AMERICA The
Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 The land question has been a central aspect of the long struggle between the Zionist movement and its product, the State of Israel, on the one hand and the indigenous Arab people of Palestine on the other. One of the chief aims of the Zionist movement, during both the Ottoman and British mandatory periods, was to acquire as much of the land of Palestine as possible for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers. On the Palestinian side, where peasants made up the great majority of the population until the flight and expulsion of 1948, the perceived threat of land loss became an important rallying cry. The issue remains important in our own day is demonstrated by the fact that Israel has expropriated for its own uses as much as 40 percent of the land on the occupied West Bank since its conquest in 1967, and by the occurrence since 1976 of annual “Day of the Land” demonstrations by Israeli Arabs to protest continuing encroachment on what land remains in their hands. An associate professor of history at Emory University, Kenneth Stein looks in this rather technical and narrowly focused study at how the Zionist land-buying institutions were able to acquire relatively large amounts of land from Arab landowners and peasants in the first two decades of British rule. He shows that the Zionists benefited from their access to capital, from the crisis in Palestinian agriculture that forced many Arabs to sell their lands and, perhaps most importantly, from the fact that despite Zionist complaints the whole thrust and structure of the British mandatory administration was designed to further the Zionist aim of securing a territorial basis for a future Jewish state rather than to protect the rights and livelihood of the existing Arab majority. Time and again Zionists were able to influence British policy in their favor and to scuttle British initiatives they found threatening. By 1939, when the British finally imposed restrictions on Zionist land purchases, Jews had already acquired enough land to form the basis for an independent political entity, although it was the dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 that put the new State of Israel on a firm footing. One of Professor Stein’s most interesting contributions is a list of prominent Palestinian families who in the 1920s and 1930s sold land to Zionists. Putting private gain and their class interests above their commitment to the national cause, not a few wealthy Palestinian landowners sold tracts to the Zionists at the same time as they were denouncing the whole Zionist enterprise and demanding an end to Jewish immigration and land purchases. That such transactions took place has been public knowledge for some time, but Professor Stein has provided very useful—and very damning—details. A later generation of Palestinians would criticize and repudiate the Palestinian leaders of the mandatory period for their hypocrisy and selfishness and for their failure to provide the progressive leadership that might have averted the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people. The Land Question in Palestine is probably not for the general reader with an interest in the struggle over Palestine. But it is the most comprehensive and careful scholarly study of this crucial issue available and as such constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the history of this tragic and seemingly irresolvable conflict. |