For more than three decades, the Nassars have battled Israeli efforts to reclassify their property as ‘state land’
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n 1916, Daher Nassar, a Christian Palestinian farmer living south of Bethlehem, made a move considered more than unusual at the time. He bought a 42-hectare stretch of farmland on the slopes and valleys of Wadi Salem, and formally registered the purchase with the Ottoman authorities, who then ruled the region.
A few years later, after transferring the title to his son, Nassar did something even more extraordinary. He re-registered the deed under each successive administration – the British mandate, then the Jordanian government, and finally, after 1967, under Israeli occupation.
Today, that ageing, yellowing document is one of the family’s few shields against the loss of their land – a plot that lies near the town of Nahalin in the so-called Area C of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, coveted by settlers and by far-right Israeli ministers eager to see it annexed. In 1991, the Israeli authorities began a legal battle to declare the Nassar family’s farm Israeli “state land”, a precursor to claiming it for occupation.
