Ottoman Land Code:
[The Ottoman Land Code of 1858] required the registration in
the name of individual owners of agricultural land, most of
which had never previously been registered and which had
formerly been treated according to traditional forms of land
tenure, in the hill areas of Palestine generally masha'a, or
communal usufruct. The new law meant that for the first time a
peasant could be deprived not of title to his land, which he had
rarely held before, but rather of the right to live on it, cultivate it
and pass it on to his heirs, which had formerly been
inalienable...Under the provisions of the 1858 law, communal
rights of tenure were often ignored...Instead, members of the
upper classes, adept at manipulating or circumventing the legal
process, registered large areas of land as theirs...The fellahin
[peasants] naturally considered the land to be theirs, and often
discovered that they had ceased to be the legal owners only
when the land was sold to Jewish settlers by an absentee
landlord...Not only was the land being purchased; its Arab
cultivators were being dispossessed and replaced by foreigners
who had overt political objectives in Palestine. |
