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All the village would harvest the olives, they even had to hire women to help. They used to come from Jweyya and Bint Jbeil in Lebanon. The Peasant Past 13 They’d take their wages in olives which they’d either sell or take to the mill for oil. The other important crop was sesame. It used to be harvested and put on the threshing floor in big circles until it was dry. Then it would be beaten so that the seeds would fall. They would be put in sacks and sold to merchants in Acre and Haifa. Other products were wheat and maize.

After the Uprooting the same ‘grouping’ instinct was a major factor in reconstituting large fragments of Palestinian villages in the camps. A man who had taken part in negotiating a camp site for his village told me that they decided to act collectively because this was the best way to secure their rights. From time immemorial Palestinian peasants had found solutions to their problems in village-based collective action. The village as administrative unit Under both Ottoman and British rule the village-as-unit was maintained as the most economical way of taxing and controlling the peasantry.

It is true that these dispossessed peasants have recalled their homes in Palestine from a present so bleak that their poverty and class oppression there tend to be blurred. But there is truth in their view of peasant life as good, for, in spite of poverty, ‘our land provided us with all our needs’. Village and clan solidarity formed a warm, strong, stable environment for the individual, a sense of rootedness and belonging. The proof of the strength of peasant social relations is that they survived in dispersion and  The Palestinians helped Palestinians themselves to survive.