of workers and farmers.The Arabs, on the other hand, saw it as a racist effort by the Zionists to dispossess them, to exclude them from the labor market and to create, on their land, an Arabfree, separatist Jewish economy.
The Catastrophe: Palestinian refugees, 1948
27 The Zionists were proud of their "Redemption of the Land". They had purchased it at full price with money collected from Jews around the world. "Olim" (new immigrants, literally pilgrims) many of whom had been intellectuals and merchants in their former lives now earned their living by hard manual labor. They believed that they had achieved all this by peaceful means and without dispossessing a single Arab. For the Arabs this was a cruel narrative of dispossession and expulsion: The Jews acquired lands from Arab absentee landowners living in the cities of Palestine and abroad, and then forcibly evicted the peasants who had been farming this land for generations. To help them in this effort, the Zionists engaged theTurkish and, later, the British police. The Arab masses looked on in despair as their land was taken from them.
28 Against the Zionist claim of having successfully "Made the Desert Bloom", the Arabs cited the testimonies of European travelers who had, for several centuries, described Palestine as a comparatively populous and flourishing land, the equal of any of its regional neighbors.