February 4, 2005
TEL AVIV - In 1901, the fledgling Zionist movement took one of its first major leaps - the creation of a fund to buy land to settle Jews in Palestine.

More than 100 years later, Israel's attorney general has decided the Jewish National Fund must make its land available to all Israeli citizens - both Jews and Arabs.

Some have welcomed Attorney General Menachem Mazuz's recent decision as a step toward fuller democracy in Israel, which long has struggled with the tension of being both a homeland for Jews - with a certain amount of "affirmative action" for them -and a democracy that serves all citizens equally.

But others have condemned the decision as surrender to a post-Zionist worldview where political correctness comes before Jewish peoplehood.

Mazuz's statement, released last week, said "The attorney general is convinced that the Israel Lands Authority as a government body is obligated to uphold the principles of equality. This obligation includes the marketing of lands belonging to the JNF."
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JNF Chairman Yehiel Leket noted in the statement that the JNF owns 13 percent of land in Israel, and 80 percent is owned by the government. Arabs and Jews own some 6.5 percent privately.


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"For many years, there were individual cases of non-Jews interested in buying an apartment or house that was situated on KKL/JNF land. To avoid state sanctioned discrimination, the KKL/JNF and the ILA simply exchanged property. The non-Jew was allowed to purchase the property, it became an ILA holding and the ILA gave a similar property to KKL/JNF. As long as the laws and regulations regarding ILA and KKL/JNF lands remained identical, this arrangement was considered a sometimes bureaucratic but satisfactory way to address the 5-10 annual occurrences. In practice, a legal fiction helped maintain both the KKL/JNF ownership of "the Jewish people's land" and equal access to land sales for Jews and non-Jews alike.

Here is the complicated part. A person who owns an apartment or house on KKL/JNF land doesn't actually own the land under the building, but rather holds a 49 year renewable lease. In 2004, as part of an effort to simplify land ownership, the government changed the ILA regulations to allow people to actually purchase the ILA land and the building. This created differences between the KKL/JNF and the ILA lands and essentially made it complicated for the two agencies to continue the 43 year "property swap" practice.

This predictably triggered an appeal to the Israeli High Court of Justice (hence my comment about the vibrant Israeli democracy) and in 2004 the court decided that the ILA couldn't discriminate against non-Jewish citizens even when administering KKL/JNF lands. When the ILA did not implement the court decision, the Attorney General ruled that the policy was discriminatory and he would not defend it in the High Court, first in 2005 and again this spring (another healthy dose of Israeli democracy at work)."


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http://www.meforum.org/370/can-arabs-buy-land-in-israel

"By the eve of statehood, the JNF had acquired a total of 936,000 dunums of land; another 800,000 dunums had been acquired by other Jewish organizations or individuals.11 These holdings amounted to some 8.6 percent of the total land of what would later be Israel; of the rest, more than 70 percent were public lands vested in the British Mandatory authorities.12 All the lands purchased by the JNF remained in JNF hands; these were never sold, either to Jews or Arabs, but instead were leased on a long—term basis for kibbutzim and other forms of Jewish settlement.

With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the new government inherited the state-owned lands formerly in the possession of British Mandatory authority as well as property abandoned by Arab refugees. The government sold some of this land to the JNF, and retained the rest. In 1960, the Israeli parliament passed a series of land laws including the "Basic Law: Israel Lands" that defined government-owned and JNF-owned land both as "Israel lands." It reiterated the principle that these lands would only be leased, not sold. While the JNF retained ownership of its lands, the 1960 laws turned administrative responsibility for these (as well as government-owned) properties to a newly-created agency, the Israel Land Administration (ILA).13

The land-owning situation in Israel today is as follows: 80.4 percent is owned by the government, 13.1 percent is privately owned by the JNF, and 6.5 percent is evenly divided between private Arab and Jewish owners. Thus, the ILA administers 93.5 percent of the land in Israel.14 Put differently, 93.5 percent of the land is unavailable for private ownership; such land is sold neither to Jews nor to Arabs but is leased out by the ILA."

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