. . . with Jewish Money before the State of Israel was established
So why are the Jews called occupiers? The ‘Palestinians’ convinced the world and themselves that the Jews were invaders from Europe who ‘stole’ their land of “Palestine.” The truth is that Jews actually bought many areas of the land. They were not invaders who came in with armies to conquer lands. Actually, the Zionist Jews were mainly pioneers who came to redeem the land from the Turkish occupiers without weapons or use of violence. They settled in areas purchased at usually exorbitant prices by Jewish philanthropists.
Was it legal under Ottoman rule?
In accordance with the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, Jewish buyers were allowed to purchase large tracts of land from wealthy influential families, who owned vast lands in Beirut, Damascus, and Palestine, and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and Jaffa. Also, small farmers who became indebted to rich families transferred their pieces of land to the large property owners who later sold them to Jewish buyers.
In 1881 the Ottoman governmental administration decreed that foreign Jews could immigrate to countries under the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of Palestine. From 1882 until their defeat in 1918, the Ottomans continually restricted Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine. Nevertheless, during the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, many successful land purchases were made through Jewish organizations such as the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PJCA), Palestine Land Development Company and the Jewish National Fund. (Before Israel became a nation in 1948, everyone in the land was called Palestinian.) In the mid-1850s, the new Jewish pioneers made the first attempts to live productively in Ottoman Palestine without reliance on the “old yishuv“. (The Yishuv was the Jewish society established in the land of Israel by the first pioneers in the late 18th century. They were supported by funding from overseas Jewish philanthropists.)
The First Jewish Land Purchases and Purchasers in Palestine
Up to 1867 Only citizens of the Ottoman Empire were allowed to purchase land in Palestine (the Land of Israel).
In 1807, the Head of the Jewish community in Hebron from Spain and Portugal, Rabbi Haim Bejayo, purchased land in the city and donated it to the community.
Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) made the first known land purchase of land outside the Old City of Jerusalem in 1855, and also about 25 acres of orange groves in Jaffa. Other private acquisitions followed, and by 1882, some 5,500 acres had been purchased by Jews.
Mishkenot Shaananim, (today a neighborhood in West Jerusalem) was bought in 1860 by David Yalin and was settled in 1894 by the Jewish organization of Bnai Brith.
The Abu family with money donated by Montefiore bought 7,000 dunams of land of the Arab village of Mairon in Upper Galilee in 1970, which was later settled by Jews from Kurdistan and North Africa. In 1872, the Abu family purchased land on Hula Lake for the Bedouin and established the Mai Marom colony.
Some lands were purchased by individuals and groups like Eliezer Rokah and the Jerusalem Jewish community in the mid 19th century from Arab villages like Jauna in the upper Galilee, and Omles in the center. 17 Jewish families from Sfad started a settlement in Jauna but later abandoned it. Jews from Jerusalem settled in Omles and also later abandoned it. The pioneers from the First Aliya resettled those areas with different names, Petah Tikva in the center in 1883, and Rosh Pina in the Galilee in 1875.
The first wave of young Zionist pioneers from Europe who settled in Palestine came without capital and without agricultural experience. The Hibbat Zion movement (the first Zionist movement), requested financial help from Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) for advancing the Zionist’s efforts. ICA became an important participant in land redemption.
With each purchase, the Jews had to deal with the complicated bureaucracy of the local Turkish authorities that often required bribery. After decades of neglect by the Ottoman Empire, the land of Palestine had become an almost desolate parched land, with a dwindled down and poor population. The land the Jewish pioneers bought required swamp draining, stone clearing, terrace creation and repairs.
The Jewish National Fund. On December 29, 1901, the Jewish National Fund (JNF. Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael in Hebrew) was founded for the purpose of land purchase in Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) – redemption of the land. In its first decade, the JNF built a worldwide fundraising organization based on the sale of stamps, small boxes for money collections (Pushka) in homes and schools, and fundraising. Its first modest purchases were made in 1904 and 1908 in Lower Galilee, Judea, and the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) region, and two forms of settlement that would prove crucial in the land-acquisition enterprise were pioneered: the cooperative farm (moshav) and the collective farm (kevutsa, later kibbutz).
In 1908, the Zionist Organization Palestine Land Development Company (PLDP) was established by Otto Warburg and Arthur Ruppin for the purpose of purchasing land for the JNF. Later an overseas fundraising organization, Keren Hayesod, was also established. In urban development, Ruppin’s efforts helped in founding the new Jewish city of Tel Aviv, and the purchase of land in the mixed cities of Haifa and Jerusalem, where Jewish neighborhoods were established. Ruppin also initiated the establishment of several educational facilities for agricultural training known as “National Farms” on JNF land.
Was it legal under British rule?
In 1918, after the British conquest of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate was established in order to make a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine as stated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. When the League of Nations handed the mandate over to Britain in 1922, it stipulated firmly in Article 6 that the “Palestine [British] administration should work together with the Jewish Agency to encourage intensive settlement of the land by Jews, which should include the land owned by the state and the uncultivated or waste land, as long as this land is not needed for official purposes.” Parts of the country were made available for redemption (buying land) such as the Negev, Transjordan and the Golan Heights.
In 1920 Zionist pioneers formed the Haganah, (small defense force) in order to combat Arab attacks on the Jewish villages and settlements, while at the same time focusing on farming the wasteland, drying out the swamps, clearing water channels, planting trees on barren hills, clearing rocks, and removing salt from the soil.
Who owned the land?
Who were the sellers? Why did they sell?
From the beginning of World War I, part of Palestine’s land was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. About 80 percent of the Palestinian Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads, and Bedouins (nomads). The Turkish Ottoman Empire ruled in Palestine for 400 years (1517-1917) and through the years their empire declined and was not able to maintain the land in good condition. Wealthy Arab landowners from Syria, Egypt and Lebanon took advantage of the situation and took over enormous tracts of real estate from the fellahs (Arab farmers) and Bedouins (nomads.) Then they sold the properties to European and American Jews at a huge profit.
According to Turkish government records, “in 1915, 3,130,000 dunams (4 dunams = 1 acre) of land in Palestine was owned by 144 Arab landowners”. So on average, each family owned 544 acres. The farmers who leased the properties were forced to pay enormous interest rates to the Arab landlords of up to 60 percent, and many tenants were left destitute, losing both home and livelihood.
Most Jewish land purchases were made in the coastal plain, the Jezreel Valley, the Jordan Valley and to a lesser extent the Galilee, because they were cheaper and less populated. (The coastal plain was mainly sand dunes and prone to lawless Bedouin attacks.) Other lands the Jews purchased were mainly uncultivated land, swampy and gravel filled.
The sparse Arab population in these areas didn’t object to Jews purchasing these lands, and there was no need for a massive eviction of the Arab tenants. Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion opposed buying land that belonged to fellahs (Arab farmers) who worked for the rich Turkish landowners. Ben-Gurion said: “Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement, should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.”
It was only after the Jews bought all of the undesirable available land that they began to purchase cultivated land. Many Arabs were willing to sell to the Jews because they needed money to invest in the citrus industry.
In 1912 Menachem Ussishkin, a Zionist leader, urged the Zionist Organization to pursue land purchase and settlement in the Land of Israel (called Palestine at that time.) He urged Hovevei Zion (groups of foundation-builders of Zionism) to donate funds for the purchase of land on Mount Scopus for a university in Jerusalem. As president of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) between 1923 and 1941, he made trips to Europe and Canada to raise funds and undertook difficult negotiations to acquire large tracts of land in Palestine for the JNF.
In 1923 Baron Edmond de Rothschild founded the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA), which carried on his work under his son, James Armand de Rothschild (1878-1957). By 1930, PICA had acquired 2,100 acres in many parts of the valleys of Jezreel, Zebulun, Jordan, Beit Shean, Huleh and Hefer. Also in the Haifa bay area and in the northern Negev. Leaders of the Yeshuv of Rishon Lezion, one of the First Aliya villages, also petitioned the Baron de Rothschild for financial help. He became patron to 12 settlements for the purchase of land, reclamation (after purchase work to clean up the land) and economic settlement. He established an administration that institutionalized all three aspects of land redemption. The best-known settlements sponsored by Rothschild are Metulla, Zikhron Ya’akov, Rishon Lezion, and Rosh Pina. Metulla (established in 1896 in the northern part of the upper Galilee) is an example of a purchase that had the further advantages of controlling water sources and establishing the northern limit of Jewish settlement to the north (today the Lebanon border).
In the second phase of land redemption, reclamation, PICA began to drain swamps, turning the land over to existing or newly founded rural settlements in the area. The JNF, by purchasing additional land in the northern Huleh Valley, achieved virtual contiguity between Metulla and Rosh Pina (Upper Galilee). The JNF, through the PLDC, purchased more than 28,350 acres during the Mandate period, mainly in the valleys – Jezreel, Zebulun, Jordan, Beit Shean, Huleh and Hefer – in the Haifa Bay area and in the Northern Negev. By 1929, towns and villages purchased by Zionists stretched from Metulla (close to the Lebanon border) in the north to Be’er Tuvia (east of Ashdod) in the south.
Yehoshua Hankin (1864-1945), the driving force of the PLDC, was another Zionist activist, who beginning in 1890 made great personal efforts to acquire lands for the establishment of the towns of Rehovot and Hadera, as well as the ICA settlements in the Galilee and most of the Jezreel Valley – close to 25,000 acres in all. Hankin knew how to interact with Arabs, foreigners and other authorities with great success. In 1927, he presented the Zionist leadership with a 20-year plan for land acquisition, and five years later became director of the PLDC.
The American Zion Commonwealth Company, bought the land in the Jezreel Valley on which Afula (a city close to Tiberius) was founded. Private capital was spent for the expansion of citrus plantations on the coastal plain and the establishment of several villages there. As time passed, private foreign capital was donated to the urban sector. Jewish national capital funded pioneering rural settlement in various parts of the country, on which it established 50 settlements of different forms: villages, kibbutzim, moshavim, and towns. PICA continued to assist rural settlements as well as developing or financing economic enterprises, such as wineries, the Potash Company, the Electric Company and Nesher Cement.
Who were the sellers?
As the non-Jewish inhabitants of the country realized the growth of the Zionist movement purchasing of lands, the obstacles increased. The Arabs who wanted to sell their acquired estates caused the price to skyrocket. Two Arab landowner families who lived in Syria had acquired from the Turkish Sultan in 1914 the land of the Huleh Valley concession area (north of the Sea of Galilee). They leased out the swamp land to Arab or Egyptian peasants (fellahs) to drain and settle the Hula. The Arab peasants lived in primitive mud huts and inevitably got sick with malaria. In 1934, the two Arab families sold 3,200 acres of the swamp land to the Jews at an exorbitant profit. The Jewish National Fund purchased this marshland for 900,000 Palestinian Liras (currency of the British Mandate in Palestine. $4.5 million in today’s money) and set up 20 Jewish settlements on it. These Jewish pioneers battled malaria, yellow fever, and the scorching Middle Eastern sun in order to drain the swamps and reclaim the land.
In 1944, Jews in Palestine paid exorbitant prices to wealthy landowners for small tracts of mostly arid or semiarid land. They paid between $1,000 and $1,100 per acre. By 1947, Jewish holdings in Palestine amounted to about 463,000 acres. Approximately 45,000 of these acres were acquired from the Mandatory British Government; 30,000 acres were bought from various churches and 387,500 acres were purchased from Arab landowners.
The land purchased by the Jews from the Arabs were from rich landowners, not poor Arabs, among them the mayors of Gaza, Jerusalem, and Jaffa. Many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including members of the Muslim Supreme Council, sold land to Jews.
Why Did the Arabs Riot?
In 1929 Arab riots started when Arab political leaders pressured the Arab landowners to stop their land transactions with the Jews, in spite of the great profits they were making. In April 1936, a new outbreak of Arab attacks on Jews resulted in the killing of 89 and wounding of more than 300 Jews.
The Peel Commission (a British commission sent from London to investigate the roots of the Arab-Jewish conflict and to propose solutions) were not friends of the Jews. Nevertheless, they reported that Arab complaints about Jewish land acquisition were baseless and that the Arab landowners did it in order to drive up prices for lands they wished to sell. Many Arab landowners who were terrorized by Arab rebels decided to leave Palestine and sell their property to the Jews.
The First Partition Agreement
As the extensive Arab disturbances increased (1936-1939), the Peel Commission came up with the partition proposal (July 1937) and the 1939 “White Paper” policy went into effect. The Jewish community and the Zionist movement were ready for statehood, even with the small section of land they were given. Regulations under the White Paper policy (Feb. 1940) partitioned the country into three zones:
Area A (the Judean and Samarian hills, the Western Galilee, and the Northern Negev), where sales to Jews were banned altogether;
Area B (Jezreel Valley the Eastern Galilee, and most of coastal plain), where sales might continue with approval of the High Commissioner;
Area C (the coastal strip, from Zikhron Ya’akov to a point north of Rehovot, plus the urban areas – corresponding roughly to the Peel Commission partition boundaries), where there were no restrictions on Jews buying land.
The State of Israel Established
On December 31st, 1944, out of 1,732.63 dunams (428acres) of land owned in Palestine by large Jewish Corporations and private owners, about 44% was in possession of Jewish National Fund.
In secret, the land-redemption agencies established approximately 50 new localities in previously unsettled rural areas by erecting, overnight, settlements which included a stockade and a watchtower. A crucial step in securing the inclusion of the Negev in the Jewish state was the formation of 11 such settlements in this area on October 15, 1946, and another 7 in 1947. 18 settlements in all by May 1948 when the Mandate expired.
By the time Israel was to proclaim its statehood, land redemption had placed nearly one-tenth of the country under Jewish ownership, the rest being owned by the government or by Arabs. By the end of the Mandate (1948), PICA possessed a large proportion of the Jewish-owned land in Israel.
Reclamation efforts and Jewish agriculture made the barren land thrive as it had not since the Roman era. The country had 277 Jewish rural settlements – 15 villages, and another 30 urban cities and towns, 99 moshavim, 159 kibbutzim, and 4 other forms of settlements. Their 111,000 inhabitants accounted for nearly 20 percent of the total Jewish population.
In summary, the land was ruled by the Ottomans and later the British. The land was largely owned by absentee landlords who were taking advantage of the population. Before the statehood of Israel, overseas Jewish philanthropists and organizations purchased first the undesirable and then the more desirable land from these landlords and then developed it, and the country to began to thrive. Every purchase was legal in the eyes of the ruling governments and the world. Riots were inspired by landlords attempting to raise the sale prices. At the time of the declaration of the statehood of Israel, there were already 277 Jewish neighborhoods in Israel (1/10th of the land of Israel) all purchased and established legally before 1948.