PLIA ALBECK, an ultra-Orthodox Jew and key legal adviser to the Israeli Government, was the self-styled “mother” of more than 100 settlements on the occupied West Bank.
A legendary figure among the settlers, she would tour the rocky region, captured by Israel in 1967, by helicopter or Jeep, identifying areas to be designated state property for conversion into Jewish settlements.
“When I visited them I always felt like they were my children,” she once said. “There were more than a hundred settlements that were built because of my legal opinion.”
All Israeli settlements on the West Bank beyond the Green Line border are considered illegal under international law. But Albeck, as head of the Civil Department of the State Attorney’s Office, determined that 1.5 million dunums, or 26 per cent of the land in the region, was state land that could be used for building settlements.
She thus became the legal architect of Israel’s massive settlement programme under the prime ministers Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir in the 1980s. At her peak Albeck, rather than the Attorney-General, signed the documents that determined whether land was privately owned or could be taken over by the Government.
Begin refused to sign an order to build a settlement unless she confirmed that it was on state land. During the 24 years she ran her department, she bore responsibility for the legal handling of land in the West Bank and provided the legal justification for the creation of settlements.
Albeck came to prominence after the Israeli High Court of Justice accepted a petition by Palestinians against the annexation of their land for building a settlement. After the ruling, Begin announced that he would only establish settlements on state land, and Albeck found it for him.
She began with the premise that any land that Israel takes is state land, and that the burden of proof is on the Palestinians to prove that it is theirs. Asked in an interview last year whether she had personally agreed with the policy she had executed, she replied: “If I had disagreed I couldn’t have carried it out. I never considered the Green Line sacred. It does not appear in the Bible. For the Arabs Jaffa and Haifa are just as sacred as Nablus and Tulkarm.”
Albeck, who served with the ministry for 35 years, became a leading expert on the problems of purchasing land in Judaea, Samaria and Gaza. She utilised a legal mechanism relying on land once held by the Ottoman Empire to define many areas of the territories as state land.
The civil administration, under her guidance, conducted a survey of all the land in the West Bank that was cultivated and land that was not. Any land that had not been cultivated for ten years, or had been abandoned for three, was considered to be ownerless and therefore belonged to the State. Albeck saw herself as protecting the rights of Palestinian farmers, while at the same time furthering the Zionist enterprise by allowing the Government to build Jewish settlements.
These settlements have become a major problem in the search for an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Albeck, who was the daughter of a well-known Israeli State Comptroller, Yitzhak Nevenzal, was born in Jerusalem in 1937. She was raised and educated in the National Religious movement and was regarded as a child prodigy. She studied law at the Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, at 17 and joined the Justice Ministry three years later. At the age of 31 she was appointed head of the civil department.
In 1993 the Labour Party Justice Minister David Libai dismissed her after she gave her professional opinion regarding a Private Member’s Bill, submitted by Haim Oron, calling for compensation for Arab victims of Jewish terrorism. “It is hard to get the impression from Mr Oron’s letter,” she wrote, “that the state of Israel is not precious to him and that he does not understand that as a Knesset member he is obliged to be loyal to the state of Israel.”
Two years later she was sharply criticised by an Israeli Cabinet minister who called for Cabinet-level supervision of settlement policy. Shulamit Aloni called on the Government “to stop relating to the Palestinians as children,” adding: “If we continue the policies of Plia Albeck there will be no peace.”
On another occasion moderate Israeli opinion was shocked when Albeck advised the Tel Aviv district attorney’s office on how to respond to a Palestinian who sued for damages in 1991 after his wife was shot dead by an Israeli border policeman. Albeck said: “The appellant only gained from his wife’s death. When she was alive, he had to support her, but now he is freed from this obligation, so he has no claim.”
After her removal from the Israeli Government, she became a private lawyer specialising in land law until she became ill two years ago. She was married to Professor Shalom Albeck and had two sons and three daughters.
Plia Albeck, legal adviser to the Israeli Government, was born in 1937. She died on September 27, 2005, aged 68.
