by Hillel Fendel
The State Prosecution has submitted a petition to the Supreme Court that leaders of the Jewish Judea/Samaria settlement enterprise fear will cause the loss of many hundreds of acres of Jewish land.
The petition, which was submitted in 2008, was heard shortly before the Passover holiday. Arutz-7 has learned that a high-level government meeting is to be held on the matter Wednesday.
The petition was filed in the name of the Military Commander in Yesha (Judea and Samaria) against a decision by the Military Appeals Committee, which granted Jewish ownership to land based on the fact that Jews had worked and maintained it for ten years. The decision, regarding land near Nebi Samuel (north of Jerusalem) and in Samaria, was made in accordance with Ottoman Period law that has long applied to Judea and Samaria. However, the Prosecution now wishes to nullify this arrangement.
Even more gravely, says a civil rights expert from Hevron, "the Prosecution aims not only to cancel the registration of the land in the names of the Jews who have worked it, but also to throw them off the land altogether!"
In addition, if the petition is accepted, it would be applied only to Jews. The discriminatory decision would thus cause the retroactive loss of hundreds of acres, or more, of Jewish agricultural land throughout Judea and Samaria.
Anti-Israel Language
In addition, the language of the petition appears to have been written by radical opponents of the State of Israel, say those who have read it. Israel is repeatedly referred to as the "occupying power," and the petition cites decisions by The Hague which support legal interpretations limiting Israel's rights in Judea and Samaria.
This, despite the fact that Judea and Samaria have not been under the legal sovereignty of any nation since 1948 when the British Mandate was allowed to expire.
Leading Yesha figures fear that the Supreme Court will jump at the opportunity to issue a ruling that would harm Jewish interests in Judea and Samaria, and call upon the government to order the withdrawal of the petition. "With this suit," one leading Yesha personality said, "the State Prosecution is actually bypassing, of its own volition, the government echelons, and is allowing the Supreme Court a jump-start that will cause grave harm to the settlement enterprise."
Danny Dayan, head of the Yesha Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria, said, "This is a fundamental test for the political echelon to decide who is really running this country, who sets its policies, and who makes its laws - the elected officials, or agenda-driven academics in the Justice Ministry. The government must instruct the Prosecution to withdraw this petition immediately, and to restore to itself the reins of policy and legislation - or else it will rock even further its ability to govern."Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143697
Hillel Fendel
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
1 comment:
I cannot agree with Hillel Fendel's conclusion that: '...Judea and Samaria have not been under the legal sovereignty of any nation since 1948 when the British Mandate was allowed to expire.
Prior to that time, the Jews had been granted exclusive political rights to Palestine, to be held in trust for them in a "mandate" or trust agreement until the Jews were were able to exercise sovereignty. At the time of the conception of this plan in the Balfour Declaration, while the Jews had had a majority of population in Jerusalem since 1845 according to the notes of the Prussian consul, its population of all Palestine was only about one tenth. It was contemplated that under the mandate the Jews in the diaspora would flock back to Israel so as to give the Jews a majority of the population and under the mandate the ability of the Jews to exercise the attributes of sovereignty would grow.
The policy of the Balfour Declaration was adopted by the victorious Allies at San Remo who gave political rights to 99% of the land captured from the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and North Africa to the Arabs and Muslims, but reserved exclusive political rights over 1% of that land, Palestine, for the Jews in view of their long historic attachment to it.
The League of Nations approved the policy adopted at San Remo and implemented it with a trust agreement called the Palestine Mandate giving the Jews a beneficial interest in the exclusive political rights to the Jews and the legal interest to the British, as trustee. When England abandoned its trust in 1948, the trust res devolved to Israel as the representative of the Jews.
The French attached a process verbal to the San Remo agreement to the effect that nothing in it would deprive the non-Jews in Palestine of their existing rights. That did not affect the grant of exclusive political rights to the Jews. Under the Balfour declaration, the civil and religious rights of the non-Jews were to be preserved, but it was silent as to political rights. These could not have been preserved because the non-Jews local to Palestine had never had any. And in article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres, the Ottoman Turks assigned their sovereignty to the mandatory power, preserving only the civil and religious rights of the non-Jews. For the 400 years prior to the mandate, sovereignty in the areas was held by the Turks and exercised from Constantinople. The only local group that had exercised political rights over Palestine had been the Jews.
In my view, Israel currently has sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem.
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