The Series of Working Papers will address nine main Israeli policies aiming at forced population transfer of Palestinians. They are: • Denial of residency • Installment of a permit regime • Land confiscation and denial of use • Discriminatory zoning and planning • Segregation • Denial of natural resources and access to services • Denial of refugee return • Suppression of resistance • Non-state actions (with the implicit consent of the Israeli state) Forced Population Transfer The concept of forced population transfer – and recognition of the need to tackle its inherent injustice – is by no means a new phenomenon, nor is it unique to Palestine. Concerted efforts to colonize foreign soil have underpinned displacement for millennia, and the “unacceptability of the acquisition of territory by force and the often concomitant practice of population transfer”2 was identified by the Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great, and subsequently codified in the Cyrus Cylinder in 539 B.C.; the first known human rights charter. Almost two thousand years later, during the Christian epoch, European powers employed population transfer as a means of conquest, with pertinent examples including the Anglo-Saxon displacement of indigenous Celtic peoples, and the Spanish Inquisition forcing the transfer of religious minorities from their homes in the early 16th century. Today, forced population transfer is considered one of the gravest breaches of international law. According to the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the former Commission on Human Rights: The essence of population transfer remains a systematic coercive and deliberate […] movement of population into or out of an area […] with the effect or purpose of altering the demographic composition 2 6 Joseph Schechla, “Prohibition, Prosecution and Impunity for the Crime of Population Transfer” (BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights, Spring-Summer 2012), http://www. badil.org/en/al-majdal/item/1764-art4.