British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume I - Page 290

CHAPTER VIII.

129. However, this ineffective legislation remained on the statute book until 1929, when the relevant section was replaced by the Protection of Cultivators Ordinance". This Ordinance provided for the payment to certain classes of tenants of compensation, not only for any improvements but also for disturbance, on their receiving a valid notice to quit a holding. It further provided for the constitution of Boards to decide disputes as to whether or not compensation for disturbance or improvement was payable and as to the amount of any such compensation. The previous requirement that a cultivator must retain a subsistence area elsewhere found no place in the new Ordinance. But in 1931 ** this requirement was restored mainly by reason of the recrudescence at that time of large scale land sales by Arabs to Jews and the emergence into prominence of the problem of the landless Arab. (In 1933 a committee of enquiry found that some 664 Arab families who had been displaced by land sales had been unable to obtain other holdings oh which they could establish themselves, or to find other equally satisfactory occupation). The amending Ordinance of 1931 also protected from eviction persons who had exercised continuously for a period of five years a practice of grazing or watering animals or the cutting of wood or reeds or other beneficial occupation of a similar character, unless the landlord had made equivalent provision towards the livelihood of such persons. Subsequent amendments tightened up the Ordinance on various points in favour of the tenant and stopped certain loopholes through which it had been found that evasion was possible.

130. This legislative action in favour of tenants culminated in the repeal of the 1929 Ordinance and its amendments, and its replacement by a new comprehensive piece of legislation, the Cultivators (Protection) Ordinance of 1933***, which is substantially the law as it exists to-day. The salient provisions of this existing law are as follows:-

(a) It defines a "statutory tenant" as any person, family or tribe occupying and cultivating a holding otherwise than as owner thereof. The term includes the relatives of any person occupying and cultivating a holding who may have, with the knowledge of the landlord, cultivated such holding : it includes the heirs of a tenant; and also any person who is hired by the landlord to do agricultural work and receives as remuneration a portion of the produce of the holding which be cultivates.
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* Laws of 1929, Vol. I, p. 299.
** Laws of 1931, Vol. I, p. 3.
*** Drayton, Vol. I, p. 506.

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