Promise & Fullfilment-Palestine - Arthur Koestler

By the middle 'thirties it was no longer a question whether Zionism was a good idea or a bad idea, whether it was desirable or not - the 500,000 Jews in Palestine were no longer a political theory but a fact. They occupied a compact portion of the land ; and though still outnumbered by the Arabs at the rate of two to one, they had become, in economic strength and social achievement, the senior partner in that unhappy concern. - p21

The fundamental fact about the Jewish colonization of Palestine is that it was carried out neither by force nor by the threat of force, but, contrary to popular belief, with active Arab connivance. No Arab was ever forced to sell his land - whether it was the estate of a rich effendi, or masha' a land, i.e. the collective property of a village. Nor is it correct to regard the Arabs as naive victims of the lure of Jewish gold. Arab political propaganda thundered ceaselessly against the sale of land to Jews. At the same time, the policy of the Mandatory Administration was deliberately aimed at discouraging such sales by administrative and legislative measures of increasing severity.

The first British Transfer of Land Ordinance dates from 1920 ; it was amended in 1921; became in 1929 the Protection of Cultivators Ordinance, which again was amended in 1932 and in subsequent years ; the last Land Transfer law dates from 1940. The one exclusive purpose of this long series of legislative acts was to protect the Arab farmer and tenant against the consequences of land sales to the Jews, either rashly undertaken by the proprietor himself, or by big landowners over the tenant's head. The first of these ordinances prohibited the transfer of land to "others than residents in Palestine"; the second added the proviso that consent to the sale should only be given after the Director of Lands was " satisfied that any tenant in occupation will retain sufficient land in the district or elsewhere for the maintenance of himself and his family". The subsequent ordinances were designed to cover any possibi loopholes, to make the eviction of tenants on land sold by the owner impossible, and to prevent by all legal means the creation of a dispossessed landless Arab proletariat. In the last of these ordinances, dated February 1940, Jews were debarred from acquiring land in 63 per cent of the area of Palestine, and restricted in 32 per cent ; in its practical effects the ordinance amounted to the prohibition of the purchase of land by Jews in 95 per cent of their National Home.

The Palestine Mandate had imposed upon the British Administration the dual obligation to facilitate the "close settlement by Jews on the land" and at the same time to safeguard "the rights and position of other sections of the population". The Land Transfer Acts were exclusively concerned with the second of these stipulations to the more and more complete neglect of the first, until, in the end, Palestine became in 1940 the only country in the world, besides National Socialist Germany, in which Jews were denied the right to acquire land. The official justification for this series of laws of increasing rigour was the protection of the Arab tenant-farmer against displacement. In fact, however, the "landless Arab", who so prominently figured in anti-Zionist propaganda, was more a political slogan than a reality. According to the official reports of the Palestine Administration, up to the 1st of January 1936 altogether 664 valid claims for resettlement were received from Arab tenants who had become dispossessed by the land being sold over their heads. In 1936 altogether nine valid claims for Government tenancies were received from landless Arabs, in 1937 six claims, and from then on the Administration was able to report to the Mandatory Commission that no further claims had been put forward.

It should be repeated, then, that the Jews acquired the stretches of land which became the economic and strategic foundation of their State not by force, but by free consent of the owners : Governmental legislation was exclusively designed to safeguard owners' and tenants' interests. The Arabs sold voluntarily, and had the fullest possible protection against acting rashly or being taken advantage of. If despite all warnings and restrictions they persisted in selling, they did it with open eyes. p23-25

The structure of Arab society in Palestine never emerged from a state of mediaeval feudalism. At its top stood a small aristocracy of landowners, a typically Levantine elite, grown up in the traditions of the decaying Turkish Empire of whose corrupt effendi class they formed the Palestine branch. Many of them had served as officers in the Turkish Army ; they had been educated in Cairo or Beirut, had acquired the outward polish of European culture, mainly in the form of familiarity with the works of Maupassant and Claude Farrere, and were living, mostly as absentee landowners, on the proceeds of their domains. These few families and their clans of more distant relatives and retainers played the part of the political parties and groupings in modem countries. The Husseinis, the Nashashibis, the Khalidis and about half a dozen other clans held the country under their complete economic and political sway. They led the opposition against Zionism, and at the same time sold their land to the Jews, through middlemen, at high profits. In 1948 it was the same effendi class which called their followers to a holy war against the Jews, and when the first shots were fired sneaked away to Beirut, leaving the masses leaderless and thereby sealing the fate of Arab resistance in the civil war. The effendis were the political leaders, administrators and vocal chords of Arab Palestine. If they sold their birthright for a mess of pottage they could not claim to have acted in ignorance as Esau did.

As in the neighbouring Arab countries, the Third Estate carried as yet no political weight. The Arab middle-class of professional men, business men and newspaper editors were a thin layer sandwiched in between the feudal landlords on the one hand, with, on the other, the politically illiterate but easily fanaticized mass of hard-working fellaheen and the leisurely drones of the shuks.