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Ottoman Jerusalem |
- The Forgotten
History of the Palestinian Peasant: Examples from Jerusalem and
other Districts of Palestine.
By Dr. Hala Fattah
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Much like the rest of
the Middle East, the Palestinian peasant or fellah is considered to
have no history worth mentioning. Because peasant families were
often illiterate and left no records, little is known of their
problems or their everyday concerns.
However, what can be recovered of their traditions and culture often
emerges through a combination of sources: Ottoman law codes or tax
surveys in the 16th century, foreign accounts of Palestinian rural
life in the 18th and 19th centuries and Arab, British, and Zionist
documents and papers in the 20th century.
Whether written from the perspective of the Ottoman tax farmer or
governor, the Arab notable, the Zionist settler, or the European
official, this elitist literature reinforces the common perception
of the Palestinian peasantry as historically subordinate and
politically unaware.
And yet, new research indicates that this was far from the truth.
Amy Singer's work on 16th century Jerusalem shows that the
frequently ignored and always marginalized Palestinian fellah had
different means at his disposal to signal his displeasure with the
status quo.
One of these was migration, the periodical-- and unsettling--
departure of peasants from villages they had cultivated by tradition
and communal right. The abrupt departure of groups of fellaheen from
their customary places of work was important because, among other
things, it threatened the Ottoman sense of order, tied as it was to
the security of food production in the empire.
By leaving fertile land uncultivated, the Palestinian peasantry
jeopardized the overall Ottoman distribution of food crops in the
empire, thus upsetting the delicate balance which tied each Ottoman
sub-region to the empire as a whole.
But evidence from Islamic court records in Jerusalem also indicates
that a sense of fair play was also at work. While many of the
judges' rulings forced the authorities to arrest peasants who had
fled to other Palestinian districts so as to bring them to justice,
the underlying justification was not always the punishment of the
fellah.
In many instances, the judge wanted to find out why the peasant had
fled and if he had done so for a valid reason. Interestingly, if
there was a legitimate reason for the fellah's migration (such as
the oppression by a particular landlord), the state was often
flexible enough to devise means to solve the problem.
For instance, Singer notes that a legal ruling allowed a peasant who
had migrated to another region , and who had not been caught and
sent back to his home village in the space of ten years, to remain
where he was. This permitted the successful migrant to forego the
oppressive conditions of work that had made him migrate in the first
place, and continue tilling the land in more hospitable districts.
This was beneficial both from the peasant's point of view (his
well-being was assured) and the Ottoman state's food security
considerations.
Singer notes that "the close attention given to peasant movements in
the sixteenth century suggests a continuing potential or real
shortage of labor ... [and] under such conditions, flight from
abusive officials was a strong weapon for peasants because it
brought their situation to the immediate attention of the
responsible administrators".
She also suggests that peasant migration eventually took on a
political character, which distinguished seasonal migrations in
search of work from the more principled stands taken by fleeing
Palestinian fellaheen as a result of injustice. Thus, even though
the peasantry had no recourse to the written word, and even though
its existence was periodically recognized only because of
extraordinary economic disruptions, the fellaheen of historic
Palestine entered history, even if it was the result of other
peoples' actions.
Moreover, in late 19th and early 20th century Palestine, it was
often the peasantry that alerted the Arab notability and elite to
the dangers inherent in Zionist land purchases and settlement. It
has often been claimed that an Arab awareness of the Zionist
takeover of Palestinian land only became entrenched in the late
1930s, too late to mount a coordinated campaign to offset the by-now
permanent features of Jewish settlement in Palestine.
But, as Rashid Khalidi has pointed out, land sales and transfers of
whole groups of Palestinian fellaheen out of their traditional
villages to make way for Zionist collectives instigated a number of
serious peasant-led rebellions. Among the most important were those
in the Tiberias region in 1901-1902 and Afula in 1910-1911.
Although peasant insurgencies against Zionist settlements were
recorded from as early as 1884-1886, those in Tiberias and Afula
were significant because they galvanized Arab nationalist opinion
against the systematic colonization of Palestine by Jewish
agricultural communities.
They also laid bare the seemingly laissez-faire attitude of Ottoman
governors who went along with Zionist aims on the pretext that they
were just upholding a contractual agreement between a buyer and
seller (often an Arab absentee landowner).
Such Ottoman Arab notables as Amir Amin Arslan and Shukri al-Asali--
both sub-district governors in Palestine at the time-- not only took
issue with their superiors' orders and resisted the command to turn
over land held communally by Palestinian fellaheen (but frequently
privately owned by Arab merchant families) to organizations, such as
the Jewish Colonization Association, but also rallied Arab
nationalist opinion against such sales in the Ottoman parliament and
the Arab press.
Because they had been first-hand witnesses to the peasant rebellions
against Zionist land expropriation, they became ardent sympathizers
with, and vocal supporters of the Palestinian cause.
Thus the politicization of the Ottoman Arab elite, usually seen as a
by-product of Western influence, actually took its cue from the very
real grievances of the Palestinian peasantry, the one sector of
Palestinian society often seen as having no voice in its own
affairs.
April 19, 1999
Of Iraqi origin, Dr. Hala Fattah is a historian of the Arab
provinces of the Ottoman empire, especially Iraq. She is the author
of The Politics of Regional Trade of Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf,
1745-1900 (S.U.N.Y Press, 1996). Presently, she is an Independent
Scholar.
References :
Khalidi, Rashid, "Palestinian Peasant Resistance to Zionism Before
World War I " in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds. Blaming
The Victims : Spurious Scholarship and The Palestinian Question,
London : Verso, 1988.
Singer, Amy, "Peasant Migration : Law and Practice in Early Ottoman
Palestine" in New Perspectives on Turkey, no.8, Fall 1992.
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