Fellahin

Fellah, plural fellahin, means one who tills — from the same root as filaha, agriculture. Before the Nakba the fellahin were roughly two-thirds of the Arab population of Palestine, living in some eight hundred villages and cultivating wheat, barley, olives, figs, grapes, sesame and vegetables, mostly on rain-fed land in the hills and increasingly on irrigated citrus land on the coastal plain.

Their position deteriorated steadily from the late Ottoman period. Holdings in the mountain villages were small and fragmented; rain-fed subsistence farming was unproductive; taxation of the peasantry rose; the Ottoman conscription campaigns of the First World War took men and animals; and the Land Code of 1858 had concentrated ownership in fewer hands, so that many fellahin worked land registered in someone else’s name. When those owners — often absentee families in Beirut, Damascus or Jaffa — sold estates to Zionist land-purchasing organisations under the Mandate, the tenants who worked them had no legal interest to defend and were evicted. A landless rural class formed in the towns and on the edges of Haifa and Jaffa; the Shaw Commission of 1930 and the Hope Simpson report identified it as one of the causes of the violence of 1929, and it supplied much of the manpower of the revolt of 1936–39.

The Nakba fell hardest on this class. It was the villages, not the cities, that were systematically depopulated and then physically erased, and it was villagers who made up the overwhelming majority of the refugees. The camps of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza were and remain, in their social composition, rural Palestine relocated — which is why camp neighbourhoods carry village names and why the distinction between fallahi and madani, country and town, still registers among refugees.

Something else happened in exile. The culture of the fellahin — the embroidered thob with its village-specific patterns, the dabke, the harvest songs, the taboun bread, the olive tree — was raised from the local to the national and became the way Palestinians as a whole represent themselves. The transformation was partly nostalgia and partly politics: a peasantry rooted in the soil for centuries was the most direct refutation of the claim that the country had been empty. What began as the ordinary life of the majority became, after its destruction, the emblem of the nation.

Sources

• Palestinian Emigration (I) — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Regulating Palestinian Land (1858 – present) — PalQuest