One of the reason’s that the Zionists received a state under the 1947 UN Partition plan is because beginning in from the 1880’s onward Palestinian Arabs living in Palestine and elsewhere sold land to them. It’s important to emphasize that sales to Jews were made by many Arabs living in Palestine itself, not just absentee landowners living elsewhere such as in Beirut or Damascus. These land sales meant that the Zionists were able to establish a contiguous geographic nucleus for a Jewish state. Had Arabs refused to sell land to Jews, it is difficult to see how there would have been a partition plan which called for a Jewish state.
Efrain Karsh who is the only historian to have examined British archives from the period leading up to 1948. In his 2010 book Palestine Betrayed, Karsh found there was a large volume of small land transactions where average Arabs in Palestine sold to Jews.
Palestinian Arab press of the late 1920s and 1930s contain many examples of articles authored by Palestinian writers who understood clearly that Jews were headed toward controlling a part of Palestine, and that Palestinian Arabs were in fact assisting the Zionists in their land acquisition.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, much of the land in Palestine was owned by a number of wealthy clans (hamulas), known as effendis by the Ottomans, Ayan’s by the Arabs and notables by the British. They were mostly based in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nablus. They were: Husseini, Nashashibi, Nusseibeh, Alami, Khalidi, Dajani, Tamimi, Masri, Nabulsi and more.
Even though they publicly railed against the practice, many were selling land to Palestinian Jewish institutions, who settled increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants from Europe, and Russia. In the 1920s, land purchases doubled to 1.2 million dunams, Turkish measurement. “At least a quarter of the Palestine Arab Congress Executive sold land to Jews, including its president and former Jerusalem mayor, Musa Karim Husseini, and the mayors of Jaffa and Gaza,” Oren Kessler writes in his 2024 book Palestine 1936. He notes that of the eight members of the Arab Higher Committee, the AHC, at least four sold land.
In June 1997, the Arab weekly Fasl al-Maqal, based in the city of Nazareth in north Israel, ran a list of 54 leading Palestinians who sold land to Jews from 1918-1945. The paper ran a story titled “Our Fathers On The Take,” tooling the era of the British mandate before 1948 when the Zionist movement was seeking land in Palestine to create a Jewish state. The Centre for Near East Policy Research reported on this- seehttps://israelbehindthenews.com/1997/06/02/old-palestinian-arab-families-sold-land-to-jews).
The Fasl al-Maqual paper reported that some of those highest up in the Palestinian nationalist movement which publicly opposed the Jewish state were at the same time selling land to the Jewish Agency, the body spearheading the Zionist drive.
The weekly’s editor-in-chief, Awad Abdel Fatah indicated that the names on the list came from an official document dating back to the British mandate in Palestine, which the paper received from official sources in Jordan. He said, “We published only a partial list from the document, showing the role of the Palestinian leadership in the flow of lands to the Jewish Agency before the disaster of 1948,” he said.
Mohammed Taher al-Husseini, father of al-Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, the undisputed leader of the Palestinians in 1948, is on the list. He was a relative of Yasser Arafat. Another was Kazem al-Husseini, grandfather of Faisal Husseini, who was a leading PLO official in Jerusalem. Kazem sold lands in Jerusalem, where he was mayor from 1918-1920. The list includes five other members of the Husseini family.
Mussa al-Alami, a prominent Palestinian Arab intellectual and lawyer, stated during a 1934 meeting with David Ben-Gurion that he would prefer the land in Palestine would remain undeveloped for a century rather than see it developed by the Zionists. Notwithstanding this, in 1937, he sold 90 hectares (222 acres) to Jews in Biden , now Beit Shean, according to the list. The land he sold became Kibbutz Tirat Zvi . Two years later, Alami headed the Palestinian delegation to the London Conference of 1939 convened to discuss the future of mandate Palestine.
Ragheb al-Nashashibi, mayor of Jerusalem from 1920-1934 and head of the National Defense Party, sold over 120 hectares (296 acres) of land in Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv. Nashashibi also sold strategic land in east Jerusalem upon which the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University was later built.
Yaakub al-Ghussein, who headed the Arab Fund created to gather money to support the Palestinian cause, sold land to Jews in Jaffa and what is now the Gaza Strip for 4,000 Palestinian pounds, equivalent to British pound sterling at that era. Other elite Muslim and Christian families of Palestine, including the Abdel Hadi, Bseiso, and Fahum clans, were represented on the list.
The anti-Israel agitprop today full of falsehoods about both history and contemporary realities. The Jewish people, indigenous to Israel, had a lawful collective right to establish a state in their homeland. In the build-up to full Independence, private land was not "stolen" for advancement of this larger and legitimate purpose. Land was bought from local as well as absent owners by lawful means.
