Who Owns the Gaza Settlements?
I was reading this article about what will happen to the houses, farms, and shops the Gaza settlers will leave behind when they are evacuated by the Israeli state and I realized I couldn’t quite sort out what the libertarian answer was to the question, “What should be done with the property? Who owns it?”
The Israelis are issuing statements that seem fairly reasonable, considering they answer most questions about disputed property with D9 bulldozers and Hellfire missiles. This article represents the Israeli position as follows:
JERUSALEM, Apr 16 (Reuters) Israel threatened today to demolish Jewish settler homes during a planned Gaza pullout unless it can work out a deal for handing them over to Palestinian refugees via an international agency.
Israel hopes to avoid a scorched-earth policy when it evacuates Gaza settlements under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s controversial ”disengagement” initiative, which won U S support this week, according to a copy of the plan obtained by Reuters.
The plan states ”Israel will aspire to leave standing the real estate assets of the Israeli settlements”. But the Israeli government signalled that a key demand would have to be met for it to leave buildings intact, as U N officials have urged.
”We want the houses to go to refugees, and if they don’t we reserve the right to destroy them,” a senior official said.
He said Israel wanted to arrange the handover of settler homes through an international organisation, possibly the World Bank.
OK, so the Israelis want an international organization to dole out the houses to “refugees.”
A few questions.
Do the houses belong to Israel? What if the Israelis built the houses on land they stole from a Palestinian? Does Israel have any standing to decide who gets the houses? Is it right to raze the houses as they leave? (They did this when pulling out of the Sinai.)
The next complication is the Palestinian Powers That Be, whoever that is at the moment. This article quotes Palestinian cabinet minister Ghassan al-Khatib saying: ”Israel has no right to make conditions or dictations on how these properties will be dealt with.”
Sharon’s plan calls for evacuating some 20 Gaza settlements inhabited by 7,500 settlers. Gaza is home to 1.3 million Palestinians, many of them impoverished refugees and their descendants displaced during the war that led to Israel’s creation in 1948.
The Israeli demand for international involvement in transferring settlement housing to refugees appeared to be part of Sharon’s effort to freeze the Palestinian Authority out of implementation of his plan.
He has vowed to carry out the withdrawal initiative unilaterally, saying Israel has no peace partner to deal with. Palestinian officials have called on Sharon to coordinate any Gaza pullout with them.
It’s an odd situation and I can’t think of an analogy. The houses were built with money extorted from Americans and Israelis, mostly on land stolen from various Palestinians. The Israelis living in them now probably paid token amounts to the State in some cases and in others were heavily subsidized to the point they never paid anything for the properties. The Palestinians don’t have any real societal institutions that could manage a peaceful and orderly transfer of these properties.
So, what’s to be done?
I’m cross-posting this question on my blog if anyone would like to debate the issue in a threaded format.