Thursday, January 3, 2008

Israel’s Jews-only Land Policy

The Zionists were not satisfied with the removal of eighty-five percent of the native Palestinians within the nascent Israeli state and the plunder and destruction of their homes.

A Good Article
By Hasan Afif El-Hasan
Special to PalestineChronicle.com

"“Jews-only land policy is at issue” was the title of an article in my US town local newspaper. It is about a housing discrimination story in Israel against an Arab Israeli couple Baha, an attorney, and Fouad Abu Raya, a dermatologist from the Israeli town of Sakhnin, referred to them by the paper as Muslims. According to the paper, the couple offered to buy a house in the Israeli town of Karmiel. And when these buyers went to the local land registry to transfer the ownership “the clerk told [them] she couldn’t transfer ownership because the house was built on land belonging to the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and it is illegal to sell JNF land to Arabs”. The JNF is the biggest Israeli land owner.

The paper should be given credit for publishing the story in the US although it was buried in the “Religion Calendar” section on page 14 suggesting either the story is not important or it is old news that no body cares for since it is about Palestinians victimized by Israel. If ordinary Americans who care to read page 14 have just discovered Israel as it is, a country for all the Jewish people in the world but not for all its citizens, Israeli Arabs have been living this nightmare since the creation of Israel......

The confiscated Arab lands have been sold or leased only to Jews. Arabs are not allowed to apply as in the case of Baha and Fouad Abu Raya. Most of the JNF land holdings that is allocated to Jews only has been expropriated by the Israeli government from Arab owners and transferred to the JNF. Arab land acquired by the JNF in 1961 exceeded 3,500,000 dounums (875,000 acres) according to a Hebrew University study.

Denying the civil rights of the Arab citizens by confiscating their land and refusing to allow them return to their own homes or even to buy or lease property because they are not Jews, has been overlooked by the US hypocrites who keep calling Israel “the only democracy in the Middle East”, suggesting that Israel is a liberal democracy. The US policy makers and journalists have been condemning human rights violations everywhere except in Israel. They do not have the courage and the conviction to describe Israel as it is “a country for all the Jewish people but not for all its citizens”."

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