* Walter Lehn is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota, and has been Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-66). 1 A shorter version of this paper was presented at the Sixth Annual Convention of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates in Washington, DC in October 1973 and is appearing in the proceedings, Settler Regimes in Africa and the Arab World: The Illusion of Endurance, edited by Ibrahim Abu Lughod. For providing information not otherwise readily available, I am grateful to the New York and the Jerusalem offices of the JNF. The Jerusalem office was particularly helpful in providing copies of documents in its archives and details of land purchases made annually from 1905-1948. Unless otherwise indicated, all figures relating to purchases and ownership are taken from this source (hereafter JNF-Jerusalem) and are used because they agree substantially with those given elsewhere, e.g., two publications by the Government of Palestine, Village Statistics 1945: A Classification of Land and Area Ownership in Palestine (Jerusalem, 1946), reprinted with explanatory notes by Sami Hadawi (Official Land Valuer and Inspector of Tax Assessments, Government of Palestine, 1935-1948), Beirut: PLO Research Centre 1970; and A Survey of Palestine Prepared for the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1946), and a Supplement (prepared for UNSCOP), (Jerusalem, 1947); also United Nations Official Records of the Second Session of the General Assembly, Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, 1947. Useful interpretive studies are Sami Hadawi, Palestine: Loss of a Heritage (San Antonio: Naylor, 1963) and John Ruedy, Dynamics of Land Alienation, in Ibrahim Abu Lughod (editor), The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Evanston: Northwestern, 1971), pp. 119-38. 2 On May 14, 1948, the JNF held 936,000 dunums; Efraim Orni, Agrarian Reform and Social Progress in Israel (Jerusalem, 1972), p. 62. A. Granott, Agrarian Reform and the Record of Israel (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956), p. 28, gives total Jewish ownership at the end of 1947 as 1,734,000 dunums; of this 933,000 were held by the JNF and the balance by other, including private, owners. The 1,734,000 figure (somewhat higher than mandate government figures) is not impressive if we note that even this represented only 6.59 per cent of mandated Palestine's total land area of 26,323,000 dunums (exclusive of Transjordan). Granott generally rounds figures to the closest 1,000, a practice observed in this paper also. No attempt is here made to cope with the herculean task of reconciling varying figures on landownership given in different sources. Most writers simply do not give specific enough information to make this possible; e.g., different figures for land owned in a given year may simply reflect the fact that one source used January and the other December as the basis of counting for the year. A further source of uncertainty is the calendar used, the Jewish or