 |
| Israel Shahak Articles |
| |
| Israeli Land Seizure in the Occupied Territories |
| |
| Israel Shahak |
| |
Dr. Shahak, Holocaust survivor and retired professor of chemistry at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, is chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil
Rights.
The Israeli methods of land seizure in the occupied territories constitute a burning political question, especially since under the Israeli government's autonomy proposals all such land will not be included in the area in which Palestinians will be granted a modicum of self-rule. This article will describe the methods and legal justifications used by Israel for land seizure, concentrating on the role of the person who is in charge of such operations, Ms. Pli'a Albek of the Israeli Ministry of Justice. Her most essential role has been in the occupied territories, particularly in the West Bank. Since the winter of 1977-78, she has been personally responsible for the supposedly legal seizures of West Bank land by the state of Israel, amounting to what the Hebrew press has variously estimated as ranging between 50 percent and 65 percent of the entire West Bank land area. These figures are rather obsolete, since the state of Israel keeps inexorably transferring land to its ownership there. I will therefore refrain from quantifying the process under this description, except for mentioning that my private sources estimate the proportion in question as having reached as high as 68.5 percent by the beginning of September 1991.
It should be recalled that even today only about 20 percent of the already confiscated West Bank land has been used for settlement. The rest is still unused by settlers. However, the political purpose of all confiscated land is the same. As explained by Benjamin Netanyahu, the deputy minister in the Prime Minister's Office, the situation envisaged by Israel in the West Bank is the following:
[a] sea of Israeli security with Arab autonomy pockets inside it. . . . The Palestinians will be granted cultural, municipal and domestic political autonomy, but only in defined geographic boundaries where the majority of the Palestinian population lives. These areas will not be connected one with the other, there will be no central authority linking them, and each area will be surrounded by Israeli military installations, roadblocks and Jewish settlements. (Yossi Torfstein, Haaretz, March 1, 1992).
The purpose of land seizures has been, since 1978, to create exactly such a situation, as will be shown below.
Since methods of land seizure used by Israel are different in the case of East Jerusalem, because of its annexation to Israel (in 1967), I will describe first the land seizures in the West Bank. Although the situation in the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights is essentially similar, it will not be discussed in this article. I will then describe the different methods used in East Jerusalem based on the land laws of the state of Israel itself.
As the Western media do not mention it, I must precede all discussion of the subject by explaining that all land seizures (in Israel and in the territories alike) are intended to benefit solely the Jews, rather than the Israelis or anyone else without discrimination. In Israel, this implicit racism of land seizures is common knowledge. It follows that well over 50 percent of all the West Bank land is barred to Palestinians, whether from the West Bank itself or from elsewhere. Even those Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship, served in the army and reached a high officer rank can in no way benefit from the seized land. The same applies to anyone who is not Jewish. For example, Americans who can prove their Jewishness will instantly be granted the right to settle on that land and offered financial subsidies for the purpose. But all other Americans are denied this right, for no matter how short a duration, even if they pay for the privilege of renting a facility. As will be pointed out below, Pli'a Albek is there to see to it that such Apartheid regulations are applied on an ever-wider scale. Toward the end of this article, we will see the connection between her efforts and the basic Israeli attitudes to Palestinians.
Out of the numerous descriptions of Albek's responsibilities in the occupied territories, I have selected for this report three articles from the Hebrew press which seem to be the most informative: "The mother of all the settlements," by Amiram Cohen (Al-Hamishmar, October 18, 1991), "Hankin [a Zionist buyer of land in 19l0-40] was a gewgaw compared to Albek," by Hanna Kim (Hadashot, October 18, 1991), and "Albek against the whole world," by Yigal Mosco, (Kol Ha'ir, October 18, 1991). Even apart from these three items, the Hebrew press is virtually unanimous in its assessment of Albek's role, in contrast to the Jerusalem Post, widely read in the West, which is too lofty to concern itself with matters as pedestrian as land confiscations.
Albek's career in the territories began, not by chance, in the winter of 1977-78, following Sadat's initiative, prior to which she had been not involved there. That point in time marks a turnabout in Israeli foreign policy, due to the Begin government's decision to compensate for the loss of Sinai through the peace with Egypt by strengthening Israeli domination in the remainder of the occupied territories and by a more aggressive stance toward Lebanon and other countries of the region. A part of the new policy, inspired by time-honored Israeli notions, was to be an expansion of Jewish settlement. As Kim and Mosco note, despite Begin's lurid rhetoric, there was little change in the pace of land confiscation and settlement formation in the first months of his government's term of office after June 1977. But within a few weeks after Sadat's dramatic journey to Jerusalem, a decision was taken to speed up the formation and extend the scope of the settlements by spreading them all over the West Bank. Prior to this decision, the rules of the "Dayan period" (1967-74) stipulating that seizures of Arab land for settlement be limited to the Jordan Valley and the eastern slopes of the mountains overlooking it, had been still more or less in force. (There were some relatively minor exceptions, such as the settlements of the Etzion area south of Bethlehem, which were not allowed to expand.) These rules were accepted, even if reluctantly, by nearly all Israeli extreme right-wingers and religious zealots. Gush Emunim was founded no sooner than the spring of 1974, when Shimon Peres, as minister of defense (1974-77) and therefore in charge of the territories, tried to force a change by establishing "illegal settlements," without prior government approval. Peres covertly supported the Gush Emunim, by sheltering the illegal settlers in the army camps, or, as in Shiloh, by letting them establish settlements under disguise as, for example, "archeological excavation camps." Yet without massive land confiscations, the formation of settlements could have no more than symbolic value.
During the entire "Dayan period," until the major change in the winter 1977-78, the seizures of Palestinian land by the state of Israel were almost always justified on the grounds of "security needs." ln cases of a genuine "security need" or for a military purpose, a takeover of land by an occupying state is permitted under international law. However, the excuses to this effect offered by Israel were in most cases false and sometimes downright absurd. A military commander would issue an affidavit stating that a given land area is needed "for security," and the defense minister would back this affidavit by a statement of his own. The Israeli Supreme Court nevertheless from the start adopted the position, based on precedents dating from the early 1950s in Israel, that every such statement be accepted at its face value and that the plaintiffs not be permitted to question the authenticy of the provided "security reasons" in the light of factual evidence. Hundreds of such cases were heard, of which I will mention just one. After the confiscation of a large area owned by some Egyptian citizens in northeast Sinai, ostensibly on "security" grounds, its former owners were expelled from it, but (if issued permits) allowed to enter it as laborers, hired by the Jewish settlers already farming that land. When they appealed, the Supreme Court ruled that it was not competent to judge the security considerations of the minister of defense.
The exclusive reliance on "security" pretexts has always entailed serious inconveniences, especially after Sadat's peace initiative. With hopes for peace then running high, and with Israeli propaganda constantly reiterating its desire for peace, the recurrent invocation of security considerations was gainsaying the government's professed claims. Furthermore, although the Supreme Court always in the end approved the confiscations, it insisted on abiding by legal formalities, as a result of which the confiscations were taking time and attracting unwelcome publicity. Even before Sadat's initiative, the authorities were already showing signs of their irritation. Kim recalls how they particularly hated the attorney Felicia Langer, "who specialized in submitting the appeals of Arab farmers robbed of their land" (to the Supreme Court). Publicity surrounding such cases was harming Israel's interests and its image. Finally, the Gush Emunim settlers became enraged at the notion of their being mere guardians of Israeli security rather than emissaries of the heavens. All these reasons together called for a change in approach.
The change which actually came about was, according to Kim and Mosco, largely the work of two men: Ezer Weizmann, then defense minister and now supposedly a "dove," and Aharon Barak, then the attorney general and now the deputy president of the Supreme Court. Both Weizmann and Barak had been Begin's advisers at Camp David. It was Barak who, in appreciation of Albek's legal talents, advised Weizmann to put her in charge of devising new methods of land seizure. Cohen adds that the choice can only be regarded as highly fortunate.
Politically speaking, Pli'a Albek is the Likud government's most precious legal resource. Without her, the state [of Israel] could not conceivably succeed in seizing over 2 million dunums of land, or roughly a half of the entire area of the [West] Bank, without paying a penny in compensation. In particular, every dunum of land on which Housing Minister Ariel Sharon's bulldozers now operate, was seized through her efforts.
For comparison's sake, Cohen notes that before 1967 "the Jordanian government claimed state ownership only over 525 thousand dunums," the same amount which the British Mandatory government had claimed beforehand.
How did Albek do it? Her crucial innovation, at least in my opinion, was her reliance on the unlimited legislative powers of the military governors. Cohen shows how, under Albek's promptings, they first issued a regulation to the effect that all appeals against Israeli land seizures were to be addressed to "military commissions comprised of the officials of the military government itself." Like all such regulations, it had the force of law. It foreclosed the appeals to the Supreme Court, minimized publicity because the commissions in question heard the appeals in camera, and ensured that cases were processed with dispatch. As the record shows, there has been no case in which Albek's arguments ultimately failed to be upheld. In her legal briefs she displayed an extraordinary legalistic ingenuity. Cohen quotes an (anonymous) lawyer "deeply involved in land affairs in the West Bank" who has described Albek's methods:
She succeeded brilliantly in taking advantage of the multi-layered system of laws regulating the questions of land in the territories. She could use for her purposes every conceivable law ever enacted since Napoleon's time, whether Ottoman, Mandatory, Jordanian or Israeli.
Some ancient laws which she, not quite disinterestedly, discovered will be mentioned below. But this must be preceded by an explanation.
In 1967 there still was no comprehensive land survey and no official registry of landed property in the territories. Most land was held by custom. Ownership of a given plot of land was recognized on the basis of tax payment or testimony of other villagers, whether written or oral. Since the state of Israel recognizes itself as a legal successor of the Ottoman sultan, Albek, in the unanimous assessment of the Hebrew press, was in a position to make use of the two crucial provisions of Ottoman law. The first of these is a law of 1855, long rescinded in Turkey and in Israel alike. It stipulates that any land never formally granted by the sultan to anyone, is to be regarded as "dead land" (i.e. as desert or other wasteland) and therefore belonging to the sultan. He ‘‘may authorize any official of his to give it away to anyone for farming," unless it is located close enough to the center of the nearest village or town to let an average person's outcry from the former be heard in the latter. All that was needed to implement this law was to issue a regulation empowering someone duly designated by Albek, or by the military government, to perform a test to determine whether a scream from a plot designated for confiscation reaches "the center of the nearest village" (usually put under a curfew for the test's purpose), and to decide accordingly. The second law Albek used had been attributed by the ancient Ottoman Codex to "immemorial custom." It stipulated that if a piece of land, even one located close to a village, had neither been farmed nor used for pasture for a number of years (three or ten according to conflicting versions), it also belonged to the sultan, as the "natural" owner of all fallow land. All that was needed was merely an Israeli regulation empowering someone to assess a given piece of land as "neither farmed nor used for pasture." Since the regulation required that the job be done by at least two persons, it will come as no surprise to learn that quite often the two "assessors" were Albek and Sharon in person. Kim quotes an already notorious speech of Sharon, in which he recounted how he and Albek had "suffered" by "having to climb hills and sit on the rocks in order to count the goat droppings," for the sake of determining that land under their inspection was not "frequently" used for pasture. In relatively few cases when the two Ottoman-law provisions were of no use, the land could still be designated for an "archeological excavation" (with the settlers as custodians of the finds) or for a "nature reserve," or for a "recreation park," or for any other imaginary purpose.
Still, all such methods could not be applied to confiscation of property in the towns or even houses in the villages. The Arab homeowners in the towns and with rare exceptions in the villages, had in most cases taken the trouble to register them with the land offices, often still with the Ottoman or British ones. Only the arableland owners seldom did the same. Albek has remained true to her legal vocation, turning down all requests of the settlers to take over houses or other town or village property in the West Bank as lacking a legal basis. Her legal strictness happened to coincide with the Likud government's policy aimed at keeping the Palestinian urban centers, bereft of most of the surrounding land, as residential pools of cheap labor which Israel needed, to which an "autonomy" will be then granted, as mentioned above. Before the settlers learned to appreciate Albek's services for their cause, they could even be angry at her because they had once wanted to establish settlements in the midst of all major West Bank towns. Let me add that the situation in regard to the Gaza Strip lands, although not to be covered by this report, is generally the same.
The defenders of Albek like to speak of her assiduity. Indeed, she would go everywhere in person, traveling by helicopters and jeeps no matter how inclement the weather, in order to test and assess everything herself. Her colleagues in the Ministry of Justice told Cohen (anonymously) that "her treatment of the Arabs as subhumans is deep-seated in her personality, even though not stemming from a personal grievance." "Personal grievance" refers to the knife-stabbing of her son, a Yeshiva student, several years ago when he was walking in the Old City of Jerusalem. "Unsurprisingly, her obsession about the Arabs has deep ideological and religious reasons." She does not even try to conceal her deep affinity for Gush Emunim. She has often been attacked by the media and left-wing members of the Knesset for breaking the rule prohibiting high officials from expressing their partisan political views while appearing in the media. But the ministers of justice, even those from Labor, have almost always defended her, and so has the Likud as a whole. She was formally rebuked only once prior to the leak of her instructions described in Report 87. It happened in 1985, after she recommended that a plot of land near Hebron, which she had earlier determined to be "state land," suitable for Gush Emunim's purposes, "be seized abruptly, in the middle of night, far from the eyes of the public and the media" (Kim). After a debate in the Knesset during which some members wanted to know whether she was also giving similar advice about foreign-currency smuggling and demanded her dismissal, the then minister of justice, Hayim Tzadok (Labor), rebuked her officially while praising her work in glowing terms. Even if he wanted it, Tzadok would have found it quite difficult to dismiss her. But he could remove her from work in the territories because, even after all these years, it still has no official status, as the Israeli Ministry of Justice is not supposed to concern itself with the territories. Yet there is no doubt that in her work in the territories she executed the policy of successive Israeli governments, Labor and Likud alike.
Likewise, there can be no doubt that the goals of these policies go beyond land seizures and the advancement of Jewish settlement. The superordinate goal has been to find "a permanent solution" to the problem of the territories, which Israel has been seeking at least since the collapse of the Israel-Egyptian negotiations over "autonomy for the Palestinians" in the aftermath of Camp David. Danny Rubinstein ("Autonomy without substance," Haaretz, October 24, 1991) cogently connects the Israeli autonomy proposals with land seizures directed by Albek. He makes a keen observation that West Bank lands seized by Israel have invariably been administratively severed from Palestinian villages or towns to which they had administratively belonged. He explains that
. . . by the force of military orders, lands owned by the State [of Israel] are usually transferred to regional councils of the settlers. Jewish settlers thereby acquire the status of formal representatives of the state [of Israel] in charge of guarding state-owned land from the Arabs living in their neighborhood.
As Rubinstein points out, the practice originated in 1981, when Israeli-Egyptian autonomy talks were still in progress. The intensification of land seizures in the middle of these talks was, in Rubinstein's opinion, intended to indicate to the Palestinians that "even if the Arab residents [of the territories] get a self-government of sorts, they will not be allowed to administer the seized lands." The idea was already implicit in Begin's widely publicized pronouncements expressing his notions of how autonomy was to look. "He saw the Arab population as one thing and a Territory inhabited by it as another. He wanted the autonomy to extend only to the population and not to the territory."
Rubinstein is right in perceiving Israeli policy as resting on two foundations, both invariant since 1967, and unaffected by developments described in this report. The first is the concept of "autonomy" as "a form of a permanent arrangement." The concept implies a staunch Israeli opposition to any kind of Palestinian independence, even falling short of statehood. It also implies a consensus, encompassing Likud, Labor and the religious parties, in opposition to what in Hebrew often goes by the name of "transfer of sovereignty over any of our [i.e. Jewish] land to strangers [i.e. non-Jews]." Accordingly, Israeli opposition to Jordanian sovereignty over any part of the West Bank is no less staunch than to Palestinian sovereignty, only professed with more restraint. The second foundation is the refusal to annex the territories formally. In Rubinstein's words, "Israel neither wants nor can afford to annex the territories all-inclusively, since it would mean treating their Arab inhabitants by standards of the Israeli law." This article shows that Israeli law could be a factor complicating arbitrary land seizures. In general, oppression and discrimination of any kind comes easily in the territories precisely because they have not been formally annexed. Some of the more thoughtful Israeli commentators have recently voiced this idea. Let me only quote Moshe Negbi's Hadashot article of October 4, 1991. He wrote:
Only in a conquered territory is it possible to deny all civil and political rights to hundreds of thousands of Arabs born under Israeli rule, while granting these rights to their Jewish neighbors. Had the areas been placed formally under Israeli sovereignty, it would be impossible to entrench an Apartheid regime there.
Rubinstein explains the rules guiding Israel in administering the territories. While stressing that these rules have not been changed, he emphasizes the prerogatives which Israel insists on keeping in its hands in its determination to reserve for itself all the powers of a sovereign state. By that he means that "Israel is determined to reserve for itself the exclusive right to enact legislation, in the form of military regulations having the force of law. Any conceivable Arab self-government will be created within the framework of this legislation and will obtain only such prerogatives as this legislation may allow." This factor is for Rubinstein constant, not subject to changes. Indeed, as I have tried to show, Albek's success in her legalistic maneuvering was due not to her finding suitable Ottoman laws, but rather to Israeli legislative monopoly in the territories, which alone made possible the enforcement of any ancient law she would fancy to discover.
Ms. Albek's legal talents have blossomed in particular in cases involving land in East Jerusalem (and the Golan Heights). As correctly explained by Danny Rubinstein ("The presence of the Absentees," Haaretz, October 8, 1991), all land and all property of the Palestinian inhabitants of East Jerusalem was not legally owned by them, but by the state of Israel. Rubinstein recalls that a 1950 Israeli law was meant to apply without distinction to any conceivable territory which might fall under Israeli sovereignty. (The law was also retroactive.) As Rubinstein points out,
The law stipulated that anyone who either lived in any Arab country or was present on enemy territory after November 1947, was to be considered an Absentee, which meant that all his property was to be transferred to the Custodian [of Absentee Property], who was to administer it but who in fact owned it.
The Custodian's office operates within the Ministry of Housing, which, as Rubinstein notes, "is now headed by the Minister Sharon." Rubinstein further explains that the law in question applied not only to genuine refugees absent from Israel, but
also to Arabs who had become Israeli citizens...even if they had been elected as Knesset members. Legally, they are still considered Absentees which means that legally all their property belongs to the State of Israel. Hence their description as Present Absentees.
Incidentally, no legal procedure has been instituted for proving that a given person is an Absentee. The Custodian, supposedly "acting on information received," has full authority to define any Arab as an "Absentee" arbitrarily, and confiscate a part or the whole of his property accordingly. In the process, he does not even need to notify the person affected, who may well have stayed for no more than a single night on enemy territory. The law was applicable in East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights as parts of sovereign Israel. As Rubinstein observes,
After the annexation of East Jerusalem to Israel, all Arab residents formally became Absentees. . . . Theoretically, the Custodian of the Absentee Property could confiscate all houses and other property of all East Jerusalem Arabs on the ground that they were no longer its legal owners.
However, the minister of justice at the time of annexation, Ya'akov Shimshon Shapira, who was a little more mindful of legal implications than the usual run of Israeli ministers, noticed the absurdity of this situation. He submitted to the Knesset an amendment to the 1950 Law "by which East Jerusalem Arabs could legally own their property." The amendment was enacted by the Knesset, but it did not affect the inhabitants of the West Bank (or of any other place) who had property in East Jerusalem. "Arabs from Bethlehem, Ramallah and all other locations in the territories as well as from outside, suddenly found themselves no longer the legal owners of their houses, shops, land and whatever else they may have possessed in East Jerusalem." Nor did the amendment affect the status of Arabs, from either East Jerusalem or the territories, in regard to property located in Israel which they had owned in the past or may acquire in the future. In regard to such property they remain "Absentees." Until recently, however, this law was not acted upon, except "under emergency." Rubinstein provides an example of such "emergency" which occurred
in Kafr-Akab, north of Jerusalem. The Custodian came to a local peasant, and after taking measurements carefully, determined that half of the courtyard of his house was located on the territory annexed to Israel. In regard to this half of his courtyard, the peasant was to be considered an Absentee, and that half was confiscated from him. Ordinarily, however, the Custodian refrained from using his "legitimate" but venomous authority.
Enter Ms. Albek. Acting in coordination with Sharon and with the custodian already operating under Sharon's authority, she carefully scrutinized East Jerusalem property archives in order to discover "the Absentees," so as to confiscate maximum property. In this job, Albek was remarkably successful. As noted in some press reports, nothing was too insignificant to escape her attention. On an inspection tour in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, she noticed a tiny shop which looked temporarily shut down. She immediately called her office computer to find that the shop owner was a resident of the territories, banned by order of the authorities from entering Jerusalem and the rest of Israel, just as thousands of other Palestinians are. Upon thus finding him an "absentee," she at once gave instructions to confiscate the tiny shop. Of the two methods of "Judaizing East Jerusalem" in current use, Albek's is clearly superior to Sharon's contrived settlement drive. Unlike the latter, the former does not cost the state of Israel a penny.
By force of the just-mentioned Shapira amendment, the Arabs actually residing in Jerusalem are legal owners of their property. Moreover, East Jerusalem has plenty of real estate owned by various churches which cannot be defined as "Absentees." Albek's distinct method of "Judaizing East Jerusalem" does therefore run upon obstacles. Yet it makes progress. The way it works was quite minutely described in the Hebrew press in April-May 1990, after the Jewish settlers took over St. John's Hospice in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.
As described by Nahum Barnea ("The House: They all lie about it," Yediot Ahronot, May 11, 1990), Gaby Baron ("The Mysterious Redeeming of Land," Yediot Ahronot, Financial Supplement, April 24, 1990) and Israel Tomer ("Whose Custodian?" Yediot Ahronot, Financial Supplement, April 24, 1990), Albek's "Judaization of East Jerusalem" relies heavily on two key institutions. One is the custodian of legacies and gifts, who operates within the Ministry of Justice, separately from the mentioned custodian of absentee property. The other is the "Heimanuta" company, which is a branch of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an agency of the World Zionist Organization. The custodian of legacies and gifts is a junior official dealing with money or property donated or bequeathed to the state of Israel. His budget is quite tiny. His utility lies in the fact that the assets he processes do not need to be included in the government budget and therefore are not subject to Knesset controls. As Tomer explains,
No law commands the Custodian to report to the Knesset or to anybody else the assets which he holds in trust. If there are any rules on how he should distribute the funds at his disposal, they are secret and not open to public inspection. . . .His decisions are not accountable to anyone.
Quite possibly, this innocuous office may be a branch of the Israeli Intelligence. In addition, the office has another advantage, which, by the way, the "Heimanuta" also enjoys. In Barnea's words "they are both Labor [party] bailiwicks, at least for the time being." Both agencies are staffed exclusively by Labor's old timers. This means that if a scandal breaks open in either of them, the Labor faction in the Knesset cooperates with the government in hushing it up.
How exactly do these agencies operate? A high government official authorizes a payment to the custodian from the reserve funds of his ministry. The payment does not need to be countersigned by the minister. In the case of St. John's Hospice, such a payment, of 3.6 million shekels ($1.8 million) was, according to Barnea, authorized by Amos Unger, the director general of the Ministry of Housing, who did not even bother to notify his minister, David Levy. The custodian then transferred the money to the "Heimanuta." Upon obtaining it the "Heimanuta" paid it to a mysterious Panamanian company. Together with some additional funds of unknown origin, the money was used by this company for bribing the Arabs subletting the Hospice to allow its takeover. Repossessed in this manner, the Hospice was subsequently offered free of charge to the notorious "Ateret Kohanim" Yeshiva for the sake of settling the place with Jews. According to Barnea, "Heimanuta" is engaged in this sort of wheeling and dealing all over Israel. For example, if suspicion arises that some "Upper Nazareth apartments reserved solely for Jews" may be sold or rented to Arabs, "Heimanuta" would "secretly provide their Jewish owners with some relief" so as to fend off the "danger." Barnea believes that nothing comparable can be spotted even in South Africa, especially since "all operations of 'Heimanuta' are clandestine." He comments,
On the surface, this may look like a vital service for the Jewish people. Unfortunately, it is not. In Israel of 1990 it is already high time to let the laws of the market regulate such matters, rather than the laws of race.
In light of what Baron discloses about "Heimanuta" operating procedures (the responsibility for which lies squarely, via the JNF, with the World Zionist Organization), Barnea's conclusion seems fully vindicated. It appears that "Heimanuta," supposedly a non-governmental organization, has for many years "operated under the direct control of a ministry of justice department headed by Ms. Pli'a Albek." Baron found "a rare interview" conducted a number of years ago with "the central figure in all such dubious purchase deals, Avraham Hillely, the director of the JNF Land Department." Hillely, "who had been born in Aleppo, Syria," was chosen to head this department on account of his mastery of Arabic and "expertise" in the so-called "Arab mentality."
Hillely explained that the registry of land in "Heimanuta's" name restricts its use to Jews alone, irrespective of who might have paid the taxes out of which that land was purchased. It is because this kind of restriction is stipulated by the JNF statutes, and "Heimanuta" is no more than a JNF subsidiary. But this condition is perfectly legitimate. Israel is entitled to place its lands at the exclusive disposal of the Jews...."Heimanuta" is merely trying to get hold of every piece of land not yet owned by the Jews.
Barnea is perfectly right in observing that even South Africa has not carried its Apartheid practices to such lengths as Israel has, by covertly guiding the hand of "Heimanuta." After all, South Africa divided its territory, most unjustly to be sure, assigning 13 percent to its black majority, and 87 percent to its white minority. But the state of Israel wants to assign 100 percent of its land to the Jews. Under its authority, the World Zionist Organization, the JNF and the "Heimanuta" busily "try to get hold of every piece of land not yet owned by the Jews." Once the Palestinians become thus dispossessed, their expulsion, in popular parlance "transfer," becomes a logical consequence of sorts.
|
| |
|
