The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 177)

غرض

عنوان

The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 177)

المحتوى

161
The findings of the three surveys, in themselves, do not reveal whether the
ownership distribution among those Palestinians who still owned land became less
equitable or not. However, given the general bad conditions in agriculture in the
late 1920s and throughout the 1930s and especially the drop in agricultural prices,
and the fact that peasants sold not only some or all of their holdings may have led
to an increase in the inequity of ownership distribution. On the other hand, when
enough small landholding peasants lose their land, this ironically shows less
concentration of holdings since the land is now divided among less people. By this
time, transfer of land ownership was not primarily confined to sales to European
Jews, but increasingly included sale of land among Palestinian Arabs.'® It is also
safe to assume that a great majority, if not all, of those Palestinians who bought
land were the large landowners, merchants, moneylenders, and better-off peasants
who could afford that, and not small landholding peasants.
In this chapter, I first examined taxation during the Mandate period and its
impact on the peasantry. It was found that there was an increase in the real burden
of taxes as compared to the Ottoman period, or, what is the same thing, an
increase in the appropriated surplus from the peasant’s product.
The government carried out contradictory taxation policies whose net effect
was negative on the peasantry. On the one hand, it abolished tax farming and
reduced the nominal rate of the tithe, both of which were supposed to reduce the
'8See Abstract 1939, 162, for figures on sale of land among Palestinian Arabs
in the 1930s.
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The Dispossession of the Peasantry

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المنشئ

Riyad Mousa

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