No Trespassers Please
It is not difficult to swindle the poor out of their patrimony. I wonder, therefore, as Israel forges ahead to the momentum of the old Zionist slogan A land without people for a people without land whether anything will remain of the West Bank to hand over to the Palestinians by the time the so-called peace process, now suspended, drags to a bitter end. What is not conquered will be bought, and, shameful to admit, there are always some Palestinians ready to pocket a few shekels in exchange for their land and their birthright.
Little wonder, then, that the Palestinian justice minister, Frieh Abu Middein, has invoked a Jordanian law imposing the death penalty for such sales. Whatever one thinks of capital punishment, the decision cannot be faulted legally since the West Bank is Jordanian territory under Israeli occupation. The practical rationale is even more understandable, for the new Har Homa colony in Arab east Jerusalem, which has brought the negotiations to a standstill, is being built on land largely bought from the Palestinians. As Middein pointed out, Israel treats property as sovereignty. If a Jew owns the land, then Israel considers it under its political sovereignty.
Yasser Arafats administration has arrested several Palestinians for violating the land law. Several others have been killed, it is not clear whether by compatriots or the administration. But Israels prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, professes to be shocked. So does Newt Gingrich, the House of Representatives speaker and other Republican stalwarts, in far-off America. What their pious wrath overlooks is that West Asias tragedy might never have assumed such grim proportions if it had not been for the greed or thoughtlessness of Palestines original landowners.
The saga began in 1878, four years before the first Russian Jewish migrants the First Aliyah reached Palestine. Once bought, the land was declared Jewish inalienable property, on which no non-Jews could work. The Jewish Agency laid down that it shall be deemed a matter of principle that the newly-bought lands should be cultivated only with Jewish labour. Thus, each purchase meant the eviction of the Palestinian tenant farmers who had cultivated the land for generations. All the Palestinian land which is purchased by Jewish funds is becoming an exclusive preserve for the Jews, Arnold Toynbee warned the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1931. You see what this means? It means what in South Africa is called segregation.
Palestine was then in the Ottoman empire. Though foreign ownership of land was forbidden, the Ottomans turned a blind eye to the sales in the hope of attracting Jewish capital to their own exhausted economy. Subsidised by Edmond de Rothschild, the number of Jewish colonies jumped up from 22 to 47 between 1900 and 1918.
When the Labanese Sursock family sold 60,000 acres to the Jews between 1912 and 1925 they pocketed nearly 750,000 while 21 Arab villages were flattened and 8,000 villagers evicted. The Tayyans were another Beirut family to sell enormous estates to the Jews. According to the Jewish Agency, 90 per cent of all the land bought before 1929 came from absentee landlords. After buying out these Beirut merchants who had bought land as an investment following the Ottoman land Code of 1858, the Zionists turned to the Russian church which the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 had crippled. The church gladly encashed some of its vast properties in the Holy Land.
About a month after the British mandate was established in 1923, Sir Herbert Samuel, the Zionist British high commissioner, legalized land sales. The first major purchase by the Jewish National Fund and the Palestine Land Development Company encompassed seven Arab villages in Galilee.
By closing the Ottoman Agricultural Bank, the British also deprived peasants, the fellaheen, of credit. They are not free agents in the matter, wrote Sir John Chancellor, a more sympathetic high commissioner than Samuel. They are distressingly poor and are heavily in debt to usurious moneylenders. When they are pressed by their creditors, and a Jewish land broker appears with money in his hand, the Arabs have no alternative but to sell their land in order to clear themselves of their liabilities. Additionally, prices were rising. Nevertheless, the hard-pressed fellaheen did not provide more than 10 per cent of the Jewish acquisitions.
Palestines aristocracy was another matter. It had few scruples about conniving with the Zionists, but it thought it prudent to maintain an appearance of patriotism. One such piece of camouflage was the Arab company for the Return of the Lands in Palestine. As the German consul in Jeruselum noted dryly in 1933, these Arab leaders in daylight were crying out against Jewish immigration, and in the darkness of the nights were selling lands to the Jews.
Children of the fellaheen, Arafat and his people cannot forget or forgive their betrayal. Hence, the denunciation as traitor of any Palestine who abets the Israeli plan to buy enough land to surround the whole of Jerusalem with two rings of settlements covering most of the central West Bank, so that the eventual Palestinian entity comprises only a small fragment of the territory that Israel conquered in 1967, and has occupied ever since.
Tailpiece: Like a promiscuous lover, says Singapore Airlines deputy chairman, Cheong Choong Kong, airlines are not averse to jumping from bed to bed if they think there are more exciting times to be had. Rejected by Qantas, rebuffed by Cambodia and India, SIA may at last have found a partner in Australias Ansett airline.