While this is not a new practice - settlers have used documents from British Mandate times as well - it would be good that this practice either be understood for what it is or be ended.
In Jerusalem they say that these documents are forged. This, of course, would be no great surprise, since settlers can’t stoop too low in their project to clear Palestine of its indigenous population. The Israeli courts are biased in favour of the settlers, but there’s no surprise there either. For a country that prides itself on its democracy and rule of law, Israel’s legal system remains fundamentally skewed against Palestinians.
There is, for instance, the Law of Absentee Property, a piece of legislation that was brought in 1950 for the express purpose of legitimising the appropriation - read theft - of Palestinian property left unguarded when some 800,000 people fled or were forced to flee in 1947-48.
Of course, the law targets Palestinians without saying so explicitly, a time-honoured Israeli practice. It does not mention Arabs or Palestinians and their properties. It talks only about landlords who fled to enemy territory, i.e., the entire surrounding Arab neighbourhood and the only place to which Palestinians could flee. Their properties subsequently became the property of the state of Israel in what is quite possibly the largest case of real estate theft in history.
Palestinians quite rightly demand this outrageous wrong be righted. They demand that their properties be restored to them and they be granted the right, if they so choose, to return to them. This is a right enshrined in international law. The whole world may have given up on this, but that is only because the international community has slowly but surely given up on human rights.
Of course, nothing annoys an Israeli more than the Palestinians’ right of return. So palpable is this annoyance that it is clear that it agitates the conscience.
If the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is about just one thing, as Israelis know deep down, it is 1948 and the wholesale dispossession of an entire nation.
For the Israeli legal system to allow the contrary, i.e., the restitution of property pre-1948 or 1967 in occupied territory to Jewish owners (when such claims have a basis in reality) is therefore a fantastic provocation that will only incite greater anger and more violence.
It is also clear testament to the racist nature of the Israeli legal system.
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