Executive summary

The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of Jewish-Zionist and, later, Israeli actions to acquire lands and property in Israel/Palestine. The study documents laws and policies governing colonisation and land acquisition in both Israel and the Occupied Territories, which Israeli armed forces captured in 1967.

We begin by looking at the inception of the Zionist movement in the late 1800s, when the groundwork was laid for land acquisition and Jewish colonisation in Palestine. Then we examine the changes to Ottoman law that facilitated Jewish land acquisition during the period of the British Mandate in Palestine. Our next focus is the legal system created within the State of Israel since its establishment in 1948. After that, we move to the situation following Israel’s 1967 capture of the West Bank – including the eastern part of Jerusalem (‘East Jerusalem’) – and the Gaza Strip.

In tracing more than a century of Jewish-Israeli land acquisitions, this study documents the methodical process underlying the Zionist conquest of Palestine and the dispossession and displacement of its indigenous Arab inhabitants. We examine this process with reference to relevant international treaties and agreements. We show that Israel’s discriminatory policies towards Palestinians constituted violations of key United Nations resolutions adopted by the international community in the General Assembly and the Security Council over the past several decades.

It is neither simple nor straightforward to demonstrate that a system of law was devised to legalise the transfer of lands and property from one people to another. For some readers, it may be disturbing to realise that deliberate discrimination could be embedded in and masked by seemingly ‘neutral’ categories within a ‘legal’ system — which, by definition, ought to denote impartiality and equal protection.

The events and laws under review here are complicated by the fact that a succession of different governments once wielded authority over the areas that later became Israel and the Occupied Territories. From Ottoman, through British and Jordanian (the latter only in the West Bank), to Israeli law — each ruling power installed its own legal framework in pursuit of its own particular interests.

As we shall see in the course of this study, legally sanctioned discrimination against Palestinians – as citizens of the State of Israel and as residents of the Occupied Territories – is not immediately discernible in the language of the laws, but exists nevertheless. The state of affairs favouring Jewish-Zionist goals in Palestine took shape early on during the British Mandate period. The British authorities took great pains to amend Ottoman law in such a way as to facilitate the Jewish purchase and colonisation of lands. This evolving body of law was the precursor of the legal system that was adopted by Israel after the creation of the ‘Jewish State’ in 1948 and that was imposed in the Occupied Territories after their capture in 1967.

To appreciate how Israeli law operates in depriving Palestinians of their lands and property and transferring these to Jewish ownership and control, we need to expose the true nature of certain implicit understandings and definitions in that law. What on the surface appear to be ‘neutral’ legal terms and categories actually operate to the great disadvantage of the Palestinians. This is particularly so in the case of those Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship. Although there are parallels between their legal situation and that of their counterparts in the Occupied Territories, the discrimination against the latter is less concealed because it is incorporated in Israeli Military Law.

Examples of terms that mask the discriminatory application of law to the detriment of the Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories are: ‘national’, ‘nationality’ and ‘national institutions’. Wherever such terms are used in the law, they actually refer exclusively to Jews. Thus, a ‘national’ denotes a Jew, not a Palestinian; ‘nationality’ is by definition Jewish. Israel defines itself as the ‘Jewish State’, not as the state of all its citizens. Palestinians in Israel may hold ‘citizenship’ and therefore enjoy certain rights and responsibilities, but they can never acquire the special privileges conferred by ‘nationality’. Similarly, ‘national institutions’ such as the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund, which have played a central role in land acquisition and development, by definition serve Jewish interests only. Immigration laws, such as the Law of Return, limit eligibility to Jews.

In this respect, another pertinent legal category is the ‘Custodian of Absentee Property’ (or ‘Custodian of Government and Abandoned Property’). This office, created once the State of Israel was established in 1948, has a counterpart office in the 1967 Occupied Territories. Without the dispossession of three quarters of the indigenous population of Palestine, the destruction of their homes, the razing of their villages and the seizing of their lands after 1948, it is highly unlikely that the ‘Jewish State’ of Israel could have continued to exist. Essentially, the ‘Custodian’ is responsible for overseeing the transfer to Jewish-Israeli control of vast areas of land and other property from which Palestinians earlier fled or were evicted. Complementing the work of this office, Israel enacted a body of laws designed to establish legal claim to the lands and property of ‘absentees’ — the Israeli legal euphemism for forcibly displaced Palestinian refugees.

Two other legal terms deserve mention in this context. The definitions of ‘State land’ and ‘public purposes’, as embodied in various land laws, are also interpreted in a way that solely advances Jewish interests. This is just as true in the Occupied Territories as it is within Israel.

In the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, yet another concept operates to mask discrimination in the law: the concept of ‘security’. Almost invariably, laws enacted in the name of ‘security’ – for example, those that declare ‘closed areas’ – permit the confiscation of Palestinian lands and the transfer of those lands to Jewish control. Invoking ‘security’ obfuscates the discriminatory application of law in the Occupied Territories in favour of Jewish settlers and to the detriment of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. Such measures have placed the actions of Israel’s Military Government beyond the consideration of Israel’s Supreme Court, which prefers not to hear complaints about security-related measures. Israel’s ‘creeping annexation’ of the Occupied Territories, which has been advancing inexorably since 1967, has, arguably, foreclosed the option of a viable two-state solution in the area. As we elaborate below, this situation existed well before the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations began in Oslo in 1993.

This study analyses and documents in detail the mechanisms employed by Israel to veil its discriminatory policies against Palestinians behind the so-called ‘rule of law’. Israel has developed a very intricate body of laws that is designed to facilitate and legalise both acquisition and ownership of lands in Palestine in the name of the Jewish people. This applies equally to lands within the State of Israel (as delineated by its 1948 borders) and to lands in the Occupied Territories.

The Israeli legal system is remarkably complex. The full reach of land and property laws in Israel and the Occupied Territories can only be appreciated within the context of other laws, including those governing immigration, planning, and national services. Although, superficially, such laws may appear to be distinct and unrelated to land and property laws, in essence they complement them in their general, discriminatory thrust. Laws in areas other than land and property, however, are beyond the scope of this study and are referred to only when relevant to the topic under discussion. It should be noted that the complete body of Israeli law — an intricate and interwoven whole — has been fundamental to the seizure of land and property from the Palestinian people ever since the State of Israel was unilaterally declared in 1948.

Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE)
BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights

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