Palestinian property is now codified, but will it be used? Michael R. Fischbach

Opinion, June 2003, Al-Jazeerah.info

Palestinian property is now codified, but will it be used?

Michael R. Fischbach

The Daily Star, 6/24/03

The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) completed in 1964 its massive program aimed to determine the scope and value of Arab land in Israel in 1948. In the process, it created 523,750 forms containing information on 458,210 parcels of Arab land, in addition to thousands of other documents. While the UNCCP issued a sanitized report detailing the scope of Arab property, it made no public mention of the land’s value, and a plan for compensating the refugees for their abandoned property has yet to emerge. After it ceased active operations, the UNCCP archived approximately 30 meters of documents behind locked doors at the UN Secretariat annals in New York, where special permission is required to view them even today. However, the UNCCP later allowed several parties to obtain copies of some these records. The Arab states began requesting copies of some of the UNCCP’s records as early as April 1953, although their requests were denied. With completion of the UNCCP Technical Program in 1964, and the Arabs’ desire to determine their own estimates of refugee property losses, the efforts to obtain the documents were renewed. In Nov. 1972, the Lebanese ambassador to the UN spoke with the US ambassador to the UN, future President George H.W. Bush, about whether the United States would support a renewed Arab request for copies of the records. The UNCCP discussed the matter with the UN’s legal counsel and decided to grant permission at long last. The UNCCP agreed to provide copies of documents to parties that had a direct interest in the refugee problem, with the provision that any party receiving such material keep the figures on land values confidential. The first Arab state to formally request and receive copies of the UNCCP material was Egypt, which asked to make copies of the material at its own expense in September 1973. Filmed copies of the records were made in June 1974. The Egyptians later received a second copy of the films in March and May 1975. In May 1974, Jordan made a similar request and received the films the following year. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) also requested copies of the films in November 1982. Duplication finally was completed in May 1984 and the copies were handed over to the PLO. Finally, another UN agency, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, requested “an inventory of Arab property in Israel and the territories occupied by Israel” in 1976. The UNCCP agreed, and provided copies of the same information it provided to the Arabs. What did these various parties do with the data? For nearly 25 years, nothing of note. The Jordanians used the films to help Palestinians prove their ancestry in order to obtain Jordanian passports. The PLO stored its copy of the films at its Economics Department in Damascus. But in the absence of peace negotiations about the refugees, no practical use was made of the records insofar as property claims were concerned. The onset of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s, however, led two of these parties to put the data in a more user-friendly format to prepare for future negotiations over refugee property claims. The first was the PLO. The initiative actually came from a research and publishing establishment, the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS). In the mid-1990s, IPS approached the PLO with a proposal to scan the UNCCP records onto CD-ROMs that could be used to create a computerized property database. IPS head Walid Khalidi approached senior PLO leader and future Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas for help. IPS offered to carry out and pay for the work, in return for which it would give one copy of the CD-ROMs to the PLO and keep another for its own use. The project lasted from 1997-2000, and involved scanning nearly 1 million images, in addition to 5,625 maps and 1,641 35mm films of mandatory land registers in the UNCCP collection. The PLO and the UN later used the CD-ROMs to build the database. They both ended up with copies of the database neither thus far has allowed unrestricted public access to the data, nor does it appear that the PLO has put it to use for its final status negotiations with Israel. In addition to the PLO, the Jordanian government computerized its filmed copies of UNCCP data as well. Shortly after signing its peace treaty with Israel in 1994, the Jordanians broached the subject of Jordanian citizens’ property claims against Israel during talks with the Israelis, although the latter refused to move forward on the issue. In 1999, the Jordanian Department of Lands and Survey was approached by the Department of Palestinian Affairs within the Foreign Ministry about undertaking a project to computerize 1948 Palestinian property records. The prime minister’s office later provided the funds for the project. Data was extracted not only from the films but from extant British and Ottoman registers that had been in the land department’s possession since 1948. In July 2001, the land department publicly announced that the project had been completed. Like the PLO, the Jordanian government has not thus far allowed the public access to its database. The refugee property issue has resurfaced in recent years after decades of relative obscurity compared with other dimensions of the peace process, like the land-for-peace formula. Will the new “road map” lead to concrete talks on the refugee property claims? While it is too soon to tell, what is certain is that detailed information about almost every parcel of refugee land is available, in modernized formats, in several places in the world. What is less certain is whether this wealth of information will be utilized, or whether the parties to the conflict will forgo using the UNCCP data in favor of some other basis for resolving the issue.

Michael R. Fischbach is a professor of history at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, USA. This is the second of a two-part commentary he wrote for The DAILY STAR on Palestinian property

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).