By LANCE J. SUSSMANA Holocaust survivor lights a candle at an Auschwitz crematorium(photo credit: REUTERS)In 1894, 36-year-old Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Philadelphia went to Russia with a plan to resettle large numbers of Jews from the Pale of Settlement in Siberia and then train them to make the tundra bloom. For Krauskopf, it was a four-way win. His plan would solve the problem of Jewish poverty in Russia, help the Czar develop the interior of his empire, remove masses of Jews from the dangers of antisemitism and most importantly, redirect Jewish immigration away from America. Met with disinterest in St. Petersburg, Krauskopf headed south and met with Leo Tolstoy at his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy agreed to meet with the young rabbi but then rebuked him and told him that if he wanted to save Jews, he should bring them to America and train them to be farmers there in freedom and safety. Two years later, Krauskopf opened a Farm School, now Delaware Valley University, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.Understood in the context of its own time, Krauskopf’s Jewish Siberia farm plan was not as strange as it sounds today. First, anxiety about Jewish immigration to America was growing among the country’s German Jewish elite which led to a number of immigration diversion plans. In the 1920s, xenophobia fueled by eugenics led to the passage of severe immigration restrictions by the United States Congress. Second, American agrarian reform was on the rise and would lead to the formation of a national Populist party. Moreover, in the Jewish world discussions about the role of agriculture were also increasing. Jewish farm schools and colonies were being established in various locations and within a few years, both the kibbutz movement and Jewish ranching in Argentina emerged and then rapidly expanded.However, the deepest root of Krauskopf’s Russia program was Biblical.In Parshat Vayigash (Exodus 47), Joseph, as Vizier of Egypt, enacted radical measures to avoid a deadly famine. First, he nationalized the country’s farmlands and then launched a massive program of social relocation, exempting only the Jews and the Egyptian priests from the program. Critical scholarship today broadly affirms the historical plausibility of Joseph’s policies in terms of what is known about land ownership in post-Hyksos Egypt. Others see the influence of early Israelite monarchial practice in the Biblical text.Although theologically, the Hebrew Bible maintains, “the earth is the Lord’s,” the earth’s real estate was divided up among the nations including the Promised Land for the people of Israel. Throughout the Biblical period, non-Israelites continued to dwell on the land while land administration evolved from tribal to a combination of private and national during the monarchial period. Particularly after the destruction of Jerusalem and the dismantlement of Judea, Jewish land claims in the land of Israel became more spiritual than based in law although some Jewish settlement on the land continued at all times.Traditional commentators like Rashi (1040-1105) writing from Diaspora based perspectives mostly applauded Joseph’s program pointing out that by uprooting almost all indigenous peoples from their land in Egypt, everyone, not just the Jews, were “strangers” in the land. Given the insecure position of Jews in the medieval world, Rashi’s approval is understandable. During the Middle Ages, Jewish ownership of land in Europe became increasingly difficult. Islamic law allowed Jews to own land but special taxes were often imposed on Jewish landowners. In 1892, the Ottomans adopted a law prohibiting selling land to Jews but it was unevenly enforced.Viewed from the perspective of society today in which private land ownership is believed to be the norm, Joseph’s program seems brutal if not dictatorial and almost Stalinist in scope and severity. As early the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin among others commented wryly that no future monarch would ever be unhappy with Joseph’s program. Today, a land and resettlement program like Joseph’s could only be imagined in places like China or North Korea.However, upon closer examination at least the issue of private land ownership is not nearly as pervasive as most people may think it is. In the United States, for example, nearly 40% of the country is owned by the government. In Alaska, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Utah, the government of the United States owns the majority of the land. 46 % of all land in California is public. Much of American land was initially either seized in war or granted by treaty and later redistributed to the public. On April 22, 1889 approximately 50,000 people lined up to claim their share of two million acres in Oklahoma alone. Remarkably, in places of long-term settlement like England and Wales, 15% of the land remains unregistered to this day.Not surprisingly, in Israel land ownership is both complex and legally stratified. Historically, legal claims to land in the State of Israel are rooted both in Ottoman and British law. In 1945, of the 26.4 million dunams (26,400 km²) of land in Mandatory Palestine, 12.8 million was claimed by Arabs, 1.5 million by Jews, 1.5 million was public land and an additional 10.6 million dunams constituted the Negev or Beersheba district. In 1901, the Fifth Zionist Congress established the Jewish National Fund (JNF) holdings by the end of the British Mandate period amounted to 936 km² or 3.55% of all the land west of the Jordan River.The situation changed dramatically during Israel’s War of Independence. Immediately with statehood, Israel’s Basic Law nationalized land ownership and prohibited the sale of land in the new country. Under this legal umbrella, unclaimed, abandoned and ‘absentee’ land was taken over by the government for the purpose of nation building including immigrant settlement, national infrastructure and defense. By 1949, approximately 86% of the land of the new State was owned by the government of Israel ‘in trust for the Jewish people.’ The majority of the new immigrants coming to Israel at this point were either Holocaust survivors or Jews displaced by Arab countries who were absorbed by Israel, in part, through its national land plan. By contrast, neither the Palestinian Arabs displaced in 1948 or 1967 were absorbed by any sovereign state with hundreds of thousands compelled to live as landless and stateless refugees. In 1960 with two of Israel’s greatest immigration periods behind it, the Knesset formed the Israel Land Administration (ILA). The ILA controlled 93% of the country’s land including property owned directly by the JNF (13%) and the Development Authority. The remaining 7% was in private hands, mostly in urban areas. To some extent, it could be said that the modern State of Israel had created a national Joseph land plan. On the other side of the conflict, beginning in 2008 the Palestine Authority not only prohibited land sales to Israelis but declared all such action null and void. Future transactions by Palestinians were to be punishable by death. Jordan, which also prohibits the sale of land to “the enemy,” abrogated land leases to Israeli farmers on the Jordan-Israeli border raising concerns about the larger Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty. Again, land not just personal rights nor national aspirations was at the center of the the conflict.In the first decade of the 21st century, parliamentary reforms resulted in the establishment of the Israel Land Authority and further discussion of privatization. Determining the exact size of Israel and the classification of its land was complicated by the expansion of Jerusalem, the annexation of the Golan, the withdrawal from Sinai and Gaza and the legal complexities of Israeli development in Judea and Samaria. In short, the question of land in Israel not only became a question of land ownership and not just the borders of the country.Four separate cases involving land administration and ownership in Israel demonstrate how messy these issues remain today. In 1989, a Jewish Israeli, Avitan, sought permission to purchase Bedouin land and was denied by the Israeli Supreme Court. Conversely, in 2000 an Israeli Arab family, the Ka’adan, attempted to buy land in a Jewish area in Katzir and was given permission. A third and current case involves the building of the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in central Jerusalem by Rabbi Marvin Hier of Los Angelos. The$100 million mega complex included uprooting part of the 700-year-old Mamilla [Muslim] Cemetery. It remains only partly built after years of construction for a variety of reasons including questions about land use in Jerusalem. Finally, complex litigation continues today over land rights in a Bedouin village, Khan al-Ahmar, near Jericho.With the passage of the Jewish State Law in June, 2018 new questions are beginning to arise about Israeli land policy in Israel itself. On the political right, decisions favoring Jews over Arabs in land disputes are viewed as correctives to the prior period’s so-called judicial activism. On the left, the same decisions are viewed as continued violations of Israeli Arab personal rights. The biggest questions about land, however, are in the territories. Are they part of the “land in Israel” to be held in trust for the Jewish people or not? Land policy, not just demographics and military concerns will continue to contribute to the legal relationship between land ownership and the State of Israel. For sure, no modern-day Joseph will be able to implement a vast national program to resolve all of Israel’s current land issue. It is also unlikely that the question of a one- or two-state solution will be made one court case at a time. If only ink alone could be spilled to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.Lance J. Sussman, PhD, is the Senior Rabbi of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, PA and the Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of Gratz College. Rabbi Sussman has taught at Princeton, Binghamton University (SUNY) and Hunter College. He is the author of Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism and is currently coproducing a television documentary on the Philadelphia Jewish experience
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