The British mandate government in Palestine embarked in 1921 on a grandiose project of land reform with the declared aims of correcting a corrupt Ottoman title registration system and encouraging the economic development of a small landholding peasantry. Using a host of archival material and other sources, this paper discusses the implementation of the land reform on the state lands in the Beisan region—a part of the Jordan Valley—and the agency of the local communities within it. Although the reform had put the peasants on a seemingly favorable track, promising to grant them secure legal titles as full owners, it paradoxically failed to create the economic and political conditions that would strengthen their legal titles to the land. Consequently, a large part of the land was sold in the market to outsiders, and the government continued to improvise protective measures to restrain the dynamics of land alienation. The paper brings to light the agency of the peasants and their forms of protest and political demands. Most significantly, the reform’s legal language of private property undermined their notions of justice and protection and moral claims to the land—as a sacred object given by their forefathers as a shelter and sphere of livelihood—tying their welfare to a detached, technocratic language of colonial ‘proper government’. Despite all this, in various cases and situations they were able to pressure their colonial rulers and influence their decisions. The paper questions prevailing theoretical assumptions in the historiography about property and government; most importantly, it discusses property as an instrument of government, rather than accepting the liberal notion that government emerges naturally as an instrument of protection for property.