Land ownership and Palestinian right of return
Let's get a couple of related issues cleared up:
James R said:
If this is true (and you have provided no evidence) then this is one of those issues on which Israel will most likely need to compromise to achieve a settlement.
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Could you please link me to the laws that deny native non-Jews a "right of return"? I'm interested in seeing how this is actually formulated in Israeli law.
(#2373991/36)
And then there is this:
Zephyr said:
Does any Israeli law prevent Israeli Arabs from buying land in Israel?
(Interesting fact: Palestinians who sell land to Israelis are sentenced to death:
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In truth, I was annoyed at James' first proposition. It seemed as if he was asking for evidence according to LaPlace, except that the Israeli denial of Palestinian right of return isn't so extraordinary an assertion. As I noted
in another thread, the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs is on the record refusing the Palestinian right of return:
This short survey has shown that neither under the international conventions, nor under the major UN resolutions, nor under the relevant agreements between the parties, do the Palestinian refugees have a right to return to Israel. According to Palestinian sources, there are about 3.5 million Palestinian refugees nowadays registered with UNRWA. If Israel were to allow all of them to return to her territory, this would be an act of suicide on her part, and no state can be expected to destroy itself.
Great efforts should be made by all those involved, and with the help of friendly outside powers, to find a reasonable, viable and fair solution to the refugee problem.
(Lapidoth)
• • •
But regardless of Olmert's motives, Livni's appointment could have an important effect on that outcome. She has long taken an interest in the true pivot of the conflict, the Palestinian demand for the "right of return." Now her goal and motto should be a simple one: without positive Palestinian movement on that, there is little point to the summit and no basis for Israeli concessions.
When Ariel Sharon went to Washington in 2004 seeking assurances to back the planned unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, it was reportedly Livni who pressed Sharon to obtain a US statement on the "right of return." The resulting statement, though vague and very rarely repeated, was significant: "The United States is strongly committed to Israel's security and well-being as a Jewish state. It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel" (emphasis added).
(Jerusalem Post)
Thus it does not seem so extraordinary an assertion that Israel opposes the Palestinian right of return. Finding those articles took less than five minutes.
But James' second inquiry is fascinating. The legal structure of Israel is a mystery to most of us who aren't Israeli. What I really didn't expect was that when I went to search for the law, I would find it so quickly. Still, though:
Basic Law: Israel Lands
1. The ownership of Israel lands, being the lands in Israel of the State, the Development Authority or the Keren Kayemet Le-Israel, shall not be transferred either by sale or in any other manner.
2. Section 1 shall not apply to classes of lands and classes of transactions determined for that purpose by Law.
3. In this Law, "lands" means land, houses, buildings and anything permanently fixed to land.
(Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
This 1960 law
seems to be at the heart of it. Reading through it the first time, I couldn't quite figure out how to apply it in the context of Palestinian right of return. So I did what just about any of us would do, and sought an analysis.
And this is why I include Zephyr's inquiry and counterpoint. Alexander Safian covered the issue in 1997 for
Middle East Quarterly:
Although the PA's actions raise a multitude of questions about its intentions to fulfill its obligations to Israel and its readiness to live peaceably next to Israel, we focus here on the specifics of Arafat's justification of brutal PA behavior. Is he correct that Israel's land policies discriminate against Arabs? Is it true, as he claims, that Palestinians from Nablus or Hebron cannot buy land in Israel. Conversely, can an Israeli buy land in Jordan or in PA-controlled territory?
Palestinian leaders are hardly alone in claiming that the land "always goes from Arabs to the Jews." Many journalists and commentators have found Israel's policies to be discriminatory. These, they variously charged, bar non-Jews from leasing, or buying, or even accessing, most or all of the land in Israel.
The original formulation of this argument would seem to be by Walter Lehn, a professor of linguistics then at the University of Minnesota, who contended in a 1974 article in the Journal of Palestine Studies that
the [Israeli] state under colour of law effectively prevents any non-Jew from leasing or holding any rights ... to 90 percent of the land in Israel.
Lehn's argument found a willing audience, and has been widely repeated by academics writing both for professional and lay readers. For example, Zachary Lockman, then a Harvard history professor, contended in a 1988 letter to The New York Times that
some 92 percent of Israel's land area is administered in accordance with ... [regulations which] prohibit these lands from being purchased, leased or worked by Arab citizens of Israel.
More recently, speaking on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, William Quandt of the University of Virginia charged that
Israel was established as a state for Jews. It has of course an Arab minority who have citizenship rights, but the specific way in which land is owned in Israel is predominantly that the Jewish Agency purchases land on behalf of the Jewish people and then leases it out to its Jewish citizens.
Arabs cannot have access to that land that's owned by the Jewish Agency. They can keep land they have privately owned before the State of Israel was created. There's a small amount of private property that can be traded and Arabs can buy that as well as Jews, but most land is held in trust for the Jewish people, so yes there is a legal basis for what we would flat out call discriminatory practices.
It's a complex issue. Safian notes that Israeli Bedouins, who comprise
82% of the nation's Arab population, have benefitted from affirmative action policies in the leasing of land, and that difference is dramatic:
Moreover, when it comes to residential land, the ILA sometimes offers Israeli Arabs more favorable terms from than it does to Israeli Jews. Thus, the ILA charged the equivalent of $24,000 for a capital lease on a quarter of an acre in new Jewish communities near Beersheva while Bedouin families in the nearby community of Rahat paid only $150 for the same amount of land. In a different case, when a Jewish policeman from Beersheva, Eleizer Avitan, applied to the ILA to lease land in a Bedouin community under the same highly subsidized terms available to the Bedouins, the ILA refused to lease him land there under any terms, so he sued. Israel's Supreme Court ruled in favor of the ILA, saying that what might be viewed as ILA discrimination against the Jewish citizen Avitan was justified as affirmative action for Bedouin citizens.
Beersheba, however, is the largest city in the Negev, where the Bedouin "tend to identify more as Israelis than other Arab citizens of Israel" (
Wikipedia). Nonetheless, the Bedouin face certain forms of official discrimination at the hands of the Israeli government:
The Israeli government encourages Bedouin to settle as permanent residents in these development towns, but the other half of the Negev Bedouin population continues to live in 45 "unrecognized villages," some of which predate the existence of Israel. These villages do not appear on any commercial maps, and are denied basic services like water, electricity, and schools. It is forbidden by the Israeli authorities for the residents of these villages to build permanent structures, though many do, risking fines and home demolition.
(Wikipedia; see also, Boteach)
The Jewish National Fund, according to Safian, held 13.1% of the land in Israel as of 1997, but suggests in the end notes that number may be higher, perhaps 18%. Thus:
The purpose of the JNF, according to both its original charter and its 1953 Israeli charter is to purchase land for the settlement of Jews, and this has been interpreted to mean that JNF land should not be leased, at least on a long-term basis, to non-Jews. There are, thus, formal restrictions on the lease of JNF land to Arabs. That JNF lands are now administered by a government agency does not change this restriction, for JNF land is privately owned and to lease it on exactly equal terms to Jewish and Arab Israelis would violate the 1960 agreement that placed JNF lands under government administration.
So much for official restrictions. In practice, JNF land is leased to Arab citizens of Israel, for both short- and long-term use. Thus, the ILA has leased on a yearly basis JNF-owned land in the Besor Valley (Wadi Shallala), near Kibbutz Re'em, to Bedouins for use as pasture. Arab citizens have also leased JNF-owned land for housing purposes via a legal device that evades the restrictions against precisely such long-term use: The land in question is traded to the government so that it can be leased out and the JNF receives other land in return. Such swaps have sometimes taken place under threat of court action.
(Safian)
The thing is that for 80% of the land,
nobody can buy it. It is
state land. JNF land is
leased to Arab Israelis, but that is a complicated issue as well, as the 1960 law is interpreted to forbid equal lease terms for Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis, and, furthermore, the JNF land is often swapped out so that, while Arab Israelis might have lease access to it, the JNF approximately maintains a certain amount of territory reserved for leases to Jewish Israelis.
Safian also explores Jordanian land restrictions, and this appears to be where the whole "death for selling land to Jews" idea comes from. In 1973, King Husayn instructed the government to pass a law forbidding the transfer of land to Jordan's enemy (e.g., Israel). Following the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, the Jordanian parliament in 1995 repealed the capital sentence for selling land to Israelis, although it did maintain restrictions against non-Arabs purchasing, leasing, or owning immovable property.
Meanwhile, over in Palestine, former Justice Minister Freih Abu Meddein declared his intention to enforce the 1973 Jordanian law, and in 1997 the Palestinian Legislative Council passed a new law describing the sale of Palestinian land to the "occupiers" as an act of high treason. The question that arises, then, is what we might expect of
any governmental authority that believes itself under occupation and discovers some of its citizens giving aid and comfort to the occupiers.
Those who would doubt Safian's credibility are free to do so, but should also bear in mind that
he denounced Christiane Amanpour, regarding her
God's Warriors miniseries for CNN, as "anti-Israel" and "anti-Christian", and furthermore accused her of whitewashing Islam. Indeed, the conclusion of his examination of the question, "Can Arabs Buy Land in Israel?" seeks not to answer the question either affirmatively or negatively, but rather politically:
In sum, the Palestinian Authority has successfully managed to charge Israel with the very sins that it itself is guilty of. The most striking instances of this success, perhaps, are the many academics and journalists who repeat and reinforce Palestinian charges of Israeli discrimination with regard to land ownership. This climate of distortion has two consequences. First, it misleads politicians, diplomats, and others about the basic facts that underlie the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Second, it encourages Palestinians to harbor unreasonable hopes and make exorbitant demands. These twin problems reinforce each other, and thereby make a genuine peace that much more difficult to achieve.
This presents a particularly bad precedent for the negotiation of such final status issues as Jerusalem, water rights, and the drawing of borders. It is likely that these final status issues will also be subject to campaigns to portray Israel as an unprovoked aggressor and Palestinians and Arabs as blameless victims. Indeed, there are signs that this has already begun.
And yet the fact remains that Arabs have access to ownership of between two and seven percent of Israeli land.
In terms of the Palestinian right of return, the 1960 Land Law would seem to forbid Israel from doing
anything other than denying that claim.
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Notes:
Lapidoth, Ruth. "Do Palestinian Refugees Have a Right to Return to Israel?" Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. January 15, 2001. MFA.gov.il. October 1, 2009. http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/peace pro...alestinian refugees have a right to return to
"Livni's mission". Editorial. Jerusalem Post. October 15, 2007. JPost.com. October 1, 2009. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1192380561934
"Basic Law: Israel Lands". July 19, 1960. MFA.gov.il. October 1, 2009. http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1960_1969/Basic Law- Israel Lands
Safian, Alexander. "Can Arabs Buy Land in Israel?" Middle East Quarterly. December, 1997. MEforum.org. October 1, 2009. http://www.meforum.org/370/can-arabs-buy-land-in-israel
Yaffe, Nurit. "The Arab Population of Israel 2003". Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2003. CBS.gov.il. October 1, 2009. http://www.cbs.gov.il/statistical/arab_pop03e.pdf
Wikipedia. "Arab citizens of Israel". October 1, 2009. Wikipedia.com. October 1, 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel
Boteach, Elana. "The Indigenous Bedouin of the Negev Desert in Israel". Negev Coexistence Forum. July, 2005. IWGIA.org. October 1, 2009. http://www.iwgia.org/graphics/Synkr...ceboard/News/Middle East/Beduinreport2005.pdf
McCarthy, Justin. "'Fox and Friends' Guest Speaks Out Against CNN's 'God's Warriors'". News Busters. October 4, 2007. NewsBusters.org. October 1, 2009. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/justin...s-guest-speaks-out-against-cnns-gods-warriors
