The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 46)
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- The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 46)
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besides numbers is that whole villages and communities where uprooted in the
process.°' In addition, Metzer’s exclusion of owner-cultivators of small plots who
were displaced by European acquisitions is characteristic of his whole study that
focuses on directly observable and quantifiable phenomena while ignoring the
underlying and more complex process of the overall impact of European
settlement, in this instance, on the indigenous rural areas.
Another example of underestimating or ignoring altogether the impact of
European settlements on Arab rural areas is when Metzer deals with the Zionist
policy of, after the acquisition of land, the prohibition of its sale or lease to
Palestinian Arabs or other non-Jews. He states, “This unilaterally imposed
segregation, besides its territorial-political connotations in the Arab-Jewish conflict,
also implied a reduction in the overall land-buying options of non-Jews.”°* Thus,
at a time of increasing Arab population in a primarily agricultural society, the
exclusivist Jewish land policy is reduced to simply a “reduction in options.” Then
after he correctly points out “that inequality of ownership of large estates rose
substantially” between 1919 and 1936 among Palestinian Arabs, Metzer continues:
This finding suggests that whatever the effect of large tracts being
purchased by Jews on reducing the size of the remaining Arab
holdings, as far as the changes in the size distribution of Arab land
is concerned, concentration of ownership within the Arab sector
seems to have dominated the scene, alongside the continued
Elia Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 46.
*Metzer, Divided Economy, 87.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - هو جزء من
- The Dispossession of the Peasantry
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- المنشئ
- Riyad Mousa
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