Yehoshua Hankin, the driving force of the PLDC, is another personage active in Jewish land acquisitions.

By dint of personal efforts beginning in 1890, he had secured the land on which Rehovot, Hadera, and the ICA settlements in the Galilee and elsewhere have been built, as well as most of the Jezreel Valley —sixty thousand hectares in all.

In 1927, Hankin presents the Jewish Agency for Israel with a twenty-year purchase plan for land acquisition,  a plan that will never be carried out in full.

During the First World War, Hankin had been exiled by the Turks to Anatolia.

Returning to Palestine, he soon resumed his work where he had left off.

In 1920, he concluded a deal with the Sursuk family of Beirut for purchase of sixty thousand dunams (sixty square kilometers) of land in the Jezreel Valley.

He negotiated for this land when he had in fact not a penny to finance the purchase.

The chairman of the Jewish National Fund, Nehemiah De Lieme, refused to pay for the land, arguing that it was beyond the budget of the Fund, but he was overruled by the Zionist organization and in particular Chaim Weizmann.

This tract became home to numerous new kibbutzim and other settlements, including Nahalal, Ginegar, Kfar Yehezkel, Geva, Ein Harod, Tel Yosef and Beit Alfa.

Half of this land was unirrigated and considered of low value, but the remainder contained about five hunddred Arab tenant farmers.