An Arab writer, in a column ahead of the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, notes that plenty of Arabs sold their lands to Jews, and that if they hadn’t done that, there would be no Jewish state.
Nahd Zaquout starts off his piece by quoting a poem from 1929 by Ibrahim Toukan expressing the frustration of the writer that Arabs were selling lands to Jews. The name of the poem is “To the seller of the country.”
Extend / They sold the country to their enemies in greed for money,
but their homelands were sold. They
may be excused if hunger forced them, and by
God, they would never be thirsty or hungry.
If you say: its name is “a homeland,”
they do not understand, and without understanding greed,
think of your death in a land in which you grew up and
leave your grave a land the length of which he sold
Zaquot then goes on to list the specific Arabs who sold large tracts of land to the Jews in the years after the Balfour Declaration.
The Sursock family (Michel Sursock and his brothers) sold 400,000 dunams to the Jews.
The Salam family sold 165,000 dunams to the Jews,
The Tians, Qabbanis, Bayhem, Sabbagh, Al-Quwatli, Al-Jaza’iri and Mardini families, most of them from Lebanon, are listed as having sold thousands of dunams to the Jews.
Given that Arabs like this author are steeped in an honor/shame mentality, why would he bring up this topic of shame that is rarely discussed in the Arab world?
Because some of his fellow Arabs behaved in a way he considers honorable.
The author takes it as a given that those who sell lands to Jews should be killed. He brings a story of some of those heroes who murdered land sellers:
Honorable Palestinians were strict in the issue of selling land, and they punished by death anyone who sold his land or worked as a broker to sell land. They exposed them to the public. The Arab press mentions the story of a broker from Jaffa who was shot dead while on his way to his house at night, and he was famous for brokering and selling land to the Jews. In the Muslim cemeteries, they transferred his body to the village of Qalqilya, his original town, and there was a reluctance to bury him in the Muslim cemetery. It was said that he was buried in a Jewish settlement called “Benjamina”, and that his grave was exhumed at night and his body was dumped 20 meters away.
What a heartwarming story of Jew-hatred, vengeance and….honor!
Perhaps the current mainstream Arab anger at Lebanon is being manifested by trying to call the entire country traitors for having its richest people sell lands at a handsome profit to Jews in the 1910s-20s.
He doesn’t mention that most of the lands sold were considered uncultivable. Last year I noted that maps of swamp areas in 1920s Palestine largely coincided with the areas Jews built up.
The land was not only legally bought by the Jews, but they worked hard to make it livable – which the “honorable Arabs” didn’t consider important enough to do.
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