British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume I - Page 296

CHAPTER VIII.

144. The first duty of the Director of Development was to ascertain the number of "landless Arabs" in Palestine and to make a register of them. "Landless Arabs" had been defined as "such Arabs as could be shown to have been displaced from the lands which they occupied in consequence of the lands falling into Jewish bands and who bad not obtained other holdings on which they could establish themselves or other equally satisfactory occupation". The Director, in preparing the register, was given the assistance of a legal assessor whose duty it was to scrutinise claims and advise him as to the sufficiency of evidence in each case before the claim was admitted.

145. As the first step to obtaining particulars of displacement, the District authorities were asked to ascertain in what villages displacement of Arab cultivators had occurred and to see that, if claims were made, some prima facie evidence was forthcoming which satisfied the conditions prescribed in the preceding paragraph.

146. The following categories of Arabs, though in fact landless, were not considered :-

(1) Persons who had been displaced in consequence of purchases by non-Jews.

(2) Persons who at the time of the sale to Jews were not tenant cultivators, e.g. owners who habitually let their lands, ploughmen and persons who, from debt or bad seasons or other causes, had ceased to be cultivators and bad become labourers, etc.

(3) Persons who were able to obtain other lands after the sale, but subsequently gave up cultivating owing to bad seasons or for some other reason.

(4) Persons who had obtained employment of a fairly permanent nature.

Consequently, up to the 1st January, 1936, although 3,271 applications for re-settlement had been received from landless Arabs, only 664 had been admitted to the register, while 2,607 had been disallowed.

147. The policy of His Majesty's Government as formulated in 1930, after the presentation of Sir John Hope Simpson's report, contemplated the initiation of a comprehensive development scheme to be financed from a guaranteed loan of £P.2,500,000; it was visualized that, during the first years of that scheme, provision should be made from His Majesty's Exchequer of such annual amounts as might be required to meet the interest and

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