Fariha’s Reviews > Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire > Status Update

About 90 percent of the rebels were peasants, and for the whole three-year span of the Great Revolt, the countryside continued to play a significant role as political challenger of the status quo. Peasants organized and funded the revolt and protected the rebels. Between 1937 and 1939, the local leadership was in charge of all activism while the national leadership was in exile, based in Damascus.

As a consequence of the strike, the British targeted the organizing cadre, not the upper-class national leadership. The British were pleased with the relatively mild response of the revolution’s national leadership. Even its decision to end the general strike was made to protect merchants’ and citrus exporters’ profits.

During the revolt, national committees were organized to coordinate a general strike, and in May 1936, a conference was held involving all the rural national committees. These committees called for adopting a platform with pro-peasant agendas, such as abolishing the unfair agricultural taxation system and the immediate cessation of land sales,

The upper-class Palestinians initially united with the oppressed classes—consisting of workers and peasants—to maintain their leadership position against the national threat of Zionism. Yet, this unity required notables to enact structural changes demanded by the oppressed classes that would jeopardize the notables’ remaining power.

Approximately half of the lands purchased by Zionist funds were sold by absentee landlords, with residing landlords selling an additional 25 percent, while individual peasants sold less than 10 percent of lands. The latter were systematically pushed to sell because of British policies and taxes that typically favored the Jewish population and wealthy Palestinians.

In one example, the bourgeois Lebanese Sursock family, who were absentee landlords, sold their lands in Marj Ibn Amer to the Jewish National Fund, evicting 8,730 Palestinian peasants in the process.

It is important to note that Palestinian peasants were not a homogenous group, and class privilege was instrumental in shaping their connection to the land. For example, small peasants demonstrated great sacrifice for the national cause by selling their lands to arm the struggle.

In addition, Britain’s exorbitant taxes and the avarice of Palestinian notables left “some 30 percent of all Palestinian villagers landless.”

Zionist expansion, facilitated by British imperialism, to establish Israeli settlement early in the twentieth century uprooted many Palestinian peasant sharecroppers who cultivated the lands that Jewish settlers purchased or otherwise obtained.

Kayyali describes Palestinian farmers before 1948 as “more prone to action and revolt entailing self-sacrifice than other groups of society.” Palestinian peasants used various tactics, including soft resistance against the inequities of the capitalist system, protesting, raiding Israeli colonial settlements in the late nineteenth century, and the mobilization of the 1936–39 rebellion.