http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?id=61064&mador=5&datee=11/14/99
Sunday, November 14, 1999
'Trespassers' on their own land
The civil administration told the
Suleiman family they were
"trespassing" on their land, and
uprooted 41 dunams (about 10 acres)
of trees. All because Israel did not
let them register their land at the
Land Registry
By Amira Hass
The soldiers came first, at about 8:30 in the
morning. The jeeps that brought them parked at the
top of the hill and the soldiers descended into
the wide wadi, and spread out with their rifles
between the sabra plants, the brush and the olive
trees. Soon afterward a small bulldozer rolled
down the hill, raised its toothed arm, and its
screeching could be heard clearly in all the
houses of Kfar Midya, huddled close together on
the hilltop to the left, barely 200 yards away
from the plowed and planted basin. Surrounding the
bulldozer were several foreign workers,
Africans.The morning of Wednesday, November 3,
1999: The workers employed by the contractor (who
was hired by the civil administration just to
uproot the trees), the soldiers, the policemen and
the officials of civil administration, assembled
on the property of the Suleiman family in Kfar
Midya, in order to return to the State of Israel
what they claimed belonged it. In the tiny town of
some 1,000 residents, everyone knew where the
soldiers were headed. On August 3, 1999, the
Suleiman family had found an injunction stuck to
the iron gate which divided their property from
their neighbors'. The papers bore the insignia of
the IDF and the Civil Administration for Judea and
Samaria, regarding the "evacuation of government
property ... in accordance with law concerning
government property (Judea and Samaria) No. 59,
1967, I hereby declare that you are unlawfully
holding the lands described herein." Underneath
was hand-written, "Land in el-Midya that was
declared State-owned land for Hashmonaim." Hand
written under the heading "Description of the
crime," was "the fencing of land and the planting
of olive trees and sabra plants."
The second paragraph of the injunction was typed,
and stated: "You are hereby commanded to remove
your mark from this land and to return the land to
its former state within three days of receiving
this order."
Paragraph three: "You have the right to appeal
this decision, if you wish to do so, to the
appeals committee within 54 days of receipt of
this order."
Beside the heading "Delivered by" was handwritten,
"Michael Yachin, Co-ordinator of Supervision of
West Ramallah, 3.8.99; Time: 02:61." It also
noted, under the signature, "Affixed to the
property's fence in the presence of Daniel Raf (a
witness, apparently a soldier who was there also).
But other vital information was not detailed: it
was not noted to whom the order was delivered, and
on the top line, where the particulars of the
"criminal" should have been, hand-written words in
Hebrew read "the trespasser" - no first name, no
father's name, no grandfather's name, no family
name, no identity number, no address.
Peter Lerner, the spokesperson for the civil
administration, explained that if no one is at the
site when the inspectors arrive, they cannot know
who planted the trees, and who is the trespasser.
This does not invalidate the legality of the
injunction, he said.
Doomed to failure
The Suleiman brothers consulted a Palestinian
lawyer two months ago, in the hope that he would
help them submit an appeal. Now it turns out that
the lawyer neglected their file. It is no wonder,
say other lawyers who deal with similar cases.
Rejection by the appeals board, which is often
composed of settlers, but never includes
Palestinians, is a foregone conclusion.
The property of the Suleiman family - six brothers
and sisters (five others live in Amman) - is about
41 dunams (10 acres), and is located between the
planted tracts of other families. The Suleiman
family knows of no other family which received a
similar evacuation notice. Apart from this plot of
land, which has been claimed by the state, the
family owns only four dunams (one acre).
The Suleiman family's tale of shrinking land
holdings is characteristic of Midya and other
Palestinian villages which are adjacent to the
Green Line. Until 1948 the family owned hundreds
of dunams. According to data from the British
Mandate era, the whole village of Midya, in the
Ramallah region, held 29,700 dunams (7,425 acres).
In 1948 most of the village's territory (23,450
dunams) was conquered and transferred to the State
of Israel. From then until 1967, the villagers
worked the remaining 6,250 dunams of their land,
3,750 dunams of which was in ownerless territory.
The Suleiman family had 57 dunams left. Over the
years, most of this was expropriated or declared
state-owned land, in favor of the nearby
settlement of Hashmonaim, and the access road to
the settlement.
"We're lucky that we still have land at all, there
are some people who have lost everything, and all
they have left is their house and the land beneath
it," said one of the brothers, Mustafa Suleiman.
In 1986 the villagers were forbidden access to
areas which had once been ownerless. Thousands of
olive trees that were planted there were uprooted.
"We were told that this area was within the Green
Line," says Suleiman, "even though there were
permits (from the administration) to build 31
houses on that same tract of land."
The shrinking of the village's land holdings had a
direct effect on the villagers. For every person
now living in the village, four others are living
abroad, mostly in Amman. The emigration began even
before 1967, and increased after the Six Day War.
Young people went away to seek employment abroad,
and others moved elsewhere in Israel. The elderly,
the women and the children were entrusted with
watching over the land that remained.
The uprooting of the trees took about three hours
on November 3. The bulldozer tore out the trees,
and the African workers dragged them to a waiting
truck. Residents of Midya who work in Hashmonaim
related that the contractor later burned the
trees. Some of the sabra plants were also uprooted
or were crushed. The soldiers prevented the women
from entering the area. They shouted and cursed at
the soldiers, but they were pushed back. One of
the children was struck in the face. "Do you know
how much work we have invested here?" the women
asked. Plowing and planting and watering and
trimming and harvesting for years. After the
uprooting of the olive trees, they stayed on the
tract of land for days, afraid that the contractor
would come back and take what was left.
Saplings or mature trees?
Mustafa Suleiman said that two years ago over 150
of the family's trees were uprooted. This is the
second time their groves have been destroyed. Both
times, first in 1997, and again now the uprooting
was done in accordance with a 1991 declaration
that the land belonged to the state. After the
declaration, the family submitted a petition to
the appeals board, and a ruling was handed down
that a few small areas were not "State-owned
land", but the rest of it was, and the trees must
therefore by uprooted.
Lerner says that this is a matter of trespassing
on state land and it was not trees that were
uprooted, but 96 saplings which were only a few
months old, and that a few days after November 3,
there were still some torn, crushed olive branches
hanging onto the nine fenceposts which surrounded
the area. They did not look like the branches of
saplings, but of mature trees. There were also
some thick roots on the ground, which the workers
had not managed to load onto the truck. Mustafa
Suleiman said that the trees were between 10 and
15 years old. The sabra plants, which form the
traditional border of the groves, look very old.
Suleiman made a film of the event with his home
video camera, which also proves that the trees
were not saplings. When the contractor came,
Mustafa Suleiman hid a short distance from the
area, and filmed the workers dragging large trees.
If some of the trees were small, says Suleiman, it
is because they were planted on rocks and
developed slowly.
The Suleiman family finds it difficult to
understand why Israel suddenly remembered in 1991
that the land belongs to it, and what is the
difference between the Suleiman family's land and
that of their neighbors.
In 1967 Israel halted the registration of land in
the Land Registry, a process that had been started
by Jordan. All the residents of Midya did not stop
registering the lands which had been in their
possession for generations. According to Lerner,
the designation of the land as state-owned "is not
done in situ. Land that is not worked, ... land
that is stony, is state land. To the best of our
knowledge," he added, "in the other planted areas
it is not a matter of trespassing on state land."
But in Midya people are asking themselves what the
state is planning to do with its property. Maybe
it wants to build a small settlement, or to lease
the land for a gas station or a motel. If so, will
"the good of the public" demand that a road be
paved to reach it, and then the state have no
choice but to expropriate another few dozen or few
hundred dunams from workers who "as far as the
civil administration is concerned" are not
included in the definition "trespassers on
state-owned lands?
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