Mawat

Summary

The Ottoman land category of waste land or land that nobody owned, which The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People identifies as the principal legal basis for expropriating Bedouin land in the Naqab: Naqab land was classified as mawat and uncultivated, and, if more than 1.5 miles from the nearest permanent base (Beersheba), therefore belonged to no one (The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People, PDF p.13-15 / printed p.93-95, note 53).

Under the 1858 Ottoman land code as note 53 gives it, waste land or land nobody owned was categorised as mawat; the codes were enacted in the nineteenth century to encourage registration, but the Ottomans did not enforce them on the Bedouin or ask them to pay taxes (PDF p.15, note 53).
Israel continued the argument through the British ordinance of 1921 (‘the mawat law’), claiming the Bedouin either did not own land or had not cultivated it, and to this day that they cannot produce Ottoman or British documents — though many Bedouin have provided both (PDF p.15).
Set against the classification in the work: continuous Bedouin cultivation under Ottoman and British rule, the January 1947 Khalasa report, land tax collected by the British and by Israel in 1950/1951 on the same disputed land, and the 1952 Weitz committee’s admission that Bedouin ownership could not be denied (PDF p.16-17).
Lord Oxford’s testimony is that the British had no registration system in Beersheba at all and accepted traditional collective tribal ownership (PDF p.15-16).

tags
aliases