The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 290)

غرض

عنوان

The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 290)

المحتوى

274
on it. Capitalist development in Arab agriculture was insufficient to provide them
employment. The same applies to Arab light industry and services in spite of their
growth during WWII. Employment in the rapidly growing European Jewish
industry was closed off to them. Perhaps the government’s “deliberate staggering”
of the “military discharge of civilian personnel”*’ was an implicit recognition of
the incapacity of agriculture to reabsorb this workforce. However, government
officials expressed a contrary view and “anxiously advocated” the “resettlement of
laborers back to their villages.”*! These actions and pronouncements reflect the
magnitude of the problem and the government’s dilemma: It could not continue to
provide employment indefinitely and at the same time was well aware of the
socioeconomic and political consequences of a large number of unemployed who,
by now, had no meaningful alternative to public wage employment.
It is clear from the above analysis that socioeconomic differentiation was an
established fact, and it was that differentiation that accounts for the increase of
wage labor. The process of differentiation was intensified and hastened by the
intertwined impact of government colonial policies, European settlement, and the
spread of market relations.
The impact of Jewish European settlement, the government’s trade policies,
and its imposition of cash taxes drove the majority of the peasantry, which was
primarily engaged in extensive cultivation, into deep debt and thus forced into
*Tbid., 282-3.
Tbid., 281-4.
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The Dispossession of the Peasantry

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المنشئ

Riyad Mousa

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