94 chapter two These regulations allowed military commanders to forcibly declare areas “closed” and to deny access of residents to their homes. Interestingly, these laws were first introduced in 1936 by the British as emergency policies to quell the Arab Revolt between 1936–1939 against Anglo-Zionist colonialism, sentencing many Arab insurgents to death in the process. They were only later modified to their present form as the British Mandatory Defence (Emergency) Regulations in 1945, and mainly done so they could be employed against Zionist military organizations, including Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel, “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”) and Irgun (Irgun Zvai Leumi, the “National Military Organization”) (Jiryis 1976, 9–11). Palestinian lawyer and Israeli citizen, Sabri Jiryis, outlines Jewish voices of opposition to these laws before the establishment of the State of Israel at a Lawyers Association Conference in Tel Aviv in 1946. Dr. Moshe Dunkelblum, a future Israeli Supreme Court Judge, held that “as lawyers, we are especially concerned because they violate the basic principles of law, justice and jurisprudence” (Jiryis 1976, 11). Dr. Bernard Joseph of the Jewish Agency depicted these laws as having “deprived [the country] of the elementary protection which the laws of any civilized country afford its inhabitants.”108 And future legal advisor to the new Israeli government, Yaacov Shimshon Shapira, held that “[e]ven in Nazi Germany there were no such laws” and that “[o]nly in an occupied country do you find a system resembling ours” (Jiryis 1976, 12). Jiryis explains: With the establishment of the State of Israel, one might have expected one if its first steps to have been the repeal of these oppressive imperialist laws. Not only did they remain in effect (with the exception of one part relating to illegal immigration to Palestine), but the new regime employed them as extensively as the old – as if nothing had happened (Jiryis 1976, 13). Indeed, many Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel today find that they are still denied access to their homes because they sit on land in a “closed area.” Additionally, in 1950, the newly established state passed The Absentee Property Law, defining all those who were expelled, fled, or left the country between 1948 and 1952 as “absentees” and their property as “absentee property.” The first of a masterly sequence of laws aimed at the expro­ priation of Arab land, The Absentee Property Law (1950) re-defined the legal status of the property and lands of Palestinians outside of Israel. 108 Jiryis continues that “… the regulations expressly reintroduce provisions such as were known in Europe before the era of liberty and, in recent times, in totalitarian states” (ibid., 11–12).