Date of Award

Spring 2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

Committee Director

Anna Mirkova

Committee Member

Jane Merritt

Committee Member

Brett Bebber

Call Number for Print

Special Collections LD4331.H47 L96 2014

Abstract

This study follows the thread of chronic land loss for small and subsistence Arab farmers in Palestine and the key solution repeatedly advocated by the British of intensive agriculture and how it routinely failed only to fuel increased tensions and violence between Arabs and Jews contributing to the reversal of the goal of a unified Palestine under the Mandate. A variety of primary and secondary sources were used to identify the main social patterns and laws during the Ottoman Empire which set up the dynamic of agricultural debt leading to land sales to Jewish immigrants. This pattern is then traced over two decades under the British administration of Palestine using government reports, policy statements, communications, memoirs, and secondary sources. With the political interaction between Jews, Arabs, and the British as a dramatic and influential background, this study looks at how the British evaluated the connection between their obligation to Arabs and Jews in Palestine and the problem of landless Arabs and the tension and violence it fueled. A series of investigations by commissions repeatedly resulted in recommendations of intensive agriculture as the solution to this problem. Alternative solutions of government backed agricultural loans were routinely rejected as too risky. Primary and secondary sources reveal how the intensive agriculture policy repeatedly failed allowing the land loss issue to grow contributing to the tension which erupted in the revolt starting in 1936. This violence forced the British to reverse their Mandate goal of a unified Palestine in favor of a partitioned Palestine between the Arabs and Jews.

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DOI

10.25777/t6fc-d286

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