-'Alami. As al-Hanafi
181 Ibid., p. 168-70.
570
has related, the handful of locally-based recruits to the Tijaniyya brotherhood (himself
included) became the core of the fighting force and secret organization that al-Qassam
forged to wage jihad in Palestine.182 Though many accounts see al-Qassam as
consistently intent on returning to the path of armed struggle against the colonial regimes
of the region, his early years in Palestine do not in hindsight appear to have been
consumed with the secret preparations for which he later became famous. His earliest
move, perhaps, was to acquire land in the Beisan valley in 1923 on which he established
al-Hanafi as a farmer who was to raise money for weapons purchasing while acting as a
communications relay for disparate local contacts (future fighters and assets) that would
be built up throughout the regions of Palestine. It was not until the formation of the
Palestinian YMMA in 1928 and al-Qassam's appointment as a marriage registrar
(ma'dhun) of the shari'a courts the following year that he began organizing cells for a
revolutionary paramilitary underground, dubbed by contemporaries and scholars Ikhwan
al-Qassam (the brotherhood of Qassam, whose followers are known as Qassamiyun).183
As has been discussed in chapters 1 and 3, members of the YMMA were greatly
involved in the ferment that preceded the 1929 rebellion and reportedly resolved secretly
at their subsequent annual conference in 1930 to train youth cadres in the use of arms
and to encourage the population to acquire weapons clandestinely. While sharing the
Arab public's antipathy towards Zionism, al-Qassam frowned upon the 1929 violence as
182 As discussed below, al-Qassam's notion of jihad was infused with nationalist themes and meaning.
This blurring of the concept - at once drawing on its theological origins while repurposing it to suit an
ideological field increasingly mediated by nationalist discourse - characterized much of the term's usage
in the interwar era in Palestine.
183 Ibid., p. 170-71, 175.
571
disorganized and undisciplined.184 Instead, he saw a need to slowly and methodically
build a network of underground cells, each composed of hardened, dedicated, and pious
cadres, who would become the military core of a popular insurrection which would
begin only after adequate preparation. A number of sources name the YMMA as the
first vehicle through which this endeavor was undertaken, though the details of this are
scant.185 It remains murky whether the secret call to arms issued by the YMMA in 1930
wasn't a reference to al-Qassam, rather than the organization as a whole, since most, or
even the overwhelming majority, of the YMMA seems to have had no part in such
activities. The Qassami Subhi Yasin, relying on the testimony of Muhammad al-Hanafi,
treats 'Izz al-Din's role in the YMMA as merely a cover for his surreptitious work.186
On the other hand, Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, a close confidant of al-Qassam and fellow
leader of the Haifa YMMA, claimed that the Ikhwan al-Qassam emerged from the
YMMA in the aftermath of the 1929 rising, suggesting that the organization was
instrumental to the underground's inception.187 If al-Hajj Ibrahim's assertion is accurate,
as several scholars have concluded,188 only a very small number of individuals were
privy to this clandestine component of the society, which appears to have been kept
secret even from stalwart nationalist members like 'Izzat Darwaza and Akram
184 Lesch, Arab Politics, p. 213.
185 Taggar, The Mufti, p. 328; Arnon-Ohana, Herev mi-bayit, p. 266; al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 43.
186 Yasin, al-Thawra al-'Arabiyya al-kubra (Cairo: Dar al-huna li-l-taba'a, 1959), p. 20. Schleifer
partially echoes this idea, though he qualifies it ("Izz al-Din al-Qassam," p. 175-76; and see below).
187 Al-Hajj Ibrahim, al-Difa' 'an Haifa, p. 151. Al-Hajj Ibrahim describes al-Qassam's religious stature
within the society as a means for spreading his message of jihad, but says little else.
188 Taggar, Arnon-Ohana, and al-Hut (cited above) are all of this view, and each wrote before al-Hajj
Ibrahim's memoirs were published.
572
Zu'aytir.189 Confusing matters more, the paramilitary underground organized and led by
al-Qassam was shadowed for some period of time by a parallel grouping that began as a
splinter from Qassam's forces.
In the heated environment that followed the 1929 thawra, a debate erupted within
the nascent underground between those who saw 1929 as a call to arms in the immediate
term, and al-Qassam, who argued that premature action would not yield the desired
results. The former breakaway party was led by a future commander of rebel forces in
the north during the Great Revolt, shaykh Khalil Muhammad 'Isa, known by his nom de
guerre Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir.190 'Isa hailed from the village of Mazra'a al-Sharqiyya in
the Ramallah subdistrict and was one of the first four recruits to al-Qassam's
organization.191 In 1930 the dispute between al-Qassam and 'Isa resulted in the latter's
defection and his initiation of guerilla-style operations in 1931 and 1932.192
Rather than act precipitously, al-Qassam sought, as mentioned above, to carefully
build an infrastructure for rebellion. The base of the underground was composed of cells
of no more than five individuals, mostly hand-picked by 'Izz al-Din for their personal
189 Zu'aytir, who regales the 1929 revolt specifically and armed struggle more generally in his diaries,
gives no indication as to having any knowledge of, let alone having been party to, paramilitary activity
within the YMMA (Bawakir al-nidal).
190 Yasin, al-Thawra al-'Arabiyya, p. 23.
191 Musa, Thawrat 'am 1936, p. 185.
192 The two also differed in their approach to the population. Where al-Qassam stressed the necessity of
maintaining social solidarity and of the mujahidin acting with rectitude towards other elements of society,
such as the villagers whom it was hoped would join or support rebel ranks, Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir felt that
there was no time for that kind of patient accretion of forces and support and held that finances and other
necessities should be obtained by whatever means necessary, including force (Yasin, al-Thawra al-
'Arabiyya, p. 23). As will be explored in depth in later chapters, the question of rebel relations with the
rest of Arab society had a great impact on the course of the rebellion.
573
dedication and principles (in line with his vision of jihad al-nafs). 193 As related by
Ibrahim al-Shaykh Khalil, a Qassami, the credo of the underground was simple, "This is
jihad, victory or martyrdom."194 To become a mujahid one needed to be willing to die
for the cause, fighting the British and the Zionists "for God and country."195 Individual
sincerity, ethical soundness, and the ability to practically abide by the secrecy and
necessities of the underground were seen as key components of mujahidin. The
selection of recruits was patiently undertaken, with much observation and probing before
an individual could be inducted.196
In addition to the core of mujahidin, the underground encompassed several
special units that were separately responsible for arms procurement, military training,
intelligence gathering, propagating the message of jihad, and political
communications.197 Possibly the most exceptional among the special units was that
dedicated to intelligence, the likes of which had not been seen before among Palestinian
organizations. Its express focus was on developing sources within the police force that
could provide useful information on specific police activity, general routines, details on
193 Schleifer writes that the oldest recruits to the organization, often dubbed shaykhs, also sometimes
served as recruiters themselves ("Izz al-Din al-Qassam," p. 175). Most other accounts depict the network
as stemming from a-Qassam alone, which seems unlikely given the geographic range it attained.
194 Quoted in al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 39.
195 Abu Gharbiya, Fi khidam al-nidal, p. 45. Al-Qassam's last words, according to Filastin, included the
phrase "This is jihad for God and country," the latter portion of which subsequently circulated as a slogan
of the Great Revolt. The newspaper is quoted in al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 20-21.
196 Al-Hut offers a fascinating glimpse of the care with which al-Qassam selected potential initiates within
the city. When he found individuals promising, he sent some of his acolytes to work beside them at their
places of employment to observe them and "to get to know their concerns and problems," surreptitiously
investigating them in order to judge their suitability for the network (al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 45).
197 Yasin, al-Thawra al-'Arabiyya, p. 23. Political communications included liaising with representatives
of foreign powers that might be able to help supply arms. Little seems to have come of this.
574
the security arrangements for Jewish colonies, and other items.198 Little is known about
the unit's operations or contacts, but the practices it established and the emphasis on
cultivating moles within the state's security apparatuses were carried on into the revolt.
Beyond the talents he displayed for disciplined, painstaking, and sophisticated
organizational development, al-Qassam's greatest innovation was to tap into the ranks of
the dispossessed and marginal peasants, both in the shanties and those still in the
countryside. Where elites, and as we have seen above, skilled workers, were often
disdainful of the downtrodden, al-Qassam "loved workers and peasants" and evinced
great concern for their lives.199 Rather than ignore them or seek power over the
underclass, al-Qassam desired their uplift. As he had done in Jabla, he inveighed against
the immorality which he felt threatened Muslim culture and was credited with
dissuading youth from frequenting brothels and gaming and gambling establishments.200
His advocacy of moral and spiritual reform also allowed him to pursue his aim of
recruiting mujahidin for the underground, which he did while teaching the poor and the
illiterate to read by using the Qur'an.201
Al-Qassam's choice to organize primarily among the oppressed was probably
also influenced by the special character of Haifa as the "cradle" of the fledgling Arab
labor movement in Palestine.202 Haifa was the birthplace of the PAWS and, thanks to its
industrial base, the preeminent center for rural in-migration, which began earlier than
198 Ibid.
199 Al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 44.
200 Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam, p. 173-74; Events of November in the north, 1.12.35, p. 5-6, CZA
S/25 - 22231.
201 Al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 45-46; Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam," p. 172.
202 Al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 45.
575
elsewhere in Palestine.203 Al-Qassam became well-acquainted with the emergent
working class culture of the Arab migrants and the settled community in his capacity as
a preacher at the Istiqlal mosque, a new house of worship located adjacent to the
industrial district and the railyards. There he provided spiritual succor to workers and
the poor, preached jihad, and clandestinely began recruiting for his underground, whose
members eventually counted many employees of the railroad and the port at Haifa, along
with day-laborers, street vendors, and others.204
In the late 1920s and early 1930s 'Izz al-Din came to take a larger role in local
society, officiating at births, graduations and other celebrations. Both in this capacity
and as a marriage registrar he circulated in the city and its hinterlands with great
regularity. His involvement with the YMMA, which preceded his appointment as
ma'dhun, was essential to the more public presence he created for himself in the Haifa
subdistrict. As alluded to above, the exact nature of the YMMA's place in building the
Ikhwan is not well illuminated by the available sources. It seems unlikely that the
YMMA could have plausibly served as a cover for al-Qassam's secret recruiting, since
the society was itself involved in the 1929 rebellion and afterwards came under
significant pressure from the state.205 In any case, its offices provided al-Qassam
203 Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam," p. 172; Seikaly, Haifa, p. 224.
204 Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam," p. 171; al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 45, 60.
205 The Haifa branch in particular was seen as a nest of radicals and was named as the possible progenitor
of the first guerilla operations against Jewish targets in the region, which were later revealed to be the
work of Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir and his men (The Ahava Yajour [Yagur] Murder, CID memo by DDSP
Barker, 9.5.31, PRO - CO 733/204/2). Some sources have pointed to the creation by members of the
Haifa YMMA of a branch at Saffuriya, near Nazareth, which was apparently little more than a public front
for organizing fighters for the underground (Arnon-Ohana, Herev mi-bayit, p. 266-68). For all of the
suspicions surrounding the Haifa YMMA, it was never shuttered, unlike other branches after 1929.
Strangely, Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim writes in his memoirs that the entire YMMA was shut down by the
government in 1934 (al-Difa' 'an Haifa, p. 155), but this is not the case.
576
contacts with the radicals within the national movement, particularly those who formed
the Istiqlal party, and with like-minded youth.206 It also afforded him a public platform
from which to champion those he considered his constituency before the state.
In 1935, as president of the local branch, al-Qassam petitioned the government to
desist from its regular demolitions of huts in the ard al-raml, which were by then a
weekly occurrence and were carried out under the pretext of maintaining sanitary
conditions. He succeeded in obtaining an appointment with DC Keith-Roach on the
issue, but to no avail. Fines for improper structures continued to be doled out,
irrespective of the recipients' abilities to pay, and demolitions continued regardless of
their effects on thousands of members of the Arab public.207
While he took the opportunity to approach state officials, al-Qassam was not so
naïve as to expect great results, and played a double game of simultaneously
encouraging grassroots opposition to the state and to Zionism. Earlier in 1935, for
instance, he visited with the 'Arab al-Raml, Bedouin in the vicinity of the shantytown
(whose traditional territory stretched between Haifa and Acre on the coast), in order to
encourage violent resistance to state policy on land in the area.208 His sermons and
public discourse also warned of threats to the Muslim holy places in Palestine and called
206 Al-Hajj Ibrahim, al-Difa' 'an Haifa, p. 151; Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam," p. 175-76. Schleifer
contends that his consorting with the YMMA, the Istiqlal, and radical youth paradoxically made him less
suspect by the state, since the former were seen as blowhards (176). As explained here, this view does not
stand up to scrutiny.
207 See 1935 correspondence and minutes by state officials in the Haifa YMMA file: ISA (25) -
871/61/141m. The reference to "thousands" affected is from an official note, dated 9.4.35.
208 Arab Bureau information (Zimroni), 24.1.35, CZA S/25 - 22224.
577
the public to jihad, messages which brought him under state surveillance and earned him
several official warnings.209
Despite his stalwart inclinations and his fiery castigation of Zionism and
imperialism, it was not al-Qassam's organization but Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir's splinter
group (universally regarded as Qassamiyun in the literature) which first began the armed
struggle, albeit in a fashion different from that intended by al-Qassam. For close to two
years, in 1931-32, Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir's men, which included several individuals from
Saffuriya, carried out a string of attacks on Jewish colonies in the Marj Ibn 'Amir and
areas nearby. These assaults, claiming seven lives in all, began with the murder of three
near Yagur in April 1931 and ended with a bomb attack that killed two at Nahalal in
December 1932.210 Although the Jewish Agency thought otherwise, they appear to have
been conducted at the will of Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir without external direction.211 After
the attack at Nahalal in 1932, the police arrested one of 'Isa's men, Mustafa 'Ali al-
209 Information (Zimroni), 1.2.35, CZA S/25 - 22224; Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam," p. 165; Yasin, al-
Thawra al-'Arabiyya, p. 27.
210 The targets also included persons or property at Kfar Yehoshua', Netanya, Wadi al-Hawarith,
Balfuriya, Kfar Hasidim, and Kfar Yehezke'el (Events of November in the north, 1.12.35, p. 3, CZA S/25
- 22231). Arnon-Ohana, citing the CID, includes another incident in 1930 in which a colonist was killed
(Herev mi-bayit, p. 268-69). The JA did not, from the documents reviewed herein, connect the 1930
incident to those in 1931-32.
211 Aharon Haim Cohen at the Arab Bureau believed they were the product of a larger conspiracy
ultimately tied to the mufti (Events of November in the north, 1.12.35, p. 3, 5-6, CZA S/25 - 22231). In
his survey of Arab underground activity written after Qassam's death at Ya'bad in 1935, he wrote that the
1931-32 attacks were undertaken "on the orders and with the moral support of northern politicians in
contact with the mufti and the Husaynis" (Events of November in the north, p. 3). However, Subhi Yasin
mentions no such connection between Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir's men and either northern politicians or the
mufti (al-Thawra al-'Arabiyya, p. 26), and neither does Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim (al-Difa' 'an Haifa, p.
153). Given the more intimate knowledge of the latter and the thinness of Cohen's evidence, which is
based on circumstantial links of al-Qassam to others connected to the mufti, it seems safe to conclude that
Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir's attacks were independently organized. The subject of al-Qassam's relations with
the mufti and other national leaders is returned to below.
578
Ahmad, who, under torture, admitted to the crime and named his co-conspirators.212 Al-
Ahmad was put to death and the bomb-maker, Ahmad al-Ghalayini, was given a 15 year
sentence. Khalil Muhammad 'Isa and 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam were also arrested with at
least two other men, but they were acquitted for lack of evidence. The Nahalal
prosecutions put Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir's group out of commission.213
Although the Nahalal-related arrests and prosecutions brought unwanted
attention to al-Qassam's organizing, there is no clear indication that they really stymied
the underground's growth. By 1935, according to Mahmud al-Salim of the political
communications unit (later head of the rebels in Shafa 'Amr during the Great Revolt)
and Hasan al-Bayir of the weapons acquisition unit, the Qassamiyun numbered roughly
200 cell leaders, with perhaps four times as many subordinate members.214 These
numbers are in some doubt, however, with competing sources claiming that the
organization comprised as few as 100 total men.215 Geographically the underground
reached all over Palestine, though its membership was greatly tilted towards the
212 Yasin, al-Thawra al-'Arabiyya, p. 26.
213 Ibid; Events of November in the north, 1.12.35, p. 6, CZA S/25 - 22231; Porath, The Palestinian Arab
National Movement, p. 134-35.
214 Yasin, al-Thawra al-'Arabiyya, p. 23; on al-Salim (a.k.a. Abu Ahmad), p. 48.
215 Al-Hut (al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 47-48) cites confusion over Yasin's division (in another text than the
one cited herein) of the underground into two groups for which he provides separate tallies, one for cell
leaders and another for cadres. Her alarm concerns Yasin's reckoning (given in the second source cited by
al-Hut) that up to 800 members who weren't leaders were part of the underground, although this figure
(given as per above by al-Salim and al-Bayir) corresponds with the idea of 200 cells of no more than five
persons each. Al-Hut, however, cites two other mujahidin who appear to dispute the idea that there were
cell leaders, and put the total number of all fighters much lower, at between 100 and 200 men (p. 48).
Porath (The Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 135), cites Zionist intelligence estimates and Yasin's
count in al-Thawra al-'Arabiyya, which each put the total at 200, though this is a clear misreading of
Yasin's reference to cell leaders ("those who were prepared for jihad, nay, to lead, reached 200 mujahidin
in 1935 most of whom supervised guided cells"). Kayyali (Palestine, p. 180) reads Yasin's count in al-
Thawra al-'Arabiyya to mean 200 were members of the underground, and 800 were "sympathizers."
579
country's northern regions, with the Haifa and Jenin subdistricts most heavily
represented.216
The success of al-Qassam in creating a paramilitary underground and his
overarching importance within Palestinian history have led to an assortment of claims
about purported ties to different political factions. Several Istiqlalists have maintained
that he was a member of the party; similarly Imil al-Ghuri claimed he was a member of
the PAP. Neither of these assertions appears to be true,217 although al-Qassam did
maintain close ties with a number of Istiqlalists, Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim foremost among
them.218 It is principally through al-Hajj Ibrahim that some Zionist accounts, beginning
with that of the JA's Arab Bureau, have contended that there were links between the
mufti and al-Qassam. The evidence for secret dealings between the two is minimal,
however, and attempts to fold al-Qassam's network into the purported web of the mufti's
influence are without foundation, if not tendentious.219
216 Arnon-Ohana, Herev mi-bayit, p. 267.
217 For instance, regarding the Istiqlal: Darwaza, Hawla al-haraka, p. 120; Zu'aytir, Bawakir al-nidal, p.
415. Al-Hut discusses and debunks both the claims of the Istiqlalists and that of al-Ghuri (al-Shaykh al-
mujahid, p. 69).
218 Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, al-Difa' 'an Haifa, p. 153; 'Ajaj Nuwayhid, Sittun 'aman, p. 181; Events of
November in the north, 1.12.35, p. 6, CZA S/25 - 22231; Porath, The Palestinian Arab National
Movement, p. 138; al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, p.325-26; Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam," p.
176.
219 Most of the basis for purported ties between the mufti and al-Qassam erroneously reads the shaykh's
mere association with figures connected to the mufti as a sign of being under his sway. Aharon Haim
Cohen of the Arab Bureau argued in the aftermath of 'Izz al-Din's death in 1935 that he had ties to the
mufti via al-Hajj Ibrahim, Subhi al-Khadra, and Ahmad Hilmi Pasha, all of whom were Istiqlalists. In his
discussion of al-Qassam's relations with the institutions of the national movement, Cohen admitted that
the police had no proof of any material interconnection, though they were sure that al-Hajj Ibrahim aided
al-Qassam and that he had made use of Ahmad Hilmi Pasha to contact the mufti (Events of November in
the north, 1.12.35, p. 6, CZA S/25 - 22231). By contrast, al-Hajj Ibrahim says nothing of the sort in his
memoirs, and 'Izzat Darwaza, a major figure in the Istiqlal and close ally of the mufti, after postulating
potential avenues through which the two could have been in some contact, stated that he was unclear as to
their relationship but discounted the possibility of al-Qassam's acting in subordination to or on orders
from the mufti (al-Dif'a 'an Haifa, p. 151-55; al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, p. 326). Most accounts
580
As al-Hut observes, "in taking his decision of [waging] jihad, al-Qassam was
well ahead [kana… mutaqaddiman khatwat ba'ida] of the course of all of the existing
political parties and institutions in the country."220 Organizing for armed struggle was
not a primary activity for even the most strident nationalist associations, with the
possible exception of those scout troops that were engaged in military drilling by 1935.
Certainly nothing compared to the organization and determination mustered by al-
Qassam. The formal organs of the national movement, the Arab Executive and its
successors, the family-based political parties, remained intent on the path of diplomacy,
even if some experimented with using the threat of violence to gain the attention of the
British.
Amin al-Husayni, a state functionary whose political influence owed in part to
his operation of a parastatal religious bureaucracy, was no different from the political
mainstream on this score. His ascent as the preeminent national figure after the 1929
rebellion confronted him with the dilemma, as Philip Mattar has shown, of opposing
Zionism while continuing to serve the British regime. The solution that he devised was
to raise the profile of Palestine as a pivotal regional or global issue through diplomacy in
the Arab and Islamic worlds, garnering support for the cause while making himself into
its foremost international dignitary in the process. His efforts did shore up his credibility
make no mention of any strong relationship between al-Qassam and the mufti, or actively declaim that al-
Qassam acted at the behest of any other national personage or party (Taggar, The Mufti, p. 330; al-Hut, al-
Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, p. 327-28; Mattar, The Mufti, p. 67). Porath, on the other hand, follows A.H.
Cohen's lead and insinuates a substantial if vague connection (The Palestinian Arab National Movement,
p. 138-39). However, at least some of the sources which Porath draws on do not appear very trustworthy,
and in fact do not directly connect al-Qassam to the Istiqlalists who supposedly facilitated the secret
partnership between the former and the mufti (see, for instance, one report cited in ibid., ft. 218, from the
Arab Bureau, dated 14.11.34, CZA S/25 - 6964; also available in file 22224).
220 Al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid.
581
and stature in the eyes of much of the Palestinian public, and underscored his belief that
building diplomatic links and leverage was the best chance the Palestinians had of
attaining independence.221
Al-Qassam's approach to the anti-colonial struggle was almost a total inversion
of the mufti's: he believed that only by force of arms could Palestine be rid of the British
and Zionism. Furthermore, his affinity for the lower classes presented an obvious
challenge to the "traditionally inherited social values" of the notables.222 The political
vision which al-Qassam represented was based in local organizing and a model of mass
mobilization that elevated the role of the poor and the dispossessed. This stood in sharp
contrast to their consignment to the sidelines of elite strategy. Al-Qassam's project was
aimed at igniting an insurrection, but in many ways its first objective was to lay to rest
the elite fantasy of attaining a negotiated settlement.
In early 1935 al-Qassam began to feel that time was running out. Surveillance of
his actions was tightening and, according to some of his comrades, he feared that his
network would be rooted out and destroyed before even beginning its mission.223 He
made one bid to widen the campaign, sending a message to al-Hajj Amin informing the
latter of his decision to wage jihad and proposing to split the task between them, with al-
Qassam responsible for the northern regions of the country and the mufti for the south.
The mufti declined the offer, stating that the time was not right for arms and that in view
of his favorable judgment of the British the political efforts of the movement were
221 Mattar, The Mufti, p. 50-64.
222 Al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 73.
223 Al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, p. 326.
582
adequate to the task of securing independence.224 In the midst of the uproar that
followed the discovery of arms bound for Zionists at Jaffa in October of that year, al-
Qassam made his move.225 In mid-November he gathered a small force of ten men and
headed to the forests in the area of Shafa 'Amr. His plan was to spread word that an
uprising was underway, hopefully igniting a wider popular response.226 The party was
discovered rather quickly, however, and was soon surrounded near Ya'bad by a force of
some 150 police. Before the clash that followed, al-Qassam allegedly gave two orders:
not to shoot at Arab police and that treachery, meaning surrender, would be met with
death.227 After being called on to yield by the police, he was reported to have shouted
back: "We won't surrender - this is jihad for God and country," before turning to his
men and adding: "O my comrades, die as martyrs!"228 As it happened, he and two of his
men were slain, and most of the others were captured.229
News of al-Qassam's death with his men in battle against the authorities met with
a stormy and emotional response from the Arab public, which was already up in arms
following the Jaffa weapons discovery. By one estimate al-Qassam's funeral outside
Haifa became the largest public gathering in Palestine's history. Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim
gauged the crowd at 20-25,000, while the Jewish Agency offered a lower count of over
224 Yasin, al-Thawra al-'Arabiyya, p. 21-22.
225 Ibid., p. 25-26.
226 Ibid., p. 27; Kayyali, Palestine, p. 181; al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, p. 320.
227 Events of November in the north, 1.12.35, p. 12, CZA S/25 - 22231; al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p.
21. The party had already spared the lives of two Arab police it previously encountered.
228 Al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, p. 319-20. As noted above, this quote was circulated in the
Arabic press.
229 The two other men killed were Yusif 'Abdullah al-Zibawi and Sa'id 'Atiya al-Misri. Another mujahid,
Muhammad Abu Qasim, was killed by police the previous day (al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wa-l-mu'assasat, p.
320).
583
10,000, which A.H. Cohen noted was larger than the Jaffa demonstration of 1933.230
The police would not allow the procession to pass through much of Haifa, as was
requested, and instead pushed its route largely outside the city, to the suburb of Balad al-
Shaykh, where al-Qassam would be buried. Elites from across the country were invited
to attend, but the leaderships of the majlisiyyin and the Opposition did not show up.231
Local youth forced most Arab stores to close before the funeral.232 The Muslim
Association and local leaders like al-Hajj Ibrahim and Ahmad al-Imam attempted to
restrain the throngs which amassed in Haifa on the appointed day, but they were
incapable of preventing "a crowd of the lower classes" from stoning the police.233
The popular outpouring which followed al-Qassam's death signaled that there
was great potential for conflagration ahead. Al-Qassam became a national hero and his
sacrifice and selflessness in the name of the nation and its liberation put national elites
and their quietist tactics to shame.234 As if to symbolically underscore the difference
between them, a rumor even circulated that al-Qassam was killed while on his knees
praying.235 The tumultuous mood which smoldered throughout much of the Arab
community was seized upon by youth, workers, Istiqlalists, and of course, the
Qassamiyun themselves. Within months their unrelenting activism set the Great Revolt
230 Al-Hajj Ibrahim, al-Difa' 'an Haifa, p. 155; Events of November in the north, 1.12.35, p. 13, CZA S/25
- 22231.
231 Zu'aytir, Yawmiyat, p. 30, 33; Mattar, The Mufti, p. 68. The CID claimed that some party leaders were
present, but only mentioned representatives from the SMC (CID, 4.12.35, periodical appreciation
summary 18/35, PRO - FO 371/20018).
232 Events of November in the north, 1.12.35, p. 13, CZA S/25 - 22231.
233 Ibid., p. 14; CID, 4.12.35, periodical appreciation summary 18/35, PRO - FO 371/20018. Quote from
the latter.
234 Mattar suggests that this is likely why many declined to show their faces at his funeral (The Mufti, p.
67-68).
235 Events of November in the north, 1.12.35, p. 13, CZA S/25 - 22231.
584
in motion, during which popular forces upended not only elite national strategy, but
established social and political hierarchies as well.
Conclusion
In its periodic report that covered al-Qassam's funeral, the CID offered a telling
description of the city in which he lived and worked:
Haifa consists of a large motley crowd of casual laborers or temporary residents from various
towns and villages in Palestine and Trans-Jordan, who are prone to trouble and responsive to
agitation, and unlikely at times to submit to the influence or direction of political leaders or
parties.236
In light of the massive public show of fury which accompanied al-Qassam's interment,
the head of the CID represented the entire city as if it were populated by migrant
villagers and poor shanty-dwellers. While this exaggerated depiction no doubt reflected
larger imperial fears concerning cities as beachheads for anti-colonial disorder, the
portrait nonetheless captured certain dimensions of the rapidly changing Arab face of the
city, including the alienation, rootlessness, and refractory mood of its growing slum.
Unwittingly the CID's stark sketch succinctly summarized the social and political effects
of the ongoing transformation of the peasantry.
Subjected to a multiplying set of financial pressures, the process of peasant
dispossession accelerated under British rule. At the same time the fabric of the rural
social order was coming apart. As much as we can ascertain, most peasants do not
appear to have wanted to leave behind their villages and the rhythms of life in the
236 CID, 4.12.35, periodical appreciation summary 18/35, PRO - FO 371/20018.
585
countryside to which they were accustomed, but those without land could not all find
adequate tenancies or work. In some locations, probably foremost in the hill country,
local potentates or wealthier landowners provided opportunities for some of the landless
and the struggling smallholders to continue to stay on the land. In the coastal zones
where bonds between landlords and peasants were weaker and where wage-labor had
already spread as a new means of mediating local class relations, sales to Zionist
interests were more common and large property owners were less inclined to extend any
kind of safety net to peasants.237 The overall decline in the position of the peasantry,
coupled with the growing impression that the ancien régime and its norms were dying,
exacerbated tensions between peasants and the swelling numbers of migrants and urban
poor, on one hand, and elites and the middle classes, on the other. The latter came to
recognize by the 1930s that the deepening crises of the peasantry and of the rural order
were intertwined with the national struggle and its fate, but their attempts to defend the
peasantry were generally feeble and largely limited to the symbolic appropriation of the
peasant as an image of cultural and national identity threatened by British imperialism
and Zionist colonialism. The failure not only of elites, but also of youth and partisans of
the new politics, to challenge the internal contradictions of the Palestinian social
formation that were crippling the peasantry was critical. The advance of peasant
bankruptcy and dispossession was a boon to the Zionist movement, which benefited
from the effects of widespread usury and accumulation through debt. Peasants, in turn,
were left landless, destitute, and embittered in increasing numbers.
237 Tamari, "From the Fruits," p. 86-87.
586
Throughout the first 18 years of British rule, peasants were not unaware of the
dramatic changes transpiring in their circumstances or the place of Zionism and British
rule in fueling them. From early on under the British occupation, they evinced hostility
towards the new colonial regime's sponsorship of the Zionist enterprise and mobilized
alongside nationalist elites to violently display their rejection of that alliance. Zionist
efforts to court the peasants and attempt to forge a basis for mutual cooperation through
the Farmers' Parties bubbled for a couple of years while much of the Palestinian elite
was embroiled in factionalist conflict in the mid-1920s, but the shallowness of these
ventures was revealed in the explosive violence of 1929, when mass peasant
mobilization led to attacks on numerous colonies as well as the carnage that occurred in
Hebron and Safad.
Peasant resistance to the colonial order and Zionist expansion was not, however,
limited to bouts of collective violence. Nor, contrary to the assumptions of much of the
literature on Palestinian politics under the Mandate, was it typically subject to the
direction of social superiors. Peasants collaborated with urbanites when the
opportunities to do so availed themselves, but otherwise acted in manners which they
saw as necessary to defend their interests. As suggested here, over time, as the social
system aligning peasants to merchants and landlords crumbled, the fellahin grew more
autonomous and were more liable to take independent initiative.
Unlike the political engagement of the leading organs of the national movement,
peasant politics was generally not bound up with formal protests to the state. In his
seminal study of peasant rebellions in colonial India, Ranajit Guha emphasizes the
587
necessity of apprehending the specific modes of social protest among peasants.238 In
Palestine several methods for expressing opposition to the colonial order - increasingly
perceived as a conjoined Zionist-British endeavor - were employed. One was to deny
the validity of new land regulations and to resist the colonial state's efforts to
reconfigure the land regime. Peasants commonly flouted new land laws, transgressing
them or bending them to their favor as much as they could. When overpowered by the
material repercussions of British interventions in the land system, they tried to wring
from them whatever advantages they could without conceding their claims to rights
based in Ottoman law and custom. Similarly the British authorities were unwilling, at
least in public pronouncements, to recognize that what they referred to as agrarian crime
represented an amplification of peasant resistance to Zionist encroachment. Uprooting
trees, maiming cattle, setting fire to buildings and the like were not indications of the
sort of passivity that both the Zionists and the British had hoped would prevail. As
standard means for prosecuting the region's "petty wars" their mushrooming incidence
indicated stiffening resistance to the growth of the Zionist land-base and warned of the
potential for persistent and widening confrontation. Finally, peasant resistance to
evictions and their support for armed endeavors like the Green Hand and the
Qassamiyun represented the greatest and most direct expression of their will to reject
and evict foreign rule and Zionist settlement. Though comparatively few took part in
these two insurrectionary ventures, peasant approval of them was subsequently apparent
in the mass support given to the Great Revolt and its peasant cadres.
238 Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford, 1983), especially chapter
three.
588
The transformation of the peasantry which British rule catalyzed brought many
unintended consequences besides peasant resistance. It is difficult not to draw parallels
between the state's handling of the interlinked phenomena of growing peasant
landlessness, the crisis in employment, and the increasing urbanization of the major port
cities. The accelerating development of each underscored the farce of the state's policy
of advancing capitalist development, led by the Zionist sector, while 'preserving' the
Arab rural order. In each instance the colonial authorities' concerns for the Arab public
were overmatched by their investment in the Zionist project. Just as the imperial
commitment to the Jewish National Home led British officials at the highest levels to
downplay burgeoning landlessness, their faith in the Zionist enterprise led them to make
light of the crisis afflicting Arab livelihoods in the first half of the 1930s, on the
expectation that Zionist industry and capital, greased with short-term relief measures
provided through the Department of Public Works, would inevitably pave the way to a
brighter future. Where the state almost willfully blinded itself regarding the scale of
landlessness, it repeated the act with respect to Arab unemployment, the apparatus for
measuring which, however imperfect, was deformed beyond utility only shortly after
being created. In short, despite the hallowed British doctrine of 'dual obligation,' the
British regime consistently sacrificed the most elementary structural components of the
Arab public welfare. The result was, paradoxically, to breathe life into an image of
Palestinian society that British planners saw as antithetical to the occupation: one
wracked by landlessness, widespread unemployment, urbanization, and bulging slums,
topped off with simmering disaffection.
589
The social and political effects of the sustained, high rates of unemployment and
underemployment, not to mention the resentments stirred by a welter of discriminatory
practices regarding wages, conditions of employment, and unionization, were not
reckoned by colonial officials to be particularly noteworthy or remarkable until the eve
of the uprising, when Arab labor unrest began to catch fire. The question of Hebrew
labor was a partial exception to this pattern, particularly after its short-lived urban
incarnation quickly raised the prospect of regular inter-communal brawls, but little was
actually done about it. The growth of a working class, however tenuous, and with it the
emergence of working class culture, labor organizing, and opposition to Hebrew labor
helped set the stage for urban centers to play major roles in the beginning of the Great
Revolt, during the general strike. The horizontal identities and affinities that were
forged in the new urban milieu gathered significant strength from the latter 1920s into
the 1930s, as did the accompanying trend towards autonomous worker organization and
activism.
Organizationally al-Qassam's underground was also a product of the social
transformation of the peasantry. Some have argued that al-Qassam's historical novelty
lies in his introduction of the sacred and the "supernatural" into the Palestinian struggle,
or focused on the "redemptive" quality of his Islamic populist ideology, even to the point
of contending that it was the bridge by which the politics of the notables transitioned into
popular politics.239 Such accounts, while instructive in their insistence on the powerful
affective and discursive components of al-Qassam's oeuvre, tend to reproduce a binary
239 Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam," p. 177; Johnson, Islam and the Politics, p. 47, 54.
590
dichotomy between religion and nation.240 As Swedenburg has suggested, however,
"Al-Qassam's appeal to religious values was not simply a return to tradition or a retreat
into the past, but instead represented a real transformation of traditional forms for
revolutionary use in the present." Al-Qassam's call for jihad was intimately related to
the emergent political and symbolic framework of Palestine, a modern administrative
creation, and to the specific burdens its Arab population confronted. His network's
recruitment of the urban and rural dispossessed and its religiously-inspired mission of
expelling the colonizers reflected the socio-economic and cultural disquiet of peasant
society's uneasy proletarianization. In his hands jihad acquired a modern anti-colonial
scope - its horizon being national, territorial liberation, not religious liberation. Its foot-
soldiers fought not for God alone, but "for God and country," according to the slogan
that subsequently swept through the hills and the plains during the revolt. The
constituencies which he first called to arms, marginal peasants and members of the semi-
proletariat, were soon the backbone of national insurrection.
240 Ahmad al-Shuqayri, for instance, future first head of the PLO, was struck in meeting those arrested at
Ya'bad that: "the phrases 'armed struggle,' 'the national movement,' and 'colonialism and Zionism' did
not flow from their tongues, as, in their simplicity, their expressions issued from a more awesome and
elevated fount… faith, and jihad for God" (quoted in: al-Hut, al-Shaykh al-mujahid, p. 60).

591