New laws to confiscate Arab land smacks of apartheid
Palestine, Politics, 9/3/1997

Israel has introduced a series of new decisions and regulations that are aimed at taking over more Arab land in the occupied West Bank as well as inside Israel itself. The measures, including a significant increase in Green Patrols that monitor Arab activities in cultivated lands, are meant to limit access to those lands by Palestinians.

The measures, announced Tuesday night, also include speedy legal procedures against alleged illegal construction in Arab sectors and declaring vast areas of lands as closed military training zones, entrance to which will be strictly forbidden to Palestinians. The measures also aim at restricting access to lands to Palestinians living inside Israel as well.

As part of the new measures taken by the prime minister's office, the government decided to reactivate the ministerial committee for Jewish settlements, which has not held any meetings since Benjamin Netanyahu took office in June last year. The committee's job will be to centralize efforts by various Jewish bodies to set up new Jewish farms and cultivated areas with the aim of aborting any attempts by Arabs to enter those lands.

The plan, worked out by Netanyahu's bureau chief, Avigdor Lieberman, was designed to improve on a former one implemented by ex-housing minister Ariel Sharon a few years ago when the Likud was in power under Yitzhak Shamir. At the time, Sharon suggested a cluster of new settlements be built across the so-called Green Line, the pre-1967 borders, on the West Bank where seven settlements were erected and given the name of Kochav Yair. Lieberman told reporters his plan aims to allow a small number of Jews to take over vast areas of lands, unlike the Sharon plan which meant making a small area of land highly populated by Jews.

Dr. Azmi Bishara, head of the National Democratic Party in Israel, said the plan "is but a racist scheme which proves that Lieberman still lives in the days of apartheid." He said the Israeli government, by means of the new plan, has allowed itself the right to confiscate vast areas of lands from their Arab owners, to declare them closed zones and then to use them for building housing projects for Jews. "When Arabs want to invest in their own land, the state claims they are stealing land which is not theirs, but when Jews take over Arab land, the state calls that a legitimate construction," he said.

Israeli laws in general state that it is the government's right to declare as public property any area of land whose owner is unknown. Under this article, thousands of dunums of Arab land, whose owners fled their country after the 1948 war, had become of "ambiguous ownership" and as such became a target for Israeli confiscation. According to recent statistics, more than half the total area of the West Bank is considered "public property" which is under Israel's direct control. Israeli press reports have recently spoken of an intention within the prime minister's office to declare additional hundreds of dunums of lands in the West Bank as public property in order to pave the way for easy access to Jewish settlers to come in and build new settlements.

Previous Stories:
  Netanyahu won't freeze settlements   (9/2/1997)
  The Palestinian conference and Arafat   (8/30/1997)

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