Rise early and steal

By 1948, after seventy years of organised buying, Jewish ownership in Palestine amounted to some 6 to 7 percent of the land.

Ninety-three percent was not Jewish-owned on the day the state was declared. So "they bought it" accounts for one-fifteenth of the country. The other fourteen-fifteenths were taken by war and then stolen by legislation: the absurd Israeli Absentee Property Law of 1950, which handed the land, houses, and orchards of roughly 750,000 refugees to the state that had just ethnically cleansed them.

And a substantial share of even the purchased fraction was bought over the heads of the people living on it, from absentee landlords in Beirut, after which the tenant farmers who had worked that soil for generations were evicted. Under the applicable laws those cultivators held recognised, heritable rights of tenancy and use; the transactions were engineered to extinguish exactly those rights.

Pseudolegalese on paper, dispossession on the ground. The fellah did not sell anything. It was sold from under him, in a language he could not read, in a city he had never seen.

But even then, buying land does not buy sovereignty. Property is a right within a country; it is not a right to the country. Qataris own half of central London yet it confers no Qatari sovereignty over a single street. If purchase created statehood, no state would survive its own land market.

Ninety-plus percent of the inhabitants of Palestine did not become tenants of a new nation because a minority had acquired real estate; no principle of law, Ottoman, British, or international, has ever said otherwise. That is why the Zionist movement, when the moment came, had to rely on arms.

So yes: the early Zionists bought some property. But no, you cannot buy a country from under the feet of its inhabitants. History shows the buyers knew it, because in the end they rose early and stole it.