JM: While Ottoman politics made it difficult for the Zionist movement to register land, the British did the exact opposite. Basically, the British took over what was miri land (state land) from the fallen Ottoman Empire. And then the newly established Israeli state took over from the British who ended their mandate overnight. What this meant was that large swaths of land were taken over by the settler-state – obfuscating varying communal relationships and practices that had taken place on it for centuries – only then to ban Palestinian use-right with the excuse that they were not registered as property. After ’48, the Palestinians who remained would be fined for herding their livestock on so-called state-land, and decades later foragers would be fined for collecting wild growing herbs on their ancestral lands.
NA: Palestinians did not need these land registration documents — they had natural boundaries and oral agreements based on liability, kinship, and social relations. There were no clear demarcations of the borders of the land. Hence, the land is not just a resource, but it’s also a social relation. And until now there are lands in Palestine where the ownership is still not registered.
JM: Historically we managed without it for many hundreds of years.
NA: And that troubled the British; not being able to read the land properly and not knowing who owned it, which directly affected the land transfers to the Zionists. Therefore, waging a war on the mushaa’ and breaking it into private parcels was the way to exert control over it, for the sake of development, and to facilitate the transfer of land to the Zionists.
Just to give you some numbers, by 1947, Zionist ownership did not exceed 6-7% of the land of Palestine, so it wasn’t really that much, and the Jewish population composed less than a third of the entire population. During the British Mandate, the gates of Palestine were open for Zionist settlers to come, but even with this the numbers are not that high.
JM: I think these numbers are important, because they reflect that even with this war on the mushaa’, the Palestinians refused its abolition in so many ways. The majority of land owners did not sell. The majority of Palestine remained in Palestinian hands up until 1947. Israel confiscated most of Palestine through ethnic cleansing, which continues in the West Bank, particularly in the last few decades.
theartofmadeline
amandla
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
turnnoffyourmind
tangentwithtanner
