THE TRUTH ABOUT PALESTINE.
during the May riots took the form of criminal offences against the civil population, including "homicide, theft, attempted rape, and unlawful wounding."[1]
As for the complaint that "farmers who for generations have owned lands and lived on them have been asked to sign leases," what has actually occurred is precisely the opposite of what is suggested. Large tracts of land in the Jordan Valley, formerly treated by Abdul Hamid II as his private property, became State Domains (Mudawara) with the advent of the Constitutional Government in 1908, and after the war passed as such into the hands of the Government of Palestine. By an agreement made on November 19th, 1921, between the Government of Palestine and an Arab agent (a well-known anti-Zionist) selected by the cultivators as their representative, any head of a family who had cultivated land in this area, even though only as a tenant-at-will, for ten years or more, receives the freehold of all the land on which he has grown crops during the last two years, on undertaking to pay (in composition of the former rent) from P.T. 150 to P.T. 125[2] per dunam,[3] in fifteen annual instalments. Not only so, but a family which has cultivated less than 150 dunams is, nevertheless, to have its holding brought up to that minimum, with an additional thirty dunams for every member of the family in excess of five. In other words, far from threatening the security of "farmers who have for generations owned lands and lived on them," the Government has, on the contrary, given a freehold in exchange for a tenancy-at-will to every such farmer without exception, and has gone so far as to grant a minimum holding of nearly forty acres, even where the area actually cultivated is less. Such is the real character of the attempt "to establish the Government's title to these lands so that in time they could be sold to the Jews."
"This, and much more," the Delegation declares,
- ↑ Report of the Haycraft Conmission (Cmd. 1540), p. 49.
- ↑ P.T.1. = 2½d.
- ↑ Dunam = ¼ acre.
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