With the case for pessimism so strong, we must take whatever good news we can find. Some of us have longed for the emergence of a charismatic Palestinian figure who, while opposing Israeli oppression and settler-colonialism in all its forms, would also defend individual property rights and free enterprise while condemning both outside donor aid as dependence-inducing and the corrupt, authoritarian, and unrepresentative Palestinian Authority (PA).
This is from Sheldon Richman, “A Glimmer of Hope in Bleak Palestine,” Antiwar.com, August 6, 2018.
The piece is about the successful efforts of Palestinian Khaled Al Sabawi to achieve clarity of property rights for Palestinians in parts of Israel.
Another excerpt:
Such a person has indeed emerged: Khaled Al Sabawi. Al Sabawi has quite a story to tell. In 1948, during the Zionists’ violent ethnic cleansing of Palestine and establishment of the state of Israel, his father’s family was driven from their home and 50-acre farm in the village of Salama, east of Jaffa. The family fled to Gaza, along with many other refugees. Then in 1956, when Israel, Great Britain, and France launched a war against Egypt, the Israeli army invaded Gaza (30 years before Hamas was formed), ransacking and searching the refugees’ homes, including the home of Sabawi’s grandmother and father. When the soldiers found the grandmother’s deed to their home in Salama, they confiscated it and departed. Apparently, that is just what the soldiers were looking for.
Khaled Al Sabawi’s background:
When his father grew up and earned advanced university degrees, he moved to Canada to raise his family. But then he moved back to Palestine and established a large insurance company in the West Bank and Gaza. His son Khaled has now done something similar, graduating from the University of Waterloo in Ontario. After switching from computer engineering to geothermal engineering, he embarked on two entrepreneurial ventures: geothermal energy for the Occupied Palestinians Territories and elsewhere in the Middle East and registration of individual property titles in the West Bank. The latter project is called TABO, the Arabic word for “title deed.”
More on his project:
So his TABO project has the admirable objective of preventing more Israeli settlements on land that Palestinians legitimately own. He and his team work to track down the last owners of properties or their heirs and to plot the boundaries. Forbes reports that “after identifying land for sale from Palestinians who possess inheritance documents but no official papers, Al Sabawi sets about obtaining approval from relevant family members, before determining the borders in a manner more accurate than the ‘this olive tree to that one’ approach.”
“We have to walk every corner of the land with a GPS machine, the head of the village council and every single neighbor,” Al Sabawi said. His work has ruffled feathers, and that may seem unsurprising until you learn that “the challenge did not come from Israel; it came from the Palestinian Authority.”
The whole piece, which I highly recommend, gives, as Richman says, a glimmer of hope for that troubled part of the world.
READER COMMENTS
Steve Horwitz
Aug 6 2018 at 12:12pm
One need not accept Sheldon’s questionable rendering of Israeli history to agree that any steps toward clarifying property rights in the region, especially to the degree that they indicate violations committed in the name of Israeli settlements, is a very good thing.
David Seltzer
Aug 7 2018 at 11:39am
Good Stuff. Some years ago, family members appealed to Germany for similar reasons. Nazi’s confiscated property. Years later those in possesion…not owners…refused to return property to rightful owners.
Hazel Meade
Aug 7 2018 at 1:10pm
People like this deserve our vigorous support, not only for the immediate good of titling property, but because they will help spread the concepts like individual rights in a place where such ideas are desperately needed.
Yaakov
Aug 7 2018 at 6:34pm
He buys land, develops it and sells it out in small lots. That is what business people do all over the world. I think Scott clearly explained in his August 7 post, the difference between this businessperson and many others:
PS. If we treat them [=business people] like heroes, then society might begin assuming they are highly qualified to perform jobs having nothing to do with business, like politics.
Gerald
Aug 13 2018 at 11:34am
Mr. Richman’s article cannot be taken seriously. It is riddled with historical error and obvious anti-Israel animus. To take just one egregious example (and there are many), Richman describes the events of 1948 as the “Zionists’ violent ethnic cleansing of Palestine and establishment of the state of Israel”. Anyone familiar with history knows that the 1947 UN vote dismantling the British Mandate and partition of the land was accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs. The Arabs instead opted for war, vowing to exterminate the Jews and nascent Jewish state. Unfortunately for the Arabs, when you go to war and and lose, there will be consequences. The bottom line is this: if the Arabs want peace, they will have it the minute they give up their genocidal fantasies and learn to peacefully coexist with Israel.
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