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Understand the tax implications for NRIs inheriting agricultural land in India. Learn about tax liabilities, exemptions, and the legal process involved.
#NRIInheritance#AgriculturalLand#TaxForNRIs#NRIWealthManagement#IndiaTaxation#PropertyForNRIs#InheritanceIndia#LandOwnership#NRIInvestments#CapitalGainsTax
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Purchase a plot this month in your daughter's name and receive a discount of Rs. 500 per square yard
#bbg#buildingblockgroups#RealEstate#OpenPlots#LandForSale#InvestmentProperty#PlotForSale#LandInvestment#PropertyForSale#RealEstateInvesting#BuyLand#BuildYourDreamHome#InvestInLand#LandSale#NewDevelopment#VacantLand#PropertyInvestment#LandDevelopment#LandInvestor#RealEstateAgent#LandListing#LandForDevelopment#LandForSaleByOwner#LandBroker#LandDeals#EmptyLot#BuyLandNow#LandOwnership#LandOpportunity#LandForBuilding
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Navigate the digital landscape of land ownership in Telangana with 'Telangana Bhulekh: Online Land Records & Property Details' on indiatechmitra.com. This comprehensive guide illuminates the path for property owners, potential buyers, and real estate enthusiasts to access and interpret land records and property details online in Telangana. Delve into the user-friendly process of checking plot information, ownership status, and property history through the Telangana Bhulekh portal, a pivotal resource in the government's initiative to promote transparency and ease in property transactions. Whether you're conducting due diligence before purchasing land, verifying property details for legal purposes, or simply exploring the history of a parcel, our article equips you with the knowledge to efficiently use the Bhulekh portal to your advantage. Learn about the necessary steps, required documents, and tips for a seamless search experience. #TelanganaBhulekh #OnlineLandRecords #PropertyDetails #RealEstateIndia #DigitalIndia #LandOwnership #PropertyTransactions #GovernmentInitiative #Indiatechmitra
#TelanganaBhulekh#OnlineLandRecords#PropertyDetails#RealEstateIndia#DigitalIndia#LandOwnership#PropertyTransactions#GovernmentInitiative#Indiatechmitra
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Garden Update 1; Rainy Day Chaos: Navigating Retaining Wall Woes and DIY Solutions in Home Renovation
See all those rocks at the bottom of the photo and the ones just sitting in the soil? They’ve removed themselves from the retaining wall opposite my front doors(yeah, I’ve got two. See this page for why). It’s been raining cats and dogs for the past week and the wall decided enough was enough. As you can tell, it isn’t exactly freshly built but I thought it would last at least until next summer.…
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#ChaosAtHome#DIYGardening#DIYHomeProjects#GardenCleanup#GardenMaintenance#HomeGardenWoes#HomeMaintenance#HomeRenovation#HouseandGardenTroubles#HouseMaintenance#LandOwnership#OliveTreeSupport#PropertyOwnership#PropertyResponsibilities#RainDamage#RainyDayProblems#RetainingWallIssues#UnexpectedChallenges#WallReconstruction#WeatheringTheStorm
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Is Capitalism Working? Landowners (2)
We saw that the aristocracy and landed gentry own 30% of England, a position that has not changed for centuries, and that they have increased their wealth at expense of the rest of us.
But the aristocracy and landed gentry are not the only ones who own land. Big corporations also own vast tracts of England.
“Multi-million pound corporations with complex structures have purchased the very ground we walk on – and we are only just beginning to discover the damage it is doing to Britain.” (Guy Shrubsole, quoted in the Guardian, 19/04/19)
Big corporations own 18% of England. Topping the list are three privately owned water companies. Since they were privatised in 1989, water companies have issued massive dividends to their shareholders.
“…payouts in dividends to shareholders of parent companies between 1991 and 2019 amount to £57bn – nearly half the sum they spent on maintaining and improving the country’s pipes and treatment plants in that period." (Guardian:01/07/22)
Since privatisation, water companies have not built a single new reservoir, have continued to pump raw sewage into our rivers and seas, and have failed to stem the tide of water leaks that blight the system. Over 70% of these water companies are foreign owned, so that there is no guarantee that the £57 bn paid in dividends since 1991 has remained in this country.
More worrying still, is the fact these dividends are paid out using borrowed money. If these companies were ever to go bust it would be us, the British taxpayer, having to bail them out.
The water companies are only one example of how corporate landownership affects all of us in a negative way. Land banking by construction companies is another problem.
“The big boys of construction are sitting on enough land to build a couple of cities, and their collective stashes have increased by nearly 10 per cent in just a year…This is surely scandalous in the worst decade for house building since the war. From a peak average of 361,885 homes a year in the 1960s, completions have slumped to 154,533 annually. Even when you take council and social housing out of the equation, the number of dwellings built by the private sector has fallen 38 per cent from an annual average of 197,141 in the 1960s to 121,500 in the current decade.” (Bigissue: 30/07/19)
This contraction in house building is known as “pipelining”. In effect the large construction companies deliberately restrict the flow of newly built homes onto the market to maximise their profits. According to Campaign to Protect Rural England, over a ten-year period the biggest house building companies increased their land banks by 20% but actually built 13% fewer homes. Restricted supply means higher house prices, means greater profits for the construction companies at the expense of ordinary working people. The House of Commons Library sums up the problem thus:
“When people are unable to access suitable housing it can result in overcrowding, more young people living with their parents for longer, impaired labour mobility, which makes it harder for businesses to recruit staff, and increased levels of homelessness.” (Commons Library: Tackling the under-supply of housing in England)
More generally, Private Eye, who investigated landownership in England and Wales, found that
“…a large chunk of the country was not only under corporate control, but owned by companies that – in many cases – were almost certainly seeking to avoid paying tax, that most basic contribution to a civilised society…Legally obliged to maximise profits for their shareholders, and biased towards short-term returns, companies make for poor custodians of land. Nor are corporate landowners capable of solving the housing crisis. Hoarded, developed, polluted, dug up, landfilled: the corporate control of England’s acres has gone far enough.” (Guardian: 19/04/19)
#uk politics#landownership#coporations#water companies#landbanking#construction#profit#housing#environment
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A Sixth of the World's Land Surface Belongs to Whom?
In this YouTube shorts video, we explore the fascinating story of the world's largest non-governmental landowner, Queen Elizabeth II. As head of the British Commonwealth from 1953 until her death last year, she was technically the legal owner of around 2.7 billion hectares of land, equivalent to around a sixth of the planet's land surface. Today, this land belongs to King Charles III as the new British monarch. The Crown Estate includes prime chunks of London, massive tracts of agricultural land in rural Britain, and around half of the UK's foreshore. The Crown also owns over 90% of the land in Canada, where King Charles III is now Head of State. However, the land cannot be sold by the reigning monarch and isn't considered their private property. Learn more about this fascinating topic in our video! Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe for more interesting content.
#youtube#QueenElizabethII#BritishMonarchy#CrownEstate#LandOwnership#KingCharlesIII#Commonwealth#BuckinghamPalace#London#AgriculturalLand#Foreshore#Canada#HeadofState
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The reason people are telling you Touch Grass after you called Farming Sims “a bourgeois fantasy of landownership” is because, in general, farmers are not the bourgeoisie.
#I understand that yes you mean the players themselves are bourgeois#but calling it a ‘fantasy of landownership’ implies you think independent farmers are somehow bourgeois#and look people investing in monopolizing farmland is its own anti capitalist gripe! this is not that#these games are not about landownersh
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okay i read a fanfiction which i liked a great deal that is set in an alternate version of the age of sail/napoleonic wars which for fanfiction reasons has black people & women hold office in the british military; this is a nonsense contrivance, but it's a fanfiction, so one can sort of take it as it is & not think about it too hard, EXCEPT, unfortunately for me, there is a brief aside in an author's note that's like 'this character refers to saint domingue because the news was slow, but haiti had been renamed about two months before.' okay king! why was haiti renamed, huh? if we're living in this fun timeline where we've done away with racism? did france just like, in a show of revolutionary spirit, hand over the island to jan-jak dessalines? huh? if they're doing that, does that make our heroes the baddies in this war? and obviously we are not supposed to be thinking about that, because we are supposed to think 'i love love and read the aubreyad at an impressionable age, yay gay sex on a boat,' but they brought it up so it's not my fault! it's not my fault :(
#new entry in: the pedantry chronicles#this is why i am always like. i LOVE regency romances. it's so interesting what's allowed to make its way into the historical fantasy#rigorous authenticity for e.g. ball gown fashions; complete disinterest in the economic underpinnings thereof#exceptions to this general trend obv! more recent historicals often nod at these problems in some way#but serious engagement with like chattel slavery or even the mundane violence of english landownership kind of punctures the fantasy#it is a good fic tho :( i did really like it! great pacing excellent character dynamics coupla great jokes
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Legal Procedure of Land Purchase and Use
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Lismore Biodiversity News - Field Days and Partnerships
Lismore Biodiversity News - Field Days and Partnerships. A summary of workshops in 2023, and events planned for 2024.
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#Big Scrub Rainforest Day#Community Landholders#Conservation Efforts#Conservation Workshop#Environmental Education#Environmental Projects#Environmental Stewardship#Environmental Strategies#Field Day Events#Koala Festival#Koala Habitat Restoration#Landcare Initiatives#Landscape Hydration Training#Lismore#Natural Sequence Farming#Property Planning#Rural Landholder Initiative#Rural Landownership#Rural Property Aspirations#Sustainable Land Management#Workshop Series
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#WomenWhoInvest#FinancialFreedom#LandOwnership#SandovalCounty#SmartInvestment#BuildYourFuture#EmpoweredWomen#InvestInLand
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People spend all day here posting about shit that doesn't matter and no one has a problem with it but when your posting about shit that doesn't matter involves Criticizing Popular Thing then they suddenly are like Poasting Is Serious Business Why Are You Posting About Shit That Doesn't Matter Poast About Important Shit Instead.
There’s so many bigger problems in this world than a fictional game about growing plants 😭 not everyone is American and not all land ownership is theft. Genuinely get some some fresh air and go to a party and talk to real people and do breathing exercises
i always wonder about people like this, like... if you see someone posting about something assume that they think they're Doing Activism and they have to be super emotional and fired up it kind of says something really depressing and sad about your own life and engagement with politics, right? the idea that you see Poasts on Website as the height of political engagement and so anyone doing that must care super deeply and passionately about what they're posting from can only really come from someone who has never done any meaningful political action in their life--someone to whom Poasting Online really is the highest level of political action they can imagine for the issues they really care about. sad!
#also love the implications that#1) your ideological opposition to the fantasy of landownership i. stardew valley radicates solely on land being stolen from indigenous ppl#(it didn't even come up even once anywhere in the original post)#2) land being stolen from indeigenous ppl is not A Thing outside of the U.S.#(literally just american exceptionalism but in reverse)
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Purchase a plot this month in your daughter's name and receive a discount of Rs. 500 per square yard.
#bbg#buildingblockgroups#RealEstate#OpenPlots#LandForSale#InvestmentProperty#PlotForSale#LandInvestment#PropertyForSale#RealEstateInvesting#BuyLand#BuildYourDreamHome#InvestInLand#LandSale#NewDevelopment#VacantLand#PropertyInvestment#LandDevelopment#LandInvestor#RealEstateAgent#LandListing#LandForDevelopment#LandForSaleByOwner#LandBroker#LandDeals#EmptyLot#BuyLandNow#LandOwnership#LandOpportunity#LandForBuilding
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Navigate the digital landscape of land records with 'How to Check Bhulekh Online and Verify Your Land Ownership' on indiatechmitra.com. This detailed guide demystifies the process of accessing Bhulekh, the online portal that has revolutionized how land records are maintained, accessed, and verified in India. Whether you're a landowner looking to confirm the details of your property, a potential buyer conducting due diligence, or a real estate professional seeking accurate land information, our article provides step-by-step instructions for using Bhulekh. Learn how to search for property details, understand land plot maps, and ensure the accuracy of ownership records, all from the comfort of your home. With practical tips and insights, this guide is an essential resource for anyone looking to leverage the power of Bhulekh to streamline land verification processes. #BhulekhOnline #LandOwnership #VerifyLandRecords #RealEstateIndia #DigitalLandManagement #PropertyVerification #OnlineLandRecords #Indiatechmitra
#BhulekhOnline#LandOwnership#VerifyLandRecords#RealEstateIndia#DigitalLandManagement#PropertyVerification#OnlineLandRecords#Indiatechmitra
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Palestinian History Between Great Powers - Part 1
From Bronze Age to Ottoman Palestine
I started writing this article months ago but as it deserves proper research, it took me a long while, and at one point I started questioning is this helpful anymore. I thought it's obvious at this point to anyone not willfully ignorant that what we are seeing in real time is a genocide, and I'm not going to convince those who are willfully ignorant. I decided to finish it anyway since I do feel obligation to do something and maybe providing some accessible historical context is what I'm capable of doing. Even if I probably won't change any hearts and minds, I think the least we can do is not forget Palestinians and fall into apathy. And at the very least more understanding of the situation is always better even when we already oppose this genocide.
This is quite out of my area of focus, so I will be doing more of a general overview of the history and link in depth sources by more knowledgeable people than try to become an expert on this. My purpose is to offer an accessible starting point for the history of Palestine to help people put historical and current events into their proper context. I don't think the occupation and genocide in Palestine pose complex moral questions - it's pretty simple in my opinion that genocide, apartheid and colonialism are wrong and need to stop for peace to be possible - but the history is complex and it's understanding needs quite a lot of background. I will do my best to represent the complexity accurately and fairly while keeping this concise. Since there is a lot of history, even if this is very general overview, it's still very long, so I did need to cut this in two parts. First part will be covering everything to the beginning of WW1, second part the British Mandate period and Israel period.
Bibliography
I'm linking my sources and further reading here so it's easy to check some specific resources even if you don't want to/have time to read 5 000 years of history right now. Because there's so much misinformation and propaganda, I read as much as I could from academic sources, linked at the top here. They are really interesting and delve deeply into specific subjects so I do recommend checking out anything that peaks your interest (Sci-Hub is your friend against paywalled papers and in JSTOR you can make a free account to access most papers). Some of them I didn't really end up using, but I still linked them here since they provide some additional context that wouldn't fit in this overview. At the end there's some accessible resources (youtube videos, podcasts etc.) which are relevant and I think good.
Pre-Ottoman Era
On The Problem of Reconstructing Pre-Hellenistic Israelite (Palestinian) History - Critique of Biblical historical narratives
Canaanites and Philistines
Archaeological Sources for the History of Palestine: Between Large Forces: Palestine in the Hellenistic Period - Everyday life in Hellenistic Palestine
Ottoman Era
Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History - Critique of politics of Ottoman Palestine historiography
The Peasantry of Late Ottoman Palestine
Consequences of the Ottoman Land Law: Agrarian and Privatization Processes in Palestine, 1858–1918
The route from informal peasant landownership to formal tenancy and eviction in Palestine, 1800s–1947
The Ottoman Empire, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine (1880–1908)
Origins of Zionism
Christian Zionism and Victorian Culture
Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins
The Non-Jewish Origin of Zionism
Zionism and Its Jewish "Assimilationist" Critics (1897-1948)
The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company: Herzl's Blueprint for the Colonization of Palestine
Books
Boundaries and Baraka - Chapter II of Muslims and Others in Sacred Space - Local syncretic religious beliefs of Muslim and Christian Arabs in Palestine
Further "reading"
Israelis Are Not 'Indigenous' (and other ridiculous pro-Israel arguments) - Properly cited youtube video on settler colonialism of Zionism (Indigenous is defined here in postcolonialist way, in contrast with the colonialist, the video doesn't argue that diaspora Jews didn't originate from the Palestine area)
Gaza: A Clear Case of Genocide - Detailed Legal Analysis - Youtube video detailing current evidence on the ongoing genocide and assessing them through international law
What the Netanyahu Family Did To Palestine: Part 1 , Part 2 - Two part podcast episode of Behind the Bastards about Israel's history and Netanyahu Family's involvement in it with an expert quest
History of Israeli/Palestinian conflict since 1799 - Timeline of Palestinian history by Al Jazeera with documentaries produced by Al Jazeera for most of the entries in the timeline
Ancient Era (33th-4th century BCE)
Palestine's location in the fertile crescent, the connecting land between Africa and Asia and the strip of land between Mediterranean and Red Sea means since the earliest emergence of civilizations it has been in the middle of great powers. Thorough it's history it has been conquered many, many times for it's strategic value. Despite the changing rulers and migrating groups there has been a continuous history history of a people, which has changed, split and evolved, but not fully disappeared or replaced at any point, which is quite rare of a history spanning thousands of years.
Speakers of Semitic languages are the first recorded inhabitants of Palestine. At least from Bronze Age (c. 3300-1200 BCE) onward they inhabited Levant, Arabian peninsula and Ethiopian highlands. Semitic languages belong in the Afroasiatic language group, which includes three other branches; ancient Egypt, Amazigh languages and Cushitic languages of African Horn. Most prominent theories of the origins of proto-Afroasiatic is in Levant, African side of Red Sea or Ethiopia. In the Bronze Age the Levant's Semitic speakers were called Canaanites and there was already urban settlements in Early Bronze Age. Egypt had been extending it's control over Canaan for a while and in Late Bronze Age, 1457 BCE, it took over Canaan. Gaza, which had had habitation for thousand years already, became the Egypt's administrative capital in Canaan. Canaan stayed as Egypt's province until the Late Bronze Age collapse c. 1200-1150 BCE, when Egypt started losing it's hold on Levant. Egypt eventually retreated from Canaan around 1100 BCE. The causes of Late Bronze Age collapse are unknown, but theories suggest some kind of environmental changes that caused destruction of cities and wide-spread mass migration all around the East Mediterranean Bronze Age civilizations.
Canaanites was not what most of the people called themselves, but rather what the surrounding empires, especially Egypt and Hittites in the north, called them. Philistines appear in Egyptian sources around the Late Bronze Age collapse as raiders against Egypt, who were likely populating southern parts of Canaan, the Palestine area. Several groups with mutually intelligble languages emerged after Egypt left the area: in Palestine area Philistines, Israelites, in Jordan are Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites, and in Lebanon area Canaanites, who were called by Phoenicians by Greeks. Israelites have been theorized to split from Philistines, possibly after Aegonean migrants during the Late Bronze Age collapse influenced the culture of the costal Philistine city states, and/or through Israelites development of monotheistic faith. During Iron Age these different groups descendant from Caananites had their own kingdoms. In the area of Palestine there was two Israelite kindgoms, Kingdom of Judah is the highlands of Judah, were Israelites likely originated, and Kindom of Israel or Samaria north to it, as well as Philistine city states in the coast around the area of current Gaza strip.
Earliest historical evidence of Israel is from mid 9th century BCE and of Judah from 7th century BCE, though Israelites as a group were mentioned earlier. It's entirely possible the kingdoms predate these mentions, but the archaeological evidence suggests likely not by much. Israel was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian empire in 722 BC, so it's entirely possible kingdom of Judah was created by retreating Israelites of the earlier kingdom. The remaining Israelites under Assyrian rule came to be known as Samaritans, marking also the split of Jewish faith into Judaism and Samaritanism. Neo-Assyrian lingua franca was Aramaic, a Semitic language from southwest Syria, which became the major spoken language in Samaria. Judah became a vassal state of Assyrians and later Babylonians. After a rebellion Babylonians fully conquered Judah in 586-587 BCE and exiled the rebels, though more recent historical study suggests it targeted the rebelling population and was not a mass exile. In 539 BCE Babylon and by extension Judah was conquered by Persian Achaemenid empire, which allowed the exiles to return and rule Judah as their vassals. Persia also conquered Samaria and Philistines. Aramaic was also the official language of the both Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid empires and replaces Old Hebrew as spoken language in Judah too, though Old Hebrew continued to be written language of religious scripture and is known today as Biblical Hebrew. Otherwise in the Palestine area there were Edomites, who migrated to the southern parts of former Judah kingdom, and Qedarites, a nomadic Arabic tribal federation, in southern desert parts.
Biblical narratives tell this early history very differently, and for a long while, those were used as historical texts, but more recent historical study has cast a doubt on their usefulness in historical inquiry. Even more recent archaeological DNA studies (like this and this) have supported the historical narratives constructed from primary historical texts.
Antique Era (4th century BCE - 7th century CE)
Under Persian rule the people in the Palestine area had a relative amount of autonomy, which lasted about 200 years. In the 330s BCE Macedonians conquered Levant along with a lot of other places. The Macedonian empire broke down quickly after the death of Alexander the Great, and Levant was left under the control of the Seleucid empire, which included most of the Asian parts of the Macedonian empire. During this time the whole Palestine area was heavily Hellenized. In the 170s BCE the Seleucian emperor started a repression campaign against the Jewish religion, which led to a Maccabean Revolt in Judea, lasting from 167-160 BCE until the Seleucids were able to defeat the rebels. It started with guerilla violence in the countryside but evolved into a small civil war. Defeat of the rebelling Maccabees didn't curb the discontent and by 134 BCE Maccabees managed to take Judea and establish the Hasmonean dynasty. The dynasty ruled semi-autonomously under the Seleucian empire until it started disintegrating around 110 BCE, and Judea gained more independence and began to conquer the neighbouring areas. At most they controlled Samaria, Galilee, areas around Galilean Sea, Dead Sea and Jordan River between them, Idumea (formerly Kingdom of Edom) and Philistine city states. During the Hasmonean dynasty Judaism spread to some of the other Semitic peoples under their rule. It didn’t take long for the rising power of the Roman Republic to make Judea into their client state in 63 BCE. Next three decades the Roman Republic and Parthian Empire would fight over control of Judea, which ended by Rome gaining control and disposing of the Hasmonean dynasty from power. It was a client state until 6 CE Rome incorporated Judea proper, Samaria, Idumea and Philistine city states into the province of Judea.
The Jewish population was very much discontent under Roman rule and revolted frequently through the first century or so. It led to waves of Jewish migration around the Mediterranean area, which would eventually lead to the formation of European and North-African Jewish groups. The Roman emperor’s decision to build a Roman colony into Jerusalem, which they destroyed along with Second Temple while squashing the previous revolt, provoked a large-scale armed uprising from 132-136 among Judean Jews, which Rome suppressed brutally. Jerusalem was destroyed again, Jews and Christians were banned from there, and a lot of Judean Jews were killed, displaced and enslaved. Rome also suffered high losses. Jews and Christians hadn’t yet fully separated into different faiths yet, but this strained their relations as Christians hadn’t supported the uprising. Galilee and Judea was joined into one province, Syria Palaestina. Galilean Jews hadn’t participated in the revolt and had therefore survived it unscathed, so Galilee became the Jewish heartland. During the Constantine dynasty, in the first half of the 4th century, when Christianity was the Roman state religion, Jerusalem was rebuilt as very Christianized. After the Constantine dynasty the Jewish relations with Rome were briefly improved by a sympathetic emperor, until Justinian came into power in 527 and began authoritarian religious oppression of all non-Christians, casting the whole area into chaos. Samaritans rebelled repeatedly and were almost fully wiped out, while Jews joined forces with several foreign powers in an attempt to destabilize Byzantium rule. By 636 the first Muslim Caliphate emerged as victors over the control of Palestine.
Muslim Period and Crusades (636-1516)
For more than 300 years under the rule of Muslim Caliphate, Palestine saw a much more peaceful period, with relative freedom and economic prosperity. Christianity continued to be the majority religion and Christians, Jews and usually Samaritans were considered People of the Book, who were guaranteed religious freedom. Non-muslims though had to pay taxes and depending on the caliph had more or less restrictions posed upon them. The position of Samaritans as People of the Book was unstable and at points they were persecuted. For the position of Jews it was a marked improvement, and after the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem by Rome in the 2nd century, they were finally allowed to return. Jerusalem became a religious center for the Muslims too, as it was considered the third most holy place of Islam. Cities, especially Jerusalem, saw Arab immigration. The rural agricultural population was mostly Aramaic speaking, though even while Palestinian Arabs had mostly been bedouins in the southern deserts, there were few Arabic villages from the Roman era. People of the Book were protected from forced conversions, but over time conversions among the Christian population slowly increased, until Islam became the majority religion. Cities became Arabicized and slowly Arabic (also Semitic language) replaced Aramaic as the majority language. Towards the end of the first millennium persecution of Christianity increased with the threat of Byzantium.
In 970 a competing dynasty, Fatimids, conquered Palestine beginning a new era of continuous warfare and conquest by foreign powers. In the beginning of the new millennium Palestine was conquered by the Turco-Persian Seljuk empire for a couple of decades, recaptured by Fatimids for only a year, until the Crusaders took Palestine in 1099. During the next two centuries Palestine exchanged hands several times between the Crusaders and the Egyptian Ayyubid Sultanate. After internal struggle the Ayyubid dynasty was overthrown by the mamluk military caste and them in lead, the Sultanate secured Palestine. First they repelled the invading Mongol empire in 1260 and by 1291 they had defeated the remnants of the Cusaders and their Kingdom of Jerusalem. The period was devastating to the Palestinian populations, cities and economic life. The Crusaders especially committed numerous massacres against non-Christians and under Muslim rule Christians were persecuted and forcibly converted. The next two centuries under the Mamluk Sultanate were peaceful and Christian and Jewish communities were afforded some self-governance and relatively high religious freedom for being recognised as People of the Book again. The state had a more contentious relationship with Christians as the wars with the Crusaders were still looming between Christians and Muslims, and at some points Christians faced persecution and forced conversions.
Ottoman Period (1516-1917)
The Ottoman Empire gained dominance in western Asia over the Mamluk Sultanate during the late 15th century and conquered Palestine in 1516. It became a great imperial power in Asia and Europe for two centuries and in the 18th century started a slow decline, eventually becoming the "Sick man of Europe". The Ottoman Empire was very decentralized and under it Palestine was at first ruled by three Palestinian families semi-autonomously. The Ottoman state didn’t pay much attention to economic development, as they considered it contrary to their chivalric culture, so they instead attracted foreign businesses with the capitulation system. Capitulations were treaties between Ottomans and a foreign power by which the citizens of that foreign power were under their jurisdiction inside Ottoman borders. This guaranteed safety and religious freedom for non-Muslim merchants and exempted them from any additional taxes applying to foreigners and non-Muslims, which encouraged them to build businesses in the Ottoman Empire. Ottomans also intentionally attracted European Jews, who faced persecution and pogroms, and had built effective international trade networks through the tight knit diaspora communities. Jews and Christians had quite well secured position in the empire as People of the Book, but Samaritans were persecuted after they had sided with the Mamluk Sultanate against Ottomans and later for being considered "pagans". City elites adopted Turkish culture, while in rural areas peasant villages and Bedouin clans remained Arabic. The rural areas were very much self-governing as both villages and Bedouin clans were fairly self-reliant with their own political structures. Villages consisted of clan-like family groups, hamulas, and the village lands were distributed between their collective ownership.
In the 19th century the Ottoman Empire was leaving behind European imperial powers in economic and military development. With the rise of the international capitalist markets, capitulation approach, which had worked well for the empire in previous centuries, was extended to markets as a very laissez faire economic policy. This did not lead to hoped economic growth however, but rather deindustrialization. The Ottoman Empire opened itself to markets it couldn’t compete in and its resources were then easy to exploit by stronger economies. The other powers, such as the European powers, avoided this by first cultivating strong national industries with protectionist policies, and then opened to international markets. The capitulation system also became a political liability the way it interacted with the protégé system. The Ottoman Empire had agreed to allow some European powers to give their protection over certain minority religious groups (mostly Christian groups) in the Empire, allowing members of those groups to claim citizenship of their protectorate nation. This had allowed those Ottoman citizens to claim the benefits of the capitulation system and cultivated trade and business for the Empire. In the 19th century the European powers, notably France, British Empire, Germany and Russia, turned their interests towards Levant which was important for their access to their colonial interests in Asia and Africa. They had a vested interest in the continuing power of the weakening Ottoman Empire, which they believed they could control through economic dominance and the protégé system. It became a competition on who could gain the most influence in the Ottoman Empire. In Palestine this led to a change in class dynamics. Christian protégés of European imperial powers were given tax exemptions from the increasing taxes, which were implemented to balance the national deposit, and better opportunities to gain wealth from international trade, turning the urban Christian Arabs into elite.
In 1832 Egypt invaded Palestine, marking a point of more rapid decline of Ottoman rule. Egypt attempted to “modernize” Palestine, which was considered backward, but Egypt's policies, especially conscription, were considered intrusive. The local self-ruling clans and families were resistant to outside powers and with their sway over the population, they rose to a popular uprising after two years of Egyptian rule. The suppression of the uprising devastated many villages and Egypt still failed to enforce order and halt violence. In 1840 Britain intervened, returning its control back to the Ottomans. They didn’t yet have capitulations with the Ottomans and were concerned over the other European powers gaining influence over the aging empire, so in return for their military assistance, they gained capitulations and named Jews and Protestants as their protégés in Levant. Palestine rapidly opened to the international markets with the increase in capitulations combined with the laissez faire fiscal policies of the empire, allowing European powers to turn Palestinian cities, especially in the coast, to centers of trade. In 1858 the Ottoman Empire also attempted to privatize land ownership to increase agricultural production and profitability in order to help with their financial troubles. Most Palestinian land was public land, but in practice owned informally by the villagers cultivating it. As long as they paid taxes, they couldn’t be evicted, which rarely happened in those cases either, and their rights to the land were hereditary. The land reform codified and formalized land ownership and removed barriers to non-villagers gaining ownership of peasant land, laying groundwork for commodifying land. The Ottoman Empire also allowed foreigners to purchase private land. This didn’t immediately lead to large-scale transfer of land ownership, but increasing taxes impoverishing the peasantry and indebting them transferred land from its cultivators to urban absentee landlords. Peasants started to turn into landless tenants and a new type of large estates were established.
Birth of Zionism
The British pushed for more control over Levant, since they wanted to secure their access to India and their colonial ventures in Africa. They didn’t have much interest in colonizing Levant themselves, which is why they were interested in backing the Ottoman Empire and gaining stronger control over it via European Jewish immigrants. European Jews had been immigrating to Palestine in small numbers for a while for religious reasons, to escape persecution and to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the Ottoman Empire. The British though also had religious interests in supporting Jewish migration to Palestine. Since the early 19th century, there had been a growing religious movement of Christian Zionism, who sought to restore Jews into Palestine and then convert them to Christianity to cause the second coming of Jesus and the end times. As you do. They were considered fanatics, even lunatics, for their literal interpretations of prophecy, but they were enthusiastic imperialists and when they expressed the idea of restoration of Jewish Palestine in imperial terms, it gained popular acceptance in Britain. Some of the common talking points originating from Christian Zionism were Jews had the right to Palestinian land for Biblical reasons, the only way to not let the “underdeveloped” agrarian land go to waste was colonialism, and Jews would be a civilizing force in Palestine. While the end goal of Christian Zionists was conversion of Jews, they had Orientalist reverence for Jews, but among the wider imperialist support for these ideas there was in addition an explicitly antisemitic aspect. The imperialists' idea was that Britain, and Europe more broadly, could this way also get rid of the Jews.
The trouble was that at the time there was no wide interest at all among Jews to colonize Palestine. The Jews who were migrating there during the first half of the 19th century did so with all intentions of integrating to the Palestinian society. European Jews had since Enlightenment and the French Revolution gained unprecedented levels of social acceptance and equality (which still wasn’t very much), and liberal assimilationism had become the dominant ideology especially among Jewish elites. Assimilationist Jews considered Judaism a religious identity, not an ethnic one, and they rather identified with their nationality. In the latter half of 19th century Jewish socialism was contesting the liberal Jewish idea that antisemitism could be overcome with individualist approach and instead demanded structural change. During the century it became increasingly clear that the assimilationist approach couldn’t fix antisemitism as racial ideology and exclusionist ethnonationalism were gaining traction and fueling antisemitism, which culminated in the 1880s pogroms in Russia and 1894 Dreyfus Affair in France. These events certainly promoted socialist approach among many Jews, but the Jewish elite were certainly not interested in socialist solutions, where they would lose their elite status, even if for white Christians they were all second class citizens. So instead, like many elites facing the threat of socialism, they turned to nationalism. To the question of how to build a nation from a diverse diaspora, they found the answer from Christian Zionism. Jewish Zionism was distinctly secular, so while they did adopt many religious and biblical narratives and goals of Christian Zionism, they put them in nationalist terms. Their end goal was of course different from that of the millennialist Christians so Jewish Zionism was presented as a practical and rational alternative to utopian fanaticism, but they were still natural allies. Zionism was opposed in the European Jewish communities by both assimilationists and socialists, who both viewed it as countering the efforts of opposing antisemitism, which Zionists saw as an inherently impossible endeavor, and also by Orthodox Jews from a religious standpoint. Orthodox Jews denounced the secularization of the Promised Land, which according to them could only be bestowed by God and couldn’t be a state with secular power.
Before Zionism was fully formalized as a movement, there were proto-Zionist movements in Eastern-Europe as a direct response to the pogroms, with the goal of settling Eastern Jewish refugees to Palestine from 1881 forward. This is considered to be the start of the First Aliyah, the explicitly Zionist mass migrations to Palestine. The funding was secured from the European Jews, and with it the Zionists bought land from the absentee urban landlords with large estates and evicted the tenants in order to form Zionist colonies. This raised concern among Ottoman officials, who had become vary of the European exploitation of their capitulation system, which increased European influence with the immigration of European Jews. They were also concerned about the rising Arab nationalism in Palestine provoked by the European economic exploitation and even more pressingly the peasant displacement. The Ottoman Empire was already facing massive difficulties with nationalist movements in different parts of the empire, like in Armenia. They attempted to restrict Zionist land purchases with legal restrictions and failed.
The 1880s settling to Palestine was still unorganized and leaderless until Theodor Herzl, who is considered to be the founder of Zionism, joined Zionist ranks in mid-1890s and began formulating a colonialist venture in earnest. The British were supportive of the Zionist project, but as long as the Ottoman Empire was in charge of Palestine and the British could extend control over it, they weren’t interested in establishing such a state themselves. So the Zionist movement with Herzl in the lead turned to the Ottoman Empire in 1901. He envisioned the Zionist colonial project as a land company, modeled after the British and Dutch East Indian Companies, which would under imperial blessing operate fairly independently and govern over colonized land. The end goal was to build an ethnonationalist Jewish state and expel the native population. There were even dreams of Jewish empire that would colonize neighbouring countries, “civilize” them and bring them “prosperity”. To persuade the Sultan, Herz proposed to pay for the Ottoman Empire’s depts with European Jewish investments in exchange for allowing the Zionists to settle and govern Palestine. The Ottoman government was well aware of Zionist movement’s end goals and their alliances with European Imperialism, rejecting their proposals.
The Zionists evaded Ottoman restrictions anyway and continued to settle Palestine with British backing. European powers then pressured Ottomans to abolish those restrictions allowing a new wave of Zionist colonialism. The violence and pogroms in Russia had convinced some of the Eastern European Jewish socialists that fighting antisemitism was impossible, so they created Labor Zionism and used the “untouched land” to experiment with utopian socialist communes. In the process they displaced indigenous peasant hamulas, which had often for centuries farmed the land in communal ownership. Mass migration and eviction quickly provoked a predictable opposition in the Palestinian population and spread of Arab nationalist thought. This second wave of Aliyah ended at the First World War, which was also the end of the Ottoman Empire.
#history#palestine#palestinian genocide#palestinian history#colonization#colonial history#zionism#islamophobia#ottoman empire
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