Changes brought about by the Tanzimat reforms and European economic penetration in Palestine during the nineteenth century effected a change in the relationship between elites (notables and rural shaykhs) and non-elites (primarily the peasantry). What as of the beginning of the nineteenth century had been a relationship based to some extent on mutual dependency—in the sense that the status of elites was partly dependent on the support of non-elites—had, by the end of the nineteenth century evolved into a much more exploitative one; elite status came to depend less on the support of non-elites, and more on one’s position in newly created Ottoman institutions, the most important of which were the majalis al-idara. These institutions, together with other changes reflective of the growing centralization of authority, allowed elites to more effectively exploit Palestine’s peasantry, in connection with newly generated economic opportunities related to the growing importance of the global market. These changes also had the effect of tying the peasantry more directly to formal Islamic institutions, a development further undermining their leverage vis-à-vis elites. Earlier in the century, the authority of elites had depended in large part on their ability to mediate between the peasantry and the more formal Islamic institutions of the urban milieu, something that depended in part on the perception that elites were acting on behalf of the peasantry and were good “Muslims” in the sense of being generous, just and fair. This would now change, as elite-dominated Islamic institutions increasingly were able to directly intrude upon the lives of the peasantry.

When the British conquered Palestine they believed it to be a territory that had been subject to misrule and mismanagement. Unaware of the extensive social transformations of the late Ottoman era, colonial officials typically saw the countryside as a social, cultural, and economic backwater, the productive resources of which were fettered by quasi-feudal institutions, archaic cultivation techniques, and a dysfunctional land regime. This assessment, and the British commitment to the Jewish National Home policy, led the colonial state to privilege the economic development of Jewish enterprises and the yishuv, in the belief that the benefits would trickle down to and help pacify the Arab community. Especially in the first decade of Mandatory rule British economic policies regarding taxation, credit provision, external and internal trade, and revision of the land regime were often geared towards Zionist interests while negatively impacting the peasantry. These policies escalated the trend towards peasant dispossession that had emerged during the late Ottoman era and contributed greatly to the erosion of the rural social order, ironically bringing about the outcome that colonial authorities hoped most to avoid: the creation of a landless, disaffected semi-proletariat. This paper examines the decomposition of the Palestinian peasantry under British rule and peasant responses to the conundrums they confronted. Beyond the official measure of landlessness in the 1931 census it uses three lenses to track the transformation of the peasantry: 1) the collapse of the tithe (‘ushr) as a collectable tax; 2) the crisis of under- and unemployment among wage laborers before 1936; and 3) the expansion of Arab slums in the port cities. Against much of the prevailing literature on the subject, it contends that a significant portion of the peasantry had become semi-proletarianized before World War II. Contrary to the suppositions of peasant docility and subordination put forth by the British, Zionists, Palestinian politicians, and a range of scholars, peasants both on the land and in the cities resisted official policies in a variety of fashions. Besides flouting and bending land laws, peasants joined youth societies and labor unions, engaged in widespread sabotage of rural Zionist property in the early 1930s, and rose in revolt in 1929 and again from 1936-39. In providing a précis of modes of peasant/migrant resistance the paper probes changes in corporate identities and social mobilization, suggesting that the disintegration of the old agrarian order gave rise to growing peasant autonomies before the 1940s.

During the first decade of British rule in Palestine, the changes that occurred among local peasantry were phenomenal in political and economic terms. Though the economic and social changes certainly pre-date the establishment of the British mandate, the new political atmosphere created a situation whereby the politics of the local elites (with whom the British interacted) were superimposed on the entire population. Setting up their political capital in Jerusalem, the classic historiography of the period centers around the political relationship the British colonial government had with the local elites, ignoring the vibrant role in political resistance of the local urban peasantry. Using Jerusalem as the backdrop, this paper will confront that colonial and elitist reading of the city as a means to suggest a more complicated understanding of political agency among the peasantry as urban actors in the Jerusalem region. Though often not seen as a primary commercial center in the larger region, the incorporation of the peasants of the villages surrounding Jerusalem into the expanding economic and social life of the city during the first few decades of the century dramatically changed the political life of the city and the local imagination of its ever-growing boundaries. Ironically, the new system installed by the British, in particular the various measures of security and governance created by the colonial government – and the consequent plethora of police, commercial and personal records created by this system – provides the opportunity to read the comings and goings of regular urbanized Palestinian peasants. Readings these records show that as the projects to expand the construction of neighborhoods in the “new city” evolved, these peasants from the surrounding villages achieved a growing sense of economic power through the new economy that fed this expansion. Rich in resources for a growing city, peasants in the villages quickly became primary economic actors. As their relationship to the economy expanded, so did their influence on the popular political scene in the city. This paper will argue that a closer reading of the lives of these urban peasants can help us understand not only the political resistance that led to the 1936-1939 revolt, but also provides us with a new way of reading “the urban” in Palestine. Beyond the well-known history of elitism in the city lies the story of these urban peasants who actively opposed the political agenda of the colonial-installed leadership.

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.