The status of Palestinians in Israel: 1948-Oslo

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Spring, 2006 by Labeeb Ahmed Bsoul

The Absentee Property Law was used against Palestinians whose land had been confiscated even if they had only left for a matter of a few days while the fighting was going on during the 1948 war. This law was only implemented against Palestinian Arabs. (49) This law could also have been used against some Jews who moved from one place to another, but the government did not invoke this law against them. (50) The Israeli government gave confiscated Palestinian absentee property to Jewish farmers. In fact, between 1948 and 1953 the government established 370 new Jewish settlements on land it had confiscated as "absentee" from Palestinian families. (51)

Several of these "absentees" addressed complaints to the custodian's office. Their concern was that their property was in the hands of others and could not be redeemed. Some absentees were even offered exorbitant rents to lease back their own land. Israeli policy was to refuse them, for fear of difficulty in getting them to vacate in the future. In this way, thousands of Jewish settlers occupied Palestinian lands. (52)

The Israeli government typically confiscated valley lands, leaving Arabs to the rocky hillsides. (53) It confiscated major tracts in the Little Triangle area, and where water pumps were left in Arab orange groves, giving them to Jewish farmers. Members of the Kibbutzim and Moshavim in Galilee took over flocks of cattle and sheep left by the departing Palestinians. (54) The government confiscated over 85 percent of the land of the Bedouin Palestinians of the Negev Desert (55) and concentrated the remaining Bedouins into small, largely uncultivable nearby areas. (56)

Under a 1965 government statute, the Israeli government confiscated as "absentee" lands the extensive Moslem charitable lands (waqf), much of which was used for cultivation on a long-term basis. (57) All land was confiscated from those Palestinians who were refugees beyond the 1949 armistice lines. Of the land belonging to the Palestinians who remained, 65 percent had been confiscated by the mid-1950s. (58) In 1954, the value of land taken from the Palestinians was estimated at 100 million Palestinian pounds; including stone quarries, 10,000 acres of vineyards, 25,000 acres of citrus groves, 10,000 business establishments, 95 percent of what became Israel's olive groves, and 50,000 apartments. (59) Of the 859,000 Palestinians who lived within the territory on the Israeli side of the 1949 armistice lines, 684,000 lost their homes and their property. (60)

The government of Israel emptied about 400 Palestinian towns and villages. (61) It demolished many of them and planted forests to eradicate all traces of habitation. (62) One of the highest ranking Israeli officials (Moshe Dayan, former Defense Minister), referring to Zionist land acquisition both before and after 1948, said there was not a single settlement in Israel "which was not built on the site of a previous Arab settlement." (63)

The government continued in later years to confiscate Arab agricultural land on a piecemeal basis. (64) In the Negev, the Israeli government evacuated 8,000 farmers in 1980 to construct a military air base to replace evacuated airfields in the Sinai Peninsula. (65) Confiscation in Galilee led to organized citizen protests. (66) The inhabitants of the three Palestinian designated areas, according to a Jewish Agency, posed "a major threat to the character of the area as part of the Jewish state, to Jewish control thereof, and even to Israeli sovereignty over it." Furthermore, this agency called for more Jewish settlements as "mini-lookouts." (67)