Dead hand* man...

or "Separate, and not Equal."

New Israeli highway separates Palestinians
By Steven Erlanger

JERUSALEM: Israel is constructing a road through the West Bank, east of Jerusalem, that will allow both Israelis and Palestinians to travel along it - separately.

There are two pairs of lanes, one for each tribe, separated by a tall wall of concrete patterned to look like Jerusalem stone, an effort at beautification, indicating that the road is meant to be permanent. The Israeli side has various exits. The Palestinian side has few.

The point of the road, according to those who planned it under the previous prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is to permit Israel to build more settlements around east Jerusalem, cutting the city off from the West Bank but allowing Palestinians to travel unimpeded north and south through Israeli-held land.

"The Americans demanded from Sharon contiguity for a Palestinian state," said Shaul Arieli, a reserve colonel in the Israeli Army who participated in the 2000 Camp David negotiations and specializes in maps.

"This road was Sharon's answer, to build a road for Palestinians between Ramallah and Bethlehem but not to Jerusalem," Arieli said. "This was how to connect the West Bank while keeping Jerusalem united and not giving Palestinians any blanket permission to enter east Jerusalem."
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To Daniel Seidemann, a lawyer who advises Ir Amim, an Israeli advocacy group that works for Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in Jerusalem, the road suggests an ominous map of the future, in which Israel keeps nearly all of east Jerusalem and a ring of Israeli settlements surrounding it, between largely Arab east Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, which would become part of a future Palestinian state.

In a final settlement, Israel is expected to offer the Palestinians land swaps elsewhere to compensate.

The road will allow Israeli settlers living in the northern West Bank, near Ramallah, to move quickly into Jerusalem, protected from the Palestinians who surround them. It also helps ensure that Maale Adumim, a suburban settlement of 32,000 east of Jerusalem, where most of its residents work, will remain under Israeli control, along with an empty area designated E1, between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem, that Israel also intends to keep.

For the Palestinians, the road will connect the northern and southern parts of the West Bank. In a future that may have fewer checkpoints, they could travel directly from Ramallah north of Jerusalem to Bethlehem south of it, while being forced to bypass Maale Adumim and Jerusalem.

"To me, this road is a move to create borders, to change final status," Seidemann said. "It's to allow Maale Adumim and E1 into Jerusalem but be able to say, 'See, we're treating the Palestinians well - there's geographical contiguity.' "

Measure it yourself, he said. "The Palestinian road is 16 meters wide. The Israeli theory of a contiguous Palestinian state is 16 meters wide."

Khalil Tufakji, a top Palestinian geographer, said the road "is part of Sharon's plan: two states in one state, so the Israelis and the Palestinians each have their own roads." The Palestinians, Tufakji said, "will have no connection with the Israelis, but travel through tunnels and over bridges, while the Israelis will travel through Palestinian land without seeing an Arab."

In the end, he said, "there is no Palestinian state, even though the Israelis speak of one." Instead, he said, "there will be a settler state and a Palestinian built-up area, divided into three sectors, cut by fingers of Israeli settlement and connected only by narrow roads."

I think Ariel Sharon is another one whose reputation will be up for reassessment in years to come. But I won't speak ill of the (brain) dead.
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*I added the footnote because lawyer-geek humor is not everyone's forte, and what fun is it if the humorous barbs go uncaught?

The rule against perpetuities is a rule in property law which prohibits a contingent grant or will from vesting outside a certain period. If there is a possibility of the estate vesting outside of the period, regardless of how remote that chance may be, the whole interest is void, and is stricken from a grant. The rule is concerned with the utility of property and tries to prevent people from tying up assets for too long a period of time—a concept often referred to as control by the "dead hand" or "mortmain." That is, the purpose is to "limit the testator's power to earmark gifts for remote descendants."

The rule was enacted to prevent the concentration of wealth in society. When a part of a grant or will violates the Rule, only that portion of the grant or devise is removed; all other parts that do not violate the Rule are still valid conveyances of property.
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The judges believed that tying up property too long beyond the lives of people living at the time was wrong, although the exact period was not determined until another case, Cadell v. Palmer, 150 years later.

In approximate layman's terms: (since I'm certain some of you are thinking. "Hey, it's my property -- why shouldn't I have some control of what happens to it after death?") That's where you get the 21 years after death. Otherwise, imagine it: if I'm a weathy man today, I could rig it so for centuries to come, later living owners unable to touch the property, or make better use of the it as they see fit. Society overall is benefitted if there's no "dead hand" from the past dictating years and years and years into the future how the property should be used.

The courts developed the rule during the seventeenth century in order to restrict a person's power to control perpetually the ownership and possession of his or her property after death and to ensure the transferability of property.

Nowadays, there's always "perpetual trusts", but then that phrase never did apply in Ariel Sharon's case, eh? (Shimon Peres, maybe... but not "the bulldozer".)