Source: The Jerusalem Post
Mar 14, 2007
In November, Israel's ultra-leftist anti-settlement Peace Now organization published a report claiming that at least 40 percent of the land on which Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria were built was private "Palestinian" land.
In particular, the group claimed that 86 percent of the largest settlement, Ma'aleh Adumim, which lies on the outskirts of Jerusalem, was built on private Arab-owned land.
But Peace Now made a serious error in judgment in petitioning the High Court to force the IDF to hand over its database on actual land ownership in the area.
That data, which the court did in fact force the IDF to reveal, shows that a mere 0.5 percent of Ma'aleh Adumim was built on privately-held land, destroying the credibility of the entire Peace Now survey.
The vast majority of Judea-Samaria was state land under the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate, and retained that status when Israel liberated the area from Jordanian occupation in 1967.