Yossi Katz, The Land Shall Not Be Sold in Perpetuity: The Jewish National Fund and the History of State Ownership of Land in Israel, (De Gruyter-Oldenbourg, Berlin, 2016), 237 pp.

The ownership, zoning, and future development of land have been a major issue in the Arab conflict with Zionism and have contributed to Arab rejection of the State of Israel over the years. In an essay published May 15, 2013,¹ the sixty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel, journalist Dalia Hatuqa of Al Jazeera remarked that “the issue of land and property, is still the defining aspect of the conflict.” In fact, in the late 1950s, Al-Ard (“The Land”) was the name of an Arab political movement in Israel and its newspaper. Both the movement and the paper were banned in 1964. Briefly, Arab propaganda claims that European Jews sought to “take over Arab land” and decided “to colonize the land of Palestine” and that Jews are a foreign power that “divided up another people’s land”.

The review article by historian Diana Muir which appeared in 2008 inadvertently reinforces this view.² Muir notes that Israel Zangwill was the first Zionist who used the phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land,” often repeated by anti-Zionists as an example of a “perfect encapsulation of the fundamental injustice of Zionism.” However, variant versions of the slogan appear in earlier works, such as The Land of Israel, written in 1843 by Church of Scotland clergyman Alexander Keith, and in a letter by Lord Shaftesbury to Lord Palmerston of July 1853, which stated that Greater Syria was “a country without a nation” in need of “a nation without a country.” Other examples include an essay by Scottish Presbyterian Horatius Bonar written in 1858, in William Blackstone’s “Palestine for the Jews,” which appeared in 1891, and in a novel by the English writer, Winifred, in 1902, and in the lead article of the Washington Post penned by a Christian journalist on December 12, 1917. Furthermore, the Biblical verse, Leviticus 25:23, occurs in land-related issues. It stipulates that the patrimony of the Jewish people, the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael), rightfully belongs to God and that “the land shall not be sold in perpetuity.” This verse became the foundational slogan of the Jewish National Fund, the organization founded by the Zionist movement, whose task was to purchase land in the historic Land of Israel on behalf of the Jewish people.

The Arab Badwil web site³ claims that the work of the Jewish National Fund and, subsequently, Israel’s legislation regarding the oversight of its activities are “attempt[s] to bypass legal oversight and to legislate against the right to equality in regards to land…the state [of Israel] will be able to ‘Judaize’ more land and discriminate against its non-Jewish citizens.” And, the late journalist, Dan Leon of Mapam, Israel’s Marxist-oriented Zionist party, wrote in 2005⁴ that the three major problems concerning the issue of land were: 1. “‘Redeeming’ [purchasing] the land before the establishment of the State of Israel was often at the expense of Arab fellahin.” 2. “After the 1948 war, it was the holdings of Arab refugees or of ‘present absentees’ (and not land purchases from the little blue boxes) that accounted for most of the JNF’s land.” 3. “The JNF undertook projects with dubious moral overtones.” He also was upset that Himnuta, the JNF subsidiary implementing the organization’s policies, is active in areas taken by Israel in the Six-Day War in June 1967 as well.

In light of the above, the book on the workings of the Jewish National Fund by the eminent and prolific geographer and 2016 Israel Prize Laureate, Professor Yossi Katz of Bar Ilan University, is timely and important. The Land Shall Not Be Sold in Perpetuity provides much essential information about the activities of the Jewish National Fund, particularly after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. This is a major shortcoming. Perhaps the author could have devoted more attention to the pre-State activities of the JNF, which served as the instrument of the World Zionist Organization for purchasing land during the late Ottoman period. Indeed, he JNF was officially established in 1901 as a “fund [that] shall be the property of the Jewish people as a whole,” in accordance with the concept of the inalienability of national land mentioned in Leviticus 25:23, quoted above. In fact, Israel is the only Western country where most of the land is owned by the state and its public body. In fact, as early as page 12, Professor Katz begins his treatment of the transition period from Mandate to state from 1947-1949, and addresses the Arab claim of dispossession dealt with at length by Aryeh Avineri.⁵ The full details of property acquired through purchase appear only in Footnote 4 on page 34. Indeed, the book seems to be a continuation of Katz’s earlier work, published in 2005, which covers the history of pre-state land acquisition by the JNF.⁶ The present volume deals mainly with the details of internal deliberations, political maneuverings, and legislative procedures of the JNF. Based upon archival sources, this study is highly academic and background on the issues is recommended.

Furthermore, Yossi Katz is not simply an objective scholar (127). He served as an expert witness before Knesset committees and other bodies to lobby against government efforts to privatize state lands and even published articles supporting the position of the JNF. This should have been stated earlier in the book. The questions of proper administration, compliance with the law and the confrontation between the JNF’s ideology of the land belonging to the Jewish people and the State of Israel as opposed to private ownership is a motif throughout this study. The book traces the history of the intimate involvement of JNF staff and members of the Knesset in formulating various laws about land ownership. Katz’s analysis of the JNF and Knesset records is excellent as far as the goals, language and political manoeuvers adopted by the JNF to further its interests are concerned. The book, however, does not provide sufficient treatment of the issue of selling JNF land to non-Jews or those who are not citizens of Israel. The author refers to statements by David Ben-Gurion and includes several arguments by Herut members of the Knesset, but does not recall Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s major article, “The Jubilee Idea” (1930) which served as the ideological basis for the Herut movement’s policy regarding ownership of land. To his credit, the author notes the ideas of Zionists who were not members of the Labor movement, such as the Mizrachi (National-Religious) MK Zerach Warhaftig (110).

Katz also points out the fact that early on, there had to be legislation which defined new territory as the British Mandate had become the State of Israel. The language of this legislation, dating from in 1952, defined the new company that would replace the original JNF which was registered by Great Britain as “the State of Israel and any region that will be under the legal authority of the Government of Israel” ( 20). The rejection of a recent attempt by a Canadian Jew to have Canada boycott wines produced in Judea and Samaria echoes the above statement which defined the territory of Israel in the official Free Trade Agreement between the two countries is “the territory where its customs laws are applied.” The reason for this language was the possible loss of JNF property left in areas of the original Mandate territory outside the borders of the State of Israel. It included 16,666 dunams near E-Salt in Transjordan, 3,300 near Hebron and 1,200 near Gaza. Interestingly, Katz notes that in 1949 the Government of Israel intended to transfer abandoned Arab property to the JNF for the purpose of resettling Arab refugees (35).

The book is well written and the translation and adaptation from the original Hebrew, published in 2002, is excellent, with only several examples of awkward phrasing. On the whole, the book is an important contribution to the subject of the concept of Jewish land and the workings of the JNF in the State of Israel, and worth reading despite its somewhat narrow focus.

* * *

Notes

More than anything else, Israel’s survival requires intellectual supremacy. Though difficult to measure, such supremacy is necessary to preserving the country’s tactical and strategic advantages. Although generally overlooked, superior weapons technologies could never be adequate per se. Looking ahead, especially after Donald Trump’s conspicuously false peace, these technologies could confer only partial and temporary benefits.

There are many explanatory details. Even with its presumptive nuclear monopoly in the Middle East, Israel will need to optimize IDF military advantage in every sector of operations. On prospectively urgent matters concerning war with Iran and its reconfiguring jihadi surrogates, Israel will have to clarify that its military assets are purposeful at all levels of destructiveness. This includes an evident capacity to achieve “escalation dominance” in extremis.

For the moment, the most plausible paths to a renewed Israel-Iran war – one in which Iran remained non-nuclear – would involve unpredictable escalations against Islamic Republic surrogates. At some conceivable point during such an escalating conflict, a not-yet-nuclear Iran could elicit “limited” Israeli nuclear responses. While such responses could be made consistent with authoritative international law,[1] their cumulative effects would be destabilizing for friend and foe alike.

Notably worrisome escalation dangers would lie in any Iranian use of radiation-dispersal weapons and/or Iranian conventional attack on Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. In a worst-case scenario, an already-nuclear North Korea would engage Israeli military forces on behalf of Iran. In such an under-examined but still-credible scenario, North Korea would operate as an “equalizing” nuclear state proxy for non-nuclear Iran.

Historically, at least, this is not a contrived scenario. North Korea engaged militarily with Israeli forces in the past, most visibly during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Back on October 31 2024, Pyongyang successfully completed missile tests demonstrating ICBM capacities against the United States. Israel, for targeting comparisons, is less than half the size of America’s Lake Michigan.

For Jerusalem, there are immediately important specifics to identify. By definition, all imaginable scenarios would be unprecedented or sui generis. This means, among other things, that related and derivative predictions could never express anything more than “quasi-scientific” judgments. In formal logic, it ought not to be overlooked, all assessments of probability must stem from a determinable frequency of relevant past events.

There has never been such an event. There has never been a genuine nuclear war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not elements of a nuclear war. More precisely, these mass-destruction events represented singular atomic attacks within a conventional war.

Even if Iran were to remain pre-nuclear, Jerusalem could at some stage calculate that it would be gainful to cross the nuclear combat “firebreak.” This high-stakes scenario would concern intra-crisis bargaining wherein the non-introduction of Israeli nuclear weapons could allow Iran to gain the upper hand. Accordingly, during an eleventh-hour existential crisis, Israel could decide to “go nuclear” at conspicuously limited levels to establish or maintain “escalation dominance.”

Prima facie, these are weighty analytic matters. They are not in any fashion matters of ordinary politics or “common sense.” In such challenging matters, common sense is the beguiling enemy of science and logic. Looking ahead, arcane matters of nuclear war and nuclear peace ought never to be left to politicians, generals or pundits.

For Israel, like it or not, nuclear weapons and deterrence remain essential to national survival. Jerusalem’s traditional policy of deliberate nuclear ambiguity or “bomb in the basement” goes back to early days of the state. During the 1950s, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, understood the need for a dramatic “equalizer” vis-à-vis larger and more populous regional enemies. For “BG,” those original enemies were Arab states, primarily Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Today, after Trump’s dangerously false peace, exceptional perils could come from Arab Qatar, but also from non-Arab Pakistan and Turkey.

What next for the Jewish State? Still facing an intransigent and potentially nuclear Iran, Israel will need to update and refine its posture of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity.” The key objective of such enhancements would be credible nuclear deterrence, a goal requiring prompt policy shifts to “selective nuclear disclosure.” Though counter-intuitive, Iran and certain other adversaries will need to be convinced that Israel’s nuclear arms are not too destructive for operational military use.

There will be perplexing nuances. For Israel to fashion reason-based nuclear policies, Iran’s leaders should generally be considered “rational.” Still, it is conceivable that Iran would sometime act irrationally, perhaps in alliance with other generally rational states like North Korea and/or jihadi terror groups. In the case of North Korea, waging an actual and direct war would be more challenging for Israel than any conflict with Iran.

In the Middle East, Israel currently has no nuclear state enemies. But Pakistan, as an increasingly unstable Islamic state, is subject to coup d’état by jihadi elements and is closely aligned with both Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Sunni Saudi kingdom could sometime decide to “go nuclear,” not because of Israel per se, but in response to reasonable fears of Shiite Iran’s nuclear progress. This consequential decision could be reinforced by parallel or coinciding nuclear decisions in Egypt or non-Arab Turkey.

Facing the dissembling results of a “Trump Peace,” Israel needs to place less faith in “common sense” than in science. Above all, it needs more consistent faith in disciplined and refined strategic reasoning. Such reasoning will have to be logic-based and continuously dialectical. In principle, at least, its creators should approach J. Robert Oppenheimer or Yuval Ne’eman[2] intellectual status. A tall order, to be sure, but compelling nonetheless.

For Israeli nuclear deterrence to work longer-term, Iran and other potential state foes should be told more rather than less about IDF nuclear targeting doctrine and the invulnerability/penetration-capability of its nuclear forces. In concert with such major changes, Jerusalem will have to substantially clarify certain core elements of its still too-opaque “Samson Option.” The point of such clarifications would be not to “die with the Philistines” (per the biblical Book of Judges), but to enhance “high destruction” options on Israel’s strategic deterrence continuum.

Though the only purposeful rationale of Israel’s nuclear weapons should be viable deterrence at variable levels of military destructiveness, there will always remain circumstances under which Israel’s nuclear deterrent could fail. How might such prospectively intolerable circumstances arise? It’s not a hypothetical question. A comprehensive answer could be extrapolated from four basic conflict scenarios or narratives. Most plausibly, these narratives would be a “by-product” of Israel’s re-started war against Hamas and associated jihadi forces or the result of a re-started direct belligerency between Israel and Iran.

There is more. All such narratives could be impacted, modified or changed by anti-Israel interventions of Russia and/or North Korea. By definition, such game-changing interventions would remove Israel’s ongoing advantages regarding “escalation dominance” and render more realistic the specter of an Iranian-jihadist victory. Because such narratives would be historically unique, however, it would be impossible for Jerusalem to make any science-based judgments of probability. Here, intellectual supremacy would remain the source of all durable Israeli power, strategic and tactical, but still could not represent an absolute assurance of national survival. In all of these scenarios, nothing could be predictable except unpredictability.

(1)Nuclear Retaliation

If Iran or other enemy state were to launch a massive conventional attack against Israel, Jerusalem could ultimately/incrementally escalate to a limited nuclear retaliation. If adversarial first-strikes were to involve chemical or biological weapons, electromagnetic weapons (EMP) or radiation-dispersal weapons, Israel could immediately or incrementally launch a calibrated nuclear reprisal. This decision would depend, in large but unspecifiable measure, on Jerusalem’s expectations concerning follow-on aggression and comparative damage-limitation. A nuclear retaliation by Israel could be ruled out only in those circumstances where enemy state aggressions were conventional and “hard-target” oriented; that is, aimed toward Israeli weapons and military infrastructures and not involving Israel’s civilian populations. Foreseeably, there are residual circumstances wherein Israel could judge limited nuclear weapons use to be rational, lawful and cost-effective.

(2)Nuclear Counter Retaliation

If Israel should feel compelled to preempt enemy state aggression with conventional weapons, that belligerent state’s response would determine Israel’s escalatory moves. If this response were in any way nuclear, including “only” radiological weapons, Israel would likely turn to correlative forms of nuclear counter-retaliation. If this enemy retaliation were to involve other non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction or mass disruption (e.g., EMP weapons), Israel could still feel compelled to take enhanced escalatory initiatives. Assuming rational decision-making, this vital decision would depend on Jerusalem’s considered judgments of adversarial intent and its timely calculations of damage-limitation.

If the enemy state response to Israel’s preemption were limited to hard-target conventional strikes, it is unlikely that Israel’s decision-makers would move toward nuclear counter-retaliations. If, however, the adversary’s conventional retaliation was “all-out” and directed in whole or in part toward Israeli civilian populations, an Israeli nuclear counter-retaliation could not be excluded. Such counter-retaliation could be ruled out decisively only if the enemy conventional retaliation were presumptively proportionate to Israel’s preemption; confined to Israeli military targets; circumscribed by codified legal limits of “proportionality” and “military necessity;” and accompanied by variously persuasive assurances of non-escalatory intent.

(3)Nuclear Preemption

It is highly unlikely that Israel would ever decide to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Iran or other state enemy. Though circumstances could arise wherein such a strike would appear rational in strategy and permissible in law, it is still implausible that Israel would allow itself to reach such “end-of-the-line” circumstances. An Israeli nuclear preemption could be expected only where Iran or other adversary had (a) acquired authentic (chain-reaction) nuclear and/or other weapons of mass destruction; (b) clarified that its intentions paralleled its capabilities; and (c) was believed ready to begin a “countdown to launch.” Also incentivizing would be belief by Jerusalem that exclusively conventional preemptions could no longer be consistent with preservation of the Jewish State.

(4)Nuclear War Fighting

If nuclear weapons should ever be introduced into a conflict between Israel and an enemy state, some form of nuclear war fighting would ensue. This would hold true so long as: (a) enemy first-strikes would not destroy Israel’s second-strike nuclear capability; (b) enemy retaliations for an Israeli conventional preemption would not destroy Israel’s nuclear counter-retaliatory capability; (c) Israeli preemptive strikes involving nuclear weapons would not destroy enemy second-strike nuclear capabilities; and (d) Israeli retaliation for conventional first-strikes would not destroy enemy nuclear counter-retaliatory capability. For the time being, at least, any adversarial nuclear capacity without Russian, North Korean or Pakistani backup would be limited to radiation dispersal weapons and/or conventional rocket attacks against Dimona.

Summing up, Jerusalem’s overriding security focus should remain fixed on enemy state capabilities and intentions, but ought also to include variously coinciding intersections with state and sub-state surrogates. The Iran/jihadi threat to Israel is not “just” an isolable terror threat, tactical threat or strategic threat, but a multi-dimensional peril that could at some point trigger nuclear warfare with Iran.[3] As for the incendiary warnings still blaring from Tehran, acting to fulfil such threats without tangible Russian/North Korean/Pakistani assistance would plausibly be more injurious to Iran than to Israel.

This logic-based conclusion is likely well-understood by authoritative leadership elements in Tehran et. al., and Israel will seemingly retain the upper hand in future struggles for “escalation dominance.” To best ensure that this Israeli advantage remains continuous and undiminished, Israel should promptly (1) declare credible shifts from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” to “selective nuclear disclosure;” and (2) reveal the most potentially persuasive contours of its “Samson Option.” Among other things, both remedies should be oriented not to actual nuclear war-fighting, but rather to advantage-based postures of nuclear war-avoidance.

More than anything else, Israel’s survival will require intellectual supremacy.

LOUIS RENÉ BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). Born in Zürich at the end of World War II, he is the author of many books, monographs, and articles dealing with Israeli nuclear strategy. Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, he has lectured on this topic for over fifty years at leading universities and academic centers for strategic studies. Dr. Beres’ twelfth book, Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: Surviving amid Chaos, was published in 2016 (2^nd ed., 2018).  https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy

Professor Beres is the author of seven lead articles at Oxford University Press’ annual publication: Oxford Yearbook on International Law and Jurisprudence. In 2003-2004, he was Chair of Israel’s “Project Daniel” (Iranian nuclear weapons/PM Ariel Sharon). Beres was an early recipient of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Rabinowitch Prize.

[1] No state, including Israel, is under legal obligation to renounce “militarily necessary” uses of nuclear force in extremis. On July 8, 1996, the International Court of Justice at The Hague (ICJ) handed down its Advisory Opinion on “The Legality of the Threat or Use of Force of Nuclear Weapons.” The final paragraph of this Opinion, concludes, inter alia: “The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law. However, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”

[2] The present writer, Professor Louis René Beres, was a long-time acquaintance and colleague of Professor Ne’eman.

[3] For specialized accounts by this author of nuclear war effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). More recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018).