Landlessness Among the Arab Peasants
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. By 1920 life had been getting harder for the fellaheen for over 50 years as the notables had used their position to take advantage of Ottoman laws that were meant to benefit the government (and possibly the fellaheen) to increase their power over the fellaheen. Attempts by the British to ameliorate conditions had mixed effects. Improvements in sanitation and health meant the population grew rapidly. Muslim inheritance laws demanded estates were shared so the land each family had to farm always decreased exacerbating the already inequitable, near-feudal social conditions.
The notables, who could see the big picture, scapegoated the Jews and British for the worsening conditions. The Jewish purchase and alienation of land obviously made the situation worse but by blaming the Muslim's "religiously subserviant" Jews the notables hoped to prevent a backlash against themselves. They did not or could not find a method to alleviate the worsening fellaheen life because they and their system were the problem. The relationship between the notables and the fellaheen was a zero-sum game and the crop is getting smaller every season. The best option for the landowner/usuring moneylender was to sell land and invest the return in more profitable ventures before it was too late and some began growing bananas for the export market using landless fellaheen as wage labourers. By promoting occasional/frequent violent outbursts against the Jews they created the path which would end with partition or civil war as the only solutions. During the years of Zionist immigration the Palestinian rulers did not create a viable alternative government or military force. They were too busy fighting each other.
All Palestinian writings, arguments and explanations came from the notables or their employeees or people who depended upon their largesse except for George Antonius who received an allowance from an anti-semite heir to the Crane Plumbing Equipment fortune. The fellaheen didn't have a way to express themselves except through violence and when they broke out it was against the British and not their oppressors or the Jews. Nowadays the Palestinian Publicity Industrial Complex portrays Palestinian Arab violence as "nationalist resistance" to colonialism and imperialism but the fellaheen had no idea what that might mean. They knew what their oppressors (the religious/legal elite were also the landowning/merchant/moneylanding class.
The British government feared the growth of a large landless class living in slums around urban centres would create civil unrest but poor urban life has attractions that poor rural living doesn't, especialy if there is paid work to be had. Joan Peters' "Time Immemorial" had at least one truth though badly argued. Fred Gottheil has demonstrated that in the 1920s Muslim populations around Jewish towns increased far more rapidly that Muslim populations around Muslim towns. As C.S. Jarvis, governor of the Sinai from 1923-36, quipped about illegal immigration into Palestine: "This illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Trans-Jordan and Syria, and it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery." Life as a landless peasant in a Jewish area was obviously more attractive than remaining in an an Arab area.
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 the redistribution procedure favoured the stronger over the weaker and so 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. This is known as the Tragedy of the Commons where individuals acting in their own self-interest deplete or degrade a shared, finite resource, ultimately harming the entire group including themselves. Under the British Mandate's better health services the peasant population rose quickly but the land remained the same area but of poorer fertility. This is known as a vicious circle, a Catch-22 or a death spiral.
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 and the actual ara of the land 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.