Plan intended to avoid discrimination charge by offering land for development to Jews and non-Jews alike.
By DAN IZENBERGjnf 224.88 (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
The government and the Jewish National Fund are as far away as ever from reaching an agreement that would enable the government to offer land for development to Jews and non-Jews on a non-discriminatory basis, it emerged Sunday during a High Court hearing.
The court was hearing three petitions filed in 2004 against the Israel Lands Authority's (ILA) official policy of issuing tenders for the development of land owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to Jews only.
In actual fact, for many years there was an informal arrangement between the ILA and the JNF whereby if an Arab won a tender for a plot owned by the JNF, or purchased a home from a Jew that had been built on land leased to the owner by the JNF, the ownership of the plot was transferred to the ILA and the ILA compensated the JNF by giving it land of equal value somewhere else.
However, due to a dispute between the JNF and the ILA in 2004, the ILA issued a tender in which it openly declared that the land could only be leased to Jews.
Three petitions were filed in response, one by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Arab Center for Alternative Planning, a second by Adalah - the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and a third by Al-Mossawa Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel.
All three petitions protested the discriminatory policy, whereby the state (which marketed JNF land as well as state land) did not offer equal opportunities to Jews and non-Jews with regard to the JNF land.
In 2005, the state attorney filed a response to the High Court in which he agreed with the petitioners that the state could not pursue a discriminatory policy. He proposed an interim solution which was essentially a return to the longstanding arrangement whereby the state would "compensate" the JNF for any plot of JNF-owned land leased to a non-Jew by assuming ownership of the plot and giving the JNF a plot of land of equal value elsewhere.
Not all the petitioners were satisfied with this proposal. While The Association for Civil Rights in Israel embraced it, Adalah and the Mossawa Center did not. They argued that according to this system, an organization that openly discriminated against non-Jews would continue to own 13 percent of the land in Israel.
But the real problem no longer seems to be between the petitioners and the respondents, which include the ILA, the JNF and the state. The court has made it clear that it will reject the objections of the Arab petitioners on the grounds that the state has proposed a way of eliminating discrimination in its land-marketing policy and therefore provided remedy to their complaint.
The problem that remains is between the JNF and the government.
Despite months of negotiations, they have failed to reach agreement on the terms of the land exchange. JNF official Zvi Lidar accused the Finance Ministry of trying to exploit the situation to deny the JNF its rightful income from the exchanges. The state's representative, Osnat Mandel, accused the JNF of insisting that in return for plots of land whose financial value has already been exhausted, the JNF wanted to receive empty plots of land whose commercial value to the owner was still intact.
The court gave the two sides until January 30 to continue negotiations. In the meantime, the petitions will remain pending.
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