To: Garden Rose who wrote (275861 ) 6/22/2010 10:01:08 PM From: Hawkmoon 3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) | Respond to the indigenous people that lived there in 1948 were kicked out and decimated by the Israelis. alnakba.org An inquiry into "Landless Arabs" who had sold their land or had lived on land sold to Jews since 1920 was instituted in 1931, with a view to make restitution to those who who had valid claims. To January 1933, 3,177 claims were made - a total of 15,000 to 18,000 people may have been affected. The relative lack of claimants was explained by the Secretary of the Palestine Administration as due to the fact that most claimants had found more profitable occupations in the cities. Most of those "affected' had thus became richer. Of the 3,177 claims, about 600- 900 were ultimately accepted. Stein claims that this was nothing but a Jewish Agency political victory, but even had 5000 claims been accepted, it would still have represented a tiny percentage of the Arab population of Palestine. There was never more than 5% unemployment in Palestine during the 1930s and thereafter. Though some lost land, they benefited from urbanization and industrialization and earned more working or trading in the cities than they had on their farms. According to the criteria adopted by the British to assess "landlessness," only about 600 families, or perhaps 3,000 to 3,600 people became landless. in all this period. zionism-israel.com (forgive the source, but it's accurate and very concise).By the mid-1930s, Jews had purchased less than 10% of the land in British Mandate Palestine. Most of the cultivable land in British Palestine was controlled by roughly 250 Arab families. Over one-half of the land that the Jews purchased had been owned by Arabs who were not from Palestine.3 elearning.la.psu.edu
