Tabu

Palestinians say the tabu the way an English speaker says the deeds. The word travelled from the Ottoman Turkish tapu, a title document, and it names two things at once: the register itself, and the piece of paper it issues.

The register begins with the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which required land to be entered in the name of an individual. What that did to musha’ — the collective village tenure it displaced — is a separate story, and a bitter one. Under the British Mandate the process was formalised: special Land Courts were established, and a systematic operation known as settlement of title went village by village, investigating every parcel, deciding its category under the Ottoman law, and recording an owner. Jordanian administration continued the same operation in the West Bank between 1949 and 1967.

It was never finished. BADIL records that settlement of title had been completed on only 37.5 per cent of West Bank land by June 1967. Adalah puts the figure at approximately one third, concentrated in the Jenin area and the Jordan Valley. Estimates of what remains unregistered today accordingly range from about 66 to 70 per cent of the West Bank, and the sources differ because the underlying surveys do. The reasons registration lagged were mundane rather than dramatic: unregistered land was not taxed, and under Ottoman and Jordanian practice a family did not need a tabu entry to farm, sell or inherit the land it had held for generations.

That mundane gap became the whole game after 1967. Military Order 291 froze settlement of title in December 1968 and left the unregistered majority frozen with it. Israeli authorities then applied an expansive reading of the same 1858 Ottoman Code — under which land left uncultivated may revert to the state — to unregistered land, so that a parcel with no entry in the tabu could be declared “state land” unless its holder could prove otherwise. A system built to record who owned what became the instrument for deciding that nobody did.

For a family in the diaspora the practical consequence is blunt. If your grandfather’s land was settled and entered in the tabu, there is a book somewhere with his name in it. If it was not — and for two thirds of the West Bank it was not — what your family holds is possession, custom, tax receipts and the memory of neighbours, none of which is a deed.

Sources

• Israeli Land Grab and Forced Population Transfer of Palestinians: A Handbook for Vulnerable Individuals and Communities (PDF) — BADIL Resource Center, June 2013
• Israeli Security Cabinet Decision to Resume Land Registration in the West Bank is Illegal — Adalah, 2 June 2025
• Annexation Through Law: Land Registration and Palestinian Dispossession in the West Bank — Alaa Mahajna, Arab Center Washington DC, 7 May 2026