The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 164)

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The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 164)

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148
feddan;, and, finally, 6,940 earner/families or 29 percent were classified as
laborers.
The last percentage, 29 percent, has been interpreted and generalized by
Simpson to mean that it represents the percentage of landless villagers for the
whole country.®’ This interpretation has been strongly attacked by Stein as
“dubious extrapolation.””° It is worthwhile to present Stein’s critique and test its
validity as it obviously bears on our discussion of differentiation in Chapter 6. In
Stein’s words:
He [Simpson] deduced that 29.4 percent of these family heads were
doubtless all landless men who previously had been cultivators. . .
The Johnson-Crosbie Report never equated the laboring class with a
landless condition. Nor did the report say that 29.4 percent of the
population in the 104 representative villages or among the 86,980
rural Arab families was landless. Hope-Simpson conveniently chose
figures to fit his philosophy. Clearly, he wanted to ascribe to Jewish
land purchase and settlement the responsibility for the creation of a
landless rural Arab class. He mistakenly or deliberately assumed that
it was not customary practice in Palestine to have laborers work
without owning land. Farm servants, field laborers, crop watchers,
manure carriers, ploughmen, threshers, herdsmen, and shepherds
sometimes worked on land without possessing either formal title to it
or formal written tenancy agreements with a landlord [emphasis
mine].”!
There are several problems with Stein’s statement. First, Stein
misrepresents Hope-Simpson: The latter never said that these men had previously
all been cultivators. Simpson explicitly states, “It is not known how many of these
®Hope-Simpson Report, 142.
Kenneth W. Stein, The Land in Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 109.
"Ibid.
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The Dispossession of the Peasantry

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Riyad Mousa

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