Whose Land Is It?

Personal property ownership claims in the Holy Land get difficult to sort out—almost as tricky as figuring out national boundaries, ethnic history, and claims of sovereignty. Rulers and empires have come and gone for millennia, displacing one another and whole populations of people.

Having done some reading on property issues in Palestine prior to the creation of the State of Israel, I find that clarity about a number of matters is not common in the public mind. One fact seems perpetually ignored by decidedly pro-Palestinian activists these days: that the vast majority of Palestinians just prior to the creation of the State of Israel were similar to sharecroppers or tenant farmers. They did not own the land. They were renters.

First, the bulk of land in Turkish-controlled Palestine prior to the First World War was government owned and thus not in private hands. Stewardship of these lands was entrusted to a small group of elite families, which also collected taxes for the government and looked after the government’s interests in the area.

Those private lands not controlled by the elite families were generally in the hands of villages, which usually maintained communal ownership. Prior to the First World War, these villages issued ownership shares (like stocks) to individual members of the community.

Though obtaining a loan from a loan shark was illegal under Turkish law, many individual villagers prior to the First World War sought such loans anyway. The lenders were usually associated with the elite families in the region. Typically the villagers offered up their shares in the village property as collateral. When the debtors defaulted, due to high interest rates and crop failures, the loan sharks claimed the debtors’ shares. This series of events led to elite families owning whole villages, with the residents becoming sharecroppers and renters.

Another large group of Palestinians was tricked out of its land by these same principal families during the First World War. Turkish law made anyone owning land or a share in land subject to conscription. To avoid conscription, vast numbers of Palestinians signed over their shares and land to the elite families, with the promise that they would still maintain de facto ownership of the land.

The scheme saved many from serving in the Turkish army. However, once the danger of conscription was over, many of the elites refused to give back title to the land. And thus many common Palestinians were rendered landless by their own superiors.

Later, these same elite families began selling this same land—obtained through loan-sharking or through the conscription-avoidance swindle—to the Zionist Jewish community. With legal title in hand, the Jewish community then had to evict the Palestinian tenants to take possession of the land it had purchased and wanted to use.

This history is one source of the immense hatred of the Palestinians toward the Jewish community. It even led to anti-Jewish pogroms in the 1920s in Palestine. It also begins to explain one reason why Presbyterian missionaries in what is now Lebanon and Syria sided with the Palestinians and opposed the creation of Israel. They blamed the Zionists instead of the elite families for disenfranchising the Palestinian community. The enmity aroused by this legal sale of land also explains why it is a capital offense in the West Bank today for a Palestinian to sell land to a Jew.

With statehood, Israel gained control of the government-held lands that the British (since the end of the First World War) had ostensibly left in the hands of the Palestinian elites. Statehood after the Second World War also consolidated Jewish ownership of lands the Zionists had previously purchased. When war came in reaction to the United Nations’ recognition of Israel, and the Arabs attacked unsuccessfully in 1948, the process of land acquisition was extended deeper into Palestine.

It should be noted that Israel would eventually offer compensation to Palestinian landowners whose land was confiscated outright by the government of Israel (not unlike an eminent domain settlement). But because of the previous history, those Palestinians who had owned the confiscated land generally refused the compensation. And we must remember that at the time of the Israeli victory, most of the Palestinians who had fled to the refugee camps had already lost ownership of any land to the elites, since they were renters.

Thus, when Palestinian activists talk about the “right of return,”  the situation is actually much more complicated then it might initially seem. Much of the injustice done to the common Palestinians had been done to them already by their own people, ruling families that still dominate Fatah and Hamas.

So what is just? How does one begin to repair the multiple injustices done to the Palestinians without perpetrating another injustice on the Jewish community that purchased the land in good faith? Consider also the hatred of Jews fanned by both nationalist and Islamist movements, and it becomes an even more complex dilemma.

As even moderate and seemingly reasonable Palestinian leaders, such as Elias Chacour, talk about “Israel taking away the Palestinians’ country,” one wonders about the meaning of such concepts, especially since there was no “country,” but only foreign rule by the Ottoman Turks and then the British Mandate between and soon after the world wars.

Were “the good old days” prior to the beginning of the State of Israel all that good for the Palestinians? Even if they could be magically endowed with the land again, how would Palestinians reestablish individual private ownership of the land? How could it be considered just to invalidate Jewish ownership of lands legally purchased from the elite families? How could leaders once again determine shares of ownership in village properties three generations later?

What’s more, in the old days prior to the British Mandate, Palestinian Christians were second-class citizens. They had even fewer rights than they do today as Israeli Arabs.  They lived under the domination of the elite Muslim families. Is that situation worth returning to?  Such dhimmitude is certainly what Hamas and Fatah would like to see!

And one final fact remains: At Camp David in 2000, Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians, through Chairman Yasser Arafat, approximately 98 percent of the land taken in the 1967 war and compensation for the remaining portion. Arafat rejected the offer. Many of those deeply involved in seeking a solution to the conflict believe that this was the best offer the Palestinians would ever receive. Apparently, the Palestinian leadership sought no fair two-state solution. They wanted everything—with no Israel at all.

The Rev. Timothy B. Smith is pastor of Sonoma Springs Presbyterian Church in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a commissioner to the 217th General Assembly in 2006, and a member of the Presbyterian Action Steering Committee.