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Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Land Regime:

The Land Settlement Ordinance Amendment of 1960

And the History of Formative Israeli Land Legislation

Geremy Forman

September 2007

- Forthcoming inIsrael Studies -

In early 1959, Israeli Justice Minister Pinhas Rosen placed an unusual bill on

the agenda of the Ministerial Legislation Committee.1 The Land (Settlement of Title)

Ordinance Amendment (herein Land Settlement Ordinance Amendment), which the

Knesset enacted in February 1960, transferred adjudication of land settlement disputes

from the settlement officers of the Justice Ministry to the countrys district courts.2

On the face of things, the timing of this government-initiated, liberal legislation

appears bizarre. In essence, it amounted to the executive branchs relinquishing of

formal control over thousands of land tenure disputes between the Jewish state and

Palestinian residents of the central Galilee at a time when governing circles viewed

these disputes as a serious threat to vital Israeli interests in the region. The legislation

was also unusual because, while all previous land legislation was clearly aimed at

intensifying government control over various forms of Arab-held or formerly Arab-

held land, it was precisely this type of land that the Amendment distanced from

executive jurisdiction. This raises two questions which I will try to answer throughout

this essay: why did Israeli officials introduce the Amendment when they did, and how

did the Amendment affect the implementation of government land policy?

Before going any further, however, I emphasize that my use of the term

liberal is intended to imply neither that 1950-60s Israel was a liberal democracy


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nor that such a system of government was the aim of Israeli decision-makers at the

time. Throughout this essay, I use the term liberal casually to refer to the

Amendments function of transferring jurisdiction over politically charged land-

disputes from the executive branch to the judiciary, bolstering the principles of

separation of powers and checks and balances within the young Israeli polity and

providing Galilee Arabs with a theoretically more neutral and objective forum in

which to dispute state claims of land they saw as their own.

As interesting as the timing and nature of the Amendment is the fact that

scholarship on early Israeli settlement of land title has neither noted nor tried to

explain the Amendments anomalous liberal character.3

One can assume that this lack

of interest stems at least in part from the Amendments technical nature and the false

impression that the change in jurisdiction was devoid of political interests. The

Amendments apparent - but also misleading - lack of connection to the Jewish-Arab

struggle over land in the country, which decisively influenced all other land

legislation during the period, also seems to have discouraged closer examination.

The absence of scholarship on the Amendments history also reflects the

relative lack of interest with which Israeli legal historical research has approached

post-1948 legislation. Most scholarship on Israels post-1948 legal history has

concentrated on the Supreme Court and the evolution of judicial doctrine, leaving the

archival history of laws relatively unexplored.4

In the case of most Israeli statutes,

very little is known with historical certainty about who initiated legislation and why,

the different interests involved, the alternatives which executive officials considered

before submitting bills to the Knesset, and the multifaceted ways that different phases

of legislation were shaped by social processes and historical circumstances. Such

information would not only add a new layer to our understanding of Israeli legal


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history but also provide a plethora of new material for social scientists interested in

the relationship between law and society. Furthermore, as 93% of the laws enacted by

the Knesset during the first two decades of Israeli statehood were initiated by the

executive branch,5

archival research on the history of laws stands to make an

important contribution to our understanding of Israeli government policy.

One realm of Israeli legislation that has been the subject of considerable

archival research is land law. This has been due primarily to the interest of scholars of

Israeli historical geography, legal history, and legal geography in the role of land law

in the Jewish state-building project, the countrys post-1948 geographical

transformation, and the dispossession of Palestinian landholders.6

It is therefore

already possible to sketch out a general historical narrative of formative Israeli land

legislation, and this will be the focus of the essays first section.

Contextualized in this general narrative, the remainder of the essay will offer a

document-based micro-narrative of the history of the Land Settlement Ordinance

Amendment. Contextualization here is a two-way street, with the general narrative of

formative Israeli land legislation offering insight into the character and function of the

Amendment, and the micro-narrative adding another dimension to the general

narrative, while reminding us that all laws are shaped in specific socio-political

contexts by a wide variety of factors which are not always reflected in statutes,

explanatory notes, or Knesset debates. Through this discussion, I will first show that,

despite its anomalous character, the 1960 Amendment was in fact consistent with the

overall changing nature of Israeli land legislation of the period. I will then show how,

despite the technical, non-political character of the Amendment, it actually evolved

through a circuitous stop-and-go legislative process that was shaped, albeit differently

than previous Israeli land laws, by the continuing Jewish-Arab struggle over land in


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the country. Finally, I will discuss why the Amendments liberalpotential to provide

private Galilee Arabs with better protection against the states aggressive, well-

organized, and well-funded Arab-land-claiming campaign was never realized.

Formative Israeli Land Legislation, Ethno-National Conflict, and the Evolution

of the Israeli Land Regime

I use the term formative Israeli land legislation to refer to the twelve acts of

land-related legislation that preceded the comprehensive Land Law of 1969. All

twelve laws were enacted between 1948 and 1960, and the Land Settlement

Ordinance Amendment was one of the final four. The present section provides a

general historical narrative of this legislation, offering insight into the statutory

context in which the 1960 Amendment was enacted and its structural role in the still

evolving Israeli land regime.

An important common denominator of these laws - including the 1960

Amendment - is that they were all linked in one way or another to the Jewish-Arab

struggle over land in Palestine/Eretz Israel, which commenced in the late 19th

century

and continued into Israeli statehood.7

During the late Ottoman period (1882-1914)

and the three decades of British rule which followed WWI (1918-1948), this struggle

took place primarily on the open market. For the local Arab population, land was an

economic, social, and political resource central to everyday life in the

overwhelmingly agricultural economy of the country. For the primarily European

Jewish settlers who flowed into the country from the early 1880s onward, land

acquisition was a major focus from the outset, as every settlement had to be located

somewhere and agriculture remained the countrys primary economic sector. Lands

centrality to ethno-national relations became more accentuated during the first half of


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the 20th

century. It was then that Jewish land purchase and agricultural settlement

became key elements of the Zionist movements territorial strategy for attaining

Jewish sovereignty in the country, and that the Palestinian national movement started

to take form, largely as a result of Zionist land purchasing practices.8

The struggle

over land in which both national movements were locked by the mid-1940s was an

integral component of their struggle over sovereignty.

The 1948 war and the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state transformed

this struggle. Before 1948, Jews had been a minority in Palestine (approximately one-

third of the population) and limited in their ability to purchase land by popular

Palestinian opposition; organized efforts of the Palestinian nationalist movement; and

legal restrictions instituted in 1940 by the British Mandate government.9 And

although British land reforms certainly facilitated Jewish land acquisition and

settlement in the country in important ways, the Mandate authorities refrained from

placing their legal and land resources at the disposal of the Zionist settlement project.

But in post-1948 Israel, due to the wartime and post-war expulsion and flight of

Palestinian refugees and the influx of Jewish immigrants from around the world, Jews

constituted an overwhelming majority of the population and Jewish leaders dominated

the new state apparatus. This facilitated the use of state land resources to intensify

Jewish control of the country, as well as the use of state law to expand beyond

recognition the stock of land used for this purpose.10

While all formative Israeli land laws perpetuated and deepened Jewish spatial

domination throughout the country, they did so in different ways. Each law was

designed to play a particular role in the nascent Israeli land regime which officials

were constructing piece-by-piece at the time. This land regime, or the system of legal

and administrative mechanisms regulating the distribution of land rights in the


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country, not only reflected Jewish political domination, but also institutionalized and

intensified, as part of the Jewish state-building process, the already existing drive to

bring as much land as possible under Jewish ownership (land redemption).11

Functionally, the laws enacted in the late 1940s and the 1950s, when the state was

expanding its land reserves by appropriating millions of dunams (1 dunam = 1,000 m2

= .25 acre) of Arab-held or formally Arab-held land, were fundamentally different

from the laws enacted in 1960, when officials were consolidating these holdings and

finalizing structural and administrative components of the land regime.

The Expropriatory Land Legislation of the Late 1940s and the 1950s

In addition to the Zionist ideological imperative of ensuring the Jewish

character of the newly established state of Israel, the fundamental premise of Israels

domestic Arab policy during the first two decades of statehood was that the countrys

Palestinian minority posed a bona-fide security threat that needed to be countered.

One way officials tried to do this was to intensify and expand the traditional Zionist

strategy of land acquisition and Jewish settlement, particularly in predominantly Arab

parts of the country.12

In this context, land legislation during the first decade of

statehood was largely designed to appropriate Arab-held or formerly Arab-held land

and place it at the disposal of the state and the Jewish Agency.

The first two pieces of legislation were enacted during the 1948 war as

emergency regulations and were intended to provide immediate legalization of the

states wartime seizure of millions of dunams of Palestinian owned land and transfer

of this land to Jewish hands for cultivation and development. The Fallow Lands

Regulations of November 1948 empowered the government to seize and transfer

possession of any land deemed fallow by the Minister of Agriculture, and was


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designed to normalize the temporary transfer of abandoned refugee land to Jews. The

Absentee Property Regulations of December 1948 went a step further by facilitating

sweeping expropriation of refugee property by vesting ownership in the Finance

Ministrys Custodian of Absentee Property (CAP).13

In 1950, this temporary legislation was replaced by the first permanent

Knesset-enacted land legislation - the Absentee Property Law and the Development

Authority Law. These two laws, which together created an integrated mechanism that

expropriated Palestinian refugee land and transferred it to inalienable state and Jewish

national ownership, stemmed from the governments policy of barring the return of

Palestinian refugees and using the wealth of land seized in 1948 for Jewish settlement

and other state priorities. Most of this land belonged to the hundreds of thousands of

refugees who fled or were expelled across the emerging Israeli borders during the

war, but a significant area also belonged to Palestinian refugees living in Israel, as

well as non-refugee Palestinian citizens of the state.14

In conjunction with the State

Property Law of 1951, which asserted state ownership over all Mandate government

property and unowned property in the country, the laws of 1950 integrated

expropriated Palestinian land into a closed landholding reservoir holding the vast

majority of land in the country, administered entirely in accordance with Jewish

national interests.15

In 1953, officials introduced the Land Acquisition Law to

normalize (through expropriation and compensation) the illegal status of lands seized

by the state in the wake of 1948 that belonged to Palestinian Arabs living in Israel.16

The seventh and final piece of land legislation during this period was Section

22 of the Statute of Limitations of 1958.17

Section 22 extended from 10 to 15 (and in

some cases 20) years the period of possession and cultivation required, under Article

78 of the Ottoman Land Code (OLC), for claiming ownership of unregistered Miri -


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an Ottoman land category held by extensive long-term usage rights, with ultimate title

residing with the government.18

This provision differed from earlier legislation in that

it made no mention of acquisition or vesting (common legal euphemisms for

expropriation),19

but simply made it more difficult for holders of unregistered land,

who were usually Arabs, to establish land rights. The history of Section 22 provides

crucial context for understanding the Land Settlement Ordinance Amendment of

1960, and I therefore discuss its evolution below in considerable detail.

To understand Section 22, we must remember that by the mid 1950s, the

central Galilee had become the focal point of the Jewish-Arab struggle over land in

the country. There were two reasons for this. First, the area was almost all-Arab in

population and land ownership, and had not been allocated to the proposed Jewish

state by the U.N. partition plan of 1947. Many officials saw this as a threat to Israeli

security and sovereignty, and efforts began in the early 1950s to Judaize the Galilee

through Jewish settlement.20

Second, the region had not yet undergone settlement of

title, or land settlement - the system of survey, mapping, and land registration

initiated by the Mandate government and adopted by Israel in 1948. According to the

terms of the system, this meant that the states recognition of ownership rights in the

region had not yet been finalized.21

At first, officials concerned with Judaization of the Galilee were troubled

primarily by the unclear picture of land-tenure relations in the registries, and their

belief that since 1948 Galilee Arabs had seized large areas of state land. In 1954,

these officials began calling on the Israeli executive to accelerate land settlement in

the region to clarify the situation,22

and mobilization in this direction picked up speed

in 1955.23

The process became a government priority in early 1956, after the Ratner

Commission - a government appointed commission considering a reduction in the


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scope of the military government system which then ruled most Palestinian citizens of

Israel - pointed out a second factor which quickly became the dominant impetus for

accelerated land settlement in the Galilee: prescription,24

or the process of acquiring

a right by continuously asserting it over time. Until 1970, prescriptive acquisition of

unregistered Miri in Israel was governed by Article 78 of the O.L.C., which specified

that a person holding and cultivating unregistered land for 10 years could request a

title deed.25

On this basis, the Commission warned that in 1958 - in two years time -

Galilee Arabs who seized state land following 1948 would be eligible to claim

ownership, and that due to incomplete registration the state would be unable to

disprove their claims. That is, unless title was first settled.

To this end, the Ratner Commission proposed modifications to the settlement

process aimed at accelerating it in Arab areas in general and the Galilee in

particular.26

These proposals constituted the basis for the special land settlement

operation, a plan approved by the cabinet in August 1956 and implemented in the

central Galilee during the late 1950s and the 1960s.27

(See fig. 1) Special operation

officials derived state land claims from what they understood to be the pre-1948 land-

tenure map, based on their conviction that Galilee Arabs had been seizing state land

since 1948. To recreate this map, they constructed composites of 1944-1945 British

aerial-photos (the earliest available) and earlier fiscal maps to determine what land

had been uncultivated during the 1940s. They then claimed this land as state land.28

But as long as landholders in the late 1950s had to prove only 10 years of

cultivation to establish ownership, officials could not use the 1944-45 photos to

disprove private prescriptive cultivation in order to prove state ownership. To make

the photos pertinent and raise the bar for Arabs land claims, officials called for

extending prescription so that it began before 1945, and legislators structured Section


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22 of the Statute of Limitations accordingly.29

By extending the prescription period

and retroactively applying it to all unregistered claims, the Statute expropriated rights

that had already been constituted through ten-years of cultivation and made it more

difficult for Galilee Arabs to establish ownership rights.30

As in the case of previous Israeli land legislation, Israels Palestinian leaders

were Section 22s most outspoken opponents. But to a limited extent, Jewish

lawmakers acknowledged an injustice as well, by enacting a law aimed in theory at

preventing landholders dispossessed by the new statute from being left landless and

without income. The Land Leasing Law of 1959, which must be read in conjunction

with Section 22,31

facilitated the provision of alternative land to those who lost land

due to the change in prescription, held no other land, and relied on the land in

question for their primary income. Although the law differs from previous land

legislation in its explicit emphasis on compensation, it is better understood as a

mechanism aimed at mollifying Arab opposition and endowing expropriation with an

air of moral legitimacy, like the compensation clauses of the 1953 Land Acquisition

Law. In reality, however, the Land Leasing Law was rarely if ever employed,32

leaving the full expropriatory potential of Section 22 unchecked.

From Overt Expropriation to Structure and Administration

The fundamental premise that Israels Arab population posed a threat to state

security remained the cornerstone of domestic Arab policy during the second decade

of statehood as well. Scholars, however, point to a change in policy in the late 1950s -

from an overtly aggressive approach of control, isolation, and expropriation to a more

accommodating approach involving loosened controls, limited integration into Israeli

society, and increased responsiveness to certain demands. Some argue that this


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change stemmed from an increased sense of security among Israeli officials, while

others point to the influence of political developments throughout the Middle East.33

In any case, by 1959 most officials held that Israels Palestinian citizens could not be

kept isolated and repressed forever and that the time had come for a less antagonistic

policy for pursuing state security.34

A similar change began in the realm of land legislation in 1958, which

witnessed the beginning of a decline in the willingness of lawmakers to endorse

expropriatory legislation proposed by executive officials, and a decline in executive

officials perception that such expropriation was desirable. Initial indication of this

change emerged during the legislation of the Statute of Limitations, when the original

government-proposed bill, which called for extending Article 78 prescription from ten

to fifty years, met with widespread opposition in virtually all Knesset factions.35

This

prompted the Knessets Law and Constitution Committee, in accordance with a

modified government position, to reduce the proposed period to 15 years.36

Although

both periods were aimed at limiting Arab land rights, the original proposal would

have meant mass dispossession of most Galilee Arab landholders, while the impact of

the final version was much more modest.

A second indication of this change was the governments withdrawal of the

Agricultural Land Consolidation Bill, which it submitted to the Knesset in 1960.37

If

enacted, the bill would have empowered the Minister of Agriculture to demarcate

land consolidation areas and to appoint officials to draw up and implement a land

consolidation plan for each one.38

For the sake of consolidation, the bill authorized

expropriation of private land rights and empowered state officials to provide financial

compensation instead of in-kind compensation when deemed necessary. Although the

bill and its explanatory note made no mention of it, its true aim was to provide


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contiguous land for new Jewish settlement.39

Again, as in the cases of the Land

Acquisition Law of 1953 and the Land Leasing Law of 1959, in-kind compensation

was guaranteed only when expropriated land was the owners only land and primary

source of income.40

In response to Arab leaders unwavering opposition, the bill was

removed from the Knesset agenda.41

According to Palestinian political activist,

lawyer, and scholar Sabri Jiryis, it was one of the rare occasions on which the Arab

population, through organized popular action, was able to defeat a government

proposal against it.42

Section 22 of the Statute of Limitations also marks a functional turning-point

in that it was the last piece of legislation to facilitate overt land expropriation during

this period. In contrast, the final four land-related statutes, which were all enacted in

1960, brought about reform that was structural and administrative in character. This is

not to say that the laws of 1960 did not perpetuate and intensify the uneven

distribution of land rights achieved during the previous decade. However, they did so

in a more indirect and facilitative manner. For instance, the three Israel Lands

statutes of 1960 were aimed primarily at resolving inconsistencies and redundancies

in the countrys splintered land administration system. To this end, they created a new

legal category of Jewish-Israeli national land known as Israel Lands and established

an agency run jointly by the state and the JNF to administer it. Together, these laws

effected the administrative consolidation of the massive land reserves created by the

legislation of the 1950s, and sealed this reservoir by subordinating it to the traditional

JNF no-sale policy. In practice, however, this brought 93% of the countrys land

under Jewish national ownership and limited Arab access to 7% of all land in Israel.43

This brings us back to the Land Settlement Ordinance Amendment with which

we began. On the one hand, contextualized within the narrative of formative Israeli


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land legislation outlined above, the Amendment emerges as one of a number of

structural and administrative statutes - seemingly unrelated to the continuing ethnic

struggle over land - that were enacted during a short second phase of legislation that

reshaped structural and administrative aspects of the Israeli land regime. In this way,

the Amendment can be understood as consistent with the other land legislation of

1960 and as a meaningful component of the ongoing construction of the Israeli land

regime. On the other hand, there is still no denying that the transfer of jurisdiction was

an anomalously liberal step that came at an unlikely moment, as state officials rushed

to accelerate land settlement and to arm themselves with as many legal and

administrative advantages as possible to counter Arab land claims and maximize state

land ownership in the central Galilee. The following sections explore the unique

circumstances that brought about this strangely-timed enactment, enabling us to

address our two original questions: why did officials initiate the Amendment when

they did, and how did it affect the implementation of government land policy?

Early Efforts to Separate Settlement Officers Judicial and Administrative

Powers

The reform embodied in the Land Settlement Ordinance Amendment can be

traced back to the early years of statehood, when Justice Ministry officials first

proposed separating the administrative and judicial powers of settlement officers.

Despite the language of the Mandate Land Settlement Ordinance of 1928 which

consistently refers to a single settlement officer, a division between judicial and

administrative powers had evolved by the end of the Mandate. Three different

officials were authorized to exercise the powers vested in settlement officers: senior

settlement officers held all administrative and judicial powers; secondary settlement


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officers held full administrative powers and limited judicial powers; and settlement

officer aides performed only basic administrative duties. This division between

administrative and judicial powers resulted from an excess of minor cases, the

disruption to judicial proceedings caused by administrative tasks, and the legal

complexities of cases that demanded the experience of senior settlement officers.44

During the first years of statehood, Justice Ministry officials sharpened the

division between administrative and judicial powers by distinguishing between

settlement officers addressing disputes and those focusing on more administrative

tasks.45 As part of this process, an internal Justice Ministry proposal called for

appointing a number of settlement officers with no administrative responsibilities

whatsoever. These judicial settlement officers, whom the proposal termed land

settlement judges, would be responsible for complex cases and would hold a

professional rank equal to district judges. In July 1953, Justice Minister Rosen

appointed a committee to review the proposal issue and to assess, among other things,

whether settlement officers should be awarded the rank of judge.46

The committee based its April 1954 recommendations on the steps that had

already been taken to institutionalize the separation of settlement officers judicial and

administrative powers. The best way to ensure judicial settlement officers efficiency

and independence, the committee concluded, was to leave them in their current

positions and simultaneously endow them with the rank and salary of a district

judge.47

Arab attorney and political activist Elias Koussa agreed with this conclusion:

The feeling of mistrust in the Land Settlement Officers, Koussa explained, arises

from the knowledge that, at present, they are ordinary administrative functionaries

subject to governmental interference. The system itself is sound and needs no change

apart from investing the aforesaid officers with the status of judge.48


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While Justice Ministry officials drafted a few versions of a bill to that effect

during the next few months,49

other, more senior officials in the ministry voiced

opposition to the move. In June 1954, the director of the Department of Land

Registration and Settlement warned that turning his departments judicial settlement

officers into judges would embitter assistants and senior attorneys in the department

who also handled important legal issues. The real impetus for introducing new

legislation, he contended, was judicial settlement officers own financial interests: It

would not take a great deal to prove that the excessive privileges and the great

disparity that has emerged between judges salaries and those of their attorney

colleagues, who remained in other positions of responsibility within the civil service

were the immediate factors causing certain settlement officers to push to acquire

the rank of district judge.50

Dov Yosef, while temporarily filling in for Justice

Minister Rosen, echoed this sentiment in October 1954, maintaining that it is not

suitable to address the problem of wages of certain state officials by awarding them

the rank of judge, so they can receive the same salary.51

Contrary to the April 1954 committee recommendations, and in accordance

with the above concerns, Rosen chose a different course of action to cement the

division of powers: transferring settlement officers judicial powers to the district

courts.52

This new approach transformed the evolving legislation from a bill focused

on issues of status and division of authority within the Department of Land

Registration and Settlement into one that removed land settlement disputes from the

purview of a government ministry altogether. Although he insisted that settlement

officers had always functioned independent of governmental pressure, Rosen also

acknowledged that theoretically, there is a basis for claims that the executive

branch of government is likely to exert pressure on settlement officers through


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administrative means, even by means of the theoretical potential of removing them

from their position. We wish to prevent any fear of this theoretical possibility.53

The bill submitted to the Knesset in February 1955 called for moving all

judicial authority to the district courts - including the frequently used power of

awarding property rights based on undisputed claims.54

After a short discussion, the

bill was passed on to the Knessets Law and Constitution Committee.55

Based on

widespread concern within the Justice Ministry that transferring the frequently-used

power to settle undisputed claims would effectively halt the work of settlement

officers and simultaneously swamp the district courts with a flood of undisputed

cases, it was decided that only disputed claims would be transferred to the courts,

leaving the other, less controversial judicial powers in the hands of administrative

settlement officers.56

With this, the bill relocating judicial authority for land

settlement disputes was born.

Liberal Reform Meets the Ethno-National Conflict

The continually evolving bill reached the Ministerial Legislative Committee in

January 1956,57

a few months after the beginning of initial preparations to accelerate

land settlement in the Galilee and one month before the Ratner Commission submitted

its report. At first, the Ministerial Committee approved the bill, despite concerns in

some circles that transferring judicial powers to the district courts would slow down

land settlement and hinder state claims.58

But the Ratner Commissions

recommendation to accelerate land settlement changed the situation completely. As

we have noted, the commission called for procedural and legal modifications to the

land settlement process in order to meet the perceived threat to state land reserves

posed by prescriptive Arab land claims. One proposed modification was the


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suspension of the 1955 bill, based on the assumption that transferring disputes to the

courts would slow down the process and hamper efforts to settle title to disputed land

before it was too late. This proposal also appeared in the plan which the government

approved in August 1956.59

In accordance with a broad consensus emerging within the executive branch,

the Ministerial Legislative Committee reversed its earlier position, deciding on 2

October 1956 to remove the bill from its agenda.60

Thus, the desire to relocate

settlement officers extensive judicial powers to the judicial branch, and to curtail

government influence over the adjudication of land settlement disputes involving the

state, was subordinated to the government policy of expediting land settlement in the

Galilee to acquire title to land for Jewish settlement.

The evolving amendment remained dormant for more than two years, and the

Office of the Prime Ministers Advisor on Arab Affairs played an active role in

preventing its reemergence. In mid-May 1957, Arab Knesset member Masad Qasis

of the Mapai-allied Democratic List of the Arabs of Israel introduced a bill that was

nearly identical to the suspended government-initiated bill. In a May 1957 letter to the

General Security Services and the Military Government, the Arab Affairs Advisors

Office expressed its opposition to resuming legislation: Our position on the subject is

that the transfer of powers to the courts will make the land settlement procedure

longer, thereby delaying the settlement operation which we are interested in

accelerating as much as possible.61

A few months later, the Advisors Office

attempted to influence key Justice Ministry officials to oppose reactivating the bill.62

Judging by the outcome, these efforts - possibly in coordination with others were

successful, and the bill remained suspended until the winter of 1958-59.


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The Pinhasovitch Scandal and the Land Settlement Ordinance Amendment

During the two years between the bills suspension and November 1958, the

disputed cases between Galilee Arabs and the state that began to emerge from the

special operation were heard by Judicial Settlement Officer Yosef Pinhasovitch.

Pinhasovitch was not only the sole judicial settlement officer serving the Haifa and

Northern Districts, but a senior figure in the Justice Ministrys Department of Land

Registration and Settlement. He had temporarily replaced Department Director

Tartakover in the winter of 1956-57 and in this capacity chaired the Supreme Land

Settlement Committee - a body consisting of representatives of a broad coalition of

military, government, and non-government agencies established to oversee the special

operation - during its first few months of work.63 Aside from the ability of claimants

to appeal his decisions to the Supreme Court, Pinhasovitch functioned relatively

unsupervised and outside the court system.

But in November 1958, something happened that completely changed the

course of events. On Sunday 16 November, Pinhasovitch was arrested for accepting a

bribe to produce a verdict in favor of Adib Khazin, a Galilee Arab in a land settlement

dispute with the CAP. Adib Khazin had appointed his cousin Shukri to act on his

behalf, and Shukri commissioned the services of well known land lawyer Hanna

Nakkarah, the attorney most active in representing Arab citizens in land disputes with

the state at the time, to argue the case before Pinhasovitch. According to the charges

against him, Pinhasovitch demanded IL 2,000 from Shukri Khazin to issue a decision

in his cousins favor. Khazin then went to the police, who provided him with cash to

verify the charge. After accepting the bribe, Pinhasovitch was arrested, tried and

convicted in the Haifa District Court (HDC), and sentenced to three years in prison.64


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Pinhasovitchs arrest sent shock waves through the land settlement

establishment. Yosef Nahmani of the JNF, who was intimately involved with the day-

to-day work of Galilee land settlement, expressed his personal dismay in his journal.

I was shocked this morning to read in Haaretz about the arrest of Y. Pinhasovitch on

charges of bribery, he wrote on 18 November.65

It was a blow from which I was

unable to recover all day. Two days later, Nahmani was still shaken, as were most

officials involved with the Haifa-based special operation: I still cannot get over my

shock at Pinhasovitchs arrestThe incident has disgraced those working on

settlement and has caused a great deal of shamePinhasovitch was the topic of the

day with everyone I met in Haifa.66

Pinhasovitchs arrest had an immediate effect on Israeli land settlement. In a

letter to the justice minister one day after the scandal broke, a representative of

Israels district judges explained that circles of judges (but not only circles of judges)

have long wondered in amazement why the abnormal situation, in which land

settlement cases are still not heard before the countrys judges, has not been rectified

He then demanded that the bill transferring disputes to the courts, which had been

discussed in the Knesset almost four years earlier, be returned to the legislature for

enactment.67

Rosen eventually adopted this course, and reactivated the bill by placing

it back on the agenda of the Ministerial Legislation Committee in February 1959, two

years and four months after its suspension.68

For some officials, the scandal highlighted a problem in the distribution of

judicial powers within the state structure and a serious breach in proper governance

that needed to be remedied. Others regarded its implications as a threat to the special

operation, which many saw as vital to the future of Jewish settlement in the Galilee

and to national security. The implications of the scandal did not go unnoticed by


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Galilee Arabs either. In a March 1959 letter to the justice minister, a landowner from

the village of Al Ramah insisted on the reevaluation of a past Pinhasovitch ruling.69

In October, a group of notables and members of the local land settlement liaison

committee of Al Bina village went a step further by attacking the appointment of

Shlomo Dori and Avraham Halima as acting settlement officers in place of

Pinhasovitch until disputes could be transferred to the courts. The fact that Dori and

Halima had both previously served as assistant district attorneys, they argued, biased

them in favor of the state.70

On this basis, the village notables called for immediate

enactment of the Land Settlement Ordinance Amendment, annulment of all decisions

of the two acting settlement officers due to conflict of interest, and postponement of

all judicial proceedings until a district judge could be found to preside over them.

Israeli lawmakers worked swiftly under the pressure. The bill was quickly

finalized by the ministerial committee and Justice Ministry legislation officials;

resubmitted to the Knesset in June 1959; debated between December 1959 and

February 1960; and enacted on 16 February 1960.71

In less than one-and-a-half years,

public exposure of settlement officer corruption resulted in the eventuality that Israeli

officials, motivated by Jewish ethno-national interests, had been working since 1956

to avoid: the transfer of land settlement disputes to the district courts.

The Amendments Impact on State Land-Claiming in the Galilee

Now that we understand why Israeli officials introduced, or re-introduced, the

Amendment when they did, and how they believed the reform would affect their

ability to achieve state land-claiming goals in the central Galilee, we can assess the

Amendments impact on policy implementation. As we have seen, officials believed

that transferring land settlement disputes to the district courts would bog down dispute

resolution in time-consuming judicial procedure, threatening government land claims


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in the Galilee in the process. This suggests that in their eyes, and not just the eyes of

the historian, the Amendment appeared to be a strangely timed liberal reform

inconsistent with state land policies at the time. Officials were most concerned about

the time factor, as in order to beat prescription and secure state land rights for Jewish

settlement, land settlement had to be completed more quickly than district court

procedures would allow. In their internal correspondences, however, these officials

revealed no concern that Haifa district judges might favor Arab claimants more than

settlement officers had, or that the state enjoyed influence over settlement officer

decisions which it risked losing if jurisdiction were transferred to the courts, as the

letter from Al Binas notables had suggested.

Nonetheless, the change did distance settlement dispute adjudication from the

interests of the Israeli executive to a certain degree. As judicial settlement officers

were employees of the Justice Ministry which was responsible for implementing the

special operation, the conflict of interest when adjudicating disputes involving the

state was clear. Judicial settlement officers also lacked the security of judicial tenure

and a judges salary, and, as we noted, Justice Minister Rosen acknowledged that their

decisions were theoretically more vulnerable to political pressures than the decisions

of judges. While I found no evidence that Pinhasovitchs judicial decisions were

unduly influenced by government interests, the fact that he was a senior land

settlement official deeply involved with government efforts to secure exclusive state

land rights in the central Galilee increases the possibility. The fact that he was corrupt,

however, not only places the sincerity and legitimacy of all his judicial decisions into

question, but also makes them impossible to analyze.

Regardless of whether Israeli officials had been aware of the executives

power to influence the adjudication process, or whether they had actually attempted to


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do so, transferring settlement disputes to the courts certainly made the feasibility of

such interference more remote. During the early 1950s, Israels courts had gradually

been modified to be free of government interference in judicial rulings and legal

considerations.72

Soon after the transfer of jurisdiction in 1960, Justice Ministry

Director-General Yosef Kokia noted that the new situation prevented him from

directly encouraging land settlement adjudicators to speed up their work as he had

routinely done before the transfer. Now, all such communication had to go through

the Courts Directorate, the government body through which the Justice Ministry

supervised administration of the judiciary.73 In another instance towards the end of

the year, Justice Minister Rosen failed in his efforts to reassign one of the four Haifa

district judges hearing land settlement disputes to a different realm of adjudication.74

The transfer of jurisdiction also brought land settlement adjudication more squarely

under Supreme Court supervision. Although the decisions of judicial settlement

officers had been bound by Supreme Court precedent, Pinhasovitch appears to have

implemented Supreme Court policy less conscientiously than Haifa district judges

subsequently did.75

But a number of factors outweighed the liberal impact of the change in

jurisdiction, making it largely theoretical. First, as I have argued elsewhere, the state

operated as a compound government repeat player during Galilee land settlement

disputes, enjoying decisive litigatory advantages by virtue of its superior resources, its

influence over lawmaking, and its strategic coordination of state agencies in court and

behind the scenes.76

Second, the settlement process remained dominated by the Zionist interests of

state officials, who adopted strategic administrative, judicial, and policy-oriented

measures aimed at maximizing state land holdings for Jews in the region. One


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manifestation of this dynamic was the Justice Ministrys ability to speed up the pace at

which courts heard land settlement cases, in accordance with government policy. To

this end, the two acting judicial settlement officers who heard cases during 1959-60

were replaced by four district judges,77

and Justice Ministry Director-General Kokia

closely monitored the progress of the court and its judges through monthly reports

submitted by the Chief Secretary of the HDC.78

Another manifestation was state

surveyors severing of relatively small uncultivated and rocky areas from larger

parcels during the preliminary surveying and mapping phases of land settlement. This

practice decided many disputes well before they reached court, by transforming

uncultivated portions of larger parcels into individual, uncultivated sub-parcels which

the state could convincingly claim as unassigned state land.79 In other words,

government officials and district attorneys quickly and effectively adapted their

practices to ensure the continuation of aggressive state land claiming before the courts.

For this reason, even if the courts had been more critical of state land claims than

settlement officers had been (which is impossible to ascertain due to the problematic

nature of Pinhasovitchs rulings), the rest of the process was so slanted in the states

favor that it is not surprising that the change in jurisdiction had no significant impact

on the outcome.

Furthermore, district judges in general were not overly critical of state land

claiming practices.80

Perhaps the most important reason for this was the solid statutory

foundation of expropriatory land law fashioned by Israeli lawmakers during the late

1940s and the 1950s, which established rules of the game that obligated judges. It also

stemmed from the fact that Israeli courts were integral components of the governing

regime and that, overall, Jewish Israeli judges appear to have identified with the

Zionist conceptions prevalent in Israels social and ideological fabric during this


24/31

period.81

This should not be taken to mean that Haifa district judges served as a rubber

stamp for state claims, as their rulings suggest that they were trying their best to see

that justice was done under the law. It should also not be taken to mean that Haifa

District judges ruled frequently in the states favor simply because they were Jewish

or out of interests of judicial land redemption.82

Still, we cannot ignore the fact that

all the judges in question were Jewish and, like judges in most countries, identified

with the political mainstream, which, in Israel at the time, was Jewish, Zionist, hard at

work at building a Jewish state, and in the midst of an ongoing ethno-national struggle

over land in the country. It is also reasonable to assume that had some land settlement

judges been Arab, their rulings would have been more varied, more critical of state

land claiming practices in Arab areas, and more understanding of the situation of

private Arab landholders. Moreover, on at least two occasions, Haifa district judges

initiated meetings with special operation officials to offer advice on how to accelerate

and improve state cases, suggesting that the judges also regarded accelerated land

settlement as a priority.83

For all these reasons, the Israeli executive - like government

litigants in most countries - enjoyed a home court advantage in the HDC.84

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, expanding Israeli conceptions of state

land and the governments focus on contesting the land claims of Arab citizens within

the framework of the special operation meant that many disputes reached the Supreme

Court as civil appeals during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this context, the

Supreme Court generated a variety of doctrines which, regardless of the intentions of

the Justices themselves, in practice made it infinitely more difficult for Arab

claimants to establish their land claims against the state, greatly expanding the area

which government officials could successfully claim as state land.85


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As a result of these advantages, the state won most of its land disputes with

Galilee Arabs. If during 1948-1958 the Knesset served as the primary arena for the

appropriation of Arab land, by the early 1960s, the focal point of expropriation had

moved to the courts, with the Supreme Court setting precedents, reviewing appeals,

and shaping and institutionalizing doctrine, and the HDC implementing the law on a

daily basis. Geographically, government successes in court enabled the state to secure

title to hundreds of thousands of dunams, much of which had hitherto been held by

Arabs.

The courts judicial legitimization of state land claims also served officials by

strengthening their hand in out-of-court negotiations, where they were in effect

bargaining in the shadow of the law.86 This caused many counterclaimants to view

negotiated settlements as preferable to risking court, thus easing state land

consolidation. In these out-of-court negotiations, Israeli officials focused on

consolidating the states extensive, but splintered and dispersed land holdings

(through negotiated purchase and land exchange) into the large blocks necessary for

establishing Jewish settlements. The land acquired and consolidated during this

process eventually provided much of the territorial foundations for the dozens of

Jewish settlements established in the area during the 1970s and 1980s.

In this way, despite officials concerns that the transfer of jurisdiction would

hamper state land claiming in the Galilee and despite the more neutral adjudicatory

setting provided by the district courts, the 1960 Land Settlement Ordinance

Amendment in fact changed very little, and aggressive state land claiming continued

in the Galilee without missing a beat.

Conclusion


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This essay explored the reasons behind the enactment of the Land Settlement

Ordinance Amendment of 1960 and its relationship to Israeli state land policy at the

time. On the surface, this legislation, which moved thousands of land settlement

disputes between Galilee Arabs and the state from executive jurisdiction into the

courts, gave the impression of a state-sponsored liberal reform aimed at advancing the

principles of separation of powers and checks and balances. The story behind the

Amendment, however, reveals that Israeli officials categorically opposed the reform

because they believed it would hinder state land-claiming in the Galilee and actually

went to great lengths to prevent its enactment. Officials were forced into sponsoring

the amendment by a public exposure of corruption that compromised the status of the

Justice Ministrys judicial settlement officers and threatened the states instrumental

use of land settlement to effect Judaization of the Galilee.

The impact of the law was also not what one might expect. Transfer of

jurisdiction did not hinder state efforts to maximize state landholdings in the Arab

central Galilee. On the contrary, it enhanced state land claiming in the region by

providing additional human and administrative resources and by speeding up the

dispute resolution process. The change also served the process by endowing land

settlement dispute resolution - which usually ended in the states favor - with

heightened judicial legitimacy. In this way, the courts emerge not as the bastion of

rights of weaker individual members of society, but as a state institution facilitating

the Jewish majoritys continued appropriation of Arab land.

This essay highlights an area of Israeli legal history which, in my view,

requires greater exploration. For the most part, the stories behind many Israeli statutes

remain undocumented, unexamined, and unknown. As we have seen, mining the

archives of government and non-government agencies, personal diaries, and other


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traditionally historical sources can teach us much about the evolution of legislation

and the motivations of lawmakers. The narrative presented here casts the 1960

Amendment in a new light, and enables us to make sense for the first time of its

anomalously liberal nature and the pivotal role it subsequently played in the

decisively illiberal Israeli land policies of the decades to come.

Acknowledgements. For their careful reading and helpful feedback and suggestions, I would like to

thank Michael Fischbach, Maxine Forman, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Nir Kedar, Sandy Kedar, Assaf

Likhovski, Shira Robinson, and the students and faculty of the Law and History Seminar of Tel-Aviv

University's School of Law. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the German-

Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development, without which this article could not have

been written (project title: "Out of Place: Ethnic Migration, Nation-State Formation, and Property

Regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Israel").

1 Israel State Archives (below ISA) (74) 21280-gim-lam/12 Justice Minister to Government Secretary,

11 December 1958; Government Secretary to Justice Minister, 15 December 1958; Justice Minister to

Government Secretary, 22 February 1959 [Hebrew].2 Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance Amendment Bill, 1959,Bills 399 (15 June 1959) 410-415

[Hebrew]; Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance Amendment, 1960,Laws of Israel 302 (25 February

1960) 13-16 [Hebrew].3 See: Alexandre Kedar, The Legal Transformation of Ethnic Geography: Israeli Law and the

Palestinian Landholder 1948-1967,New York University Journal of International Law and Politics

33(4) (2001)923-1000; Haim Sandberg,Land Title Settlement in Eretz-Israel and in the State of Israel

(Jerusalem, 2000) [Hebrew]. Also see: Michal Oren-Nordheim, who mistakenly attributes the change

to the poor image of the land courts and the belief that they had more than once resulted in a distortion

of justice. The Evolution of Israeli Land and Settlement Policy from the Establishment of the Statethrough the First Years of the Israel Lands Administration: 1948-1965 (Ph.D. Thesis, HebrewUniversity, 2000) [Hebrew].4 Israeli Legal History: Past and Present and Israeli Legal History: A General Bibliography, in Ron

Harris, Alexander Kedar, Pnina Lahav, and Assaf Likhovski (eds) The History of Law in a Multi-

Cultural Society: Israel, 19171967(Dartmouth, 2002) 13-20, 423-436. For some exceptions, see: Ron

Harris, Legitimizing Imprisonment for Debt: Lawyers, Judges and Legislators, in The History of Law

in a Multi-Cultural Society, 217-271; Yifat Holzman-Gazit. Law as a Symbol of Status: The Jewish

National Fund Law of 1953 and the Struggle of the Fund to Maintain its Status after Independence,

`Iyunei Mishpat26(2) (2002) 601-644.5 Peter Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy, 1948-1967(New York, 1990) 102.6 See: Geremy Forman,Israeli Settlement of Title in Arab Areas: the Special Land Settlement

Operation in Northern Israel (1955-1967) (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Haifa, 2005); Geremy Forman

and Alexandre Kedar From Arab Land to Israel Lands: the Legal Dispossession of the PalestiniansDisplaced by Israeli in the Wake of 1948,Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22(6)

(2004) 809-830; Yossi Katz, The Land Shall not be Sold in Perpetuity: The Principle of National Land

in the Legislative Process and Israeli Law, Karka` 48 (2000) 46-79 [Hebrew]; Yossi Katz To Whom

Belongs the Land of Germans in Israel? `Iyunim bTkumat Israel 17 [Hebrew] (forthcoming); Oren-

Nordheim, The Evolution of Israeli Land and Settlement Policy; Sandberg,Land Title Settlement.7 Katz focuses on the institutionalization of the no-sale policy within the Israeli land regime during this

period. Katz, The Land Shall not be Sold"8 Arthur Ruppin, Jewish Autonomy in Eretz Israel, in Thirty Years of Building in Eretz Israel(Jerusalem, 1937) 1-8 [Hebrew]; Yossi Katz, The Battle for the Land: The History of the Jewish

National Fund (KKL) before the Establishment of the State of Israel (Jerusalem, 2006); Rashid Khalidi,

Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York, 1997) 89-117.9 Katz, The Battle for the Land.


28/31

10 Forman and Kedar, From Arab Lands to Israel Lands; Geremy Forman, Law and the Historical

Geography of the Galilee: Israels Litigatory Advantages during the Special Operation of LandSettlement,Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 796-817.11 Kedar, The Legal Transformation of Ethnic Geography.12 Yair Bauml, The Attitude of the Israeli Establishment to the Arabs in Israel: Policy, Principles, and

Activities: The Second Decade, 1958-1968 (PhD. Thesis., University of Haifa, 2002) 60-86 [Hebrew]13 Forman and Kedar, From Arab Lands to Israel Lands, 813-815.14 Ibid., 816-819.15 State Property Law, 1951,Laws of Israel 68 (15 February 1951) 52-54 [Hebrew]; Forman and

Kedar, From Arab Lands to Israel Lands, 823; Katz, The Land Shall not be Sold," 52-53.16 Ibid., 819-822.17 Statute of Limitations, 1958,Laws of Israel 251 (April 6, 1958) 112-115 [Hebrew].18 See Art. 3 of the Ottoman Land Code in Stanley Fisher, Ottoman Land Laws (London, 1919) 2-3

(and f.n. 1). Most cultivable land in Israel was Miri. During British and early Israeli rule, Miri rights

came increasingly to resemble full ownership.19 For instance, see: Absentee Property Law, 1950,Laws of Israel 37 (20 March 1950) 86-101

[Hebrew]; Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law, 1953,Laws of Israel 122 (20

March 1953) 58-60 [Hebrew].20 Ben-Gurion Archive, Ben Gurion Journal, entry of 14 December 1949 [Hebrew]; Yosef Nahmani,Yosef Nahmani Man of Ha-Galil, ed. Yosef Weitz (Israel, 1969) 118 [Hebrew]; Sabri Jiryis, The

Arabs of Israel (London, 1976) 105-106; Ghazi Falah, The Processes and Patterns of Sedentarization

of the Galilee Bedouin, 1880-1982 (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Durham, 1982) 307-8.21 On the principle of "finality" in land settlement, see Sandberg,Land Title Settlement in Eretz Israel,

297-299.22 Israel Defense Forces Archive (below IDF) 756 / 61 79 Harsina to Commander of Operations

Branch, 26 May 1954 [Hebrew]; IDF 72/70 649 Yuval Neeman, The Problem of Developing the

Galilee, December 1954 [Hebrew].23 ISA (74) 3431-gim/14 Chair of Advisory Committee for Amending Land Law to Justice Minister, 21

June 1955 [Hebrew]; ISA (74) 5741-gim/18 Minutes of the Ministerial Development Authority Sales

Authorization Committee, 11 July 1955 [Hebrew]; ISA (43) 5497-gim/2624 Finance Ministers

Explanatory Note for the Ministerial Finance Committee, 13 July 1955 [Hebrew]; ISA (74) 3431-

gim/14 Sharef to Ministers of Justice, Finance, and Labor, 1 August 1955 [Hebrew]; ISA (74) 5741-gim/18 Report on Consultation regarding the Plan for Urgent Land Settlement of 100,000 dunams,based on the Ministerial Finance Committee Decision of 31 July 1955, August 4, 1955 [Hebrew].24 ISA (130) 2401-htz/20 Ratner Commission Report Appendix: Security Settlement and the Land

Question, 24 February 1956 [Hebrew].25 See Article 78 of the O.L.C. in Fisher, Ottoman Land Laws, 26-27; Moshe Doukhan, The Land Law

of Israel (Jerusalem, 1952) [Hebrew] 314-315; PRO FO 1022/6 Koussa to Justice Minister, 23 July

1957.26 Security Settlement and the Land Question.27 ISA (74) 5497-gim/2624 Rosen to Government Secretary, Suggestions for Land Settlement in the

Areas under Military Government, 30 May 1956 [Hebrew]; ISA Minutes of the 6th Israeli

Government, 12 August 1956 [Hebrew]. On the special operation, see: Geremy Forman, Law and the

Historical Geography of the Galilee. For a detailed discussion, see Forman,Israeli Settlement of Title

in Arab Areas.28 ISA (104) 3431-gim/15 Summary of Meeting to Determine Priorities for Land Settlement in the

Galilee, 8 August 1956 [Hebrew]; Minutes of the Supreme Land Settlement Committee and the Land

Settlement Operations Committee, 21 October 1956 [Hebrew].29 ISA (74) 5742-gim/1 Summary of Meeting of Aharoni, Kokia, and Rosen 28 February 1958

[Hebrew].30 Statute of Limitations, 1958.31 Land Leasing (Temporary Order) Bill, 1958,Bills 369 (21 December 1958) 128-130 [Hebrew]; Land

Leasing (Temporary Order) Law, 1959,Laws of Israel 290 (14 August 1959) 196-204 [Hebrew].32 Alexandre Kedar, Majority Time, Minority Time: Land, Nationality and Adverse Possession Law in

Israel, Iyunei Mishpat21(3) (1998) 665-746: 699-700, note 119 [Hebrew]; Nakkarah, unpublished

untitled manuscript, 136; Menahem Waxman (Attorney), in discussion with the author, June 2003.

Reuven Aloni, deputy director of the Israel Lands Administration, was appointed under the terms of the

Land Leasing Law to authorize leases. However, he was removed from this position by a 1965 High

Court of Justice ruling, based on conflict of interest, and it is not clear if he was ever replaced. All we


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are saying, read the decision, is that a person serving in a senior position in a given department

responsible for protecting state interests in a specific realm cannot simultaneously adjudicate betweenthe citizen and the state on an issue related to this realm. SeeHasin v. Aloni as Authorized Authority et

al., High Court of Justice Case 293/64,Decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court19(1) 572-577

[Hebrew]. In 2003, Waxman reported that he still had 10 cases pending regarding lease requests based

on the Land Leasing Law from the 1960s.33 Uzi Benziman and Attalah Mansour, Subtenants: The Arabs of Israel, their Status and Policy

Towards Them (Jerusalem, 1992) 74; Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, 41.34 Bauml, The Attitude of the Israeli Establishment, c, 4-5, 30-35, 61-63, 107-108 [Hebrew]; Benziman

and Mansour, Subtenants: The Arabs of Israel, 71, 73; Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, 27-28, 41, 137-157.35 See comments of Hanan Rubin of Mapam, Nahum Nir-Rafalkes of Ahdut Haàvoda-Poàlei Tziyon,

Shimshon Unichman of Herut, David Bar-Rav-Hai of Mapai, and Israel Shlomo Rosenburg (Ben-Meir)

of the National Religious Party, Hamizrahi-Poèl Mizrahi. Knesset Proceedings (25 June 1957) 2225-

2231 [Hebrew].36 ISA (60) 111-kaf/11Minutes of Knesset Law and Constitution Committee, 12 February 1958

[Hebrew].37 Agricultural Land Consolidation Bill,Bills 432 (31 July 1960) 152-155 [Hebrew].38 Ibid., Art. 2, 3 and 4.39 This motivation was publicly revealed by Minister of Agriculture Moshe Dayan who, uponpresenting the bill to the Knesset, proclaimed that 40 new Jewish settlements would be established on

the consolidated land. Oren-Nordheim, The Evolution of Israeli Land and Settlement Policy, 227.

Dayan Announces a New Project for Stealing Arab Land,Al-Ittihad, 17 February 1961 [Arabic].40 Ibid., Art. 6 and 7.41 Oren-Nordheim, The Evolution of Israeli Land and Settlement Policy, 227; Jiryis, The Arabs in

Israel, 100-101; U.S. National Archives and Records Administration RG 59 884a.16/2-166 Koussa to

American Consul in Haifa, 31 January 1961; You Defended Your Land in Unity in the Past, and now

you can Prevent the Theft of your Land Targeted by the Land Consolidation Law,Al-Ittihad, 15

November 1960 [Arabic].; The Popular Front Criticizes the Land Consolidation Law,Al-Ittihad, 25

November 1960 [Arabic]; The Al-Rama Local Council Unanimously Opposes the Land Consolidation

Law,Al-Ittihad, 29 November 1960 [Arabic].42 Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, 101; Nakkarah.43 Forman and Kedar, From Arab Lands to Israel Lands, 822-826.44 ISA (74) 5657-gim/31 Deputy Director of Land Settlement to Justice Ministry Director-General, 19

October 1948 [Hebrew].45Knesset Proceedings 18 (9 May 1955) 1558-59.46Knesset Proceedings 18 (9 May 1955) 156; ISA (74) 3431-gim/14 Summary of Consultation on the

Land Ordinance Amendment, 24 August 1955 [Hebrew].47 ISA (74) 21280-gim-lamed/9 Committee Recommendations, 19 April 1954 [Hebrew]; ISA (102)

17025-gim-lam/11 Land Settlement (bill proposed by M.K. M. Qasis), 21 May 1957 [Hebrew].48 ISA (97) 2438-gim/6 Koussa to Naphtali, 5 January 1955.49 ISA (74) 21280-gim-lam/9 Memo - Proposed Bill, 30 August 1954; Memo Proposed Bill, 14

September 1954 [Hebrew].50 ISA (74) 21280-gim-lamed/9 Fishman to Justice Ministry Director-General, 25 June 1954; Arnon to

Supervisor of Legislation, 9 September 1954 [Hebrew].51 ISA (74) 21280-gim-lam/9 Yosef to Government Secretary, 6 October 1954 [Hebrew].52Knesset Proceedings 18 (9 May 1955) 1560; ISA (74) 3431-gim/14 Summary of Consultation on the

Land Ordinance Amendment, 24 August 1955 [Hebrew].53Knesset Proceedings 18 (9 May 1955) 1560.54 Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance Amendment Bill, 1955, Bills 229 (28 February 1955) 86-87

[Hebrew].55Knesset Proceedings 28 (14 December 1959) 80 [Hebrew].56 ISA (74) 3431-gim/14 Fishman to Attorney General, 15 March 1955; Chair of the Advisory

Committee for Amending Land Law to Justice Minister, 21 June 1955; Summary of Consultation on

the Land Ordinance Amendment, 24 August 1955 [Hebrew]; ISA (74) 21280-gim-lam/9 Rozenthal to

Attorney General, 14 October 1955; Zohar to Eisenberg, 17 November 1955; Tartakover to Attorney

General, 13 January 1956; Rozenthal to Attorney General, 20 January 1956, ISA (74) 21280-gim-

lam/9 [Hebrew].57 ISA (74) 21280-gim-lam/12 Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance Amendment - 1956, 3 January

1956 [Hebrew].


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58 ISA (74) 21280-gim-lam/9 Ministerial Legislation Committee Minutes, 14 February 1956 [Hebrew].59 Security Settlement and the Land Question; "Suggestions for Land Settlement in the Areas under

Military Government.60 ISA (74) 21280-gim-lam/12 Government Secretary to Justice Minister, December 1958 [Hebrew].61 ISA (102) 17025-gim-lam/11 Blatman to General Security Services, Department of Military

Government, and Ajar, 8 May 1957 [Hebrew].62 ISA (102) 17025-gim-lam/11 Land Settlement (bill proposed by M.K. M. Qasis), 21 May 1957;

Land Settlement Discussion with Tartakover, undated (most likely November-December 1957)[Hebrew].63 ISA (104) 3431-gim/15 Minutes of the Supreme Land Settlement Committee and the Land

Settlement Operations Committee, 21 October 1956 [Hebrew]; ISA (74) 5741-gim/8 Pinhasovitch to

Kokia, 24 October 1956 [Hebrew].64 After decades of suspension following his release, and just a few years before his death in the mid-

1990s, Pinhasovitch was permitted to resume practicing law in Haifa.Attorney General v.

Pinhasovitch, Criminal Case 390.58 (H.D.C., 23 December 1958) [Hebrew], copy on file with the

author; Avraham Hilleli, interview by Shimon Ben-Shemesh, 9 March 1992, J.N.F. Land Use Research

Institute, p.11; Hilleli, in discussion with the author, January 2007.65 IDF/Yosef Nahmanis Journal, Entry of 18 November 1958 [Hebrew]; Land Court Judge Suspected

of Taking Bribe,Haaretz, 18 November 1958 [Hebrew].66 Yosef Nahmanis Journal, Entry of 20 November 1958.67 ISA (74) 21280-gim-lam/12 Lam to Justice Minster, 19 November 1958 [Hebrew].68 ISA (74) 21280-gim-lam/12 Justice Minister to Government Secretary, 11 December 1958;

Government Secretary to Justice Minister, 15 December 1958; Justice Minister to Government

Secretary, 22 February 1959 [Hebrew].69 ISA (74) 8003-gim/2 Hussein to Justice Minister, 7 March 1959 [Hebrew].70 ISA (74) 8003-gim/2 Bi`na Village Mukhtars and Land Settlement Committee Members to Justice

Minister, 3 October 1959 [Hebrew].71 ISA (74) 21280-gim-lam/12 Rozenthal to Justice Minister, 6 April 1959; Yadin to Justice Minister, 4

May 1959; Chair of Ministerial Legislative Committee to Supervisor of Legislation, 22 May 1959

[Hebrew]; Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance Amendment Bill, 1959, Bills 399 (15 June 1959) 410-

415 [Hebrew]; Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance Amendment, 1960, Laws of Israel 302 (25

February 1960) 13-16 [Hebrew].72 The Judges Law, 1953 [Hebrew],Laws of Israel 132 (28 August 1953) 149-152 [Hebrew]; Pnina

Lahav, The Supreme Court of Israel: Formative Years, 1948-1955, Studies in Zionism 11(1) (1990)

25-66:55.73 ISA (74) 5742-gim/4 Kokia to Justice Minister, 12 October 1960 [Hebrew].74 Forman,Israeli Settlement of Title in Arab Areas, 164-167.75 See the Supreme Courts repeated instructions to Pinhasovitch to relax aspects of formal judicial

procedure in order to ensure the admission of all relevant evidence by unrepresented Arab claimants

unfamiliar with standard courtroom procedure. Arshid v. C.A.P. et al., CA 75/54,Decisions of the

Israeli Supreme Court9 (1955) 1890-1892; `Uthman v. Attorney General, CA 35/56,Decisions of the

Israeli Supreme Court11 (1957) 355-357 [Hebrew].76 See: Forman, Law and the Historical Geography of the Galilee.77 The four judges appointed were: former Acre Magistrate Court Judge Avraham Friedman; former

Tel Aviv Magistrate Court Judge `Emanuel Yedid Halevy; Leonard Arieh Rabinovitch of the HaifaDistrict Attorneys office; and Acting Judicial Settlement Officer Shlomo Dori, who had served as one

of the two judicial settlement officers in the north between May 1959 and April 1960. Avraham

Halima, the other acting judicial settlement officer and a future Israeli Supreme Court Justice, was

appointed as a judge and reassigned to the Tel Aviv Magistrate Court.78 These reports, submitted to Kokia by the court secretary on a regular basis, consisted of a list of the

cases set to be heard by each judge during the upcoming month. ISA (74) 5742-gimel/4.79 Forman,Israeli Settlement of Title in Arab Areas, 101-102.80 For an anatomy of land settlement dispute litigation and case law before the HDC, see: Forman,

Israeli Settlement of Title in Arab Areas, Ch. 7.81 Yifat Holzman-Gazit, Land Expropriation Law in the 1950s and the Zionist Ideology of Immigrant

Absorption and Private Property, in Hanoch Dagan (ed) Land in Israel (Tel Aviv, 1999) 223-252

[Hebrew]; Kedar, Majority Time, Minority Time, 668, 720.82 cf. Kedar, Majority Time, Minority Time, 668, 720.


31/31

83 Azulai to Eisenberg [Hebrew], 1 March 1961, ISA (74) 5742-gimel/4; Yanai to Levin [Hebrew], 7

March 1961, ISA (74) 5742-gimel/4; Minutes of meeting of 19 March 1961 [Hebrew], ISA (74) 5742-gimel/4.84 Herbert Kritzer, The Government Gorilla: Why Does Government Come Out Ahead in Appellate

Courts, in Herbert Kritzer and Susan Silbey (eds),In Litigation: Do the Haves Still

Come Out Ahead? (Stanford, 2003) 342-370; Forman, Law and the Historical Geography of theGalilee, 808-810.85 Kedar, The Legal Transformation of Ethnic Geography.86 R. Mnookin and L. Kornhauser, Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: the Case of Divorce, Yale

Law Journal 88 (1979) 950-997.

forman 1960 amendment

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