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Detail - Land Laws that Discriminate in Creating a "Jewish State"
Goto Source for this Table - essay on Israeli discrimination.
The Zionist founders had made some important decisions regarding government and land in the State of Israel:
- 1. Their new country would be “a Jewish State”, where the Jewish people could take refuge from Anti-Semitism, and be in control of the country.
- 2. The Jewish people needed to be the demographic majority in the new country in order to keep their government as a democracy (despite the fact that they were in fact a minority at the time).
- 3. The land in the new country needed to be eternally owned by the Jewish People.
Thus, the laws they developed for regulating the development of the lands of the State of Israel empowered the government to perform the following actions:
- 1. Take land from Arabs, and make them 'Israel Lands' (various categories of lands owned and/or managed by the national government).
- 2. Declare that 'Israel Lands' can never be sold or transferred except between government agencies or to the Jewish National Fund.
- 3. Declare that 'Israel Lands' will be managed and developed as per various policies which forbids non-Jews from leasing them, and which favors Jewish communities (although some exceptions have developed).
- 4. Give the Jewish National Fund semi-government status.
- 5. Empower the Israeli government to take lands that are not being used properly as per government policy, including the above policy forbidding non-Jewish residency.
- 6. Empower the Israeli government to take possession of lands owned by Arabs who left during the 1948 fighting (they called Absentees), and then redistribute their property to Zionist-Jewish citizens (a few Arab land owners were compensated). Then forbid these Absentees from returning to their homes within Israel (a few exceptions were allowed to re-enter Israel).
- 7. Develop 'Israel Lands' to favor Zionist-Jewish immigrants and settlements.
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(c) Israel Law Resource Center, February, 2007.