The Palestinian Arab defeat owed much to the society’s shortcomings and divisions. Palestinian society was poor, agriculturally based, largely illiterate, 9 politically and socially primitive and disorganised, and deeply divided. The rifts in Palestinian society – between town and country, Husseinis and Nashashibis, Muslims and Christians, beduin and settled communities – were rooted in history.
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Palestine’s towns, for centuries little more than overblown villages, during the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th began to grow as landless or poor fellahin left the villages. 10 In part, they were attracted by the economic benefits that flowed from newly developed commercial ties with Europe, via Jaffa and Haifa ports; in part, they were driven from the countryside by Ottoman taxation and indebtedness, and land purchases by Arab effendis (many from outside Palestine) and Zionists. In a general way, this process may have contributed to loosening the Palestinians’ grip on or bonds with the soil in advance of the exodus of 1948
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immigration to Palestine of tens of thousands of Maghrebi (North African), Egyptian, Bosnian, Kurdish and Caucasian peasants and beduin tribes, either on their own volition or by Ottoman design. Many of these immigrants established new villages, particularly in the less populated lowlands of the Galilee and in the Coastal Plain. The names of some of the villages bore testimony to these immigrant waves; for example, there were a number of Kafr Misrs (‘Misr’ is Egypt in Arabic) and two ‘Kirads’ (indicating Kurdish origins). Later, the relative prosperity and order of Mandate Palestine drew thousands of additional Arab immigrants from the neighbouring countries, especially to the large towns.
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In the 20th century, under British influence and the impact of the burgeoning, neighbouring Jewish society, the shift of centres of gravity from the countryside to the towns gained momentum.
Nevertheless, while there was a large, growing urban component, Arab Palestine in 1947 remained essentially a peasant society. About half the Arab land was owned by small proprietors and much of the rest – worked by tenant farmers – was held by big landowners, who lived in the towns, many in Lebanon, Egypt or Syria. (About 50 per cent of Palestine’s land mass – most of it in the Negev – was state land while Zionist organisations and individual Jews owned 6–7 per cent.)
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By the end of 1947 there were one and a quarter million Arabs (about 1.1 million Muslims and 150,000 Christians), 65–70 per cent of them living in some 800–850 villages; about 30 per cent lived in cities and towns.
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While the rural majority and its agricultural economy remained largely primitive and inefficient, there were the beginnings, under British prompt- ing, European cajoling and the influence of the neighbouring model of Jewish settlement, of innovation and modernisation, especially in the Coastal Plain. In 1922 there were some 22,000 dunams of Arab land producing citrus crops; in 1940 there were 140,000, mostly destined for export. In 1931 there were 332,000 dunams under orchards (apples, olives); in 1942 there were 832,000. By and large, however, agriculture in Arab Palestine remained geared to local consumption. The fellahin in 1947 had almost no tractors and used a primitive plough, a simple crop cycle and almost no irrigation or fertilisers. Jewish political leaders and settlement executives through the 1930s and 1940s spoke, with varying degrees of sincerity, of helping to reform Arab agriculture to increase its output which, in turn, would allow both the Arab and Jewish populations to increase while still coexisting peacefully on a constant, relatively small tract of land.
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The Palestinian national movement took root mainly among the urban elite and middle classes, but over the decades of British rule, in which there was a major growth in education and literacy, the national idea began to filter down to the urban and peasant masses. The fact that each bout of anti-Zionist (and anti-British) rioting during the Mandate (1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936–1939) was larger than its predecessor reflected the growth and spread of political consciousness among the masses. In the course of the Mandate, in part as a result of improvements in edu- cation, the politicisation of the urban elites and growing middle class, and the threatening Zionist enterprise, villagers became increasingly politi- cised.
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As late as the 1940s, for most villages and villagers politics and the national struggle were remote, playthings of sophisticated city folk. As one Arab memori- alist from the Galilee village of Mi‘ilya put it, ‘The Mi‘ilyan’s world was his village – the land and the people. Matters of national or even regional politics were the concern of [only] one or two people in the village.’
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In the first years of the Mandate, the Arab population possessed almost no motor vehicles; by 1945, they had more than 3,000, with a sup- portive infrastructure of garages and workshops producing spare parts. The enormous growth in transportation affected agriculture, commerce and industry. Commercial ties with Europe were channelled through chambers of commerce and an efficient banking network had devel- oped in the towns by the end of World War II. The war was crucial; the credit of the largest Arab bank, the ‘Arab Bank’, grew between 1941 and 1945 eighteenfold, and deposits twentyfold. Industry, too, had begun to develop. 19
Some 30–35 per cent of the urban Arabs were employed in light industry, crafts and construction, 15–17 per cent in transportation, 20–23 per cent in commerce, 5–8 per cent in professions, 5–7 per cent in public service and 6–9 per cent in other services. By the late 1940s, Palestinian Arab society was in the throes of rapid urbanisation. British rule and, particularly, the onset of World War II had triggered a small measure of industrialisation. Yishuv intelligence identified the begin- nings of a change from ‘the typical primitive workshop’ economy to ‘modernisation’. Sweet and chocolate factories and three glass factories were established; there was a significant growth of the textile industry; and a modern cigarette plant was set up in Haifa. 20 By the end of the Mandate, there were in Arab Palestine some 1,500 industrial workshops and small factories employing altogether 9,000 workers with an average of 5–6 employees per workshop. (By contrast there were 1,900 industrial workshops and plants in Jewish Palestine, employing 38,000 workers, an average of 19–21 workers per plant.) Other Arabs worked in Jewish- owned plants and in British-run plants and services. Altogether, the Arab proletariat numbered some 35,000, with 5,000 employed by oil compa- nies and 8,000 in the government railway service. During the war, tens of thousands were employed by the government in public works and 30,000 in British Army camps (though most of these were laid off in the immediate post-war years).
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From the early 1920s, the ‘Ayan split into two main camps, the Majlisiyyun and the Mu’aridun (Opposition) – that is, those support- ing the Husseinis and the Husseini-controlled Supreme Muslim Council (majlis) and Arab Higher Executive (which preceded the emergence of the AHC), and those opposed to them, led by the Nashashibis.
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The struggle between the Husseinis and the Opposition was mainly over power and its economic spoils; the political–ideological differences were secondary, though the Nashashibis, with their rural allies in the Hebron, Nablus and Nazareth areas, tended to take a more moderate line towards Zionism and the Mandate. The Nashashibis often secretly met Jewish representatives and, in private, adopted a conciliatory tone. The rivalry between the two camps was to characterise Arab politics down to 1948 and the fric- tion was to dissipate Palestinian strength at crucial junctures, including 1937–1939, when the Husseinis assassinated some of their opponents, and 1947–1948.
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d 1947–1948. 24 During the 1930s, the elite families set up formal political parties. In 1935 the Husseinis established the Palestine Arab Party, which became the Arabs’ main political organisation. Earlier, in 1934, the Nashashibis had set up the National Defence Party. In 1932 Awni ‘Abd al Hadi of Samaria set up the Istiqlal Party, which was pan-Arab in ideology, and in 1935, Jerusalem mayor Dr Husayn Khalidi set up the Reform Party. The early 1930s also saw the establishment by Ya‘qub Ghusayn of the Youth Congress Party and the Nablus-based National Bloc Party. The proliferation of parties tended to dissipate the strength of the Opposition.
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