The experience of growing tobacco as a cash crop deeply affected many Palestinian family households and reorganized agrarian life. However, as scholarly literature rarely concentrates on the history of Palestine’s rural society, questions about this reorganization remain unanswered: How did the family conceive of, and divide “work”? How was the “home” reconfigured as it became the site of initial commodity processing for leaf tobacco? How did growing tobacco affect bodies and roles within the family? How were these different from the working conditions of Jewish tobacco growers? How did the state of Israel perceive the labor of Palestinian peasants? And finally, what changed with the shift to wage labor? Drawing on archival sources and oral history interviews with Palestinian citizens of Israel who used to cultivate tobacco, this paper examines peasants’ views of the agrarian family household and its economic viability in the twentieth century. It argues that Israeli plans for the Arab agrarian sector were marked by a policy of de-development, through which it aimed at incorporating Arab peasants into the Israeli work force as cheap laborers. Using the language of modernization, progress, and science, this policy delegitimized the collective working body of the household in favor of individual, mostly male, working bodies. Peasant families, who in the past had special words, clothes, tools, and spaces for tobacco, kept them as souvenirs of a time when the family was more than a kinship group. As tobacco cultivation faded away in the 1970s and 1980s after a century of cultivation, the social, cultural, and bodily experiences of growing tobacco within a multigenerational household remained (and still remains) alive in the memories of individuals and families.