Landlessness Among the Arab Peasants
The information I have found most difficult to obtain is the actual number of Arab peasants evicted after the lands they cultivated were sold to the Zionists. I've noticed that much of the pro-Palestinian propaganda claims that very little of the land of Palestine was actually owned by Jews in 1947, when partition was decided upon, and wondered how this can square with the supposedly large number of peasants disposessed of "their" land by sale to Jews by the legal owners. There is an everpresent meme, 55% of the land of Palestine was given to the Jews who only owned 7% of it.
55% of the land of Mandatory Palestine was partitioned for the 600,000 Jews and the 400,000 Arabs who currently lived therein. 160,000 Arabs remained in Israel after the war despite the Arabs having attacked the Jews and initiated a civil war. 50% of that land was wasteland, desert and still is desert 70 years later. There were also 350,000 Jews in camps in Europe who were migrating to Israel once the British allowed it. It was understood that 850,000 Mizrahi Jews were going to be expelled from their home countries should Israel survive. 650,000 arrived as refugees in Israel by 1951. There were more Jewish refugees expelled, without assets, from countries in which they'd lived for centuries, than the Palestinians who fled or left thinking they would return after Arab victory or were expelled by the military. There was no UNRWA for them, no sit down money for generations of Jews, no inherited refugee status. Maybe it was thought they could live on Nobel Prize winning money.
Roughly 46% of the total land area was state land held by the government.
Life as a Palestinian peasant was not one to be envied. You were poor, you were always in debt, a third of your children died at or shortly after birth and your wives died at 35, a good 5 years before you did.
The traditional system of agriculture in 2/3 of the land in Palestine was under the musha' land system. This was a collective ownership or cultivation of land which was periodically redistributed by lot among various clans to insure a measure of equality. Palestinians were only human and so this meant no-one would spend time, effort or money on improving land which would be someone else's within one, two, or five years. Crop rotation and fallowing on musha'-held land was rare, another man would get the future benefit of your current loss. Palestinians were only human and so the redistribution procedure favoured the stronger over the weaker. Under the British Mandate the peasant population rose quickly but the land remained the same area but of poorer fertility. Everything that could go wrong, did.