10 Israeli Land Grab and Forced Population Transfer of Palestinians in the confiscation and colonization of Palestinian-owned land. Such legislations have also been fundamental to the corresponding concentration of the Palestinian population into ever decreasing pockets of land. It was war that set in motion a more extensive process of Israeli land acquisition in both (what are today) the State of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory. The 1948 War caused the displacement of between 750,000 and 900,000 Palestinians – 55 to 66 percent of the total population at the time.15 Up to 531 Palestinian localities were destroyed or depopulated16 leaving vacant 20,350 km² of land.17 Military Rule, based on Mandatory emergency regulations, was immediately introduced to facilitate the confiscation of this land. The most important legislation introduced to deal with refugee property was the Emergency Regulations (Absentee Property) Law, 1948. The Absentee Property Law gave control over ‘absentee’ property to a Custodian of Absentee Property. The term ‘absentee’ was defined so broadly as to include not only Palestinians who had fled the newly established state of Israel but also those who had fled their homes but remained within its borders.18 In fact, the term even included many Jewish colonists. However, an ostensibly race-neutral provision exempted absentees who left their home because of, among other things, “fear of Israel’s enemies” - thereby effectively excluding the Jewish population from the application of the law.19 The Israeli authorities also made immediate use of emergency legislation to confiscate land from Palestinians who had not fled the terror of the 1948 War. Among the laws used for this purpose were the Defense Regulations that were introduced during the British Mandate. According to Bisharat, these regulations “were neutral on their face,” however, the military governors, who ultimately retained discretion as to how they were to be enforced, “rarely invoked them against Jews”.20 The Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law, 1953 was enacted in order to complete the transfer to the State of confiscated Palestinian land not abandoned during the 1948 War. In the words of Israeli Finance Minister Elilezer 15 16 17 18 19 20 BADIL, Survey of Palestinian Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons, 2008-2009 (Bethlehem, Palestine, 2009), 10. BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 33; See also: Salman Abu Sitta, From Refugees to Citizens at Home (London, 2001). BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 34. 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. Forman and Kedar, ‘From Arab Land to “Israel Lands”’, 814. George Emile Bisharat, ‘Land, Law and Legitimacy in Israel and the Occupied Territories’, American University Law Review 43, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 515–516.