The Proletarianization of Palestinians in Israel (ص 171)

غرض

عنوان

The Proletarianization of Palestinians in Israel (ص 171)

المحتوى

(a) The Conquest of Land and the Dispossession of the Palestinian
Peasantry
The dispossession of the Palestinian peasant is a function of the inter-
locking relationship between Arab feudal plunder, British colonialism, and
Zionist land acquisition. The latter, however, played the major and most
systematic role in this process.
Under the heavy yoke of rural indebtedness many peasants were forced
to "free'' themselves by turning over their small holdings to the landlords
and becoming share tenants. Similar was the effect of taxation imposed by
the British authorities, in turn transferring State-controlled land to Zion-
ist settlement institutions. Purchase of land was the predominant method
of land acquisition by the Zionist movement in the Yishuv. Land was pur-
chased mainly from feudal lords, specifically absentee landlords, resulting
in tenant eviction. As Christopher Sykes puts it:
"The land problem of Palestine came primarily from...the sales,
often of very large tracts of country, by absentee landlords to
Zionist individuals and syndicates. A usual condition of such
Sales was that the tenants should be evicted, for of what interest
to Zionist was the possession of Arab-tenanted land? The wret-
ched people who had earned a living, sometimes for many genera-
tions, on the land in question, found themselves forced out of
their homes and deprived without compensation of their only means
of earning bread....Evicted tenants, the real sufferers by Jewish
immigration, were the essence of the Palestine problem." 34
Regardless of the method and form of Zionist land acquisition for Jew-
ish settlement, it was inevitably at the expense of the Palestinian small
peasant and tenant. This fact was recognized even by Arthur Ruppin, the
Jewish Agency's expert on agriculture and settlement, in a secret memorandum
to the Jewish Agency (in 1930), stating:
"Land is the most necessary thing for our establishing roots in
Palestine. Since there are hardly any more arable unsettled lands
in Palestine, we are bound in each case of purchase of land and
its settlement to remove the peasants who cultivated the land
thus far, both owners of the land and tenants...." 35
171

هو جزء من

The Proletarianization of Palestinians in Israel

تاريخ

١٩٧٨

المنشئ

Najwa Hanna Makhoul

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