Translated by Ronit Lentin

Note by the translator

Eli Aminov (1939-2022) was a radical anti-Zionist Israeli socialist activist, a member of Matzpen, the Socialist Organization in Israel. Aminov was one of the signatories of Matzpen’s September 1967 statement that called for the Zionist entity to withdraw from the Palestinian territory it occupied in July 1967, and predicting that “Occupation entails foreign rule, foreign rule entails resistance, resistance entails repression, repression entails terror and counter-terror […] Let us get out of the occupied territories immediately.”¹

Aminov, a working-class Mizrahi activist, was a constant critic of the Zionist entity and has published many articles in the Matzpen journal and in several online journals, including Hagada Hasmalit (The Left Bank), Ha’oketz (the Sting) and others. He was a relentless campaigner for a one secular democracy in historic Palestine and a member of the Committee for a Secular and Democratic State in Palestine (see his contribution in Race Traitor no. 16: “Why a secular democracy?”). This article, published in Hebrew in Ofra Yeshua-Lith (ed.), Eli Aminov His Clear Voice, Mevaseret Zion: November Books, 2024, was translated with additional footnotes by Ronit Lentin, and is published with the kind permission of the editor and the publisher.

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From Land Redemption to Apartheid Regime 

Eli Aminov

Introduction

With the enactment by the Knesset of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People (the Nation State Law)² in 2018, Israelis – at least those regarding themselves as democratic activists – finally understood the state’s real nature. In January 2021 the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem officially defined Israel as an apartheid state. Established after the first Palestinian intifada, B’Tselem has been researching human rights infringements in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 for thirty years. However, prior to its apartheid report,³ which deals with Israel’s sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it had not dealt with the discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel’s sovereign territory within the 1948 armistice borders.

The Nation State Law institutionalizes Jewish supremacy in the Israeli-ruled territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. While the Israeli state apparatus has operated a set of apartheid laws for over seventy years, in the absence of a constitution, the basic (constitutional) Nation State Law combines and re-brands these laws in lieu of a full apartheid constitution. The law put paid to the semblance of democracy many Israelis wrongly believe Israel is, which has led B’Tselem to realize that a regime of Jewish supremacy has existed ever since the Zionist state’s first day, and not just in the territories occupied in 1967. The Nation State Law concerns the essence of the Jewish colonization of historic Palestine. It justifies, reifies, and legitimizes the theft of the land of Palestine, turning it into the settler nation’s homeland, granting superior rights to everyone born to a Jewish mother, and depriving Israel’s non-Jewish citizens of any civil rights – all this within the “1967 borders” that exist only in the fertile imaginations of western diplomats and their Israeli left-centre counterparts.

The process of robbing the Palestinian homeland and turning it into the homeland of a conceptual nation built on religion has been ongoing for over one hundred years. In Zionist speak this process is called “land redemption.” More than anything else, the transfer of lands from the Palestinian natives to the settlers who have taken their place in the process of the Zionist colonization is what determined the power relations between the colonial movement and the dispossessed natives. “Land redemption,” that is the process of transferring lands from its non-Jewish natives to Jewish ownership, was, and still is, a central tenet of Zionist ideology and practice.

It is no accident that the term “land redemption” is the secular version of a religious concept. The term “redemption” in the sense of shifting from the profane to the sacred, from the impure to the pure. In fact and the mystical element of the Zionist world view is reflected not only in the process of “Judaizing” the land, but also in the laws enacted to enable the various stages of this process. These laws, starting from the Jewish National Fund and Jewish Agency laws, and Israel’s land and housing laws are all based on the segregation between Jews and non-Jews and the elevation of Jewish people above non-Jews. This is the true meaning of apartheid.

The legal structure upholding the Jewish-Zionist apartheid regime has been gradually and carefully constructed since the early 1950s. It includes all the laws, regulations, orders, and verdicts relating to land and real estate ownership between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. This legal structure enabled the Judaization of most of the country’s lands that became state lands, to be exclusively used by the “Jewish nation.” However, these lands are not “state lands” that belong to the state of Israel, because if they were, the government would have had to allocate them to all citizens. Rather, this land ownership – according to the Zionist ideology – constitutes the material infrastructure of the Jewish state and is allocated to a collective the boundaries of which are determined by religious criteria, which is why there is no chance that Israel would ever become a democracy.

Because of the need to preserve this land ownership held by the government of Israel for a metaphysical, ethno-religious collectivity, there is no way of separating state and religion or enacting a constitution that would guarantee civil equality to all citizens. Ultimately, the Jewish national land ownership constitutes the material basis for linking Zionism’s colonial racism and Halachic Judaism’s xenophobic racism. 

“A dunam here and a dunam there”⁴

Despite the efforts made by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to “redeem” Palestine’s lands and expropriate the Palestinian natives, the JNF managed to “redeem” only about one million dunams, or less that 4 per cent of Palestine’s lands, in its first fifty years of existence. At the time of the 1947 United Nations partition plan, only 7 per cent of the lands were owned by Jews, either as private lands or as “national lands” owned by the JNF. We won’t detail here the devious temptation, deceit, bribery, and violent means the JNF employed to achieve its aims during the British Mandate period, including the use of archaic Ottoman land laws. The purchase of lands was enabled by the Palestinian fallaheen who tilled them despite not being their legal owners. Most lands were owned by wealthy Palestinian effendis, mukhtars, sheikhs and landowners, most of whom didn’t reside in Palestine. Most of the large patriarchal Palestinian families, including privileged families such as the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, the Alamis, the Ansibis, the Hammads and others,⁵ sold lands to the Zionists. This did not prevent the heads of these families, whose social standing was tainted by selling their lands, to claim national leadership positions.

The failure of the early stages of the Palestinian struggle for independence, between the Great Arab revolt and the 1948 war, was due above all to the conduct of this privileged leadership class which served as double agents of a nation struggling for freedom on the one hand, and of the colonial force on the other. It is worth mentioning, however, that the British colonial authorities did limit the expropriation of the fallaheen to some extent despite their massive support for the Zionist project. Therefore, getting rid of the British became a prime Zionist aim.

The end of the Mandate: The gloves are off

After the UN announced the partition plan and after the British colonial forces concentrated in specific areas of Palestine, the Zionists took the gloves off and began the process of ethnic cleansing within the area the partition plan allocated to the Jewish state, completing most of the process before the end of the British Mandate.⁶ The Palestinian cities Yaffa, Haifa, Safad, Bisan, Acca, and many Palestinian villages were conquered and “cleansed” by the Zionist militias prior to the official start of the 1948 war. The massive expropriation of the original inhabitants of the land lasted throughout the war and continued after the 1949 Armistice Agreement. The establishment of the Jewish state involved the occupation of 55 per cent of the area allocated by the partition plan to the Palestinian state and the transfer of 70 per cent of the Palestinians from their homeland. More than 400 villages and towns, as well as properties, lands, houses, and belongings were robbed by the victorious Zionists. More than half of the 13 million dunams expropriated by the Zionists – ten times more lands than they had held before – some 6,705,567 dunams⁷ – were cultivated lands stolen by the Zionists complete with their produce. In addition to thousands of houses in which some 300,000 Jewish “new olim (immigrants)” settled, the Jewish state also took over some 7,800 offices, shops, workshops, and storerooms.

The successful land robbery whetted the victors’ appetite and greed. The state of Israel began to develop a sophisticated set of land laws enabling it to continue the “redemption” of the land from its non-Jewish owners. The legal infrastructure was provided by the Defense (Emergency) Regulations, 1945,⁸ a set of colonial British laws which, according to the Zionist leadership’s argument prior to the end of the Mandate, were “worse than the Nazi laws.”

From emergency laws to apartheid

The Palestinians who remained on their lands retained only about five million dunams, which the Zionists also intended to “redeem.” October 1948 saw the enactment of the Emergency Regulations (Cultivation of Waste Lands) Ordinance,⁹ which empowered the minister of agriculture to take all uncultivated lands from their owners and give them to Jews for “temporary” cultivation. This meant that many lands the owners of which had been expelled were designated as “uncultivated lands.” The means used to remove Palestinian landowners from their lands included expelling owners from the battle zones, allegedly temporarily, instructing owners not to be within ten kilometres from the Jordanian or Lebanese borders for alleged security reasons, and preventing owners from tilling their lands, declared closed military zones by the military government orders. Uncultivated Palestinian lands were distributed to existing Jewish settlements – kibbutzim and moshavim – or used to establish new Jewish settlements. However, although these lands were expropriated by the Zionists, their Palestinian owners continued to be their legal owners and the legally sophisticated and efficient Zionist apartheid regime required additional laws to turn these lands into Jewish lands, not permitted to non-Jews, while at the same time protecting Israel’s private property laws. This process led to the enactment of several laws including the two detailed below. 

(a) The Absentees’ Property Law (1950)¹⁰

This law enables the State of Israel via the Custodian for Absentees’ Property to take charge of movable and immovable property (land, houses, bank accounts, etc) belonging to all citizens defined as absentees but referring only to Israel’s Arab (Palestinian) sector. The law aimd to expropriate the property of all citizens who were absent from their homes or from Israel’s sovereign space on 1 September 1948. Thus, Palestinians who escaped or were expelled from the battle zone, or who were ordered to move to a neighbouring village for a few days, became property-less. In addition, inhabitants of the Galilee or the Triangle,¹¹ not yet occupied by the Israeli military, were also included in this law.  However, Iraqi Jews, for example, who had purchased lands which were in “enemy territory” by that date did not lose their property, nor did the Jewish residents of Gush Etzion, captured in 1948 by the Jordanian army.¹²

This is how the discrimination worked: in order to turn the lands into state property the Custodian for Absentees’ Property had to designate the lands’ owners as absentees, but in the case of Jewish property he simply did not do so. This law created the strange status of “present absentees,” that is Palestinians who were physically present as citizens in the State of Israel but were absentees as far as their lands were concerned, which became “state lands.” These lands were governed by the State Development Authority and later by the Israel Land Administration,¹³ which follows the Jewish National Fund’s regulations that prohibit the selling or leasing of lands to non-Jews. The Absentees’ Property Law enabled the state to turn some two million dunams into state lands.

(b) Land acquisition Law (Actions and Compensation) (1953)¹⁴

This law aimed to copper fasten the theft of Palestinian lands already distributed to kibbutzim, moshavim and housing projects. The law made all the temporary acts of land expropriation that were arguably motivated by temporary emergency regulations permanent. The legal ruse used to enact this law was the announcement that “all the lands on which their legal owners did not reside on the relevant date, 1 April 1952, and all the lands used by the state since its establishment for the purpose of development, settlement and security – will be transferred to state ownership” (note that the terms development, settlement, and security relate to Jews only). This law enabled the Jewish state to take over a further 1.3 million dunams of land and Palestinian citizens were left with just 1.8 million dunams, though not for long. In the following years more than half of these lands were expropriated for the “Judaization of the Galilee” and the creation of Bedouin reservations in the Naqab. Today Israel’s Palestinian citizens retain just 800,000 dunams of land.

Land ownership as apartheid infrastructure 

As stated above, the “Jewish nation’s” land ownership is the material link between Zionism’s colonial racism and Halachic Judaism’s xenophobic racism. Israel’s apartheid infrastructure is camouflaged by the clever use of organizations such as the Jewish Agency, which used public resources such as state lands and state money to establish exclusively Jewish settlements. The Jewish Agency’s Settlement Department has been instrumental in establishing over 1,000 Jewish settlements since 1948 but has not established a single Palestinian settlement. The special relationship between the state and the Jewish Agency grants the Agency statist authority, yet its racist policies are justified by masquerading as a private organization. The JNF is one of the Jewish Agency’s subsidiaries. 

Another way of camouflaging land theft by the state is not mentioning the word “Jewish” in any of the laws discriminating against the Palestinians, but rather disguising the discrimination by defining entitlement as due to “anyone entitled to Israeli citizenship under the Entry Into Israel Law¹⁵ (which, together with the 1950 Law of Return,¹⁶ grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any person who can prove she has Jewish parentage, which Palestinian citizens cannot do). This definition also appears in all Israel Land Administration leasing contracts. These contracts are valid both within the sovereign state boundaries in which 93 per cent of the lands are considered state lands, and in the occupied Palestinian territory in which “only” 70 per cent of the lands are deemed state lands.

Within the fictional Zionist terminology, ethnic ownership means Jewish land ownership, particularly when referring to communal ownership (in kibbutzim and moshavim). The process of exclusively allocating land to Jews paralleled the ending of rural Palestinian collective land ownership. The increase in land reserves for exclusive Jewish use went hand in hand with Zionist ideologues congratulating themselves for allegedly creating a “new society”. This was self-deception: colonialists who settled in ethnically exclusive Jews-only settlements could argue – and were no doubt convinced – that what united them and separated them from the Palestinian ’others’ was a different social outlook and not racist nationalism based on ethnically exclusive land ownership. This approach underpinned other Zionist practices, a prime example of which was “the conquest of (Hebrew) labor” which the Zionists considered central to the colonial apartheid regime, aimed at preventing Palestinian workers from accessing the labor market, and was seen as a proof that the Zionist project was not colonial but merely based on “manual labor.”

Considered the lands of the “Jewish nation,” state lands are forbidden to all Palestinians, even those who are citizens of Israel. The Jewish National Fund as operated by the Israel Land Administration prevents non-Jews from using them, settling on them, building on them, leasing them and in some cases even spending the night on them. An interesting and little-known fact is that many kibbutzim built on JNF lands have “conversion institutes” where non-Jewish volunteers interested in joining the kibbutz can convert to Judaism (and naturally, these institutes are not open to Palestinians).

Although the JNF owns only 17 per cent of the state’s lands, it signed a contract in the early 1960s with the ILA, according to which its regulations – preventing non-Jews from living in Jews-only moshavim, kibbutzim, villages, outposts, and communal settlements – would be valid regarding all state lands.

These regulations harm not merely the Palestinians’ rights, livelihoods, living space and economic welfare, but also the core liberal civil principle of the right of ownership. The USA Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of the Citizen (1789), and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948) all sanctify the human right of private ownership. But these documents cannot be part of the Israeli statute as 93 per cent of state lands are ethnically owned. No non-Jews can use these lands, even if they are citizens of the state.

Limitless redemption

The process of transferring the lands in the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967 to Jewish ownership resembles what happened after the 1948 war. This time the expulsion was relatively limited – “only” some 410,000 Palestinian people were expelled compared with nearly a million in 1948, and only a few villages were completely destroyed and depopulated. The destruction was carried out through military orders, military committees, and Ottoman laws from an earlier era, all with the Israeli Supreme Court of Justice’s stamp of approval. The combination of arbitrary sovereignty, military power and the justice system created a powerful expropriation apparatus, which the Palestinians were powerless to oppose. The Jewish National Fund was a crucial part of this apparatus.

Most of the Jewish settlements constructed in the occupied Palestinian territory were built on expropriated lands, including many settlements built on small tracts of land purchased by the JNF, in areas where the “legal” expropriation instruments failed to prevail. As soon as a piece of land was purchased, its fate was sealed: roads had to be built, the area’s “security” had to be ensured, and sufficient land reserves had to be ascertained. Through its subsidiary Himanuta,¹⁷ the JNF allocated large sums of money to establish these Jewish settlements. 

The 1993 Oslo Accords accelerated the taking over of Palestinian lands within the Green Line boundaries too. Using the excuse of the “peace process,” the Israeli authorities expropriated many more lands than before the Accords.

As early as 1997 the late Israeli columnist B. Michael wrote that each Jewish Israeli had a living space of 4.2 dunams compared with less than 0.7 dunam for each non-Jew.¹⁸ This pertains to the sovereign state of Israel; in Area A of the occupied Palestinian territory, governed by the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords, the living space allocated to each Palestinian is also 0.7 dunam – less than a sixth of the land allocation to Jewish citizens. This proves the existence of an apartheid regime in the whole territory of Palestine between the river and the sea.

Apartheid Israel style: Irreparable

Apartheid is different from racism and xenophobia because its characteristics such as segregation, racism, and xenophobia are anchored in legislation, and the population under apartheid is forced by the state’s law enforcement agencies – the police, the judicial system, and the military – to obey the law. Apartheid South Africa segregated Whites and Blacks while the state of Israel legally segregates Jew and non-Jew, yet the Israeli apartheid legislation is deeper than that of South Africa. Thus, in white South Africa 87 per cent of state lands were legally allocated to white people while in the Jewish sovereign state of Israel 93 per cent of the state lands are allocated by law to Jewish people. It is worth noting that all the rural settlements established by the state since its establishment have Admissions Committees¹⁹ that implement de facto candidate selections, aimed mostly at preventing Palestinian families from purchasing lands in these settlements. 

It is also worth noting that Israel’s apartheid legislators were even more sophisticated than their South African counterparts, by focusing on “grand apartheid” which instituted segregated housing and employment by race as opposed to “petty apartheid” which entailed the segregation of social events and facilities such as separate public toilets, or transport lines.²⁰ In South Africa legislators focused on more visible issues while the Israeli apartheid legislator (the Knesset) avoided petty apartheid, much to the chagrin of professed racists such as Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich (who objected to his wife having to give birth next to a Palestinian woman.²¹) The Israeli sophistication enabled it to market the Jewish apartheid state as the “only democracy in the Middle East” for over seventy years.

The state of Israel designated itself as the state of all the world’s Jews and thus anchored the inequality of its citizens in a series of laws,²² culminating in the 2018 Nation State Law mentioned above, employing racial and religious criteria in granting citizenship rights. This is what makes Israel an apartheid state – the discrimination against Israel’s non-Jewish citizens is not circumstantial but structural, which is why it is not reformable.

To conclude: the apartheid state of Israel cannot be reformed but has to be replaced by an alternative regime that would transform it into a secular communal democracy: not two states for two nations, not-bi-nationalism, but a modern republic for all the inhabitants of the territory between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea and including all its refugees, a republic in which the nation includes all the citizens, regardless of their ethnic or religious origin. Its secular nature is intended to make sure none of the prevailing religions takes over, which is why religion will not be officially represented and the state will ensure freedom of religion and freedom from religion.