Comment by hunterpayne
19 hours ago
"In the beginning of the 20th century when Jews started campaigning for bringing more Jews into Turkish, then British Palestine, the process often went like this: Jewish community or a wealthy individual buys a plot of land from a Turk owner. Turks never worked that land themselves, and used to hire local Arabs to do the agricultural labor. Jews would not rehire Arabs after acquisition, instead, they used the newly bought land to create jobs for more Jewish immigrants."
I have never heard this one before. And it doesn't really track with the populations that were actually there in 1900. The Arabs at that time, in that place were largely nomadic herders. The largest city in the region at the time only had about 30,000 people in it. And it had been sometime since the Ottomans actually had any real political control of the area. So perhaps it did happen to some extent, but to claim it was the driving force in creating the conflict seems very ahistorical to me. Especially considering the 200 years of Pograms that preceded it. The real reasons for the conflict happened between 1500-1700, and have more to do with trade and the collapse of the Silk Road than Zionism.
PS The Ottomans outlawed selling land to Jews in about 1900. So a lot of the sales weren't recorded so perhaps you have a point, IDK.
Well, I lived in Petakh Tikva and met some people who lived there before 1948. There are still some patches of land (eg. behind Belinson) that used to be in Turkish possession, then were bought by Keren Kayemet le-Israel, and then kinda went nowhere. That one looks like it used to be an... orange orchard (is it what it's called? the orange tree plantation?). Anyways, growing oranges was a very common agricultural activity in that general area. Not really done by the nomads. There's also a park, if you go from Ramat Gan around Bney Brak in the direction of Petakh Tikva, and it has an old mill that used to belong to some Arab family (that whole place used to be an Arab village before 1948). Now it's a museum of sorts.
Petakh Tikva is also commonly called "Em ha-Moshavot" (mother of settlements) because it was one of the first, if not the first settlement by Jewish immigrants. It was very much the pilot in terms of how Jews were trying to get a hold of any plot of land they could and entrench there, including the tactics I described earlier. Of course, this wasn't the only tactics, and it wasn't necessary hostile to the locals. Another tactics that is well-known around that time is called "homah u-migdal" (wall and tower), which refers to the fact that having a wall and a tower was a necessary prerequisite for a place to be considered a settlement (for the purpose of drawing maps), and so Jews, esp. the Solel-Boneh (a well-known today construction company) would invest into building these sorts of "settlements" to claim more territory.
I'm not saying that the expulsion of Arab fellakhin from their peasant jobs was the reason for the confrontation. But it certainly contributed. And it certainly happened. While even to this day there are nomadic tribes in Israel and the occupied territories, none of them are Arabic (they are Bedouin). There are plenty of Arabic agricultural communities, and many of them can be traced back more than a hundred years. For instance, the Jaffa Oranges you might associate today with Israel (they are a popular export good and found in a lot of Western supermarkets) were actually bread by Arab farmers living around Jaffa (south of modern day Tel Aviv).