Custodian of Absentee Property

The statute itself, its definition of an “absentee”, its application to East Jerusalem after 1967 and its use in the Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan cases are covered in this archive’s entry on the Absentees’ Property Law (1950). This entry is about the office the law created, which is where the abstraction of the statute becomes an administration with keys, ledgers and a sales department.

Israel did not confiscate refugee property by decree. It appointed an official. Property meeting the statutory definition vested in the Custodian the moment the definition applied — automatically, without notice, court order or compensation, and irrespective of whether the owner intended to return. The Custodian’s certificate that a person or an asset is absentee property is treated by the courts as proof of the fact unless the contrary is shown, which puts the burden of disproving one’s own absence on the claimant. There is no procedure in the law by which an absentee may recover property.

The scale of what passed through the office was the scale of the Nakba: the houses of Jaffa, Haifa, Lydda, Ramle, Safad, Tiberias and Acre; the lands of more than four hundred depopulated villages; urban shops, workshops and agricultural equipment; bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes. It also took in the waqf — property endowed in perpetuity for religious and charitable purposes under Islamic law, and therefore in principle inalienable. Mosques, cemeteries, schools and the rental properties that endowed them were treated as absentee property and placed under the same administration, so that an institution designed to be incapable of being sold became, administratively, an asset of the state.

Selling was the point of the design. The Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law of 1950 created a body to which the Custodian could sell what he held; the Development Authority could sell on to the Jewish National Fund and to Jewish communities, and land reaching the JNF was held under its constitution for Jewish use alone. The chain was built so that at no stage did the state have to justify the original taking: the Custodian’s title came from the statute, the Authority’s from the Custodian, the JNF’s from the Authority. Adalah has pressed the Attorney General and the Custodian for years on the sale of refugee land through this chain. Human Rights Watch, in its 2021 report on apartheid and persecution, treats the Custodian’s regime as a foundational element of the land-control system it documents.

Nothing symmetrical exists. Jewish property lost in the same war was the subject of restitution claims Israel pursued; Palestinian property lost to the Custodian has never been the subject of any recovery process, and the compensation scheme offered under a 1973 amendment required claimants to accept the finality of the taking. The United Nations Conciliation Commission’s property records, compiled in the 1950s, remain the fullest surviving inventory of what the office received.

Sources

• Absentees’ Property Law (1950) — Adalah’s Discriminatory Laws Database
• Adalah to Attorney General and Custodian of Absentee Property: Israel’s Sale of Palestinian Refugee Land — Adalah
• A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution — Human Rights Watch, 2021