Israel Returns Just .7% of Seized ‘Military’ Land to Palestinians
Fair Play? Israel seizes Palestinian land on the West Bank on the pretext of it being for ?military needs.? It then gives it to private owners, almost exclusively Jewish settlers. Image by haaretz
Over the past 33 years Israel’s Civil Administration has allocated less than one percent of state land in the West Bank to Palestinians, compared to 39 percent to settlers, according to the agency’s own documents submitted to the High Court of Justice.
The West Bank includes 1.3 million dunams (approximately 325,000 acres) of “state land,” most of which is allocated to Jewish settlements.
The declared policy of the previous Netanyahu government was to remove Jewish construction from private Palestinian land in the West Bank and to approve all construction on state lands.
According to the classification of the Civil Administration, a small amount of “state land” was registered with the Jordanian authorities until 1967. But most declared “state land” was declared as such after 1979.
The need for such a declaration emerged in October 1979, when the High Court struck down as unconstitutional the state’s practice of seizing Palestinian land, ostensibly for “military needs” but in practice in order to establish Jewish settlements.
For more, go to Haaretz
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
