Saturday, June 16, 2012

To the Members of the Ministerial Committee on Settlement Affairs

Yisrael Medad

I have received this item, communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser:-


The Cabinet will, on Sunday, 17 June 2012, be asked to approve the establishment of the Ministerial Committee on Settlement Affairs to be chaired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The Committee will have authority to formulate Government policy regarding unregulated construction on state and private lands, including the main issues that have reached the courts. Committee decisions will have the status of Cabinet decisions and ministers will be unable to appeal them.

In addition to Prime Minister Netanyahu (Chairman), Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, Science and Technology Minister Daniel Hershkowitz, Vice Premier Shaul Mofaz, Interior Minister Eli Yishai, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon, Minister Zeev Binyamin Begin, Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein, Education Minister Gideon Saar and Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan will also be members of the Committee.

I will be writing to them.  I will request them to place high up on the list of agenda items they will be discussing the adoption of a resolution that could resolve many of the problems in the framework of "private property" claims, of land used for Jewish residency or agricultural use (see this). Here is my formulation:


"Whereas the regime in TransJordan, known currently as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, whose territory was to be part of the Mandate for Palestine, a Mandate whose territory the League of Nations decided was to become reconstituted as the the Jewish national home, which illegally occupied the area of Judea and Samaria in 1948 and then, in April 1950, annexed said territory, an act never recognized nor considered as legal, except by Great Britain;
 
and Whereas the rulers of said Kingdom distributed as gifts and bribes for purposes of currying political and personal favor lands that were state and waste lands to private persons without receiving any recompense in the form of direct payments or taxes;
 
and Whereas in the case whereby those lands were never ploughed, planted, or developed, or built upon or any other instance of tangible ownership by those so granted by the Hashemite rulers and were later plough, planted, or developed or built upon by persons now resident and, due to their Jewishness could not own such land as a result of Jordanian land;
 
that this Committee instruct state officials to review all such instances, collect all registery details and then declare such transactions of property as null and void and  thus cause them revert to their original status as state and waste lands to be used for close settlement of Jews as directed by the Mandate decision in Article 6."
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