One thing I've always wondered about is who owned the land in Palestine before 1948 and who owns it now. I'd be much more concerned over expropriation of private property than over transfer of tax rights from the Ottomans to Britain and then to Israel or Jordan. Palestine has not been a state for many hundreds of years (since the Crusaders?), but Palestinians have long owned land there. Also, I can't see what's wrong with Jewish settlements if they just consist of Jews buying land and living there. But the articles I read don't ever touch on questions of who owns what.
I've found a few sources which help, but I don't know how dependable they are. Here's
what I've found. It seems that in Israel proper, the government owns almost all the
land, and leases it out. A 1997 source, "Land, the Palestinian
Authority, and Israel," says
After 1948 state-owned lands formerly in the possession of British Mandatory
Authorities, together with property abandoned by Arab refugees, passed into the control
of the new Israeli government. Some of this land was sold by the government to the JNF,
which had developed expertise in reclaiming and developing waste and barren lands and
making them productive.
In 1960 under Basic Law: Israel Lands, JNF-owned land and government-owned land were
together defined as "Israel lands," and the principle was laid down that such land would
be leased rather than sold. The JNF retained ownership of its land, but administrative
responsibility for the JNF land, and also for government-owned land, passed to a newly
created agency called the Israel Land Administration or ILA. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, V
10, p. 77)
Today, of the total land in Israel, 79.5% is owned by the government, 14% is privately
owned by the JNF, and the rest, around 6.5%, is evenly divided between private Arab and
Jewish owners. Thus, the ILA administers 93.5% of the land in Israel (Government Press
Office, Israel, 22 May 1997).
In order to purchase land for the resettlement of Jews in their ancient homeland, the
Fifth Zionist Congress (1901) created a private charitable organization called the
Jewish National Fund (JNF). Before statehood land purchased by the JNF was not resold
but was instead leased out on a long-term basis to create kibbutzim and other forms of
Jewish settlement.
Also: "about half of the land farmed by Israeli-Arabs is leased from the ILA." Bedouins
get favorable terms, and when a Jew challenged this in court, the policy was upheld as
permissible affirmative action. Private property can be transferred freely in Israel. In
Arab countries, this may not be the case. In particular, consider the Palestinian
Authority:
...
...between October 1948 to November 1949, the Israeli army evacuated the villages of
al- Safsaf, Iqrit, Kufr Biram, Kufr 'Anan, Khasas, Jau'neh, Qayttiyeh, al-Ghabasiyya,
al- Majdal, and al-Battat and later seized all of their properties. In 1951 the Israeli
army evacuated 13 villages in the triangle area and seized their properties. In October
1956 the Israeli army forced the Palestinian Bedouin tribe al-Bakara to cross the border
into Syria. In October 1959 some Bedouin tribes in the Negev desert were forced to cross
the borders into Egypt and Jordan. The lands for all these villages and tribes were
confiscated after their cleansing (Jiryis, 1973).
...
When the Absentee Law was introduced, it considered all the properties of the exiled
Palestinians as absentee property. It also considered any person who left his home
between November 29, 1947 (the UN partition of Palestine) and June 19, 1948 (the day the
Israeli government declared an end to the state of emergency) an absentee as well.
According to this definition of an absentee, over 30,000 Palestinians who remained in
what became Israel after the war were considered absentees and their properties were
confiscated. Also under the absentee law, the properties of the Islamic endowments were
all confiscated (Jiryis, 1973).
...
The Army would declare an area as a closed military zone, barring farmers from reaching
their fields. At a later point the Ministry of Agriculture issued confiscation orders
regarding these fields due to 'neglect' by their owners. And then the army officers
would issue permits for the settlers to whom the lands were assigned by the Department
of Agriculture.
Over the last year PA Justice Minister Freih Abu Meddein has repeatedly (IMRA interview,
12/23/96; Agence France Presse, 5/5/97; Yediot Ahranot, 5/20/97; Ha'aretz, 5/28/97;
IMRA, 6/4/97) stated his intention to enforce a Jordanian law which, on penalty of
death, prohibits the sale of land to Israelis.
A pro-Palestinian site, the
Alternative Palestinian Agenda, says,
As a result of the 1948 war and the armistice agreements Israel reached with Egypt and
Jordan, Israel controlled 20.5 million dunums of the total land of Palestine,
representing 78% of the land. The vast majority of these lands were owned by Palestinian
residents who were evacuated from their villages or who fled their homes during the war.
It sounds plausible, but I don't know whether it is true or not. The APA has an
interesting plan to partition
Israel between Jews and Arabs based on current population proportions, with interesting
descriptions of the various areas' fertility. Their map ends up looking similar (to
me at least) to the 1947 U.N. Plan. It seems that the Jewish population is concentrated,
so although Israel is now mostly Jewish, there are large areas that are mostly Arab. The
plan pretty much ignores history, defensibility, economics, and governability, but it's
useful to see the population location part of the problem in isolation like this.
The Jewish settlements on the West Bank will have to wait for another day's web-log, but I'll link the best map I found of them. I haven't tracked down how the land was acquired for them. The sources linked to here also mentioned that in 1997 there were proposals to privatize more land in Israel, which is a very good idea. If the government is leasing the land to private parties, there is tremendous room for discrimination and corruption, and a disincentive to invest in improving the land.
Sorry to end up so inconclusive, but I've yet to find a satisfactory description of private property in Israel past and present, so it's hard to come to any conclusions.
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