Israel-Palestine Mega Fact Check!

The detailed claim is that the land had been part of the Ottoman Empire prior to being administered by the British Mandate. The Arabs and Jews living there were mostly squatters and renters. Land ownership was uncommon. If you don’t own the land, it therefore cannot be stolen from you.

There is some truth to this. Under Ottoman rule, all of the land was in theory owned by the Sultan, in the same way that the British monarch in theory owns all of the land in England. But the de facto ownership of land was based on custom and usage—those who built on land or cultivated it essentially became the owners (not just “squatters” as some claim, which would imply they could be kicked out by legitimate “owners”). There wasn’t ownership in the modern sense of having a registered title or deed.

As such, I disagree with the assessment that “If you don’t own the land, it cannot be stolen from you”—if you are the de facto owner (even without a legal deed), the land can still be de facto stolen from you by an aggressor with a tank or a gun.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the slow process to officially register land ownership had begun, though it was far from complete by 1948 when the Nakba (War of Independence) occurred.

Some argue that the land taken from the Palestinians in 1948 didn’t amount to theft because the Palestinians didn’t have official deeds to their own land. What they neglect to say is that deeds were a relatively recent invention, and many Palestinians hadn’t yet registered the land they owned. It is quite bold for Zionists to use this argument because they also did not have official deeds to the Holy Land.

This leads to an interesting asymmetrical argument:

• Palestinians do not own the land because they have no deeds, even though they have maintained a presence on that land for centuries.
• Jews own the land—all of it—because they’ve maintained a presence in Palestine for centuries, even though they have no deeds.