[News] Palestine: Today is Land Day

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 11:27:10 -0500
AL-AWDA-News] Reflections on the Land Day


On 30 March 2004, Palestinians living in the areas occupied in 1948 held a 
general strike and demonstrated against an upsurge of land 
confiscations.  The demonstrations were peaceful; nevertheless, six young 
Palestinians were shot dead by the Israeli army.



Ever since, the Land Day was commemorated annually as a symbol of 
Palestinian resistance to the combined Imperialist-Zionist project in 
Palestine.  This project led to the dispossession of the Palestinian people 
from their lands, which represented the backbone of the their 
agricultural-based economy.  Moreover, the project led to the destruction 
of the Palestinian society and ethnically cleansed the land from more than 
half of its population who became refugees living in refugee camps under 
miserable and appalling conditions.



In his Der Judenstaat, which was published in 1896, Herzl outlined the 
overall framework for the creation of a Jewish State. The First Zionist 
Congress, which was held in 1897, adopted the strategy proposed in Der 
Judenstaat.  This strategy called for "Land Redemption" and "Transfer" and 
was implemented under the leadership of a number of Zionist leaders that 
included, among others, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Begin, Rabin and Sharon.



"Land Redemption" meant dispossessing the Palestinians from their land and 
"Transfer" meant ethnic cleansing of the land from its indigenous 
population.  The whole project, however, could never had been possible 
without a partnership agreement with the Western Imperialist powers for the 
mutual benefit of both parties.  This partnership was reflected in the 
Balfour Declaration issued by "Great" Britain on November 2, 1917 promising 
support for a "Jewish National Home in Palestine".



The Zionist Organization established two central agencies for the purpose 
of land acquisition: the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which was founded in 
1901, and the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC), which was founded 
in 1908 to purchase land for the JNF.  An overseas fundraising mechanism, 
known as Keren Hayesod, was also established.  The PLDC efforts were 
cardinal in the founding of Tel Aviv and the purchase of lands in Haifa and 
Jerusalem, where Jewish neighborhoods were established.



Following the entry of the allied forces into Jerusalem on 9 December 1917 
led by General Allenby, a British military administration was established 
in Palestine.  Constrained by the rules of war, the military administration 
had to maintain the status quo in Palestine and accordingly closed the Land 
Registry Offices in November 1918.  Among the first actions of the British 
civil administration in 1920 was a new Land Transfer Ordinance in 
September.  The effect of this law was to facilitate the purchase of land 
by the Jews.  The Land Registry Offices were reopened in October, 
permitting transfer of ownership.  A new system of land titles was 
introduced to make it easier, faster, and less costly for the Zionists to 
acquire land.  The Land Transfer Ordinance ostensibly intended to protect 
tenant-cultivators from eviction by landlords.  It had in fact the opposite 
effect mainly because absentee landlords owned most of the large tracts of 
land.  Whereas relations between landowner and tenant had, until then, had 
been relatively good, the new law gave the tenant the impression 
(encouraged by Zionist land brokers) that he no longer needed to pay the 
rent, since the law gave him certain "tenancy rights" under ambiguously 
worded provisions.  The landowner, placed in the unenviable position of 
owning land but realizing little return from it, and burdened with 
taxation, was pushed into a difficult situation.  The Zionist land-broker 
would then step in, offer to buy the land and rid the landowner of his 
troubles.  The Land Transfer Ordinance was later judged to have been a 
contributory cause of the May 1921 riots.  (Sami Hadawi, Zionism and the 
Land of Palestine, pp. 5-6. Zionism and the Lands of Palestine was a paper 
prepared and delivered as a speech in an International Symposium on 
"Zionism and Racism" convened in Tripoli, Libya, during the period 24 – 28 
July 1976.  The speeches were edited by Walter Lehn and published in book 
form.)



As leadership of the imperialist powers shifted from Britain to the U.S. 
during WWII, a national conference of American Zionists was held at the 
Biltmore Hotel in New York under the leadership of Nahum Goldmann and Meyer 
Weisgal from 9 to 11 May 1942.  Ben-Gurion used the conference as platform 
to present his political program, which was reflected in the resolutions 
adopted by the conference.  These resolutions laid down the Zionist demands 
after victory in the war against Germany, which included the creation of a 
Jewish State in Palestine.  Ben-Gurion had no doubt that the Biltmore 
Program would "replace the one adopted in Basle
and would, after the war, 
become the objective of the Jewish people".  (The complete text of the 
Biltmore Program was reproduced in Walid Khalidi, From Heavens to Conquest, 
pp. 495-497.  See also Michael Bar-Zohar, pp. 107-108)



When the British Mandate expired in 1948, the country had 277 Jewish rural 
settlements (15 villages, 99 moshavim, 159 kibbutzim, and 4 others).  Their 
111,000 inhabitants accounted for nearly 20% of the Jewish 
population.  (Centenary of Zionism, 1897 - 1997, "The Redeemers of the Land")



The total land acquired by the Jews in Palestine by 1948 was less than 2 
million donums (no more than 8% of the total land of Palestine).  After the 
creation of the Jewish State in 1948, Israel began systematic plunder of 
Palestinian land in different ways.  The "Absentees Property Law" of 1950, 
the "Land Requisition Law" of 1953, the "Defence Emergency Regulations" 
passed by the British in 1945, and the "Emergency Regulations" introduced 
by Israel in 1949 were all used to expropriate Palestinian Arab lands.



The Absentees Property Law stated that any body that was not present 
directly before, during or after the war of 1948 was defined as an absentee 
and his/her land as surrendered.  Thus it was confiscated.  The Land 
Requisition Law "legalized" the stealing of Arab lands.  By such measures, 
Palestinian Arabs were "legally" deprived of their lands and those 
displaced have been prevented from returning.



A study issued in April 1949 by the Knesset's Finance Committee admitted 
that the presence of so much Arab property put "the fighting and victorious 
community before serious material temptation".  Not only were thousands of 
landholdings seized and occupied but thousands more orchards and vineyards 
were either uprooted or neglected irreparably by Israelis who wished to use 
the land for Jewish settlement.  The land of all Palestinian refugees was 
subject to confiscation, as well as the property of 30,000 Israeli Arabs 
who were classified as "internal present-absentees".  Many of these people 
had fled only a short distance from their homes or had been absent for only 
a few days.  Even though they had never left Palestinian territory and were 
considered citizens of Israel, their land was subject to 
confiscation.  Many other "Israeli Arabs" lost their land because they 
could not prove their ownership.  Numerous records had been destroyed in 
the chaos of war and the transition from British to Israeli 
administration.  There were many cases where Arab residents of Israel lost 
property that had been in their family for generations.



The Arab Knesset members asserted that the government had no right to seize 
the property of legal residents of the country who carried Israeli identity 
cards.  Even Israeli High Court of Justice ruled in several cases that the 
government lacked the slightest pretext to seize property of many 
Arabs.  Eventually the government offered monetary compensation for the 
land of Israeli Arabs but it amounted to a tiny fraction of its real 
value.  Most Israeli Arabs refused to accept the insulting pittance.



Much larger in extent, however, were the lands of the over 750,000 
Palestinian "refugees" who were expelled from the country.  Since the 
Israeli government had no intention of ever allowing any substantial 
repatriation of the refugees, much of this land was soon given outright to 
those who had occupied it during the war.  Other portions were given to 
many of the thousands of Jewish immigrants who were flooding the 
country.  Indeed by 1953, about a third of Israelis lived on property 
stolen from the Palestinians.  (Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian 
Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their 
Homeland.  London/Boston: 1987, pp. 195 - 198)



An Agricultural Settlement Law was passed in Israel in 1967, which included 
restrictions on the use of agricultural land and of water.  The intent of 
this law was to prevent any non-Jew from leasing or holding any rights in 
national lands, including those owned by the JNF.  This law and similar 
restrictive and discriminatory policies adopted by the state from the JNF 
apply to over 90% of the lands in pre-1967 Israel.



Following the 1967 war, Israel applied the same laws which were used in 
1948 - Absentees Property Law, Land Requisition Law, and Emergency 
Regulations - to "confiscate" Palestinian Arab lands in the newly conquered 
territories, the West Bank and Gaza.



This systematic and continuous plunder of Palestinian lands was intolerable 
and led to the Land Day, which is being commemorated today.



Nizar Sakhnini, 30 March 2004


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