Arab MK leads campaign against bill allocating state land to Jews only

Haaretz 21:24 23/10/2007
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent
Hadash MK Hanna Swaid has been promoting action to foil a Jewish National Fund bill, which calls for all JNF lands to be allocated to Jews only. The bill is geared to bypass a 2004 court ruling that annulled an Israel Lands Administration (ILA) policy preventing Israeli Arabs from participating in bids to purchase JNF-owned land. Hadash MKs have started collecting documents and ownership certificates from Arab citizens, whose lands have been expropriated and assigned to the JNF. They seek to prove that a majority of JNF lands, which constitute 13 percent of the State of Israel's land, were expropriated from Arabs for Jewish communities during the 1950s.

Numerous former landowners have submitted their papers to Hadash offices nationwide, following an appeal in Arabic that the party issued on its Web site. Hadash is vigorously opposed to the bill, which was submitted to the Knesset by right-wing MKs Uri Ariel, Zeev Elkin and Moshe Kahlon. The bill passed preliminary reading and is now being debated by the Knesset Finance Committee before it is brought back to the Knesset plenum for first reading. Swaid told Haaretz on Tuesday that "at the moral basis of this bill stands the assumption that the lands in question were bought by Jews for Jews, but we intend to prove that a majority of JNF lands were expropriated from their Arab owners." He added that "the act of expropriating land from Arabs and then preventing them from buying it is unethical." He said that he and his faction members are trying to persuade the Jewish members of the Finance Committee to oppose the bill, and call it off. If this lobbying campaign fails, they will consider appealing to courts in Israel and abroad.