Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520262530
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520262539
- Pub. Date:
- 09/01/2012
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520262530
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520262539
- Pub. Date:
- 09/01/2012
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520262539 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2012 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 472 |
| Sales rank: | 1,028,151 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel
By Mark LeVine, Gershon Shafir
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-26253-9
CHAPTER 1
"Left Naked on the Beach"
The Villagers of Aylut in the Grip of the New Templers
Mahmoud Yazbak
The village of Aylut is five kilometers to the northwest of the city of Nazareth. Most of the houses in the village are on a small hill and near the village bayader (threshing floors). Victor Guerin, who visited Aylut in 1876, estimated its population at two hundred people. In 1886, Gottlieb Schumacher put the figure at 350. The members of the British-based Palestine Exploration Fund described Aylut in 1881 as "a small village in the woods." Travelogues and journals penned by European pilgrims who toured Palestine in the nineteenth century, as part of a growing movement of interest in the Holy Land, on the whole lack references to Aylut, perhaps because no remnants of a possible Jewish or Christian history had ever come to light there. Guerin, though, in a passing remark, mentions five sections of limestone pillars lying close to the walli's maqam, which he thought could have belonged to an old church.
The walli's maqam to which Guerin referred still stands in Aylut. People call it the Shrine and Tomb of the Prophet Lot (Lut) and believe the name of the village to be derived from the name of the prophet. Others suggest that Aylut is Syriac in origin and means "summit." In reports by the Palestine Exploration Fund, the village's name is seen as a corruption of the Arabic word Alit, a species of tree.
The main landmark of the Shrine of the Prophet Lot is a tomb that was later incorporated into the village's small mosque compound. The tomb represented a holy site for the local people, who believed that the person buried there had special powers to fulfill their prayers and requests. Close to the shrine, there is a spring known as the Fountain of the Prophet Lot, whose waters flow copiously through the center of the village and border the bayader. The latter comprises a large, flat area of land, the village square, which, besides its agricultural function, acted as the main meeting point for the villagers throughout the year and was where they held their festivals, in particular wedding celebrations. As in other villages, a large oak tree stands in the middle for people to enjoy its shade on hot summer days. Over time the tree too became sacred, and local people placed lights in its branches twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, to drive evil spirits from the village.
In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman state granted families in Aylut the right to cultivate large areas of arable land extending some six to seven kilometers to the west of the village. The land included parts of the fertile plains of Marj Ibn 'Amir (the Jezreel Valley) and was divided into feddans (areas of about one acre each). In 1902, the area comprised eighteen such tracts, which the village's twenty-one families cultivated communally. The main crops they produced were wheat, barley, sesame, kirsanna (a kind of vetch), and various species of legumes, including beans, chickpeas, and lentils. Lands lying alongside the built-up area of the village were used for growing vegetables and irrigated with water from the village wells and fountains. The high-lying land surrounding the village was planted with several varieties of fruit trees, including some 250 dunams (a unit of land equal to one thousand square meters) of olive groves. The surrounding hills also provided the pasture for the village, which, like other Palestinian villages at the time, was bounded on all sides by sabir (cactus) that kept wild animals out.
In 1869, the Ottoman government allowed a family from Beirut by the name of Sursuq to purchase full ownership rights to twenty-two villages in Marj Ibn 'Amir, including several areas of agricultural land surrounding Nazareth. This followed the Ottoman Land Law of 1859, which freed state lands for sale to individual Ottoman citizens, partly in an effort to raise badly needed revenue for the state's treasury. In total, the Sursuq brothers—Niqula, Najib, and Iskandar—acquired 230,000 dunams of land in the area. The Sursuqs were a new breed of capitalists to this part of the world, for whom the land and the fellahin (the country's peasant farmers), who had cultivated it for centuries, were mere tools to make an easy profit. The new owners used the local fellahin, as well as fellahin they brought in from other areas, to cultivate the vast stretch of land, but now as hired farm laborers. The Sursuqs provided them with more modern agricultural implements and appointed urban merchants as agents to manage the villages. That they themselves held only usufruct but no ownership rights to the land made little difference in the minds of the local fellahin, since, as in time immemorial, they were allowed to remain on the land and continued to make a living from it. Thus they did not fully grasp the dramatic shift in their situation when proprietorship of the land passed from the state to the Sursuqs. However, once a capitalist landowner was no longer in need of the fellahin to work his land, their situation stood to deteriorate dramatically. Additionally, the 1859 Ottoman Land Law entitled the new owners to dispose of their land to whomever they pleased, and as their main interest was profit, they were not likely to show much regard for the plight of the peasants.
As was the case in many other Palestinian villages, the people of Aylut slowly became victims of the high-interest loans they had to take out from an expending stratum of moneylenders—in the case of Aylut, the Sursuqs themselves. The preferred form of collateral for the loans was land, and when the fellahin were no longer able to meet the repayments, they effectively became hostages of the moneylender, who would await an opportune moment to use his credit as a means of appropriating their land.
For the people of Aylut this moment came in 1902. From then onward, they found themselves forced into waging a protracted and desperate struggle against displacement. In 1902, without prior notice, the Sursuq brothers served a lawsuit against the people of Aylut in the Nazareth Commercial Court for allegedly defaulting on the payment of their accumulated debts. The Sursuq brothers' orderly records and standing in society convinced the court to rule in their favor against the fellahin. Indeed, the court not only ordered the fellahin to pay off the arrears immediately but also ruled that in case they failed to do so, the Sursuqs were entitled to confiscate from them a piece of arable land equal in value to the sum of their debts. In court, the people of Aylut vehemently protested that the loss of their land made them feel like they had been "left naked on the beach."
ENTER THE GERMAN TEMPLERS
The Ayluti fellahin could not fathom why the patience of Najib Sursuq had suddenly come to an end, or why he had refused to pay the werko (state land tax) on their behalf, as he had always done until now according to the provisions of an annually renewed loan. They were also at a loss to understand why he had insisted on confiscating their arable lands as repayment for his loans. Answers to these questions have surfaced a century later in the form of a file of documents discovered in the German consulate in Haifa and housed in the Israel State Archives. The file contains, among other papers, documents relating to the Aylut-Sursuq case that form part of a separate lawsuit filed against the people of Aylut in 1903 by a certain Hans Keller, a German merchant living in Haifa's German Colony, with the active intervention of his brother, Friedrich (Fritz) Keller, at the time the German vice-consul in Haifa and Acre. The two lawsuits, of Keller and the Sursuqs, throw into sharp relief European colonizing endeavors in Palestine and the displacement and dispossession these spelled for the indigenous population.
As early as 1870, the Sursuqs initiated a procedure to rent out the village of Sammuniyya, located on arable lands in Marj Ibn 'Amir, to German settlers from the newly established German Colony in Haifa. The Germans belonged to a millenarian movement called the Templers, who originated in Württemberg and began arriving in Palestine, the Holy Land, in the early 1860s. The German settlers wished to establish agricultural colonies in Palestine, and renting the land was a first step toward purchasing it outright. Notables from Nazareth—local landowners and cereal merchants—and the fellahin who lived off the land raised a protest and secured the intervention of the local authorities, the qadi (magistrate) and the qa'imaqam (district governor) of Nazareth, who ordered the immediate evacuation of the new settlers. The Sursuq brothers unsuccessfully appealed the decision to the higher authorities in Damascus, who ruled that "the German colonization is illegal." For now, the fellahin, with the help of notables from Nazareth, had retained their farming rights to the land.
From then on, the struggle over the land of Aylut played itself out between the same six groups of actors: the fellahin cultivators and their urban notable allies, who operated in the local markets; the absentee landowners like the Sursuqs, who were motivated by capitalist and international interests; the German Templers; the German diplomatic corps; the local representatives of the Ottoman state in Nazareth and Beirut; and the representative of the Imperial Ottoman state in faraway Istanbul. These actors fell roughly into two groups: local and foreign. The local powers (the notables and the nearby state agencies) by and large wished to protect the fellahin and the traditional order of village life, whereas the more distant powers—both Ottoman and European—which had set in motion the economic modernization and political centralization of the Ottoman Empire, viewed the fellahin as obstacles to their aims. While economic modernization and attempts to strengthen the control of state authorities over outlying regions have undermined the traditional lives of peasants in many societies, in Palestine these forces frequently came from the outside, in the form of the few thousand Templers and later the mass-based Zionist movement, and led to dispossession. The story of Aylut repeated in another dozen Palestinian villages in the vicinity of Marj Ibn 'Amir.
The background to the attempted centralization and modernization of the Ottoman Empire had been its shift toward a market economy through its integration into the European-dominated world economy in the mid-nineteenth century. The rise of the market economy in Palestine naturally prompted the merchants' interests in land ownership as an investment. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a gradual growth in the ranks of urban merchants who had become major agricultural landowners, and the higher taxes they paid strengthened the central authorities of the empire.
A stronger Ottoman Empire was now able to improve the security situation in the Palestinian countryside. Better public safety coupled with an increased demand for agricultural produce led to a gradual migration of the fellahin from Palestine's mountainous areas to the fertile plains. Even so, fluctuations in crop prices and the inability of the fellahin to track developments in the world economy only increased their financial dependence on urban merchants and moneylenders. With the passage of time, as the loans owed by the fellahin accrued ever higher interest, they found themselves ensnared in a vicious circle: forced to use their loans to pay off older debts and provide for their immediate needs, they were unable to put them to productive use to improve the yield of the land. The fellahin were therefore unable to stimulate the development of the village economy. In the case of the people of Aylut, their mounting debts pushed them into unfavorable contracts, first with Najib Sursuq and later with Hans Keller.
The fellahin typically paid the moneylenders high rates of interest, often in excess of 30 percent, as shown by the popular local saying "Al-'ashara khamsta'ash"—that is, a loan of ten pounds extended during the sowing season could mean a return of fifteen pounds at the end of the harvest. The peasantry's spiraling debts were to play a significant role in their dispossession and in the gradual creation of a narrow stratum of large landowners that by now sharply contrasted with the growing stratum of landless peasants who had become agricultural laborers. This would be the destiny awaiting the fellahin of Aylut if Hans Keller were to convince the authorities of his case.
The timing of Najib Sursuq's decision to call in the debts of the people of Aylut was not accidental. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Templers of the German Colony in Haifa decided to revive their plans for a new agricultural colony in Marj Ibn 'Amir, preferably in Galilean Bethlehem. The German colonizers looked upon Bethlehem in the Galilee—and not, as all other Christian denominations believe, the town of Bethlehem near Jerusalem—as the true birthplace of Christ. The Templers' ambitions coincided with the business interests of the Sursuqs, much as they had when the former attempted to colonize the village of Sammuniyya in 1870.
The Sursuq brothers by now enjoyed long-standing economic ties with the German Colony and were well known to the German settlers. German merchants living in the Haifa colony, for example, had become the Sursuqs' agents for the export of their agricultural produce. In 1871 the Sursuqs commissioned Gottlieb Schumacher, a German engineer living in Haifa's German Colony, to conduct a topographic survey of Marj Ibn 'Amir and examine the options for constructing a road or a railway to connect the area to the Haifa harbor.
In early 1902, the heads of the colony, including Hans Keller, entered into negotiations with the Sursuq brothers for the purchase of thousands of dunams of land in the Palestinian villages of Galilean Bethlehem and Umm al-'Umad for their new agricultural colony. The two villages straddled Aylut's fertile land, which lay to its west. Negotiations over the sale of the land ended in the Sursuqs' agreement to sell the German Colony fourteen thousand dunam, which included the entire villages of Galilean Bethlehem and Umm al-'Umad. The land also included some two thousand dunams that the state had confiscated from the people of Aylut a short time before as payment for the villagers' debts to the Sursuqs.
To complete the transaction to the satisfaction of both parties, Najib Sursuq wanted to make sure that ownership of the land would transfer to the investors from the German Colony in Haifa with the land "cleansed" of its population. His solution was to further tighten his economic stranglehold on the residents of Aylut and so force them to abandon their lands.
Needless to say, the villagers lacked the resources and legal backing to stand up to the economic and political clout wielded by the Sursuq brothers. Despite their sympathy for the crisis Aylut faced, this time Nazareth's Muslim cereal merchants, the town's qadi, and its mufti could do nothing to stave off the Commercial Court's order. Thus they merely directed the villagers to pay the arrears they owned to the Sursuqs and to the state or else relinquish their inherited usufruct rights to a portion of their land equal to the said arrears, land that the Sursuqs had decided to sell to the German colonizers. The only way left for the fellahin to defend their land and safeguard their livelihoods was to forcibly resist the police and government officials who arrived to execute the ruling of the Nazareth Commercial Court by confiscating the land and evacuating its inhabitants.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel by Mark LeVine, Gershon Shafir. Copyright © 2012 The regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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