Wikala Dawriyya

Under Israeli military administration, registering a land transfer in the tabu department meant a long wait, and often a refusal. The historian Michael R. Fischbach, writing in Middle East Report in March 1997, describes what people did instead: sales “were generally conducted through a process known as wikala dawriyya (irrevocable power of attorney) by which the seller granted an intermediary the right to sell the land within a fixed, lengthy period of time.” The register stayed as it was. The authority to dispose of the land moved separately, on paper, into somebody else’s hands.

It worked, and it left a fault line. Fischbach records that when the Palestinian Authority’s tabu department began taking registrations after 1995 and land prices rose, the accumulated consequences arrived at once: “thousands of residents have flocked to PA courts seeking redress for occupation-era cases involving everything from boundary disputes to allegations of fraudulent sales,” worsened by the practice “whereby some unscrupulous agents resold the same land more than once.”

Two of the groups he names are the ones this archive’s readers belong to. “A number of Palestinians from Bethlehem currently living in Latin America discovered that their land in Palestine had been sold without their consent through such methods.” And: “Jordanians who possess land rights in the West Bank have similarly discovered that their rights have been disposed of improperly by other landowners in the village.”

The document is also what gets forged. In December 2008 the Associated Press reported the case of Abdel Latif Sumarin of Burqa, near Ramallah: a 2004 paper bearing his signature in English script and the stamp of a notary in a strip-mall postal shop in Tustin, California, transferred his family’s plot to a company. Public records show Sumarin died in 1961; his family says he could not write English; the notary said the signature was not his. The land became part of the Migron outpost. In December 2018 the Jordanian parliamentarian Khalil Attiyeh laid before the prime minister a power of attorney purporting to authorise the sale of a Palestinian home in East Jerusalem, notarised by a Jordanian lawyer; the prime minister’s office stated the following day that the documents had been forged, and the notary’s grandson said his grandfather had been dead for decades.

None of this makes every power of attorney suspect, and none of it says who in any particular family did what. It says that in a system where the register is empty and the owner is abroad, a single sheet of paper carries more weight than it can safely bear.

Alaa Mahajna records a further turn: among the Israeli cabinet decisions of February 2026 was the publication of West Bank land registries previously protected under the applicable legal framework, exposing detailed information about Palestinian landowners and, in his assessment, “facilitating targeted blackmail, coercion, and, in many cases, illegal transactions”.

Sources

• Documenting Land Ownership in the Palestinian Authority — Michael R. Fischbach, Middle East Report (MERIP), 17 March 1997
• Forgery, fraud undermine West Bank land deals — Associated Press via NBC News, 18 December 2008
• Forged Jerusalem home sale gets Jordan’s attention — Daoud Kuttab, Al-Monitor, December 2018
• Annexation Through Law: Land Registration and Palestinian Dispossession in the West Bank — Alaa Mahajna, Arab Center Washington DC, 7 May 2026