November 28, 1945
A report by the British Land Transfer Committee reveals that Arabs in Palestine have willingly continued to sell land to Zionists in the early 1940s despite the British legal prohibition on doing so. Palestinian Arabs provide all the evidence that legal circumvention of the law is regular, covert, continuous and sophisticated.
As part of the 1939 White Paper for Palestine, the British throttled Jewish immigration and land purchases and promised a federal state in Palestine in 10 years. In an effort to find out how the land transfer regulations were being circumvented, an investigatory committee was established without Zionist members. Palestinian Arabs provided information and testimony. With exceptional detail, the collective testimonies outlined how Arab buyers and Jewish purchasers skirted the British intention to halt the sale of Arab lands.
The report finds that “the remedy lies in the hands of the Arabs themselves. Unless they enter into collusion with the Jews to defeat the spirit of the White Paper, Jews will not be able to enter improperly into possession of the land within a restricted area. If the parties whom the law is designed to defend conspire to evade the law, then it is indeed difficult for the authorities to enforce it and to defend them.”
The amount of land sold was not large but was sufficient for Zionists to doubt the sincerity of many Palestinian Arabs who expressed strongly anti-Zionist views. Moreover, the purchases enabled Jews to create contiguous areas of land, connecting previous isolated settlements.
