Early Zionism and Its Attitudes Toward Palestinian Arabs

The economic and agricultural development of Tanzimat had significant affects on the Palestinian population. While their population remained relatively stagnant at about 350,000 for the first half of the 19th century, it grew rapidly in the following decades and had reached 650,000 by 1889 (38). This period not only saw rising birthrights, but also notable immigrations of Circassians, Algerians, Druze, Persians, Sudanese, and Jordanians. The Palestinian population, which had primarily resided in the hilly inland areas of Palestine, began to look towards the coastal plain and low-lying valleys as places to settle and farm.

Shortly after the end of Tanzimat, the Biluim of the First Aliyah began arriving in Eretz Israel. Naturally, they looked to settle in the more sparsely populated areas of Palestine: the coastal plain and low-lying valleys. Thus were they put into an inevitable competition with the native population over control of these fertile, undeveloped areas. Because of the new system of largely foreign land ownership and private property, ownership over the land would essential go to whomever had the deepest bank account. Not surprisingly, the Jews, backed by Baron Edmund de Rothschild, started winning the competition for these lands and eventually became the predominant inhabitants of these regions. Of the 681,978 dunams purchased by Jews between 1878 and 1936, the majority - 52.6% - came from absentee landlords who lived outside of Palestine, mainly in Beirut. Only 9.4% of the land came from local fellaheen, the local agricultural laborers who actually had vested personal interests in the fate of those lands and of Palestine as a whole. A further 24.6% came from major Palestinian landowners (41). After the JNF was formed at the beginning of the 20th century and both immigration and land purchases shot up, the demand for Palestinian land shot up. The price of land increased as much as fifty times between 1910 and 1944 (42), thus almost excluding any Arab Palestinians from buying these fertile lands. Furthermore, land purchases “usually led to the eviction of tenant farmers who had often cultivated it for generations” (Dowty 36), but who did not own the land themselves. As time went on and foreign Arabs and Palestinians became increasingly aware of and opposed to the aims of the Zionist movement, both groups continued to sell land to Jews and the JNF, simply because the rise in land prices offered irresistible profits for lands that had been previously uninhabited and undesired.

The JNF had, and still has, a strict policy that its lands were only to be sold or leased to Jews, so that meant that all land sales to the JNF in Palestine (which accounted for about half of the land sales to Jews during the Mandate) were permanent surrenders of land from Arabs to Jews (Holzman-Gazit 59). This was because olim had just given up the comforts of European life to work in malaria-infested fields, and thus the option of selling their increasingly valuable land to any potential buyer was extremely tempting - but also extremely detrimental to the goals of the JNF and the Zionist endeavor as a whole. While there was certainly some satisfaction because of the economic development the Jews brought, the local Palestinians were angered that their growing population could not afford to move into nearby uninhabited lands, that profit-oriented foreign landownership had allowed huge chunks of their homeland to be bought out by colonizers, and that these colonizers carried out discriminatory policies that ensured that the Palestinians would never be able to regain these lands. But, to the Zionists, these things were unavoidable in their attempt to build a Jewish state.

While the acquisition of land by Jewish settlers and organizations may have unfairly excluded or exploited the indigenous Palestinian population, and while it certainly seems hypocritical that the success of a socialist movement such as Labor Zionism came to depend on the backing of capitalist millionaires, it is worth noting that this may have been the most benign colonization by Europeans in the history of that continent. There are three ways of acquiring land, as Ussishkin noted - by military force, by governmental authority, and by purchase. The Jews, stateless for 2,000 years, obviously lacked the military and the government prerequisite for either of the first two options, and thus were forced to pursue the third. Thus did the Jews acquire lands through consensual purchase. Almost all other European colonial efforts, however, have relied on the first two options, and have thus been land confiscations rather than consensual acquisitions. After Israel became a state, unfortunately, it too resorted to force and authority to expropriate land from its own Arab citizens and from Palestinian refugees, using a mixture of brute force, discriminatory laws and administration, and the circumvention of the law through non-state actors like the JNF to systematically gain control of the majority of land in the young Israeli state (Holzman-Gazit 103-111).