the israeli incorporation regime95 The property and lands of refugees and internally displaced persons were confiscated, transferred to an ad hoc “Custodian” of Absentee Property, and eventually used for the purposes of Jewish settlement. Without being openly racially discriminatory, provisions in this law ensured that the ‘absent’ persons were understood not to include Jews. For instance, this law was also applied to the Palestinians who involuntarily became citizens of the State of Israel and, at the time, about half of the population (an estimated 40,000 to 75,000 people) were not at their usual place of residence as defined by the law. These individuals who remained inside Israel but were not at their place of residence were defined as “present absentees” and prevented from reclaiming their lands. As outlined by American professor Don Peretz, in Israel and the Palestine Arabs (1958): Every Arab in Palestine who … left his town or village after November 29, 1947, was liable to be classified as an absentee under the regulations. All Arabs who held property in the New City of Acre, regardless of the fact that they may never have traveled farther than a few meters to the Old City, were classified as absentees. The thirty thousand109 Arabs who fled from one place to another within Israel, but who never left the country, were also liable to have their property declared absentee. Any individual who may have gone to Beirut or Bethlehem for a one-day visit, during the latter days of the [British] Mandate, was automatically an absentee (Peretz 1958, 152; also quoted in Jiryis 1976, 84). Assessments of the total amount of lands Israel defines as “abandoned” and claims ownership over range between 4.2 and 5.8 million dunums, and in the first years of its establishment (between 1948 to 1952 alone) it is estimated that Israel built 350 of the 370 new Jewish-only settlements on 109 As it stands, there is no single authoritative academic source for determining the population of Palestinian refugees and IDPs. However, recent scholarly research and publications have revealed that the number of internally displaced Palestinians during the years of 1947–1950 were higher than the number Peretz quotes. One of the foremost academic data and statistical resource centres in the world on Palestinian refugees and IDPs, the Survey on Palestinian Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons 2008–2009, published by the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, explains that by the year 1950, the number of registered IDPs in the pre-1967 Israeli territories was 47,610 persons. In this report Badil explains that: “Internally displaced Palestinians can be divided into two groups. The first is composed of persons displaced in the area that became the State of Israel in 1948. This group includes those who were displaced in the 1948 Nakba (approximately 335,000 persons) as well as those subsequently displaced by the State of Israel. No authoritative data exists for this second category. …. The second group (approximately 129,000 persons) is composed of Palestinians internally displaced in the OPT since 1967 as a result of Israel’s occupation, apartheid and colonization of the area. This figure includes Palestinian refugees who suffered subsequent secondary forced displacement inside the OPT, and whose numbers are estimated to be 37,000 persons at the end of 2008” (Badil 2009, 57–59).