Israel's government publicity machine, the hasbara, has made much of the closure of the Jewish-Israeli illegal settlement of Evyatar in the occupied West Bank. Fifty families were obliged to vacate the land and properties. The message was that Israel obeys the law as the occupation was illegal under Israel's own law. But will the land be returned to the Palestinian people?
Not quite.
It will be re-classified as “state land”. The illegal settlers leave but the houses remain and the army makes it a military post.
However, other settlements declared under international law are deemed to be legal. Israel legalises them by an interpretation of old Ottoman law that if the land was not cultivated for several years in a row it would become the property of the state.
Israel uses the Absentee Property Law to claim the lands it forced the Palestinians to abandon in the 1948 and 1967 wars. It also deploys a range of tactics to declare all unregistered lands – left out by the Ottoman and British occupiers and believed to be two-thirds of the West Bank – as possible “state” land. Palestinian lands are also confiscated in the name of archaeological and tourism purposes.
Israel grants tax benefits to settlers to build homes and to Israeli industries to set up shop in these territories. The Israeli state also encourages Jews to establish agricultural farms and enables the extensive takeover of Palestinian farmland and pastureland.
In 1968 Israel put the land registration process on hold, allowing it to label any unregistered land as state land. Israeli law allows the Israeli state to confiscate private land for Palestinian public necessities, which is then passed on for settler infrastructure. Israel uses this law to seize private land for building segregated roads to connect the settlements.
Israel’s settler-colonial policy has a clear goal: maximum land with minimum Palestinian people. Israel boxes in Palestinian communities – refusing to accommodate their natural population growth – not just in the West Bank but also in Palestinian towns and villages inside Israel.
The Israeli state control 93 percent of all land, including in East Jerusalem, and has delegated the task of managing these lands to a state agency – the Israel Land Authority. But this body is dominated by the Jewish National Fund whose mandate is to develop land for Jews and not any other segment of the population. While Palestinians make up 21 percent of Israel’s population, less than 3 percent of land falls under the jurisdiction of Palestinian municipalities.
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