Netanyahu calls on Israel’s Arabs to ‘thrive in droves’

[Little Tich]

8. There's no equal access for Israeli Arabs to land in Israel, even though I was wrong about Israeli

Arabs having no access whatsoever to 93% of the land:

Off the Map: Land and Housing Rights Violations in Israel’s Unrecognized Bedouin Villages, IV. Discrimination in Land Allocation and Access
Source: Human Rights Watch, 2008

Unlike most industrialized countries, which have widespread private land ownership and a free real estate market, in Israel the state controls 93 percent of the land. This land is owned either directly by the state or by quasi-governmental bodies that the state has authorized to develop the land, such as the Development Authority (DA) and the Jewish National Fund (JNF). A governmental body, the Israel Land Administration (ILA), administers all of this land. This gives the government an exceptionally decisive role in land allocation, land-use planning, and development.

According to Israel’s Basic Law, state land cannot be sold. The ILA usually leases land to individuals or institutions for periods of 49 or 98 years.

The JNF has a specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens, and when the ILA tenders leases for land owned by the JNF, it does so only to Jews—either Israeli citizens or Jews from the Diaspora. This arrangement makes the state directly complicit in overt discrimination against Arab citizens in land allocation and use, and Israeli NGOs are currently challenging this practice in Israel’s Supreme Court. The ILA’s Governing Council is comprised of 22 members—12 representing government ministries and representing the JNF, giving the JNF a hugely influential role in Israeli land policies generally and the overall allocation of state lands.

Notwithstanding the prohibition on sale of state land, the law allows the state to transfer directly owned state land to the JNF. The JNF acquired approximately 78 percent of its land holdings from the state between 1949 and 1953, much of it the land of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war that the state confiscated as “absentee property.”

While by law Arab citizens can lease land owned directly by the state and not transferred to the JNF, in practice numerous obstacles limit Arab citizens’ access to land, as described below. According to Adalah, a human rights organization representing the Arab minority in Israel, Arab citizens are blocked from leasing about 80 percent of the land controlled by the state.

Bedouins’ lack of access to land occurs in a wider context affecting Israel’s Palestinian Arab population generally. Not only has the state confiscated pre-1948 Palestinian Arab lands, it has not allowed Arab citizens to establish new towns; nor has it approved adequate expansion of existing ones. Since 1948 the state has authorized the creation of about 1,000 Jewish communities, but not a single Arab community except for the seven government-planned townships and the nine new or newly recognized villages, which concentrate the Bedouin in limited areas in the Negev, and some similar towns in the Galilee. The state rarely grants expansion requests to Arab local authorities. While Arab citizens of Israel comprise roughly 20 percent of the country’s population, just 2.5 percent of the land of the state is under the jurisdiction of Arab local governments. In the northern Negev region, Bedouin municipalities have jurisdiction over 1.9 percent of the land, while Bedouin citizens comprise 25.2 percent of the population in that area.

Read more: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2008/iopt0308/4.htm#_Toc193705071

How is this not discriminatory?