Response to question #2, Kimmerling

Who owned the land - Arab or Jew - at this time?

Few census records exist dating from the First Aliyah (1880) to the UN Partition of Palestine in 1947. Nonetheless, Benny Morris - an acclaimed Israeli historian known widely for his distinct pro-Palestinian bent - summarizes the matter as follows:

Historians have concluded that only "several thousand" families were displaced during land sales to Jews between the 1880s and the 1930s.

Even after 1930, the amount of Arab land available for sale well exceeded Jewish ability to purchase. A formal study of land purchases between 1880 and 1948 revealed that three-quarters of the plots bought by Jews were from mega-landowners (many of them absentee) rather than from those who worked the soil.

Finally, the groups of people existing in Palestine prior to the First Aliyah and the century prior rival those of today's metropolitan New York in their multitudinous ethinicities: Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Bosnians, Druzes, Circassians, Egyptians, Kurds, German Templars, Persians, Sudanese, Algerians, Samaritans, Tatars, Georgians, and those of mixed race.

It would be misleading and mendacious to say that no Arab was displaced by a Jew in the era of the reprisal raids. Neither would it be true to say that Arabs as a people had no substantial stake in the physical land of Palestine. But the intimation that the rank and file of Palestinians were just victims of the Israeli war machine is more than false - it's ridiculous. The strongest supporters of the Palestinian people acknowledge readily that three-quarters of the land sold to the Jews were from non-fellahin landowners, many of whom ruled the lands from Beirut or Damascus. And these lands were bought, not stolen. Very likely, many of their landlords never took the time to get a firsthand look at their holdings. Isn't that what advocates of a free market call a market inefficiency? Viewed in this light, it seems the worst criticism that could be levied against the Jews buying plots of malarial swamps in their own strange, ancient land was that they had the foresight and the faith to see their dream through with their sweat and blood. But not before they paid for the lands their own Bible told them would be their own forever. With money.

Source: Dershowitz.