Dunum
دونم
The standard unit of land measurement in Palestine: one thousand square metres, or a tenth of a hectare. Roughly a quarter of an acre. Nearly every figure in the history of Palestinian land — ownership, cultivation, expropriation — is stated in dunums.
The word comes from the Ottoman dönüm, originally the amount of land a team of oxen could plough in a day — in practice a little more than 900 square metres in Ottoman Palestine, though the figure varied considerably from place to place. The British Mandate standardised it as the metric dunum of exactly 1,000 square metres — a tenth of a hectare, or about 0.247 of an acre — and that is the unit used in the Mandate’s Village Statistics, in Israeli land law, in Palestinian Authority planning documents and in United Nations reporting. Ten dunums make a hectare; a thousand make a square kilometre.
The unit is not a curiosity of measurement but the language in which the conflict over the country is conducted. The Mandate’s 1944–45 Village Statistics, compiled village by village, record for each locality the total area in dunums and its division between Arab, Jewish and public ownership, and the breakdown of land use — cereals, plantations, citrus, built-up, non-cultivable. Those tables are the basis of most modern estimates of what Palestinians owned in 1948. For Salama, near Jaffa, they show 6,782 dunums in total, of which 5,633 were Arab-owned, 885 Jewish and 264 public.
Every subsequent measure of dispossession has used the same unit. The land confiscations in the Galilee announced in 1975 — about 20,000 dunums around Sakhnin, Arraba and Deir Hanna — produced Land Day. Israeli declarations of “state land” in the West Bank, settlement master plans, the area enclosed between the separation barrier and the Green Line, the firing zones of the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills, and the demolition and confiscation figures published each month by UN humanitarian monitors are all reported in dunums.
Reading Palestinian history therefore requires a working sense of the number. A village of a few thousand people typically held several thousand dunums. A family plot might be five or ten. Twenty thousand dunums is twenty square kilometres — enough to redraw the economic life of three towns, which is exactly what it did.
Sources
Cited works
3- en.wikipedia.org — Dunam(opens in a new tab)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunam
- palquest.org — salama(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/place/17133/salama
- ochaopt.org — area c key humanitarian concernsPDF(opens in a new tab)https://www.ochaopt.org/sites/default/files/area_c_key_humanitarian_concerns.pdf