With the recent construction of the fence in the Jerusalem region, Palestinian landholders from Bethlehem and Beit Jala requested permission to continue working their fields, which are within Jerusalem's municipal jurisdiction. The state's response stated that the lands "no longer belong to them, but have been handed over to the Custodian for Absentee Property." At stake are thousands of dunam of agricultural land on which the Palestinians grew olives and grapes throughout the years.
The BBC has more:
Israel has reportedly begun seizing tracts of east Jerusalem land owned by Palestinians in the West Bank under a law not used for decades...
That legislation allowed the seizure of property of Palestinians who had left Israel during the 1948 war.
Under the law, an absentee is anyone who in 1948 "was in any part of the land of Israel that is outside the area of Israel" - such as the West Bank.
The "absentee" owners - who in some cases live only 100 metres from their land on the other side of the separation barrier - may have no right to compensation for their lost land.
Johnny Atik, a Bethlehem resident, told Haaretz that property belonging to 40 people in his neighbourhood had been taken. He plans to appeal to the Supreme Court over the eight acres of olive groves he has lost.
He said: "The olives fall on the ground. We see them, but can't get to them."
Daniel Seidemann and Mohammed Dahla, lawyers acting for several of the landowners, said hundreds of other Palestinians could be at risk of having land seized.
"We're talking about land that those Palestinians in Beit Jalla have owned for hundreds of years," Mr Dahla told Haaretz. "They are not absentees... In fact, they continued to cultivate the land up until now."
Pay special attention to the language of that Israeli law: any part of the land of Israel that is outside the area of Israel. The language of the law assumes that, regardless of the UN partition plan or any internationally recognized boundary, all of what was British mandate Palestine is in fact the land of Israel, though for the time being that land inconveniently happens to be inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Arabs. The ideology of Greater Israel, and the concomitant destruction of Palestine, is inscribed into the very laws of the State of Israel.
While Israel may have only recently reactivated this particular law, it has for decades used various other bureaucratic mechanisms to expropriate Palestinian land. Usually it goes something like this: Palestinian resident owns land in East Jerusalem. Palestinian resident wants to develop that land, for which he must obtain a permit from the occupying Israelis. Palestinian applies for permit. Palestinian waits. Palestinian waits. Sorry, come back tomorrow. Sorry, we lost your paperwork. Sorry, the guy who handles those particular permits for that particular neighborhood isn't here today. He might be back next week. Months pass. Years pass. Whoops, since that land has lain undeveloped (never mind why), Israel declares it "abandoned" and passes ownership to a group of Jewish settlers, sends in bulldozers to create a "security perimeter" for the new enclave (destroying a playground in this particular instance), and builds a literal Jewish fortress, flags flying, armed guards walking the ramparts, smack dab in the middle of an Arab neighborhood. Shalom, muthafuckas.
Stories like these represent only one part of the broader process of mass immiseration of the Palestinians by their Israeli occupiers which Baruch Kimmerling has termed politicide.
Israel under Ariel Sharon became an agent of destruction, not only for its surrounding environment, but for itself as well, because its domestic and foreign policy is largely oriented toward one major goal: the politicide of the Palestinian people. By politicide I mean a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people's existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic entity. This process may also but not necessarily include their partial or complete ethnic cleansing from the territory known as the Land of Israel. This policy will inevitably rot the internal fabric of Israeli society and undermine the moral foundation of the Jewish state in the Middle East. From this perspective, the result will be a double politicide—that of the Palestinian entity and, in the long run, that of the Jewish entity as well. Therefore, the current Israeli Government poses a considerable danger to the stability and the very survival of all the peoples of the entire region.
Politicide is a process that covers a wide range of social, political, and military activities whose goal is to destroy the political and national existence of a whole community of people and thus deny it the possibility of self-determination. Murders, localized massacres, the elimination of leadership and elite groups, the physical destruction of public institutions and infrastructure, land colonization, starvation, social and political isolation, re-education, and partial ethnic cleansing are the major tools used to achieve this goal.
And this is the environment in which Mahmoud Abbas is expected to reign in militants.
One might ask why the Sharon government is choosing now to reactivate a particulary egregious and manifestly racist law which is sure to increase Palestinian resentment and make Abbas' job substantially more difficult. I think the reason is that Sharon wants to make Abbas' job more difficult. It's fairly obvious that, despite what he may say, Sharon is and always has been opposed to any kind of Palestinian self-determination that involves genuine sovereignty and an actual state, as opposed to a massive refugee camp (albeit one with elections, with ballots and everything) guarded on all sides by Israeli soldiers, pockmarked with heavily armed Jewish enclaves, and intersected by Israeli-only highways, a vision which this law obviously brings closer to reality, both by strengthening the Israeli presence in Palestinian territory, and by inciting resistance on the part of Palestinian militants, resistance which Sharon will be then be able to point to as proof that the Palestinians just aren't serious about making peace.
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