ABSTRACT
The term ‘landownership’ means more than simply ‘who owns the land,’ and in fact includes a number of processes – the first being the land laws. The Jewish Agency worked closely with the British Mandate Government to produce legislation that would legitimize Zionist land acquisition objectives. This chapter and the one that follows will therefore examine each step of the land tenure system. After breaking down the landownership system in Palestine and studying each aspect individually – particularly how it was formed, and the variables and actors involved – it will then be possible to analyze the implementation of the system on the ground through the case studies. Rather than study the land system chronologically, as others have done, this
part of the research will examine the land system in terms of the different stages that form it. In analyzing a land tenure conflict, each stage of the system needs to be scrutinized separately after the conflict has occurred, in order to identify the factors involved in each phase. An attempt was made to put these stages in the order in which they occur within the land system, beginning with the topic of legislation and ending with land sales and disputes. However, as noted in the previous chapter, many of the stages also overlap (and all are linked together as part of the land tenure system), not only in the sense of when they occurred but also in terms of their content. Legislation was the foundation of the tenure system in Mandate Palestine.
The British Government had certain objectives that the laws were intended to fulfill, and it was through Zionist collaboration that these objectives and laws were established. Land legislation on its own consists of many elements, as previously discussed, and land tenure reforms are tools for governments to utilize in obtaining their larger political objectives, as well as the means through which a power legitimizes itself within a territory. In the case of Mandate Palestine in particular, the topics that fall under the land’s legal system also include the actors behind the laws, i.e. those who wrote them, influenced them, and even chose the time that they were issued. Also, as noted in Chapter Two, the land tenure conflict in Palestine was unique because of the triangular relationship between the British, Zionist-Jews, and
Palestinian Arabs.1 Therefore, even though the Zionist movement and the Jewish Agency were not the government in power over the land, the government had an obligation to them, making their objectives important as well. For this reason this chapter will also discuss what the Zionist-Jews hoped to get out of the British Mandate Government’s rule over Palestine. Kenneth Stein notes that by 1939 Zionist-Jews had purchased “the core of
a national territory” through an escalating course of action:
