Introduction 19 Deserving as the Gazan situation is of great concern and attention, it would be incorrect to view it outside of the wider context of Israeli concentration and containment of Palestinians generally. Land and planning laws have played a critical role in this process. It is important to emphasize that the concentration and containment of the Palestinian population by a process of fragmentation is exactly what is intended by Israeli policy-makers. For example, the Drobless Plan, stated that “[t]he disposition of the settlements must be carried out not only around the settlements of the minorities, but also in between them, this in accordance with the settlement policy adopted in the Galilee and other parts of the country”.78 Thus Dajani notes that, “Oslo institutionalized into permanent form the territorial fragmentation of the Palestinian community in the Occupied Territories as envisaged in the Drobless Plan of the early 1980s”.79 As the Drobless Plan indicates, the policies employed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory are very similar to those employed within the State of Israel itself. One obvious parallel is that since its foundation, no new Palestinian communities have been established in Israel, other than a number of ‘townships’ established for the Palestinian Bedouin community in the south.80 This is in stark contrast to the situation for the Jewish population living within its 1967 borders, for whom 700 new communities have been established.81 It also runs counter to the six-fold increase in the number of Palestinian citizens of Israel since 1948.82 An estimated two-thirds of West Bank land was appropriated by the Israeli authorities by the early 1990s83 and over 30 percent of the land area of the Gaza Strip was similarly confiscated prior to the ‘Gaza Disengagement’ in 2005. These appropriations continue today. The Absentee Property Law was employed by Israel in Jerusalem as late as 2005.84 Israel set about turning these lands over to the exclusive use of the Israeli Jewish population. 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 Emphasis in original, BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 75. BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 120. Abu Hussein and McKay, Access Denied, 199. Abu Hussein and McKay, Access Denied, 199. After the Rift: New Directions for Government Policy Towards the Arab Population in Israel, an emergency report by an inter-university research team submitted to Mr Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel (Hamachpil, Beer-Sheva, November 2000), 17; available from http://www.dirasat-aclp.org/ files/After_the_Rift-English.pdf; accessed 23 April 2013. Bisharat, ‘Land, Law and Legitimacy in Israel and the Occupied Territories’, 526. Ir Amim, Absentees Against Their Will - Property Expropriation in East Jerusalem Under the Absentee Property Law (July 2010); available from http://eng.ir-amim.org.il/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/ Absenteesagainsttheirwill.pdf; accessed 23 April 2013.