The 1985 West Bank land fraud case was a 1985 scandal involving fraudulent sales of land in the West Bank.
At the start of the Israeli occupation of Palestine in 1967, it was illegal for Israeli individuals to privately purchase land in the occupied territories. In 1979, however, the Likud government led by Menachem Begin decriminalised Israeli private purchases in the occupied territories in the goal of increasing the number of Israeli settlers. [1] By 1985, the population of Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian West Bank had grown to 40 000. [2]
In 1983, the State Comptroller of Israel compiled a report on sales of Palestinian land to Israelis in the occupied West Bank, finding that the majority of those sales had been fraudulent. [2] According to the report, the sales had been realised using a combination of forged documentation, coercion, bribes to Israeli officials, and arson of Palestinian land registration archives. Many of the buyers of the land, in turn, had been ordinary Israelis, who had been led to believe that the land they were buying had been officially cleared for settlement by the government. [3] [4] A number of Israelis were implicated in the report, including senior government officials and real estate companies, while the key Palestinian figure implicated in the report was 37-year-old Ahmed Odeh, a former teacher who had become a land broker willing to work with Israelis and who had built personal ties with several senior Likud officials. [3]
The State Comptroller's report was published publicly in August 1985 and immediately ignited controversy. Centre-left newspaper Haaretz published an editorial describing the case as "another, almost inevitable aspect of the moral decline that has set in as a result of the continued rule in the territories... One can now sense the rot that has been festering here for years." [3] Likud leader and Minister of Foreign Affairs Yitzhak Shamir, on the other hand, argued that it was "intolerable that the investigation of isolated cases of land purchases should turn into a general with hunt on all the land purchases in Judea and Samaria, with the aim of preventing this Zionist mission," adding that "the police, even when it investigates criminal acts, must consider the national interest. Criminal suspicions must be investigated, but no policeman or officer must be influenced by those defeatists who want to harm settlement." [5]
Ministry of Justice official Pliah Albeck stated that "out of land offered for sale by Arabs to Jews, more than 90% are attempts at fraud--people trying to sell land that does not belong to them." [6] Political scientist and former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti stated that there were at least ten cases of Palestinians being killed since 1979 in connection with land fraud. [6] Kassem Yusuf, a 57-year-old Palestinian from Biddya, described the impact the case had on him to United Press International, claiming that a group of Israelis in bulldozers, along with Odeh and an Israeli military escort, arrived at Biddya one day and told him and several of his neighbours that their lands had been sold for a below-market price. When the neighbours protested and tried to stop the bulldozers, Yusuf claimed, the military opened fire, killing one of them and arresting the others. [2] The Chicago Tribune described a case represented by Palestinian lawyer Nidal Taha: "in one instance Israeli brokers posing as soldiers broke the thumb of one of his clients when they tried to force him to sign a fraudulent land sale agreement with his thumbprint. Such signatures are legally acceptable." [3]
In October 1985, Palestinian journalist Hassan Abdul Halim Fakih, an Al Fajr correspondant who had been covering the case, was reported missing. His body would be found near the highway between Ramallah and Latrun in late December 1985. The cause of death was not immediately clear, with initial police reports and the newspaper indicating that he had been murdered, but with news agency ITIM indicating that he had accidentally killed himself while preparing a bomb for a terrorist group. [7] [8]
In early December 1985, 2 Israeli officials were arrested in connection with the case. [9] The officials, Avi Tsur and Claude Malka, were accused of having accepted tens of millions of Israeli new shekels in bribes and of falsifying government documents when they had worked at the Ministry of Agriculture. The falsified documents were used to mislead buyers into believing that they were purchasing Palestinian land that had been approved for Israeli settlement, with some of the bribe money also being funnelled towards Likud pro-settlement lobbying groups. [10] The arrests further sparked controversy in Israeli politics, with Likud politicians arguing that the arrests were politically motivated. Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and Likud MK Roni Milo claimed that there was "a total disproportion in the importance given to this so-called land scandal," [11] [12] while Shamir described the case as "exaggerated." [13] In the following days, Likud MK Michael Dekel, who had been appointed Deputy Minister of Defence at the beginning of the months and who had previously served as Minister of Agriculture, was summoned by the Israeli police for questioning. [14]
On 13 January 1986, 17 Palestinians were arrested in connection with the case. Among the seventeen were three police officers, two mukhtars, one court clerk, one notary public, and several land brokers. [15]
In June 1986, Israeli real estate developer Avraham Gindi committed suicide via self-immolation. Gindi had been charged in connection with the case, with his company having made millions of dollars by selling land it did not own to several hundred Israelis. His brothers, Moshe and Yigal, had fled Israel to Brazil to evade warrants against them. [16] [17]