LONDON (Middle East Eye) – The British government acquired a plot in Al-Quds long earmarked for a future embassy in the occupied territories by trading an area of sand dunes in Jaffa with a company acquiring Palestinian land for Jewish immigrants, newly unearthed documents show.
In October, a Middle East Eye investigation revealed that the UK government holds a 6,950 square-meter property in West Al-Quds’ Talpiot neighborhood known as the “Orange Plot”.
Documents found by MEE in the UK’s National Archives show that as early as the 1950s, British officials were discussing potential locations for an embassy on UK-held land in Al-Quds, and considered it inevitable that a site would one day be needed.
Now, records recently found in the Israeli State Archives by Adalah, the Haifa-based advocacy group, show how the Al-Quds property came into British possession in April 1933, a decade into British rule over Palestine under the mandate conferred by the League of Nations after World War One.
Letters exchanged between Mandate officials show that the Palestinian Government, as the British administration was called, exchanged land described as sand dunes in the Jabalia area of Jaffa for an Al-Quds plot which had been purchased by the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC).
The PLDC had been established in 1908 by the World Zionist Organization - and incorporated in the UK - to acquire land in Palestine for Jewish immigrants. The letters explain that it had bought the land in Al-Quds in 1921 “at 13 Egyptian Piastres a pic [Ottoman-era units of currency and measurement]” but do not say from whom.
“I have discussed this matter with the Palestinian [sic] Land Development Company Ltd, and have agreed, subject to your concurrence, the Government should transfer to the Company the three parcels of Government land in the Jabalia sand dunes,” wrote JN Stubbs, director of lands, to the administration’s chief secretary in March 1933.
The government’s land in Jabalia was, at 105 metric dunams (105,000 square meters), 12.5 times the size of the Al-Quds plot that the company was prepared to exchange, Stubbs noted.
“But I would observe that I propose to acquire all of the level land instead of a proportion of level and sloping land. Any value assignable to the sand dune must be dependent solely on the activities of the Company in the neighboring area,” Stubbs said.
How the PLDC used the Jabalia land is not yet known to MEE, but a letter in the file suggests it was slated for future development.