The Palestinian Arab villages ‘unrecognised’ by Israel
Palestinian Bedouins demonstration against the planting works carried out by the JNF on 13 January 2022
Motasem A Dalloul writes in Middle East Monitor:
For centuries before the Zionist occupation of Palestine, there were hundreds of Palestinian villages across the country.
…. …. ….
Most of the Palestinian villages which survived, and predate the creation of the occupation state of Israel, are concentrated in the Galilee, in the north of Israel, or in the Naqab Desert in the south.
Israel has, since 1948, been “Judaising” the landscape. More than fifty laws have been passed enabling the confiscation of land from its Palestinian owners. Place names have been changed from their original Arabic to Hebrew.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are referred to as “Israeli Arabs”; the state refuses to call them “Palestinians”. They own their land under a clearly defined traditional system of individual and communal ownership. The Israel Land Administration (ILA), the Israeli government body in charge of administering public land, and the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a quasi-governmental body that buys and takes land solely for the use of Jews, do not recognise this system and take what they call “state land”. According to the ILA, all the areas in the Galilee and Naqab are state land; the ownership rights of the villagers are ignored. As I have written previously, the JNF’s “forestation” of such land is simply a cover for more ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.