Israel to sieze Dead Sea as 'state land'

Just 0.7% of state land in the West Bank has been allocated to Palestinians, Israel admits
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/just-0-7-of-state-land-in-the-west-bank-has-been-allocated-to-palestinians-israel-admits.premium-1.512126>
Haaretz 28 Mar by Chaim Levinson -- Over the past 33 years the Civil Administration has allocated less than one percent of state land in the West Bank to Palestinians <http://www.haaretz.com/misc/tags/Palestinians-1.477125>,
compared to 38 percent to settlers, according to the agency’s own documents
submitted to the High Court of Justice. The West Bank includes 1.3 million dunams (approximately 325,000 acres) of "state land," most of which is allocated to Jewish colonies. The declared policy of the previous Netanyahu government was to remove Jewish construction from private Palestinian land in the West Bank and to approve all construction on state lands. According to the classification of the Civil Administration, a small amount of "state land" was registered with the Jordanian authorities until 1967. But most declared "state land" was declared as such after 1979. The need for such a declaration emerged in October 1979, when the High Court struck down as unconstitutional the state’s practice of seizing Palestinian land, ostensibly for "military needs" but in practice in order to establish Jewish settlements. It was after 1979 that the process of the wholesale declaration of territory as state land began. According to the law in the West Bank, any land with continuous agricultural cultivation for at least 10 years becomes the property of the farmer; land under cultivation cannot be seized by the state. Although the Civil Administration team charged with determining which lands are cultivated is supposed to base their conclusions on testimony and aerial photos, a senior official in the Civil Administration conceded recently in the Ofer Military Court that the decisions are political. The hearing at which the official was speaking was over the state lands declared with regard to the Hayovel outpost. The latter has been at the heart of a High Court case for over seven years. The state had decided to retroactively authorize Hayovel, but aerial photos clearly show a number of houses and cultivated land, and the road to Hayovel goes through private Palestinian land. The state therefore devised a method of declaring the area between cultivated spots, for example, between trees, as "uncultivated" and thus it could deem it state land.
<http://www.haaretz.com/misc/tags/Israel%20settlements-1.477056>
First published at Today in Palestine