Israel’s new trick to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and steal West Bank land

‘The new law states that all Palestinian land is State Land unless Palestinian owners can prove otherwise.’ Israel has always used legislation as a shield for colonial ends.

Israel has always been clear about its intentions: to take control of all of historic Palestine, a goal it is pursuing through different means, all converging towards the same goal. After October 7, 2023, this process – which had advanced at a varying pace over the decades depending on internal and international conditions – accelerated in a way seen only twice before in its history: in 1948 and 1967.

Today, as in the past, this is taking place under the indifferent or complicit gaze of the international community. In Gaza, it has taken the name of the “Board of Peace,” a new colonial mandate that Italy is rushing to join with its usual opportunism. In the West Bank, it is called annexation, implemented through unprecedented measures that are either the object of muted criticism or deliberately ignored by Western chancelleries, which are hiding behind an idea that is reassuring precisely because it is unattainable: the two-state solution.

On Sunday, the Israeli government – with an initial budget of $79 million – launched the process of land registration in the West Bank, with the declared goal of confiscating at least 15% of Area C (the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and military control since the Oslo Accords) by 2030: declaring it “State Land,” thus amenable to be used for colonial expansion.

The issue might appear technical, but it is deeply political. “The new law states that all Palestinian land is State Land unless Palestinian owners can prove otherwise,” Jamal Juma tells il manifesto. Juma is a Palestinian activist with a long history, coordinator of the Anti-Apartheid Wall campaign since 2002 and the Land Defense Coalition since 2012.

Israel has always used legislation as a shield for colonial ends, giving a semblance of “legitimacy” to something that is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions: as an occupying power, it cannot confiscate land, expel inhabitants or transfer its own population into the occupied territory. But it is doing so, cloaking the violation in a mantle of “legality” by claiming it is only following domestic law.

The latest measure requires Palestinians to prove ownership of their land before an Israeli commission set up for this purpose. And that is not a simple task: many families do not have those documents. There are many reasons for this: because Palestine has been subjected to different rulers for centuries, from the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandate and Israel itself; because the only property deeds issued, the original Ottoman ones, date back a couple of centuries and have often been lost in wars and exiles.

And this is also made difficult, Juma explains, “because of the Absentee Property Law, which Israel has made use of since its foundation to confiscate the real estate assets of Palestinian refugees; because of the nature of family property, often registered in the name of a single member according to the Tabu practice; and because of land transfers that, in the absence of a registry, were carried out on the basis of oral agreements.”

In 1967, Israel immediately took control of 900,000 dunams of land – 900 square kilometers that were registered as State Land under the Ottoman Empire. It also confiscated another 450,000 dunams, even though they were registered to private Palestinian owners, in one of two ways: on one hand, it extended the scope of its domestic laws to the occupied territory, claiming private land for itself for “public interest” or “security reasons”; on the other, it resorted to the Absentee Property Law to appropriate the land of Palestinians who were forced into exile abroad in 1967 or who, despite being present, were not recognized as such by the occupation because at the moment of the “census” they were in a different city than the one where they owned land and homes.

And Israel had one last trick up its sleeve: immediately halting every registration process. “In 1968,” Juma recounts, “Israel stopped the proceedings initiated by the Jordanian authorities, and since then it has no longer been possible to register a property or transfer it to one’s descendants. A few years ago, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) attempted to resume registration, particularly in Area C, but the Israeli army physically prevented engineers and surveyors from reaching the plots.”

Area C is not the only target. “Any plot, wherever it is located, can be declared State Land: Israel will not stop, but will expand into Areas A and B. It will be up to an Israeli commission to establish which documents to recognize as valid and which not – a system left to the interpretation of the occupier. It is a process of blatant theft.”

The new regulation comes just a few days after two radical legislative interventions: first, Israel unilaterally annulled the Jordanian law that prohibited the sale of land in the West Bank unless the buyers – individuals or companies – were Palestinian; then, it deprived the PNA of any civil administrative power in Areas A and B and over archaeological sites, wherever they are located.

This means that the urban planning “rules” hitherto applied only to Area C – where Israel already decides what can be built and what cannot – “will extend to the rest of the West Bank. Israel is effectively dissolving the PNA: it is assuming civil authority in every municipality, from where one can open a landfill to urban planning, up to and including permits for the construction of new homes. By replacing military rule with civil rule, Israel is effectively annexing the West Bank.”

This acceleration is taking place at a particularly favorable moment for Israel: the world is not watching. In the last two and a half years, the army has cleared 980 square kilometers – three times the size of the Gaza Strip – of the presence of Palestinians through the violent eviction of agricultural and Bedouin communities, and has declared over 25,000 dunams as State Land, a record-breaking pace (these confiscations exceeded all those carried out in the previous 25 years combined).

“We are witnessing the continuation of the process of liquidating the Palestinian question and assuming total control of the land, the heart of any settler-colonial project,” concludes Juma. “Palestinians are being crammed into ever-smaller scraps of land, in ghettos created by walls, settlements, new laws and daily confiscations.”

© Il Manifesto Global