Israel ever since.14 In practice, all the forcibly displaced Palestinians were declared ‘absentees’ and their property transferred to a Custodian.15 Indeed, the definition of absentee was so broad that not only did it include the more than 750,000 Palestinians who, pushed away by Zionist militias’ aggressions, fled the newly established state of Israel, but it also encompassed those 300,000 individuals who fled their homes while remaining within Israel’s newly created borders,16 and in many cases, within a few kilometers of their homes and land.17 These IDPs became known as “present absentees.” To complete the transfer of Palestinian land not abandoned during 1947 – 1949, which was already confiscated through the 1948 Absentee Property Law, no distinction in practice was made between absentee and non-absentee land. This enabled Israel to appropriate 1.2 million dunums of land: 704,000 was deemed “absentee land” while the remaining 310,000 dunums was confiscated through the 1953 Land Acquisition Law.18 As confirmed by Elilezer Kaplan, Israeli Finance Minister, this legislation’s purpose was “to instill legality in some acts undertaken during and following the war.”19 The Israeli Land Laws, adopted in the 1960s, further developed this system of expropriation and privatization by establishing the Israel Lands Administration 14 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, “The Internally Displaced Palestinians in Israel”, Jadal: Mada Al-Carmel Arab Center for Applied Social Research, no. 3, 2009, 35, available at: https:// mada-research.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/Jadal_May09_Eng.pdf 15 Absentee Property Law, 5710-1950, 1950, Available at: https://www.knesset.gov.il/ review/data/eng/law/kns1_property_eng.pdf 16 Geremy Forman and Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar, ‘From Arab Land to “Israel Lands”: The Legal Dispossession of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 6 (2004), 814, [Hereinafter: Forman and Kedar, “From Arab Land to “Israel Lands”]. 17 For example, Palestinians from Saffuryi settled in Nazareth, Palestinians from Ma’lul settled in Yafat Al-Nasira, and Palestinians from Iqrit settled in Al-Jish. These IDPs became known as the “present absentees”. See Amnesty International Report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, 2022, 116, Accessed 15 February 2022, Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/ documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/ [Hereinafter: Amnesty International Report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians]. 18 Forman and Kedar, From Arab Land to “Israel Lands”, 821. 19 IBID Forman and Kedar, From Arab Land to “Israel Lands”, 820. 6