On the Margins
Annual Review of Human Rights Violations of the Arab Palestinian Minority in Israel 2005
Chapter Two
Discrimination in Land and Planning Policy
A) Historical background
Israel regards land as a key resource and has worked to take for itself land both from Palestinians made refugees by the 1948 war and from Palestinian communities incorporated into the new state of Israel. Through the office of the Custodian of Absentee Property, Israel has appropriated the extensive landholdings of Palestinians forced to flee or expelled during the 1948 war. It has also destroyed more than 400 Palestinian villages that were emptied during the war, usually turning over the villages’ lands to Jewish farming communities such as kibbutzim and moshavim.
Also since 1948, much of the land belonging to Arab towns and villages in Israel has been taken on a variety of pretexts: the need to create military firing ranges, to establish conservation areas and national parks, to provide space for forests, and to construct roads. Such confiscations continue to this day. Often confiscated lands are later passed on to exclusive Jewish communities for them to exploit. Following decades of land confiscation, most Arab towns and villages are now starved of space for natural expansion or to develop industrial areas. Today, 93 per cent of the territory inside Israel is effectively nationalised and mostly off-limits to the Arab population.
The state has succeeded in controlling Arab citizens’ access to confiscated land through a policy of enforcing strict territorial segregation between the Arab and Jewish populations. Even in the mixed cities, in which a significant Palestinian minority lives alongside a clear Jewish majority, the Arab population effectively live in separate ghetto neighbourhoods attached to Jewish cities. The management of land in the interests of the Jewish population has been achieved through two institutions: the ILA and an international Zionist organisation called the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has special privileged recognition in Israeli law.
In practice, the two bodies work closely together in managing land inside Israel. Under deals agreed with the state in its first decades, the JNF was given “state lands” and today owns about 17 per cent of Israeli territory. According to its charter, the JNF holds this land in trust for the Jewish people around the world and therefore is obligated to discriminate against Arab citizens in the allocation of land resources under its control. A further 76 per cent of Israeli territory has been nationalised and is held as “state lands”. The ILA manages both state land and land owned by the JNF. Although the ILA is a government body, half of its board members belong to the JNF, meaning that the JNF’s own planning goals largely determine those of the ILA.
As well as confiscating Arab land and managing it in the interests of Jewish citizens and worldwide Jewry, Israel has established a hierarchy of planning authorities that openly discriminate against Arab citizens and Arab communities in planning matters. A piece of legislation passed by the Knesset in 1965 known as the Planning and Building Law created these planning bodies at the national, regional and local levels, with all levels dominated by Jewish officials. Planners have also designated all the areas for development in Israel and all the areas of green belt and agricultural use. It is illegal for people to live outside the areas marked for development. The 1965 law established 123 Arab communities, with the proscribed development area usually tightly encircling existing homes. No new Arab community has been approved since then. By contrast, there are more than 900 Jewish communities today, with the state continuously approving new ones.
By strictly demarcating the areas in which Arabs can live, the state was able to classify all other inhabited Arab areas as illegally occupied, whether or not the community pre-existed Israel’s creation in 1948. This has been done to many dozens of Arab villages across the country, particularly Bedouin communities, which have found themselves retroactively criminalised. Such communities are “unrecognised” in law and cannot therefore receive any services such as electricity, water, sewerage or telephone from the public utility companies. From a planning perspective, these villages are also invisible to the government and planning authorities, and so are not provided with roads, schools or medical centres. But they are visible to the authorities when they want to enforce building regulations. Because no planning bodies exist to which the unrecognised villages can apply for building licences, the inhabitants’ homes are all illegal and can be demolished. The cost of such demolitions is billed to the homeowners. Nearly 100,000 Arab citizens – one in 10 – live in unrecognised villages.
The combined effect of the land management system, represented by the ILA and JNF, and the 1965 Building and Planning Law has been to trap Arab citizens in land-starved communities without room for expansion. Widespread unlicensed building and the threat of house demolitions in both recognised and unrecognised Arab communities have been the main consequences.
B) Land confiscations faced by Arab communities
Statistical information from 2001 for the northern district of Israel – where nearly half the country’s Arab population live – shows that 490,000 Arab citizens live on 390 sq km whereas 560,000 Jewish citizens live on 2,900 sq km. In other words, Jews are allocated six and a half times more land to live on than Arabs. Population density figures are similarly bad for Arab towns. They reveal that 4,100 Arabs live in each sq km of an Arab town, compared to 1,600 Jews in each sq km of a Jewish town. Things are certain to get worse. According to a study by the Galilee Society and Mada Institute published in July, housing shortages in Arab communities would increase over the next ten years. Some 61 per cent of families will need at least one extra housing unit within a decade, while 44 per cent believed they would not have the ability to build or buy a new home, either because of a lack of funds or because of a shortage of land to build on.
A graphic illustration of the land shortages facing Arab communities was provided in February when the village of Majd al-Krum in the central Galilee announced that it had run out of land not only for the living but also for the dead. The village had submitted proposals to the Northern Planning and Building Committee and to the ILA for possible sites for a new cemetery in 1996 and 2001 but in 2002 all their proposals were rejected. A leader of the village, Sheikh Ali Edres, said: “The population of Majd al-Krum is 12,000 and approximately 40 to 45 people need to be buried every year. When someone dies we often don’t know where to bury them. In the past we have had to open old plots. Sometimes, however, the body in it hasn’t finished decomposing so we have to close it and look for another old plot to open”.
In March the villagers of Jatt in the Little Triangle region, adjacent to the northern tip of the West Bank, heard that a state-appointed border committee was recommending that a further 250 acres be taken away from the village and passed to a Jewish regional council, Menashe. The committee was formed to designate the new borders of Jatt and neighbouring Baqa al-Gharbiyya after a decision was taken to merge the two local councils. The land is privately owned by inhabitants of Jatt and is considered the last land reserves available to the village. Until 2000 Jatt had the same amount of land – 1,700 acres – as it had in 1961, even though the population had quadrupled to more than 8,500 people. But since then much of Jatt’s lands have been confiscated by the state. In the last few years some 850 acres were taken for the purpose of building the Trans-Israel Highway. The Tamam 6 Regional Master plan also envisages taking more land from Jatt for a green area, threatening 70 homes that have been built there with demolition. After these planning decisions, Jatt will be surrounded on all sides, with no possibility of expansion.
The Nature Reserves Authority announced in April that it was intending to confiscate 750 acres on the western side of the village of Fassuta, near the Lebanese border, so that the land could be turned into a nature reserve. Of this land, 250 acres are currently being used for farming and animal grazing – the last land left to the village for agricultural use since the state confiscated all its other lands.
Separately, Arab farming lands near the northern city of Acre were confiscated to build a trail road.
An order to confiscate 550 acres of farmland from the town of Daliyat al-Carmel, near Haifa, was issued in September. The planning authorities said the land was needed for the building of the Trans-Israel Highway, to lay gas pipelines in the area and to construct a large new traffic intersection. In an earlier decision, in 1998, more than 1,000 acres were confiscated from the town. Kamal Halabi, chairman of the Local Committee for Saving Carmel Lands, said the original plan for the gas pipelines had been to lay them on Jewish lands but had been changed. In December Daliyat al-Carmel and the neighbouring village of Usifiya faced further confiscations when the National Planning and Building Committee announced that it had approved the building of the 60km-long Valley railway line from Haifa to Beit She’an, with the tracks due to pass through the two communities’ lands.
A border committee appointed by the Interior Ministry to decide a land dispute between the Arab town of Sakhnin in the Galilee and the neighbouring Jewish Regional Council of Misgav announced its verdict in December. Sakhnin had been demanding the return of some of the lands confiscated from it over many decades and passed on to Misgav. The committee rejected Sakhnin’s claim for an additional 2,000 acres to ease overcrowding and allow the municipality to plan housing and infrastructure for its rapidly growing population. Instead it offered Sakhnin 425 acres – most of it covered by forest. Today Sakhnin has only 2,500 acres of the 25,000 acres it owned in 1948. Its population of 24,000 is expected to nearly double over the next 20 years. Neighbouring Misgav, on the other hand, which comprises several small rural communities surrounding Sakhnin, has a population of approximately 19,000 but more than 47,000 acres. Misgav has about 25 times as much land for each of its residents as Sakhnin has for its residents. The decision was not entirely surprising as the chairman of the committee was Prof Gideon Biger, a leading member of the Yisrael Beitenu party of Avigdor Lieberman, who advocates the transfer of Arab citizens from the country.
In the same month the Transport Ministry declared that a small neighbourhood of Shafa’amr, an Arab town halfway between Nazareth and Haifa, would be confiscated for the construction of the Trans-Israel Highway. A large intersection for the road will be built on the Sarkees neighbourhood, requiring the destruction of 12 homes and making 25 families homeless.
C) Demolition of Arab homes
Israeli government ministers often refer to Arab citizens who live on their own, private land – if it is land the state wants – as “invaders” and “criminals”. Today, these descriptions are applied to a large number of Arab citizens. In March the Interior Minister Ophir Pines-Paz, of the Labor party, declared that 30,000 buildings in the Naqab were illegal and therefore under threat of demolition. Most of these buildings are in the 45 Bedouin villages the state refuses to recognise, communities in which all housebuilding is illegal, although a significant number also exist in recognised communities. There are believed to be a similar number of illegal homes in Arab towns and villages in the country’s north, again in both recognised and unrecognised communities.
Pines-Paz revealed at the same time that his ministry had issued 350 demolition orders against Bedouin homes in the Naqab, while another 350 orders had been issued by local planning and building committees. Later in the year the number of such orders against Arab homes reached at least 1,200. MK Jamal Zahalka, of the National Democratic Assembly party, demanded that Pines-Paz negotiate with the Bedouin homeowners rather than demolish their houses. The minister replied that the families should accept recognised lands in the Naqab townships.
According to government figures, a third of all illegal structures are built in Jewish communities, usually in kibbutzim and moshavim. But enforcement orders against such buildings – often constructed for agricultural purposes – are issued extremely rarely. In October the Umm al-Fahm Centre for Contemporary Studies published a report confirming that the overwhelming majority of demolition orders are issued against Arab homeowners. Mohanad Mustafa, one of the report’s authors, said the number of orders against Jewish homes each year could be counted on one hand. By contrast, 933 Arab families from the Naqab had been convicted of building unlicensed homes in 2003, three times as many as those convicted in 2002. The centre also noted a steady rise in the number of demolitions in the Naqab. Some 132 Arab homes were demolished in the Naqab in 2003, compared to 113 homes in all of 2002. The figure rose to 150 demolitions in 2004. In addition, the report points out that most unlicensed construction in Arab communities occurs on privately owned Arab lands. Unlicensed construction of Jewish homes usually occurs on state-owned land.
The Weekly Review of the Arab Press in Israel, published by the Arab Association for Human Rights, reported on dozens of home demolitions in 2005. In February, 10 homes in an unrecognised Naqab village belonging to the Azazmi tribe were destroyed by the ILA and the Green Patrol, a paramilitary police force. After the destruction, the ILA issued a press release in which it stated: “In line with the Supreme Court decision and after 19 years of legal struggle, we finally succeeded in expelling the Bedouin who have occupied state land”.
In another unrecognised village in the Naqab, Bir al-Mashash, 16km east of Beersheva, large numbers of police arrived in June to deliver demolition orders against the homes of all 4,000 inhabitants. In clashes between residents and police, four Bedouin youths, a 22-year-old woman and her three-year-old child were hurt. Officials came back again to the village to post notices in November, when 15 residents were hurt in scuffles with the police. Shortly afterwards, Beersheva magistrates court created a legal precedent by ordering six residents of Bir al-Mashash be placed under house arrest until their homes were demolished – in the very houses that will be destroyed.
The Interior Ministry ordered that a kindergarten be demolished in September in the unrecognised village of Um Batan in the Naqab. Villagers said they were forced to begin building the kindergarten illegally because the Education Ministry refused them a kindergarten for the village children.
Such demolitions do not only occur in unrecognised communities. There were also many reports in the Press Review of homes in recognised Arab towns and villages being destroyed. In May, for example, dozens of police surrounded and helped bulldozers raze a house in Arrabeh being built by Mahdi Kamal Waked in time for his wedding. His father explained why the family had chosen to build the house even though they had been denied a permit. “The land is registered in our name and, even though it is outside the village masterplan’s designated building area, it is still very close to it. We don’t have any other land for our son, who will be married this year. We submitted an application for a building licence but the Planning and Building Committee rejected it. Our need for housing led us to start building the house.”
In June the municipality of Haifa demolished the home of Basem and Miriam Bushqar after their family had been living in the same spot place for 70 years. The courts issued a demolition order five years ago, saying the area had been designated as an industrial zone. Police enforcing the order sealed off the area at 10am and attacked Jewish and Arab peace activists defending the house. Twelve people were injured and 20 arrested. Haifa’s mayor, Yona Yahav, refused appeals from a delegation of Arab MKs the night before the demolition.
A spokesman for the councils of Dailyat al-Carmel and Usifiya, near Haifa, revealed in June that, because of a severe shortage of land, 4,000 homes in the two communities were illegal and facing demolition.
In December the Interior Ministry asked the planning and building authorities and the ILA to step up house destructions in the run-up to the election, presumably believing that such a tough approach against Arab families might prove a vote winner with Jewish citizens. In coordination with the Lod municipality, the ILA brought a large number of policemen to demolish three homes in Lod on December 22, a few weeks after demolition orders had been issued and before the families had had a chance to appeal. One family, the Khawajas, said they had been approached by the security services a few weeks earlier offering protection for their home if they turned informers.
D) Special problems of the unrecognised villages
The inhabitants of the unrecognised villages face many other land and planning pressures – apart from house demolitions – designed to make them leave the lands they have lived on for generations. Two problems that stood out in 2005 were the destruction of Bedouin village crops and the refusal to supply the villages with electricity, even in cases of life and death.
Crop destruction
During the period 2002-2005, approximately 8,821 acres of agricultural areas in the Naqab were destroyed by the ILA. These agricultural areas had been sown with wheat and barley by the Bedouin citizens of the Naqab who live in the unrecognized villages, and for whom the crops constitute their sole source of income.
The destruction of agricultural areas took place by means of aerial spraying from airplanes hired by the ILA, and using a chemical substance known as Roundup. According to a report published in July 2004 by the HRA, the spraying operations took place:
§ Suddenly and without any prior warning to the Bedouin citizens;
§ without giving the Bedouin citizens a fair opportunity to present their arguments before undertaking the spraying operations;
§ without granting the Bedouin citizens the possibility to address the court in advance in order to prevent the spraying operations, or at least to examine the legality thereof;
§ without consideration of the fact that, for many years, there has been a protracted conflict between the Bedouin citizens and the ILA regarding the ownership of the agricultural areas that were sprayed, and that this conflict has yet to be resolved;
§ without consideration of the fact that, in some cases, spraying took place while Bedouin citizens were present in the agricultural areas, with the result that some of them came into contact with the chemical substance, inhaled it, and consequently suffered respiratory difficulties, headaches, blurred vision and general weakness, causing some of them to require medical treatment;
§ without consideration of the fact that although this chemical substance has been used for many years as a herbicide and insecticide, studies have suggested that the use of this substance may pose various threats to human health, to animals and to the environment – and, in any case, the warning label on the substance itself states that it must not be used by means of aerial spraying, and certainly not in the vicinity of civilian population centres.
In response to a petition launched in March 2004 against the use of toxic sprays, the ILA admitted at a hearing in February that it had used an unauthorized chemical substance. The ILA said two chemicals it used – RoundUp and Glyphosate – were authorized by the Ministry of Agriculture but the third – Typhoon – was not. The ILA admitted that this unauthorised substance comprised more than a quarter of the spray used in 2004 on Bedouin crops. According to expert opinions cited in the HRA report, even the authorized chemicals were used in a harmful way, as it is explicitly stated in the instructions that they are not to be used from the air.
The Supreme Court, which issued a temporary ban on the spraying of Bedouin crops with herbicides in March 2004, extended its previous ruling at a hearing in November. Judge Naor said crop spraying was not only detrimental to the crops but also psychologically damaging to the farmers. Judge Jubran asked the state prosecutor if any other country in the world sprayed chemicals on crops belonging to citizens in order to drive them from the land. The court said it would maintain the temporary ban until it made a permanent ruling. The state prosecutor defended the policy of spraying crops, saying it was effective in preventing illegal occupation of state land. Other options, such as uprooting the land, were more expensive. Since the ruling the ILA has returned to its previous policy of destroying Bedouin crops by ploughing them up.
Withholding of electricity
During 2005 there were a series of public battles by families of sick children living in unrecognised villages to have their homes supplied with electricity, on humanitarian grounds. The unrecognised villages are denied all public utlities, including water, sewerage and telephone services.
In May it was reported that the family of Saif Naim, a six-year-old who was born with liver failure, was being refused electricity to their caravan in Arab al-Naim village in the Galilee. The village of Arab al-Naim won recognition in 1999 but its inhabitants are still living in appalling conditions, in tin shacks and tents with no services, because the local planning and building committee refuses to approve a masterplan for the village. When Saif was released from hospital after an operation on his liver, his doctor insisted the family move out of their tin shack. Although the family won permission from the authorities to live in a caravan, they had no success being connected to the electricity supply. Saif needs his medicines to be refrigerated and his treatments to be administered by an electric device. Requests from the family for electricity were rejected by the Interior Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office. Saif’s father said: “Why do the livestock in the settlement next door have electricity before our child has?” In June, after publication of Saif’s story, the Israel Electricity Company began laying cables to the village and the former Housing Minister, Binyamin Ben Eliezer, paid a visit to the family to promise that electricity would soon be supplied to the family. Finally, Saif's house – and only his house – was supplied with electricity.
But in other story similar to Saif's one, the result wasn't happy. The handicapped Yousef Sawaed, died in September after his unrecognised village of al-Husseiniya was denied electricity. Yousef, who suffered from a hereditary condition that prevented normal body growth, needed treatment from special electrically-operated equipment. Because the family could not use the equipment, his condition deteriorated rapidly and he died after being admitted to hospital. His father said his eldest son died in the same way six years ago and his two other children are in similar danger. He added that the Infrastructure Ministry refused permission to supply electricity to the village.
And in July it was reported that the family of Inas al-Atrash, aged three, who suffers from cancer and needs air conditioning to keep her body temperature stable, were being denied electricity to their home in the unrecognised village of al-Atrash in the Naqab. Electricity cables lie only a few hundred metres from her home but government officials refused all the family’s requests. The family has a few hours of electricity a day provided by a generator shared with neighbours but the cost of running it permanently is prohibitive. In August the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Physicians for Human Rights filed a petition in the Supreme Court against the Health, Interior, and Infrastructure Ministries demanding that the al-Atrashs’ home be connected to the electricity supply. A month later the court suggested a remedy: either the Israeli authorities agree to cover half the cost of running the electric generator used by the family, or the family move to a recognized village. Finally in November the court ruled that the government assist the girl’s family with money to buy fuel for a neighbour's generator. The judges acknowledged that their ruling did not address the girl's problem but blamed the parents for choosing to live in an unrecognised village, which they knew lacked electricity. The ruling ignored the fact that the family had not chosen to live in al-Atrash village – they had lived there for generations – but rather that the government had chosen not to recognise their village.
One minor success for the unrecognised villages was noted in September when the village of Ayn Hawd, near Haifa, was finally given representation on the district council of Hof HaCarmel. Its situation is the most advanced of all the unrecognised villages seeking recogntion: it led the struggle for recognition in 1980 and won formal recognition in 1992. However, Ayn Hawd still faces many obstacles to full recognition.