In the spring of 2021, the world watched the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem become a flashpoint. Palestinian families — some of whom had lived in their homes since being displaced from West Jerusalem in 1948 — faced eviction orders issued by Israeli courts. The legal instrument used against them was a property claim lodged by settler organizations asserting Jewish ownership dating to the nineteenth century. The families’ own displacement, their UN-registered refugee status, their decades of residency under Jordanian and then Israeli administration: none of it carried equivalent legal weight in the same courtroom.
That disparity is not an accident of individual rulings. It is structural. A close examination of how Israeli civil and administrative courts handle Palestinian land claims — versus claims made by or on behalf of Jewish Israelis — reveals a legal architecture built on asymmetry.
The One-Way Restitution Mechanism in Sheikh Jarrah
The Sheikh Jarrah eviction cases turn on Israel’s Legal and Administrative Matters Law of 1970, which allows Jews to reclaim property held before 1948 in areas that came under Israeli control after the 1967 war — including East Jerusalem, annexed unilaterally by Israel in a move not recognized under international law. No reciprocal mechanism exists. Palestinian families expelled from West Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, or the hundreds of villages depopulated during the 1948 war — what Palestinians call the Nakba — have no legal avenue inside Israel to reclaim those properties.
The families at the center of the Sheikh Jarrah cases, including the Ghawi, Hanoun, and Shamasneh families, had documents establishing their residence agreements with UNRWA and the Jordanian government from the 1950s. Israeli courts, including the Jerusalem District Court and subsequently the Israeli Supreme Court (High Court of Justice, or HCJ), treated those documents as establishing tenancy, not ownership — and tenancy that could be terminated. The HCJ’s May 2021 intervention delayed but did not resolve the cases; it transferred the matter back to lower courts while urging a negotiated settlement, effectively leaving Palestinian families in prolonged legal limbo. Human Rights Watch documented the cases in detail in its 2021 report A Threshold Crossed, noting the discriminatory framework underpinning the proceedings.
The Israeli Supreme Court and the Limits of Palestinian Petitions
Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel — maintains a database of discriminatory laws in Israel and has litigated hundreds of cases before the HCJ on behalf of Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of the occupied territories. Its research offers one of the most systematic pictures available of how Palestinian petitions fare in Israeli courts.
Adalah has documented more than 70 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens on the basis of national or ethnic identity, many of which touch directly or indirectly on land and housing. These include the Absentee Property Law of 1950, under which land belonging to Palestinians who fled or were expelled in 1948 — including hundreds of thousands of internally displaced citizens who remained inside Israel — was transferred to the state and subsequently to the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The law’s definition of “absentee” was drawn broadly enough to ensnare Palestinians who had never left the country but had simply moved from one village to another during the fighting.
When Palestinians petition the HCJ over land confiscations, settlement expansion, or demolition orders in the West Bank, the court has in most cases deferred to military and administrative decisions. Legal scholar Noura Erakat, in her book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), argues that Israeli courts have consistently used procedural and jurisdictional tools to avoid substantive rulings on the legality of occupation policies — providing a veneer of judicial oversight without meaningful constraint on state action.
The Levy Report: A Legal Outlier That Revealed the Logic
In 2012, the Netanyahu government commissioned a three-person committee headed by retired Supreme Court Justice Edmund Levy to examine the legal status of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The resulting Levy Report concluded that the West Bank was not “occupied territory” in the legal sense, that the 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention therefore did not apply, and that Israeli settlement construction was legal under international law.
The report was rejected — by the Israeli government itself, which quietly shelved it; by Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, who declined to adopt its conclusions; and by the overwhelming consensus of international legal scholars. The International Court of Justice had already ruled in its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Wall that the West Bank is occupied territory and that Israeli settlements there violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The UN Security Council reaffirmed this in Resolution 2334 (2016), adopted 14–0, which stated that Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 had “no legal validity.”
What the Levy Report did, despite its isolation, was articulate plainly the ideological assumptions already embedded in Israeli administrative and judicial practice: that Jewish historical and biblical connection to the land creates a category of claim that supersedes the rights of the people currently living there. That logic does not appear in mainstream Israeli court rulings — but it operates beneath them.
Demolition Orders and the Planning System as Legal Dispossession
The asymmetry extends beyond restitution claims into the planning and zoning apparatus. In Area C of the West Bank — which comprises roughly 60 percent of the territory and remains under full Israeli civil and military control under the Oslo Accords — Palestinians are almost entirely barred from obtaining building permits. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt) has reported that permit approval rates for Palestinian applicants in Area C have historically been below 4 percent.
Israeli settlement construction in the same zone proceeds under a separate and far more permissive planning track. B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, has documented how Israeli military orders, the Civil Administration’s planning committees, and the HCJ have together produced a system in which Palestinian structures built without obtainable permits are demolished — sometimes repeatedly — while settlement outposts built in violation of Israeli law as well as international law are regularized retroactively through Israeli legislation, including the Regularization Law of 2017, which the Israeli Supreme Court struck down only in 2023 after years of application on the ground.
What Systemic Asymmetry Looks Like in Practice
The cumulative picture is of a legal system that processes Palestinian land claims through frameworks specifically designed before and after 1948 to produce particular outcomes: to facilitate Jewish Israeli land acquisition and settlement, and to foreclose Palestinian return, restitution, or expansion. Individual Palestinian litigants occasionally win procedural victories — a demolition order stayed, an eviction delayed — but the structural rules of the system remain intact.
Rashid Khalidi, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020), describes this as a colonial framework in which law functions not as a neutral arbiter but as an instrument of settler-colonial consolidation. The courts are part of that framework. They provide legitimacy and process. They do not provide equality.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution (2021)
- Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Discriminatory Laws Database, adalah.org
- Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, Stanford University Press (2019)
- ICJ, Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2004)
- UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016)
- OCHA oPt, Area C of the West Bank: Key Humanitarian Concerns (updated periodically)
- B’Tselem, A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid (2021)
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Metropolitan Books (2020)
- Israeli Levy Report (Edmund Levy Committee), official text (2012); Israeli Attorney General response (2012)
- Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49; 1907 Hague Regulations
