Quotation from Albert Hyamson “The moral … rights of the tenants, who had been resident on that land all along, were ignored” — 1950

" … Jewish agencies bought relatively large amounts of land from [Arab] landowners who lived in Paris, Beirut or Cairo, whereby the moral – if not the legal – rights of the tenants, who had been resident on that land all along, were ignored. ... The sellers, who had no local interests at all, were of course keen to sell at as high a price as possible. They very quickly found a way to dodge the law (*) by means of a small payment. … In order to get the tenants to abandon the land before it was transferred, they paid them small sums of money with which they could settle some of their debts to the moneylenders. … So everyone was completely satisfied: the sellers, the buyers and understandably the moneylenders, but of course the tenants only for a limited time.

* According to the new legislation – at the beginning of the 1920’s – the transfer of lands was forbidden if the tenant’s interests were not ensured by leaving him enough land to guarantee his own and his family’s livelihood. "