Forgery, fraud undermine West Bank land deals

Selling land viewed as treason
Palestinian society sees selling land to Israelis as treason, and the bullet-riddled corpses of Palestinian land dealers turn up every so often around the West Bank. To protect sellers, the deals are secret and almost never registered.

That allows several kinds of scams. Sometimes, Palestinians cheat the settlers by taking their money and not turning over the land, or selling land they don't own. Other times, settlers falsely claim they've purchased Palestinians' land.

On Feb. 12, 2004, according to a document the Migron settlers provided to an Israeli court, a person identifying himself as "Abdel-Latif Hassaan Sumrain (Elmatin)," a "previous resident of the Village of Borka Ramallah now residing in Orange County, California," appeared before Shah, the California notary.

"Sumrain" gave the number of a California ID card and confirmed he received an unspecified payment for turning his land over to a company called Elwatan Ltd. In Arabic, "el-watan" means "homeland" — but Israeli settlers founded the company to buy Palestinian land.

Court documents list the company's address as 17 Six-Day War St. in Jerusalem, but a woman who answered the main door to the two-story residential building said she had never heard of it. She refused to give her name.

Document doesn't hold up
The notary's document also doesn't stand up. It contains several misspellings, including Sumarin's name and that of his El-Mu'atan clan — mistakes that could easily have been made by someone working off a document in Arabic, which is largely written without vowels.

A check of California records shows the ID number the seller gave belongs to an Ernie Mario Mendoza. A man who answered the phone at a Poway, Calif., number for Mendoza did not appear to have heard of the case and refused to answer questions.

A Palestinian Authority document shows that Sumarin died in 1961, when his grandson says he was around 80. The grandson and a grandnephew said the elder Sumarin was buried near a fragile olive tree in the village cemetery. From there, Migron is visible on a hilltop to the east.

The El-Watan company was set up by an Israeli local government in the West Bank that was headed until recently by Pinhas Wallerstein, a prominent settler leader.

"The person who sold us the land was very much alive at the time, and living in the United States," said Wallerstein, adding that the settlers had paid "millions of dollars" for the small plot. He said the document transferring ownership was genuine "to the best of my knowledge."

If anyone was guilty of fraud, Wallerstein said, it was the seller, who may have tricked the settlers into believing he was the Palestinian owner. He did not present evidence for that claim, which if true would mean the settlers spent millions without verifying the seller's identity.

Evidence in court
The company has a photocopy of the seller's California ID and a videotape of him, Wallerstein said. But he would not make them available to the AP, saying they would eventually be introduced as evidence in court.

Shah told the AP in Tustin that he never signed the document and that the stamp on it was not authentic. Copies of Shah's real signature provided by Orange County officials do not match the signature on the Sumarin document.

"It's not my writing," Shah said. "Somebody did fraud, I guess."

He said he had been questioned by FBI agents and was not allowed to reveal more details. The FBI's Los Angeles office said only that it does not confirm or deny investigations.

Hillel Cohen, a Hebrew University expert on Palestinian collaboration with Israel, said the forgers likely would not have hesitated to use a dead man's name since Palestinians registered as owners of West Bank land are often dead or live abroad.

He said it was reasonable to expect that no one would even notice the supposed sale, let alone check its authenticity. Although Israeli watchdog groups like Peace Now and Yesh Din have tracked sales of Palestinian land in recent years, these forgers "might still have been playing by the old rules," said Cohen,

"If no one cares, you don't get caught," he said.

Israel pushing compromise deal
Dror Etkes, an Israeli peace activist behind the legal action against Migron, said the crude forgery demonstrated the settlers' confidence. "If they were more afraid, they would do it more professionally," he said.

The Israeli government has not recognized the Sumarin sale or any other land purchases at Migron, and is pushing a compromise deal to move Migron elsewhere in the West Bank. But the Migron settlers say they won't move and are fighting to prove their ownership in a Jerusalem court. The process could take years.

Itay Harel, a social worker who lives on the Sumarin plot in Migron, insisted the sale was legitimate, although he refused to discuss it in detail. He also made clear that from the settlers' perspective, the sale was beside the point.

"This land belongs to the people of Israel, who were driven off it by force," Harel said, referring to the defeat and exile of the Jews by Rome in A.D. 70. He said no Palestinian had a rightful claim to any part of the West Bank.

"Anyone who claims the land is his is lying, and it is said that if you lie enough times, you start believing it," he said.

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