Possession and Dispossession Through Labor and Purchase

Zionism and its supporters assumed that purchasing land and improving it through labor were unquestionably legitimate long before Arabs complained Zionism was a threat. Although criticism of Zionists granting preference for Jewish workers emerged as Jewish immigration grew, the purchase of land by Jews was a different story altogether. Objections rooted in the religious identity of purchasers were established under Ottoman rule. When the British wrested control, acquisition of land by Zionist entities was understood as a manifest means of establishing a Jewish polity. Initially legal during the Mandate, and without the oblique circumventions and subterfuge that had characterized land purchases during the Ottoman period, objections to Jewish purchase came to be framed in terms of the injury to the Arab rural population. However, the transfer of unworked and un-reclaimed land was hardly the exclusive cause for uprooting or displacing fellahin nor were Jewish land purchases. The reduction of rural populations was a universal phenomenon that Palestine could not escape. Jewish pioneers did replace Arab peasants in settled and cultivated areas although the extent and causes, as will be suggested here, have been exaggerated and often concealed.