Israeli Ruling Bars Jewish Bias in Land Sales

In a landmark decision that strikes at the heart of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the government may no longer allocate land to its citizens based on their religion or ethnicity and may no longer prevent Arab citizens from living where they choose.

Acting on a discrimination complaint brought by an Israeli Arab family barred from buying a home in a Jewish community, the court challenged the very land-distribution policy on which the Jewish state was founded 52 years ago.

The sale of land to Arabs--who make up about 20% of Israel’s population of 6 million--has been heavily restricted out of concerns for security and demographics.

With Wednesday’s 4-1 ruling, the court stepped into Israel’s existential debate over whether it is first and foremost a democratic or a Jewish state. In confronting the inherent contradiction, the court sided with democracy. And it chose the most fundamental conflict in the Middle East--the right to land--as the issue on which to make its case.

“The principle of equality prohibits the state from distinguishing between its citizens on the basis of religion or nationality,” Chief Justice Aharon Barak wrote. “The principle also applies to the allocation of state land. . . . The Jewish character of the state does not permit Israel to discriminate between its citizens.”

The court’s action ended a 4 1/2-year battle that began when the Assn. for Civil Rights in Israel filed suit on behalf of an Israeli Arab couple, Adel and Iman Kaadan.

While it isn’t likely that many Arabs will immediately try to move into Jewish communities, civil rights activists and Israeli Arab politicians hailed Wednesday’s decision as a victory for democratic values and equality. But numerous Jewish legislators said it threatens the fundamental raison d’etre of Israel.

The National Religious Party, which is a member of the governing coalition, decried the ruling as a suicidal blow against Zionism and promised legislation in parliament to bypass it.

“This is a black day,” said lawmaker and party member Haim Druckman.

“Maybe [the Supreme Court justices] are trying to dismantle Israel as a Jewish state,” right-wing lawmaker Michael Kleiner told Israeli radio. “This state was established under slogans of the Jewish Galilee and saving ‘The Land.’ All those slogans that were the basis for the Jewish state are now in danger.”

The state controls 93% of Israeli land, and most of that has been designated for Jewish settlement through the Jewish Agency, a powerful quasi-governmental body.

The full implications of the ruling were still coming into focus Wednesday.

Mindful of its ground-shattering implications, the court--often accused by its critics of being overly activist--advised caution. It said it was not addressing certain types of Jewish settlement, such as kibbutzim or moshavim (cooperative farms), and left room for communities to claim “special circumstances” that might constitute an exception to the discrimination rules.

In addition, the ruling applies only to land that was part of Israel before the 1967 war in which Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Furthermore, no one is predicting large movements of Arabs into Jewish communities. Israel is a largely segregated society, and most Arabs, who can vote in Israeli elections but do not serve in the army and often find their loyalty questioned, live in Arab villages. Because of tradition and the desire to stay with one’s own, they remain in such villages even though they are generally neglected and impoverished.

But the Kaadans were determined to escape that kind of life.

The couple and their three daughters lived in the broken-down, overcrowded Arab village of Baqa al Gharbiya. There was no sewerage, and asbestos covered the walls of the makeshift school. Envious of the manicured lawns, neat fences and whitewashed homes of the nearby community of Kazir, the Kaadans applied to buy a lot there.

But Kazir, established in northwestern Israel by the Jewish Agency on state land, was for Jews only. In a first, the Kaadans sued.

On Wednesday, Adel Kaadan went on Israeli TV to praise the ruling as “a victory for Israeli democracy and for the equality of Jews and Arabs.” He said he would apply immediately to buy a home in Kazir. “Only coexistence will solve our problems,” Kaadan said in Hebrew. “Even the Berlin Wall came down. Why build new walls?”

The Jewish Agency, targeted by the lawsuit, said the court’s decision was a bombshell and went into emergency session Wednesday night. Agency officials said they hope the application of the ruling would be narrow.

Sali Meridor, chairman of the Jewish Agency, said he is worried about what the court’s intervention would do to Arab-majority areas in the Galilee in the north and Negev in the south that border autonomous Palestinian territory.

“We must find the way to ensure defense of the Jewish presence and to protect our sovereignty from erosion, while at the same time ensuring equality to all citizens,” Meridor said.

Alexander Kedar, a property law expert at the University of Haifa, noted that the court recognized that a “separate but equal” system of settling Jews and Arabs has in fact become “inherently unequal.”

“Land allocation during the last 50 years has been an extremely discriminatory system practiced under the pretext of making the Zionist project succeed,” Kedar said. “This is one of the most important cases ever decided by the Supreme Court.

“The court is saying that, when there is a conflict between the Jewish character of Israel and its democratic character, the democratic character--including the idea of equality before the law--prevails.”