Conclusion
Upon examination, the policy of land confiscation and denial of use has
been one of the most injurious and effective Israeli mechanisms to forcibly
displace or transfer Palestinians from their lands, starting from the 1948
Nakba to the present day. The largest confiscation of Palestinian land took
place in 1948 with the Absentee Property Law, and after the beginning of
the 1967 occupation, with the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem. Both
actions and the subsequent Israeli legislation attempting to legitimize them
are incompatible with international law. Israel intentionally and consistently
violates the human rights provisions associated with permissible confiscation:
legality, public interest, proportionality and compensation, as well as the
requirement for these principles to be applied exceptionally and in a nondiscriminatory manner. Israel has not only created multiple and complex legal
mechanisms to facilitate de jure and de facto confiscation, but implements
these mechanisms through a discriminatory lens and with a political motive,
to ensure that Palestinians are forced out and replaced by Jewish-Israeli
colonizers.
The cases above demonstrate multiple mechanisms of de facto confiscation
where Israel manipulates or outright ignores the rights connected to ownership
without actually being the legal owners, preventing Palestinians from exercising
their ownership rights. This results in the denial of access to their homes, lands,
livelihood or source of income and essential services. This denial can result in
the direct forced displacement of the residents when their homes are located
on confiscated land, or indirect due to coercion and pressure to leave the area.206
206 Jurisprudence from the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other international criminal tribunals
is consistent in holding that the understanding of the forcible nature of displacement is not limited to
simple indications of physical removal. Forcible transfer also includes acts or omissions which amount to
threats of force or coercion, the creation of fear of detention or violence, or taking advantage of a coercive
environment. The essential component is that the displacement must be involuntary, with the person(s) in
question being deprived of genuine choice in the decision to leave their homes and communities. (For more
information about Israel’s forcible transfer of Palestinians in the oPt, see BADIL, Coercive Environments:
Israel’s Forcible Transfer of Palestinians in the Occupied Territory, February 2017).
73
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