Zionist immigration to Palestine started at the beginning of the 1880s. The entire population of Palestine in 1881 was estimated at 457,000. Palestinian Jews numbered between thirteen thousand and twenty thousand;220 most of them lived in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safad, and Tiberius. The majority of Jerusalem’s inhabitants were Jews, the “old Yishuv,” extremely orthodox, devoting their energies to religious scholarship. They subsisted primarily on irregular charitable donations from Jewish communities in other countries. 221
The Palestinian Arabs knew of Zionism from 1882, when the immigration of Jews aroused the fears of Arab peasants who lived near the Jewish colonies, and of Arab city dwellers, particularly in Jerusalem and Jaffa. Arab fears intensified after the start of the second wave of immigration in 1903. In the mid-1880s, Zionist immigrants comprised between five hundred and a thousand immigrants. In 1893, the combined population of the nine colonies founded in the 1880s was about two thousand. In 1889, there were more than four thousand settlers in eighteen colonies; and a decade later, in 1908, there were some ten thousand settlers in twenty-six colonies. 222
The conflict between the settlers and the Arab peasants began with disputes regarding grazing, where the newcomers viewed the incursions of Arab shepherds with their sheep and goats as trespassing and used force to expel them. At times, they rounded up the animals and fined their owners. More serious incidents arose over questions related to land. When villagers defaulted on their debts, the moneylenders would confiscate their land and sell it to the Jews. But in some cases the moneylenders sold the Jews more land than was actually theirs to sell. When, in 1884, the settlers began working more of what they considered their land, clashes began taking place in the settlements of Peta Tikva, Gedera, and Hadera, among others. 223
The fellahin were behind the Palestinian struggle against Zionist colonization. Palestinian peasants played a major role in making Zionism a central issue in Palestine’s political life. Their resistance to land purchases by Zionists in Tiberias in 1901–1902 and in Affula in 1910–1911 alerted Palestinian leadership to the great threat of Zionism. The strongest demonstration of such resistance was the armed clash between the peasants of Affula and the settlers of Merhavia in May 1911, which arose when the Palestinian peasants discovered that the land they cultivated had been sold from under their feet by the Sursuqs in Beirut.
In urban areas, the situation was not much different. The rapidly growing Jewish population of Jerusalem, Jaffa, and other towns from 1881 onward alarmed the local elites, including merchants and craftsmen who felt threatened by economic competition from Jews. In the decade between 1881 and 1891, the Jewish population of Jerusalem almost doubled, from 13,920 to 25,322. In Jaffa, the Jewish population in 1893 had reached 2,500, having been virtually nonexistent in 1880. In response, on June 24, 1891, the notables of Jerusalem sent a telegram to the Ottoman grand vizier asking him to halt Jewish immigration into Palestine and to bar Jews from purchasing land. 224
In 1899, Yusef Dia Pasha alKhalidi addressed a carefully worded letter in French to Zak Khan, the chief rabbi of France, who was a friend of Theodor Herzl. He noted that Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, that it was inhabited by Muslims and Christians, and that its holy places were dear to the hearts of millions of Christians and Muslims around the world. He also pointed out that despite Jewish financial power, Palestine could only be acquired by war. Concluding his letter, al-Khalidi called on the Jews to leave Palestine “in peace.” 225
In 1897, Muhammad Tahir alHusayni, the mufti of Jerusalem, set up a local commission to examine land sales to Jews. Despite the opposition of the Ottoman government of Sultan Abdul Hamid, little could be done to stop Jewish settlement in Palestine. The “capitulations”—a term referring to the legal position of foreign citizens in the Ottoman Empire, giving them special privileges such as the right to worship, special tax status, and exemption from the jurisdiction of the local courts throughout the Ottoman Empire—permitted the Jewish immigrants to seek the protection of their consuls after the expiration of their entry permit. The practice of bribery enabled the Jews to pay Ottoman officials to allow them to stay. In addition, Jews were able to enter Palestine through Egypt and purchase land in the names of established Jews who were already Ottoman citizens. 226
After 1908 CUP coup, when press censorship was lifted, thirty-five newspapers were founded in Syria and Palestine. The press was the most effective vehicle for expressing the view of the Palestinians against Zionism. The biweekly publication Al-Asma’i, founded in Jaffa in September 1908 by Hanna Abdullah alIsa, opposed Jewish immigration, characterizing the Jews as a threat and criticizing the capitulations. In 1908, Najib Nassar founded al-Karmil, a weekly paper which he published in Haifa. Alarmed by the land sales to the Jews, al-Karmil reran articles from major papers in Beirut and Cairo, in addition to Nassar’s own articles criticizing the Zionists’ activities in Palestine. Nassar also wrote a book entitled al-Sahyuniyya (Zionism). Al-Mufid was founded in Beirut in 1909, by Abd alGhani alUraysi and Fuad Hantas, both members of al-Fatat. By 1910 al-Mufid had become an influential daily throughout Syria, featuring articles written by the best-known spokesmen of the national Arab movement. Al-Mufid strongly opposed the sale of Palestinian lands to those suspected of working for the Zionist movement and condemned Arab landlords who sold their land to the Zionists. 227
Ruhi alKhalidi and Said alHusayni, Palestinian members of the Ottoman parliament, used the parliament as a platform to raise awareness of the Zionist threat and to stop Jewish settlement in Palestine. In his manuscript Kitab al-Mas’ala al-Sahyuniyya, Ruhi al-Khalidi presented the ideological and organizational aspects of Zionism and pointed to the increase in Jewish immigration and setting up of Jewish colonies and Jewish colonial institutions, including the Jewish Colonization Association founded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch in 1891, and the schools and vocational centers set up by the Alliance Israelite Universelle founded in 1860 in Paris. 228 Many Arab intellectuals in Syria and Cairo voiced their opposition to Zionism.
The British occupation of Palestine in December 1917 was a turning point in the history of the Zionist movement. Between 1882 and 1917, only about 35,000 Zionists managed to settle in Palestine. In 1917, Weizmann obtained the “charter” from Britain that Herzl had failed to obtain from Turkey. The Palestinian resistance was now confronting not only Zionism, but even more Britain, which had adopted the Zionist project as part of its imperial strategic plan for the control of the Middle East. As stated earlier, Britain aimed to control the Ottoman Middle East terri tories, which represented the key supply routes to India, the crown jewel of the British Empire. The Zionist colonial project of Palestine definitely served British interests. If a million Jews were moved into Palestine within the next fifty or sixty years, it would constitute a barrier separating the Suez Canal from the Black Sea and any hostility which might come from that direction. For this reason, the British gave considerable support to Jewish settlers in Palestine. In the 1920s, however, especially between 1920 and 1923, the Palestinian Arabs were more formidable as a result of their numerical superiority. During this period the Zionists were almost completely dependent on the British for the survival of their project.
Between 1923 and 1929, the development of the Jewish national home in Palestine was dramatic. After the Balfour Declaration, by mid1926, 100,000 Jews had entered Palestine as immigrants. The land acquired by the Zionists at least doubled by 1929. Membership of the Histadrut rose from 4,433 at its founding in 1920 to 27,000 in 1930. The number of Jewish agricultural settlements, by 1931, had doubled to 110, and their population had tripled to 38,000. The number of Jewish industrial employees rose from 4,750 in 1920 to 10,968 in 1929. And the Hebrew University of Jerusalem formally opened in 1925. 229
The British mandate government in Palestine, under Samuel and the other high commissioners, undertook the implementation of the Balfour Declaration, assisting the Zionists in their project of colonizing Palestine. To fulfill the promise and to achieve their goal of planting a foreign body in the center of the Arab World, Britain facilitated the following:
- Jewish immigration to Palestine
- The acquisition of land
- The establishment of various industrial projects by the Zionists and the creation of a separate Jewish economy
- The establishment of an independent education system
- The establishment of a strong military apparatus
All these measures led to the establishment of a Jewish state within a state.
Immigration and Land Acquisition
Immigration and land acquisition were the Zionists’ main strategies for the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine. One of the early actions of the new civil administration was to enact the first Immigration Ordinance on August 26, 1920, fixing a quota of 16,500 for the first year. At the end of World War I, Palestine had a population of about 700,000 persons, of whom 574,000 were Muslims, 70,000 were Christians, and 56,000 were Jews. The Jewish population were mostly Arabs of the Jewish faith. About 12,000 of these Jews lived on the land as farmers; the rest carried on business in the principal towns, mainly Jerusalem.
Reliable data on the population of Palestine was collected twice during the thirty years of British administration. The first census of the population was taken on October 23, 1922, and the second (and last) on November 18, 1931. After the census of 1931, regular quarterly and annual estimates of the population, classified by religion, were kept by the Palestine Government Department of Statistics. These estimates were obtained by adding to the figures of 1931 the annual increase and net migratory increase in the period between the census of 1931 and the year for which the estimate was prepared. The population of Palestine rose from an estimate of 700,000 persons in 1918 to the figures shown below:
BY RELIGION
| 1922 Census | 1931 Census | 1944 Estimates | |
| Muslims | 589,177 | 759,700 | 1,061,277 |
| Jews | 83,790 | 174,606 | 528,702 |
| Christians | 71,464 | 88,907 | 135,547 |
| Others | 77,617 | 10,101 | 14,098 |
| Total population by religion | 752,048 | 1,033,314 | 1,739,624 |
BY RACE
| 1944 Estimates | 1946 Estimates | 1948 Estimates | |
| Arab Muslims and Christians | 1,179,000 | 1,293,000 | 1,380,000 |
| Non-Arab Jews | 554,000 | 608,000 | 700,000 |
| Others | 32,000 | 35,000 | 35,000 |
| Total population by race | 1,765,000 | 1,936,000 | 2,115,000 |
According to these figures, the proportion of Jews to the total population rose from 8 percent in 1918 to about 12 percent in 1922; then about 17 percent in 1931 and about 31 percent in 1944. The large-scale immigration accounted for the rapid rise in the ratio of Jews to the total population. 230
The third wave of Jewish immigration increased the number of Jewish settlers by 35,000, most of them being Russians. The fourth wave, between 1924 and 1931, brought another 85,000 immigrants, most of them middle-class Poles. The fifth wave of Jewish immigration, between 1932 and 1936, brought to Palestine close to 200,000. In 1936, the Jews comprised 28 percent of Palestine’s population, a significant increase from 17 percent in 1931. Such a radical change in a period of five years must certainly be recognized as an important cause of the 1936 rebellion. In the wake of the 1936–1939 Palestine revolt, the British placed a ceiling on new Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years. Eighty-five percent of the Jewish population remained centered in three major urban centers and the surrounding areas: Jaffa–Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa. 231
In 1918, the Jews owned only 2 percent of Palestine’s land—that is, 162,500 acres out of a total of 6,580,755 acres of land. During the ensuing thirty years, Jewish land purchases brought their total holdings, to 372,925 acres, or 5.67 percent of the total land area of Palestine, on the date of the termination of the mandate in May 1948. However, Palestine’s British government estimated in 1946 that the Jews held over 15 percent of the cultivable area of Palestine. Resistance to sale of land to Jews persisted throughout the period of the mandate. Most of the land acquired by Jews between 1918 and 1948 (210,425 acres) was purchased from Lebanese and Syrian absentee landowners living outside Palestine. The area sold by Palestinians during the mandate was only about 100,000 acres, despite the high prices offered and the legislation enacted that was designed to facilitate transfer of land to Jews. 232 The British mandate government classified Palestinian arable land as good, medium, and poor. By 1948, the Zionist state had captured 78 percent of Palestine, including 95 percent of the good soil, 64 percent of the medium soil, and 39 percent of the poor soil. 233
Laws affecting land disposition, registration, and settlement were issued to hasten Jewish acquisition of Arab land. One of these laws, disguised as a law to protect farmers against eviction by their landlords, did the opposite. Almost all of the large tracts of land were owned by absentee landowners living in Lebanon and Syria. Whereas relations between landlord and tenant had until then been on the best of terms, the new law gave the tenant the impression (encouraged by Jewish land brokers) that he no longer needed to pay his rent, since the law gave him certain “tenancy rights” and protected him against eviction. The landlord, who was placed in the unenviable position of owning land but getting hardly anything out of it, and burdened with taxation beyond his means, found himself in a critical situation. Here the Jewish land broker would step in and offer to buy the land and rid the landlord of his problems. In one instance, over 40,000 acres comprising eighteen villages in Marj ibn Amer were sold by the Sursoq family to the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC) for 700,000 British pounds, resulting in the eviction of 688 Arab agricultural families. Of those, 309 families joined the landless classes, while the remainder drifted either into towns and cities or became hired laborers in other villages. 234
Acquisition of state land was another source of the transfer of land to the Zionists. By 1947, approximately 195,000 dunums (nearly 50,000 acres) of state land had been granted or leased to Jewish settlers by the British mandate authorities. 235 According to Article 6 of the mandate charter, Britain promised to facilitate Jewish settle ment on state lands. The government granted state land for the following settlements: Athlit, Caesarea, Kabbara, and Beisan.
The Zionists followed a strategic political policy in land acquisition. They looked for quantity, location, and contiguity. Accordingly, they tended to purchase land in large, contiguous areas of the inland and coastal plains. Their acquisitions were made not by private individuals but by political agencies of the Zionist movement, such as the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the aforementioned PLDC, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, and the Jewish Colonization Association. Around 70 percent of all Palestinian land acquired by the Zionists was purchased by the PLDC on behalf of the JNF. Between 1920 and 1927, 82 percent of all land acquired by Zionist organizations was purchased from absentee landlords. Zionist land purchases from non-Palestinian Arab absentee landowners were at their highest in the 1920s. Beginning in the 1930s, land sales by large Palestinian landlords and peasants constituted the greater proportion (89 percent) of the total land purchased by Zionists. 236
Intensive land acquisition by Jews and Zionist organizations occurred during three periods: between 1923 and 1927, an average annual 61,400 dunums (15,172 acres); from 1932 to 1935, an average annual 59,500 dunums (14,702 acres); and from 1942 to 1947, an average annual 61,200 dunums (15,123 acres). While in 1922 Jews owned 751,192 dunums (185,624 acres), representing 3 percent of the land of Palestine, the total area purchased by 1947 was 1.73 million dunums (427,500 acres), representing nearly 24 percent of all arable land and 7 percent of the total surface area of Palestine. The percentage of Jews who lived on the land—that is, on farms— was 19.3 percent; most Jews lived in cities. 237
Palestinian peasant discontent, political activism, and hostility to and violence against the Zionists and the British authorities were highest after periods of high transfer of land, accounting for the 1929 unrest, the 1936–1939 revolt, and the 1947–1948 war.
These periods also coincide with heavy waves of Jewish immigration into Palestine, particularly the five years before the rebellion of 1936–1939. By 1945, 52.6 percent of land sales to Jews or Jewish organizations were by nonPalestinian absentee Arab land lords; 24.6 percent were by large Palestinian owners; and 9.4 percent by peasants. 238 The Zionists managed to purchase more than 420,000 dunums (104,000 acres) before 1917, most of it in four blocks: 1) the eastern parts of the upper and lower Galilee; 2) the Hadera-Zikhron Ya’akov block, on the coastal plain south of Haifa; 3) the Petah Tikva-Kfar Saba block, northeast of Jaffa; and 4) the Judean colonies southeast of Jaffa. Most of this land acquired by the Zionists was owned by absent landlords from neighboring countries. 239
With the beginning of British rule, more land was purchased in the Jezreel Valley from the Sursuq family; 70,000 dunums (17,300 acres) in 1920, 40,000 dunums (10,000 acres) in 1924. A year later, 28,000 more dunums (7,000 acres) of the valley were purchased from the Sursuqs and another Beirut family, the Tuwwinis, in addition to land in Zevulun Valley along Haifa Bay. In 1927, the Zionists purchased 30,000 dunums (7,500 acres) in the Heffer Valley (Wadi al-Hawareth), south of Haifa, from the Tayan family of Lebanon. 240
Collaboration and Resistance
The deals made with Palestinian owners of large estates had the most significant effect on the map of Jewish settlements: In 1921, a Haifa landowner sold the land on which the Jewish settlement of Yagur was established to the Zionists. In 1924, a family from Qalqilia sold the land on which Magdiel was established. In 1925, the sheikh of the AbuKishk tribe sold the land on which Ramatayan, Ramat haSharon, Bnei Berak, and other settlements were built. Another piece of Bnei Berak was bought from the mayor of Jaffa and his brother. In 1928 the city of Natanya was built on land purchased from the sheikh of the village of Umm Khaled. In 1932, a family from Tulkarem sold 10,000 dunums (2,500 acres) on which the settlement of EvenYahuda was established. The same year, Kefar Yona was built on land sold by a Nablus landowner. In 1933, the settlement of Qadima was built on land sold by a landowner from Qalansawa. Two brothers and a third partner sold 2,000 dunums (500 acres) on which the kibbutzim Givat Brener, Na’tan, and Gibton were built. The neighborhood of Neve Sha’anan in Haifa was established on land purchased from another sheikh. 241
In the two years between June 1934 and August 1936, Jews bought more than 53,000 dunums (13,000 acres) in 2,339 separate land sales. Of those, fortyone sales involved plots of more than 500 dunums (120 acres) and 164 involved plots between 100 and 500 dunums (25 to 120 acres). The vast majority (2,134) were plots of less than 100 dunums. This means that thousands of Arabs of all backgrounds—poor and rich, Christians and Muslims, city dwellers, Bedouins and villagers—were involved in land sales. The assistance the Zionists received from Arabs was not limited to cooperation in completing the sale, but went further by providing them with vital information about land available for sale.242
Collaborators assisted the Zionist land acquisitions in many ways. Often influential people in their villages, they provided information about land ownership and locations of documents. They worked as brokers, persuading the owners to sell their land, and sometime they bought the land then sold it to the Zionists. They also assisted in the removal of tenant farmers, marking the land and guarding it. Some of them went far further in serving the Zionists by testifying before Sir John HopeSimpson (who was overseeing a British commission investigating immigration, land settlement, and development issues in Palestine in 1929; see page XX), claiming that land acquisition by Jews was beneficial to the Palestinians. 243 One such landowner stated:
I have about five thousand dunums that are no use at all, and I owe money to creditors. If the gates of immigration were open I could hope that in a year or two companies of immigrants would come to buy four thousand dunums of land from me, which will rescue me from debts and allow me to cultivate what is left of my land and in that way I could live happily, me and my descendants after me.
A resident of Anabta, west of Nablus, who was known to have ties with the Hagana’s intelligence service (the Shai), testified as to the benefits derived from the sale of two thousand dunums (five hundred acres) in the Heffer Valley to the Zionists. Three more men made similar statements in their testimony before the Hope-Simpson inquiry.
Zionist records describe the kind of service they had received from Palestinian collaborators in achieving their goals of acquiring land. The Zionists acquired land by putting pressure on farmers for economic reasons and persuasion by land brokers. Jewish immigration and land acquisition had aroused opposition in some Arab circles since the 1880s. But the opposition did not involve all parts of the public. In the 1920s, what had previously been vague sense of antagonism to Zionism took on new conceptual framework: “nationalism.” A new form of national consciousness evolved that cast land sales to the Zionists as “treason and collaboration.” The national leadership raised public consciousness about the danger posed by Zionism. Even before World War I, the press was enlisted in this mission, including Haifa’s al-Kamel, edited by Najib Nassar and founded in 1908; the Isa brothers’ Filastin published in Jaffa, founded in 1911; and the Jerusalem newspaper al-Muntada. An article published in July 1911 by Mustafa Effendi Tamr, a teacher of mathematics at a Jerusalem school, excoriated those selling land:
You are selling the property of your fathers and grandfathers for a pittance to people who will have no pity on you, to those who will act to expel you and expunge your memory from your habitations and disperse you among the nations. This is a crime that will be recorded in your names in history, a black stain and disgrace that your descendants will hear, which will not be expunged even after years and eras have gone by. 244
Opposition to land sales was one of the principal focal points around which Arab nationalist ideas in Palestine coalesced. It was adopted by the urban elite, and at the same time created great fears among the rural community, as it meant disposition of the land. The fear intensified among tenant farmers who were removed from land purchased by the Zionists. During British rule, attachment to the land became a central component of national identity.
In the mid1920s the condemnations of collaborators grew more severe. The land sellers were the “true enemies of the homeland” and “human devils.” After a dozen years of struggle, the faction that rejected land sales had become strong enough that they did not hesitate to attack even influential and prominent settlers by name. In 1925, the Muslim religious authority issued, for the first time, a fatwa forbidding land sales to Jews. This ruling was written by the mufti of Gaza, Hajj Muhammad Said alHusayni. The importance of the mufti’s statement was that Jews had ceased to be a protected minority whose rights were to be respected by Muslims. Their status had changed because they were seeking to take control of the country. The fatwa did not receive great attention, however, because it did not come from Jerusalem.
In the 1930s, land sales became a central issue in Palestinian political activities. Izzat Darwaza, a writer and educator from Nablus who was the leader of the Istiqlal Party, wrote an article about a land broker (simsar, plural samasirah) who tried to entice a landowner to sell his holdings. He described the way Zionist institutions worked and the moral deterioration of the samasirah. The poet Ibrahim Tuqan of Nablus wrote poems condemning the samasirah. Most important, Hajj Amin alHusayni, the mufti of Jerusalem, exercised his religious authority for the first time to issue a fatwa forbidding the sale of land to Jews. The ruling was the beginning of a religious awakening that encompassed the entire country. The fatwa was disseminated by clerics and representatives of the Supreme Muslim Council and read aloud in city and village mosques. Throughout Palestine, public assemblies were held at which the ruling was proclaimed. 245
The press and religious establishment worked together to prevent Zionists from acquiring Palestinian land. When the newspaper al-Jami’ah al-Arabiyyah learned about the sale of tens of thousands of dunums in the Negev to Jews, it published a call to the heads of the Bedouin tribes there to “eliminate the phenomenon of land dealings, and to humiliate the samasirah, and use all means against them.” Later the mufti and his staff conducted a series of visits to the sheikhs of the Negev tribes, read the fatwa before them, and had them take an oath on the Quran not to sell any of their land or to provide aid to land sellers. The sheikhs also signed a statement saying that “the members of a tribe are to shun and scorn any person who is proved to have betrayed the homeland by selling lands or speculating in them or expressing loyalty to the Zionists. They will not shake his hand and will not eat with him.” The editor of al-Jami’ah al-Arabiyyah, who was present at his ceremony, reported that some of the sheiks wept when they signed the petition—presumably these were tears of remorse for involvement in previous land deals. 246
In January 1935, the first assembly of Muslim religious scholars (ulama) in Palestine convened to discuss land sales. The ulama issued an additional religious legal ruling written by unanimous consent (ijma) that read:
After study and discussion of the entire matter and support for what was said in these venerable fatwa, we have reached agreement that the seller and speculator and agent in the sale of the land of Palestine to Jews and he who abet them
First: acts for and causes the removal of Muslims from their lands.
Second: prevents the mention of Allah’s name in mosques and works to destroy them.
Third: accepts the Jews as rulers, since he abets their victory over the Muslims.
Fourth: offends Allah and His messenger and the faithful. Fifth: betrays [kha’in] Allah and His messenger and believers.
From a study of the irrefutable proofs of rulings in cases such as these that are in the verses of Allah’s book, as the Supreme One said: “O believers, do not betray Allah and the Prophet.”
And from all above said, which includes the persons, the utterances, and the fatwa, it transpires that one who sells land to Jews in Palestine, whether he did so directly or through an intermediary, as well as the speculator or agent in this sale and those who knowing facilitate and help them in any way, one may not pray for them [at their death] or bury them in Muslim graves and one should abandon them and ban them and despise them and not become friendly with them or get close to them, even if they are parents or children or brothers or spouses. 247
This fatwa applies the traditional religious concept of khiyana, or betrayal, to traitors against the national cause. Not long after, a congress of Christian Arab clergymen issued a declaration with a similar wording forbidding the sale of land to Jews. Over time, the press, mufti, and religious establishment, and national poets and intellectuals, succeeded in establishing a norm that selling land to a Jew was an unpardonable religious and national sin.
Britain’s obligations under the Palestine mandate extended both east and west of the Jordan River, including the Transjordanian areas inhabited largely by semi nomads. A year earlier, Churchill had separated Transjordan (80 percent of the mandatory territory) from the Palestine mandate. This became a separate British protectorate; Abdullah, Husayn’s son, became its emir. The term “Palestine” was reserved for the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Weizmann and BenGurion declined to confront the British authorities over prohibition of Jewish settlements in Transjordan, while Jabotinsky insisted that Britain should place the full resources of His Majesty’s government at the Zionists’ disposal for the purpose of creating a Jewish majority and state in Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River.
The Jewish Economy and Industry
The Constitution of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, signed in Zurich on August 14, 1929, stated that the title of the land acquired should be taken in the name of the Jewish National Fund. The Agency was to promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labor, and it was deemed a matter of principle that only Jewish labor should be employed. The lease contracts entered into with the Jewish settlers prohibited hiring or employing non-Jewish labor.
In the first decade of the mandate, different measures were taken by the mandate government to support Jewish industrial ventures. Jewish companies were granted concessions over state lands and natural resources: the Rutenberg power plant, Dead Sea salt, the Athlit Salt Company, and the Shemen oil and soap company. In 1924, A Jewish refugee from Soviet Georgia opened the Nesher cement factory. In 1920, the British mandate government granted the Russian Jew Pinhas Rutenberg a contract to supply electricity throughout Palestine. Rutenberg was awarded exclusive rights to use the waters of the Auja basin to provide power, electric light, and irrigation using any type of energy in the district of Jaffa, and exclusive rights to carry out a grand hydroelectric and irrigation scheme based in the Jordan and Yarmouk River basins. The concession also gave Rutenberg’s company monopolistic rights over the supply of electric power throughout Palestine and Transjordan (excluding Jerusalem). The Athlit Salt Company, a Jewish enterprise, was given exclusive concession to produce salt. The salt was sold at an artificially inflated price, which hurt the Palestinian Arabs in all aspects of life, as salt was not merely a basic daily food necessity, but was also crucial in the manufacture of soap and leather goods. 248
The Nesher Cement Company, Shemen (Palestine Oil Industry), and a long list of other Jewish industrial enterprises (specializing in products ranging from silk and textiles to leather tanning, confectionery, false teeth, and umbrellas) received specific customs concessions. The mandate government exempted import duties on the importation of olive oil and sesame seeds to benefit Shemen; at the same time, it raised import duties on salt, jelly, jam, cakes, chocolate, and other products in order to protect Jewish manufacturers.
By 1929, these manufacturing projects provided support for nearly 39 percent of Palestine’s Jewish workforce. The growth of the Jewish private industry helped raise the country’s absorptive capacity and allowed sixty thousand Jews to enter the country between 1924 and 1929. The immigrants who came during the middle of the decade (the Fourth Aliyah) were mainly lower middle-class Jews, and socialism and agricultural labor did not mean much to them. They preferred to settle in the cities. During this period many Jews migrated to Palestine for personal reasons rather than ideological ones; Palestine seemed to offer economic opportunities, especially after the United States introduced tighter restriction on immigration in 1924.
Before 1929, the Zionists were financially dependent on the British mandate, as they lacked the resources to build the foundation for a state. During the early 1920s the British authorities in Palestine carried out several construction projects for military-strategic purposes, including expanding Palestine’s highways, railroads, ports, and communications networks. In the process, the mandate government became one of the country’s largest employers of Jewish workers. After 1929, money from external Jewish investments in Palestine enabled the Jewish community to prosper, as middle-class Jews arrived from Central Europe with their own capital. The British, around 1929, allowed the economic system to be divided. In collecting taxes, the mandate government benefited much more from the Jewish community; Jews paid twice as much tax as Palestinians did. By consenting to the bifurcation of the country’s economy, the British helped create a Jewish privileged enclave and enhanced the chances of Zionist success in Palestine. 249
During the Second World War, Palestine became a strategic outpost for the British in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean region. It served as a base for large land, air, and naval military forces; the terminus of oil pipelines from Iraq; and the site of a key oil refinery. The British devised an economic plan aimed at rapid economic development of all sectors of Palestine’s economy that resulted in significant increases in industrial capacity, output, and product variety (including sophisticated military hardware) of goods for the military, Palestine’s internal market, and the region. Jewish industries jumped by 200 percent, whereas the Palestinian-owned industries increased by 77 percent. By 1946, the number of industrial enterprises rose to about six thousand; most were Jewish-owned. The share of the Jewish population in both capital investment and value of industrial production was about 85 percent. 250 The initial efforts of the Zionist colonial project were directed toward agricultural settlements, but this quickly shifted during the mandate period into the development of an urban and industrial Jewish economy. Industrialization took off in the mid-1920s following the wave of migration of urban middle-class Polish Jews, who were sophisticated in industry. Following this, in the mid-1930s German Jewish immigrants arrived in great numbers into urban centers, ensuring that Jewish industry was well established. According to the Survey of Palestine, by 1939, Jews comprised 31 percent of the total population, but Jewish capital investment in industry was 88 percent of total industrial investments, 90 percent of installed horsepower, and 89 percent of total net industrial output, and Jewish workers represented 79 percent of all industrial workers in Palestine. During the mid-1920s, customs regulations were changed to reduce import duties on raw materials and on machinery needed for production. 251 The socialist Zionist leaders, Weizmann and David Ben–Gurion, welcomed the new trend of creating an industrial economy, and encouraged the new immigrants to become industrial workers. Not all Zionists accepted this new approach. The most influential challenger was Vladimir Jabotinsky, who believed that the Zionist Organization existed only to enhance the physical safety of Jews threatened by the hostility of non-Jews, and was focused on encouraging the immigration of all Jews to Palestine. Jabotinsky was convinced that the Arabs would fight anything Zionists did in Palestine, for they understood that any Zionist success would reduce their dominance in the country. Therefore, he concluded, the Jewish national home could develop only behind an “iron wall” of combined British and Jewish force. He was certain that Arabs would try to pierce the wall, but he was equally sure that repeated failure to do so would eventually lead them to accept the parity he envisioned. 252
The Autonomous Jewish Educational System
One of the most important Zionist projects for the creation of a Jewish national identity was the establishment of a separate Jewish educational system. Palestine’s educational system for the two communities under the mandate was separate, and unequal in terms of quality, financing, levels, and delivery, especially in the rural areas. Jerome Farrell, the assistant director of education in the mandate government, reported:
The natural result of the disparity between the educational facilities offered to Arabs and Jews is to widen the cultural gap between the two races, to prevent social intermixture on equal terms and to tend to reduce the Arabs to a position of permanent inferiority. 253
In the mandate agreement, the British and the League of Nation granted recognition of Hebrew as an official language, along with Arabic and English, even though Jews represented no more than 10 percent of the population of Palestine. The British also gave consent and support (fixed grants-in-aid or block grants from the mandate government) for a separate and exclusive private Jewish school system. Furthermore, the Zionists gained autonomy over the curriculum, which was imbued with Zionist-inspired Jewish nationalism. This system eventually covered kindergarten through secondary schools, as well as vocational schools, technical institutions, and universities. 254
The same freedom and financial support with respect to education were not granted to the Palestinian Arabs. By 1946 there were a total of 795 schools for Palestinians, with 118,335 students. A little over half were government schools; the rest were private. By the 1940s about 40 percent of Palestinian schoolchildren attended private schools. Among the rural population, elementary school attendance was only 20 percent, in contrast to 85 percent in the urban centers. Fewer than half the villages had government elementary schools, often to the fourth grade only; just a tiny fraction (11 percent) were for girls. Educationally speaking, the Palestinian Arabs were disadvantaged compared to the settler-immigrant Jews. Mandate government figures indicate that in 1944 only 32 percent of Palestinian Arab children between five and fourteen years old were enrolled in schools, as opposed to 97 percent for Jewish children in the same age group. British authorities denied the Palestinians the right to teach nationalism. The private and government Palestinian school system helped reduce illiteracy substantially, yet failed to provide the technical or higher education that the Jewish community had access to. Secondary education for urban Palestinians was limited, and unless they attended teacher’s school in Jerusalem, Palestinians had to leave the country to go to a university.
Palestinian Collaborating Parties
The Muslim-Christian Associations had played a major role in the Palestinian National Movement since the start of the occupation of Palestine by the British in 1918. The Zionists realized the potential power of the Palestinian nationalists in opposing Zionism and the pro-Zionist policy of the British. The riots of April 1920 and May 1921 alarmed them, prompting the leaders of the Zionist Executive—Chaim Kalvarisky, Fredrick Kish, and Chaim Weizmann—to develop plans to counteract the activities of the Palestinian nationalists.
During Weizmann’s visit to Palestine in the spring of 1920, he held a series of meetings with various Palestinians—Bedouin sheikhs in the Beisan Valley and Abu-Ghosh and certain other officials. Following these meetings, he asked the office of the Jewish Elected Assembly, the body responsible for intelligence, to draw up a comprehensive plan for countering Arab opposition to Zionism. Its proposal included the following:
- Cultivation of an agreement with an official who agreed to open a proZionist Cultural and political club in exchange for 1,000 British pounds.
- Creation of an alliance with the influential emirs on the eastern side of the Jordan, based on the assumption that they opposed the Palestinian National Movement led by the urban notables and thus would be natural allies of the Zionists.
- Establishment of an alliance with the Bedouin sheikhs in southern Palestine, in order to sever the connections that already existed be tween them and the Palestinian nationalists.
- Purchase of newspapers hostile to Zionism.
- Organizing and promoting friendly relations with Arabs, and open ing cooperation clubs.
- Provocation of dissent between Christian and Muslims. 255
This document sets out the basis for the relationship between the Arab and Jewish communities. It advocated three main strategies. The first was support of opposition forces within the Arab public, with the object of creating an alternative leadership. The second was to deepen fissures within Palestinian society by separating the Bedouin from the rest of the population and fomenting conflict between Christians and Muslims (and Druze). The third strategy was to develop a propaganda machine of newspapers and writers. 256
Chaim Margaliot Kalvarisky, the head of the Zionist Executive’s Arab department, was behind the establishment of the Muslim National Associations as a counterweight to the Muslim-Christian Associations. The public activities of the Muslim National Associations were limited to petitions to the British authorities, attacking the Palestinian National Movement, and supporting the Zionist immigration to Palestine, the British mandate, and the Balfour Declaration. In July 1921, when a Palestinian delegation set out for London to negotiate with the British government, Hasan Shukri, the mayor of Haifa and president of the Muslim National Association, sent a telegram to Britain:
We strongly protest against the attitude of the said delegation con cerning the Zionist question. We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy whose wish is to crush us. On the contrary, we con sider the Jews as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the construction of our country. We are certain that without Jewish immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development of our country as may be judged from the fact that towns inhabited in part by Jews such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, and Tiberias are making steady progress while Nablus, Acre, and Nathareth where no Jews reside are steadily declining. 257
In July 1922, after the ratification of the mandate by the League of Nations, the British planned elections for a legislative council in an attempt to get the Palestinian National Movement to accept the mandate and the Balfour Declaration. The Fifth Palestinian Congress decided to boycott the elections. While the Arab Executive Committee was holding public assemblies all over the country, preaching against elections, the Zionist Executive used the Muslim National Associations to encourage Arab participation in the elections.
In 1924, Colonel Frederick Kish, a retired British intelligence officer who was the head of the Zionist Executive’s political department in Palestine, established the Farmers’ Parties. This was a loose network of political parties set up by the Zionists to deepen the divide between the fellahin and the urban Arabs. The men involved in these parties were from families with land in the villages, not the fellah class. Although many of the members of the Farmers’ Parties were active in the Muslim National Associations, some of them took a leadership role in the new organization. Influential heads of families from Hebron, Jerusalem, and Nablus played an important role in the activities of the Farmers’ Parties, exaggerating the number of villages participating in order to gain financial support from the Zionists. But the financial crisis in Eastern Europe in 1926 and 1927 halted the flow of capital to the Jews in Palestine. In the absence of funding, the Farmers’ Parties ceased to function almost completely until 1929. 258
The Western Wall riots of 1929 (see page XX) prompted the British Colonial Office to appoint the Shaw Commission to investigate the immediate causes of the outbreak of violence. In reaction to the appointment of the Commission, the Zionists needed their collaborators to sign petitions similar to those they had submitted in the previous decade, and some did. In their petitions to the high commissioner, they demanded the dismissal of Hajj Amin al-Husayni from all his positions. In addition to the petitions, the Zionists needed people to testify before the Shaw Commission. Many of the collaborators refused to testify out of fear that they would be exposed. After the riots of 1929, the activities of the Farmers’ Parties intensified, especially in the villages of the Jerusalem region. Zionist funds for these activities became available during this period. The Farmers’ Party was revived in ‘Ayn Karem, the Bani-Hasan subdistrict, and a village convention in was organized in ‘Ajjur. The Zionist Executive allocated fifty Palestinian pounds for the delegates’ travel expenses on the condition that they pass resolutions against the Arab delegation’s trip to London and to announce the establishment of a new Arab Executive Committee separate from the existing one. About five hundred people convened in ‘Ajjur on March 27, 1930, many of them heads of the families and villages from the Jerusalem Hills, Mount Hebron, and the coastal plain of Gaza. While the Zionists waited for encouraging reports from their people on site, members of the Arab Executive Committee showed up at ‘Ajjur, spoke against dividing the nation, and exposed the planners and organizers of the convention as being paid agents of the Zionists. The assembly broke up, and the attempt to establish alternative leadership ended. Other attempts to revive the Farmers’ Parties were made, but failed. After two decades of effort, the Zionists abandoned their strategy of establishing or encouraging collaborating parties. 259
As mentioned earlier, the Zionist plan for countering Arab opposition to Zionism was the development of a propaganda machine of newspapers and writers. In early 1920s, two newspapers received financial support from Kalvarisky: al-Akhbar in Jaffa, and the Lisan al-Arab in Jerusalem. In April 1930, Kalvarisky admitted that the editor of Lisan al-Arab, Ibrahim Najjar, had not kept his end of the bargain, as he did not stay neutral and criticized the Zionists’ actions. Kalvarisky described Najjar as “devious as a snake and a man of talent,” but he continued to fund Lisan al-Arab out of fear that Najjar would print fierce anti-Zionist propaganda. In addition to buying newspapers, Kalvarisky looked out for writers to publish articles praising Zionism. He succeeded in finding a few Arab mercenary writers who wrote articles portraying Zionism’s positive features and idealizing Jewish-Arab relations. 260
The Zionist Intelligence Service
The first initiatives to establish an intelligence service that would recruit Arab agents and informers began immediately after the British conquest. Nili, one of the early Zionist defense organizations, was assigned the responsibility of establishing the Elected Assembly’s Information Service. The office’s staff was made up of residents of the moshavim (Zionist farming villages established under Ottoman rule) who already had built relations with many Arabs. These connections with the Arabs allowed Nili to gather hundreds of intelligence reports. Jews who did not work for the intelligence office but had their own connections with Arabs also gathered information and passed it to the intelligence office. Spies were recruited from among the Arabs to gather information about activities or locate weapons hidden in villages or among people.
In 1929, the United Bureau became responsible for gathering information. Certain mukhtars (village leaders) were agents of recruitment for the Zionist cause. After joining the Zionist Executive in 1933, Ben-Gurion also devoted more attention to the intelligence apparatus.
The Zionist Military Project
The Zionists’ military preparations started as early as 1920, when the Hagana was established (its name literally means “defense” in Hebrew). The Hagana over time became the strong military arm of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist governing body that developed and implemented the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Orde Wingate, a British officer who became enchanted by the Zionist dream, devoted his life to training the members of the Hagana. He succeeded in transforming this paramilitary organization into a regular army. He attached the Hagana troops to the British forces during the Arab revolt. The Hagana also gained valuable military experience in Second World War, when many of its members volunteered for the British war effort. By 1948 the Jewish military forces were well prepared for the mission of ethnic cleansing. 261
Intelligence activities were an essential element in the preparation for ethnic cleansing. One of the first such activities was the development of the Village Files project. The precise details of the topographic location of each village, its access roads, quality of land, water springs, main sources of income, sociopolitical composition, and religious affiliations; the names of the mukhtars; its relationship with other villages; and the ages of individual men between sixteen and fifty were catalogued. After the 1936–1939 revolt, these files recorded a list of everyone who had been involved in the revolt, especially those who allegedly killed Jews. Regular members of the Hagana were involved in information gathering and discovering how to approach the villages in future military operations. They also were interested in recruitment of informants and collaborators.262 This information was later instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Jewish agents.
The Jewish Agency
From the outset, the British mandatory authorities had allowed the Zionist movement to carve out an independent enclave for itself in Palestine as the infrastructure for a future state. In August 1929, the British authorized the establishment of the Jewish Agency to represent, lead, and negotiate on behalf of the Jewish settler community in Palestine in all aspects of British policy. Prior to 1929, the World Zionist Organization had served that function. Many Jews denied the Zionist assertion that Jews throughout the world constituted a single nation; however, prominent US Jews like Louis Marshall welcomed the creation in Palestine of a cultural center to perpetuate the sacred Jewish literature, the teachings of the Jewish sages, and the tradition of Israel. Wealthy American Jews such as Marshall and Felix Warburg assured Weizmann that Jewish Palestine’s financial troubles were over. This is why in August 1929, when the Jewish Agency was established, Weizmann declared that the first phase of Jewish work in Palestine had been completed. 263
The Jewish Agency proceeded to develop social, economic, and political agencies and institutions, including military and intelligence units. These organizations were the nucleus of an autonomous Jewish political authority within the Palestine mandate government. In reality, the Zionists had a state within a state.
The Histadrut
The Histadrut (the General Federation of Jewish Labor), which was established in 1920, was one of the most developed Jewish social institutions in Palestine. The Histadrut owned a construction cooperative, consumer and marketing cooperatives, a bank, and credit, insurance, and publishing institutions. The great majority of Jewish workers belonged to the Histadrut, and became one of the largest employers. The Histadrut provided comprehensive health insurance, training, education, placement, and pension programs not only to Jewish workers, but to the entire Jewish settler community, making it the most developed Jewish social institution in Palestine. The Jewish Health Council was established to coordinate all health services, including hospitals, clinics, laboratories, and pharmacies in most of the cities with large Jewish populations.
The British colonial government of Palestine contributed to the creation, protection, and unemployment relief of exclusive Jewish labor. The British facilitated the creation of a two-tier wage structure for Palestinian Arabs and Jews in both the private and public sectors. The wage rate of Jewish workers was as much as three times higher than that of the Palestinians.