The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 165)

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The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 165)

المحتوى

149
are families who previously cultivated, and have since lost their land. This is a
matter which should be ascertained in the course of the Census which is to take
place next year.””* More important, however, is that, in this context, neither
Stein nor Hope-Simpson specifies what they mean by “previously”; did they mean
a few years before 1930, but since the mandate, before European Jewish land
acquisition which started in the 1880s, or even before the latter? Although Stein
did refer to Ottoman times, it was in the context of asserting that it was
“customary . . . to have laborers work without owning land,” and thus, to him,
landlessness does not necessarily mean having ever owned land. Stein does not
qualify his assertion of customary agricultural laborers in terms of how far back
this was the case, and more importantly, to what extent did it prevail, which will
be dealt with below.
Second, Stein is only partially accurate in maintaining that “The Johnson-
Crosbie Report never equated the laboring class with a landless condition,” for
they did not also say that they were landed either. So, who were these families
classified by the Johnson-Crosbie Report as “laborers” and representing 29.4
percent of total families or households? Stein’s argument could be interpreted in
one of two ways: Either they owned land and did not cultivate it, or they
“previously” never cultivated land of their own. As for the first interpretation, it
could mean either that the land is too small to afford a living or that the earner
chose to work as a laborer because the latter path generates more income. In either
**Hope-Simpson Report, 142.
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The Dispossession of the Peasantry

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المنشئ

Riyad Mousa

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