Legal purchases from absentee owners still displaced the farmers, as at al-Fula in 1910

Buying land doesn’t give you sovereignty over the people already there, for anyone.

Back in 1858 the Ottomans passed a land law that said everyone had to register their land on official paper so it could be taxed. The Fellahin, who had worked these lands for generation, did not want to register because it meant getting taxed and your sons would get drafted into the Ottoman army. That left a gap that allowed the rich men of the city, such as in Beirut and Damascus, to actually register land they had NEVER BEEN ON, in THEIR OWN NAME.

So now you had a situation, completely legal on paper, where a banker who had never even seen a village technically “owned” it, while the families who’d lived and farmed there for centuries were suddenly just “tenants” on land the law now said belonged to someone else.

Elias Sursock, Al-Fula village, 1910, “sold” about 10,000 dunams of it to the Jewish National Fund. The farmers actually living there didn’t want to go so they petitioned Istanbul to stop the sale and when they refused to leave the local Ottoman governor of Nazareth, Shukri al-Asali, even sent troops to back them up. But, nonetheless, his superior overruled him, and the farmers were expelled anyway. A Jewish settlement, Kibbutz Merhavia, was built on that exact land in January 1911.

So that’s why “purchased from the legal owners” and “nobody was displaced” are both technically true and completely misleading at the same time.

First published on Quora: my original debunk.