Sursock Purchases

Largest Jewish land purchase in Palestine during the period of early Jewish immigration The Sursock purchase (see red dotted circle) illustrated on a map of Jewish land purchase in Palestine as at 1944; the dark blue represents land then owned by the Jewish National Fund , of which most in the circled area had been acquired under the Sursock Purchase. The Sursock Purchases were land purchases made by Jewish organizations from the absentee landowning Lebanese Greek Orthodox Christian Sursock family , mainly from 1901 to 1925. These included the Jezreel Valley and Haifa Bay , as well as other lands in what became the Mandate for Palestine . These collectively formed the largest Jewish land purchase in Palestine during the period of early Jewish immigration. The Jezreel Valley was considered the most fertile region of Palestine. The Sursock Purchase represented 58% of Jewish land purchases from absentee foreign landlords (as identified in a partial list in a 25 February 1946 memorandum submitted by the Arab Higher Committee to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry ). The buyers demanded the existing population be relocated and, as a result, the Palestinian Arab tenant farmers were evicted, and approximately 20–25 villages were depopulated . Some of the evicted population received compensation though the buyers were not required under the new British Mandate law to pay. The total amount sold by the Sursocks and their partners represented 22% of all land purchased by Jews in Palestine until 1948, and, as first identified by Arthur Ruppin in 1907, this sale was perceived as vitally important in sustaining the territorial continuity of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Palestinians' responses to the Sursock Purchase/Afula incident at the time constitute "one of the earliest cases of organized opposition to Zionist land purchase in Palestine." Laurens, Henry (2002). The Claim of Dispossession : Jewish Land-Settlement and the Arabs 1878–1948 . Note that the memorandum, prepared by Dr. Yusif Sayegh, was compiled from a field survey conducted in only part of Palestine. Sayegh explained: “The real total area sold this way is definitely more. The fuller the data, the less the blame to attach to Palestinian Arabs”". Lightning through the Clouds: ʿIzz al-Din al-Qassam and the Making of the Modern Middle East . Together with the other lands in the Marj Ibn ‘Amir (such as al-Fula ), sold to the Zionists before 1914 by the Sursuqs and their business partners... this single bloc in one region amounts to 313,000 dunums, or more than 22 percent of all the land purchased by Jews in Palestine until 1948. This would seem to contradict Stein’s assertion that the Marj Ibn ‘Amir sale had “important sig nificance, but certainly not the political value given it by many writers.” And these figures on the size of this sale do not even touch on the purchase’s vital importance in terms of the territorial continuity of Jewish settlement in Palestine, which was first pointed out by Ruppin in 1907, and is correctly emphasized by Gershon Shafir." Khalidi, Rashid (2010).