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Séminaire Sciences Sociales du droit : « A Genealogy of Title-by-Registration in Palestine: British Rule and the Unmaking of the Ottoman Order »

15 avril 2025 / 14h00 – 16h00

La session sera tenue en anglais / This session will be held in English.

  • Intervenant / speaker : Munir Fakher Eldine

    Professeur département de philosophie et d’études culturelles de l’université de Birzeit, Palestine.

    Dr. Munir Fakher Eldin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies and serves as the Arab Center Chair in Social Sciences and Humanities at Birzeit University. He has held significant leadership roles, including Director of the Master’s Program in Israeli Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Arts (2015-2021, 2021-2024). He is currently a EUME fellow (2024-2025) at the Forum Transregionale Studein, Berlin.
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Abstract:

The talk provides a genealogy of « the birth of title-by-registration » in Palestine under British colonial rule, tracing its conflicted origins back to the late Ottoman period. The discussion centers on a famous lawsuit filed by the heirs of Sultan Abdulhamid II in the Jaffa land court in 1933, seeking to reclaim the possessions of the late sultan in the al-Muharraqa village of the Gaza district. The disputed land, comprising about 4,800 dunums, was just a small portion of the vast land holdings accumulated by the former sultan as emlak-i humayun, or imperial estates, across various parts of the empire. The lawsuit aimed to serve as a test case for reclaiming all such properties from the successor states. The heirs contested the Ottoman state’s treatment of these lands as state property, arguing that no changes had been made in the imperial land registry. They challenged the British authorities by presenting their written proofs of ownership: the Ottoman Tapu. This initiated a series of legal battles and retrials spanning Jaffa, London, and Jerusalem, which only ended with the termination of the British Mandate in 1948. British officials were dispatched to Istanbul to obtain official Turkish documents from the state archives and sought legal counsel from prominent Turkish lawyers to refute the heirs’ claims. Fakher Eldin addresses two main questions: Why did the Ottoman authorities not see a need to alter the Tapu records? And why did the heirs’ claims wield such influence over the British government, despite a clear state action that should have swiftly resolved the case? What insights can be gained from this case about the nature of British colonial intervention in land tenure in Palestine?

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