Registering Dispossession: The Legal Architecture of Palestinian Land Confiscation and Erasure
By: Dana Abuqamar *
“A land without a people, for a people without a land.” Zionist texts are often littered with such slogans,[1] deployed in furtherance of Israel’s propagandist mission of attaching legitimacy to its ethnocratic and inhumane project. This piece situates the particular phrase in the context of modern developments with respect to the “Zionist project’s continued presence in the Holy Land”. While its literal interpretation has been long debunked, the slogan’s colonialist underpinnings remain unscathed, repeatedly driving Israel’s policies of Palestinian dispossession and echoing the logic of the civilising mission captured in Winston Churchill’s infamous description of Palestinians’ roots in the land: “I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time.” [2]
This blog post examines recent legislative developments in Israel concerning Palestinian land and situates them within the broader framework of Israel’s policies towards Palestinian territory and its annexation practices since the Nakba of 1948. This includes developments in Area C of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and policies affecting the Indigenous Palestinian population within Israel itself.
Against this backdrop, the blog argues that Israel’s legal construction of Palestinian private lands as state land functions as a colonial spatial mechanism designed to sustain and legitimise ongoing domination over Palestinian lands across historic Palestine. As such, the article concludes that law, within this settler-colonial context, law does not function as a neutral mechanism merely regulating space; rather, it actively produces it, serving as a tool for reshaping the demographic composition in ways that consolidate territorial control, facilitate settlement expansion, and enable the gradual but systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and the forced displacement of its people.
West Bank Land Registration: Infrastructure of Annexation
A key expression of this legal architecture emerged on 15 February 2026, when the Israeli government approved a mechanism of land registration in Area C of the illegally occupied West Bank. This area, home to 180,000-300,000 Palestinians and constituting almost 60% of the West Bank, remains subject to full Israeli control, both administrative and military. Presented as an administrative reform designed to systematise property rights, the registration mechanism carries significant implications for Palestinian private land ownership. It is designed to consolidate Israeli control over Palestinian land and facilitate de facto annexation, as stated by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who introduced the proposal underpinning this land registration mechanism and described it as part of a continuation of “the settlement revolution to control all our lands”.
The contemporary mechanism of land registration as a mechanism for annexation represents just one element of the Israeli legal framework aimed at dispossessing Palestinians of their property. It cannot be understood in isolation from the broader historical and legal architecture governing Palestinian property rights.
Historically, Palestinian land registration was codified in the Nüfus (Ottoman population registry) during the Ottoman rule, and thereafter in the British Mandate census data, followed by registration initiatives undertaken by the Jordanian government after the Nakba in 1948. After the Naksa, the 1967 war, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Israel halted the Jordanian land registration process, thereby preventing Palestinians from formally recording ownership of their property. This has resulted in only around one-third of the territory being officially registered. Over time, many of the remaining records or registration documents were lost, damaged, or destroyed, particularly in areas subjected to Israeli military operations during and after the 1967 war, creating structural gaps that now underpin the contemporary registration mechanism.
The 1967 war also marked the displacement of approximately 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank, in addition to those displaced during the 1948 Nakba. Palestinian refugees, systematically expelled from their lands upon the establishment of the Zionist project and subsequently prevented from returning in violation of international law, became part of a broader process in which forced displacement was transformed into a durable mechanism for the permanent transfer of land ownership and control to the Israeli state.
This trajectory is further entrenched by Israel’s Absentees’ Property Law of 1950, a key legal mechanism that perpetuates the events and consequences of the Nakba. The law grants Israeli occupation authorities the power to seize property belonging to Palestinians classified as ‘absentees’ – a category that includes individuals who were expelled or fled during the Nakba to neighbouring states or other parts of historic Palestine.
It is within this layered legal history that the February 2026 land registration mechanism must be situated. Theoretically, it allows Palestinians to file land registration claims. In practice, however, their ability to realise these ownership rights is severely limited, if not -for many- entirely non-existent.
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Registering Dispossession: The Legal Architecture of Palestinian Land Confiscation and Erasure
