Palestine Is Not For Sale!

Because it was already sold, and you'll never guess by who

I don’t know if this rates as cultural appropriation, but Palestinian activists are producing their own version of Mordechai Ben David’s legendary hit “Jerusalem Is Not For Sale.” This will be taking place tomorrow, in Boro Park!

I’m not sure what songs they will be singing other than the title song. Maybe "Just one jihad and we'll all be free!" And perhaps they’ll do an adaptation of the Abie Rotenberg classic, "Come with me, little shahidele."

But seriously, folks. Apparently this protest is in response to some kind of Israeli property sale that is taking place. And what I find extremely interesting is that the organizers of this protest - along with many people around the world - are probably unaware of how Jewish settlement in early 20th century Palestine acquired land to begin with.

The extraordinary explanation of this is presented by David Fromkin in A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. He has an interesting account of Churchill’s dealings with the Arab leadership regarding Palestine:

In August 1921 Churchill repeated to an Arab delegation that had come to London that “I have told you again and again that the Jews will not be allowed to come into the country except insofar as they build up the means for their livelihood. They cannot take any man's lands. They cannot dispossess any man of his rights or his property... If they like to buy people's land and people like to sell it to them, and if they like to develop and cultivate regions now barren and make them fertile, then they have the right... [to do so].”

“There is room for all...,” he told them. “No one has harmed you… The Jews have a far more difficult task than you. You only have to enjoy your own possession; but they have to try to create out of the wilderness, out of the barren places, a livelihood for the people they bring in.”

…The Arab delegation to London, which was headed by Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husseini, president of the Arab Executive… did in fact understand what Churchill meant about Arabs wanting to sell land to Jews, for Musa Kazim Pasha, the president of the delegation, was himself one of those who had sold land to the Jewish settlers. So had other members of the Arab delegations that he brought with him to London in 1921-2 and in succeeding years.

Prince Feisal and Dr Chaim Weizmann had agreed in 1918 that there was no scarcity of land in Palestine: the problem, rather, was that so much of it was controlled by a small group of Arab landowners and usurers. The great mass of the peasantry struggled to eke out a bare living from low-yielding, much-eroded, poorly irrigated plots, while large holdings of fertile lands were being accumulated by influential families of absentee landlords.

The Zionist plan, as outlined by Weizmann to Feisal in 1918, was to avoid encroaching on land being worked by the Arab peasantry and instead to reclaim unused, uncultivated land, and by the use of scientific agricultural methods to restore its fertility. The large Arab landholders, however, turned out to be eager to sell the Jewish settlers their fertile lands, too - at very considerable profits.

(For a variety of reasons, the economic yield on Palestinian agricultural landholdings had sunk to low levels during the First World War and just afterward, and the Arab propertied classes were enabled to maintain their level of income only because of the bonanza provided by Jews purchasing land at inflated prices. Jewish settlement was a boon to wealthy Arabs, whatever they said in public to the contrary, and their claim that Jews were forcing them to sell was fraudulent. The genuine grievance was that of the impoverished Arab peasantry. As socialists, the Jewish farmers were opposed to the exploitation of others and therefore did all their own work; when Jews bought Arab farms the Arab farm laborers therefore lost their jobs.)

Indeed Jewish purchasers bid land prices up so that, not untypically, an Arab family of Beirut sold plots of land in the Jezreel valley to Jewish settlers in 1921 at prices ranging from forty to eighty times the original purchase price. Far from being forced by Jews to sell, Arabs offered so much land to Jews that the only limiting factor on purchases became money: the Jewish settlers did not have enough money to buy all the land that Arabs offered to them.

Not merely non-Palestinian Arabs but the Palestinian Arab leadership class itself was deeply implicated in these land sales that it publicly denounced. Either personally or through their families, at least a quarter of the elected official leadership of the Arab Palestinian community sold land to Jewish settlers between 1920 and 1928.

The Zionist leadership may have been misled by such dealings into underestimating the depth of real local opposition to Jewish settlement.

It’s often noted that Palestinians blame Israel for the consequences of their own bad decisions. Generally, this refers to such early 20th decisions as that to engage in all-out war against Jewish immigration and a Jewish state, involving violent attacks on civilians, instead of compromise. But at least in that case, the Palestinian decision is understandable from their national perspective. Selling land to the Jews, on the other hand, is something that the elected Palestinian leadership did against their own national interests out of personal greed.

How ironic that Palestinians are demonstrating in Brooklyn that Palestine is not for sale, when some of their own ancestors were the ones who sold it to the Jews and helped make Israel possible in the first place.