Comment by dotancohen
2 years ago
You might want to note that the rulers of the holy land at the time that you are referring to specifically enacted laws to encourage settling the nearly-empty holy land. Ottoman law since the 1850's stated that anyone who settles land (houses, farms, factories) owns it - Muslims and Jews and Christians alike.
You'll also note that League of Nations (and UN) mandates can not change the laws of the lands they administer - then can only issue temporary orders (usually limited to three years). So British orders are not valid in the holy land today. Likewise, military occupation (Jordanian, Israeli) also can not change the laws but rather can issue temporary orders. So the law of the land in the West Bank even today remains Ottoman law, modulo "temporary" Israeli military orders that are actually renews (for the most part) every three years or so.
> You'll also note that League of Nations (and UN) mandates can not change the laws of the lands they administer - then can only issue temporary orders (usually limited to three years). So British orders are not valid in the holy land today
I don't know where you are getting this from, it isn't true. The League of Nations Palestine Mandate [0] granted the UK "full powers of legislation and of administration, save as they may be limited by the terms of this mandate" (Article 1). You will not find any limitation preventing them from making permanent laws within it.
The UK imposed its own legal system on the Mandate, as Article 1 allowed. It ended up mostly abolishing Ottoman law, although it retained it in certain areas (especially family law, inheritance, religious affairs and real estate). The laws it imposed were not necessarily those of the metropolitan UK – the criminal code was largely copied from colonial India. The starting point of Israeli law is Israel's decision at the time of independence to continue the British Mandate's legal system, until such time as the Knesset decided to alter things. It wasn't until 1977, for example, that Israel completely replaced the British-imposed penal code with its own. Palestinian law has the same fundamental starting point, although with the added complexity of being overlaid with Egyptian and Jordanian legislation (in Gaza and the West Bank, respectively), and then a mixture of Israeli and Palestinian legislation laid on top of that.
[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Palestine_Mandate_(1922)
Thank you. You are correct, I did not want to make an already-complicated matter more complicated for purpose of discussion, as the relevant part (real estate) remained Ottoman.
Thanks.
As far as I’m aware, the reason why the UK retained Ottoman real estate law in Mandatory Palestine was pragmatic rather than due to any international obligation that they do so-all the existing land titles were based on Ottoman law, changing them to a different system of real estate law would have involved a lot of work for little practical benefit, so the British decided to leave the existing Ottoman system in place. But, if they’d felt strongly enough about it, they could have done otherwise
You might want to read the wikipedia article linked as a citation in my original comment.
The demographic numbers I cited came straight from that wikipedia article, and they do not agree with your "nearly-empty" claim.
Actually, the article supports my statement. Before the laws encouraging immigration with no regard to ethnicity, there were 275,000 people living in the area. After, 532,000 people.