The Proletarianization of Palestinians in Israel (ص 155)

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عنوان

The Proletarianization of Palestinians in Israel (ص 155)

المحتوى

(430,000 of a total 757,182) were peasants and the large majority of land-
owners were feudal lords.
Prior to World War I, 250 feudal landlords owned 4,143,000 donams (1
donam = 1,000 square meters), which equalled all peasant-owned land. 29
percent of Palestinian peasants were landless. The development of a mone-
tary economy and commodity production allowed for further concentration of
property, mainly land. Consequently, the latifundia structure was formed.
This, in turn, reinforced the imposition of higher taxation on the small
peasant and, in effect, forced the peasant to "free" himself from property
relations, resulting in greater concentration of property and in class
polarization: land-holders, on the one hand, and the bulk of peasants be-
coming seasonal sharecroppers or tenants, on the other. It is worth stress-
ing here that concentration of land in the context of private property took
place upon the distintegration of the original communal ownership of land,
which used to be held collectively in "Masha'a" tenure.
The disintegration of the Masha'a communal land tenure system in order
to provide for more effective taxation was one of the objects of the Ottoman’
Land Code of 1858. Under the yoke of immense rural indebtedness, the indi-
vidual cultivators were, in effect. forced to sell their small holdings to
wealthy merchants and become share-tenants. This is how the land-holding
class emerged from merchant capital, and how the existing subsistence economy
was caught in a process of disintegration as a result of the gradual absorp-
tion of the Turkish Empire into the capitalist orbit. 2°
Industrial production remained retarded. It was only in the 1890s that
the first industrial projects were established in the country; a silk manu-
facturing plant and a raisins-and-spices processing factory in Tantura, fol-
155

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The Proletarianization of Palestinians in Israel

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المنشئ

Najwa Hanna Makhoul

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