The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 160)
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- The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 160)
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144
nature of the bulk of the land in Palestine in spite of the rise of large-landed estates
in the nineteenth century. The great majority of peasants owned the land they
cultivated. As elsewhere in the world where land is the main source of income and
livelihood, peasants strongly hold on to their land. According to figures cited by
Granott for the second decade of the twentieth century, there were 3,130,000
dunums held by large owners of which 2,000,000 were in the southern part of the
country (gadas of Gaza and Beersheba),® that is, in the agriculturally marginal
and sparsely populated area of the country. As Zureik points out, the 1,130,000
dunums held by large owners on the northern populated half of the country
comprised less than 10 percent of that area.™
The small landholding nature of the bulk of land and the peasants’ tenacious
hold to it, in spite of hard times, are borne out by the distribution of land sales
(about 55 percent of total) by different holders between 1878 and 1936: 90.6
percent from large landowners (52.6 percent from absentee large owners, 24.6
percent from resident large owners, and 13.4 percent from the government,
churches, large foreign companies, and wealthy businessmen), and 9.4 percent
from fellaheen.® By June 1947, according to Granott’s figures, of the total land
held by European Jewish settlers, 73 percent were acquired from large owners both
8Granott, Land System, 39.
“Elia Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 43.
SGranott, Land System, 277; Granott’s calculations are based on figures
collected by the Statistical Department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - هو جزء من
- The Dispossession of the Peasantry
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- Riyad Mousa
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