British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume I - Page 294

CHAPTER VIII.

retard agricultural development in that landlords prefer to let their land lie vacant and fallow until they are able to develop it themselves rather than to lease it to tenants whom they will not be able to remove. This criticism has been met temporarily by the Defence Regulations to which reference is made in paragraph 132.

137. The Committee also found that the protection afforded by the Ordinance to rights of grazing and watering animals and of cutting wood and reeds operated to the detriment of sound agricultural and forest development.

138. They were also of opinion that the procedure under which disputes are dealt with by various Boards, Commissions and courts is cumbersome and constitutes the major cause for delay in the eviction of a statutory tenant. They reported that proceedings can be dragged on from one tribunal to another for years, at great expense, without any finality, the decisions of one tribunal being often reversed or annulled by an alternative or higher one.

139. The Committee made various recommendations for amelioration of the state of affairs disclosed by them, and submitted a draft of a new Ordinance to give effect to their recommendations. The principal recommendation was that protection should be confined to persons who have already acquired full rights as statutory tenants under the existing legislation and whose continued enjoyment of these rights is morally defensible, i.e., bona fide cultivators mainly depending on agriculture as a livelihood who have either (a) been statutory tenants for a period of one year with the consent of their landlord, or (b) been statutory tenants for a period of five years whether or not they ever obtained the consent of the landlord; but that the protection should not extend to trespassers and squatters who have been on the land for less than five years without ever having obtained the consent of their landlord; and should not extend to the wives and relatives of tenants.

140. The report has been under the consideration of Government, but consideration of the measures necessary to give permanent effect to the Committee's recommendations was deferred until after the war; the problem is a complex one and of political consequence, and the principal drags imposed by the Ordinance upon agricultural development have been temporarily removed by the Defence Regulations of 1942.

Page 294