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ILR Fellowship in Jerusalem: Archives on Land Use Law in British-Rule Palestine

February 27, 2023

The International Legal Research (ILR) Fellowship offers Penn Carey Law Students financial support for a short-term summer legal research project abroad.

Library of Congress Library of Congress

Jenan Abu Shtaya SJD’24

Almost without exception, Palestinian towns in Israel-Palestine exist with no planning vision. Where there are no planning sketches, private houses are in constant danger of being demolished, and public spaces are a rare find. As Palestinians witness the shrinking of their spaces daily, Jewish towns grow at a rapid pace, creating a parallel reality, often criticized for being segregated and unequal.

As a Palestinian, I have been intrigued not only by questions about the absence of planning in Palestinian towns, but also by the roots of the discriminative land and planning policies in Israel-Palestine. In an attempt to understand the historical background of these laws and the ways in which they continue to shape the segregated spaces of Palestinians and Israelis, I spent the past summer researching the land-use laws and policies that were enacted during the British colonial rule in Palestine.

With the support of the International Legal Research (ILR) Fellowship from Penn Carey Law School, I was able to visit the Central Zionist Archives (Jerusalem), where I had the opportunity to explore the work of the Zionist organizations and personalities who were active during the British Mandate in Palestine.

Choosing to conduct this research in the Central Zionist Archives was not random: the leaders of the Zionist movement in Palestine not only built relationships with British officials but also were deeply involved with and well represented in the British legal system in general. Their stories, visions, and activities can shed light both on the role played by the Zionist movement in importing legal systems to Palestine and on the British Mandate’s part in tailoring some legal norms in a way that improved the lives of the Jewish immigrants during that time.

While in the Archives, I examined multiple versions of the British land-use statutes that were brought to Palestine by the colonial government. These laws constituted the basis for the Planning and Building Law (1965), the main planning statute, which concentrates the majority of the land-use regulations in Israel-Palestine today and plays a major role in the design of the physical spaces of both Israelis and Palestinians.

In addition to the planning legislation, policy documents and correspondence between major Zionist planners introduced me to the different ideologies and visions that stand behind the current land-use laws in Israel-Palestine. One of the most valuable insights I gained concerned the contribution of the Zionist movement and its leadership to bringing Western models of planning to Mandatory Palestine—models more suited to the lifestyles of the European Jewish immigrants than to those of the indigenous people. Early sketches of Jewish settlements elaborate the Europe-oriented vision of planning during that time. These plans were drawn up by both Zionist and British planners, who worked collaboratively to build what would become the largest Jewish towns in Israel-Palestine.

These archival documents provide a partial explanation for the creation of the segregated spaces that prevail in Israel-Palestine today. Though physical spaces in the Jewish settlements have been developing since the British Mandate’s rule, with the support of both British and Zionist planners, the Palestinian spaces and lifestyles were excluded from the British planning, a fact that continues to shape and control their reality even today.

Beside these observations, I was also provoked by a different (and a more methodological) set of questions. This research was part of a larger project—a doctoral dissertation—focused on the colonial planning of Palestine and the Palestinians’ experiences in the segregated physical spaces in Israel-Palestine.

Though the main goal of my research is to explore Palestinian lives and spaces, the primary source of information that I had been using until this summer was the Zionist and British documentation of the history of Palestine. Without dismissing the contribution these records can bring to the research, it is important to be conscious of the challenges they impose: I must draw conclusions from second-hand documentation, made by colonial powers, regarding an undocumented and colonized population.

The relative absence of Palestinian archives—a direct result of colonial dynamics in Palestine—would have major implications for nearly all Palestine-related research. Although the preliminary research question does not with deal methodological inquiries, my summer experience has not only answered some of the initial questions related to the historical origins of discrimination, but also emphasized the complexity of working on legal historical issues, and highlighted the role that the politics of archives might play in shaping the course of legal-historical studies.