Did Palestinians really Sold Lands to Jews or Not?

By: Ruhollahzaad

According to available documents, before 1947 and even before UN issued the Resolution 181, known as the "Division" resolution, about 6.6% of Palestinian agricultural lands were owned by Jews.

Accordingly, about 650 square kilometers were owned by Jews who lived in Palestine during the Ottoman Empire and were considered essentially as Palestinians.

- About 680 square kilometers were purchased from some non-Palestinian families who took advantage of the weak oversight of the Ottoman empire and named some portions of Palestinian lands and villages after themselves. Some of these tribes are al-Ishaq and al-Sarsouq, families who were mostly based in Beirut and Paris.

- The British military chief also handed over about 500 square kilometers of Palestinian lands to Jewish Agencies, the lands were forcibly confiscated from the Palestinians.

- Some small portions of the lands were bought by some non-Palestinian Muslim immigrants and later they handed over their properties to the Jewish Agency. Among them was Seyyed Zia Tabatabai, an Iranian politician and Prime Minister under Ahmad Shah, the last Shah of the Qajar dynasty.  He lost the power contest to Reza Khan in Iran and fled to Palestine.

- A small number of Palestinians also greedily traded with the Jews in hope for large piles of money, the move was later criticized by Muslims inside and outside Palestine. For this reason, the great Palestinian religious leader, Allama al-Husseini, wrote letters to Islamic clerks requesting for a fatwa for selling Palestinian lands to Jews, most of clerks banned the deal and issued a Harram fatwa.

- One of the most prominent Shia clerks, widely known as Ayatollah Kashef, strongly banned selling the lands to Jews and issued a fatwa which suggested, forbidding the sale of land to Jews, declaring sellers as apostates, who will not be allowed to be buried in Muslim cemeteries.

- After this fatwa, the Palestinians killed some people who had sold lands to Jews and extracted their bodies from Muslim cemeteries.

- Some consider the suspicious death of the late Ayatollah Kashif as assassination ordered by Zionists/ Jews in return to the Fatwa he issued.

The scholars issued the fatwa, forbidding selling lands to Jews on the basis of the verses of the Qur'an, "God has sent down to the disbelievers the disbelievers from the believers."

- On the other hand, large parts of the land of Palestine are among the Islamic endowments, and buying and selling them without the coordination and permission of the Endowments of Jerusalem is illegal and legally forbidden.

- At the time of the adoption of Resolution 181 of the total area of ​​27,000 square kilometers of Palestine, only less than 2,000 kilometers of Palestinian agricultural land was owned by Jews, about 3% of which was owned by Palestinian Jews and not by Zionists who immigrated to Palestine.

- However, there are many questions, including:

1- As it has been said, a large area of ​​Palestinian land is endowed and its sale is forbidden; how did this land become the property of the Zionists?

2. Roads, rivers, lakes, mountains, mosques, Palestinian schools that were not privately owned to be sold to Jews?

3- And of course, a very important question is whether ownership can create sovereignty? If we answer this question in the affirmative, then anyone in any city or country who owns land or a house can establish a government. For example, every Saudi citizen can establish a government in his property and consider himself its ruler.

The sale of Palestinian land to the Jews by the Palestinians is unlikely to cast doubt on both Muslim communities in support of the Palestinian liberation movement and the normalization of spending with the occupying regime in Jerusalem, which has occupied the Islamic State of Palestine.