You're about 60% right. About 1880 or so the zionist movement was born and Jews started to trickle into Palestine and started to buy land in small amounts from the Ottomans who owned the place. Most of these "estates" were owned by absentee landlords living in Beirut, Damascus and Constantinople. The Ottomans did not have a problem with Jews and up until about the mid 20s neither did the Arabs (Palestinians).

What had happened was the Jewish Agency out of London with Weitzmann and Herzl had spent 20 years cultivating relationships with those landlords. It's not until after 1918 and Palestine becoming a British Mandate that land transfers really took off. Most of the Palestinians were tenants but had been so for generations paying minimal rent to the Ottomans. The British overall were slow to learn the old legalities of the Ottomans and so relied on the expertise of the Jewish Agency on those matters.

Interesting side note: If it were today and the place were governed by Common Law by the British or American principles, a lot of the land could have been claimed by the tenants in adverse possession.

The Jewish Agency would buy up the land and many times wait to evict the tenants and then evict them and then put a stipulation that only Jews could by the land going forward.

No doubt, the European Jews improved the land and its uses, but they did not deal with the native Palestinians / Arabs fairly. They would forcibly evict these generational tenants with the help of the Hagana in many cases give them a week's notice . As such the Palestinians /Arabs were forced into smaller areas to live. I saw a picture of the shanty towns outside of Haifa. 8/9 people to a 1 room hut. At that time the Jews were not about offering any real concessions to them and the British were overall powerless to stop it.

It's all "legal", not necessarily fair overall. You see remnants of what the Jews did back then with the settlers who take over blocks of property in the West Bank today.