A month or so ago I read in a thread, which unfortunately I was unable to locate, that pre-1948, Jewish settlers bought land from Palestinian landowners at exorbitant prices. Is this true, and if so how much land was purchased? Also, could anyone direct me to a valid source?
Normally I would post this question in GQ as it is intended to be rather straight forward and objective, but I’ve learned when it comes to world politics, especially in the near east, objectivity goes out the window.
A decent enough primer reviews some of the facts without excessive judgements.
Land was purchased from land owners. The land owners were often not the people working and living on the land, and those tenent farmers didn’t usually want to leave.
I don’t know of a source for how much land and at what cost. My guess is it was priced high.
According to sources quoted on this web site…
This answers the question of “how expensive.” As for “how much,” the same web site says:
FWIW, here’s something I wrote on or about 3/20/02 (in reply to Dex):
"Let me convey my non-expert understanding, based on Cleveland’s History of the Modern Middle East .
The Jewish National Fund bought most of its land during the 1930s from absentee landlords. Since the fund was subsidized by the Jewish Diaspora, it was able to turn around and sell the land to Jewish settlers (and the Kibbutz’s, I suppose) for a song.
The former Arab tenants (that’s paying tenants, not squatters) were evicted and permitted to experience the joys of unemployment during the 1930s.
In additions, the Brits forced many small Arab proprietors into bankruptcy and forced land sale, since unlike the Ottomans, they refused to accept their tax payments in kind. More dispossessed.
By 1939, some 5% of the Mandate (and 10% of all cultivatable land) was Jewish-owned.
Woops. That suggests that 95% of the land was not owned by Jews. Now, much of that was probably owned by absentee landlords. And some of that was probably purchased by Jewish residents between 1939 and 1948.
But I think its fair to say that a fair amount of wealth, in the form of land and in the form of housing was left behind by the 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees who fled Israel. There are documented incidents of forced evacuation in 1948 and even 1949."
If Jews owned 5% of the land, then Arabs owned the remaning 95%. Huh.
So what about government-owned land?