[DEBATE] : Israeli Map Says West Bank Post on Arab Land

[tony roshan samara]

November 21, 2006
        Israeli Map Says West Bank Posts Sit on Arab Land          By STEVEN ERLANGER
                  JERUSALEM,  Nov. 20 — An Israeli advocacy group, using maps and figures leaked from  inside the government, says that 39 percent of the land held by Israeli  settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by  Palestinians.
  Israel  has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property  in the West Bank and only takes land there legally or, for security  reasons, temporarily. 
  If big sections of those  settlements are indeed privately held Palestinian land, that is bound  to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already  distant prospect of a negotiated peace. The data indicate that 40  percent of the land that Israel plans to keep in any future deal with  the Palestinians is private.
  The new claims regarding  Palestinian property are said to come from the 2004 database of the  Civil Administration, which controls the civilian aspects of Israel’s  presence in the West Bank. Peace Now, an Israeli group that advocates  Palestinian self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, plans  to publish the information on Tuesday. An advance copy was made  available to The New York Times.
  The data — maps that show  the government’s registry of the land by category — was given to Peace  Now by someone who obtained it from an official inside the Civil  Administration. The Times spoke to the person who received it from the  Civil Administration official and agreed not to identify him because of  the delicate nature of the material. 
  That person, who has  frequent contact with the Civil Administration, said he and the  official wanted to expose what they consider to be wide-scale  violations of private Palestinian property rights by the government and  settlers. The government has refused to give the material directly to  Peace Now, which requested it under Israel’s freedom of information law.
  Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for the Civil Administration, said he could not comment on the data without studying it.
    He said there was a committee, called the blue line committee, that had  been investigating these issues of land ownership for three years. “We  haven’t finished checking everything,” he said.
  Mr. Dror  also said that sometimes Palestinians would sell land to Israelis but  be unwilling to admit to the sale publicly because they feared  retribution as collaborators.
  Within prominent settlements  that Israel has said it plans to keep in any final border agreement,  the data show, for example, that some 86.4 percent of Maale Adumim, a  large Jerusalem suburb, is private; and 35.1 percent of Ariel is.
  The  maps indicate that beyond the private land, 5.8 percent is so-called  survey land, meaning of unclear ownership, and 1.3 percent private  Jewish land. The rest, about 54 percent, is considered “state land” or  has no designation, though Palestinians say that at least some of it  represents agricultural land expropriated by the state.
  The  figures, together with detailed maps of the land distribution in every  Israeli settlement in the West Bank, were put together by the  Settlement Watch Project of Peace Now, led by Dror Etkes and Hagit  Ofran, and has a record of careful and accurate reporting on settlement  growth.
  The report does not include Jerusalem, which Israel  has annexed and does not consider part of the West Bank, although much  of the world regards East Jerusalem as occupied. Much of the world also  considers Israeli settlements on occupied land to be illegal under  international law. International law requires an occupying power to  protect private property, and Israel has always asserted that it does  not take land without legal justification. 
  One case in a  settlement Israel intends to keep is in Givat Zeev, barely five miles  north of Jerusalem. At the southern edge is the Ayelet Hashachar  synagogue. Rabah Abdellatif, a Palestinian who lives in the nearby  village of Al Jib, says the land belongs to him.
  Papers he  has filed with the Israeli military court, which runs the West Bank,  seem to favor Mr. Abdellatif. In 1999, Israeli officials confirmed, he  was even granted a judgment ordering the demolition of the synagogue  because it had been built without permits. But for the last seven  years, the Israeli system has done little to enforce its legal  judgments. The synagogue stands, and Mr. Abdellatif has no access to  his land.
  Ram Kovarsky, the town council secretary, said  the synagogue was outside the boundaries of Givat Zeev, although there  is no obvious separation. Israeli officials confirm that the land is  privately owned, though they refuse to say by whom.
  Mr. Abdellatif, 65, said: “I feel stuck, angry. Why would they do that? I don’t know who to go to anymore.”
  He  pointed to his corduroy trousers and said, in the English he learned in  Paterson, N.J., where his son is a police detective: “These are my  pants. And those are your pants. And you should not take my pants. This  is mine, and that is yours! I never took anyone’s land.”
  According to the Peace Now figures, 44.3 percent of Givat Zeev is on private Palestinian land.
  Miri Eisin, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,  said that Israeli officials would have to see the data and the maps and  added that ownership is complicated and delicate. Baruch Spiegel, a  reserve general who just left the Ministry of Defense and dealt with  the separation barrier being built near the boundary with the West  Bank, also said he would have to see the data in detail in order to  judge it.
  The definitions of private and state land are  complicated, given different administrations of the West Bank going  back to the Ottoman Empire, the British mandate, Jordan and now Israel.  During the Ottoman Empire, only small areas of the West Bank were  registered to specific owners, and often villagers would hold land in  common to avoid taxes. The British began a more formal land registry  based on land use, taxation or house ownership that continued through  the Jordanian period.
  Large areas of agricultural land are  registered as state land; other areas were requisitioned or seized by  the Israeli military after 1967 for security purposes, but such  requisitions are meant to be temporary and must be renewed, and do not  change the legal ownership of the land, Mr. Dror, the Civil  Administration spokesman, said. 
  But the issue of property  is one that Israeli officials are familiar with, even if the  percentages here may come as a surprise and may be challenged after the  publication of the report.
  Asked about Israeli seizure of  private Palestinian land in an interview with The Times last summer,  before these figures were available, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said:  “Now I don’t deny anything, I don’t ignore anything. I’m just ready to  sit down and talk. And resolve it. And resolve it in a generous manner  for all sides.”
  He said the 1967 war was a one of  self-defense. Later, he said: “Many things happened. Life is not  frozen. Things occur. So many things happened, and as a result of this  many innocent individuals on both sides suffered, were killed, lost  their lives, became crippled for life, lost their family members, their  loved ones, thousands of them. And also private property suffered. By  the way, on all sides.”
  Mr. Olmert says Israel will keep  some 10 percent of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem,  possibly in a swap for land elsewhere. The area Israel intends to keep  is roughly marked by the route of the unfinished separation barrier,  which cuts through the West Bank and is intended, Israel says, to stop  suicide bombers. Mr. Olmert, however, describes it as a putative  border. Nearly 80,000 Jews live in settlements beyond the route of the  barrier, but some 180,000 live in settlements within the barrier, while  another 200,000 live in East Jerusalem.
  But these  land-ownership figures show that even in the settlements that Israel  intends to keep, there will be a considerable problem of restitution  that goes beyond the issue of refugee return.
  Mr. Olmert was elected on a pledge to withdraw Israeli settlers living east of the barrier. But after the war with Hezbollah  and with fighting ongoing in Gaza, from which Israel withdrew its  settlers in the summer of 2005, his withdrawal plan has been suspended.  
   In March 2005, a report requested by the government found  a number of illegal Israeli outposts built on private Palestinian land,  and officials promised to destroy them. But only nine houses of only  one outpost, Amona, were dismantled after a court case brought by Peace  Now. 
  There is a court case pending over Migron, which  began as a group of trailers on a windy hilltop around a set of  cellphone antennas in May 1999 and is now a flourishing community of 50  families, said Avi Teksler, an official of the Migron council. But  Migron, too, according to the data, is built on private Palestinian  land.
  Mr. Teksler said that the land was deserted, and that  its ownership would be settled in court. Migron, where some children of  noted settlement leaders live, has had “the support of every Israeli  government,” he said. “The government has been a partner to every  single move we’ve made.” 
  Mr. Teksler added: “This is how  the state of Israel was created. And this is all the land of Israel.  We’re like the kibbutzim. The only real difference is that we’re after  1967, not before.”
  But in the Palestinian village of Burqa,  Youssef Moussa Abdel Raziq Nabboud, 85, says that some of the land of  Migron, and the land on which Israel built a road for settlers, belongs  to him and his family, who once grew wheat and beans there. He said he  had tax documents from the pre-1967 authorities.
  “They have  the power to put the settlement there and we can do nothing,” he said.  “They have a fence around the settlement and dogs there.”
  Mr.  Nabboud went to the Israeli authorities with the mayor, Abu Maher, but  they were told he needed an Israeli lawyer and surveyor. “I have no  money for that,” he said. What began as an outpost taking 5 acres has  now taken 125, the mayor said.
  Mr. Nabboud wears a  traditional head covering; his grandson, Khaled, 27, wears a Yankees  cap. “The land is my inheritance,” he said. “I feel sad I can’t go  there. And angry. The army protects them.”
          


But when fascism comes it will not be in the form of an anti-American movement or pro-Hitler bund, practicing disloyalty. Nor will it come in the form of a crusade against war. It will appear rather in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism; it will take some genuinely indigenous shape and color, and it will spread only because its leaders, who are not yet visible, will know how to locate the great springs of public opinion and desire and the streams of thought that flow from them and will know how to attract to their banners leaders who can command the support of the controlling minorities in American public life. The danger lies not so much in the would-be führers who may arise, but in the presence in our midst of certain deeply running currents of hope and appetite and opinion. The war upon fascism must be begun there.

John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (1944)

Excerpt at:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15478.htm

Book online at:
http://www.mises.org/books/aswegomarching.pdf
 
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