Ottoman land ownership law in
Palestine-Israel
It is time to learn the facts
about Judea and Samaria
To truly understand the
status of this territory we have to first differentiate between the personal
and the national. The recent furor surrounding the government’s decision to
declare nearly 1,000 acres at Gvaot in Gush Etzion “State Land
For many, if not most, around
the world, every inch of land beyond the 1949 armistice lines is automatically
Palestinian; a display of unfamiliarity with history and international law.
To truly understand the
status of this territory we have to first differentiate between the personal
and the national.
Of course there is land
privately owned by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria West Bank ” in seeming deference to the Jordanian occupation, which invented the
term as juxtaposition to its eastern bank. These areas, like privately owned
territory anywhere in the world, cannot be touched unless there is very
pressing reason for a government or sovereign power to do so. These areas,
according to Ottoman and British records, constitute no more than a few percent
of the total area, meaning the vast majority is not privately owned.
However, to contend that
these territories are “Palestinian” on a national level is problematic. To
claim an area belongs to a particular nation requires the territory to have
belonged to that people, where they held some sort of sovereignty that was
broadly recognized.
All of these criteria have
been met historically by the Jewish people, and none by the Palestinians.
In fact, the Jewish people
were provided with national rights in these territories not just by dint of
history and past sovereignty, but also by residual legal rights contained in
the League of Nations Mandate, which were never canceled and are preserved by
the UN Charter, under Article 80 – the famous “Palestine Clause,” that was
drafted, in part, to guarantee continuity with respect to Jewish rights from
the League of Nations.
For the past almost 2,000
years, since the destruction of Jewish sovereignty and expulsion of most of its
indigenous people, it remained an occupied and colonized outpost in the
territory of many global and regional empires.
The Ottomans were the most
recent to officially apportion the territory, in what they referred to as
Ottoman Syria, which today incorporates modern-day Israel, Syria, Jordan and
stretching into Iraq. Before The Ottoman Land Code of 1858, land had largely
been owned or passed on by word of mouth, custom or tradition. Under the
Ottomans of the 19th century, land was apportioned into three main categories:
Mulk, Miri and Mawat.
Mulk was the only territory
that was privately owned in the common sense of the term, and as stated before,
was only a minimal part of the whole territory, much of it owned by Jews, who
were given the right to own land under reforms.
Miri was land owned by the
sovereign, and individuals could purchase a deed to cultivate this land and pay
a tithe to the government. Ownership could be transferred only with the
approval of the state. Miri rights could be transferred to heirs, and the land
could be sub-let to tenants. In other words, a similar arrangement to a tenant
in an apartment or house as having rights in the property, but not to the
property.
Finally, Mawat was state or
unclaimed land, not owned by private individuals nor largely cultivated. These
areas made up almost two-thirds of all territory.
The area recently declared “State Land
Many claims to the territory
suddenly arose during the course of the investigation, but all were proven to
be unfounded on the basis of land laws.
Interestingly, it should be
clearly understood by those who deem Judea and Samaria “occupied territory”
that according to international law the occupying power must use the pre-existing
land laws as a basis for claims, exactly as Israel has done in this case, even
though Israel’s official position is that it does not see itself de jure as an
occupying power in the legal sense of the term.
None of these facts are even
alluded to in the many reports surrounding the government’s actions in Gvaot.
This is deeply unjust and a semblance of the relevant background, history and
facts would provide the necessary context for what has been converted into an
international incident where none should exist.
I frequently take foreign
visitors and officials on a tour of Efrat and Gush Etzion and am amazed at the
well-meaning ignorance and preconceived positions that many, even friends of Israel Judea
and Samaria Samaria
I welcome and even challenge
anyone and everyone to come and see the reality for themselves and learn the
history and context of the region, if only for the sake of intellectual
honesty. No one ever lost out through intellectual curiosity, and I am certain
that we can lessen the next furor and international incident if a greater
number of people can be made more familiar with the facts of history.
We should be
upfront here about the ‘history’ or ‘historicity’ of Israel/Palestine/Jordan
1. In 1948, Jordan
attacked the nascent Jewish State of Israel in an UNPROVOKED attack which was
coordinated with other members of the Arab League … during the war whose aim
was NOT TO CREATE ANOTHER ARAB/MUSLIM STATE but rather to ‘erase’ ‘eradicate’ ‘murder’
as defined in this quote from Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, the Arab League’s
Secretary-General: “… this will be a war of extermination and momentous
massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader
wars.”
2. The
Arab/Muslims armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan (Iraq &
various Jihadis as well) didn’t expect anything but to divide the territories
between themselves and by joining in “[the war] will be an opportunity for vast
plunder …” quoted by Akhbar al-Yom’s editor Mustafa Amin from the
aforementioned Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha
3. The war and
invasion created the Arab/Muslim Refugee Issue …
4.
Transjordan/Jordan ANNEXED the territories they conquered in the war and ruled
over the population … they should be considered JORDANIAN CITIZENS!
5. After 1967 … Jordan Egypt Syria Iraq West Bank ’ and subsequently renouncing its prior annexation
…
Local Arabs is the description of the Arabs in what was formerly known as the region of Palestine, which is the Land of Israel.
ReplyDeleteIt is an insult and it is promoting the perpetration of a fraud by calling the local Arabs nothing else than local Arabs. Prior to the mid sixties they were called Arabs all of a sudden they woke up one morning and decided in order to promote their fraud and deception to assume the title the Jews had since the Romans renamed the Land of Israel Palestine and Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina.
YJ Draiman
There will never be a second Arab-Palestinian State West of the Jordan River; they have Jordan which is Jewish territory.
If the U.S. was conquered by various nations over a thousand years plus and than some outside forces helped Americans defeat the occupiers and regain its sovereignty and set up the American U.S. government again, would you consider the Americans as occupiers.
I will take it a step further. Many Americans who were displaced by the occupying forces in America were forced out of their homes and returned to the U.S., would you consider them occupiers or people returning to their homes.
If Mexico which had numerous wars and battles with the U.S. decided to fire thousands of rockets against the U.S., would you tolerate it or you would demand your country respond with extreme force at all costs, no holds barred and stop this rockets and terror attacks against Americans and women and children.
YJ Draiman
The Arabs in The Land of Israel are illegal squatters. Illegal intrusion. Illegal Trespass
And what of “Arab nationalism”? At that time, no one had heard of a “Palestine Arab people”; the term was not invented until after 1964, entirely for political reasons. The British Peace Handbook No. 60, published in 1918, declared that “the people west of the Jordan are not Arabs, but only Arab speaking... In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race...they (the Arabs of Palestine) have little if any national sentiment...they hide their weapons at the call of patriotism.” The idea that Palestine should be Arab was never even contemplated. On the contrary, the attitude of the Arabs to the Jewish National Movement was one of almost unanimous approval. In 1906, Farid Kassab, a famous Syrian author, expressed the view uniformly held by the Arabs: “The Jews of the Orient are at home. This land is their only fatherland. They don’t know any other.” A year later, Dr. Moses Gaster reported that he had “held conversations with some of the leading sheiks, and they all expressed pleasure at the advent of the Jews, for they considered that with them had come ‘barakat’ – blessing, since the rain came in due season.”
ReplyDeleteThroughout Arabia, the chiefs were for the most part, distinctly pro-Zionist, as were the Palestinian peasantry, who were delighted at the benefits that Jewish immigration was bringing them. The Muslim religious leader, the Mufti, was openly friendly, even taking a prominent part in the ceremony of laying the foundation stone of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Emir Hussein of the Hejaz replied “with an expression of goodwill towards a kindred Semitic race”, when the Balfour Declaration was communicated to him in 1918, and his son Feisal, acting officially for the Arab movement, wrote on March 3, 1919:
We Arabs look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, insofar as we are concerned, to help them through. We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.