The History of Zionism in Palestine, 1917-1950 P. II.

1920 to 1923

Just as Europe underdeveloped Africa, leaving it to the mercy of its neo-colonial and imperialist creditors, so too did the British only allow a “slow process of change, which left the rural [Palestinian] economy unable to cope with the economic competition of the Jewish market,” which was largely urban and industrial.¹ In other words, just as the United States ensures that the present State of Israel is a modernized, post-industrial economy, the British committed what I term "rural containment” policies that kept the Palestinians from having an independent market base. This would lead to the immense precarity in the Palestinian labor force as it was subject to the yearly-seasonal cycles of agriculture and therefore tied to access to arable land and to employment on that land.

(“Arab laborers line up by the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem in anticipation of employment,” January 1, 1925, Khalil Raad).