Palestinians sold their land to Jews and Zionists.

The land-purchase myth has been engineered by the coloniser it protects. Under the British colonisation of Palestine, Britain deliberately built the legal and administrative machinery to transfer Palestinian land to Zionist settlers. The Mandate's own charter conducted Britain to facilitate Jewish settlement, and it did: easing land registration in favour of Zionist institutions, and crushing the Palestinian revolts that resisted this transfer. Britain did all of this while slamming its own doors shut on Jewish refugees fleeing European antisemitism, channeling them toward Palestine instead. The "selling" narrative hides the coloniser standing behind every transaction. This was not a free market between neighbours. It was land engineered out of Palestinian hands by an imperial power that wanted them replaced.

The argument is not only false but obscene in its logic. It asks a people to accept responsibility for their own dispossession, killing, and exile, on the basis that a fraction of land changed hands under colonial rule. No sale can explain massacres. No transaction can account for the expulsion of an entire population, the levelling of their villages, the barring of refugees from return, and the decades of military rule, siege, and now genocide that followed. The mechanisms of dispossession were never commercial. They ran from the Absentees' Property Law, which declared expelled Palestinians "absent" in order to confiscate everything they owned, to the ongoing land grabs in the West Bank today, where displacement to make way for colonial settlers continues in real time. Blaming Palestinians for selling their homeland inverts victim and perpetrator. It takes the crime committed against a people and files it under their own name.

Even taken at face value, the figures dismantle the claim. By 1948, after five decades of organised Zionist purchasing backed by the British, Jewish landholdings amounted to only around 6 to 7% of Palestine. Some Palestinians did sell, most transactions were with large absentee landlords, and some smallholders were defrauded through the scams of Zionist land agents and lawyers operating under colonial protection. But even counting every acre bought, Zionist ownership stood below 7% when Israel was declared. It then seized 78% of the land following the first Nakba in 1947-48. A colonial movement that had legally acquired a fraction of the land ended up controlling almost all of it, not through sales, but through the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 people and the destruction of some 530 villages.