The Sursock Purchases were land purchases made by Jewish organizations from the absentee landowning Lebanese Greek Orthodox Christian Sursock family, mainly from 1901 to 1925. These included the Jezreel Valley and Haifa Bay, as well as other lands in what became the Mandate for Palestine. These collectively formed the largest Jewish land purchase in Palestine during the period of early Jewish immigration.

The Jezreel Valley was considered the most fertile region of Palestine. The Sursock Purchase represented 58% of Jewish land purchases from absentee foreign landlords (as identified in a partial list in a 25 February 1946 memorandum submitted by the Arab Higher Committee to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry). The buyers demanded the existing population be relocated and, as a result, the Palestinian Arab tenant farmers were evicted, and approximately 20–25 villages were depopulated. Some of the evicted population received compensation though the buyers were not required under the new British Mandate law to pay. The total amount sold by the Sursocks and their partners represented 22% of all land purchased by Jews in Palestine until 1948, and, as first identified by Arthur Ruppin in 1907, this sale was perceived as vitally important in sustaining the territorial continuity of Jewish settlement in Palestine.

Palestinians' responses to the Sursock Purchase/Afula incident at the time constitute "one of the earliest cases of organized opposition to Zionist land purchase in Palestine."

Through much of the period of Ottoman rule, the low-lying land of Palestine had suffered from depopulation due to the unhealthy conditions on the plains, and the insecurity of life there. According to Henry Laurens, this was not peculiar to that region, but rather reflected a general trait also common to all the littoral regions north and south of the Mediterranean. Malaria was widespread in the area, especially in the plains, hindering settlement and allowing Bedouins to settle there. During drought years, Bedouins from the ghor even encroached on lands cultivated by local fellahin, covering the entire area with their tents. The "permanent" nomads, Bedouins of Turkmen descent, lived in the Jezreel Valley during summer and autumn, then spent winters between the Sharon region and the Valley, passing through the Manasseh Hills.

According to Henry Laurens, Zionism's concept of the conquest of labour by Jewish workers meant excluding wherever possible employment of the local Arab workforce.

In 1872, the Ottoman Government sold the Jezreel Valley (in Arabic, Marj ibn Amir) to the Sursock family for approximately £20,000. The family went on to acquire 230,000 to 400,000 dunams (90,000 acres or 364 km²). These purchases were sustained over a number of years.

This purchase, along with others, dispossessed the local Bedouins. The Sursocks soon began to repopulate long-abandoned villages with tenant sharecroppers. Most of those were located in the outskirts of the valley.

According to Frances E. Newton's testimony at the Shaw Commission noted the genesis of the Sursock purchase: "...these lands came into the possession of Sursock through a loan he had made to the Turkish Government. The Turkish Government never had any intention of turning the Arabs off the land, it was more of a sort of mortgage, and Sursock was collecting the tithes interest on his money... Sursock did not become possessed of the lands by virtue of Title Deeds in the original instance. Later Sursock applied to the Government to give him title deeds."