Contemporary conversations about Palestine and Israel often place land and land claims at the center of the historical and ongoing conflict; however, such discussions rarely concern the structures of land policy and ownership at play. Reflecting on Israel’s recent dispossession of the Bedouin village of Umm el-Hiran in the Naqab, this paper takes a historical approach to understanding the land tenure systems of Israel and the previous governing regimes over Palestine. Land systems are more than a public versus private division of land or the zoning regulations governing an area; rather, land systems encompass a multi-layered process including valuation, registration, titling, and formulation of transfer regulations. Through a comparative analysis of the 1858 Ottoman Land Code, British land ordinances, and Israel’s Abandoned Property and Cultivation Laws, this paper demonstrates how Israel’s ability to alienate and accumulate Palestinian land as state property was facilitated by the multi-layered land systems that preceded it. Ottoman and British land systems outlined systems of categorization and documentation as a matter of determining the current state of land use, noting where and what type of land transfers were possible, but most importantly, they attempted to implement a standardized method of what is deemed and respected as claims to ownership. As these legal policies map the land, manners by which to articulate ownership come to the fore. More specifically, these laws show the centrality of western forms of articulating ownership, especially land cultivation, threading together the land policies of these three regimes. While the implications of such articulations on the native Palestinians varied between Ottoman, British, and Israeli rule, the continuity between the three ultimately provided Israel the space to blur the lines between terra nullius, “abandoned,” and “waste” lands to their benefit as they dispossessed Palestinians of their property from the inception of the state until today. Each element of the land tenure systems, from categorization to demarcation, gave rise to the space for Israel to conceive of land systems tool for property seizure and state property accumulation.