"The aim of the Jewish National Fund was `to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people'. As early as 1891, Zionist leader Ahad Ha'am wrote that the Arabs `understood very well what we were doing and what we were aiming at'... Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, stated: `We shall try to spirit the penniless Arab population across the border by procuring employment for it in transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly'...

...At various locations in northern Palestine Arab farmers refused to move from land the Fund purchased from absentee owners, and the Turkish authorities, at the Fund's request, evicted them...

...The indigenous Jews of Palestine also reacted negatively to Zionism. They did not see the need for a Jewish state in Palestine and did not want to exacerbate relations with the Arabs."  John Quigley  "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice"

"Zionist land policy was incorporated in the Constitution of the Jewish Agency for Palestine...`Land is to be acquired as Jewish property and, the title to the lands acquired is to be taken in the name of the Jewish National Fund, to the end that the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people'. The provision goes to stipulate that `the Agency shall promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labor'... The effect of this Zionist colonization policy on the Arabs was that land acquired by Jews became extra-territorialized. It ceased to be land from which the Arabs could ever hope to gain any advantage."  Sami Hadawi  "Bitter Harvert"

In 1919, the American King-Crane Commission spent six weeks in Syria and Palestine, interviewing delegations and reading petitions. Their report stated: "The commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favour... The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conferences with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase...

...If the principle of self-determination is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine's population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine - nearly nine-tenths of the whole - are emphatically against the entire Zionist program... To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted...

...No British officers, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than fifty thousand soldiers would be required even to initiate the program. That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist program...

...The initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a 'right' to Palestine based on occupation of two thousand years ago, can barely be seriously considered."

"Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund... On December 19, 1940, he wrote: `It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country... The Zionist enterprise so far...has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with 'land buying' - but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe'.  There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists."  Edward Said  "The Question of Palestine"

How did land ownership traditionally work in Palestine and when did it change?

"The Ottoman Land Code of 1858, required the registration in the name of individual owners of agricultural land, most of which had never previously been registered and which had formerly been treated according to traditional forms of land tenure, in the hill areas of Palestine generally masha'a, or communal usufruct. The new law meant that for the first time a peasant could be deprived not of title to his land, which he had rarely held before, but rather of the right to live on it, cultivate it and pass it on to his heirs, which had formerly been inalienable... Under the provisions of the 1858 law, communal rights of tenure were often ignored... Instead, members of the upper classes, adept at manipulating or circumventing the legal process, registered large areas of land as theirs... The fellahin (peasants) naturally considered the land to be theirs, and often discovered that they had ceased to be the legal owners only when the land was sold to Jewish settlers by an absentee landlord... Not only was the land being purchased; its Arab cultivators were being dispossessed and replaced by foreigners who had overt political objectives in Palestine."  Rashid Khalidi  "Blaming The Victims"

Very few takers

"An article by Yitzhak Epstein, published in Hashiloah in 1907, called for a new Zionist policy towards the Arabs after 30 years of settlement activity. Like Ahad-Ha'am in 1891, Epstein claims that no good land is vacant, so Jewish settlement meant Arab dispossession. Epstein's solution to the problem, so that a new "Jewish question" may be avoided, is the creation of a bi-national, non-exclusive program of settlement and development. Purchasing land should not involve the dispossession of poor sharecroppers. It should mean creating a joint farming community, where the Arabs will enjoy modern technology. Schools, hospitals and libraries should be non-exclusivist and education bilingual. The vision of non-exclusivist, peaceful cooperation to replace the practice of dispossession found few takers. Epstein was maligned and scorned for his faintheartedness."  Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi  "Original Sins"