Arabs Set To Buy Jewish Land

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

Three Jewish families in the Lower Galilee are set to sell their land to Arabs unless Zionists can come up with the money and offer a better deal. Israel Land Fund official Aryeh King said that the land involves 12 acres (50 dunam) of farmland at Moshav Ilaniya, located in a picturesque rural area near Kfar Tabor and between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Coast. "The Jewish families found the easiest way to make money and did not offer it to fellow Jews or to the state of Israel," said King, who was the first Jewish resident in the 1990s in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras al Amoud.



He said that the Arab Lawyers Organization Adalah intends to buy the land for 6,000 shekels ($1,700) an acre. The names of the Jewish families have been kept secret but will be made known if Jewish buyers can offer them more money.



Adalah activists have been involved with demanding that the Jewish National Fund sell land to Arabs and tried convince the Civil Lands Administration to overturn decision preventing Arab citizens from bequeathing their rights to state land to overseas family members who do not hold Israeli citizenship



King called on Likud Knesset whip Gidon Saar to push for Knesset legislation that would bar the sale of land to Arabs without allowing the State of Israel the opportunity to purchase it and keep the property in Jewish hands.



Statistics usually represent the Galilee as 50 percent Jewish and 50 percent Arab, but the figures include the Haifa metropolitan area, which accounts for most of the Jews.



The Lower Galilee, named because of its relative altitude when compared with the hills and mountains in the Tzfat area to the north, includes primarily rural farmland outside of the cities of Beit Shean and Afula and Arab cities and villages.



Kibbutzim and moshavim abound in the area, which once was plagued by malaria until pioneering Zionists and the Jewish National Fund drained mosquito-infested swamps.