In this paper we examine the Israeli government's use of law to institutionalize the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs displaced by the 1948 war and trace the legal transformation of their land during the formative years of Israel's land regime (1948^60). This legal transformation facilitated the expropriation and reallocation of formerly Arab land to primarily Jewish hands and was therefore a central component of the legal reordering of space within Israel after 1948. Based on close examination of Israeli legislation, archival documents, Knesset proceedings, and other sources we delineate a 12-year legislative process consisting of four phases, each concluding with the enactment of major legislation. The process was led by senior and second-tier Israeli officials, and the result was the construction of a new Israeli legal geography. The culmination of the process was the integration of appropriated Arab land into the country's new system of Jewish-Israeli`national land' known as Israel Lands'.
This article focuses on land rights, land law, and land administration within a multilayered colonial setting by examining a major land dispute in British-ruled Palestine (1917-1948). Our research reveals that the Mandate legal system extinguished indigenous rights to much land in the Zor al-Zarqa and Barrat Qisarya regions through its use of "colonial law" -the interpretation of Ottoman law by colonial officials, the use of foreign legal concepts, and the transformation of Ottoman law through supplementary legislation. However, the colonial legal system was also the site of local resistance by some Palestinian Arabs attempting to remain on their land in the face of the pressure of the Mandate authorities and Jewish colonization officials. This article sheds light on the dynamics of the Mandate legal system and colonial law in the realm of land tenure relations. It also suggests that the joint efforts of Mandate and Jewish colonization officials to appropriate * Geremy Forman is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Haifa's Department of Land of Israel Studies. Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar is a Lecturer in the University of Haifa's Faculty of Law. Names of authors by alphabetical order. We would like to thank Oren Yiftachel for his contribution to this article and Michael Fischbach for his insightful remarks and suggestions. We are also grateful to Assaf Likhovsky for his feedback and constructive criticism, to Anat Fainstein for her research assistance, and to Dana Rothman of Theoretical Inquiries in Law for her expert editorial advice. Maxine Forman and the women of 'Push-Up' also provided important assistance in editing and graphics. Finally, we would like to thank the Israeli Science Foundation for its generous support, without which this research could not have been undertaken (Grant No. 761/99). Brought to you by | Georgetown University Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/15 6:21 PM Theoretical Inquiries in Law [Vol. 4:491 land and undertake "development" operations in the area were fueled by neither the interests of colonial rule nor those of Jewish colonization alone, but, rather, by the integrated impact of both forces. Theoretical Inquiries in Law [Vol. 4:491contemporary geographies, others focus on the historical geographies of the past. 5 Colonial territories offer fertile ground for such a critical legalgeographical approach. In a recent review essay on "law and colonialism," legal anthropologist John Comaroff asserts that such studies demonstrate the importance of legalities, broadly defined, in the imposition of control by Europe over its various "others": how law was "the cutting edge of colonialism, an instrument of the power of an alien state and part of the process of coercion" ... how it became a "tool for pacifying and governing ... colonized peoples" .... 6 Indeed, some South African tribes termed English legalities "the English mode of warfare." 7 In the realm of land tenure and land administration, the construction of colonial land regimes served as standard battleground for this mode of warfar...
The “50 percent rule” is an Israeli judicial doctrine that has played a pivotal role since the early 1960s in deciding disputes between the Israeli government and Palestinian landholders under Article 78 of the Ottoman Land Code. It was first institutionalized during a government land‐claiming campaign aimed at providing state land for settlement‐based Judaization of Israel's predominantly Palestinian Galilee region. Two decades later, during a similar state land‐claiming campaign, the doctrine diffused into the occupied West Bank. Drawing on spatial components of social science diffusion literature and work in the field of legal geography, this article offers a legal‐historical‐geographical analysis of the evolution and diffusion of the 50 percent rule. Its conclusions suggest a new spatialized approach to the study of legal transfers and transplants that conceptualizes law's movement across international borders as one component of a broader process of legal diffusion, in which internal diffusion also plays an important role.
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