Absentees' Property Law (1950)

Enacted in March 1950, the Absentees’ Property Law defined an “absentee” broadly: any person who, between 29 November 1947 and the end of the war’s emergency regulations, was outside the area of Israel, or in territory held by Arab forces — a definition that swept in the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees of 1948, including people displaced only a few kilometers from their homes. Their land, houses, businesses, and bank accounts were vested in a state Custodian of Absentee Property “for safekeeping”; in practice the property was never returned and the owners were never compensated. Much of it was later transferred to the state’s Development Authority and the Jewish National Fund, forming a large share of the land on which new Israeli towns and settlements were built. Adalah, the legal center for the Arab minority in Israel, describes the law as the main legal instrument used by Israel to take possession of refugee land.

The law also reached Palestinians who never left the country. Tens of thousands of internally displaced Palestinians who remained inside Israel — citizens of the new state — found themselves classified as “present absentees”: physically present, legally absent, and barred from recovering their homes and villages.

After 1967, Israel applied its law to occupied East Jerusalem, and the Custodian began declaring properties there “absentee” when their owners lived in the West Bank — people who had never moved at all, ruled absent from their own property because the Green Line now ran between them and Jerusalem. Israel’s Attorney General Menachem Mazuz conceded in a 2005 legal opinion that such absence was “technical in nature,” yet the practice continued, and it remains one of the legal levers in East Jerusalem property disputes. The question of restitution for 1948 absentee property is one of the core unresolved issues of the refugee question.

Sources

• Adalah to Attorney General and Custodian of Absentee Property: Israel’s Sale of Palestinian Refugee Land — Adalah
• Application of Absentees’ Property Law to Palestinian West Bank Residents with Property in East Jerusalem — Adalah