Saturday, February 21, 2009

Protecting National Land

Spotted this advert:



and the short translation:


Tens of thousands of dunams of land pass into Arab hands yearly

Tens of Arab and pro-Arab groups work to achieve the Partition program

Tens of millions of dollars from Arab countries and the EU are poured into the objective of having Arabs take control of state lands

Contribute to the National Land Protection Trust

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, I'm sorry to seem to be oposed to you personally but:

"Tens of millions of dollars from Arab countries and the EU are poured into the objective of having Arabs take control of state lands"

Scuse me but did they not own the land before 1944?

All sympathy and all but does not a thief stolen from still remain a thief?

Anonymous said...

Please Japan, you know it. Save America from that ... you know what, please.

YMedad said...

"did they not own the land before 1944?"

Actually, no, they didn't. Can you imagine that?

Let me bring you things I found as I can't rewrite all the history:

1)
“Israel usurped all of Palestine in 1948.”

FACT
Nearly 80 percent of what was the historic land of Palestine and the Jewish National Home, as defined by the League of Nations, was severed by the British in 1921 and allocated to what became Transjordan. Jewish settlement there was barred. The UN partitioned the remaining 20-odd percent of Palestine into two states. With Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank in 1950, and Egypt's control of Gaza, Arabs controlled more than 80 percent of the territory of the Mandate, while the Jewish State held a bare 17.5 percent.


2)"The majority of the population in Palestine was Arab; therefore, a unitary Arab state should have been created.”

At the time of the 1947 partition resolution, the Arabs did have a majority in western Palestine as a whole — 1.2 million Arabs versus 600,000 Jews.7 But the Jews were a majority in the area allotted to them by the resolution and in Jerusalem.

Prior to the Mandate in 1922, Palestine’s Arab population had been declining. Afterward, Arabs began to come from all the surrounding countries. In addition, the Arab population grew exponentially as Jewish settlers improved the quality of health conditions in Palestine.

The decision to partition Palestine was not determined solely by demographics; it was based on the conclusion that the territorial claims of Jews and Arabs were irreconcilable, and that the most logical compromise was the creation of two states. Ironically, that same year, 1947, the Arab members of the United Nations supported the partition of the Indian sub-continent and the creation of the new, predominantly Muslim state of Pakistan.

3)
The simple "land" fact was that most Arabs were tenant farmers on lands they did not own and Jews made legal purchases of same.

4)
and

In 1948 the Israeli Government took over all British Government Lands in the area of Palestine which it controlled.37  These State Lands included mawāt, matrūk maḥmiyya, and abandoned mīrī, and represented about 70% of all Israeli-controlled Palestine.38  The mawāt lands, which accounted for over half of the State lands, had been (as of 1931) supporting 7,869 landowners and 2,508 tenants.39  Although previously reckoned as owners of the land "by the act of possession"40 these farmers had no title-deeds and therefore had little legal claim to the land. As noted above, matrūk lands were sometimes registered in the name of Mandate officials; these now become State Lands as well. Finally, "security" orders were used to "temporarily" clear certain lands of inhabitants; and after a specified time such lands were then declared uncultivated (maḥlūl), thereby transferring full legal title to the State.41  In these ways antagonisms between Jews and Arabs — which continue to a great degree to center on the issue of land — were exacerbated.

The Ottoman Land Codes and Laws of 1858 and 1859, then, were issued in order to assure state control over the lands of Palestine and to increase state revenues from those lands. For a variety of reasons much of the cultivated or occupied land was never registered or was registered in the name of someone other than the individual or collective that actually worked it. The resulting concentration of land ownership and the confusion as to legitimate title contributed significantly to the development of antagonism and ill-will between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and Israel.

37 Eisenman,(Robert H. Eisenman, Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel: A History of the Survival of Tanzimat and Sharī`a in the British Mandate and the Jewish State, (Leiden: E.J. Brill) 1978), p. 235.


38 Moshe Auman, Land Ownership in Palestine 1880-1948, Third Revised Edition, (Jerusalem: Israel Academic Committee on the Middle East) 1976, p. 22.

39 Granott,(Abraham Granott, The Land System in Palestine — History and Structure, translated by M. Simon, (London) 1952) p. 106.

40 Granott, 1952, p. 106.

41 Jiryis, 1976, p. 10. Also cf. J. L. Ryan, "Refugees within Israel: The Case of the Villagers of Kafr Bir`im and Iqrit," Journal of Palestine Studies, 2iv (1973), pp. 55-81. Other provisions of Ottoman and Mandate law, as well as other devices, were used to disposses Arab inhabitants of Palestine before and since 1948.

and we can add a general comment:

"As Khalidi wrote, "in a period of a few years, Ottomanism as an ideology went from being one of the primary sources of identification for Palestinians, to having no apparent impact at all". Then came the turn of the Syrian identity that did not last long either. When the French crushed the two-year-old independent Syrian state in 1920, the elite of the Palestinian Arabs decided to change orientation again. Khalidi quotes the nationalist leader Musa Kazim Pasa al-Husayni, who said, "Now, after the recent events in Damascus, we have to effect a complete change in our plans here. Southern Syria no longer exists. We must defend Palestine". "