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It is well known that land was the major economic resource of mandate Palestine, the basis for the livelihood of the vast majority of the population and consequently the subject of much discussion by British rulers about its ownership. The major piece of land legislation was the 1928 land settlement ordinance. This legislation launched a cadastral survey of agricultural land, with the aim of ensuring that ownership of all landed property was secured by a government-issued title deed. There is a large and growing body of literature on land in mandate Palestine,1 but the full complexity of the land settlement process remains understudied.
This article argues that the main problem remains one of frames of reference.2 Before the mandate had even ended, observers were already struggling with how rapidly changing contexts were twisting terms and distorting their relation to the past. In A Survey of Palestine, the massive report prepared by the Palestine government for the 1947 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, officials described land settlement operations as
the examination of rights to land and the solution of disputes about the ownership, boundaries, category and other registrable rights in land, its cadastral survey for the purpose and the eventual recording of rights in Land Registers. It must not be confused with the settlement of people on the land.3
Or should it? Most writers tend to ignore the Survey's caution and adopt the narrow view that the history of land registration in mandate Palestine is best understood solely in terms of those processes that facilitated a Jewish national home.4 Thus, the two quite different meanings of "settlement" distinguished by the Survey are indeed neatly conflated in much of the extant literature, with scholars identifying the legal settlement of individual property rights as the essential precondition for separating Arab inhabitants from land on which the physical settlement of European Jewish immigrants could then proceed. This paper, by contrast, heeds the caution to be mindful of historic processes unfolding during the mandate period that were not solely the result of Zionism. The main argument put forth is that when the role of Zionism is pushed too far as a determinant force in the development of mandate land policies, not only are...