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We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, it's Friday.
So it's time for our TGIF.
The goal is freedom interview with Sheldon Richman.
And only this time Sheldon is going to be co-hosting the show and helping me to interview Khaled Al-Sabawi.
And you might remember, he, Sheldon wrote his article, A Glimmer of Hope in Bleak Palestine for last week's article.
And we talked about this on the show about Khaled's effort to provide land titles for Palestinians on the West Bank.
So very happy to welcome you to the show.
How are you doing, Khaled?
I'm great.
Thank you very much for having me on.
Really appreciate it.
And good morning, Sheldon.
How are you?
Good morning, I'm fine.
All right.
So first of all, tell me about UCI Union Construction and Investment and MENA Geothermal.
So people get kind of a idea of who you are and where you come from, what you're about here.
So UCI is a publicly listed company on the Palestinian Securities Exchange.
Believe it or not, Palestinians don't have a country, but they have a securities exchange.
The company was founded in 2005 by my father and various businessmen throughout the Middle East that really wanted to change the culture of real estate development in Palestine in a way to sort of give back to the community in Palestine while at the same time helping provide jobs and employment and help the Palestinian economy become just that much more independent.
I went to Palestine, I grew up in Canada my whole life.
I graduated with a degree of computer engineering from the University of Waterloo.
And I traveled to Palestine in about 2007 to see what I could do to give back because we were raised, my parents were Palestinian refugees, and we were raised on this imperative that we were the ones that were fortunate enough to end up in Canada.
And if we don't go back to a place like the West Bank or Gaza and help out, then really, who will?
So I went there in 2007 and did an assessment of what I could possibly do to help out.
And I recognized that in addition to all the problems that Palestinians face, there were significant problems when it came to energy.
Palestinians face the highest energy prices in the Middle East, there's no source of natural energy, and they have one of the world's highest population growth rates.
So that is a bad combination.
So I looked at different types of renewable energy and sustainable energy solutions that could be applied and determined that geothermal or ground source heat pump technology was really the way to go.
Based on the climate that existed in the West Bank, based on the energy prices that were there, there was a natural incentive to install a geothermal system and to reduce the building loads, which is like most of energy consumption in a developing country.
They don't have that much manufacturing, so buildings consume the most energy.
So that evolved into a green energy startup called MENA Geothermal from Middle East, North Africa, geothermal.
And MENA grew on to install the largest geothermal system in the entire Middle East at the American University in Jordan.
I started MENA with the investors that invested in UCI.
And once they saw all the good work that MENA had done, I was promoted to run UCI as a big real estate investment company.
You know, when we took over, when I took over that company, I wanted to further help do projects that were also going to give back to the Palestinian people, which is when we launched PABL.
And PABL is the main project for UCI, and it is a project that is designed to tackle one of the significant issues we face in the Palestinian economy and in Palestine in general, which is the lack of property rights in Palestine.
We discovered, shockingly, that 70% of the West Bank doesn't have title deed.
And Israel has been taking advantage of this since its occupation of the West Bank in 1967, by taking advantage of an old Ottoman law that states if your land is not registered or in active use, then the state can appropriate the land and declare it as state land.
And in spite of the fact that most Palestinian land is used for farming, Israel uses this law as a pretext to confiscate Palestinian land.
And unfortunately, the Palestinian authority was doing virtually nothing.
And combined with that, real estate prices within the Palestinian cities skyrocketed.
In Ramallah, a quarter of an acre is about a million US dollars.
And in Bethlehem, which is also a Palestinian city, most people don't know that, it's around $800,000 for a quarter of an acre land.
So we wanted to tackle this problem directly.
So we created a project called PABL, which went and acquired land that doesn't have title deed.
And we essentially mapped out the Ottoman registration process that still exists, and registered the land, created title deeds for the first time in the history of these Palestinian villages, extended roads, electricity, infrastructure, divided them into small, affordable quarter acre plots, and made land affordable again for Palestine really in the first time since the inception of Oslo and the Palestinian Authority.
And that really allowed people for the first time to be able to buy affordable land.
And we're essentially putting native land into native hands, you know, a quarter of an acre at a time.
Yeah, well, it's an incredible story.
And people can look at this TED Talk all about it, Khaled al-Sabawi.
It's Every Palestinian Needs a Title.
And also, there's this great article in Forbes all about it, as well, The Good Deed.
You can read about that.
Now, before we talk more about Thabo, and Thabo, I know Sheldon's got lots of questions.
But I was wondering if you could tell us real quickly about the story of your family in the 48 War.
And then again, this very interesting story and very relevant story about what happened when the soldiers came to Gaza in 1956, as well.
Yeah, you know, so our imperative to come and help Palestinians protect their land is deeply rooted in our own history as a family.
You know, my parents, so my father was born in a small town called Salama, which is just outside of Jaffa, or modern day Tel Aviv.
And they fled Gaza, like many Palestinians fled, sorry, they fled Salama, like many Palestinians fled other villages in Palestine when Israel was established in 1948.
Because the militias that formed Israel used violent tactics to scare Palestinians to instill fear in the hearts and minds of Palestinians to get them to flee.
So my parents were close to Gaza, which was a big population center.
So they fled from Salama to Gaza.
And they had 200 dunams, which is equivalent to 50 acres of fertile farmland in Salama, orange groves that were beautiful, that were essentially their lifeline.
And these are farmers, these are villagers, this is their asset, this is everything that they depend on, their livelihood depends on this land.
And after they fled, because of the violence caused by these militias, they went to Gaza.
And then shortly afterwards, the newly founded State of Israel invaded Gaza.
And when they invaded Gaza, my dad recalls this story, he was a kid at home in the place they were staying in, and the Israeli military arrived.
And they rallied all the older men into a local school, leaving women and children in their homes, and they did this for a reason.
They entered the homes, and they went to search them all.
And when they entered my father's home, he recalls the story of the soldiers barging in, ransacking the house, searching for something.
Of course, my father didn't know what it was.
My grandma was sitting on the couch, silent, kind of not really saying anything.
And then after they ransacked the house, a soldier suspiciously looked at my grandmother, asked her to stand up off the sofa, and then proceeded to search under the sofa.
And he found a large folded piece of paper that my grandma was hiding.
When he unfolded it, he looked at it up and down.
And then he turned to my grandmother and actually gave her a military salute, because he found what he was looking for.
And it was the title deed to the 50 acre land that my family owned in Salamah, because that's what they were after.
They were looking for land so they can steal it, essentially.
And that stripped my family of their assets completely.
They became poor refugees.
They had to really start all over again.
I gotta say, it's interesting to me that they would even bother, right?
I mean, yeah, we did our ethnic cleansing campaign, you're gone, the land belongs to us now.
It seems like a technicality to even bother stealing the deed, and yet they searched for hours for it.
They would not give up until they found that thing.
Yeah, they're quite meticulous.
You know, this was a planned campaign.
You know, the formation of the State of Israel was not a haphazard event that suddenly happened overnight.
It was a planned, you know, like the current Israeli Defense Force was actually an underground militia called the Haganah that was forming in the 1920s and 30s, and then was waiting for the right opportunity to turn from underground militia into the official military of Israel.
So they knew what they were doing.
They knew, you know, the early Zionist settlers that arrived into Palestine in 1920s were actually purchasing land.
They had a campaign where they purchased 6% of Palestine, because they knew that they needed to acquire as much land as possible in order to have some sort of legitimate or some sort of claim that they could then propose to the international community to say, hey, we have land here.
It's ours.
We deserve a state.
Right.
Sheldon, you want to go ahead and start asking about how these property rights and these titles work on the West Bank now under this new program?
Well, a couple things still about the biography, which I find so interesting, and it's important, because Americans, by and large, don't hear these kinds of stories.
So they don't, and Scott, this is something you're constantly bringing up.
They, Americans pretty much have such a distorted picture of what happened in Palestine and how Israel was formed that they just don't get this.
So I think it's very important to hear this at the most personal level, at the, you know, the micro level and what happened to individuals and families.
So first question I wanted to ask, Khaled, is what happened to Salama?
Did that get paved over and turned into a Jewish village or town with a new name?
What happened?
Yeah, it's essentially pretty much like a street in Tel Aviv right now.
Oh, so it's been basically a tour by Tel Aviv.
Yeah.
So it's part of greater Tel Aviv.
Exactly.
The other question, another question I have, again, getting back to this property issue was, I believe you say that there's so much unregistered land in the West Bank because if you registered, I guess this would go back to the Ottomans, if you registered, you made yourself subject to taxation.
So a lot of people just didn't register because they had the, to me, the totally human reaction, I don't want to be taxed.
So that is, that, am I right about that?
Yeah, you are.
Yeah.
Like most people around the world, they didn't want to pay taxes, you know, to the Ottoman Empire, which were, you know, essentially sultans that ruled them from abroad.
And you had to, yeah.
I'm sorry, is it also the case that a lot of land and homes, parcels owned by individuals was registered by absentee, like feudal landlords who were living, I've read in Beirut and other places, because this way the individual didn't get taxed, the wealthier absentee landlord who maybe held the deed now to many properties, he might get taxed, but it was worth it because he was charging rent to the actual, the real owners.
Is that on your understanding also?
Yeah, that, I mean, that happens in most feudal societies.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's important because as I understand it too, a lot of land bought by the Jewish National Fund or the various, the Zionist organizations or by Rothschild in the earlier days were from these absentee landlords, who in our view, Scott, in my view, certainly are not the true owners, because they're not the people who originally work the land.
Scott and I are sort of working from a framework of John Locke.
And John Locke, under John Locke's theory, you acquire ownership of land by mixing your labor with it.
So the tillers of the soil, in our view, are the legitimate owners of land.
And the feudal landlords are not, they're the recipients of favors and privileges from the state, because they have good connections, something like that.
So if you buy land from them, and then you kick off the tillers, you're in, in my view, you're not really legitimately acquiring land, because the person who got kicked off is the real owner, and he didn't sell it.
It's like buying Kansas from Napoleon.
Yeah, exactly.
And then claiming that you own it.
So anyway, I just wanted to put that on the record.
Yeah, sure.
That's the nuance of that, that 6% of it, you know, their land was owned by the villagers, you know, the majority of it, and passed down from generation to generation.
You know, when we go, when we buy a piece of land that isn't registered today in the West Bank, it has 50 inheritors, or even more, that have just been inheriting the land over generations and generations.
So it's definitely been private land owned by Palestinians.
Oh, but not so much then by the absentee landlords, you're saying?
Yeah, the majority of it is privately owned by Palestinians.
Oh, because in this, in this paper, I believe I linked to, I'm pretty sure I linked to it in this article, I certainly linked to it before, but there was a paper by a scholar named Stephen Holbrook, called The Alienation of a Homeland.
And he actually set out charts and tables showing how much was purchased from absentee landlords, versus how much was purchased from individuals.
And of that six or 7%, only a very small percentage was actually bought directly from an individual farmer or, you know, homeowner.
Most of, he seemed to, the numbers, I don't know where he got his numbers, but I guess they were official.
They seem to be coming from these people I would say were not really legitimate owners.
They were, again, the people, wealthy people living in Beirut, who were just the owners of record because the, you know, the tillers didn't want to be taxed or they wanted protection from the feudal landlord.
Something like that.
Well, and you know, I guess it could be too, that there are sort of two sets of books where on the West Bank, they actually, you know, they know who owned this land before in, in their own terms, as opposed to, you know, absentee landlords granted a title by the Ottoman Sultan or whatever.
Yeah.
Anyway.
So, so let's, yeah, let's move on now to, to the Tabo project, because you have, you tell a great story about how you actually track down who, who really owns the land and what the boundaries are.
So tell us a little bit about how you did that.
That would seem to be such a difficult thing to do.
How did you do that?
It was definitely challenging.
And that's why it's very difficult for, you know, an individual that wants to be able to, wants to purchase land in the West Bank to complete the transaction.
You need a team of engineers and lawyers, and you have to be meticulous in kind of your approach.
So when you, when there's a land that's available for sale in the West Bank that doesn't have a title deed, first thing you do, you have to look at the current papers that exist.
Usually there are, there are an inheritance document and a record that just shows that this family owns land in this area without order, without a title deed, of course, because that doesn't exist.
So what you do is you, you meet the people that are represent the, the inheritors that are interested to sell the land.
You negotiate a price with them, and then you do due diligence on all the paperwork.
And that means you have to make sure that every single inheritor has given the power of attorney to the individual that's representing them.
So they could actually sign an agreement to sell the land.
And then you have to make sure that every single inheritor has received their fair share.
Because once you purchase the land, you have to prove that every single inheritor has received a fair share, and it was a fair transaction.
And then you go out with the, that representative of the inheritors, and you say, okay, well, you know, let's, where are the borders of your land?
And, you know, they'll literally say from this olive tree to that olive tree to see that donkey walking over there.
Or my favorite one is when they're like, we see that cloud, like below that cloud, that's where the border is.
And we will essentially go out with the head of the village council, all the neighboring owners of land and a surveyor with a GPS machine, and we will plot the coordinates of the land, draw the first ever surveyed master plan, and every single neighbor will sign on the borders.
And that master plan will be posted in a local mosque and the newspapers to allow anybody to object.
And this is part of the Ottoman registration process that has now been codified according to Palestinian Authority law, which they also took from the Jordanians.
And then we go through a very bureaucratic process where we go through judicial committees, review more objection periods, and finally, after maybe a two-year process, we come out with the first ever title deed in the history of this land.
So when you found the owners or the heirs of the last owners, did most of them not want to come back to the land and live on it?
Or were they unable to?
Why was so much land available for sale, rather than just the people that you found saying, okay, yeah, I'm going to come back and live on the land?
It depends on the family.
It depends on the situation.
Sometimes when you have a piece of land that's owned by 50 people, it's too cumbersome and too difficult for them to then register it themselves and divide it up or do something with it.
When it's unregistered, pretty much the only thing they can do is just farm the olive trees that are on it.
And sometimes that doesn't provide them enough of an income.
Sometimes there's disputes within the families, and they'd rather just find someone to buy it because they'd just rather have cash instead.
And when nothing's really done with it, then vulnerability is really a complication.
Some people are aware of that.
So they'd rather have somebody come and take it, develop it, bring roads, electricity, and help people build homes on it.
Well, yeah, so I really wonder about that.
Have you come up against the Israelis saying, Oh, geez, I guess we can't do anything now.
We can't build our settlement since you have a deed, whereas before they would have been able to get away with it?
You know, the irony of that question is that the obstacles that we've faced have been from the Palestinian Authority, and not from Israel.
Right.
Well, talk a little bit about that, because you talk about that in your speech, in your TED Talk, because it's incredible.
I guess typical, but still incredible.
Yeah, and it arises from this.
I've been working, I worked for about 10 years in the West Bank, and working there, it was quite an astonishing experience, because the reality on the ground that I witnessed daily was completely detached from the illusion that was perpetuated by the international community, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the Palestinian private sector elite.
And it's this idea that we are building a Palestinian state, and there is something called the peace process, that is aiming to reach a two-state solution.
And, you know, going through the experience I went through with Tabal, and learning that the Palestinian Authority was actually the main obstacle for us really shattered that illusion.
And the Palestinian Authority, when we launched Tabal, and we, you know, because it was a new project, by nature, we had to educate the market about it.
And part of the education was, well, 70% of the West Bank is unprotected.
And we need to do something about it.
And the areas, you know, the lands that are designated areas A and B, according to OSPO, are under the administration and responsibility of the Palestinian Authority.
So we can register those lands, there's no excuse, there's nobody standing in our way.
So let's do it.
And when we did it, instead of doing it ourselves, the obvious question that the Palestinian public starts to ask is, well, what the heck is the Palestinian Authority doing?
Why aren't they doing anything about it?
Why have they encouraged people to register their land?
And on the contrary, why are they putting obstacles and making it an extremely difficult bureaucratic process to navigate?
And that essentially goes to the heart of the issue, which is the Palestinian Authority is not designed to serve the interests of the Palestinian people.
They are a group of Palestinians that have had a monopoly on Palestinian leadership since the inception of the Palestinian diaspora.
And they're literally looking out for their own interests and not the interests of the Palestinian people.
And, you know, when they obviously didn't like the fact that people were beginning to realize that when we were doing a service that they should have supported, or they should have, you know, if not done themselves, at least facilitated.
So they didn't like that.
They didn't like the fact that we were making them look very bad.
And we were exposing the, you know, the sort of, the reason why they exist.
And they went after us.
They, you know, and in addition to that, of course, when we were asked, and interviewed as the project grew, you know, in terms to assess the situation on the ground, we were critical that Palestinian Authority bureaucracy was standing in our way.
And they didn't like that.
So like most dictatorships or authoritarian regimes around the world, they decided to punish us for our dissent.
And they actually, you know, they did something that was shocking to me, something that I never imagined they would do was they suspended the title deed transactions and the registration of Palestinian land, and therefore prevented the protection of Palestinian land from Israeli settlement expansion, which is astonishing, that they're so that it's gotten that dark.
You know, they've gotten that bitter and resentful as a leadership that they're willing to shoot themselves in the foot just to make a point, just to hold on to their leadership.
Yeah.
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Well, and a boss was supposed to stand for election or reelection years ago and has stayed far beyond his terms.
So not much question about the lawlessness of the PA, which is really just, they're just the trustees in an Israeli prison anyway.
I mean, we understand the power relationship there and the, you know, the, the form of the Palestinian authority, such as it is.
But, you know, I wonder too, if you think that maybe the fact that the Palestinian politics have really been dominated by religious types like Hamas or by, you know, kind of right-wingers and, but, you know, right-wing collectivists in that sense, versus, you know, more like the the, I forget the initials, but the communist groups and the, the more leftist revolutionaries from the PLO days and that kind of thing, whether that's kind of part of the reason why they haven't done this already is because they don't put property rights first at all.
They don't really see property rights as the first right of human beings to own what they own and not have it taken from them.
And instead they defend the Palestinians as a collective when really, obviously you've stumbled on the right take here that these people are individual human beings.
They own this land.
They have the paperwork to prove it.
It was their grandfathers before theirs, et cetera, like that.
And, you know, and maybe, you know, that's why it was so easy.
I guess you're saying in effect, this was part of why it's been so easy for the Israelis to colonize the West Bank is because they're saying, well, where's your piece of paper when they hadn't stolen it outright?
There really wasn't one.
And, and yet the whole time, the PLO and the PLA and the Hamas and everybody else, they've never taken this route.
They're, you know, not only they're not focusing on Palestinian property rights, they're not focusing on Palestinian human rights.
You know, the Palestinian Authority has adopted a nationalist, you know, movement, a nationalist perspective.
So they, you know, nationalism has, in my opinion, plagued the Palestinian cause and Palestinian political movement.
You know, when, when, when Israel formed the Palestinian Authority in 1993, there's a reason why they called it the Palestinian Authority, not the Palestinian government.
You know, that term was coined specifically, because essentially, the Palestinian Authority was brought in to police the Palestinian cities.
You know, Arafat at that time was exiled in Tunis, him and the PLO leadership, because of their support of Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, the rest of the Arab world kicked them out, and they were in Tunis.
And after the first which was a grassroots uprising, nonviolent uprising against the Israeli occupation, the Israeli government, and this is to quote Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Foreign Affairs Minister of Israel, he said, you know, we were being forced to negotiate with these local Palestinians that actually represented the Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza.
And they were asking for the right thing, self determination, human rights, 1967 borders, UN resolutions.
But there was this exiled leadership in Tunis, run by Arafat and the PLO, and they had nothing at the time.
So they thought to themselves, well, you know what, we should channel the negotiations with them, because these guys have nothing, we give them something small, they'll take it.
So they started these under the table secret negotiations in Oslo in 1993.
And that culminated into an agreement that, you know, the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said, who is a professor at Columbia University, he wrote an article that how do you spell apartheid?
Oslo, also signifying that agreement that was signed by the Palestinian Authority.
And that agreement was essentially brilliant on Israel's behalf, because it essentially brought Arafat and his, for lack of a better way to describe it, his mafia, essentially, that's what the PLO leadership was, into the West Bank and Gaza to rule the Palestinian cities on behalf of Israel.
And Israel transferred the economic burden of occupation on the international community, which paid the bill, essentially, they paid for Arafat and his, and, you know, his leadership to rule the Palestinian territories.
So essentially, the Palestinian Authority is a subcontractor for the Israeli occupation, designed to look out for its own interests, rather than further the human rights of the Palestinian people.
As I understand it, of course, Oslo is the, what, 92 or 93.
And in 91, when the US went to war against Iraq, with its coalition to get get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, Arafat sided with Saddam.
And the Gulf countries then cut him off financially.
So he had no money, he was broke.
So he was open to Oslo, which would mean an importing of money from Europe and the United States.
And so yeah, that's a part of the story.
I was going to point out that corruption certainly predates the Palestinian Authority.
And we know why.
Because Lord Acton taught us in the 19th century that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So we really should not be surprised by any of this.
Precisely, you know, and the Palestinian Authority has just been vying for scraps of power that Israel will give them.
And, you know, to Scott, to kind of answer the question that you're asking about how this fragmentation has happened, you know, right now in this society, you know, because the Palestinians, and I would actually talk about this from a psychological perspective, about that generation of Palestinian leaders, they have such an inferiority complex relative to the other Arab states around them, you know, because their generation of Arabs were able to have their states and rule them.
But the Palestinian leadership was, you know, spent their lives as second class citizens in the Gulf countries before they were kicked out, where they couldn't own land or own businesses.
So they wanted to rule anything, no matter how truncated or small, which is also why they accepted ruling the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli rule, under Israeli occupation, at the same time.
And then, you know, after everything fragmented, and then, you know, now that a case where you have Hamas and Gaza and the West Bank, and, you know, the prisoners have lost sight of the fact that they're in prison, and they're just trying to rule the prison yard.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, so back to my question, then about, you know, you say, your answer was that while the Palestinian Authority have been all the trouble for you and what you're doing, they're in area A and all that where you are.
But it didn't specifically answer my question about, have you been able to stop settlement encroachment with these deeds?
And have you been able to get Israeli courts or the IDF or whoever to recognize that?
Oh, geez, I guess we can't develop in that direction.
We'll have to go this way instead or anything like that yet.
In other words, have you been put to the test?
Yeah, well, so according to international law, when a country occupies a territory, they're not allowed to change the law.
And the laws that govern the West Bank are Jordanian laws that are based on Ottoman laws, which have that registration process in there.
So it is a legal and internationally recognized process to register your land and create title deeds.
Okay, but I think we all know that when it comes to international law, it says a lot of things and yet the Israelis do whatever they want anyway.
So I guess what I'm asking is, has it actually worked though?
Sure.
And there's two, you know, Palestinians, it's been challenging for them to understand how the legal system works to a certain extent.
But there are some excellent Palestinian lawyers that have actually taken Israeli actions to court when there have been title deeds.
And there are precedent cases that show that when there is proof of ownership, then the Israeli government has to reassess their plan or re-justify their plan of why they're going to appropriate the land.
And it makes it far more difficult for them.
So there are cases in the Israeli court in which Palestinians have won by suing.
Secondly, what we do is we don't just create title deeds, we take it to another step.
We help the people that purchase these title deeds build homes on them.
Because what we're trying to do is change the reality on the ground.
So when Israel wants to try to expand a settlement, and it finds that that mountain that was once empty, now has, you know, title deeds that have homes built on them, proof of ownership, you know, and roads and electricity, it makes it far more difficult for Israel to appropriate that land compared to a land that is completely, that has no proof of borders.
So when Israel is building a wall, when they're expanding their wall, for example, and they, you know, go to an area that is owned by a Palestinian, and the Palestinian, you know, comes up and says, what are you doing?
You can't build a wall, this is my land.
They say, really?
It is?
Prove it.
Where are the borders of your land?
And if that Palestinian doesn't have a title deed, it makes it significantly easier for Israel to just completely ignore the documentation that he has and build their border, or their wall, or expand their settlement.
Yeah.
Khalid, has Israel built or tried to build settlements in Area A or B, or are they all in C?
They're mostly in C. That being said, if there is an area in Area A or B that Israel wants, and there's no proof of ownership, or there's no Palestinians living there, they'll take it.
And has A been untouched by settlement activity or plans for settlements?
I don't know.
I think there are some areas where, so Areas A are really pretty much like the densely populated centers in the West Bank.
Yeah.
Like Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus.
So there aren't really settlements, although there are settlements that overlook them, like literally a hilltop that's right beside it.
Those settlements, I think, were there early on.
But Area A is difficult.
The Israelis don't want to get near Area A because it's so close to Palestinian population centers.
But Area B is a more popular area where settlements exist.
And yeah, I believe settlements have expanded in those areas.
So getting back to the Palestinian Authority obstruction, you didn't take that lying down.
You went to the International Court of Justice.
Can you quickly summarize how that went?
So we went to the High Court of Justice, which is a Palestinian Authority court.
And we sued them there.
There was a lot of attempts to get us to pay money to fix our problem.
I speak about this outright, which is why the Palestinian Authority doesn't like me.
Because I speak about the experience.
My experience in Palestine, which is different than most Palestinians that come and visit Palestinian territories and have this kind of lovely experience when they come there, is that I've had exposure to the Palestinian Authority.
We've worked directly hand-in-hand with them, and we see how they operate.
And once they suspended our title deeds, they literally sent somebody over to ask us to make a payment.
And the payment was to Mohammed Abbas Assad.
And we said, no, we're not going to do that.
That's against our principles, and we're going to sue you.
So we took a long, hard road, and we prepared a thorough case.
And we took them to the High Court of Justice there.
It took a long time, and unfortunately, our entire project was suspended.
But fortunately, we prevailed.
And in our case, I don't know if to say lucky, but our persistence did end up winning.
So it's a good story.
It's a good positive story in that case.
Oh, yeah.
I'm sorry.
I have to apologize, then.
I misunderstood in your talk.
I thought it was the International Court of Justice.
I will fix that in the article.
That was my error.
So you and your team, people who are actually working with you on this, have had harassment and worse from the Israeli authorities.
Like when you travel there, you get stopped and questioned for a long time.
Can you give us a quick—I don't know how much time we have, but can you give us a quick rundown of the kinds of harassment you've faced or detention?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
This is when I was running Nina Geothermal, my renewable energy startup, which predated Tavo and UCI.
This was in 2008, 2011.
Suddenly, one time, coming back from a conference, I was denied entry by the Israelis.
I had to go back to Canada for a month, try to figure out how to get my way back in.
It turns out at that time, Israel had launched a campaign of entry denials to anyone that had a Palestinian background that was entering Palestine, the West Bank or Gaza, to do work or to work for an NGO.
It's interesting, actually, when you look at that, because when Oslo was negotiated, there was no system that facilitated the entry of Palestinians into the West Bank and Gaza to allow them to help out and help rebuild the Palestinian economy.
That goes to show how, again, Israel controls all aspects of life in the West Bank and Gaza because they control the borders.
The Palestinian Authority has no control, further supporting that subcontractor, the occupation kind of description of the Palestinian Authority.
So I was denied entry three times in total by Israel.
Every single time I would enter the Palestinian territories, I would be interrogated between four to eight hours by the Israelis.
It was actually quite brutal, quite anxiety inducing.
I would have to describe what geothermal was to the Israeli border security every single time I'd walk in.
And this continued for three years until I finally met, when I got in, I met Amira Haas, who's a journalist in Haaretz, one of the more liberal Israeli newspapers, mainstream newspapers.
And she wrote a 1,000 piece article about myself and my father and what we were doing.
And she was asking, well, here's this entrepreneur coming to provide green energy into the West Bank.
Why are they being denied entry?
And that article made its way to the Global Mail in Canada, made its way to the Foreign Ministry.
And they started to put pressure on the Israelis to help get me in.
Rather than focus on growing my business and employing Palestinians and selling more renewable energy projects, I was spending 50 to 60% of my time solving these problems.
This startup that was growing, we brought a geothermal specialist to train my staff with a very thorough and intensive course.
And as soon as one of my team members finished and graduated from the course, but a week later, he didn't show up to work.
And we called his family and we said, what's going on?
Where is he?
And his mom was in tears telling us that the Israelis had come and taken him.
And he was put in a holding cell for two months in solitary confinement, released with no charges, none whatsoever.
And it actually was interesting because his brother had been detained the week before by the Palestinian Authority.
So that's just an example of the security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
So it was an enormous challenge, trying to start up these businesses, trying to navigate this security system that exists.
So the list goes on and on.
And now, if I understand it right, you can, so far, you're only able to do this in Area A, but do you plan, because obviously Palestinians own at least all of the West Bank, never mind the other side of the green line for the sake of this discussion.
But so what about the rest of the West Bank?
Are you at least planning on moving forward there?
Or there's no way to do it until the legal situation on the ground changes?
No, we actually are doing it in Areas A and B. And just so for your listeners, so Area A means Palestinian Authority administration and Palestinian Authority security.
Area B means Palestinian Authority administration, no security.
And Area C is completely controlled by Israel.
So when we register land in Areas A and B, we go through the Palestinian Lands Authority, which is a sort of ministry or government entity that's part of the Palestinian Authority.
But now Area C is about 60% of the whole West Bank, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
This is that famous clip of Netanyahu joking about how he got one over on Bill Clinton.
And where he says, the American people, 80% of them support us.
It's absurd.
And then he talks about America's easily moved.
And that's what he says, America's easily moved.
And his example is, he told Bill Clinton, yeah, no, we'll only control Area C and then snicker, snicker.
Yeah, it turns out Area C is 60% of the whole place.
So, haha.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
I mean, from a Palestinian's perspective, that the Palestinian leadership even accepted that.
You know, that's how much we just wanted to rule anything.
But anyway, to go back to your question, yes, we are definitely considering doing this in Area C.
But what that would mean, Area C is far more challenging to create title deeds.
Because when you buy a land in Area C, of course, it is owned by a Palestinian and we go through the same paperwork.
But when we want to register the land and create a title deed, we have to go through the Israeli Ministry of Civil Administration.
So we have to go through essentially the Israeli military.
And they do have a process, which is the same Ottoman registration process that we go through, but we go through them.
And the challenge is that they look at it from the interest of the settlement.
So when we go through that period of putting up the master plan for objection, if anybody wants to object, settlers come and object.
And they make it very, very hard for anybody to be able to register their land and get approval, get a building license to actually build on the land.
So in spite of the fact that Palestinians own all of Area C, the Israeli Civil Administration rarely gives a license to build for Palestinians.
They allow them just to find that land for that specific reason that they want control and they want to be able to take it and expand their settlement.
So we actually just started doing thorough research in terms of how we can possibly expand into Area C, so we can help protect it and help put it in the hands of Palestinians.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, give us some stats here, because you have some impressive ones about just how much land you've been able to put through this process so far.
So, so far, we have registered and protected over 1 million square meters of Palestinian land, about 1000 dunams or about an acreage, 250 acres worth of Palestinian land.
And we're still expanding.
This is like we're still growing and growing and growing.
As a project, we've you know, we've paved over 10,000 meters of roads.
We've allowed over 400 Palestinian families to own over 600 plots of land for the first time.
These Palestinians could not afford owning land before this because it was literally unaffordable.
So we're very proud of these statistics.
And you know, we've been doing this since 2011.
And, you know, after winning the lawsuit against Palestinian Authority, things have moved much more smoothly, we're able to register the land and deliver them to the hands of our customers.
And it's an ongoing project.
And, you know, it's important to note also that in a context where Palestinians are amongst the highest, are amongst the highest recipients of foreign aid in the world per capita, where we are an extremely donor dependent economy where nothing really moves unless some donor state comes and funds the project.
We've created a company where we are independent financially, where we purchase land, we register it, we allow Palestinians to own it in a completely independent way.
And the more that our project profits, the more that we can buy, you know, expand, buy more land, protect more Palestinian land, and maintain our independence.
Because it's fundamentally important for Palestinians to have economic and political independence, because donor aid, donor aid is like, they're like golden handcuffs.
You know, they are, they are, they are given to the Palestinian Authority, which employs, by the way, 40% of the Palestinian workforce, 150 to 160,000 Palestinian employees.
But that donor aid is conditional, conditional on the fact that the Palestinian Authority is obedient, prioritizes Israel's security above the human rights of its own citizens.
And that compromises the political and economic independence of Palestinians.
So it is, I'm very critical of the effects of donor aid on Palestinian society.
So what I'm also most proud of about this project is that we do it in an independent way.
Right.
Sheldon, yeah, one last question for you.
Well, one last comment, really, I think that your criticism of aid is such an important part of this whole story.
I tried to pay attention to it in my article.
And I just think is I really, I'm so happy that you draw attention to that.
It's been great talking to you.
Yeah, absolutely.
My pleasure.
Thank you guys so much for covering this story.
I mean, any coverage we get is sincerely appreciated, because not many people, not many people hear about these positive stories coming out of Palestine.
You know, like you were saying, Scott, Palestinians are, you know, they're highly stereotyped and vilified.
In the mainstream American news, we are gun-toting fanatics that are hellbent on destroying Israel in every context, unfortunately.
So thank you for covering the story and showing that Palestinian entrepreneurship exists, that Palestinians are innovating, that we do, you know, we do want our human rights.
And above all, they're, my opinion, more important than nationalism.
And again, thank you.
All right.
Well, thank you again, everybody.
That's Khaled Al-Sabawi and Sheldon, hang on right there.
Sheldon Richman, of course, too.
Check out Sheldon's article at libertarianinstitute.org and at antiwar.com, A Glimmer of Hope in Bleak Palestine.
And then there's The Good Deed in Forbes Magazine cover story there about this effort.
And it's tabo.ps, T-A-B-O.
P-S for the website.
And also check out the TED Talk, Khaled Al-Sabawi, Tabo, Every Palestinian Needs a Title, a TED Talk that he gave on this subject.
It's really great.
Thank you again to both of you.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
