A Hill Of Trouble

The government attempts to defuse a West Bank
land dispute through a loophole.

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Soldiers arrest a settler who was protesting new settlements.

W

hat began two weeks
ago as a property dis-
pute between the Pales-
tinian residents of the
West Bank village of al-Khadir,
south of Bethlehem, and the Is-
raeli members of the Olive Asso-
ciation (a private building society
founded to add a neighborhood of
400 units onto the nearby Israeli
settlement of Efrat) soon as-
sumed the proportions of a full-
blown showdown. The conflict,
replete with angry demonstra-
tions and a no-confidence motion
in the Knesset, has dominated
the headlines ever since.
In brief: The villagers of al-
Khadir and the Olive Association
both claim sole right to a barren
hill (which the settlers call Givat
Tamar) located between al-
Khadir and Efrat. When Israeli
bulldozers began the groundwork
for the new neighborhood, the
residents of al-Khadir flocked to
the hill to stop them. The Pales-
tininan demonstrators were
joined by Israelis from Peace Now
and the Peace Bloc.
The government's initial re-
sponse was to send in the army
to maintain order. But at this
stage of the peace process, it soon
became obvious that the issue at
hand was far more than a local
squabble over property rights. It
was a battle over the prickly
question of whose land — in the
collective political sense — the
West Bank really is.
That is, of course, the heart of
the matter in the Israeli-Pales-
tinian peace process. But with the
understanding that Israel had
placed a freeze on settlements in
the West Bank and Gaza, the
Palestinians had agreed to post-
pone dealing with this issue un-
til negotiations on the final
settlement. But then the heavy
equipment moved in and bull-

dozed the lid off a whole Pando-
ra's box of land questions — the
key one being the issue of "state
lands."
When Israeli troops occupied
the West Bank in 1967, certain
areas already had been delineat-
ed by Jordan as government land.
Twelve years later, the Likud
government expanded that cate-
gory by declaring all land in the
West Bank not specifically regis-
tered as private property to be
"state lands." The legal basis of
this move, explained historian
Meron Benvenisti, was an 1855
Ottoman law stating that any
land "located at a distance from
a city or town where the voice of
a man standing at the edge of the
settlement cannot be heard" was
"the property of the Sultan."
But that raises the question of
where the "edge" of a settlement
lies. "The land of a Palestinian
village extends through five con-
centric circles," explained Pales-
tinian anthropologist All Qleibo.
"Beginning with the garden and
then the vegetable patch by a
family's house, they move out to
the vineyard and olive orchards,
the grain fields, and finally the
grazing land. The first two circles
are considered private property
that is passed down within each
family. The last three are collec-
tively owned by the village."
These understandings were so
obvious to Palestinian villagers
that the finer points of land reg-
istration were not always ob-
served. In many cases, Mr. Qleibo
said, villagers failed to list their
property in the Land Registry to
avoid paying the heavy "stamp
tax." The result was that many
villagers were unable to prove
ownership of their land. By in-
voking the obscure Ottoman law,
Israel's Military Government (the
"successor to the Sultan" for the

