From the Pages of the Defter (ص 75)

غرض

عنوان

From the Pages of the Defter (ص 75)

المحتوى

required to sow them, or in dunums the number of which was arrived at by
; . . 126
the merest guess. In other instances areas were entirely omitted.
This passage reveals lingering British confusion regarding Ottoman laws and procedure, after
more than two decades of having interpreted these laws as rulers of the land.’”’ Yet, it has
served as the framework that has dominated the historiography of land-tenure reform in
Palestine for almost a century. In light of the preceding discussions in this study, a number of
inaccuracies mentioned in this quotation have likely struck you, the reader. First, the notion
of land registries is vague. As we have seen, individuals were able to register land with the
tapu already in the early 1860s. Second, when land and property registration officials were
installed at the provincial and district levels, voluntary registration continued for some time
before yoklamas were carried out. The commissions’ work was not “the” only procedure for
‘8 Third, the claim that “no survey was carried out” because not all lands in
registering land.
the country were included in the registry indicates a fundamental misunderstanding about
the role and modus operandi of the yoklama commissions. Additionally voiced in this short
26 A Survey of Palestine, Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the information of the Anglo-
American Committee of Inquiry, vol. 1 (Palestine: The Government Printer, 1946): 237-238.
7 On British adoption and adaptation of Ottoman land laws during the Mandate, see Martin Bunton,
“Inventing the Status Quo: Ottoman Land-Law during the Palestine Mandate, 1917-1936”, The
International History Review, 21/1 (March 1999): 28-56, and Idem., (2007), particularly Chapter 1.
128 Although the Turkish pronunciation and common transliteration is yoklama (see the previous section),
the transliteration used in the Survey is closer to the Ottoman-Turkish spelling of the word. An Arabic
speaker would read the word as yuglama. The understood Ottoman pronunciation puts the stress on
the first syllable.
58

هو جزء من

From the Pages of the Defter

تاريخ

٢٠١٦

المنشئ

Susynne McElrone

مجموعات العناصر

Generated Pages Set

Theses رسائل ماجستير ودكتوراه