Haaretz
Adar1 3, 5765
Against the background of the
recent public dispute surrounding the connection between the government
and the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet LeYisrael), the subject of the
historic land transactions, termed "the transactions of millions," is once
again on the public agenda. The issue involves a series of transactions
that resulted in about half of the land owned by the JNF having been
confiscated or seized from Palestinian refugees of the 1948 War of
Independence.
The JNF purchased the land from the state starting in
1949 and early 1950. Then prime minister David Ben-Gurion initiated the
sale of land to the JNF to prevent any possibility of international
pressure forcing Israel to restore it to the Palestinian
refugees.
The first transaction was carried out despite the
opposition of then-attorney general Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, who had
doubts regarding its legality.
The land sale was halted after the
JNF ran out of money, among other reasons. The matter of the "transaction
of millions" has been investigated in recent years by a number of
researchers, including Dr. Arnon Golan of Haifa University, Dr. Michal
Oren of the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and Prof.
Yossi Katz of Bar-Ilan University.
Since 1961, the state has
administered the JNF lands through the Israel Lands Administration (ILA).
Until recently, only Jews were permitted to participate in the tenders for
the leasing of JNF land, but Attorney General Menachem Mazuz decided last
week that the ILA could not continue this policy because it discriminated
between Jews and non-Jews.
Haaretz revealed last week that the JNF
and the state are involved in advanced stages of negotiations to separate
the JNF from the ILA, in order to enable the JNF to market its lands at
its own discretion. Mazuz's decision was made in the wake of petitions to
the High Court of Justice against the policy of the ILA, and after the
State Prosecution concluded that the policy would be disqualified by the
High Court of Justice.
The blue box
The JNF was
established December 29, 1901, by a decision of the fifth World Zionist
Congress that met in Basel that year. The leaders of the Zionist movement
who established the JNF intended to use it to raise money from Jews all
over the world to purchase land in the Land of Israel, to be used for the
establishment of a national home for Jews. The main source of the JNF's
funding was from the hundreds of thousands of "blue boxes" used to collect
contributions, which were distributed to Jewish communities throughout the
world, though mainly in Europe and the United States.
In the
initial decades following its establishment, the JNF worked to purchase
land alongside other organizations. But following the great Arab revolt
(1936-1939), private land dealers halted almost all dealings out of fear
for their lives, and the JNF remained almost the only organization still
involved in land purchase. After this period, the JNF managed to increase
the land it owned from 350,000 dunams (1 dunam=.25 acre) to some 940,000
in 1948.
The establishment of the state in 1948 posed a question
regarding the continued existence of the JNF. "The JNF actually lost its
raison d'etre after the establishment of the state," says Oren. "The
feeling was that they had done the dirty work and were no longer needed.
Some said that now that there was a state, it would not be proper for Jews
from abroad to dictate what to do in Israel. Other voices, especially from
the right, wanted to dismantle the JNF because they viewed it as one of
the Mapai-Labor party establishment's centers of power."
At first
prime minister David Ben-Gurion led those that favored dismantling the
JNF, but an unexpected event caused him to change his mind from one
extreme to the other.
On December 18, 1948, Ben-Gurion summoned
Yossef Weitz, the director of the JNF land department, for an urgent
meeting. Six days earlier, debates in the UN General Assembly regarding
the question of the land of Israel had culminated with Resolution 194,
which resolved that "that the refugees wishing to return to their homes
and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the
earliest practicable date." According to Oren, the resolution awakened a
fear among the country's leadership of a wave of refugees that would
demand their property back.
At the time, Israel held about 3.5
million dunams of abandoned land that had belonged to Palestinian
refugees. Ben-Gurion believed then that this land reserve - equivalent to
one-sixth of Israel's total area - was vital to ensure the existence of
the state. According to Golan, Ben-Gurion feared that appropriation of the
land would be interpreted as a provocation and a challenge to the UN
resolution. The only solution he could come up with was to quickly
transfer the lands to private Jewish hands. Money was an additional
consideration: The state was in desperate need of money that the JNF was
holding in order to buy arms and food and to absorb the waves of mass
immigration.
At the beginning of their meeting, Ben-Gurion informed
Weitz that the government had decided to sell the JNF one million dunams
of "abandoned lands" at a low price. The details of the transaction - the
largest real estate transaction ever carried out in Israel - were
concluded three days later in another meeting that was attended, in
addition to Ben-Gurion and Weitz, by the chairman of the JNF, Avraham
Granot, finance minister Eliezer Kaplan, and the chairman of the
settlement division of the Jewish Agency, Levi Eshkol.
In return
for 11 million Israeli pounds, the JNF received full ownership of about
one million dunams in the areas of the Jerusalem Corridor, the southern
coastal lowlands, the southern Carmel and the Galilee Panhandle.
At
the meeting, Weitz and Granot raised with Ben-Gurion the question of the
legality of the transaction. Ben-Gurion got angry and told both men that
they were still thinking in terms of the British Mandate, and that they
did not understand the urgent political and security need to settle those
lands.
The attorney general was opposed
Weitz and
Granot were not satisfied with this answer, and expressed fear of future
suits by the Arab owners. In order to dispel their fears, they were
promised that the state would defend them from any suits by owners. Golan
notes that the transaction was endorsed despite opposition from Shapira,
the attorney general at the time.
"The problem was that the law at
that time did not permit the government to sell the land contrary to the
agreement of their original owners," says Golan. Nevertheless, he notes,
the problem was resolved after the fact by means of the Development
Authority and Absentee Property Law.
In the wake of the success of
the first "transaction of millions," the country's leaders and the JNF
planned to gradually transfer all the abandoned lands to the ownership of
the JNF. In fact, however, only about 250,000 additional dunams were
transferred. The practical reason for that, says Oren, was that the JNF
ran out of money, but another reason was that "the state saw that their
fear of international pressure was not as bad as it had
expected."
The JNF response: All its lands were purchased at full
price at the market prices then in effect. "There is not a single dunam
for which we did not pay down to the last penny," says Yehiel Leket,
current chairman of the JNF's board of directors.
Golan also notes
that the prices for which the lands were sold to the JNF were close to
market prices at the time.
The cream of Israeli
land
In 1960, the JNF and the government of Israel signed a
convention to establish the Israel Lands Administration. In the context of
the convention, it was agreed that the JNF would receive responsibility
for all the forests located on state lands, whereas the ILA would
administer the lands. This involved about 93 percent of all Israel's land,
including state lands, JNF lands and lands belonging to the Development
Authority, an agency set up to administer land formerly belonging to 1948
refugees not sold to the JNF.
The JNF, which owns 13 percent of the
lands, received the right to appoint half of the members of the ILA's
board of directors, and representation on the committees of the ILA almost
equal that of the state. Over the years, complaints were voiced that the
state had given the JNF exaggerated representation and strength, but these
complaints did not take into account the high value of the lands or their
location.
Almost all the JNF lands are located in areas of high
demand in the center and north of the country, whereas over 60 percent of
state lands are located in the Negev, Golan and Arava, which are in
relatively low demand. In the central district, for example, the JNF holds
almost 40 percent of state land, and in the country's three largest
cities, its holdings average about 30 percent.
Dr. Michal Oren
notes that in the areas of high demand, the JNF made sure to obtain better
lands than those that remained in state hands. "The JNF always knew how to
choose the lands best suited to farming and settlement, la creme de la
creme," she says. "The state was left with uncultivated and rocky lands."