Attorney General halts East Jerusalem property expropriation

[Quetzal]

AG halts East Jerusalem property expropriation

Attorney General Menachem Mazuz has canceled a June 2004 governmental decision made by two ministers to apply the absentee property law to tens of thousands of dunams of Palestinian property in East Jerusalem.

In a letter to Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mazuz wrote that Netanyahu must order an immediate halt to the application of the absentee property law to properties owned by West Bank residents in East Jerusalem.

Mazuz moved very quickly to halt the application of the law after Haaretz revealed that on June 22, 2004, ministers Natan Sharansky and Zevulun Orlev - in their role as members of the Ministerial Committee on Jerusalem - decided to apply the absentee property law, despite the recommendations of the two Justice Ministry officials who attended the meeting, Yaakov Shapira and Ariela Kalai.

Moreover, the two ministers decided that there was no need to consult with the attorney general "regarding any action concerning expropriated property" in East Jerusalem, which the two Justice Ministry lawyers told the ministers was inappropriate.

more...

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/534925.html

[Scurrilous]

1. Ministers defend right to confiscate E. J'lem property

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/535735.html

<snip>

"Minister Natan Sharansky, who chairs the cabinet committee that adopted the controversial decision to apply the Absentee Property Law to East Jerusalem, on Wednesday indignantly rejected Attorney General Menachem Mazuz's charge that the Ministerial Committee on Jerusalem Affairs made its decision improperly.

The decision, which Mazuz overruled on Tuesday, would have enabled the government to confiscate East Jerusalem properties owned by West Bank residents, without paying compensation. The law was applied to all of Israel shortly after the War of Independence, but since East Jerusalem was annexed only in 1967, it was not covered by the original decision.

"I am astonished by the accusations in your letter regarding the way the ministerial committee was run, as well as the way the decision was made," Sharansky wrote Mazuz. Specifically, he said, Mazuz's claim that the committee is not authorized to discuss the Custodian of Absentee Property's powers does not accord with cabinet rules."

[Scurrilous]

2. Israel's latest land grab is part of an old strategy

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=12359

<snip>

"The latest legal maneuvers by the Israeli government to confiscate Palestinian land in East Jerusalem have rightly caused outrage, even among senior Israeli officials."

<snip>

"Despite the agonizing over the current use of the Absentee Property Law, Israelis of both the right and left have lived quite comfortably for more than half a century with the original mass dispossession of the Palestinians engineered by that very same law. In 1948 almost all the territory on which Israel was established was Palestinian-owned. But using the draconian 1950 law, millions of acres of land, as well as hundreds of thousands of homes, bank accounts and other properties worth many billions of dollars in the prices of the day, were transferred from some 800,000 Palestinian refugees to the Custodian of Absentee Property.

The land was used to settle Jewish immigrants and the money to finance their entry into Israel. By the early 1950s, Israel's rural economy depended on the plundering of Palestinian refugees' farmlands, whether olive trees, vineyards or Jaffa orange groves. The waqf - the Islamic religious endowment in Palestine - had two-thirds of its land taken by the new state.


No compensation was, or ever has been, offered to the refugees or the millions of their descendants, many of whom today languish in poverty in refugee camps across the Middle East. Nor has Israel settled accounts with the absentees who live inside the Jewish state: A quarter of a million Arab citizens of Israel are today deprived of all rights to their original property, having been declared, in truly Orwellian language, "present absentees" (present in Israel but absent from their property for a day or more in 1948).

According to the Custodian's office, more than two-thirds of Israel is comprised of "absentee" property. Statistics compiled by the United Nations in 1956 suggested an even higher figure - nearer to 80 percent. One Israeli academic, Don Peretz, has observed: "Abandoned property was one of the greatest contributions toward making Israel a viable state."