Absentees' Property Law (1950)

Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: inferredThe Absentees' Property Law of 1950 defined an "absentee" broadly enough to include people displaced a few kilometres inside the country, and vested their land, homes, businesses and bank accounts in a state Custodian; Adalah describes it as the principal legal instrument by which Israel took possession of refugee property.

Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: inferredThe Absentees' Property Law (1950) then transferred the lands, homes and bank accounts of those refugees — people made "absent" by a war — to a state Custodian, and from there largely to Jewish state institutions.

Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: inferredLand was taken under the Absentees' Property Law, the Land Acquisition Law of 1953 and repeated "public purpose" seizures; villages were denied master plans, so that building became illegal and demolition lawful; regional councils were drawn to exclude Arab localities from their own agricultural hinterland; and admissions committees were empowered to screen applicants to new communal settlements.

Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: inferredIts people were not permitted to return although most had gone no further than Nazareth and the neighbouring town of Yafa an-Naseriyye — present in the country, but classed as absentees under the Absentees' Property Law, and so dispossessed of what land the JNF had not already taken.

Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: inferredIts February 2017 legal memo on the Absentee Property Law and its application to East Jerusalem is among the clearest accounts in English of how a property becomes "absentee", what the Custodian may do with it, and why release is so rarely granted.

Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: inferredHow the Absentees' Property Law (1950) defines an absentee, and what the Custodian of Absentee Property did with what it took, are covered elsewhere in this archive.

Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: inferredTheir 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.

Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: inferredAfter 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.