On Land Day and Jewish Laws of Land Seizure - 3/31/2024

Hello everyone, and thank you for coming to our community kaddish. Today marks the 176th day of the on going genocide in Gaza. As of yesterday, according to al Jazeera close to 33,000 people have been killed and over 75,000 have been injured in Gaza. More than 8,000 people are missing and the state of famine and starvation and illness grows more tragic and desperate day after day.

While we focus on Gaza because of the sheer level of horror, we must also mention the devastation in the West Bank. Since October 7th, over 450 people have been killed including 116 children. Thousands have been kidnapped without charges and are being held in prisons with brutal conditions.

We have also been seeing reports that the West Bank is experiencing the largest theft of land since 1993.  On March 22nd, Bezalel Smoltrich, the Israeli far right finance minister, announced the seizure of 10 square kilometers in the West Bank. That is about 6.2 square miles, which is the size of the city of Geneva Switzerland. Though illegal land seizures have been increasingly common by the Israeli government and settlers, it has escalated in intensity over the past years. And since October 7th, the Israelis have seized a total of 10 square miles of land in the West Bank. This is the same size as Berkeley California, which is the 16th biggest US city by land mass. 

Over the decades, these land grabs have chopped the West Bank into small, segmented communities where the Israelis bar Palestinians from traveling outside of or between villages safely or at all. Though the land seizures have been deemed completely illegal by the UN, they keep happening, and millions of American dollars pour into these settlements. Palestinians have resisted these settlements since their beginning and continue to to this day.

On March 30th, 1976, the IOF ordered a land seizure of 7.7 square miles, the size of ½ of Manhattan or 3,000 soccer fields. Six unarmed Palestinas were killed and more than 100 Palestinans were injured by the IOF while protesting the theft of their land. This day is commemorated every year - it is called Yom al-Ard or Land Day. Every year, Palestinians mark this day by holding protests and vigils and plant olive trees to reaffirm their connection to the land. These are often met with force. 

I wanted to see if Jewish text had anything to say on the matter of land theft, especially knowing that so much of the talmudic and post talmudic text really is about law and implementation of it. First, let’s look at the original source material, the Torah. 

The book of Leviticus is the part of the Torah that details many of the laws given to us by God (at least as the story goes). In Leviticus (chapter 5, verses 21-22) we read: When a person sins and commits a sin to god by dealing deceitfully with another in the matter of  a deposit or pledge or through robbery or by defrauding another, or anything else about which one swore falsely, that person shall pray the principal amount and add a fifth part to it. One shall pay its worth upon realizing guilt. 

So in this first piece of text, we are told that we, and by we I mean people who follow Torah and its commandments, are required to pay a sort of reparations if we steal something or defraud someone. In addition to having to deal with the material consequences of our action, we also are sinning against God in our theft and have to deal with that spiritually. 

So how did the rabbis think about implementing this law? For those that don’t exactly know what Talmud is, and I know it is a term I have used several times over the past months, it is a series of thousands of discussions that rabbis had and then wrote down. The rabbis would take the original text of the Torah, and debate how exactly to turn it into law. In their discussions, they always gave priority to the exact words of the Torah and then built additional rules so that it would be harder to violate the core commandments in the Torah. So the way that the books of Talmud are structured is as follows: the rabbis recap a verse from the Torah and talk about it in an iterative way. They sometimes come to a consensus, and sometimes they don’t. We as Jews are then supposed to follow what the rabbis decided. And so, I wanted to see how exactly the rabbis thought of these verses that we just talked about. 

Rabbi Elizar, a rabbi in the first century CE had this to say in the talmudic book Baba Kama, which is the book of Talmud that really expands on Jewish property laws. He said: One person should repay another and make restitution when they steal or otherwise acquire an object through deceit. Land is just like any other object and can be replaced by payment. The other way that he interpreted this quote was to say that the laws in Leviticus only cover “movable property” (ie. can be picked up and moved). Only movable property can be replaced by a payment and since land is not movable property, it cannot be replaced. 

So what do we take from his statements? I interpret this to mean that since land cannot be replaced, and that since the Torah requires us to make restitution if we do steal, we are required by Jewish law not to steal land because it is not something we can make any kind of restitution over. We cannot take land in deceit because there is no way to make up for our sins and transgressions.

To bring in another piece of text, I want to fast forward about one thousand years. Rashi, one of the foremost Jewish commentators who lived in France during the 10th century, had this to say in the Talmud Book of Sukkot page 30b:1: But land cannot be stolen: That is to say, the thief cannot acquire it through despair, for it will alway be in the possession of its original owner. 

In this quote, it is very clear that Rashi, who really is held up as one of the most important and influential rabbis in Jewish study, makes it very clear that if land is taken through despair. He is agreeing with his predecessors that land cannot be stolen. Land can be given or traded, but if there is any kind of theft, deceit or harm to the original owners, land cannot be transferred. 

I’d say, it is pretty easy to understand that Judaism thinks that land theft is bad and it is not permissible under law. When these highly orthodox and supposedly pious people, like Bezalel Smoltrich, encourage land seizure, I find myself really confused and angered. They live in a fantasy world where they are under the assumption that Jews have always been on the land of Palestine and are indigenous to the area. To which I say, there is no way that this can be true.

In their conquest of Palestine, the Israelis have caused irreparable damage to the land. They have ripped out olive trees that Palestinians have tended to for hundreds, even thousands of years. They pollute the land with development and chemical weapons and bombings. There are even efforts where organizations like the Jewish National Fund have Jews from all over the world plant trees all over Israel. These trees are not native to the land and have caused massive forest fires. 

Indigenous people do not treat their land like this. Palestinians have spent hundreds and thousands of years stewarding their land and understanding how to live and work with it. Which is why, it seems clear to me that the people who are and have been encouraging and conducting Palestinian land theft have become so detached from Judaism that they refuse to reflect and understand what our very rich text has to say. I feel like it is pretty clear that Jewish text would find the actions of the Israeli government and its Occupations actions to be completely illegal. And yet, people like Nitanyahu, Smoltritch, Ben Gavir and the other members of this regime also continue to promote violent land seizure and complete ecocide in the name of Judaism. 

Of course, there is so much to mourn. The Israeli government and military have killed thousands of people, and wiped out entire lineages of people. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy and these people are all more than numbers. They are people who had lives, and loved ones and had dreams and aspirations. We also need to mourn the devastation that the Israeli government and military have wrought onto the land. The destruction and seizure of orchards, farms, grazing land and gardens. This is also devastating and horrific. In their land seizures, the Israeli government, and the Settlers they empower, terrorize Palestinians with ancestral claims to the land and take this land in deceit and despair. Just as we mourn the mass killing of Palestinians, we must also pay attention, mourn and also fight back against the continued colonization of Palestinian land.