The Land Registration Campaign Remaking East Jerusalem
Using a revived colonial-era legal process, the Jewish National Fund is quietly transferring long-inhabited Palestinian property into Israeli hands.
Vastly different worlds are visible from Hassan Musa Abu Tair’s house in Umm Tuba, a Palestinian neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem. To the west are the open, green hills of Ramat Rachel, an Israeli kibbutz; to the east are the homes of the neighborhood’s Palestinian residents, tall and slender to maximize the area’s panoramic views; and, south, down the hill, concrete buildings make up the Har Homa settlement, on land belonging to the neighborhood that had once connected it to Bethlehem. Hassan is one of the many members of the Abu Tair family in Umm Tuba—his cousin Abid Rahman Abu Tair estimates that at least 95% of the neighborhood’s 4,000 residents are related to each other—and one of 150 residents who built houses at an intersection adjacent to the neighborhood’s commercial center, on land his family has owned for centuries. According to both personal and British documents, the family has resided there for at least 300 years.
Like most East Jerusalemites, the Abu Tairs have lost significant land since Israel annexed the eastern part of the city in 1967, including 800 dunams (nearly 200 acres) seized in 1991 to build the Har Homa settlement. But since then, and unlike most East Jerusalem neighborhoods, Umm Tuba had not been subjected to demolition and eviction orders. Its master plan, which allows residents to secure Israeli permits to build on their land, was even approved in 2017 by the Jerusalem Local Planning and Construction Committee, which has denied these plans to some 85% of Jerusalem Palestinians. But everything changed for Umm Tuba in January 2024, when Hassan applied for a routine permit to add another building to his property for his children and their families, and the permit was denied. According to municipal authorities, it was rejected because he does not own the land his home sits on—the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund (JNF) does.
Without any of the Abu Tairs’ knowledge, between 2018 and 2023, the JNF had claimed and formally registered what was referred to as plot 31784, which comprises the entire hill where Hassan’s house sits, alongside 17 others. To do so, it used a British Mandate-era legal process that Israel had reinstated in 2018 to formally determine ownership of disputed land: Settlement of Land Title (SOLT). According to the SOLT law, authorities are required to publicly announce when registration is initiated in a given place, at which point claims of ownership, like land deeds, tax records, and wills, can be submitted. Despite these regulations, the Tabu, Israel’s land registry, initiated and completed a registration process in Umm Tuba without providing any notice. When no one comes forward with a claim—which is necessarily the case when no one knows the process is happening—the land becomes “state land” managed by the Israel Land Authority (ILA), the governmental body tasked with overseeing and enforcing land ownership. It routinely allocates state land to settlement construction, which is how the Jerusalem settlements of Har Homa, Gilo, Ramat Shlomo, and others were built.
According to a 2023 decision arrived at through the SOLT process, the JNF had purchased the land in Umm Tuba in the 1920s from five Palestinian residents. The Abu Tairs, however, argue that the five people in question never owned land in the area and that, moreover, no individuals had—it belonged to the wider Abu Tair family. In October 2024, residents petitioned the Israeli High Court to cancel the registration, given that it was carried out improperly, and requested that it be redone to grant them the opportunity to put forward a claim. Residents now await a decision on whether their petition will be heard in court, but even if it is, they are not optimistic about the outcome. Despite the fact that most residents have either British or Jordanian documents confirming their ownership, these papers will likely be rejected as insufficient in Israeli courts, since most of the documents follow Islamic family inheritance law, which Israel dismisses as imprecise.
Although the court has yet to decide whether it will hear the petition, in June 2025 the ILA issued eviction notices giving residents 30 days to vacate their property before police could seize it by force and place it in JNF control. While the deadline has come and gone and residents are still in their homes, they could be expelled any day. This threat is part of a broader strategy to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem and into the West Bank, a process the United Nations and other international bodies refer to as “the de-Palestinization of Jerusalem.” Even if the state had adhered to SOLT’s notification requirements, the SOLT procedure is itself an explicit violation of international law, which forbids an occupying power from making permanent changes to land ownership. “The goal of SOLT is to transfer as much land in East Jerusalem to state or Jewish ownership in order to prevent a viable solution to the conflict in the city and beyond,” said Sari Kronish, the director of the East Jerusalem department at Bimkom, an organization that advances planning and development rights across Israel and the West Bank. “These steps,” she explained, are part of “the current government’s broader annexation policy.” Yousef Abu Tair, who can name five generations of Abu Tairs who have lived on his precise plot—which the JNF has now claimed—told Jewish Currents, “The Israeli Tabu is trying to seize the area to make it Jewish. But I live here—I am a Jerusalemite.”
The JNF’s new property registration work raises an obvious question: How can a 125-year-old Zionist land fund suddenly assert ownership over homes that have stood for generations? The JNF, a semi-governmental organization that has bought land in Israel for Jewish settlement since 1901, refers to itself as Israel’s largest and the world’s oldest “green organization.” It buys land for agricultural projects and has established over 1,000 parks and planted some 250 million trees since its inception.
Despite its self-fashioned image as an innocuous environmental organization, the JNF has long been implicated in deeply discriminatory projects. A large portion of its land holdings were taken in 1948 from Palestinian refugees who were not compensated for their property, and the JNF deliberately worked to make their return impossible. Moreover, according to its charter, the JNF only sells and leases its land—comprising 13% of Israel’s total land, which is home to 70% of the state’s population—to Jews. As the JNF wrote in response to a 2004 lawsuit alleging discrimination in land sales practices, “The loyalty of the JNF is given to the Jewish people and only to them is the JNF obligated. The JNF, as the owner of the JNF land, does not have a duty to practice equality towards all citizens of the state.” Further, the organization has long been involved in entrenching the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Since almost immediately after the 1967 war, the JNF has worked to purchase land in the occupied territories, and has long collaborated with right-wing organizations to fund, build, and support settlements—helping to evict Palestinians across the West Bank; allocating land for settlement construction; and pouring money into countless settlement development projects to build bike paths, roads, parks, and more. This work includes decades of collaboration with Ateret Cohanim, which is actively evicting dozens of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood, and Elad, which runs City of David, an archaeological site and national park being used to take over Palestinian homes.
The JNF has now turned to SOLT as a new tactic in its long-standing Judaization efforts. “Settlement of land title, if done properly, provides significant advantages” for those whose property undergoes that process, explained Gaal Yanovski, a researcher who focuses on SOLT at Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO that works to promote a more equitable Jerusalem. Because land registration offers the strongest—nearly uncontestable—proof of ownership a government can offer, it codifies the right to receive municipal services like water and electricity, protects against state land seizures, and makes real estate ownership an official asset credible to banks. Without the ability to register their land, East Jerusalem residents have been barred from accessing building permits, mortgages, and insurance claims.
SOLT has its roots in British colonial land policy, which used land registration processes in colonies around the world to replace usufruct land rights with an ownership model and to more efficiently tax land holdings. In 1926, the Mandate administration appointed colonial land surveyor Ernest Dowson to carry out reforms and oversee the surveying, titling, and registration of land in Palestine; he managed to register about a quarter of the territory before Britain withdrew from Palestine in May 1948. Most of the completed titles were for rural agricultural land along the coast, while urban areas proved much more complicated to complete—so much so that British officials did not touch Jerusalem. When East Jerusalem came under Jordanian rule in 1948, Jordanian administrators attempted to register the city’s land, but they had completed the process for only 10% of the city (mostly small swaths of the Shuafat, Beit Hanina, and Issawiya neighborhoods) by 1967, when Israel seized East Jerusalem; at that point the SOLT registration process was frozen for over 50 years.
Then, in May 2018, Government Decision 3790 approved a five-year plan, known as the Homesh Plan, for the socioeconomic development of East Jerusalem, including some $16 million to register its land, with the goal of completing registration for half of East Jerusalem’s land by 2021 and the rest by 2025. Ostensibly, the registration was meant to redress the systemic discrimination Jerusalem Palestinians face in accessing municipal resources, but the very act of instituting land registration in East Jerusalem functioned to entrench Israeli control over the illegally annexed territory. “Under the guise of closing socioeconomic gaps between East and West Jerusalem,” Kronish explained, “the decision was really meant to demonstrate Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem,” by transferring property in a form that is “final and difficult to challenge.” Indeed, then-Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked championed the plan as “de facto applying sovereignty over East Jerusalem through land registration regulations.”
The JNF dedicated extensive resources to using this newly available method to claim East Jerusalem properties. In the fall of 2021, the JNF board voted to commit over 100 million NIS (32 million USD) to registering land across Israel, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem in its name. (Although at the time SOLT could be used only within Israel’s 1948 borders and East Jerusalem, the JNF was already identifying properties in the West Bank that it could target under the correct assumption that SOLT would later be expanded to the West Bank.) The JNF proceeded to identify 2,050 properties in East Jerusalem alone that it thought it might be able to register as its own. To do so, the JNF located documents detailing proposals, negotiations, and other facets of land sales in East Jerusalem that it had been involved in before 1948 but that had not been completed. Even though these deals never went through, under SOLT, documents demonstrating intent to purchase land can meet the legal threshold for registration in cases where no one makes a competing claim. In such circumstances—as when Palestinian residents do not know their land is undergoing registration—the authorities often decide proven intent to purchase is the strongest claim on a piece of property. This means that the JNF could permanently take control of land it never paid for, and never will.
The properties the JNF has targeted through SOLT proceedings are in parts of East Jerusalem that Jews have long sought to take over in order to Judaize the city and isolate the urban areas of any future Palestinian state. These include areas around settlements and surrounding the Old City, and in places that connect Palestinian neighborhoods to nearby cities in the West Bank. Umm Tuba’s proximity to Har Homa, for instance, limits possibilities for extending the settlement, and its location on the border between Jerusalem and the West Bank connects Palestinians across urban centers. Until SOLT was reinstated, the decades-long efforts of both the government and organizations like the JNF to displace Palestinians in many of these areas had been largely unsuccessful, with locals steadfastly staying in their homes despite mounting settler pressure and the expansion of discriminatory laws to seize Palestinian property.
But following the failure of these other means, the reinstatement of SOLT quickly proved effective. In 2021, the Jerusalem municipality settled the first significant land title cases in the Umm Haroun section of East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The state had accelerated the registration process for the area without telling the 45 Palestinian residents, most of whom had lived there since 1948. Without letters, public signage, or visits from land registration officers, residents were denied the opportunity to file a claim, losing their land before learning it was contested. Their appeal to the High Court was rejected, and the houses received eviction notices.
The Sheikh Jarrah case quickly proved the dangers of SOLT. As the first government decision that acknowledged the systematic neglect of East Jerusalem, the Homesh Plan couched title registration as a beneficial opportunity to formalize residents’ land ownership. But the government’s failure to announce the registration process is not the only obstacle for East Jerusalem residents. The process itself has requirements many Palestinians can’t meet: fluency in Hebrew, expensive lawyers, and hundreds of documents. Moreover, once land is registered, owners are obligated to pay Israel all the property taxes the state would have charged them since 1967—in other words, millions of shekels that few East Jerusalemites can afford. Thus, through the complex, bureaucratic nature of SOLT, Israel can hide its confiscation of Palestinian property behind a seemingly routine legal process. “The state is taking advantage of the legitimacy of the process,” Yanovski said. “The very fact that it is generally a good process” provides some cover—a distraction—from the true use of SOLT to “take over East Jerusalem.”
In the seven years since SOLT was reinstated, 3% of Jerusalem’s land has been registered, falling far short of the state’s goal of 50% by 2025. During these seven years, however, just two dunams of land in all of Jerusalem have gone to Palestinians, while 85% has been registered to the state or Jewish organizations or individuals. If these ratios continue, some 75,900 dunams (nearly 19,000 acres) of the area in East Jerusalem currently undergoing registration will become Jewish-owned. This prospect is why Yanovski warns that SOLT “is the most serious land-related threat that Palestinians of East Jerusalem are facing.”
When the Homesh Plan was renewed in 2023, the state promised to complete East Jerusalem registration by 2029. As Palestinians across Jerusalem watch their neighbors in Umm Tuba, Sheikh Jarrah, and other neighborhoods lose their land to arbitrary SOLT registration processes, they fear that dispossession may be just months away. Indeed, registration of the entire Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is close to completion, and nearly all of the land is titled to Jewish owners, despite the fact that the vast majority of the neighborhood’s 3,000 residents are Palestinian. In Wadi Hilweh, Jabal Makaber, and Beit Hanina, 200 plots are facing imminent registration, while another 150 areas are in the early stages of the process. Experts anticipate that the rest of East Jerusalem will follow, and there is no reason to think such proceedings won’t also be kept hidden from residents. But even if Palestinian residents are alerted and do put forward their own claims, it is unlikely that whatever documentation, NGO support, or lawyers they can gather will be enough to prove ownership on Israel’s terms.
On February 8th, the Israeli cabinet approved a proposal to reinstate SOLT in the West Bank. The plan seeks to register 15% of currently unregistered land in Area C—the rural areas of the West Bank under both Israeli military and civilian control—within the next four years, with more to follow, and it allocates staff, funding, and an administrative unit to do so. The government “saw it worked in East Jerusalem, and now wants to do the same in Area C,” Yanovski explained. The cabinet decision thus opens the floodgates for organizations like the JNF to move forward and officially register the properties for which they have been building legal cases for years. Experts warn that the use of SOLT to register privately owned Palestinian land to Israelis, Jewish institutions, or the state, could result in the seizure of 58% of Area C, bringing the total of Israel-controlled territory in the area to over 80%. Areas between major Palestinian cities like Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin will likely be especially targeted in order to try and isolate the cities from one another.
As SOLT spreads across East Jerusalem and the West Bank, it continues to undermine and endanger what is left of historic Palestine. And while some Palestinians are boycotting the SOLT process, most residents know that registration will go on regardless of whether they participate, and that if they do not make a claim, they will likely be expelled. The Abu Tairs share this knowledge, along with a commitment to stay: Abid is erecting new buildings behind his house for his children’s families and relatives returning from abroad, and he promises “no one is going anywhere.” But they are not optimistic. “We’ll be kicked out, that’s what we expect,” Abid said. But, he added, “we’ll have to be dragged out of our houses to leave. Who’s going to leave? Where would we go?”
Photo on frontpage: The neighborhood of Umm Tuba, with Palestinian towns around Bethlehem in the background, April 2026. Source: Yahel Gazit. Photo on this page: Yousef Abu Tair’s home in Umm Tuba, April 2026. Source: Yahel Gazit.
