The Waste Land

By Melanie Phillips
www.melaniephillips.com

Alex Safian of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, shreds the claim by Peace Now that 40% of Israeli West Bank settlements were built on Palestinian-owned land and not, as Israel claims, on public land. Safian shows that the Peace Now claim is based on information which is unsourced and uncheckable and which contains previously acknowledged cartological errors - and, most fundamental of all, that it makes misleading or downright false claims about the legal status of the land, and thus misreprents publicly owned land as private property:

For the rights in such land, whether or not it is registered, are in no way equivalent to what would be commonly called private property. Rather, it is more a form of feudal tenancy, as explained by the previously mentioned Survey:

'The land tenures of Ottoman law consist of various modes of user the features of which are set out in the Ottoman Land Code. Most of the land [in Palestine] is held under two distinct tenures commonly referred to as mulk and miri. Mulk means "property." The tenure called mulk is a private ownership tenure. Land so owned may be called "allodial" land. It is held in absolute ownership. The holder has almost unfettered freedom in regard to its use and disposition. Miri is a conditional usufruct tenure of land held by grant from the state. The holder or possessor is a usufructury whose tenure resembles a leasehold, subject to certain limitations on the use and disposition of the land and to the payment of certain fees.' (p225-226)

That is, what Peace Now is calling 'private Palestine land' is under the Ottoman Code at best miri land, and it is therefore not privately owned. It is rather land in which a person is granted by the state a limited right of use (whence the term usufruct). And contrary to Peace Now, the land remains the property of the state, and therefore in no way does it revert to the state only if there is a failure to cultivate. Miri land - the land of the Emir, or equivalently, of the sovereign - is state land, period. In addition, regarding the West Bank, there is under the Ottoman Code another very important category of land known as mewat, or 'dead land,' which was deceptively unmentioned by Peace Now. Mewat land, according to the Survey is:

'. unallocated or waste areas situated beyond the confines of inhabited regions which can only be rendered cultivable by special effort. Nowadays, the development of "waste" land without prior leave from the State is legally a trespass. The conclusion is that mewat should have no significance and should be deemed undeveloped "vacant land" proper which cannot be possessed except by allocation from the State.' (p 233)

This category is important, since, as pointed out by a different British Mandate source:

'Practically all the unoccupied land of Palestine is mewat and cannot be occupied without the permission of the Government.' (Palestine and Transjordan, p 210; Great Britain, Naval Intelligence Division, 1943).

The same source offers a further definition of mewat land:

'Mewat is ownerless land, at a minimum distance of a mile and a half from the nearest inhabited town or village. Another system of measurement is, sufficiently distant from such a town of village that the voice of a man
shouting there cannot be heard.' (p 210)

That is, much of what Peace Now is terming 'private Palestinian land' is in fact state land because it is mewat, and has been considered so for generations. The land on which Ma'ale Adumim was built, for example, was more than a mile and a half from the built up area of the closest Arab village, Al 'Ayzariyah; the land was also rocky and on a ridge, and had therefore never been inhabited or cultivated. It was therefore clearly mewat land which belonged to the state and not to any private owners.

This unmasking of the Peace Now claim is particularly important, since it is a core belief of the Israel-bashers (whom Peace Now has done so much to equip) that the Jews stole Palestinian-owned land in the disputed territories. It isn't true - just like the related claim that the territories in general belonged to the Palestinians until Israel occupied them in 1967 isn't true either. They never belonged to them: they were rather a kind of legal no man's land, owned by the British under the Mandate and then illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt until 1967 when Israel conquered them and retained them in self-defence, as it is entitled to do under international law, pending the ending of the war of annihilation being waged against it.

Which has never happened.