The Ghost of Jordan: Why Israel is Finally Getting Rid of the 1953 Property Law
Why international law does not require Israel to act as a trustee for the discriminatory relics of an illegitimate occupant.
On Sunday, the Israeli cabinet made a series of decisions facilitating Israeli land acquisition and development in Judea and Samaria. Among the decisions is the annulment of a Jordanian-era law barring Jews from purchasing property in the area.
According to Amendment 40 of the 1953 Leasing and Sale of Immovable Property to Foreigners Law, non-Jordanian and non-Palestinian citizens or residents are prohibited from buying property in Judea and Samaria. Article 4 of the Law specifically allows foreigners of Arab origin to purchase property with the authorization of the Jordanian ministerial committee.
Under the Israeli military administration, authority over property transactions was transferred from the Council of Ministers to the Head of the Israeli Civil Administration. This created a tiered system for land acquisition: Jordanian and Palestinian nationals may acquire land without any special permits. Individuals of Arab origin who are not residents may purchase property for residential or professional use anywhere, provided they obtain a transaction permit. In contrast, non-Arab foreigners are restricted to urban areas and must also secure a permit. While foreign corporations were initially barred from trading in real estate, a 1971 military order amended the law. Today, foreign companies registered within the Judea and Samaria Companies Registry are eligible for permits to acquire land for commercial and trade purposes, not just personal use. (See Vinitzky, 97-98)
These restrictions in Judea and Samaria result in a disparate impact on non-Arab Israeli (ie, Jewish) purchasers. Unlike Palestinian residents who enjoy unrestricted land acquisition rights or individuals of Arab heritage who can hold title directly via a permit, non-Arab Israelis are prohibited from individual private registration in rural or non-urban areas. To acquire such property, they are legally required to establish a corporate entity registered with the Civil Administration and secure specific transaction approvals. Although these restrictive measures are phrased as general regulations for all foreign nationals, they disproportionately affect the Jewish public, who represent the most significant demographic of external buyers interested in the region’s real estate market.
While Israel rejects the de jure application of the laws of belligerent occupation to the territory, it largely adheres to them de facto. The laws of belligerent occupation require the occupying power to maintain the legal framework of the occupied territory, except in cases of security or other necessities.
According to Article 43 of the 1907 Hague Conventions:
"The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.
Article 64 of the Fourth Geneva Convention expands on this and states that:
"The penal laws of the occupied territory shall remain in force, with the exception that they may be repealed or suspended by the Occupying Power in cases where they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the present Convention."
These sources demonstrate that the obligation to maintain the legal status quo is not absolute.
Furthermore, Jordan, between 1948 and 1967, was an illegitimate occupant of the territory. The invasion was aimed at preventing the implementation of the United Nations General Assembly Partition Resolution. It is unclear why Israel, more than five decades later, must protect Jordan’s supposedly sovereign right in Judea and Samaria.
The Jordanian occupation was characterized by anti-Jewish and discriminatory policies. Following the 1948 War, Jordan expelled 17,000 Jews from the territories that it had conquered and destroyed a dozen Jewish communities. Despite explicit provisions in the 1949 Armistice Agreements intended to guarantee access to holy sites, Jordan refused to implement these clauses, effectively from the Old City and the Western Wall. This exclusion was enforced through strict visa requirements, where tourists were often forced to provide baptismal certificates or proof of non-Jewish identity to enter. Beyond the denial of access, the period was marked by physical erasure: the Jewish residents of East Jerusalem were expelled, and the Jewish Quarter was largely decimated. Religious landmarks were targeted with particular severity, as 34 of the Old City’s 35 synagogues were dynamited or repurposed as stables and chicken coops. This disregard for sanctity extended to the Mount of Olives, where ancient gravestones were uprooted to be used as paving stones, construction materials, and even flooring for Jordanian military latrines.
The history of occupation, from WWII until the present, shows that occupiers often refuse to maintain laws that are considered odious or illegitimate. Regarding the post-Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Melissa Patterson writes (469-470):
“There is no ousted authority returning to Iraq; the very purpose of the Coalition invasion was to raze Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, which reputedly had been responsible for violations of disarmament duties and the human rights of Iraqi citizens. The Coalition could not even rely on the dubious proposition of reinstalling an exiled authority, as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom’s M16 did in returning Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power as Shah of Iran in the 1953 coup d’etat. There was no exiled Iraqi government, legitimate or otherwise, to reinstall.
Moreover, in Iraq there were no authorities with whom the Coalition forces had any intention of cooperating. High-ranking members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist party were emblazoned on playing cards in order to facilitate their capture, and Saddam Hussein himself was the subject of an eight-month manhunt that generated pictures trumpeting the Coalition forces’ triumph and left the deposed dictator awaiting trial. Civil society apart from the Ba’athist regime was virtually nonexistent. Thus, occupation law’s mandate to preserve existing government structures by cooperation with the previous government’s authorities was an impossibility in post-invasion Iraq and could have been recognized as such even pre-invasion.”
In the case of Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) engaged in a radical restructuring of the state. This transformative approach was signaled by the immediate issuance of CPA Order No. 1, which disestablished the Ba’ath Party, and Order No. 2, which abolished the country’s existing security and military infrastructure. These moves aimed to purge the administrative landscape of the previous regime’s influence. The CPA fundamentally altered Iraq’s economic character through Order No. 3, which removed discriminatory nationality-based restrictions on business ownership, opening Iraqi companies to foreign investors regardless of Arab citizenship. The CPA set out to de-Bathasize Iraqi society and state.
Similarly, the post-2001 mission in Afghanistan intended to replace a primitive dictatorship with a liberal democracy. Central to this transformation was the 2004 Constitution, which attempted the complex task of aligning Islamic principles with international human rights standards. This foundational shift was most visible in the codification of gender equality under Article 22 and the subsequent 2009 Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW), which criminalized deeply entrenched traditional practices like child marriage and the settling of disputes through the exchange of women. To ensure these changes were structural rather than merely rhetorical, the occupiers instituted electoral quotas reserving 25% of parliamentary seats for women and reformed the Criminal Procedure Code to prioritize formal state justice over summary religious punishments.
In light of the above, Israel is under no obligation to maintain Jordanian-era anti-Jewish legislation. The recent cabinet decision is a long-overdue step towards normalizing civil life for all of the region’s inhabitants, both Jews and Arabs.
In other words, for 77 years, Judea and Samaria have been under a system of apartheid, where noncitizen Arabs have enjoyed personal property rights which have been denied to Jewish Israeli citizens. Do I have this right?