Fellahin
فلاحين
The peasant cultivators who made up the large majority of Palestine's population before 1948 — the class whose villages were destroyed in the Nakba, and whose dress, food, songs and calendar became, in exile, the national culture.
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
Cited works
2- palquest.org — palestinian emigration i(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/33643/palestinian-emigration-i
- palquest.org — overallchronology(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/overallchronology?nid=150&chronos=150
Connected in the archive
5 connected records5 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
names this record — 3 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Filastin Newspaper Founded
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Within a short time the paper was reporting systematically on the purchase of land by Zionist organisations and the eviction of the fellahin who worked it, and warning that a national movement was establishing itself in the country with the resources of European Jewry behind it.
- Infiltrator
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …numbers who had reached neighbouring states — some 75,000 to Transjordan, 5,000 to Iraq, 12,000 to 15,000 to Lebanon, 20,000 to Syria — and noting that the fellahin, the village population, "were encamping along the front lines and hoping to return." Some had begun moving back to their villages while the war was still going on.…
- The refugees could have gone home after the war; nobody stopped them
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …reported to Ben-Gurion on 13 September 1948 figures of 75,000 to Transjordan, 5,000 to Iraq, 12,000–15,000 to Lebanon and 20,000 to Syria — while the fellahin, the village population, "were encamping along the front lines and hoping to return." Movement back toward their villages was what the new government began to call "infiltration." Lifschitz…
named in this record — 2 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Dabke
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: 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.
- Haifaحيفا
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: 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.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Fellahin.” Glossary, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/glossary/fellahin.- MLA
“Fellahin.” Glossary, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/glossary/fellahin. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-fellahin, title = {Fellahin}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/glossary/fellahin}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }