Palestine Land Problems Assume Serious Character; Arabs Charge Menace in System of Jewish Land Acqui

General attention has been drawn to the seriousness of land problems in Palestine by the interruption of the work of Jewish ploughmen at Wady Hawarit, the most important Jewish purchase of a continuous stretch of land since the acquisition of the land around Haifa Bay. The British Inquiry Commission was informed several days ago by the Arab Executive that the Jews were driving Arab tenants off the Wady Hawarit land, which had been bought by the Jewish National Fund with $1,000,000 of Canadian-Jewish funds.

The Arabs do not dispute the legality of the Jews’ title to the land which was purchased from 13 members of a prominent land-owning family. They also grant that the purchase and the effort of the Jews to evict the Arab squatters is in perfect accord with law but they maintain that just because of its legality the purchase and the attempted eviction make it clear that the entire system of Jewish acquisition of land constitutes a standing menace to the Arab population.

The Arab leaders claim that when an owner sells his land the tenants are turned off the property without having any place to go. They also contend that the compulsory compensation to these evicted tenants under the law which has been effective only since August is insufficient. Besides, they claim that the Arab gets compensation in money but since he has been accustomed to handling only land and doesn’t know how to handle money he quickly squanders it. The result of all this, according to the Arabs, is that the evicted tenants are developing into a landless and pauperous class who become bandits and anti-Jewish.

The Arabs’ sentiment on this matter is summed in their question: “Will you convert all Arabs into bandits in order to build up the Jewish National Home?”

In an interview with an important official of the Jewish National Fund, he contradicted the Arab argument at all points. “The Fund buys ninety percent of its land from large holders, most of whom live abroad, in Paris, Beirut and Alexandria, and receive twenty percent of the proceeds of the crops of their lands from the fellaheen who till the soil as tenants or squatters. We purchase the land and then serve notice on the tenants, giving them a long period of removal before occupying it. When we bought the Nahal land in 1921 we gave the tenants the right to setle 3,000 dunams of it within six years and an option to purchase at the end of that period. In the case of Wady Hawarit we paid $75,000 in compensation to the tenants in addition to the purchase price. About three-quarters of the tenants had already been paid off and we were prepared to settle with the remainder when the rioting broke out. Now the tenants, including those who had already received compensation, refuse to vacate. Our position is perfectly legal and moral. We cannot be blamed if the law is unsatisfactory. Let a new one be made.”

This official denied the validity of the Arab argument that dispossessed tenants become paupers and bandits. He maintains that practically all of the dispossessed tenants use their compensation money to buy land elsewhere and are satisfied with the arrangement. If land is difficult to obtain, he says, the government should give state lands to the squatters and evicted tenants, reserving, of course, a proper proportion of the state land for Jewish settlement.

The Jewish National Fund further argues that displacements are practically unknown in the Littoral orange-growing regions where the peasants who were previously unsuccessful in raising grain have sold most of their holdings, retaining ten to twenty dunams on which they have begun orange cultivation from which they have derived more than from their larger holdings on which they tried to grow grain.

The Inquiry Commission is expected to go further into the land question which some Arabs point to as the fundamental cause of Arab-Jewish conflict. It has thus far been impossible to obtain a concrete statement of the Arab demands with regard to the land question.

A regrettable fact in this connection is that neither the Jews, Arabs or the government possess statistics showing the actual number of tenants and squatters dispossessed or their fate. It is understood that the Jews are collecting such statistics which it is believed will show that the former tenants have been successfully reestablished in agriculture in other regions.