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ScienceDirect - Political Geography : Dynamics and patterns of the shrinking of Arab lands in Palestine Political Geography
Volume 22, Issue 2 , February 2003, Pages 179-209

Dynamics and patterns of the shrinking of Arab lands in Palestine

Ghazi-Walid Falah

Department of Geography and Planning, University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325-5005, USA

20 March 2003.

1. Introduction

The questions "who controls what where?" and "who has the right (God-given or otherwise) to possess and populate land in Palestine/Israel?" continue to remain central in any discourse of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Other temporal issues such as the ongoing Intifada, the Palestinian right of return to their homeland, Jerusalem, water resources and future state boundaries, all of which spring from the 1993 Israel–Palestinian leadership talks, may appear to have gained greater importance and priority. Yet it is unlikely any of these issues can be resolved without first addressing the pivotal question of land and its geopolitics.

Possession of land and obtaining title over it in a free-market transaction has to be carefully distinguished from that of conquering the land by force and imposing sovereignty (Shaw, 1986 and Khatchadourian, 1989). The latter scenario describes more accurately the practice in the case of Israel, due to the fact that the pre-state Zionist movement and Jewish Agency were unable to gain possession over more than 6.8% of the total land in Palestine prior to the state's establishment ( Palestine Government, 1946; Granott, 1952; Reichman, 1979 and Falah, 1991a).

This paper seeks to sketch a number of geographical patterns for the ongoing efforts on the part of the state of Israel and its agencies to acquire the remaining portion of Palestinian land, conquered by force (in 1948 and 1967 wars), not purchased voluntarily from its legitimate owners (i.e., the Palestinian Arabs) but in effect confiscated. Here the state of Israel and its agencies have acted in keeping with what Taylor (1994) views as the state as container, a territorialized vessel for wealth and social goods. In other words, in this instance the Israeli state is utilizing its legal system and all other feasible means (occasionally including its huge military and police) in order to appropriate remaining lands from the Palestinian Arabs (a portion of whom are its own citizens) and then to pass this "liberated" turf on to full ownership under Jewish use and title ( Falah, 1990 and Yiftache and Kedar, n.d.) in an abiding struggle aptly encapsulated in the binomial "land and power" ( Shapira, 1992).

It is no secret that successive Israeli governments and the Israeli political class have at times sought to mask their intentions, but they have been unable to renounce an overriding ideological aim: to place virtually all lands in Palestine (and most of its water) under the control of the Jewish people (and by extension, the state of Israel and the international Zionist movement, Granott, 1956, p. 104). This is central to the discourse of Eretz Israel across the entire Zionist political spectrum. Nor have Israeli governments ceased long-standing policies of confiscation of Palestinian lands and fragmentation of land parcels, even during key points in peace negotiations over the past several years. As the current Intifada rages on, relocation from within the Green Line to West Bank settlements is being encouraged, occasionally even with relevant advert spots on Israeli state radio.

Indeed, it can be demonstrated that land confiscation was even intensified during the critical period of peace negotiations. One example among many can illustrate this: the declaration of the government of Israel in late April 1995 to confiscate 53 hectares of land from the villages of Beit Hanina and Beit Safafa in the vicinity of Jerusalem, a declaration which was protested at the courts of the Secretary-General of the United Nations (www.Palestine-un.org/mission/4_land.html). This incident and dozens of other cases are often obfuscated by invoking the need for "security" or supposedly "explained" by the rhetoric of "development": e.g. the action was taken to facilitate the natural growth of one settlement or another. The process of transferring Palestinian land into Jewish-controlled turf has been described in academic literature using various terms: alienation of Palestinian land (Ruedy, 1971), Judaization and Israelization ( Falah, 1989a and Falah, 1989b). The popular Arabic terms nahb and salb (robbery or plunder) are common in Palestinian discourse to signify the dynamics of the process.

The present paper employs the term "shrinking" to underscore that land confiscation is a continuous process of erosion and forced contraction in Palestine. This of course has both political and social ramifications for the type of state Israel seeks to be, declaring its desire to live in peace and harmony with its own Palestinian citizens and ultimately with all Palestinians beyond its finally drawn frontiers once a peace deal has been reached. The paper does not chronicle the history of land confiscation and transfer in Israel/Palestine, a topic exhaustively treated elsewhere (Oded, 1964; Jiryis, 1973; Jiryis, 1976; Kislev, 1976; Falah, 1989c; Falah, 1991b and Falah, 1992). My concern here is to draw attention to the specific ways in which the geography of a given Palestinian locality is manipulated by planners and state-policy makers in order to (1) reduce the amount of Arab land ownership and holdings and (2) attenuate Palestinian ties to the land by means of a battery of state-imposed restrictions. As will be elaborated below, these two dynamics can be explained by drawing on models and geographical patterns in political geography. In grounding my analysis in some theoretical context, the current crisis (already 23 months into the Intifada, with a toll of 1,726 Palestinians dead by August 30, 2002 ( Palestine Red Crescent Society, 2002) must be taken into relevant account: Israeli bulldozers uprooting trees, demolishing housing, closing roads and fragmenting localities on a daily basis, often directly filmed by international camera crews. This is a war against a people and its total environment with no end in sight.

In a broad, first-approximation sense, the Darwinian and Spencerian notions of the survival of the fittest and Ratzel's (1886) organic state seem to serve as useful models for what is happening daily on the ground ("ground" taken here in a very literal sense). Though some outside observers and analysts may consider these notions an extreme armature for trying to encompass the violence in Palestine at the moment, a kind of geopolitical social Darwinism ( Hofstadter, 1955, "Racism and Imperialism," pp. 170–200) comes close to the stark realities as perceived by the Palestinian population, where they face an Israeli Goliath bent on their disempowerment, dispossession and forcible subjugation. Hofstadter (1955), p. 190, quotes the American general Homer Lea, whose Darwinistic remarks in 1909 seem reminiscent of discourse today in some quarters in the Israeli military and political leadership: "As physical vigor represents the strength of man in his struggle for existence, in the same sense military vigor constitutes the strength of nations . . . As manhood marks the height of physical vigor among mankind, so the militant successes of a nation mark the zenith of its physical greatness". For Lea, militancy had three phases: "the militancy of the struggle to survive, the militancy of conquest, and the militancy of supremacy or preservation of ownership . . . The laws of struggle and survival are universal and unalterable, and the duration of national existence is dependent upon the knowledge of them" (ibid.). The present paper consists of three main parts: first, using the concepts of "enclave" and "exclave", I attempt to sketch the spatial pattern in which the shrinking or withering of Arab lands is taking place at macro-regional level. Second, a general background examination of the geopolitics of Jewish land acquisition in Palestine before 1948 is presented; third, an analysis of the spatial pattern of land shrinkage and fragmentation in specific Arab localities in Israel after 1948 is sketched. This third section forms the main body of the paper, and is in turn divided into four subsections, followed by a brief conclusion.

2. The concept of "enclave"/"exclave" and the continuous dispossession of the Palestinians

It is almost impossible to touch upon the land discourse debate in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict without having to remember the Zionist slogan of "a land with no people for a people without land" (See Khalidi, 1997, p. 101). A logical reading of this ideological position suggests that nothing but full annihilation of the Palestinian-Arab people is the ultimate covert goal, erasing them in one way or another from the surface and replacing them by another population in line with what some political geographers have termed Israel's "ethnocratic" policies ( Yiftachel, 1999 and Yiftachel, 2002). Moreover, such an agenda reflects various elements common to the fabrication of colonial myths and narratives that have driven or justified colonial enterprises of land confiscation and immigrant settlement in North and South America and South Africa during the age of European imperial expansionism, such as the notion of "frontiers of exclusion": "several motivations combined to exclude the indigenes, and for those influenced by religious considerations, the biblical paradigm provided a ready justification for it" ( Prior, 1997, pp. 174–75). The foundational myths of the State of Israel entailed a systematic rewriting of Palestinian history, legitimizing Jewish and repudiating Arab claims to the land: "one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in modern times has succeeded in masking the fact that the creation of the State of Israel resulted in the dispossession and dispersion of another people" ( Prior, 1997, p. 186). While the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and subsequent wars have indeed materialized much of that agenda of supplanting, marginalization and exclusion, these upheavals have not fully erased the Palestinian presence in the land. Yet that presence has not deterred the Israeli authorities from continuing to expropriate their lands, often literally from beneath their feet. Emblematic of this urge to sever the ties between a people and its place are the frequent bulldozings of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, an insidious "punishment" tactic unique to Israel among contemporary "democracies" and, I would argue, deeply symbolic of this underlying will to obliterate their presence and demolish built-up structures on the land. Despite the clear racist sentiments embedded in the slogan, few in the Israeli political class have stood up to repudiate this ideological baggage of colonialism or its implications. This is important because in signing the Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 1995, Israel insisted on the deletion of certain clauses from the Palestinian Charter that were interpreted by Israel as containing a threat to its very existence. Yet, by marked contrast, the Israeli political class did not abandon or replace the slogan of a "land without people" with a vision that might hold out the promise of an eventual condominium between two peoples, a sharing of territory (and water access) with the indigenous Palestinians. This tactic is tantamount to a kind of limbo of non-decision-making. As Taylor (1993), p. 36, has indicated, non-decision-making is "essentially a form of manipulation which allows decisions to be steered along certain lines normally favourable to maintaining the status quo". Giddens (1987) also hints in a similar direction: "Non-decision-making . . . is not accurately seen just as the obverse of decision-making, but as influencing the circumstances in which certain courses of action are open to `choice' in any way at all" ( Giddens, 1987, p. 9). While in a sense glorying in `non-decision-making', Israel's leadership is still guided by the spirit of that guileful slogan of negation of the Other which informs the state's covert policy for "dealing" with the "natives" in Palestine and their lands. Some may contend here that the spirit of Israel's 1948 "Declaration of Independence" ( State of Israel, 1948) superceded the catchword of "a land with no people for a people without land". Yet look at the civil realities: in Israel there is still no written constitution (!) guaranteeing the civil rights of non-Jews (or of Jews for that matter). That absence is compounded by the fact of no less than 34 separate laws, ordinances, and regulations legislated by the state authorities and designed to dispossess Arab citizens within the state of their ancestral lands ( Abu Kishk, 1984, p. 31), creating indeed an internal "frontier of exclusion".

Using Dear's (1988) terminology, Zionist ideology (in which the quest for land and its control and settlement forms an essential component) could be seen as a specific social context (structure) that frames individual activities ( Dear, 1988, p. 269). Interpreted from this frame, any possession of lands by an Israeli agency or an individual inside Palestine, whether through market transaction or otherwise, can be viewed as a fulfillment of the overriding Zionist ideology of exclusive possession of land, furthering the "ethnocratic" Jewish character of the state and consolidating state sovereignty (see Falah, 1989a). So the purchase of an extra dunam (1 DUNAM=1/10 hectare) of land from a Palestinian is, however miniscule, translated into a patriotic "achievement" by the state and its Jewish citizenry, while simultaneously perceived as a treachery in the eyes of the indigenous Palestinians. This kind of dichotomy in perception, a territorializing par excellence of the basic confrontation, accorded the possession of land an added value in the mind of Jews and Arabs, one far exceeding its economic exchange-value: indeed, land (cum water) and its control have become a prime emblem of the conflict, its very signature. Palestinians who sold land to Jews have been portrayed in Israeli literature in a positive and "progressive" light, while those who resisted such transactions were denigrated as fanatics and extremists (see Bernstein, 2000). In their resistance to the sale of lands to Jews, Palestinian fellaheen in the pre-1948 period often claimed that the Jews at the time were "purchasing homeland, not just a few dunums" ( Document, 1947). The Jewish purchase of land is decried as a "dangerous disease" that has to be stopped at once ( Document, 1946). Khalidi (1997) contains a number of case studies where Palestinian peasant resistance to Zionist settlement and takeover of Palestinian land constituted an essential component in fueling the evolution of Palestinian nationalism.

What follows is an attempt to draw a schematic model for the spatial pattern that evolved into the process of shrinking Palestinian lands through systematic expropriation by Israel and Jewish-related agencies. I appropriate a concept from interstate relations analysis, applying it to phenomena within the boundary of a single political entity. The spatial metaphor of exclaves, "small pockets of land lying outside the main territory [but] within the territory of neighboring States" (Glassner, 1993, p. 69) and their functioning are used here to draw the contours for the process of formation and consolidation of Jewish parcels of land in the heart of Palestinian territory and the subsequent enterprise by these exclaves to expand and multiply. The concept of enclaves, small islands of land located within another's territory, functioning along similar lines of a partitioned geometry, are also considered in the analysis. I argue that exclaves/enclaves, dealt with by geographers primarily in association with interstate relations, can also be usefully appropriated in their basic meaning applied to illuminate intrastate phenomena, extended even to statelessness and its inchoate territoriality.

Significantly, by their very existence within the territory of others, exclaves and enclaves are important geographical "facts"; states or people may go to war if the status quo of these exclaves/enclaves is altered or put at risk. Consider, for example, a scenario in which Spain seeks to forcibly conquer and annex Gibraltar: Great Britain would likely respond with full military force. In another scenario, if the Palestinian Authority police should attempt to (re)take control of Tel Al Rumaida in Hebron, for example, now under the control of Jewish settlers, the Israeli government would most likely react with a similar show of state force (in the name of "security", its abiding shibboleth). Obviously, the reaction of these states to the "intruders" would be fierce because it touches a sensitive nerve: the very pride of the state and its sovereignty. So these small pockets are more than just simple pieces of territory. Typically, distance from the main homeland does not play a major role if it becomes necessary to send an army and "liberate" these exclaves/enclaves (as in the case of the British colonial "exclave" of the Falkland Islands under Margaret Thatcher). Moreover, because of their symbolic importance, exclaves/enclaves continue to be hot spots, flashpoints and sources of potential tension between states, as was the US military exclave at Subic Bay in the Philippines. That a state is able to maintain an exclave located at some distance means it is successfully exercising power beyond its immediate sovereign space. The occupation of Northern Cyprus by Turkey in 1974 and maintenance of the status quo down to today is a classic example, as has been the struggle over the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian enclave/exclave in southwest Azerbaijan.

To complicate the above metaphor further, exclaves can be a major source of tension between states and other political entities if the "owner" of these exclaves claims the adjacent space around it and the inhabitants of the respective exclave seek to expand territorially, even linking in contiguity with the core country. This later scenario can be found at present in the occupied territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Israeli settlements and settlers are systematically attempting to expand their exclaves at the expense of neighboring Palestinian towns and villages. An extended case study from the Bethlehem area connected with the Jewish settlement of Efratah is examined below.

Three types of "enclave/exclave" corresponding with different colonization periods are suggested below in sketching the evolution of Jewish land control and possession in Palestine. We should note that the application of "enclave" or "exclave" for either group (Arabs or Jews) is invariably subject to modification, a dynamic phenomenon. This clearly depends on the optics of inquiry: how one looks at the scale of analysis and whose territory is bounded by whom and for how long.

The dynamics of "claving" bears strong similarity to spatial partitioning familiar under labels such as gerrymandering, zoning and redlining when applied to discriminatory manipulation of space and its allocation for the benefit and power enhancement of a given social class or ethnic group in the population. Indeed, the structures of social and spatial apartheid that have been built up in Israel from the prestate period and are perpetuated today are reminiscent in their rationale and contours to practices familiar from apartheid in South Africa over several decades of ethnocratic white rule. Palestinian leaders have sometimes borrowed the concept of the "Bantustan" to decry what they perceive to be the intent of partitioning and claving policies (and proposed "maps" associated with "peace proposals") regarding the occupied West Bank. All such partitioning seeks to reinforce and reproduce spatial, economic and military hegemony over a dependent population, through fragmentation and manipulation of territorial, social and economic space.

2.1. Pre-1948 Jewish land and settlement in Palestine as an "enclave"

Like any other colonial society which arrives at a new place already occupied by an indigenous people, Zionist settlers found themselves living in a situation of dispersed enclaves among a majority indigenous Palestinian-Arab population. This pattern commenced with Jewish colonization in the late nineteenth century and continued down basically to the establishment of the state. Had Palestine truly been "a land without people", there would be no need to form any colonizing enclaves during this period. One should recall a testimony from the famed Zionist writer Ahad Ha-Am after his visit to the country in 1891. He described an entirely different geographical reality for Palestine:

"We abroad are used to believing that Eretz Israel is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed, and that anyone who wishes to purchase land there may come and purchase as much as he desires. But in truth this is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed. Only sand dunes and stony mountains are not fit to grow anything but fruit trees––and this only after hard labor and great expense of clearing and reclamation––only these are not cultivated" (cited in Khalidi, 1997, p. 101).

Fig. 1 provides a general cartographic illustration for the distribution of Jewish land possession in 1944 at macro level. The dark shading in the map, spotted along the costal and northern part of the country, is composed of hundreds of enclaves of various sizes and shapes. This pattern should be seen as it has been in evolution for almost half a century and the map presents a snapshot of a dynamic colonizing process at a fixed point of time. In his description of the pre-state Zionist strategy of land acquisition, Reichman (1979), p. 50, used the Hebrew phrases "ne'tzat kaneh" and "ketem shemen", roughly translatable as "sticking a (thin) pole" and "oil stain", respectively. Tellingly, the Zionist leadership at the time was seeking to gain effective "legal" hold of any piece of land at the heart of Arab areas; eventually this foothold spread outward and enlarged like an "oil stain". Reichman's phraseology expresses in essence the same principle that enclaving/exclaving embodies. It is undisputable that these colonizing enclaves were established as "core settlements" to facilitate territorial expansion and enlargement as local conditions permitted. Indeed, territorial expansion is the raison d'être for such enclaves. The Zionist movement and Jewish agency at the time envisioned, worked for and mobilized resources in order to transform these enclaves into a contiguous territory for an envisioned political entity (a state) when circumstances might permit. Significantly, they consolidated enclaves from within by employing racist national ideas, often in "socialist" guise, such as the "conquest of labor" and "conquest of the soil"––which in practice meant replacing Arab workers with Jewish ones (Khalidi, 1997; Bernstein, 2000; Avishai, 1985 and Shapira, 1992). These ideas were indeed the genesis of the endemic practice of institutional discrimination against local Palestinians down to the present day, and are also the seed for the notion and praxis of the purification of space in Palestine based on ethnic cleavage, pivotal to the consolidation of Israeli ethnocracy ( Yiftachel, 1999 and Yiftachel, 2002).

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Fig. 1. Distribution of Jewish land possession in Palestine in 1944. Source: After Falah, 1991a.

2.2. Post-1948 Palestinian localities and lands in Israel as "enclave"

The 1948 war, known as the al-Nakba (catastrophe) war among Palestinians, uprooted close to three-quarters of a million of Palestinians and led to the creation of the State of Israel (Falah, 1996). It functioned to engender the obverse of the previous model. The pre-1948 Jewish enclaves no longer existed because they were swiftly amalgamated into the new national space of the state. Now a new pattern of enclaving emerged in the incipient ethnocracy, encompassing the lands and localities of the some 160,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel after the war ended and eventually were accorded citizenship in the Israeli state. As will be elaborated below, this array of Arab enclaves has been subjected to massive land expropriation by Israel. As a result, their land holdings (or enclaves) are being eroded (or shrinking if viewed as a defined enclave). Speaking in 1950, comments by Joseph Weitz, a key figure in the Zionist land/settlement establishment, provide a hint as to the fate of land belonging to Israel's new Palestinian minority (cited in Yiftachel and Kedar, n.d.):

"Some theorists in the Hebrew public think that since the state was created, it controls all land . . . and therefore the land problem was solved by itself . . . and the land was redeemed . . . the land is indeed state land, but there is one flaw with it . . . right to that land belongs to all the state's citizens, including the Arabs . . . in this situation, we must ensure that most land will belong to the Jews . . . and therefore we must continue with land redemption".

Ominously, this rationale continues. On February 14, 2002, the Israeli government dispatched several planes to spray 12,000 dunams of crops with poison on ancestral fields cultivated for decades by Bedouin Arabs in the southern Naqab (Negev) region. The land management minister Avigdor Lieberman justified this action: "We must stop their illegal invasion of state land by all means possible. The Bedouins have no regard for our laws; in the process we are losing the last resources of state lands. One of my main missions is to return to the power of the Land Authority in dealing with the non-Jewish threat to our lands" (quoted in Yiftachel, 2002).

Space does not allow me to deal in length with all the various laws that were legislated and were designed to facilitate the above exclusionary practice of ge'ulat ha-karka ("land redemption") and combatting the "non-Jewish threat to our lands", it is essential here to point to one prime law centrally instrumental in purifying space in Israel according to ethnic cleavage and make transfer of land irreversible. This is the 1958 Basic Land Law. Section 1 of this law indicates "[t]he ownership of lands, being the lands in Israel of the State, the Development Authority or the Keren Kayemet le-Israel, shall not be transferred either by sale or any other manner" (Basic Laws of the State of Israel, n.d.).

Fig. 2 provides a general picture of the fragmentation of Arab land ownership and localities (according to Israeli sources) in the mountainous region of the Galilee up to 1970, the last date for which data on land ownership are available for the region as a whole. One can easily note the land remaining in Arab ownership at that time disperses into the dynamic geometry of an enclave-like pattern. It also amounted to approximately one-third of land in the region, while nearly two-thirds of the land was transferred in the period 1948–1970 to the state and to Zionist organizations. Significantly, pre-state Jewish ownership of land in this section of what today is northern Israel was extremely limited in scope. Territorial expansion and shrinking or withering of Palestinian land in this region continued after 1970 under the rubric of Judaization of the Galilee––a government plan which aimed to offset the demographic growth of Palestinians in this region by means of settling Jews among Arab localities and preventing any possible territorial continuity between Arab towns (Yiftachel, 1992 and Falah, 1993), constructing an internal "frontier of exclusion". The net result is that more lands has been expropriated and fragmented and more Arab enclaves have proliferated in the landscape of the Galilee, a form of Judaizing gerrymandering central to the consolidation of hegemony. Indeed, such spatial fragmenting can be seen as an extension of the colonizing dynamic, anchored in state policy, down into the present period.

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Fig. 2. Galilee mountainous region: Arab settlements pattern and land ownership. Source: After Falah, 1990.

2.3. Post-1967 Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "forward exclaves"

The Jewish settlements established in the West Bank and Gaza strip are viewed here as a complex of exclaves because they are located outside Israel's sovereign space as defined by the 1967 "Green Line" and are sited in areas surrounded by Palestinian lands and localities. While these exclaves are geographically located outside the main area of the state, functionally and economically they are closely linked to it. In some sense these settlements are "forward" exclaves or "micro-colonies", because they act on behalf and reflect the government policy and are serving, like outposts, to capture and control more territory, analogous to the "oil stains" of an earlier proto-colonizing era. Notwithstanding their illegality according to international law, which prohibits changes in the status of areas taken by force and using it for civilian purposes, Israel continues with its active project of colonization, taking over the land and building new settlements, totally ignoring international and specific United Nations resolutions.

In doing so, Israel treats these areas as if it were what the Zionist movement have envisioned it a hundred years ago, i.e, "a land without a people". Fig. 3 provides an overview for the proposed political division of the West Bank as it was seen at time of Camp David II negotiations in July 2000. This map does not show land ownership, but it gives insight into the distribution of Jewish settlement blocks, spread all over the region, resembling the classic pattern of enclaves within the West Bank. Yet these same entities are also considered exclaves of Israel if one looks at them in association with Israel's pre-June 1967 territory. It has been said that these settlements were established by successive governments in Israel since 1967 to be used as bargaining cards when negotiations for peace take place in the future. By contrast, many fundamentalist religious settlers (especially in Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful) regard them as paving the way for the "coming of the Messiah", of which "redemption of the whole of the Land of Israel" is a step. Yet the Israeli government and Palestinian Liberation Organization leadership have decided under the DOP (Declaration of Principle) agreement of 1993 to postpone negotiations over the fate of these settlements (along with talks over Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugee issue) until talks on the permanent status of the occupied territories were slated to begin after an interim period of five years (Falah & Newman, 1996). In other words, a non-decision-making arrangement was employed here and it was meant, at least for the government of Israel at the time, to leave the door open for other possible choices.

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Fig. 3. Political division and settlement pattern on the eve of Camp David II negotiations (July 2000).

When the "moment of truth" came in July 2000, the government of Israel headed by former prime minister Ehud Barak, in offering a territorial solution to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, indeed came to gather the fruit spilled by the action of the early Israeli government, headed by Rabin, who had effectively manipulated the course of peace talks to its own advantage.

Fig. 4 provides a cartographic illustration of what Prime Minister Barak presented at Camp David II (July, 2000) as a "generous offer" to the Palestinians––an offer which was rejected by President Arafat and his negotiation team due to the fact that such a "compromise" clearly fell short of what Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 aimed at, namely full and complete withdrawal from all territories Israel conquered during the June 1967 war. Without engaging in any deliberations here on who was "responsible" for the failure of the Camp David II talks, the territorial configuration envisioned in Fig. 4 can be convincingly embedded within the present discussion using the conceptual framework of exclaves and enclaves. As the map shows, Prime Minister Barak proposed to annex substantial areas permanently to Israel and others temporarily, leaving Palestinian areas (in gray shading) composed of three major or macro-enclaves and a fourth mini-enclave with the city of Jericho. Understandably, some commentators, both Arab and Jewish, have used the term "Bantustan" instead of enclave to describe these areas, invoking the discourse of partitioning and control under apartheid. In doing so, the Prime Minister essentially proposed to create territorial continuity between Israeli sovereign territory within the Green Line and territory located adjacent to or bound up with most of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In other words, this territorial configuration leads to abrogating the current "exclave" pattern distinguishing most Jewish settlements in the West Bank at the expense of new land expropriated from the Palestinians. This spatial consolidation of state territory, the melding of Jewish exclaves to the core state area, Barak's "generous offer", would leave the Palestinian people and localities in the West Bank with the option of living in a number of enclaves confronting a network of internal exclusionary frontiers. The absurdity of such an offer can be better understood when one looks at the entire area of Palestine: while Israelis live in continuous space and enjoy free movement, Palestinians are compelled to reside in an array of newly generated enclaves, requiring formal permission from Israeli authorities (generally military) even to travel from one enclave to another.

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Fig. 4. Territorial division for the West Bank offered to the Palestinians by Prime Minister Ahod Barak during Camp David II negotiations (July 2000).

2.4. Interim conclusion

Land policy in the Jewish yishuv in Palestine (1880–1948) and in the Israeli state has been tied to a process of "enclaving" colonization cum settlement in various forms and phases for much of the past century. Since the June 1967 war, a corollary form of "exclaving" settlement was initiated in the newly occupied territories of what Israeli colonizing discourse terms "Judea and Samaria". For some, these settlements were seen as political bargaining chips. In the eyes of others, especially religious fundamentalists, they were regarded as a proactive part of the continuing process of "redemption of the land" in the sense of "the whole of the Land of Israel" (Eretz Yisrael ha-shelma) (Prior, 1997 and Avishai, 1985). The "generous" peace offer of the Barak government was basically grounded on: (a) incorporation of most "exclaves" into the main territorial space, and thus their "de-exclavization" into contiguous blocks; (b) the concomitant "enclavization" of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza within their own space, where they remain the majoritarian population. To "enclavize" these areas is to assure their basic spatial, economic and transportational fragmentation, turning them into a kind of analogue to Palestinian Galilee, where Israeli land policy has proved relatively successful over half a century in enclaving a Palestinian population that is nearly majoritarian in the Galilee core.

Such enclaved entities, granted relative autonomy yet in reality controlled politically, economically and of course militarily by the enveloping powerful state, bear some similarity to the Bantustans created by nationalist white governments in South Africa from the 1960s. Critical Palestinians are determined to unmask these tactics and show how such bantustanization, resulting in a Palestinian state that is nominally "independent" but in geopolitical reality a dominated "cluster of enclaves", is contrary to the ultimate interest of both parties to the Israel–Palestine conflict.

As argued by all major Palestinian political forces and much of the Israeli peace bloc, particularly around the Gush Shalom movement, the Israeli public must come to understand that these "exclaves" are the greatest stumbling block to a viable peace. The first constructive step is not their "incorporation" into a contiguous band with the territory inside the Green Line (1967 borders) but their systematic and speedy dismantling. The Israeli government and public can, it is hoped, come to recognize the folly of exclaving land policies beyond the Green Line over the past 35 years, and the inequity of analogous "land redemption" policies within the Green Line during the pre-state period and down to the present.

3. The geopolitics of Jewish land acquisition in Palestine in the pre-state period

This period was distinguished from the post-1948 era by a salient fact of power: the Zionist and Jewish organizations actively operating in Palestine did not possess the authority of state institutions. Thus, they were unable to pass legislation relating to land or to confiscate lands. Any land sale transaction between Jews and Arabs was made through the mechanism of the free market, or through a deal or a recommendation made by the Government of Palestine or its High Commissioner under the British Mandate during the three decades prior to 1948. Instances of land confiscation during this period were subject to the authority of the Mandatory power.

The total lands in the possession of Jewish organizations on the eve of the 1948 war constituted a relatively small area, not exceeding 6.8 percent of total lands in Palestine. This portion includes public lands leased to Jews by the Mandatory government of Palestine. Most of land purchased during this period was bought from absentee landlords and residents of Palestine, often wealthy landowners. The strategy of land acquisition over much of this period was the notion "dunam by dunam", "acre by acre". Significantly, the Palestinian peasantry, who were the overwhelming majority of the population in Palestine, refrained from selling their lands (Falah, 1991a).

According to an Israeli land expert, Avraham Granott, the total lands acquired directly from Palestinian felaheen amounted to some 64,201 dunums or 0.25 percent of the total lands in Palestine. So a small moneyed and landed Arab social class sold acreage in effect out from under the peasantry, often at a high price.

This miniscule amount of land acquired by the Zionist enterprise was the product of over some 70 years of effort since the inception of the political Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century in Europe: the first major colony Petach Tikva was founded in 1878, Rishon le-Tsion in 1892, Gedera in 1894, Tel Aviv in 1909.

It is arguable that the Zionist institutions, such as the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet, founded 1901) and the Jewish Foundation Fund (Keren ha-Yesod, founded 1920) had by early 1948 totally exhausted their capacity for purchasing possibly available lands in Palestine. There were basically no more rich landowners who could sell land. The only realistic option that remained for acquiring more land was military means, or diplomacy, i.e. some gift of "allocation" by the United Nations. The military option unfolded during the 1948–49 war. In the conflict, Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, and Israel seized control of 77 percent of the land. Significantly, this was forcible conquest and takeover––it did not entail legal title.

Despite the relative small area of Jewish land possession in Palestine before 1948, the lands that were purchased had significant political and geopolitical value, far beyond their economic utility. This function as a foothold for colonization and occupation was used by the Zionist leadership at the time and served in effect as spatial nodes for the creation of the state of Israel.

This geopolitical value can be summed up in four points. First, the purchase of land by the Jews in this period was accompanied by massive colonization and emigration of Jews to Palestine which changed the demographic composition of the country. In 1880, there were but 24,000 Jews in Ottoman Palestine, less than 0.05 percent of the population. By 1914, that had increased to 85,000 Jews, some 8.1 percent of the total population (Bachi, 1974) p. 47. The percentage of Jewish population increased from 8.1 percent in 1914 to 35.1 percent, some 550,000, in 1946. Though the actual purchase of lands by Jewish institutions was small, it created the intensive settling of a new basically outsider ethnic group in Palestine––the Yishuv in Zionist discourse, whose raison d'être was the Ingathering of the Exiles––which pushed towards obtaining self-determination in a sovereign state or at least political recognition as a people redux. In Zionist ideology, this was conceived as a "return from exile" to their "original" homeland.

Second, this new presence of Jews in Palestine as settlers and colonizers was accompanied by a crystallization of military power (basically terrorist during the Mandate) that aimed at expansion and control of as much of Palestine as could be had. What had been purchased under the conditions of a free market became the territorial nucleus for moving towards control of ever more land. The Zionist political class in the past and the present has never hidden its ultimate aim to control all lands in Eretz Israel (i.e. Palestine), in accordance with the guiding ideological tenet of Geulat ha-karka (or "land redemption"), a religiously loaded term, meaning appropriating or expropriating such land from its Arab owners and occupants. Ratzel's (1844–1904) classic theory regarding the growth of the state and amalgamation of land conquered from others (and in more current discourse, "ethnic cleansing" of its long indigenous population) is strikingly exemplified by the case of Israel. Specifically, one is reminded of his third of the seven laws of the spatial growth of the states. As he postulated: "3. The growth of the state proceeds by annexation of smaller members into the agglomerate. At the same time, the relationship of the population to the earth becomes continuously closer" (cited in Kasperson & Minghi, 1969).

Third, the pre-1948 purchase of lands by Jews in Palestine contributed directly and indirectly to the eventual partitioning of Palestine into separated Arab and Jewish areas. The British administration in Palestine at the time gave legal legitimacy to partition by issuing the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations. These regulations were based on the notion of partition, which had been suggested early in 1937 by the Peel Commission. Accordingly, Palestine was divided into two major zones: Zone A, some 64% of Palestine where transfers of land from Arabs to Jews were prohibited aside from certain exceptions, and Zone B, some 31% of the total area, in which land sales from Arabs to Jews, though regulated, were permitted in such cases as the consolidation of holdings or the development of an area for the mutual benefit of Arabs and Jews. In other areas, such as Zone C, about 5% of Palestine, comprised of municipal areas, the Haifa industrial zone and the maritime plain, no restrictions on transfer of property were imposed (Palestine Government, 1940).

A further function of the pre-1948 Jewish possession is embodied in its patterns of settlement distribution, which led the Anglo–American Committee of Inquiry (1945–1946) to consider it a major factor for the partitioning of Palestine, eventually resulting in the UN 1947 Partitioning Proposal for Palestine. Creating "facts on the ground" has been a central strategy in Zionist land policy and politics over 12 decades. The creation of a binational state, undivided, was championed only by a small radical fringe on the Jewish left in pre-1948 Palestine, principally in Brit Shalom and its successor organization Ihud.

Fourth, there are parallel geopolitical aspects accompanying the partitioning tendency mentioned above. That has to do with the demarcation of the Jewish state stipulated in the November 1947 UN Partition Proposal. The boundary for this proposed state was largely influenced or dictated by the distribution of the Jewish colonies in Palestine at the time. The boundary in essence followed the settlement frontier. Two examples illustrate this point. In one case, it was well known that the northeastern area of the Galilee, known as the Hula area and its Arab villages (also called the Galilee Panhandle) were initially to be considered as part of the French Mandate that governed Syria and Lebanon in the 1920s. However, during the demarcation stage of the northern boundary of Palestine, the two Mandatory governments agreed to leave this area as part of Palestine due to the presence of Jewish colonies in this region (for example, Metulla, the northernmost settlement, established in 1896) and for the sake of keeping Jewish settlement under a single Mandatory regime ––in this case, the British. Hence this area was annexed to Palestine in 1923 after the demarcation of the boundary.

The second case is related to the southern part of Palestine known as the Naqab in Arabic and the Negev in Hebrew. This area was initially considered as part of the Arab state stipulated in the 1947 UN partition proposal. Yet the Naqab was eventually allocated as part of the Jewish state in this proposal, despite its large Bedouin population. In Israeli discourse, it is common to hear that this decision that was made by the UN was due in part to the establishment of eleven Jewish colonies in the Naqab literally overnight––a creation of irreversible facts on the ground, and that this induced the UN to reconsider its demarcation lines. As noted above in remarks by minister Lieberman, the battle for state "control" of the Naqab lands continues, almost "invisibly" for the media, far from the zone of clashes in the current Intifada.

This kind of geopolitical manipulation by strategically placed establishment of settlements in an area and the subsequent securing and claiming of the turf now––under hegemonic control––is still practiced today. Seemingly a paradox but in Realpolitik not, the number of settlers in the occupied West Bank has nearly doubled since the beginning of the Oslo peace process and has increased by some 17,000 since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September, 2000.

Consider the recent proposal for final status on the West Bank, where the Israeli government is very keen to stretch the Green Line further to the east in order to encompass the majority of Jewish settlements established there post-1967. According to recent surveys, less than 15% of the Jewish-Israeli electorate think that some or most of those settlements should be dismantled. Land, once "redeemed", cannot be forfeited.

4. Palestinian land confiscation and fragmentation in the post-1948 period

Israel after May 1948 enjoyed the status of a recognized state––now the entire issue of land was under a new legal dispensation. A total of 418 Arab villages were levelled and virtually obliterated from the new maps, their population fled or expelled (Khalidi, 1992 and Falah, 1996). Although in this period Israel extended its control over 77 percent of Palestine in the wake of the war, that did not grant the state automatic title to the territory. Backed by ideological hunger for land and over thirty new laws, Israeli-Jewish control over land (represented by the Jewish Agency and various Zionist organizations) reached over 93 percent inside Israel proper (i.e., pre-June 1967 boundaries). The remaining percentage is comprised of lands privately held by Jews and Arabs and by various mainly Christian religious institutions. The situation in the 1967 Occupied Territories is not much different: since 1967 Israel has pursued a policy of land expropriation of Palestinian land in these territories. It is estimated that 212 Jewish settlements have been built to date in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. There are reports ( Hanthala Palestine, 2001) which confirm that Israel's control of land in the West Bank reaches 60% ( Israeli Settlement Building, 2001). According to a report of the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment (LAW) which covers the period from January 1 to June 30, 1999, Israeli authorities had confiscated 10,024 dunams and leveled 14,678 dunams to build either bypass roads or new Jewish settlements. In addition, 2,265 trees were uprooted and 34 houses were demolished in the West Bank including East Jerusalem ( Hanthala Palestine, 2001). In the Gaza Strip, the recent construction and expansion of Jewish colonies and roads that serve them have resulted in further loss of land and home demolition. According to the ARIJ (2001a) website report, "[f]rom September 29, 2000 to February 14, 2001 alone, the occupation forces razed 7,024 dunums (7.024 km²) of land in the Gaza Strip. Of this area, about 5,494 dunums (78.2%) were agricultural land while about 1,530 dunums (21.8%) were wooded or other unplanted areas. In the same period, 94 Palestinian houses were completely demolished, leaving over 450 people without homes."

What I would like to show in the remainder of the paper is how this hunger for land has been effectively embodied in the newly acquired geography of the Arab Palestinian localities in Israel. The inhabitants of these localities are formally Israeli citizens in theory, so their interest and well-being in a democratic state should be fully protected under the law. Yet in ethnocratic practice (Yiftachel, 1999), laws and orders were passed very often to consciously block the progress of the Arab population and to satisfy the ideological ends of the now majority ethnic group in the state's citizenry––the Jews.

Two recent cases in point: in late December 2001, reports from Israel indicated that Palestinian inhabitants of two villages in the Galilee, namely, Hurfeish and `Ein Mahil were engaged in a struggle with Israeli authorities to regain and benefit from their expropriated land. In the case of the village of Hurfeish (upper Galilee), members of the village went on open strike by means of sitting up temporarily a tent on the expropriated turf (Assenara, 21 December, 2001). This land is located at the eastern side of the village on a hill known as Abu Ghamir. They asked the Israeli authorities to return this land to them so they could build their new houses on it. Yet, the case of `Ein Mahil village (lower Galilee) was somehow more dramatic. The Israeli authorities sent in bulldozers, guarded by some 500 soldiers and policemen, leveled the land and uprooted over 2000 olive trees. All this was done for the sake of expanding a new settlement project belonging to the Jewish town of Nazareth Illit (Upper Nazareth) ( Assenara, 21 December, 2001).

Let us look at the geography of an Arab village or town in Israel and consider the way in which these settlements have been treated from the planning perspective. A typical Arab town or village can be divided into three distinct geographical zones that by and large encircle each other (see Fig. 5). The first zone is an area designated for the expansion of the built-up area. It can be demarcated by an imaginary line which circles the houses of the town. From the planning perspective, this area is often amalgamated into the Master Plan or sometimes called Outline Plan for the settlement––i.e., a plan that designated future development within the site of the village and determines land uses. The size of this zone is relatively small in comparison with the original land held by the inhabitants, a form of redlining to contract Arab land.

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Fig. 5. Deir al-Asad: Pattern of landownership in relation to officially designated jurisdictional boundary of local council.

The second zone is an area lying immediately outside the built-up area and surrounds the village. It is larger than the designated built-up area and is officially called the jurisdiction area of the local municipality or council. The size and shape of this area is decided by the Minister of Interior at the time a locality is recognized and gains municipal status. From the planning perspective, this zone encompasses the built-up area and additional areas that are assigned for future development, including recreational, agricultural and industrial land uses.

The third zone is basically all remaining areas in the original land of the village or town after the deduction of the previous two zones. Such a third zone lies outside the jurisdiction area of the municipality but belongs geographically to the original land of the village or town. It should be noted that the extent of land holding for each Palestinian locality (including pre-state Jewish colonies) was demarcated on maps since 1928 when the Mandatory Government of Palestine was in office. One can examine the maps accompanying the 1945 Village Statistics and see the exact extent of boundaries for all Palestinian localities (Palestine Government, 1945).

Significantly, when it comes to planning, the Israeli authorities do not like to admit (or even wish to recognize) that Arab villages in Israel have original lands that they wish to continue to maintain title over and develop as they wish. Such a space in the state, owned by non-Jews, becomes a likely target for fragmentation and confiscation. Israel's policies of regional and local planning were designed in part to be an effective tool for fragmentation in a Judaizing state.

Let us now see how Arab lands in Israel are treated in each of the three zones mentioned above.

4.1. Land fragmentation and confiscation at the built-up area

The way in which a village master plan was prepared and approved by the respective Israeli authorities, including the designation of the land for various land uses (residential, roads, public and open land, parks, etc.) is the cornerstone for absorbing land in the built-up area.

Take Beit Zarzir (in Lower Galilee) as a case in point. In a critical reading of the the Beit Zarzir master plan prepared by the Israel Land Administration in 1974 (see Fig. 6), one sees that the Arab private land was targeted in three different ways: first, the planners deliberately excluded Arab private land (that is settled by dozens of Arab households) from the zoning, a form of spatial gerrymandering akin to urban redlining. These houses and land parcels were left out of the perimeters of the master plan despite the short distance of less than a hundred meters. Declared in effect illegal, such houses are subject to demolition by dint of this exclusion from the master plan.

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Fig. 6. Beit Zarzir: Private Bedouin land in relation to areas officially designated for bedouin housing (1974). Source: After Falah, 1983.

Second, in looking at the designations of land used within the master plan itself, one can notice that the planners attempted to exclude privately owned Arab lands from designation as residential areas. They have excluded such categories of land while deftly allocating another category of land for residential use: namely, land that largely now belongs to the state (expropriated or transferred to state ownership by various means). In other words, the planners channel the residents to an arrangement where they are compelled to lease state lands to build their future homes. These Arab residents were unable to use their own land for such purposes––despite the fact that they lie within the approved master plan.

Third, in several cases, the planner deliberately planned the internal roads between various neighborhoods to cut, partition and thus fragment the private Arab lands. This is another tactic to shrink the total area of Arab lands. One should note that once private land is assigned for roads, it is automatically confiscated by the state for what is termed the public benefit. Essentially, it is forcibly transferred to state ownership.

What does the case of Beit Zarzir reveal? Although Israeli authority spokespersons often deny that such carefully crafted master plans were intended to dispossess local Arabs of their lands, over the course of time the impact of these hidden policies gradually emerges into clarity. It is clear that the intent is to deprive Arab landowners of the right to build houses on the land they own and to erode their economic independence while enhancing state political control. It also forces residents to rely on the state for provision of land for residential purposes or any other uses. The Arab landowner does not have the power to dictate prices or choose location of parcels.

In addition, there is another hidden agenda in allocating state lands within the village master plan for residential use, apart from the aims of economic and political control. In a number of localities, these so-called state lands are lands that were owned by Palestinians before 1948 who are now refugees elsewhere outside (or inside) Palestine. By directing local Arabs to lease (but not purchase) and settle in such parcels, the state creates a hindrance for the original Palestinian owners to return to these same lands at some unspecified future date. Here one can see that local planning is interlinked within the broader Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The master plan helps to block the return of refugee families to their ancestral lands by settling (via lease) other Arabs on that land.

Look at the issue at hand from the current demographic perspective. Due to the natural growth of the Arab population in Israel and the accompanying need for land to build houses, many Arabs who still own lands outside zoning areas are left with little choice but to exchange several dunams of agricultural land for a half dunam of leased state land in the master plan.

According to Yiftachel (1999), the ratio of such land exchange reached 1:5.3 for the years 1965––1980 and that ratio increased to 1:10 and 1:15 in the 1990s. Most of such swaps are done through the Israel Land Administration, which normally operated within the spirit of a 1960 law which does not permit the transfer of state land into private ownership. Those Arabs who agreed to such swapping transactions have to forsake ownership over their agricultural lands and instead have leased a parcel for 49 years from the state. The social consequence of such a transaction is directly rooted in Israel's concept of planning for (or perhaps against) Arabs. In the longer run, it functions to create a landless class in Arab villages and towns. This can be seen from the study by Khamaisi (1995) of three Arab localities: Umm al-Fahem, Shafa Amir, and Kafar Kanna. Khamaisi's finding suggests that the percentage of those under the age of 30 who do not own land for building in these towns is 67%, 60% and 71%, respectively. This shrinking of title to land serves to consolidate "frontiers of exclusion" ( Prior, 1997) here reaching into the very heart of existing Arab towns and villages.

4.2. Land fragmentation and confiscation within jurisdictional areas

Jurisdictional areas are assigned for each locality for development purposes so local council and municipalities could benefit from revenue obtained from commercial and economic enterprises within the perimeters of the municipal jurisdiction. The notion that citizens have to pay taxes for their property in return for daily public services is inherent in the idea of assigning jurisdictional areas.

How is privately owned Arab land impacted by jurisdictional practices in Arab localities in Israel? Note that jurisdictional areas are assigned and approved for any locality in Israel by the Minister of the Interior. He is authorized by state law to approve the extent and shape of the jurisdiction area for each local authority or municipality. The fact that these jurisdictional areas are not identical with the entire land belonging to the Arab locality is basically the most gross alienation of Arab lands. Many Arab mayors for decades have struggled to have the jurisdiction boundaries for their municipalities and local council encompass the original land of their respective localities. But the Interior Ministry refuses to respond positively to such appeals (See Falah, 2000).

Significantly, the first mayor of a newly recognized local council is usually appointed by the minister, never chosen by the residents. As one might expect in line with ethnocratic policy, he is usually chosen among those who are co-opted and prepared to sacrifice the interest of the people for the sake of pleasing those who appointed him. In many cases, these appointed mayors have been used to provide legitimacy for the limited size and shape of jurisdictional areas––they sign deals with authorities that have a legal status, thus making such destructive elements permanent in the village master plans and jurisdictional areas.

The generalization in this section is based on a survey conducted by Falah (1993) in eight Arab villages in the Galilee. Namely, Eilabun, Kafr Manda, Deir al-Asad, Kafr Yassef, Deir Hanna, Rama, Abu Sinan and Majd el Kurum. In examining the boundaries of jurisdiction line in relation to land ownership in these villages, I discovered that the size of jurisdictional areas does not exceed 30–50% of the original village land. What is most noticeable is the extent of Arab private ownership that has been included in or excluded from the jurisdictional areas, which varies from village to village. Significantly, within the jurisdictional area, a number of modes of land ownership have been included, i.e., land which was transferred to the state, to the Zionist Organization, or land held jointly by the state and Arabs; or lands jointly held by a government agency (i.e. the Development Authority) and Arab owners (see, for example, Fig. 6). This selection of properties to be included within the village jurisdictional areas acts to impede the very idea of development envisioned by any local council or municipality, since for any plan to be valid, it must seek the approval of the owner, unless a mayor decides to use specific laws available and opts for confiscation. Moreover, Falah's (1993) survey of these eight villages shows that at least half of the privately owned Arab lands were left out of the jurisdiction area. This means that the local council does not benefit from any development on the land, even though it is owned by the local resident. Yet, private Arab lands which are excluded from the jurisdictional areas are potentially reserved for future confiscation. It may be allocated to be within the nearby Jewish settlement's jurisdictional area and the latter can expropriate as much as 40% of the land, for what is called public purposes and benefit, without court challenges.

4.3. Land fragmentation and confiscation outside jurisdictional areas

This category of land which is still owned by Arabs is the most vulnerable and subject to confiscation or annexations by Jewish local councils at any time. It can be safely described as reserve for future confiscation and will be treated so as the opportunity arises. A portion of this land is officially described as located in areas without municipality status. In such situations, the central government is directly responsible for any change of land use there. Needless to say, owners of these lands must pay taxes on this land to the local authority that this land jurisdictionally belongs to, even though they live and obtain services in their local village.

In addition, should the owner need to develop or change land use––say, convert it from agricultural land to plantation––s/he has to seek the approval of the respective local council under whose jurisdiction the land is included. In short, Arabs may still own land and have title over it, but their opportunity to develop and benefit from the land is very limited. There are many cases where olive trees have been cleared and roads blocked by police and planning authorities under the pretext of lack of proper authorization. To this category of land we can add dozens of small villages that have not yet been granted municipal status or recognition. The houses in these villages are technically considered illegal and the land is treated as if there are no villagers on it––a rather surreal scenario but an integral part of Israeli reality. The land is treated as belonging to the third category discussed above. There are some 40 Bedouin settlements in northern Israel in this category, for example, along with many in the Naqab desert.

4.4. "One more hill confiscated in a pattern of colonization"

The following text is extracted (by permission) from the ARIJ (Applied Research Institute––Jerusalem) website (ARIJ, 2001b, Hill Confiscation). This case study provides a classic example for the way in which Palestinian land is being shrunken or withered in the occupied territory of the West Bank. It also shows longstanding cooperation between the government of Israel and the settlers of Efrata colony. Yet the limited tools that are available for resistance by the local Palestinian have been exhausted. Here once again one can clearly see that Ratzel's organic theory of expansion, amalgamating the area of others by force, has an ever clearer example on the ground in Palestine.

The applicability of the concept of enclaving as a means for colonial kernelization and expansion are well illustrated here. Hilltops seized for "military purposes" are indeed perfect focal points for such enclaving from the point of view of strategic control. They are of course analogous in structure if not function to the "mitzpim" (lookout settlements) that dot the Arab Galilee (Falah, 1989a and Falah, 1993).

Colonists of Efratah colony, located just south of Bethlehem, have recently established a new outpost by moving several caravans to an adjacent hill. The creation of the outpost, called Givat Yitmar, follows a typical pattern of colonial expansion and demonstrates the insincerity of Israel's talk of a "settlement freeze".

The battle for this particular hill, called Batn Al-M'aasi by Palestinians, has a long history. In November of 1979 the Israeli government ordered the confiscation of the hill for military purposes. In 1981, the status of the hill was changed from a closed military area to one for civilian development and the colony of Efratah declared its intentions of expanding to the hill as part of its master plan. A fence was constructed around the land, but was then taken down after demonstrations protesting the move. The Palestinian villagers of the Sbeih, D'doo' and Sabah families from Al-Khader, who own the land, took the issue to court. But the case was stalled for years. In December of 1994 Israeli forces began bulldozing land on the hill, resulting in more protests in which 45 Palestinians were arrested. At this time Prime Minister Rabin postponed implementation of the colony expansion to Batn Al-M'aasi, shifting focus to other nearby hills. Soon two hills adjacent to Efratah colony were confiscated. Building began on the Givat Hazayit outpost in 1997, followed by Givat Hadajan to the north. In addition, a section of bypass road was paved passing by the outposts and connecting them with the bypass road toward Jerusalem. On April 31, 2001 the colonists renewed their efforts to capture Batn Al-M'aasi and moved three caravans to the hilltop after bulldozing the area. An Israeli army tank was also stationed nearby. For the Palestinian owners of the hill, its confiscation means the loss of about 800 dunums of land used primarily for rain fed farming.

Future intentions for the expansion of Efratah colony are clear from the map (Fig. 7). Over the years, Efratah has expanded snake-like northward toward Bethlehem. The strategy behind the strange growth pattern is to cut off Palestinian villages such as Wadi Rahhal and Wadi En Neis from the lands west of Efratah, while at the same time preventing demographic continuity between these villages and the Bethlehem area. The establishment of the Givat outposts completes this task. Even so, there has been activity to suggest that the colonial forces intend to capture yet another hilltop further northeast of Givat Hadajan. Furthermore, the expansion of Efratah colony sections off a large area of land between it and the colonies of Neve Daniyyel and El'azer. This area is now completely isolated from Palestinian villages and will surely be expropriated for colony expansion in the future. The isolation of this area for Efratah expansion by necessity eliminates the ability of the Palestinian village of Al-Khadar to meet the needs of its own population growth.

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Fig. 7. Distribution of Jewish colonial settlements in occupied areas of Bethlehem, West Bank. Source: See text.

Recently, Israeli authorities have announced the possibility of limiting construction in colonies to within built-up areas as part of a settlement freeze in the context of the end of the Palestinian resistance to occupation. However, the Efratah colony expansion reveals the insincerity of this `offer'. Israel considers each of the Givat outposts neighborhoods of Efratah colony. Therefore, Efratah will expand to fill in all the area between the outposts and the main colony, all under the claim that the new housing units are being constructed within a built-up area. The strategic growth of Efratah colony, including the recent establishment of Givat Yitmar, is but part of the larger development of the gush Etzion colony block south of Jerusalem, intended to be included in the creation of Israeli-controlled `Greater Jerusalem'. Israel will continue to find ways to gain an ever-stronger grip on this and other areas of the West Bank if its deception is not revealed and if it is not held accountable by the world community.

5. Concluding remarks

When it comes to land and its fate in Israel, it is evident that its ownership and patterns of control and confiscation over half a century stand out as a pivotal geopolitical reality. On the eve of the 1948 war, the Jews of Palestine, then some one-third of the total population, were on some seven percent of the land purchased over the course of several decades. Seven percent, not more.

The truth of the subsequent fate of land within the Green Line boundaries of the State of Israel has been masked by slogans of security, the "only democracy in the Middle East" and colonialist rhetoric of "making the desert bloom", claiming the indigenous Palestinian population had lost any right to the land by virtue of having allowed it to become a "wasteland" over the centuries. Yet much of this land was in fact occupied by military might and subjected to a practice that today elsewhere would be called ethnic cleansing.

The progressive confiscation and "legal transfer" under duress of Arab lands inside the Green Line, and the blocking of their development by a deftly designed battery of laws are part of the story of that chronicle of past and ongoing expropriation of the land for the benefit of the state and its majority population (and an anticipated future Jewish immigrant influx, especially from Russia and the Ukraine, and perhaps again from Argentina). Indeed, the Israeli media are full of discourse about the "demographic problem" and fears that without such massive immigration Jews will soon become a minority in Palestine/Eretz Israel (Sofer, 2002).

The present uprising in the Occupied Territories is ultimately also about the theft of land, theft of identity, and the marginalization of the population there, strangers in and on their own land. Any discussion of the Right of Return of Arab refugees, those who fled and their descendants in the Palestinian diaspora, must confront this question of land and its ownership, inside the so-called Green Line and beyond.

Viewed from the defining perspective of land, its control and use, there is no other choice than to return to square one: to reconfigure a new geography for Palestinian villages and towns in Israel and for those many hundreds of villages which were demolished and have since been obliterated. This new geography, however painful, will endeavor to restore some modicum of territorial justice as it seeks to return expropriated and state-pilfered land to its rightful owners in the context of a "historic compromise".

Uri Avnery (2001), a leading veteran figure in the Israeli peace camp and head of Gush Shalom, has suggested that a number of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948–49 could be rebuilt as part of the program for bringing Palestinians back into the areas where they and their families once lived––a sane proposal for a reasoned historic reconciliation. To quote Avnery: "When the [two parties] sit together to find creative solutions, all kinds of interesting ideas may turn up. Many things that seem impossible today may appear on the table once the atmosphere between the parties changes".

All rhetoric of "making the desert bloom" notwithstanding, in practice Israel's agriculture sector has failed to use to the fullest capacity the land the state has confiscated. Large tracts of excellent agricultural lands have been fenced-in and converted into pasture or military training areas. Much of the Naqab desert in southern Israel, lands expropriated from Bedouin Palestinians, lies undeveloped, for decades a vast training ground for the Israeli army. In its ethnocratic folly, the Israeli government sprays poison on crops planted by Naqab Bedouin agriculturalists. Arguably, Israel has absorbed far more land from the Palestinians than it can swallow. So we currently have a situation inside the Green Line where lands are left fallow, while their original owners are kept from planting and tilling, or (as in the case of the Naqab Bedouin) their crops are willfully destroyed. Other former owners eke out an existence as third-generation refugees, most in grinding poverty, crowded in distant now ravaged camps like that in Jenin, waiting for a modicum of territorial justice and the chance to return.

If a plan of land return, village reconstruction and a certain "repartitioning" of Palestine can be implemented and peacefully accepted, there will be a prospect for giving the Israeli political class what it desired in Camp David II: namely, a declaration from the Palestinian leadership for an end to this conflict, at whose geopolitical core lies land and its rightful possession and use.