Land Settlement in Palestine before 1948 (Nakba), British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume I - Page 233. Chapter VIII: Land: Section 2

CHAPTER VIII.
the land, and the rules applicable to miri land are applied to the accretions as well.

Mewat (dead lands).

27. Mewat (dead lands) are unallocated or waste area; situated beyond the confines of inhabited regions which can only be rendered cultivable by special effort. Such land could be granted gratuitously to usufructuaries if revived with the State permission, as an inducement to controlled development of waste lands. Clandestine revival was penalised by the payment of a consideration. Nowadays, the development of "waste" land without prior leave from the State is legally a trespass. The conclusion is that mewat should have no significance and should be deemed undeveloped "vacant land" proper which cannot be possessed except by allocation from the State.

Section 2.

THE SETTLEMENT OF TITLE TO LAND.

28. The system of registration of land initiated in 1920, combined with the previous system inherited from the Turks, is described in section 3 of this chapter. That system is defective since it is not based on a cadastral survey rigorously kept up to date whereby the units of registration (parcels) are accurately defined on a plan on which they are related to all contiguous registration units, and to the national frame work of triangulation. The system may be described as a combination of a register of deeds and a register of transactions.

29. Acting on recommendations made by Sir Ernest Dowson (formerly Financial Adviser and Director-General of Surveys to the Government of Egypt, who was called in to advise), Government decided in 1927 to introduce registration of title based on the Torrens system in use in Australia and other parts of the British Empire. This is intended gradually to supersede the previous system. It involves :

(a) division of the land, by means of a cadastral survey, into units of registration called parcels according to the category and ownership. The survey is linked to a framework of triangulation points which is related to the precise position of each parcel; the parcels are grouped in units of survey, called blocks;

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