Jews-only land policy prompts questions of Israeli identity

c. 2007 Religion News Service JERUSALEM _ It was love at first sight for Baha and Fouad Abu Raya when they spotted the split-level house in Karmiel, a quiet, predominantly Jewish town in northern Israel. The house was more than three times the size of their home in the Arab town of Sakhnin, where the […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ It was love at first sight for Baha and Fouad Abu Raya when they spotted the split-level house in Karmiel, a quiet, predominantly Jewish town in northern Israel.

The house was more than three times the size of their home in the Arab town of Sakhnin, where the Muslim family of four had been living, and they liked the nice plot of land that came with it.


As the closing on the house neared, Baha, an attorney, and Fouad, a dermatologist, went to the local land registry to transfer ownership. What they encountered there shocked them.

“The clerk told us she couldn’t transfer ownership because the house was built on land belonging to the Jewish National Fund,” Abu Raya says, “and that it is illegal under JNF’s charter to sell JNF land to Arabs.”

The 2004 encounter prompted three Israeli groups to petition the country’s High Court of Justice to overturn the longstanding policies of the JNF and the Israel Lands Authority (ILA), which prevented land leases among non-Jewish citizens and demanded compensatory land when leasing to non-Jews.

The case, now before the court, has sparked an emotional debate over whether Israel “is the state of the Jewish people or a state of all its citizens,” says Yossi Klein Halevy, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem think tank.

If Israel is above all a Jewish state, Halevy says,“it has an obligation to honor those transnational Zionist institutions that connect world Jewry to the land of Israel and helped build it. At the same time, as a democracy, it has an obligation to maintain full equality for all of its citizens.”

JNF spokesperson Orit Hadad said her organization “does not discriminate against non-Jews.”Before Israel’s high court invalidated the land-swap arrangement in 2004, Hadad said, JNF lands “were open to everyone.”

Rabbi David Rosen, director of interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee said: “To deny non-Jews the right to purchase land in Israel is inconsistent with Jewish teachings, and is inconsistent with an entity that calls itself a Jewish state.”


“The Jewish sages say that denying the dignity of a non-Jew is even worse than denying the dignity of a Jew because it involves the desecration of the divine name,” said Rosen, who is based in Jerusalem.

JNF holdings are about 13 percent of Israel, and are home to about 70 percent of Israel’s population. Much of the land was purchased by Jews in the diaspora to “return the Jewish people to their homeland,” according to JNF.

For decades, little “pushkes,” the small blue JNF collection boxes into which schoolchildren placed their lunch money, were a proud symbol of the Jewish struggle for statehood. the time Israel was founded in 1948, the JNF already owned vast tracts, which were largely settled by Jewish refugees. JNF land holdings more than doubled soon after, when the fund purchased property nationalized _ Arabs say “expropriated” _ by the Israeli government.

Minority-rights activists accuse the JNF and ILA of conspiring to keep it in Jewish hands by excluding Muslims and Christians, who comprise about 18 percent and 2 percent of the population, respectively.

“The difficulty in procuring land certainly contributes to convincing our young people they have no future here,” said Elias Chacour, the Melkite Catholic bishop of Israel. “It is one more way non-Jews feel marginalized and not accepted as partners.”

Gershom Gorenberg, senior correspondent for the liberal political journal The American Prospect, calls the JNF/ILA’s efforts to safeguard land for Jewish-only use “both anachronist and damaging,” a relic from Israel’s pre-independence past that cuts against Israel’s democratic instincts.


Recalling his own grandparents, who maintained a JNF pushke in their living room, Gorenberg said, “I can’t imagine they would want their money to fund discrimination.”

Halevy, from the Shalem Center, points out that JNF develops land, including parks and reservoirs, that is available to all Israeli citizens. “Its environmental work aids everyone,” he said.

What’s more, Halevy said, the Wakf, the Islamic religious trust, will not sell its land to non-Muslims. And he noted that the Greek Orthodox partriarch in Jerusalem was deposed after he sold church-owned property to Jews.

“Many Israelis fear that Israeli land could be could be bought up by Arab countries with intentions contrary to their interests,” he said.

Gerald Steinberg, director of the Program on Conflict Resolution at Bar Ilan University, said land has a visceral connection to people on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The fear is that instead of a two-state solution of one Palestinian state and one Jewish state, there will be a Palestinian state and a state of all peoples _ essentially a second Palestinian state,” Steinberg said. “Controlling (who receives) land in Israel is a way of preventing this.”


Baha Abu Raya gained title to her house in Karmiel thanks to the high court’s interim intervention. Her case could have implications for more than 1 million other non-Jewish Israelis.

“We are Israeli citizens,” she said. “We are prepared to carry out our legal obligations _ provided we receive equal rights.”

DSB/LF END CHABIN

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