There's a Good Story in Here

"Here" is this Haaretz smear piece on my next-door community, Eli, where the neighborhood in question houses some of my good friends, and the widows of two IDF heroes, Ronni Klein and Eli Peretz Hayad:

Israel expropriates Palestinian land in order to legalize West Bank settlement

Move is Netanyahu government's first confiscation of land in the territories.

For the first time in three years, the state has confiscated uncultivated land in the West Bank. The land will be used to legalize a nearby settlement outpost. Last week, acting on orders from the government, the Civil Administration declared 189 dunams of land belonging to the Palestinian village of Karyut to be state land, so as to retroactively legalize houses and a road in the Hayovel neighborhood of the settlement of Eli. This would seem to violate Israel's long-standing commitment to the United States not to expropriate Palestinian lands for settlement expansion.

An Ottoman land law dating from 1858 allows uncultivated land to be declared state land. This law, which is still in force in the West Bank, is what was used to carry out the expropriation.  According to last Sunday's decree, the lands in question belong to the village of Karyut. Hayovel was built on these lands in 1998 as a temporary outpost, and later permanent houses and an access road were built. A 2005 report on the outposts by attorney Talia Sasson concluded that Hayovel was built on private Palestinian land.

After the Peace Now and Yesh Din organizations petitioned the High Court of Justice against the construction in 2005 and 2009, the Civil Administration reviewed the land's legal status. Since Jordan, which ruled the West Bank from 1948-67, had never registered them in its land registry, the Civil Administration reclassified them as under review. This meant that any place that was still cultivated in the late 1990s would remain private land, but the rest could be declared state land...

The story is, in short, that

(a) Talia Sasson, a far-left Meretz activist, used her political prejudices in her official state position and wrongly decided what she decided;

(b) you'll note that the Arabs of the area had no legal standing even after more than 150 years passed under four different regimes: Ottoman, Britihs, Jordan and Israel and couldn't prove their ownership;

(c) the land in question was never purchased and the villages simply extended communal claims rather than private ones as agricultural land.

All this would never be tolerated in civilized orderly locations.

Also, as the League of Nations Mandate declared:

ART. 5.
The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of the Government of any foreign Power.

ART. 6.
The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

So, the whole idea that we Jews have no rights, that the local residents have more rights, that somehow we are 'stealing', that the Arabs are better than we Jews is all a fiction.

The courts are open for counter-claims but the presumption that there is private land when perhaps not and certainly never registered seems to lead the theme rather than highlight the Jewish primacy.

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