By Alon Hilu, Haaretz – 15 June 2011
www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/settling-a-score-1.367785
IOA Editor: A news story about quarrels among Jewish settlers in the Hebron (Al-Khalil) area. Interesting mostly for the following:
According to the [Israeli] court decision, the custodian of abandoned property in the West Bank area allocated the land on which the farm stands to the World Zionist Organization, which granted a permit for use of the land to Sussia, a cooperative agricultural association [a group of Jewish settlers].
This useful reference is a reminder of the larger World Zionist context — the actual, official organization, as recognized by the Israeli legal system, not some vague conspiratorial-sounding reference — of the Occupation and the 100 year long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The “custodian of abandoned property” refers to a state-created entity which oversees Palestinian lands and property captured by Israel. Seemingly holding such properties temporarily as a “custodian,” it actually distributes Palestinian properties for the exclusive use of settlers or other Jewish members of Israeli society. This is the same entity which directed the distribution of properties lost to Palestinian refugees and Present-Absentees after the 1948 Nakba.
Finally, the use of the term “abandoned” in connection with Palestinian property is yet another bit of the greater, self-serving Israeli “narrative” in which Jews arrived to Palestine early in the 20th Century and, finding it ’empty’ of people, they proclaimed it for themselves: as in “a land without a people for a people without a land.” The very same Palestinians who did not inhabit that empty land subsequently ‘abandoned’ the properties that, somehow, existed there. The propaganda war continues.
For the full article, click HERE
