Mondoweiss: Kafka in Area C
Source: Mondoweiss
When Sa’id ‘Awad spotted the first pomegranate saplings popping up on his fields, he should have seen it coming. A part of him perhaps already understood that the long process threatening his land was nearing its logical conclusion; that the handful of tender trees would yield the poisoned fruit of dispossession. How could anyone possibly come to terms with this surreal state of affairs? But then it was precisely because Sa’id had fallen victim to a lawless invasion of the lands he, his father, and his father’s father had farmed that he could expect no help from the law. Sounds Kafkaesque? Welcome to Area C.
To understand the predicament of Sa’id’s family and of that of many of his fellow Palestinians, we have to go back in time and also to burrow beneath the surface of Israeli legalese. Sa’id lives in the South Hebron Hills, the arid hilly slopes that comprise the southernmost tip of the West Bank on the edge of the desert. Like Palestinian farmers throughout the region, he has farming rights over his family’s lands. These rights can be legally sold or transferred, but they fall short of actual ownership. The reasons go back to the Ottoman Land Code, where the bulk of the region consisted of miri land, that is, land belonging to the Turkish Emir and designated to individual farmers for cultivation. During the British Mandate (1917-1948) and later, under Jordanian rule (1948-1967), government officials began a large-scale project of registration in the entire region under their control, in which they systematically listed the farmers as lawful owners, plot by plot. But in 1967, when Israel occupied the region, the military commander suspended this process in the West Bank, leaving about two-thirds of the region’s farmers without ownership rights over their lands. The process was never resumed.
There were serious implications to this decision. For one thing, the documents that establish user’s rights—tattered receipts for the payment of land tax (maliyah in Arabic) from the Ottoman, Jordanian, and British periods—are rather vague and come with nothing like accurate maps, let alone aerial photos. Without such detailed deeds, most Palestinians farmers find it difficult to establish their historical rights over plots that others claim as theirs. For another, a special clause of the Ottoman Law Code states that if miri land has not been cultivated for three consecutive years, it reverts to the Emir; another clause stipulates that if the farmer has cultivated a plot for ten consecutive years, he can register as its legal user. The state of Israel retained Ottoman law in the West Bank but offered a new, restrictive interpretation to these clauses. For example, in the past, farmers could be granted user’s rights over outcrop land that allows only sparse cultivation, if they consistently used portions of it, regardless of the exact percentage– whereas Israel now demanded proof that at least 50% of every plot was cultivated. Moreover, land deemed a priori unfit for agricultural use, primarily the hillier parts of the region, now became State Land by definition, regardless of actual use, and reverted, initially on paper, to the Israeli Emir. In a massive project carried out throughout the 1980’s, Israel combed the region and declared 750,000 dunams, about 14% of the entire West Bank, to be State Lands. Almost overnight, Sa’id’s family lost a sizable portion of its lands. Significantly, the newly declared miri lands were areas used for an activity that was the key to his family’s survival: grazing of sheep.
In theory, the state of Israel, now the largest landlord in the area, could have used its newly created vast reserve of land to benefit its inhabitants. In fact, according to international law, this was what it had to do as an occupier whose responsibilities were to protect the civilian population under its rule. But in gross violation of international laws and standards, all this land was allotted to the new Jewish settlements that began to reshape the region radically in the 1980s. Some of the newly declared “state lands” were used for building the first round of settlements, while others were allotted to them for future use, even when they were non-contiguous with the settlements to which they were connected. Despite repeated requests, the Israeli government has refused to release any data about the proportion of state land allotted to Palestinians in the West Bank, but documents that came to light when several Israeli human rights organizations took the state to court show their share is a statistical zero. The lands belonging to Sa’id’s family were allotted to the settlements of Susya and Ma’on, some miles away. In the 1980’s, when Israel was busy building the hard core of these settlements, Sa’id’s sheep still happily grazed their familiar grounds in Um al ‘Arais. But change was coming, and it was coming fast.
Read more: http://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/kafka-in-area-c/
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