What were things like for the peasant farmers, the fellahin, living and farming in Palestine after the Ottoman Empire took over from the Mamluks in the 1880s when the Zionist invasion began and the land was forcibly taken from those peasant farmers? 

According to Yasser Arafat’s speech to the UN on 13 November 1974 it would have been thanks to an enlightened system of government that let to Palestine under the Muslims who lived in the area of modern day Israel, and worked the farms there to make it, in his words, a verdant area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture. 

Syria, as it was called, which covered Syria, Israel and Jordan, was ruled by sultans. Sultans were secular rulers of an area in the Ottoman Empire – not Muslim religious leaders. The sultan’s power was virtually unlimited. A wise sultan could make the area he governed prosperous. And if he was the opposite, then the result would be bad.

Historian Jacob de Haas in his 1939 book, History of Palestine – The Last Two Thousand Years, wrote of Palestine:

"The sultans regarded Palestine as their personal domain, acquired by the law of arms and war. The inhabitants …. could not pretend to real or personal property. Even private inheritance reverted to the sultan. …. all the country was crown land. When this system of crown land was compromised by grants to nobles, the peasants did not go with the land. …. The individual could not be imprisoned for debt though the village, as a unit, could be made to suffer for its collective obligation. The struggle, therefore, was between the land and the tax collector. If the assessor arrived at the right moment he seized what he claimed, and satisfied his demand. The peasant had no interest in thorough cultivation, or in the fertilization of the soil. His primitive tools were evidence of his poverty and indifference."

Obviously, for Yasser Arafat to have been right in his description of Palestine as a thriving, verdant green land, things had to have changed from what Jacob de Haas was describing, so let’s find out what happened and when that made this transformation of Palestine, that Yasser Arafat knew, possible.

Tag words: peasant farmers; fellahin; Palestine; Ottoman Empire; Mamluks; Zionists; Yasser Arafat; UN; Muslims; Sultans; Jacob de Haas; History of Palestine – The Last Two Thousand Years, wrote of Palestine; Count Constantine Francois Volney; Travels Through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, 1785; Charles Issawi; Columbia University; Princeton University; The Economic History of the Middle East. 1800-1914; Abraham Granott; The Land System in Palestine: History and Structure; Sir John Hope Simpson; The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey; Lord Ormsby-Gore; Bernard Lewis; John Lewis Burckhardt; Travels in Syria and the Holy Land; William McClure Thomson; The Land and the Book; Roderique Davison; George Washington University; Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876; Ziya Bey; Hurriyet #5; Suleyman Pasha; Printing presses; Hebron; Charles Thomas Wilson; Peasant Life in the Holy Land; Akira Kurosawa; The Seven Samurai; Sam Peckinpah; The Magnificent Seven; Count Volney;Charles Issawi; H. B. Tristramm; Lortet; G Schumacher; Der Arabische Pflug; Zionist Jews; Neville Mandel; al-Husayni; al-Khalidi; al-Nashashibi; Abdul Razak Kader; The Jerusalem Post;