The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 152)

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The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 152)

المحتوى

136
3.3 Land Tenure
3.3.1 The Disintegration of Musha’a
At the time of the British occupation of Palestine in 1918, musha’a was still
the most prevalent form of land tenure. No figures based on actual surveys are
available, only the estimate of 70 percent on the eve of WWI. What is clear,
however, is that the breakdown of musha’a proceeded at a much faster pace than
the very slow pace of the pre-WWI period.” This faster breakdown can be
explained by the intertwined processes of the accelerated further integration of
Palestine into the world market as mediated by the British colonial government and
European Jewish settlement on the one hand, and the nature of and developments
within the Palestinian Arab rural areas on the other. More specifically, the
breakdown can be seen as an outcome of the spread of a market economy to the
extent it did, with the concomitant increase of peasants’ debt; but equally important
was the issuance of government regulations for the registration of land in
individual holding enacted in 1928, namely the Land (Settlement of Title)
Ordinance.® Besides claiming “better development from greater security of title,”
“Gabriel Baer, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East (London: Frank Cass,
1982), 136. Baer does not explain how he derived this estimate; the same figure
for 1917 is given by Raphael Patai, “Musha’a Tenure and Cooperation in
Palestine,” American Anthropologist 51 (1949): 441.
*’Ya’akov Firestone, “The Land-equalizing Musha Village: A Reassessment,”
in Ottoman Palestine, ed. Gad G. Gilbar (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 94.
Survey I, 233-4; actually the registration of land was initiated in 1920, but the
1928 ordinance was based on the Torens system (used in Australia and other
British colonies) that was more precise.
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The Dispossession of the Peasantry

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المنشئ

Riyad Mousa

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