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;

Yasser Arafat, in his speech at the United Nations on 13 November 1974, declared that the Jewish invasion (his words not mine) of Israel began with Zionism in 1881. Then on 29 November 1947, the United Nations passed Resolution 181 for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine, modern day Israel and Jordan, into Jewish and non-Jewish areas. This led to the creation of the modern states of Israel and Jordan. The British Mandate covered the area of Biblical Palestine, as it existed in the Bible. The whole of the area of Israel and Jordan was supposed to have been the new Israel. That didn’t happen.

The UN Resolution gave the Jews just about 8.3% of the British Mandate of Palestine. That was a bit puzzling because the League of Nations resolution of 24 July 1922 gave the British certain territories in the Middle East, including where the much smaller modern Israel is today, for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people. This Mandate was for the purposes of expressly putting into effect the declaration originally made by the British government on 2 November 1917, the Balfour Declaration, which had that aim. Why this happened will be the subject of some later programmes – and that is a story you won’t find told today.

The UN Resolution for creating the state of Israel, even in the form that it was passed in giving Israel only 8.3% of what it should have been given as its homeland, was voted against by all Arab nations.

Jews had been mostly blocked from moving to their Promised Land by the Ottoman Empire at the request of the local rulers it had appointed to that area. This has to be remarked on. Why would the Muslims have no problem with Jews living anywhere in the Ottoman Empire which covered all of North Africa and the Middle East, but forbade the Jews returning to their Promised Land. You would be justified in thinking that the reason for that was what was likely to come out of it. The Jews returning to their homeland that the Arabs had conquered and reclaiming it for their home. Just speculation on my part but it sounds plausible.

But with Zionism emerging in Europe, with powerful and wealthy Jews backing it, like Baron Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, and with well educated Jews, including many professional people, this stopping of Jews going to the Holy Lands looked like it was going to end. The Jews have always been a major race in the world, over represented in most fields of human endeavour. But without a country of their own they had been powerless and as my previous programmes have recorded from observations of travellers through Muslim lands over that time, at the overwhelmingly and unrelentingly cruel mercy of the Muslims for 1500 years.

The Jews had been mostly passive victims of the inhuman treatment they had received for so long from the Muslims and many European countries. Zionism, a movement expressing a strong urge for Jews to return to their Promised Land and make it their own again after thousands of years, was not a welcome development. How would the Muslims react in the time leading up to the creation of the ..

According to Yasser Arafat 1881 was when Zionism got under way, and some surprising and unexpected things happened that no one has bothered to tell you. Not even Yasser Arafat.

Tag words: Yasser Arafat; United Nations; Zionism; British Mandate of Palestine; Resolution 181; Israel; Jordan; League of Nations; Balfour Declaration; Ottoman Empire; Muslims; Jews; Baron Rothschild; Moses Montefiore; Promised Land; Holy Lands; fellahin; Egyptian Nationality Code; Theodor Herzl; Der Jüdenstaat; The Jewish State; Zionist Congress; Alfred Dreyfuss; anti-Semitic; Adolf Hitler; Joseph Stalin; Jewish Colonial Trust; Bank Leumi; Jewish National Fund; World War I; Statistical Abstract of Palestine; Arab Conquest; Jewish Revolt; Sephardic Jews; Reverend James Parkes; Vital Cuinet; Mohammad; Mamluk; Bedouin; Bernard Lewis; The Emergence of Modern Turkey; A Granott; The Land System in Palestine;