Law on the ground: practising law in Occupied Palestine

Abstract

The Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) have been under Israeli military occupation since June 1967, the Palestinian Authority notwithstanding. This paper will concentrate on two areas: the legal aspect of town planning and home building with respect to the Palestinians and the question of ‘state land’ as a means of land acquisition by the Jewish state.

Keywords:

• Palestinian property rights
• Expropriation
• Demolition
• Planning

Notes

1. A dunum is 1000 sq. m or a quarter of an acre.

2. This information was communicated to me initially by the owner of a private library in OEJ, who makes his library available for public use without remuneration. It abuts onto the Ministry of Justice buildings and faces the St George Hotel. I checked this theory, and other people confirmed that miri means arable land, or land to be used for cultivation in general but they did not realise the import of the Israeli misinterpretation. It is my suspicion that this falsification began with the British, but I have not been able to find much material on it.

3. I should also contend that any attempt to compare Ottoman land holdings to those of feudal England, many categories of which still remain in practice, is not only incorrect but extremely misleading. It also works against the indigenous population, as is seen in this method of expropriation. One may compare systems, but one may not ‘read’ one system through the other.