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One day, an Arab university professor timidly asked me this question: Did the Palestinians sell their land and abandon it to the Jews?
He would not have asked if the connection had been forged, and he knew that he would not embarrass me by asking him. In fact, I was not embarrassed by his question, but what surprised me was that he was a professor of modern history, and those who contributed to the preparation of the courses of history in his Arab country, and there are investigations about Palestine! I understood afterwards that this question resonated with many, and they find it awkward to raise it, and I knew how much The Palestinians, and those specializing in Palestinian studies, fail to explain the issue properly and objectively, not to the world but even to the people of their skin and religion.
Zionist Jewish propaganda focuses on the fact that the Palestinians sold their land to the Jews, and that the Jews bought it with "halal" out of their money, and the Palestinians should no longer demand it! We may be able to give a brief idea of the subject here.
Palestine: A people rooted in their land
Zionist propaganda in its beginnings and since the nineteenth century was based on the idea of "land without a people for a people without land", considering that there is no people in Palestine, and that the Jews who do not have land have the right to this land to be theirs. But since the beginning of the settlement, they have found it vibrant and energetic, in which an industrious people rooted in their land live.
It is funny to mention a rolling story, that in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Max Nordo, a senior leader of the Zionist movement close to Theodor Herzl, sent two rabbis to report to the Zionist Congress on the practical possibility of migrating to Palestine, and after they returned, they wrote a report that read: "Palestine is a beautiful bride, but she is already married to another man!" (1) That is, there is a people who inhabit it and not a land without a people.
Early resistance
The active Palestinian resistance to Jewish-Zionist settlement in Palestine began from the beginning of this project, and from the early stages of it, in the days of the Ottoman Empire. There were clashes between Palestinian peasants and Jewish settlers in 1886, and when Rashad Pasha acted in Jerusalem and showed favor, a delegation of Jerusalem elders protested against him in May 1890, and on June 24, 1891, jerusalem elders filed a petition with the Great Sadr (Prime Minister) of the Ottoman Empire, demanding that Russian Jews be prevented from migrating to Palestine and prohibited their land acquisition. (2)
Palestinian scholars and their representatives to the Ottoman authorities, as well as the Newspapers of Palestine, alerted the danger of Jewish settlement and called for strict measures to confront it. In 1897, Sheikh Mohammed Tahir al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, headed a local body with government powers to scrutinize requests for transfer of property in the Beit al-Maqdis area, preventing the transfer of many land to Jews. Sheikh Suleiman al-Taji al-Faruqi, who founded the Ottoman National Party in 1911, played his role in warning of the Zionist threat, as did Youssef Al-Khalidi, Ruhi al-Khalidi, Saeed al-Husseini, and Najib Nassar. (3)
Although Sultan Abdul Hamid and the central authorities instructed them to resist immigration and Jewish settlement, the corruption of the Ottoman administrative apparatus prevented it from being carried out, and the Zionist Jews were able through bribes to buy much of the land. Moreover, the control of the Ottoman Empire by the Union and The Promotion Party and the overthrow of Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1909, and the great Jewish-Zionist influence within that party, facilitated the Jewish takeover of the land and their migration to Palestine.
By the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Jews had received about 420,000 dunums (1.5 percent). From the land of Palestine, they bought it from Lebanese feudal owners belonging to families such as al-Sarsak, Tian, Tueni, Andor, or from the Ottoman administration through the auction of the land of Palestinian peasants who are unable to pay their taxes, or from some Palestinian owners belonging to feudal families such as the Rock and Kassar families. These purchases covered about 93% of the land they received. In any case, the Zionist threat did not pose a serious threat to the Palestinians at the time, because of the small size of the Jewish settlement and population, and the practical impossibility of establishing a Zionist entity under a Muslim State (Ottoman State). (4)
Under British occupation and oppression
When Palestine fell under British occupation from 1917 to 1948, it was clear that this state came to implement the Zionist project and establish a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine. All the powers and oppression of colonial rule have been invested to impose this reality. The Palestinian national movement resisted Jewish settlement with all its political, media and protest means, and fought many revolutions and confrontations. The total number of Zionist Jews was captured during the British occupation was about 1.2 million dunums, or only about 4.5% of the land of Palestine, despite its global potential, huge capital, and the direct support and terror of the brutal occupying power.
But wait! Most of these lands have not actually been bought by the Palestinians! The objective facts indicate that most of these lands are leaked to Jews through British government grants to the "state land" of Palestine, or through large non-Palestinian feudal owners who lived abroad, and were practically and formally prevented from entering this area (under British occupation) to invest their land if they really wished to do so.
The British authorities granted some 300,000 dunums of land to Jews from the Princely lands free of charge, and 200,000 dunums for a nominal fee. Under Herbert Samuel, the first British high representative to Palestine (1920-1925), a Zionist Jew, he granted 175,000 dunums of state land on the coast between Haifa and Caesarea to Jews, and repeated his huge donations on other coastal lands, the Negev and the Dead Sea coast. (5)
There was huge feudal property for families that acquired these lands, especially in 1869, when the Ottoman Empire was forced to sell princely land to provide some money for its treasury, which was purchased by rich Lebanese families, which was another facet of the tragedy. A total of 625,000 dunums of feudalism from outside Palestine sold the Sarsak family, which sold more than 200,000 dunums of The Marj Ibn Amer land to the Zionists, displacing 2,746 Arab families, the 22 Palestinian villages, which had been working for hundreds of years. The tragedy was repeated when other Lebanese family feudals sold about 120,000 dunums around Lake Houla in northern Palestine, and two Lebanese families sold the land of Wadi Al-Hawath (32,000 dunums), displacing 15,000 Palestinians. The agricultural land sold by absent feudal owners outside Palestine (belonging to Lebanese and Syrian families) during the period 1920-1936 amounted to 55.5% of the land received by Jews from agricultural land. (6)
Despite the responsibility of the children of these families, the blame is not entirely on them, as the British authorities prevented them from entering to exploit these lands, on the grounds that they are foreigners, after Palestine was separated from Syria and Lebanon according to the Sykes-Picot divisions between british and French colonialism. Our mention of some family names comes in the context of scientific information.
A total of 260,000 dunums (less than 1%) were sold to them by The Arabs of Palestine during the British occupation. From the land of Palestine. The Jews acquired these lands because of the harsh conditions in which the British colonial Government placed the Palestinian peasants, and as a result of the British use of the method of expropriation of Arab property in favour of the Jews in accordance with articles of the British Mandate of Palestine, which entitled the High Commissioner to this right.
The government's efforts to address the problem of the use of the "black" list of persons in the country are also a major concern.
Thus, the total number of Palestinians received by The Jews until 1948 does not exceed 1% of the land of Palestine, and within 70 years of the beginning of settlement and organized migration to Palestine, under harsh conditions. This in itself highlights the extent of the suffering the Jews have suffered in stabilizing and succeeding their project in Palestine, and how determined the Palestinians are to hold on to their land. (7)
Resistance and resilience
Palestinians, especially in the 1930s, made great efforts in fighting the sale of land, and the Supreme Islamic Council, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Palestinian scholars played a prominent role. On January 5, 1935, the First Palestine Scholars Conference issued a unanimous fatwa prohibiting the sale of any inch of Palestinian land to Jews, preparing the seller, the broker and the intermediary for sale to be religious, out of the Muslim group, depriving them of burial in Muslim cemeteries, boycotting them in everything and defaming them. (8)
The scholars carried out a major campaign in all the cities and villages of Palestine against the sale of land to The Jews, held many meetings and took the covenants and covenants on the masses to hold on to their land, and not to overdo it. The scholars were able to save many lands that were threatened with sale, and the Supreme Islamic Council bought entire villages such as Deir Amr and Zeta, the common land in the villages of Taybeh, Atel and Tayra, and stopped selling in some 60 Jaffa villages. National institutions were formed that helped stop the sale of land, and the Umma Fund was established under the direction of the Palestinian economist Ahmed Helmi Pasha, and was able to save the land of Al-Batiha in north-eastern Palestine, an area of 300,000 dunums. (9)
The 1948 War and its consequences
The real loss of the land of Palestine was not due to the sale of their land by the Palestinians. Until 1948, the Palestinians held about 94% of the land of Palestine, despite the harshness of their suffering and the ferocity of the British occupation and the Zionist project. The land of Palestine, on which the Zionist entity or the so-called "Israel" was founded, was taken over by the defeat of the Arab armies in the 1948 war, where about 77% of the land of Palestine was taken over, and the Zionist gangs, backed by the major powers, committed dozens of massacres, and displaced some 58% of the Palestinian people by force of arms, out of the land on which the Zionist Jews established their entity.
The 1948 war has torn apart the social and economic fabric of the Palestinian people. The Zionists who built their entity on a sea of Palestinian blood, pain and suffering would not have felt sin or conscience. Moshe Dayan, who served as chief of staff of the Israeli army, ministry of defense and ministry of foreign affairs, and was an archaeologist, admits that "there is not a single Jewish village in this country that has not been built on the site of an Arab village." (10) In the 1967 war, the Zionist entity occupied the rest of The Land of Palestine (West Bank and Gaza Strip), pursuing settlement and confiscation of land under various pretexts.
Conclusion
Until now, the Palestinians have looked at those who sell their land or are being marketed with contempt, and the death penalty continues to haunt anyone who has been accused of selling the land, and many of them have been liquidated by the Palestinian revolution despite the protection of them by the Zionist occupation forces.
The Palestinian people are a secretariat in their neck, and they continue to hold on to their land, holding on to the embers, not to be harmed by those who have violated or failed them; they will not give up a grain of dust from them, and will continue their resistance until they are completely liberated from their river into the sea and have their Arab-Islamic identity restored.
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| The development of Jewish-Zionist control over the land of Palestine. |
References
This article is translated from مركز الزيتونة للدراسات, and does not necessarily reflect the point of view of the SquarePost team