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‘Israel secretly endorsed more land grab in Jerusalem’

By: Ahmad Hammadi

HELD JERUSALEM: Israel secretly approved last summer land seizure in east Jerusalem that is owned by Palestinians who live elsewhere, a lawyer for the Palestinian landowners said.

The Israeli government is considering reusing the Absentee Property Law that strips thousands of Palestinian land owners of their properties in Arab East Jerusalem, which threatens ongoing peace talks aimed at ending the conflict between both sides.

According to the lawyer Israel has already grabbed some of the Palestinians’ lands, under the Absentee Property Law, although those land owners live nearby – just outside city limits in the West Bank.

"This is state theft, pure and simple," said Hanna Nasser, the mayor of neighboring Bethlehem, which houses many of the Palestinians who could lose land they own in Jerusalem.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem – along with the West Bank and Gaza – in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed.

Palestinian landowners living in the West Bank used to have access to their property inside the Jerusalem boundaries for many years. But during the past two years, they have been denied this access thanks to the West Bank barrier, which includes walls and fences separating Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Last July, the Israeli government approved the confiscation measure in as a clarification of the decade-old Absentee Property Law. At the time the law was passed, Israel did not control East Jerusalem, but the measure allowed confiscation of property, and now Israel appealed to the law to seize lands owned by thousands of Palestinians who fled fearing violence during the 1948 war.

An Israeli lawyer representing many of the Palestinian landowners Daniel Seidemann said Israel used the law infrequently in east Jerusalem since 1967 but now it seems that it is considering to invoke it much more widely.

Under the 1950 law, Palestinians who live in the West Bank and own property in East Jerusalem can be considered absentee landowners, which allows Israel to confiscate their property without paying any compensation.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli rights group B’Tselem Sarit Michaeli said: “It’s just an obvious land grab, and it is absolutely illegal… It is so blatantly an attempt to take as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible.”

However, the move was done secretly, without being announced by the Israeli government, which requires no compensation for the land.

The land seizure was uncovered by last week’s report published in Haaretz news.

Seidemann noted that he will file a suit in Israel's High Court of Justice if the government didn’t withdraw its decision.

“The next step would be filing a lawsuit on the ownership of the land,” said Muhammad Dahleh, a prominent Arab lawyer representing Palestinians from the Bethlehem area, adding that his West Bank clients had been told last year they were absentees.

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