Did early Zionist land purchases displace the families farming the land?

Yes — early Zionist land purchases did displace many of the families farming the land, even though the sales themselves were often technically legal. The standard pro-Israeli framing, still repeated in materials like the Jewish Learning Institute’s account of land ownership in Palestine, 1880–1948¹, holds that Zionist organizations bought only empty or underused land from willing absentee landlords and that dispossession began only with the 1948 war — in Moshe Aumann’s words, that the “Arab propaganda” claim of farmers being “driven off his land” is a myth. That framing rests on a sleight of hand: it equates legal title with moral possession.

The Suraya Effendi (Sursuq) sales

A property-rights conservative should recognize exactly what happened: Palestinian fellahin had cultivated the same plots for generations under usufruct and customary tenancy recognized since the 1858 Ottoman Land Code, but had weak formal registration, while wealthy absentee families like the Beirut-based Sursuq (Sursock) dynasty — sometimes styled in old records after heads of the family such as Suraya Effendi — held paper title to entire valleys like the Jezreel. As historian Kristen Alff shows from the contracts themselves, when the Sursuq company sold roughly 97 villages (up to 300,000 dunams) to the Jewish Colonization Association in 1902, it explicitly “assured the JCA’s purchasing agents that hundreds of peasant families who lived on the land would be expelled,” so that buyers could “have whomever they please work on their land” (Cambridge, IJMES²). Each such sale, from the 1880s onward, carried the same effect for the tenant farmers living on it.

What the Mandate meant for Arab tenant farmers

Under the British Mandate, displacement of Arab tenant farmers became systematic: the administration reclassified long-settled villagers as mere tenants, and bodies like the Jewish National Fund — whose charter required land to be held in perpetuity and worked by Jewish labor only — obtained British eviction orders against them, as with the forcible removals from Wadi Hawarith and the Jezreel Valley (Ilan Pappé, Le Monde diplomatique³). None of this required the pre-1948 countryside to be deserted, and it wasn’t: Palestine had a long-established agricultural economy — olives, wheat, barley, and by the late 1800s commercial citrus exports (History of agriculture in Palestine⁴); even a sympathetic account concedes that “legal ownership alone does not establish whether land was unoccupied or how residents were affected” (paxpoint.org⁵). This pattern of fellahin eviction continued through the 1940s.

So the honest verdict is not that individual Jews bought farms innocently and war alone caused the refugee problem: it is that a deliberate, organized program of land acquisition treated law-abiding tenant farmers’ generational rights as disposable, displaced them, and made the expulsions of 1948 possible.