Present Absentee

How 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. The point of this entry is the category the law produced without naming: the Palestinian who was inside the country the whole time and lost their land regardless.

The definition was drawn by place and date, not by intention or by presence in the country afterwards. A villager who fled the fighting to the next town and was there on the relevant date satisfied it. So Palestinians who moved a few kilometres — to Nazareth, Acre, Haifa, Shefa-Amr, Majd al-Kroum — and who were still inside the territory when it became Israel, received Israeli citizenship in one hand and a notice of absence in the other. Israeli administrative usage produced a term for them: nifkadim nokhahim, present absentees.

The consequence is a landscape. Their villages are the ones whose ruins stand inside Israel with pine forests planted over them — Saffuriyya, al-Birwa, Iqrit, Kafr Birim, Lifta, Miska — visible from the towns their owners live in. In several celebrated cases, Iqrit and Kafr Birim above all, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the villagers were entitled to return, and successive governments have declined to implement the rulings for more than seventy years. Internally displaced Palestinians inside Israel have organised since the 1990s through ADRID, the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced in Israel, which holds an annual march of return to a destroyed village on Israel’s Independence Day. When ADRID won the Body Shop Human Rights Award in 2002, BADIL — which had nominated it — put the number of Palestinians living as internally displaced inside Israel since 1948 at some 250,000.

Those it describes use the phrase with a certain dry precision. Ameen Muhammad Ali of Saffuriyya — Abu Arab, whose testimony this archive keeps — told Al Jazeera in 2016 that in Israeli legal parlance he is classified as a “present absentee”: present in Israel, absent from his property. He was an Israeli citizen with no more right to return to his village than his relatives in the camps of Lebanon. He was eighty-one, and unshaken: “If not me, then my son — and if not my son, then my grandson.”

Sources

• Absentees’ Property Law (1950) — Adalah’s Discriminatory Laws Database
• Nakba survivors share their stories of loss and hope — Al Jazeera, 19 May 2016
• Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced in Israel Receives International Human Rights Award — BADIL, 30 October 2002