Well… yes and no. The real drive towards creating a separate state began once the sovereign power fell. It’d be much more like Chinese people moving to Washington state and forming a big ol’ China Town community, and then the US government fell, the United States ceased to exist, and the Chinese people there declaring that they wanted self-determination but that people who lived there would be free to continue, their new sovereign would just be Chinese instead of American.
Do you have a cite for this? My understanding is that under the Ottoman land laws (at least from the middle of the 19th century and onwards), tenants had the right to usufruct, but only while they cultivated the land and they didn’t have the right to uproot trees (for example) and move them with them should they move to a different parcel of land. I’m unaware of any category of miri or mawat land that was treated as you describe, and musha land wasn’t essentially different, at least after the Ottoman Land Code reforms of 1858 and '59.
Never said it was unique, people hate landlords in general, especially absentee landlords, and they really hate having to move off land that they’ve been renting. That those who were dispossessed were annoyed is hardly surprising.
I’m not going to speak about “the Jews” and more than I will about “the Arabs”, and honestly neither should you. Sure, a non-zero portion of both Jews and Arabs were bastards and more than a little hateful and prejudiced. But a non-zero portion weren’t, and I honestly have no idea what the actual percentages were. I will point out, again, that there was substantial disagreement within the socialist circles of Zionist movement, where many considered exclusionary hiring practices to be an abrogation of their responsibility to fellow workers. Obvious, the Communist Zionists often went further than that in their analysis.
We’ve had this discussion before.
In this thread, in a few places. That anti-Jewish sentiment, and anti-group murderous violence existed in the Arab world is a fact. I do not grok, nor agree with, your distinction that it was fundamentally different than anti-Semitism. I contend that it was a different ‘flavor’. To use a rough and ready analogy, it’d be in the nation of Hypothetica, people had contempt and disdain for blacks because they thought that having black skin was the ugliest thing possible. And they would beat the shit out of/murder a bunch of them from time to time, and generally imposed discriminatory regulations and kept them as second class citizens, but then they got some pamphlets from the KKK and decided that they really hated blacks because they were scheming to rape non-black women and were all criminals, anyways.
In any case, in the Arab world, the cultural diffusion of ‘western flavor’ anti-Semitism wasn’t after the creation of Zionism. The Damascus Affair occurred in 1840, pretty much before any appreciable immigration from even the proto-Zionists. And again, there was significant opposition to Jewish immigration before the OE fell, meaning that there was no practical chance at all for the new residents to seriously be planning to set up their own nation.
This is actually inaccurate, and one of the more pervasive myths when dealing with this conflict. When you’re dealing with state owned land in Israel, about four fifths of the country (and about 9/10’s if you include JNF land), nobody can buy it, Arab, Jew or sentient cuttlefish. It can only be leased. But Arabs lease land that’s state-owned, and even some JNF owned land in Israel.
The debate about the term “colonialism” is also a bit of a rabbit trail. When we refer to state-colonialism, we’re generally talking about a nation state dominating a foreign nation in order to obtain material benefit from its people and/or resources, usually by setting up an administration in their target country and sometimes by settling it heavily with some of their own citizens who retain extraterritoriality. In the case of Zionism, people who were representatives of no nation state were moving onto land and living there themselves as their home, first under the Ottomans and then under British rule. In that case, “colonization” is a synonym for “settling on” rather than something like “European imperialism”.
And was some of the area already cultivated by its Arab residents? Sure was. Were there also swamps that were drained by Zionist immigrants and rendered habitable? Yep, that too. Richon L’Tzion, for example, was a pretty awful barren stretch before its inhabitants got their shit together and made the area livable. And now it’s the location of Carmel’s winery, IIRC.
[nitpick]During the Mandate, all the people who lived in Mandate Palestine were referred to as “Palestinians”, Jews and Arabs alike. Citizenship was simply referred to as Palestinian citizenship. In fact, when Jews were visiting the US to try to solicit funds/raise support for Zionism, they were referred to as “Palestinians”. [/nitpick]