96 chapter two lands appropriated under The Absentee Property Law (1950).110 Severely criticized by both Arab and Jewish voices and Members of Knesset, the law was seen to grant broad executive powers to the Custodian without effective monitoring. As Tawfik Toubi, then Communist Party Member of Israel’s first Knesset and one of the first to propose the formula for Israel as ‘a state of all its citizens’, states: This law is a symbol, it is an expression of the discrimination practiced against the Arabs of this country …. By virtue of the provisions of this law, thousands of the Arab inhabitants of Israel are regarded as ‘absentees’ although they are citizens of the country. They are deprived of their rights to the use of their property. The custodian, with the help of the [Absentee Property Law] … of course, is stripping them of their rights as citizens. This law does not allow them to enjoy their rights to their land and their homes and they are quite unjustifiably regarded as ‘absentees’ …. The real assignment of the honourable custodian is to steal more and more [land] (Jiryis 1976, 87). All in all, land and property laws work in conjunction with a series of other Israeli laws that favour the Jewish population over the Arab citizens of the state. By now it is well documented that one of the methods employed by the state to deprive Palestinians of their land is to turn it into state land that is maintained by Jewish national and regional planning groups.111 In 1960–1961, The Basic Law: Israel Lands, The Israel Lands Law and The Israel Lands Administration Law was formulated on behalf of the government of Israel to formalize its land regime so that the land controlled by the JNF would now be administered by a single authority, the ILA. Here it was agreed that “the lands controlled by the ILA shall be administered according to the principles of the JNF,” and the objective of purchasing and developing land as a national resource of the Jewish people, by the Jewish people, and for the Jewish people.112 As such, the ILA is forbidden from selling or leasing the land to non-Jews. This extra-territorialization of the land places it beyond the control of the government, rendering it inaccessible to all Arab citizens. Thus, while, prior to 1948, members of the Palestinian-Arab community owned and/or cultivated some 93–94 percent of the land in geographical Palestine, today, 93 percent of the territory of Israel is under direct control of the state. This land is administered 110 COHRE and Badil, Ruling Palestine, 41. 111 See Lustick (1980); COHRE and Badil, Ruling Palestine; Stein (1984); Zayyad (1976); and Kimmerling (1983), among others. 112 Lehn and Davis 1988, 116. See also COHRE and Badil, Ruling Palestine.