The New York Times · 1 April 1985

CP-1985-037

Israel Said to Seize Control Over 52% Of West Bank Land

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, Special to The New York Times

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM, March 31 — The Israeli Government has seized direct or indirect control of 52 percent of the land on the occupied West Bank, according to an authoritative study issued today.

The study is entitled “Land Alienation in the West Bank: A Legal and Spatial Analysis” and was produced by the West Bank Data Base Project, headed by a former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti.

The study contends that the Israeli Government has assumed effective control over more than half of the West Bank and that it has monopolized virtually all the growth potential in the occupied territory for Jewish use. It also maintains that the Government has accomplished this through questionable legal tactics.

“The study gives an up-to-date picture on how far Israeli land expropriation on the West Bank has gone,” Mr. Benvenisti said in an interview. “The Israeli Government has used every legal ruse to gain control of the land. Virtually all of the Arab land that can be confiscated has been confiscated.

The Jewish settlers are now left with all of the growth potential on the West Bank and the Arabs solely with that land that they have cultivated.” Mr.

Benvenisti’s research, which is financed by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, is generally considered by both Arabs and Israelis to be the most authoritative and exhaustive on the West Bank and is quoted by both proponents and opponents of the Israeli

How this transcription was made

Transcribed from the slide scan by a reader working off magnified crops, not by optical character recognition. The newspaper is printed on the page, in the credit line “Special to The New York Times” set beneath the byline. The scan is the lower part of a front page and no masthead or folio survives on it, so the date is derived from three things printed on the fragment: the dateline “JERUSALEM, March 31”, the INSIDE index listing “SportsMonday”, the section the paper ran on Mondays, and a reference in an adjoining column to Walter F. Mondale as the 1984 Presidential candidate. 1 April 1985 was a Monday. The fragment also carries a photograph of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon with its own Reuters caption and the tail of an unrelated story; neither belongs to the article transcribed here.

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