1/18/2018 This Land Is Our Land - Raja Shehadeh New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/01/18/palestine-this-land-is-our-land/ [Review: Enclosure: Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror by Gary Fields]…Over the past two decades, most of the land used for Jewish settlements in the West Bank has been acquired on the grounds that it belongs to the state. This tactic has enabled Israeli leaders to maintain that the state of Israel does not confiscate land from Palestinians to build settlements. The state only began to use this legal ploy in earnest after 1982. Until then, the authorities acquired land for settlement primarily by requisitioning it for military purposes. A smaller percentage of land had been acquired by declaring it absentee land or territory formerly held by the Jordanian government. By 1979, when I cofounded the organization Al-Haq with several other lawyers to bring legal challenges against the Israeli occupation, Israel had gained control of roughly 30 percent of the land in the West Bank…What distinguishes Israel/Palestine from the other regions Fields describes is that the usurpation of land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is taking place long after the age of colonialism came to an end, sixty-nine years after the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in defiance of international law. Jewish settlements violate Article 49 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own people into occupied land. And this is happening in full view of the media in one of the most reported conflicts in the world...
[Review: Enclosure: Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror by Gary Fields]…Over the past two decades, most of the land used for Jewish settlements in the West Bank has been acquired on the grounds that it belongs to the state. This tactic has enabled Israeli leaders to maintain that the state of Israel does not confiscate land from Palestinians to build settlements. The state only began to use this legal ploy in earnest after 1982. Until then, the authorities acquired land for settlement primarily by requisitioning it for military purposes. A smaller percentage of land had been acquired by declaring it absentee land or territory formerly held by the Jordanian government. By 1979, when I cofounded the organization Al-Haq with several other lawyers to bring legal challenges against the Israeli occupation, Israel had gained control of roughly 30 percent of the land in the West Bank…What distinguishes Israel/Palestine from the other regions Fields describes is that the usurpation of land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is taking place long after the age of colonialism came to an end, sixty-nine years after the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in defiance of international law. Jewish settlements violate Article 49 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own people into occupied land. And this is happening in full view of the media in one of the most reported conflicts in the world...
Posted by Judith Ferster, AIME member
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