Palestinian Walks

by Raja Shehadeh

  Further down from this land the Jordanian army had expropriated an area where they had established an army camp. But no one, neither private individuals nor officials, had encroached on Albina's land even though François was living in East Jerusalem, where he ran a travel agency. Private property was protected under Jordanian control. When the Israelis began to build their settlement the residents of the nearby village assumed that The Christian had sold his land to The Jew. But just in case this wasn't true, the Mukhtar after ascertaining that our office represented Albina, had come to court to tell me of the order for expropriating the land which the Israeli military custodian had served him in his capacity as the village elder.

  I could tell by the sceptical manner in which the Mukhtar asked what we were going to do that he was probing for something. He wanted to know whether his suspicion that Albina had sold the land to Israeli Jews was well-founded and whether the order was just a camouflage to protect Albina and remove any suspicion of his treacherous act.

  But Albina had not sold. He had often been told by his father about this land that had been bought during Mandate times, that it was a beautiful plot on a hill near Beit 'Ur El Fouqa, which overlooked the western plain and the sea. His father traded in real estate. He had bought many plots in different parts of the country for investment. No one had told Albina that the settlers were claiming it. It was only when I relayed the Mukhtar's enquiry to him that he realized his land was endangered. Later, when I approached the Israeli Custodian who had signed the order served on the Mukhtar and presented him with the early registration documents pertaining to the land, he claimed that he didn't know that the land was privately owned. This was why he gave the order to the Mukhtar, he said. Of course, he could have consulted the land registry to which he had free access. Then he would have found out that there was registration, even if not final, in the name of Albina. Clearly he was not acting in good faith.

  Now François Albina was a big man, portly and difficult to miss. He smoked a pipe, wore overalls and was a jovial fellow with a large head. When I reported to him what the Custodian had told me he collapsed with laughter, showing his tobacco-stained teeth: 'I with my excessive weight of 92 kilograms an absentee? Am I that easy to miss?' Not only was he a big man but his travel agency had a large sign posted prominently on the side of the building right in the centre of Salah Ed Din Street, the main commercial road in East Jerusalem, declaring 'Albina Tours' in big bold black letters.

  Still, the case was not as simple as I at first thought. In the course of it we had to go through the whole gamut of allegations used by the government to appropriate Palestinian lands.

  The first claim put forward by the Custodian, that François was an absentee, was easy to defeat simply because he has been a resident of East Jerusalem all his life, living and working there. He was not one of those who left the country or had been thrown out during the 1967 war or since.

  Then came the second preposterous claim. The Custodian of Absentee Properties, who also happened to be the Custodian of Government Land, now said that if François was not an absentee then his land must be public. 'But it isn't,’ I said. 'It is registered in my client's name and I have documents to prove it.' I presented maps and early Ottoman and British registration certificates. But the Custodian claimed the maps did not tally with the land and the area to which the deeds pertained was not the same area that was the subject of the order. We went on with this until I believe I satisfied the court that the land was indeed privately owned.

  There now came a third claim, that in the event the land was not owned by an absentee and was not public land it had been expropriated by the Jordanian government for military purposes. 'If this is so,' I said, 'then show me the expropriation order.' I brought the Jordanian Official Gazette to the court to prove that in every case when the Jordanian army expropriated land they published a corresponding order. This was what Jordanian law required and, indeed, the Jordanian army camp nearby was the subject of a published order. 'No need for an order,' responded the Custodian, 'the Jordanian army used the land and this proves the government had taken it.' 'What would they use it for?' I asked. 'You shall see,' he answered enigmatically and asked that the court make a site visit. A visit to the site by the entire court was duly scheduled.

  For the first month on the case I had liaised only with the Custodian, who was sheepish and confused. I was hoping to get him to cancel the order. When we reached a deadlock, he advised me not to bother with the court, suggesting to me through gestures and winks that the land had already been taken and would never be returned. But of course I was not going to take this as an answer. I then had no choice but to put my trust, albeit reluctantly, in the due process of the court.

  The president of this court, Abu El Afia, had been a student in the 1940s at the American University in Beirut, where I studied. Prior to 1948 he was a close friend of relatives of my partner and uncle, Fuad. He was now an established Israeli lawyer with expertise in land law. In fact both he and I had a common client in the British Consulate. He was their counsel for West Jerusalem; I represented them in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. I believed I could depend on him to stop the legal distortions of the Custodian, who seemed determined to swindle this land.

  By the time the case came to me, the Custodian had already leased the land. Work was being carried out laying the infrastructure of the settlement, as François discovered when he visited it. Almost all property designated for settlement is held by the Custodian of Government Land on behalf of the Israeli state. The Custodian then allocates the land through a long-term lease to the World Zionist Organization Settlement Division. The lease stipulates that the lessees may not sub-lease the land to a non-Jew. The Ministry of Defence must approve the allocation.

  The work of establishing the new settlement on François's land was the responsibility of the Jewish Agency, the pre-state Zionist movement recognized by the British in the terms of their 1922 Mandate over Palestine, which represented Palestine's Jews to the British Authorities, served the Jews as a government in the making and funnelled Jewish philanthropy from abroad to projects in Palestine. It is a sister organization of the World Zionist Organization, the international body created by Herzl in 1897 to promote Jewish nationalism. In 1948 the Agency turned over most of its functions to the new state but continued to exist as a conduit by which Diaspora Jews could keep up financial support, donating to a nongovernmental organization rather than to a foreign state. A contract with the government had outlined a division of functions. It was considered a national institution along with the Jewish National Fund and its West Bank subsidiary Hamanuta, which bought and managed land holdings in the West Bank in the name of the Jewish people.

  Before 1967 recommendations were made in Israel to reduce the Settlement Department. Building settlements to create facts, it was argued, belonged to the era of ethnic struggle, not to a time when a state existed. But the occupation of the Palestinian Territories in 1967 increased the appetite of the Israeli government for more land and this organization swelled rather than contracted.

  I first asked for an injunction to stop the work on the land. 'Would I be willing to guarantee the losses of the other side?' the president of the committee wanted to know. 'Losses?' I asked. 'Whose losses?' 'The Jewish Agency's, of course. They have entered into contracts with big contractors,' said the president. 'If we stop them now from implementation, they would be liable to pay damages for breach of contract.' He would only be willing to grant the injunction, he said, if I was prepared to make a guarantee of a quarter of a million US dollars to compensate the organization for their losses in the event that there was a delay in carrying out the work already contracted. This refusal to grant the injunction did not bode well for the outcome. Work on the land continued as the court proceeded to hear the case. It was no longer only a matter between the confused Custodian and me. International organizations and large sums of American money had been mobilized to fight this battle.

&
nbsp; I don't believe the president of the court was a proponent of the settlement project. He certainly was not a right-winger. Every Israeli Jew had to do his stint of reserve duty and this was an easy way of carrying it out. Nurit, the court secretary, would call his office and arrange the time and venue that suited him. On the designated day, he donned his army uniform and spent a few hours in service of the state without the inconvenience of going to barracks or tents out in the field. The site visit requested by the representative of the state was the only field trip he had to do and it was bearable enough. We were able to drive to the land.

  But my worries about the integrity of the court were exacerbated when the president repeatedly called me to the bar. Sometimes his tone was that of: 'You Arabs are always hard-headed and are never willing to compromise, won't you prove to be an exception?' At other times he used the tone of an elder giving good sensible advice to a stubborn, foolhardy younger man. In both instances he was urging me to advise my client to sell his land, implying that it was lost anyway. He had tired eyes with bags below them. He ended with an edge of exasperation, saying: 'At least get your client some money.' But I wouldn't give in. My whole purpose was to save the country, not sell its land away to the enemy. Fortunately my client, to whom I felt duty-bound to relay all these messages, did not want to sell either. As I expected, he was no less a patriot than myself. I was relieved. Because of the abundance of evidence and near-final registration, this was the best possible case I could ever hope to get. I was determined to win it, to show before the whole world the lie of those settlers who were claiming that they were only taking land that did not belong to anyone.

  I had heard and read much about the crazy settlers and their even crazier Rabbis, and on the day designated for the site visit was expecting a lively encounter with a group of very strange people.

  The road we took to Beit 'Ur was still that narrow winding road from Mandate times which my parents used every year before 1948 to travel from Jaffa to their summer house in Ramallah, a mere hour and forty minutes' drive. It was that same road they took on that fateful day on 27 April 1948, when they left behind everything they owned, never to return except as wistful visitors. Since then we had been stuck behind these hills and confined, away from our chosen home in the cosmopolitan city by the coast. How utterly miserable it must have been for my father to have been forced to return to the land of Abu Ameen and the provincial life of Ramallah. But for me, it was the only life I knew.

  In 1948 the Jewish forces lost many of their fighters trying to reach Jerusalem through the only corridor that stretched from the coast to the city. It has been the consistent policy of successive Israeli governments since 1967 to plant settlements around Jerusalem to ensure that the city could be reached through another access route, which would eventually be annexed to Israel, thickening the seam around the city's north-western border. The settlers, driven by religious motives, were convenient agents for the state to fulfil its strategic objectives. They had its full support.

  The old Ramallah–Jaffa road, which we took when the court was making its site visit, was built when roads still followed the contours of the hills, long before the affluent Israeli government began digging deep into them, slicing them open to make roads that were straight and level and could quickly get settlers from the centre of the country to the Jewish suburbs, cutting the travelling time from Jaffa and Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by half. This was an important development and selling point that convinced many Israelis to live in these areas on the West Bank. This old road climbed up the highest hill, passing close to Albina's land. François's father might have walked up and been dazzled by the gorgeous view overlooking the Mediterranean and the clean fresh air. Perhaps he thought that one day he would build himself a summer house there.

  It took a little over twenty minutes to reach the land from Ramallah. Just before we got to it we passed the Jordanian army camp to the right of the road. This land had already been taken over by the settlers, who had placed ugly red-coloured caravan-style houses on it. Then came the empty plot owned by 'The Jew'. The original owner of this land was from the village. It is said by people there that he was forced to sell it before 1948 to raise money to pay the defence lawyer handling the case of his son, who was accused of murder during the British Mandate. After 1967, rather than return Jewish absentee properties to their individual owners, Israel reclaimed them in the name of the Jewish people out of fear that if it gave them back to individual Israeli Jews, Palestinian absentees who owned land in Israel would request similar treatment. The existence of this plot must have alerted the Custodian to my client's land. He now had a peg on which to hang his claim, starting from a small plot and ending up grabbing the whole hill. Albina's land stretched along the side of the hill, reaching all the way up to the first houses in the village. The settlers had connected the first plot with Albina's by an unpaved road.

  The wind was very strong that day. We had to battle against it on our way up the hill from the temporary structures, using the dirt road dug by the settlers. An American settler enthusiastically pointed to clefts in the ground, which he said were trenches that the Jordanian army had built, evidence, as he explained, that this was not private but state land. which Israel was now entitled to take back. The judges remained impassive. Like me, the president knew very well that Jordanian law required that an expropriation order be issued. We had already been through this. After struggling with the wind and the hill we were cold and tired. We were all invited to have tea in the community hall of the fledgling settlement.

  At the settlement headquarters I was expecting to meet devils incarnate, fanatic, crazy people, starry-eyed and religiously inspired, who were forcing us to a confrontation and to many years of bloodshed. The prospect of coming face to face with these settlers filled me with a sense of excitement and adventure. I wondered how these evil people would look and act. How would they behave towards me? Would I be safe in their midst?

  We were met by earnest-looking men, with no women. They served us tea in Styrofoam cups. We sat around a long table. I felt myself a witness to what it must have been like for the old Zionist settlers. I expect their latterday counterparts were living out an old dream. They were in their thirties and were wearing jeans. Many were bearded. They seemed amiable. They were not starry-eyed, they were hard-headed men who were fully committed to what they were doing and had no conception of how Albina, the victim of their actions, would see them. Nor did they seem to care. I doubt, if I had articulated to them my deeply held convictions and arguments against the settlement project, that they would have even heard me, so full were they of their own sense of purpose.

  Their enthusiasm was contagious. Had I not been on the other side, I could have fallen for it. They were literally camping on the land, pushing out their enemies and expanding the area of their state, perhaps carried away by a sarha of their own. What were a few legal objections against the elevated nobility of their purpose? They had none of the looks or mannerisms I attributed to evil people.

  Nor were they crazy. They were efficient and calculating businessmen who wanted to get over this legal hurdle. What surprised me even more was the lack of guilt they exhibited towards me. I was the representative of the owner of the land whose property they were taking, or, more accurately, stealing. I had expected they would at least be apologetic or timid in my presence. They were not. They cared little about the Palestinians in Beit 'Ur, who had been in the village for centuries and were now going to be edged out by the new settlement which these men were establishing from their office hardly five hundred metres away. Nor did they have any qualms, as I discovered later, about using any sort of trickery or deceit to get their way. To them the end seemed to justify the use of any means. This was how those who believed they were serving a higher purpose behaved.

  The settlement to be established on the land was given the name Bet Horon, Horon being the Canaanite deity mentioned in Ugaritic literature. Biblical tradition attributes the founding of bot
h Lower and Upper Beth-Horon to Sheerah, daughter of Beriah, son of Ephraim (I Chronicles 7:24). With the exception of this ancient biblical link, the settlement being planned on my client's land had nothing to do with religious Zionism. It was planned to attract ordinary middle-class, secular Israelis, not believers, who wanted to live in the quiet of the countryside with breathtaking views and a commute to Tel Aviv of less than an hour.

  When Jonathan and I sat on that rock and plotted how we were going to frustrate the whole of the settlement project through legal action we did not know that the legal aspects were only one small, ultimately insignificant, component. The building of settlements in the Occupied Territories was a state project. It was not going to be hampered by questions of law. The custodians, legal advisors and judges would have to work out the legal solutions amongst themselves. The government knew the decision it wanted out of these land courts. Higher national objectives overrode legal niceties.

  I remember well that last session in the case when, having attempted many other tricks, the Custodian tried to prove to the court that the land was used by the Jordanian army by bringing an Arab youth to testify. The weather had worsened and the courthouse was getting darker. Outside it was cold and misty. There was a rumour that it was going to snow. We were ensconced in the overheated Russian Compound, the Mascobieh, that housed the Israeli court, a police station and a prison where several Palestinians have lost their lives under torture. The president of this tribunal, Abu El Afia, an Israeli Jew with an Arabic surname that means the father of vitality, had frog eyes that opened wide as he attempted to infuse these sham proceedings with a veneer of respectability. His two colleagues on the bench were mostly silent. On his right was a chocolate factory owner, a young handsome man who looked totally distracted, perhaps thinking of his chocolates. The third judge was a meek-looking man, probably a government official in disguise.