British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume I - Page 234

CHAPTER VIII.

(b) judicial investigation of all registerable rights in the parcel: and

(c) the recording in a new land register of the title and other registerable rights affecting the land concerned in a separate folio for each parcel; on this folio are subsequently recorded the successive incidents relating to the land comprised in the parcel.

To provide for this, the Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance was enacted in 1928*.

30. Thus by "land settlement" is meant the examination of rights to land and the solution of disputes about the ownership, boundaries, category and other registerable rights in land, its cadastral sun-ey for the purpose, and the eventual recording of the rights in Land Registers. It must not be confused with the settlement of people on the land.

31. The immediate purpose of the Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance is to establish, at a comparatively low cost to the landowners, a clear and comprehensive record of registerable rights in the legal categories of land. The principal registerable rights are those of proprietorship, mortgages, leases for periods exceeding three years, and servitudes (usually rights of way). The record is based on plans of each block with its number and of the parcels with their numbers and areas in metric dunums and square metres.

Other aims served by the operations under the Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance are the establishment of better records for taxation; the collection of increased fees on dispositions registered after settlement; better development from greater security of title and from the partition of land formerly held in common and periodically divided for the purpose of cultivation; increased public security through a decrease in the number of violent disputes about boundaries and possession based on claims to ownership: and the delimitation and registration of Government lands.

32. The principal stages of the operations under the Ordinance are these:-

I. After the High Commissioner has published an Order in the Palestine Gazette. constituting a Settlement Area, a Settlement Officer publishes two notices in order to be in a position to proceed with the actual work of settlement in a given village. The first is a notice of intended settlement, the chief effect of which is to prevent the entering of fresh actions in the courts concerning

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* Drayton, Vol. II, page 853, as amended in 1937, 1939, 1942 and 1944.

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