In a rogue state, land document forgery is hardly surprising

In December 2013, a court in Israel ruled that a synagogue built in the Givat Ze’ev settlement must be demolished. The reason was that it had been illegally built on privately owned Palestinian land after the purchase deeds were forged by Israeli settlers. The synagogue – and the entire enclosure around it – were built on land owned by a Palestinian man called Raba’a Allatif. It took him several years of legal proceedings – which were initially dismissed – to prove that the sale documents were fake.

According to the Israeli NGO Yesh Din, there are many cases of Israeli settlers forging documentation to justify their illegal outposts. Many Palestinian lands – around 60 per cent – are not officially registered. Given that Palestinians are already disenfranchised, this poor documentation can make the search for justice even hard. Moreover, given the size of the diaspora, some people might be overseas and not realize that their land has been illegally taken over and built on.

“The frauds sometimes are ludicrous – someone who’s dead sold the land, the spelling of the last name is not correct,” Reut Mor, the spokesperson for Yesh-Din told Al Jazeera recently.

The forgery of documents is just one more complicated element in an already labyrinthine system of domestic laws and legal justifications for settlements in the occupied territories. All settlements are considered illegal under international law. The UN, the International Court of Justice, and the International Committee of the Red Cross have all stated that the building – and continued existence – of settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights break international law. One Security Council resolution cites the Fourth Geneva Convention and calls upon Israel to desist from transferring its own population into the territories and changing the demographic make-up of these areas.

But Israel insists that settlements are legal, arguing that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to the territories occupied in the 1967 Six Day War. Successive governments have insisted that all “authorized settlements” are consistent with international law. There are around 100 “unauthorised settlements” which are sometimes – like the property ordered for demolition in Givat Ze’ev – built on privately owned Palestinian land. These are technically illegal under Israeli law.

One way in which the Israeli state attempts to mask its continued settlement programme and violation of international law is by sometimes ordering the evacuation of these outposts built on private Palestinian lands. This gives the appearance of honouring a commitment to international law, but actually provides a smokescreen for other, bigger settlements, which are treated as structures that exist within the law. And even then, clampdowns are inconsistent at best. Reports – including the Sasson Report, commissioned by Ariel Sharon under pressure from the US – have shown that the government has supported the construction of “unauthorized” settlements, either providing direct funding, or indirect funding through building new roads and infrastructure to serve the settlements.

The question of building on private Palestinian land is a complicated one. Theoretically, settlements cannot be built on private land without providing compensation to the owners. But, as Yesh Din proved in 2009 through a government database, many West Bank Israeli settlements have been built on private land. While settler communities strongly deny that the forging of documents is widespread, there have been some clear instances of irregularities. A recent Al Jazeera report on the subject said that settlers often hold off showing proof of ownership of land until the very last minute, as it buys time.

The overall effect of this is to keep Palestinians away from their land for longer, making it easier for the Israeli government to declare private land as “state” land and ultimately confiscate it. Yesh Din says that in recent years, six illegal outposts (on private land) have been legalized, and that eight more are in the process. Of course, so-called “unauthorized” settlements are just a small part of the picture, in which settlements – mostly those considered legal by the Israeli government – and the associated infrastructure leave Palestinians with less than half of the West Bank. Against this backdrop of widespread violations of international law, small scale forgeries of land documents are hardly surprising.