This is a factual question, and I ask everybody’s forbearance. In another board, I got a little too excited and claimed that Israel was built upon stolen land. This caused much excitement. So much in fact I allowed that thread of the argument to drop. It seemed to push a very hot button with some members and that was more than I wanted to do. I regret it.
On the other hand, things have settled down now and I have been called to explain my earlier claim, which I think is correct.
So again, let us all remain calm.
“Can anyone here describe the mechanism used by Israel to transfer huge gobs of land from Arab land-owners to Jewish ones?”
Wiki-cites would be most welcome.
As I understand it …
Land title in that neck of the woods can be very convoluted, with records going back to the Ottomans and before.
The Jewish Agency used a number of techniques to get land for Jewish settlers. While many or not most were moral, I am proposing some were not.
Usually, a conquering army does not affect land title. When Texas became independent, land title did not change. Right? When the Germans took France, nobody lost their farm to a German family? (Poland was of course different.)
3a. OK, so the Israelis took your little town, how did a Jewish family get title to your or your neighbor’s farm? Was it declared vacant? What is seized for taxes?
Land use law in Israel may use legal forms, but they are forms that have historically favored one side over the other. Of course these laws were made by the Israelis.
A quick trip to Wiki did not help. I admit I might be wrong, and am willing to be educated. In any case, I ask your help in winning the argument I am having elsewhere, and hope can avoid spreading the argument here.
Can’t help you with the OP, but I recall Hitler used Marxism to justify stealing land in WWII. He argued that the official state policy of the Soviet Union prohibited private ownership and said that everything in the country was communally owned. So Hitler said that the Germans could legally take anything they wanted in the Soviet Union because the laws of war only protected private property and according to the Soviets’ own statements, there was no private property in the USSR.
That is a side point, but (for me) a useful one. How did the Israeli handling of private property in conquered territory differ from how other countries behave in wartime?
I have to go to work. I will be back later in the day. Thank you all.
I can’t help much with the Israelis but I used to live in Larnaca Cyprus. Which had a revolt/rebellion/civil war in the '70s. The populace fled to whichever side of the island was safe for them, abandoning their homes and farms.
Abandoned farms and houses were simply occupied and kept by whoever got there first and had the firepower to hold onto it. Each group then applied to their new government to get title to the land. I suspect that this is what the Israelis did when they drove off the Palestinians.
I have some friends that have just retired, bought property, and built a house in a beautiful coastal area in North Cyprus. They bought the land from a Turkish-Cypriot farmer that had owned the land for 30+ years and whose title deed came from Turkey. It turns out that the land had been seized by the Turks in the '70s.
Oddly and horribly, I met the descendants of the original Greek-Cypriot owners here in Saudi and was innocently jabbering about the cool house my friends had built. I had no idea it was these people’s ancestral lands. It put quite a damper on the conversation. :smack:
I believe the legal theory on which most land previously owned by Palestinians was transferred to Israelis was the theory of abandonment. Israelis could file a claim only on land that had been abandoned by its Arab owners. From what I can recall of David Shipler’s Arab and Jew, at least 70,000 Arabs “abandoned” the land at gunpoint, being driven out by the Palmach and Haganah, but nearly a million more fled the land at Egyptian and Syrian urging, long before any Israeli soldiers came anywhere near them. Then also, a large number of Arabs neither left nor were forced out, and still own their lands; I don’t know how many there were in 1948, but their descendants in modern Israel number nearly a million. That’s why I say the theory was “abandonment,” because those Arabs that did not leave Israel willingly or at gunpoint generally still own their land.
I heard a brief report on NPR recently about Israel beginning to take land away from Bedouins in the Negev Desert. This is something distinct from what happened in 1948, and I couldn’t discern from the report what justification the Israelis offered for taking this land. By pure speculation, I would guess this is the Israeli government taking advantage of the fact that a society long on tradition and short on literacy probably just has a traditional claim to the land that goes back centuries or millennia, but which isn’t formalized on paper anywhere.
Gfactor, I think that’s a little different from the question Paul was asking. The West Bank isn’t part of Israel, by Israeli law or any other. Of the land Israel occupied in 1967, the only territory it annexed was the Golan Heights. I believe Paul was asking specifically about private Arab lands being claimed by Jews in Israel.
I recall reading back in the '90s, during the early days of the Palestinian Authority, Arafat declaring the private sale of West Bank and Gaza Strip land to Jews illegal (!). I wonder if Peace Now’s calculation of the percentage of Israeli settlements built on privately owned Palestinian land includes land sold to the Israelis in violation of that order. And I don’t know how long that order was in effect, or even if Arafat had the legal authority to issue it.
Essentially, except that very little property was taken by individuals: most of it was seized by the state and eventually sold off. Remember, the vast majority of Jewish combatants in the 1947-1949 war served in one of the militias (most of them in the Haganna, which comprised of something like 80% of the fighting force) and were in no position to take land for themselves.
Another thing that most people forget is that much - even most - of the land in this country has always been state-owned. It was originally Turkish land, then British, then Israeli. The Israeli government often unfreezes it for development, but echnically, it’s not “taken” from anyone. You should bear in mind, then, that when some people say that Israel is stealing Arab lands, they actually mean that the Israeli govm’t is unsing lands that should be controlled by an Arab government, as the Israeli government, to them, is illegitimate.
I went into Cyprus during the Turkish invasion to get British service families out of danger
and evacuate.
What I saw there was the Greek Cypriots were mostly acting in the same way to the Turkish Cypriots as the Serbs were later to act against the ethnic minorities in the former Yugoslavia .
We went up to a former T.C. village in the Troudos mountains and there was totally no sign of life,plenty of blood stains and massive amounts of bullet scars in building walls .
I have no sympathy whatsoever for the G.C.s they were murderers and to dateI have never seen any sign of remorse from them for what they did.
As to Israel I think that technically they have no legal right to the lands they live in but when the PLO started murdering innocent Europeans to promote their cause they lost any rights to anything.
Having been there it seems to me that the Palestinians only understand one thing ,the man with the gun is in charge,when they’re not murdering old ladies out shopping in Israel they’re murdering each other (In between stealing for themselves as much aid cash as possible)
Danimal, my understanding is that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War rearranged the map of the Middle East. The Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank, and Jerusalem became Israeli occupied territories. The West Bank contained 750,00 Arabs. In 1977, ten years after the Six Day War, Menachem Begin insisted that the West Bank contained the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria and encouraged Israeli settlement. I suppose it can be said the West Bank was never officially annexed, but Israelis considered it their land.
The Arab-Israeli Wars and Israeli occupied lands did result in refugees and abandoned Arab property which the Israelis considered also rightfully theirs to settle. The Israeli government essentially seized the land and provided grants to settlers to build homes. Six Day War
British policy tried to satisfy all claims to the land. The 1916 Hussein-McMahon agreement promised the recognition of an Arab state in exchange for the Arabs help fighting the Turks. In 1917, the British wanted Jewish aid with the Turkish rebellions, so Britain also promised a national home for the Jews in the Balfour Declaration. The Balfour was endorsed by the League of Nations. To satisfy the Arabs, Britain transferred a stretch of land in eastern Palestine to the Emirate of Trans-Jordon and in 1939 issued the White Papers which expressed the British position of limiting the Jewish population in Palestine and the transfer of land to the Jews. I am not sure that the Jews ever bought land. The British transferred land to the Arabs and the Jews.
Ultimately, the destruction of European Jews in WWII ushered in the creation of Israel as a matter of Jewish survival.
**A few of the dates from my book source are not the same as wiki. **
Lust4Life
Actually, I agree about the Greek Cypriots. They are still acting crazy over that whole thing. I lived there (briefly) in the late '80s and it was always a PITA to drive across the border. We had the Cypriot CIA or whatever they call it trash our offices for calling Istanbul, lots of things. Even the Turkish villages selling seafood were harassed in the newspapers and accused of selling radioactive shrimp. (Seriously, no kidding! :smack: ) Flying from Larnaca to Istanbul was quite a chore. I went through Athens once, where they treated me like I had leprosy.
I can’t really address the Israeli / Palestinian thing as I avoid it. I will say that over the years the automatic, unthinking support I used to have for Israel has diminished. Neither side is as lily-pure and put upon by the other side as they would have you believe.
Nearly every successful group swiped their land from someone or (if you get nutty enough about animal rights) something with a more “original” claim to title.
The Jews, in particular, own the book of Joshua which is very clear (and very graphic) about how the Jews stole the land from its previous owners, slaughtering them in the process.
An example cite:
*“The Book mentions 31 kings defeated (12:24)… and after every battle, the city and everyone in it he put to the sword, as ordered by the Lord” * http://biblia.com/jesusbible/joshua.htm
Basically pretty much a holocaust deal with total extermination of conquered men, women and children.
As a member of a conquering group myself, I am delighted at my ancestors’ success even though I think civilization has evolved to where such shenanigans are no longer appropriate. The clear lesson seems to be that if you are going to swipe, you need to wipe out the previous owners if you want to avoid hard feelings.
As an aside, see the current National Geographic for a perspective on some of the modern controversy, with particular reference to Bethlehem.
I think it’s pretty clear that we’re talking about two seperate issues; national sovereignty of territory and private ownership of individual pieces of real estate. The first issue has been debated many times in regards to Israel. But the OP is asking about the second issue. Paul isn’t asking about Israel taking the West Bank from Jordan, he’s talking about Sol owning a field that used to belong to Ahmed.
Aren’t you overlooking the simple one: ownership by right of conquest?
But I’d suggest a more diplomatic response: something along the lines of, “Given the upset caused last time around, I’d really rather drop the matter.”
Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory*, Advisory Opinion of 9 July 2004, International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/131/1671.pdf (Emphasis added.)