Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880-1948 by Moshe Aumann

Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880-1948

by  Moshe  Aumann

A great deal has been spoken and written over the years on the

subject  of  land  ownership  in  Israel—or,  before 1948,  Palestine.

Arab propaganda, in particular, has been at pains to convince the

world,  with  the  aid  of  copious  statistics,  that  the  Arabs  "own"

Palestine,  morally  and  legally,  and  that  whatever  Jewish  land

ownership there may be is negligible.  From this conclusions have

been  drawn (or implied)  with regard to the sovereign rights of

the State of Israel and the problem of the Arab refugees.

The  Arab case against  Israel,  in  the  matter  of  Jewish  land

purchases,  rests  mainly  on  two  claims: (1)  that  the  Palestinian

Arab farmer was peacefully and contentedly working his land in

the latter part of the 19th century and  the early part of the 20th

when along came the European Jewish immigrant, drove him off

his  land,  disrupted  the  normal  development  of  the  country  and

created a vast class of landless, dispossessed Arabs; (2) that a small

Jewish  minority, owning an even smaller proportion  of Palestinian

lands  (5 per cent as against the Arabs' 95 per cent), illegally made

itself master of Palestine in 1948.

Our purpose in this pamphlet is to set the record straight by

marshalling  the  facts  and figures pertaining  to  this  very  complex

subject, on the basis of the most reliable and authoritative information

available,  and to trace the history of modern  Jewish  resettlement

purely from the point of view of the sale and purchase of land.

Pre-1948  Conditions  in  Palestine

A study of  Palestine under Turkish  rule reveals  that already  at

the beginning of the 18th century, long before Jewish land purchases

and  large-scale Jewish  immigration  started,  the  position  of  the

Palestinian  fellah (peasant)  had begun to deteriorate. The heavy

burden  of  taxation,  coming on  top  of  chronic  indebtedness  to

money-lenders, drove a growing number of farmers to place them-

selves  under  the  protection  of  men  of  wealth  or  of  the  Moslem

religious  endowment  fund (Waqf),  with  the  result  that  they were

eventually compelled to give up their title to the land, if not their actual

residence upon and cultivation of it.

Until the passage of the Turkish Land Registry Law in 1858,

there were no official deeds to attest to a man's legal title to a parcel

of land; tradition alone had to suffice to establish such title— and

usually  it did.  And yet,  the  position  of  Palestine's  farmers was  a

precarious one, for there were constant blood-feuds between families,

clans and entire villages, as well as periodic incursions by rapacious

118    The Case for Israel

Bedouin tribes, such as the notorious Ben Sakk'r, of whom H. B.

Tristram (The  Land  of  Israel:  A  Journal  of  Travels  in  Palestine,

Society  for  Promoting Christian  Knowledge,  London, 1865)  wrote

that they "can muster   1,000  cavalry and  always join  their  brethren

when  a raid  or war is on  the  move.  They  have  obtained  their present possessions gradually and, in great measure, by driving out the fellahin (peasants), destroying their villages and reducing their rich corn-fields to pasturage." (p. 488.)

Tristram goes on to present a remarkable and highly revealing

description of conditions in Palestine on both sides of the Jordan

River in the middle of the 19th century—a description that belies

the Arab claim of a tranquil, normally developing Palestinian rural

economy allegedly disrupted by Jewish immigration and settlement.

A few years ago,  the whole Ghor was in the hands of the fellahin, and

much of it cultivated for corn.  Now the whole of it is in the hands of the

Bedouin,  who  eschew  all  agriculture,  except  in  a  few  spots  cultivated

here  and  there  by  their slaves;  and  with  the  Bedouin  come  lawlessness

and  the  uprooting  of  all  Turkish  authority.   No  government  is  now

acknowledged  on  the  east  side;  and  unless  the  Porte  acts  with  greater

firmness and  caution  than  is  his  wont .  Palestine  will  be  desolated

and given up to the nomads.

The same thing is now going on over the plain of Sharon, where, both

in the north and  south,  land  is going out  of cultivation,  and  whole villages

rapidly  disappearing  from  the  face  of  the  earth.  Since  the  year

1838,  no less than 20  villages have been thus erased  from  the map and

the  stationary population  extirpated.  Very  rapidly  the  Bedouin  are  encroaching

wherever horse can be ridden;  and  the Government is  utterly powerless to resist

them or to defend its  subjects. (p. 490)

For descriptions of other parts of the country, we are indebted to

the  1937  Report  of  the  Palestine  Royal  Commission—though,  for

lack of space, we can quote but the briefest passages.  In Chapter  9,

para.  43 the Report quotes an eye-witness account of the  condition

of the Maritime Plain in    1913:

The  road  leading from Gaza to the  north  was only a  summer  track

suitable for transport by camels and carts ... no orange groves, orchards

or vineyards were to be seen until one reached Yabna village. . Not

in  a  single  village  in  all  this  area  was  water  used  for  irrigation.

Houses were all of mud.  No windows were anywhere  to be seen.

The ploughs used were of wood. . The yields were very poor.

The sanitary conditions in the village were horrible.  Schools did  not

exist.  . The rate of infant mortality was very high.

The area north of Jaffa  . consisted of two distinctive parts. . The

eastern part, in the direction of the hills, resembled in culture that of the

Gaza-Jaffa area. .  The  western  part,  towards  the  sea,  was  almost  a

desert.  . The villages in this area were few and thinly populated. Many

ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted  by  their inhabitants.

The  Huleh  basin,  below  the  Syrian  border,  is  described  as

"including a number of Arab villages and a large papyrus swamp

draining south into Lake Huleh .  a  triangular strip  of  land  some 

Appendix     2        119

44 sq. miles in area.  . This tract is irrigated in a very haphazard

manner by a network of small, primitive canals. It is, owing to

over-irrigation,  now the most malarious tract in all  Palestine.

It might become one of the most fertile."

With regard to yet another region in Palestine—the Beisan   (Beit

Shean)  area—we quote from  the report of  Mr.  Lewis  French,

Director of Development appointed by the British Government in 1931:

We found it inhabited by fellahin who lived in mud hovels and suffered

severely from the prevalent malaria. . Large areas of their lands were

uncultivated and covered with weeds.  There were no trees, no vegetables.

The fellahin, if not themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor

these  and  other  criminals.  The  individual  plots  of  cultivation

changed hands annually.  There was little public security, and the fallahin's

lot was an alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors

the Bedouin.

This, then, was the picture of Palestine in the closing decades of

the 19th century and up to the First World  War:  a land that was

overwhelmingly  desert,  with  nomads  continually  encroaching  on

the settled areas and its farmers; a lack of elementary facilities and

equipment; peasants wallowing in poverty, ignorance and disease,

saddled with debts (interest rates at times were as high as 60 per

cent)  and threatened by warlike nomads or neighboring clans.

The result was a growing neglect of the soil and a flight from the

villages, with a mounting concentration of lands in the hands of a

small  number  of  large  landowners,  frequently  residing  in  such

distant Arab capitals as Beirut and Damascus, Cairo and Kuwait.

Here, in other words, was a social and economic order that had all the

earmarks of a medieval feudal society.

Who  Dispossessed  the  Palestinian  Peasant?

The Palestinian peasant was indeed being dispossessed, but by

his fellow-Arabs: the local sheikh and village elders, the Government

tax-collector, the merchants and money-lenders; and, when he was

a tenant-farmer (as was usually the case), by the  absentee-owner.

By the time the season's crop had been distributed among all these,

little if anything remained for him and his family, and new debts

generally had to be incurred to pay off the old. Then the Bedouin

came along and took their "cut", or drove the hapless fellah off

the land altogether.

This was the "normal" course of events in     19th century Palestine.

It was disrupted by the advent of the Jewish pioneering enterprise,

which sounded the death-knell of this medieval feudal system. In

this  way  the  Jews  played  an  objective  revolutionary  role.  Small

wonder that it aroused the ire and active opposition of the Arab

sheikhs, absentee landowners, money-lenders and Bedouin bandits.

120    The Case for Israel

Jewish   Land   Purchases

It is important to note that the first enduring Jewish agricultural

settlement in modern Palestine was founded not by European refugees,

but by a group of old-time families, leaving the overcrowded

Jewish  Quarter of the  Old  City of Jerusalem. (According to the

Turkish census of 1875,  by  that  time  Jews  already  constituted  a

majority  of  the  population  of  Jerusalem  and  by          1905  comprised

two-thirds  of  its  citizens.   The  Encyclopedia  Britannica  of   1910

gives the population figure as     60,000,  of whom 40,000 were Jews.)

In       1878 they founded the village of  Petach Tikva in the Sharon

Plain—a village that was to become known as the  "Mother of

Jewish  Settlements"  in  Palestine.  Four  years  later  a  group  of pioneering

immigrants from Russia settled in Rishon le-Zion. Other farming villages

followed in rapid succession.

When considering Jewish land purchases and settlements,  four factors

should be borne in mind:

(1)  Most of the land purchases involved large tracts belonging to

          absentee  owners. (Virtually  all  of  the  Jezreel  Valley,  for

example, belonged in       1897  to  only  two  persons:  the  eastern

portion to the Turkish Sultan, and the western part to the richest banker

in Syria, Sursuk "the Greek".)

(2)  Most of the land purchased had not been cultivated previously

          because it was swampy, rocky, sandy or, for some other reason,

          regarded as uncultivable. This is supported by the findings of

          the Peel Commission Report (p. 242): "The Arab charge that

the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land

cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange

groves  was  sand  dunes  or  swamp  and  uncultivated  when  it

was purchased . there was at the time at least of the earlier

sales  little  evidence  that  the  owners  possessed  either  the  resources

or training needed to develop the land." (1937)

(3)  While,  for this  reason,  the early  transactions  did  not  involve

          unduly large sums of money, the price of land began to rise

          as Arab landowners took advantage of the growing demand for

          rural  tracts.  The  resulting  infusion  of  capital  into  the

          Palestinian  economy  had  noticeable  beneficial  effects  on  the

          standard of living of all the inhabitants.

(4)  The  Jewish  pioneers  introduced  new  farming  methods  which

          improved the soil and crop cultivation and were soon emulated

          by Arab farmers.

The following figures show land purchases by the three leading Jewish 

land-buying organizations and  by  individual  Jews between 1880 and 1935.

Appendix 2

JEWISH LAND PURCHASES, 1880-1935 (in dunams*)

Total  Govern-       From Large  tracts**

121

Organization land acquired PICA (Palestine Jewish Colonization Assoc.)        469,407

Palestine Land Development  Co.        579,492

Jewish National Fund*** *        836,396 Until 1930

1931-1947

Individual Jews      432,100

* 4 dunams =  1 acre.

Government concessions

39,520

66,513***

private owners       Percent Dunams    (approx.)

429,887       293,545       70

512,979       455,169       90

270,084       239,170       90

566,312       50

432,100       50

** The  large  tracts  often  belonged  to  absentee  landlords.

*** Land situated in the sandy Beersheba and marshy Huleh districts.

* ". . . created on December 25,         1901, to ensure that land would be purchased

for  the Jewish  workers who were  to be  personally responsible for its cultivation.

"Since the J.N.F. was as concerned with conforming to socialist ideals

as  with  intensive  economic  exploitation  of  land,  its  Charter  was

opposed to the use of lands purchased by it as private property.  The

J.N.F. retained the freehold of the lands, while the people working it

are only life tenants.

"The capital of the Jewish National Fund was essentially raised from

small  regular  donations  from  millions  of  Jewish  craftsmen,  laborers,

shop-owners and intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe where the

shadow  of  genocide  was  already  apparent,  who  felt  concerned  about

the return of Jews to Zion.

"Contrary to colonialist enterprises, which were seeking an exorbitant

profit  from  land  extorted  from  the  colonized  peoples,  Zionist

settlement  discouraged  private  capital  as  its  enterprise  was  of  a

socialist  nature  based  on  the  refusal  to  exploit  the  worker." (Kurt

Niedermaler,  Colonization  without  Colonialism,  Youth  and  Hechalutz

Dept., Jewish  Agency, Jerusalem, 1969).

From the above table it will be seen that the proportion of land

purchased from large  (usually absentee) owners ranged from about

50 to 90 per cent.

"The total area of land in Jewish possession at the end of June

1947," writes A. Granott in The Land System in Palestine (Eyre

and Spottiswoode, London, 1952, p. 278), "amounted to 1,850,000

dunams, of this 181,100 dunams had been obtained through con-

cessions  from  the  Palestinian  Government,  and  about 120,000

dunams  had  been  acquired  from  Churches,  from  foreign  companies,

from the Government otherwise than by concessions, and so

forth.  It was estimated  that  1,000,000 dunams  and  more,  or  57

122    The Case for Israel

per cent, had been acquired from large Arab landowners, and if to

this we  add  the  lands  acquired  from  the  Government,  Churches,

and foreign companies, the percentage will amount to seventy-three.

From  the  fellaheen  there  had  been  purchased  about 500,000

dunams, or 27 per cent, of the total acquired. The result of Jewish land

acquisitions, at least to a considerable part, was that properties which had

been in the hands of large and medium owners were converted into

holding of small peasants."

The   League   of  Nations  Mandate

When the League of Nations conferred the Mandate for Palestine

upon  Great  Britain  in 1922,  it  expressly  stipulated  that  "The

Administration of Palestine  .  shall  encourage,  in  cooperation

with the Jewish Agency .  . close settlement by Jews on the land,

including State  lands and waste  lands  not  acquired  for public

purposes" (Article 6), and that it "shall introduce a land system

appropriate to the needs of the country, having regard, among other things, 

to  the  desirability  of  promoting  the  close  settlement  and intensive

cultivation of the land." (Article 11)

British  policy,  however,  followed  a different course,  deferring to

the extremist Arab opposition to the above-mentioned provision of

the Mandate. Of some 750,000  dunams of cultivable  State  lands,

350,000,  or  nearly half,  had  been  allotted  by 1949  to  Arabs  and

only 17,000  dunams  to  Jews.  This  was  in  clear  violation  of  the

terms of the Mandate. Nor, ironically enough, did it help the Arab

peasants for whose benefit these transactions were ostensibly carried out.

The glaring examples of this policy are the case of the Besian lands

and that of the Huleh Concession.

Beisan Lands

Under the Ghor-Mudawwarra Agreement of 1921, some 225,000

dunams of potentially fertile wasteland in the Besian   (Beit Shean)

area were handed over to Arab farmers on terms severely condemned

not only by Jews but also by such British experts as Lewis

French and Sir John Hope-Simpson. More than half of the land

was irrigable,  and, according to  the British experts, eight dunams

of irrigated  land  per capita (or 50-60  dunams  per  family)  were

sufficient  to  enable  a  family  to  maintain  itself  on  the  land.  Yet

many farmers received far more than that: six families, of whom

two lived in Syria, received a combined area of about 7,000 dunams;

four families (some living in  Egypt)  received  a combined  area of

3,496 dunams; another received 3,450 and yet another,  1,350.

Thus  the  Ghor-Mudawwarra  Agreement  was  instrumental  in

creating a new group of large landowners. Possessing huge tracts,

most of which they were unable to till, these owners began  to sell

the surplus lands at speculative prices.  In  his         1930  Report,  Sir

Appendix 2  123

Hope-Simpson wrote of the Agreement that it had deprived the Government 

of  "the  control  of  a  large  area  of  fertile  land eminently  suited  for 

development  and  for  which  there  is  ample water for irrigation," and that

"the grant of the land has led to speculation on a considerable scale."

Huleh   Area

For twenty years  (from 1914  to 1934)  the Huleh Concession—

some 57,000 dunams of partly swamp-infested but potentially highly

fertile  land  in  north-eastern  Palestine—was  in  Arab  hands.  The

Arab concessionaires were to drain and develop the land so as to

make additional tracts available for cultivation, under very attractive

terms offered by the Government (first Turkish,  then British).

However, this was never done, and in 1934 the concession was sold

to  a Jewish  concern,  the  Palestine  Land  Development  Company,

at a huge profit. The Government added several onerous conditions

concerning  the  amount  of  land (from  the  drained  and  newly

developed tracts)  that had to be handed over—without reimbursement

for drainage and irrigation costs—to Arab tenant-farmers in

the area.

All  told,  hundreds  of  millions  of  dollars  were  paid  by  Jewish

buyers  to  Arab  landowners.  Official  records  show  that  in   1933

£854,796  was paid  by Jewish individuals  and  organizations  for

Arab land, mostly large estates; in  1934 the figure was   £1,647,836

and in 1935, £1,699,488. Thus, in the course of only three years

£4,202,180   (more than   20 million dollars at the prevailing rate of

exchange)  was  paid  out  to Arab  landowners      (Palestine  Royal

Commission Report,       1937).

To understand the magnitude of the prices paid for these lands,

we need only look at some comparative figures. In  1944, Jews paid

between       $1,000  and  $1,100  per acre  in  Palestine,  mostly for arid

or semi-arid land; in  the same year rich black soil in  the state of

Iowa was selling for about         $110  per  acre       (U.S. Department of

Agriculture).

Effects  on  Arab  Population

In  those  instances  where  as  a  result  of  such  transactions  Arab

tenant-farmers were displaced (on one year's notice), compensation

in cash or other land was paid, as required by the    1922  Protection

of Cultivators Ordinance; the Jewish land-buying associations often

paid more than the law required (Pollack  and  Boehm,  The  Keren

Kayemeth   Le-Israel).   Of 688  such  tenants  between 1920  and

1930, 526 remained in agricultural occupations, some 400 of them

finding other  land  (Palestine  Royal  Commission  Report, 1937,

Chapter 9, para. 61).

124    The Case for Israel

Investigations initiated in  1931  by Mr. Lewis French disposed of

the  charge  that  a  large  class  of  landless  or  dispossessed  Arab

farmers was created as a result of Jewish land purchases. According

to  the  British  Government  report     (Memoranda prepared by the

Government of Palestine, London       1937,  Colonia No. 133,  p.        37),

the total number of applications for registration as landless Arabs

was 3,271. Of these, 2,607 were rejected on the ground that they did

not come within the category of landless Arabs. Valid claims were

recognized  in  the  case  of 664  heads  of  families,  of  whom 347

accepted  the  offer  of  resettlement  by  the  Government.  The

remainder refused either because they had found satisfactory employment

elsewhere or because they were not accustomed to irrigated

cultivation or the climate of the new areas (Peel Report, Chapter 9,

para. 60).

Purchases of land  by Jews in  the  hill  country  had  always  been

very small and, according to the investigations by Mr.  French, of

71  applications by Arabs claiming to be landless, 68  were turned

down.

Arab  Population   Changes  Due  to  Jewish  Settlement

Another  Arab  claim  disproved  by  the  facts  is  that  Zionist "colonialism"

led to the disruption and ruin of the Arab Palestinian society and economy.

Statistics  published  in  the  Palestine  Royal  Commission  Report

(p. 279)  indicate a remarkable phenomenon: Palestine, traditionally

a country of Arab emigration, became after World War I a country

of Arab immigration.  In addition  to recorded figures for 1920-36,

the Report devotes a special section to illegal Arab immigration.

While there are no precise totals on the extent of Arab immigration

between  the two World  Wars,  estimates vary  between 60,000  and

100,000. The principal cause of the change of direction was Jewish

development,  which created  new and  attractive work opportunities

and, in general, a standard of living previously unknown in the

Middle East.

Another major factor in the rapid growth of the Arab population

was, of course, the rate of natural increase, among the highest in

the world. This was accentuated by the steady reduction of the

previously high  infant  mortality  rate  as  a  result  of  the  improved

health and sanitary conditions introduced by the Jews.

Altogether, the non-Jewish element in Palestine's population        (not

including Bedouin)  expanded  between         1922  and     1929  alone  by

more than 75 per cent. The Royal Commission Report makes these

interesting observations:

The shortage of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land

acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population,     (p.     242)

Appendix     2        125

We  are  also  of  the  opinion  that  up  till  now  the  Arab  cultivator  has

benefited, on the whole, both from the work of the British administration

and from the presence of Jews in the country. Wages have gone up; the

standard of living has improved; work on roads and buildings has been

plentiful.  In  the  Maritime  Plains  some  Arabs  have  adopted  improved

methods of cultivation. (p. 241)

Jewish development served as an incentive not only to Arab entry

into Palestine from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and other neighboring

countries,  but  also  to  Arab  population  movements  within  the

country—to cities and areas where there was a large Jewish concentration.

Some idea of this phenomenon may be gained from the

following official figures:

Changes in towns: The Arab population in predominantly Arab

towns rose only slightly (if at all) between the two World Wars: in

Hebron—from  16,650 in 1922  to       22,800 in      1943; Nablus—from

15,931  to    23,300; Jenin—from        2,737  to      3,900; Bethlehem—from

6,658 to       8,800. Gaza's population actually decreased from   17,426

in 1922 to 17,045 in 1931.

On the other hand, in the three major Jewish cities the Arab

population shot up during this period,  far beyond  the  rate  of

natural increase: Jerusalem—from        28,571  in     1922 to 56,400       (97

per cent); Jaffa—from 27,437 to 62,600        (134 per cent); Haifa—

from 18,404 to 58,200 (216 per cent).

Changes in  rural areas: The population of the predominantly

Arab  Beersheba  district dropped  between  1922  and     1939  from

71,000 to 49,000 (the rate of natural increase should have resulted

in a rise to 89,000). In the Bethlehem district the figure increased

from 24,613 to about 26,000     (after falling to       23,725 in      1929). In

the Hebron area it went up from 51,345  to    59,000         (the natural

increase rate dictated a rise to 72,000).

In contrast to these declines or comparatively slight increases in

exclusively  Arab-inhabited  areas,  in  the  Nazareth,  Beit  Shean,

Tiberius and Acre districts—where large-scale Jewish settlement and

rural development was underway—the figure rose from 89,600 in

1922 to some 151,000 in 1938 (by about 4.5 per cent per annum,

compared with a natural increase rate of 2.5-3 per cent).

In the largely Jewish Haifa area the number of Arab peasants

increased by 8 per cent a year during the same period. In the Jaffa

and Ramle districts (heavily Jewish populated), the Arab rural

population grew from 42,300 to some 126,000—an annual increase

of      12  per  cent,  or more  than  four  times  as  much  as  can  be

attributed to natural increase (L. Shimony, The Arabs of Palestine,

Tel-Aviv,     1947, pp. 422-23).

One  reason  for  the  Arab  gravitation  toward  Jewish-inhabited

areas, and from neighboring countries to Palestine, was the incomparably

126    The Case for Israel

higher wage scales paid there, as may be seen from the following table.

DAILY WAGE SCALES, 1943

          (in mils)

Unskilled     Skilled labor

Palestine      220-250       350-600

Egypt 30-50 70-200

Syria  80-100         150-300

Iraq    50      70-200

Source:  A.  Khoushy,  Brit  Poali  Eretz-Israel,       1943, p. 25.

The capital received by Arab landowners for their surplus holdings

was used for improved and intensive cultivation or invested in

other enterprises. Turning again to the Report of the  Palestine

Royal Commission (p. 93), we find the following conclusions: "The

large import of Jewish capital into  Palestine has had  a general

fructifying effect on the economic life of the whole country.

The expansion of Arab industry and citric-culture has been largely

financed by the capital thus obtained. . . . Jewish example has done

much to improve Arab cultivation.       . The increase in Arab

population is most marked in areas affected by Jewish development."

During  World  War  II,  the  Arab  population  influx  mounted apace,

as is attested by the  UNRWA  Review, Information Paper No. 6 (September 1962) :

A considerable movement of people is known to have occurred, particularly

during the Second World War, years when new opportunities of employment

opened  up  in  the  towns  and  on  military  works  in  Palestine.

These wartime prospects and, generally, the higher rate of industrialization

in  Palestine  attracted  many new  immigrants  from  the  neighboring

countries,  and  many  of  them  entered  Palestine  without  their  presence

being officially recorded.

Land Ownership in       1948

The claim is often made that in 1948 a Jewish minority owning

only 5 per cent of the land of Palestine made itself master of the Arab majority,

which owned 95 per cent of the land.

In May 1948 the State of Israel was established in only part of the

area allotted by the original League of Nations Mandate. 8.6 per

cent of the land was owned by Jews and 3.3 per cent by Israeli

Arabs, while 16.9 per cent had been abandoned by Arab owners who

imprudently heeded the call from neighboring countries to "get

out of the way" while the invading Arab armies made short shrift of

Israel. The rest of the land—over 70 per cent—had been vested in

Appendix 2  127

the Mandatory Power, and accordingly reverted to the  State of

Israel as its legal heir. (Government of Palestine, Survey of Pales-

tine, 1946, British Government Printer, p. 257.)

The greater part of this 70 per cent consisted of the Negev, some

3,144,250 acres all told, or close to 50 per cent of the 6,580,000

acres in all of Mandatory Palestine. Known as Crown or State Lands, 

this  was  mostly  uninhabited  arid  or  semi-arid  territory, inherited

originally by the Mandatory Government from Turkey. In 1948 it

passed to the Government of Israel.

These lands had not been owned by Arab farmers—neither under the

British Mandate nor under the preceding regime. Thus it is obvious

that the contention that 95 per cent of the land—whether of Mandatory

Palestine or of the State of Israel—had belonged to Arabs has

absolutely no foundation in fact.

*        *        •

There is perhaps no better way of concluding and summing up

this study than to quote from an article entitled Is Israel a Thorn

or a Flower in the Near East? by Abdul Razak Kader, the Algerian

political writer, now living in exile in Paris (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 1,

1969):

"The Nationalists of the states neighboring on Israel, whether

they are in the government or in business,  whether  Palestinian,

Syrian or Lebanese, or town dwellers of tribal origin, all know that

at the beginning of the century and during the British Mandate

the marshy plains and stone hills were sold to the Zionists by their

fathers or uncles for gold, the very gold which is often the origin

of their own political or commercial careers. The nomadic or semi-

nomadic peasants who inhabited the frontier regions know full well

what the green plains, the afforested hills and the flowering fields

of today's Israel were like before.

"The Palestinians who are today refugees in the neighboring countries

and who were adults at the time of their flight know all this, and no

anti-Zionist propaganda—pan-Arab or pan-Moslem— can make them

forget that their present nationalist exploiters are the worthy sons of their

feudal exploiters of yesterday and that the thorns of their life are of Arab,

not Jewish, origin."