Posted on: 1999

By Dr. Hala Fattah

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 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.

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.