14 Israeli Land Grab and Forced Population Transfer of Palestinians By 1967, land and planning related laws had played, and were continuing (as they do today) to play, a central role in Israel in both cementing and continuing the massdisplacement which took place during the Nakba. It is hardly surprising therefore that “the process of land acquisition and colonization in the Occupied Territories closely mirrors strategies adopted” in Israel.45 In the West Bank, this process commenced with the introduction on 7 June 1967 by the Israeli Military of the Proclamation on Law and Administration (Proclamation No. 2).46 This proclamation vested all powers of “government, legislation, appointment, or administration with respect to the Region or its inhabitants” in the hands of the Commander of the Israeli Military and provided that the prior existing law governing the region would remain in force, subject to its compliance with any order issued by the military government.47 Just as in the aftermath of 1948, a measure to deal with “Absentee Property” – Military Order 58 – was among the first introduced by the military administration. Similar to the corresponding Israeli law, it provided for the transfer of property “whose legal owner ... left the area”.48 A further means by which Israel confiscated vast swathes of Palestinian-owned land in the occupied Palestinian territory was by drastically redefining the concept of ‘State Land’.49 Reviewing the jurisprudence of the Israeli Supreme Court which developed around this process, Kedar found that “[l]ike courts in other settler societies, the Israeli Court applied the law in ways that restricted the scope of legal recognition of ‘borderline’ land possessed by [Palestinian] Arabs”.50 Prior to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, 13 percent of the land in that area was registered as State Land a land registration process initiated under Jordanian rule.51 That process, which had been completed in only 37.5 percent of West Bank land by June 1967, was frozen by Military Order 291, introduced in December 1968.52 Those Palestinians whose land the registration process had not yet reached were therefore denied the opportunity to have their land-ownership formally recognized.53 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 72. BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 79. Bisharat, ‘Land, Law and Legitimacy in Israel and the Occupied Territories’, 527–528. BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 85. BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 85. BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 85. BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 89. Bisharat, ‘Land, Law and Legitimacy in Israel and the Occupied Territories’, 539. Raja Shehadeh, ‘The Land Law of Palestine: An Analysis of the Definition of State Lands’, Journal of Palestine Studies 11, no. 2 (January 1982): 97.