CHAPTER TWELVE — Part 1 of 4

L00TING, PILLAGE, PLUNDER AND SPOLIATION OF THE PERSONAL AND REAL PROPERTIES OF PALESTINIANS IN TWELVE CITIES AND LARGE TOWNS AND 526 SMALL TOWNS AND VILLAGES 1948-1967

In the wake of World War 11, in which the Nazi war criminals looted, pillaged and plundered the property of Jews and non-Jews in Europe, it is astonishing that similar crimes were committed against the Palestinian Arabs by Jews, many of whom were either victims or the relatives of victims of Nazi persecution.

The crimes committed by the Zionists against the Palestinian Arabs were verified in their own unguarded remarks. For example, Levi Eshkol "went on a tour of the Arab villages which had recently been abandoned and captured. As he put it, he saw 'the traces of what had been and was no longer - the houses broken into, plundered and burned, The sight sank through my head, brain, blood and heart.'"(1)

Many cases of robbery committed against Palestinian Arabs during their expulsion by Israeli soldiers acting under the orders of their commanders have been reported. For example, Aharon Cohen, the director of Mapam's Arab Department, recalls that Israeli "troops at the checkpoints out of Lydda had been ordered to take from the expelled Arabs every watch, piece of jewelry or money."(2)

A British teacher reported confirmation of this provided by Arab refugees from Lydda:

They were told by the Jews that they might leave at their leisure and take what they couldcarry, then as they got outside the town, they were met by Jews who stripped them of all their valuables, even to the women's earrings, bracelets and head coins. One woman told me she started with only 11 piastres and that was taken from her.(3)

The homes these people were forced to leave behind them were then systematically looted by Israel. Cabinet Minister Bechor Shitrit confirms this official looting. He stated, "The army from Lydda alone had taken over 1,800 truckloads of property ."(4)

Yet while theft on a grand scale was practiced by the Zionist authorities, the big thieves of Zionism complained about the personal thefts made by the little thieves in the Zionist rank and file.

David Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary entry for July 15, 1948: "The bitter question has arisen regarding acts of robbery and rape in the conquered towns. Soldiers from all the battalions robbed and stole."(5)

Yosef Lamm, a Member of the Knesset, officially admitted on November 22, 1949: "None of us behaved during the war in a way we might have expected the Jewish people to behave, either with regard to property or human life, and we should all be ashamed."(6)

The punishment of the Nazi war criminals by the international community was meant to deter the future commission of such war crimes as those to which the Zionists have in some cases confessed their guilt. That they should also be brought before the same type of bar of justice is a moral imperative facing the international community.

It is a generally accepted principle of law that "a criminal may not derive benefit from the perpetration of his criminal act." The entire Zionist edifice is constructed on the foundation of usurped Palestinian lands and proceeds of plundered Palestinian possessions. The Zionist regime in Palestine and its people have nothing of any value that does not incorporate the use of purloined Arab property. The establishment of Israel and its survival would not have been possible without the benefits the Zionists have derived from usurped Arab lands and possessions.

The Custodian of Absentee Property reported to the Finance Committee of the Knesset in 1949 that they were the receivers of "great quantities of property in hundreds of thousands of dwellings, shops, storehouses and workshops, as well as produce in fields and fruit in orchards, groves and vineyards."(7)

Israeli leaders officially admitted to the United Nations in 1966:

So far as the facts are concerned, the abandoned properties in question, mainly agricultural land, have long become an integral and indivisible part of the country's econorny.(8)

So it is beyond question, from the admissions of the Israelis themselves, that the gains they received from their crimes against the Palestinians "have long become an integral and indivisible part" of their economic life-blood.

The Nazi Jurist Hans Frank who was tried and found guilty of war crimes, for which he was subsequently hanged, made autobiographical notes in the Nuremberg prison. In these notes he recalled that one of his teachers of law, old Geheimrat von Calker, had warned him to stay away from the infant Nazi movement: "I beg you to leave these people alone! No good will come of it! Political movements that begin in the criminal courts will end in the criminal courts."(9) The prophetic words of the wise German professor were unheeded by Hans Frank, to his later regret. The same words are equally applicable to the Zionist movement, which has ended up as an ignoble perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The only difference is that the Nazi war criminals have already been brought to justice, and the Zionist war criminals have not yet been brought to justice.

If anyone should consider the equation of the Zionists with the Nazis to be too extreme, he should simply examine the facts of their crimes. The facts themselves can only lead objectively to the conclusion that the Zionists and the Nazis are culpable of many of the same crimes.

This was admitted by Israeli Minister of Agriculture Aharon Cizling, recorded in the Minutes of the Cabinet Meeting of November 17, 1948:

I often disagreed when the term Nazi was applied to the British. I wouldn't like to use the term, even though the British committed Nazi crimes. But now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being has been shaken.(10)

Following its collapse at the end of World War 11, Nazi Germany was erased from the map. But the ill-gotten gains of the Nazi war criminals' looting, pillaging and plundering were disgorged, and returned to their rightful owners. Further, the German people were saddled with the burden of reparations for both property destroyed and for having deprived their victims of the use of their property. In no case did the commission of a war crime allow its perpetrator to have title to any criminally obtained property or valuables.

The Israeli regime is still functioning, but through its co-mingling of stolen goods and usurped Palestinian lands, with outside economic assistance, none of its people can claim clear title to any fruits connected with any Israeli endeavors. Those whose aid alone allows Israel to survive must realize that they are aiding and abetting robbery and murder.

A prophetic statement by Israeli Attorney General Moshe Shapira is contained in the Memorandum of the August 4, 1949, Meeting on Abandoned Property: "In the end we shall both pay compensation and still be considered thieves."(11)

It is not compensation that is due to the Palestinian Arabs, but the restitution of their homeland, lands and possession and reparations for having been criminally deprived of the use of their property and having been reduced to a refugee nation in exile. The United States of America and European nations who aided and abetted the Israelis must also pay a price.

Official United Nations confirmation of the looting, pillaging and plundering of the property of the Palestinian Arabs is found in Count Folke Bernadotte's Report of September 16, 1948:

There have been numerous reports from reliable sources of large-scale looting, pillaging and plundering, and of instances of destruction of villages without apparent military necessity. The liability of the Provisional Government of Israel to restore private property to its Arab owners and to indemnify those owners for property wantonly destroyed is clear.(12)

Nearly forty years later the Palestinian Arabs are still awaiting the restoration of their properties and indemnification for the damages done to them. The international community has been both lax and dilatory in supporting the fair application of international law on behalf of the Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes.

Instead, nations like the United States seem to have swallowed Zionist myths and canards about the Palestinian Arabs. Zionists claim that the Palestinian Arabs did not exist as an entity, or, if they did, that Palestine was a primitive backwater of the Arab world. In fact, a separate Palestinian Arab identity is rooted in the most ancient history of Palestine, and Palestine, on a per capita basis, had, and has today, a larger proportion of educated people than many of the nations of the world. Palestinian physicians, lawyers, professors, bankers and businessmen are found all over the world. The properties stolen from them were not the artifacts of primitive tribes, but the worldly possessions accumulated over generations by a sophisticated and often well-to-do people. Many Palestinian farmers possessed carefully nurtured vineyards, citrus groves, olive trees, orchards and agricultural fields producing crops of a quality only possible afters years of cultivation. Palestinian livestock were not the scrawny beasts of primitive tribes, but a stock of wealth representing continual improvement in breeding. Palestinian shopkeepers sold wares from all over the world, as well as the products of skilled Palestinian artisans and the products of modem factories financed by Palestinian capital.

It is important to recognize that the Israelis looted, pillaged and plundered the property of a prosperous infrastructure, well developed in comparison with much of the world at the time.

Jerusalem is an excellent case in point. The city retained its ancient charm, but also had a bustling, modem economy and lifestyle wantonly destroyed by the looting of the Israelis after the British Mandate ended.

Palestinian Arab citizens of Jerusalem record the orgy of robbery committed by the Israelis on the day the British left Jerusalem. In the Palestinian Arab neighborhoods of Greek Colony, German Colony, Qatamon, Upper and Lower Beqaa, May 14,1948 was a date not just marking the birth of the alien regime of Israel in their midst but a date of rapine destruction of the Palestinian Arabs of Jerusalem and the looting of their property by Zionist mobs. Contrary to Zionist propaganda, the birth of Israel did not represent liberty for the Jews, but license to steal for its most criminal element. This is proved by their behavior in the Holy City of Jerusalem.

For Naim Halaby, as for most of the Arabs left in those middle-class neighborhoods, the memory of May 14 and 15, 1948, would always be associated with a sight he watched from his window, "an orgy of looting."

Halaby saw one group bring a horse and a cart up to his next-door neighbor's abandoned home and systematically strip it bare. Down the street other looters carried away tires, furniture, kerosene and heaps of clothing from another house. Halaby's worst shock, however, came when he saw a green Willys drive by his window. It was his. He had left it in a friend's garage with its distributor cap removed, thinking that no one would be able to move it.(13)

The wanton looting, pillaging and plundering of the property of the Palestinian Arabs of Jerusalem is attested to by other eyewitness testimony:

Dr. Boulos, the surgeon at Government Hospital, looked on helplessly as a wave of looters picked his home clean, even stripping the clothes from his closet. "If I had known," he later lamented, "at least I would have put on a good suit that morning."

Daoud Dajani heard a noise outside his house. Stepping out, he saw a man trying to get into his home through a little door under its eaves. He yelled and the frightened looter tumbled at his feet. It was a Yemenite truck driver from the Dead Sea Potash Works who had been a customer of Dajani's grocery store for years.

Emile Hourani overheard two elderly Jewish women who were looting his neighbor's house bitterly complain, "The rich people took all the good things and left nothing for us."(14)

The looting, pillaging and plundering of the property of the Palestinian Arabs certainly was part and parcel of the Zionist plan to expel all Palestinians and erase their presence from Palestine. From official Zionist Archives we may quote the words of Eliyahu Carmeli, a Mapai Member of the Knesset: "I'm not willing to accept a single Arab, and not only an Arab but any gentile. I want the State of Israel to be entirely Jewish."(15) Though the presence of Arabs was unacceptable to an ardent Zionist, their property was vitally useful.

A secret report, written by Dov Shafrir, Custodian of Abandoned Property, tried to explain how "people succumb to the grave temptation of looting," and why. First there was the massive flight of panic-stricken Arabs who abandoned thousands of apartments, stores and workshops as well as crops and orchards. Second, the property concerned was in the midst of the front-line combat area during the transition from mandatory to Israeli rule. This meant there was no stable authority with which to be reckoned. "The moral sense of the few who were attacked by the many and managed to survive, justified the looting of the enemy's property," reported the Custodian. "Passions of revenge and temptation overcame great numbers of people. Under those conditions only an extremely Firm action by the military, administrative, civil and judiciary authorities might have saved, not only the property, but also many people, from moral bankruptcy. Such firm action did not take place, and perhaps could not, given the circumstances, and so things continued to go downhill without restraint."(16)

This once-secret report of the Zionist Custodian of Abandoned Property constitutes an admission of the widespread looting, pillaging and plundering of Palestinian Arab property. But its caveats are worthy of analysis.

1. The abandonment of their property by the Palestinian Arabs who owned it was impelled by the Israelis themselves.

2. The very fact that there was combat in Palestine was the result of Zionist ideology's determination to seize the land of the Palestinians, land which did not belong to the Zionists, in order to establish an all-Jewish State.

3. The "passions of revenge and temptation" which overcame a great number of Jewish people at the time were totally contrary to the Commandments and moral code of Judaism, but were wholly consistent with the amoral code of Zionism. Thus Zionism itself destroyed the Jewish moral restraints of these people, replacing those restraints with Zionist attitudes towards non-Jews.

4. The Zionist authorities themselves were stealing Palestinian land and property for the Zionist cause and thus were in no position to control or criticize their rank and file for doing exactly what they themselves were doing on a larger scale.

Years later the Custodian removed the veil of secrecy: "The inspectors found most of the houses broken into, and rarely was there any furniture left," he wrote in his memoirs. "Clothes, household effects, jewelry, bedding - other than mattresses — never reached the warehouses of the Custodial authority. More than 50,000 Arab homes had been abandoned, but only 509 carpets reached the Custodial authority ."(17)

It should be noted that every Arab house had one or more carpets of some value. Carpets were not only an essential component of Arab living standards, but also represented part of a family's store of value.

The Custodian's complaint, boiled down to its essential ingredients, is that the Israeli rank and file stole for their own use or sale tens of thousands of valuable Arab carpets, property which the Zionist authorities considered it permissible to steal for their own use. To the victims of these crimes, as to justice, it matters not whether the proceeds of the theft of their property wound up in the pockets of an individual criminal or in the coffers of the Zionist State. What is important to the victim, and to justice, is that the property was stolen, and has not been restored.

According to Israel's own official Yearbook of 1951- 1952: "During and after the War of Liberation, goods, equipment and belongings of absentee owners were collected in storehouses. In 1948-49 most of these stores were liquidated through sale."(18)

No Palestinian Arab authorized the Government of Israel to conduct a sale. of his stolen property. The sale of these goods, as admitted by Israel itself, was illegal.

Abandoned property was one of the greatest contributions toward making Israel a viable state. Ten thousand shops, businesses and stores were left in Jewish hands. At the end of the Mandate, citrus holdings in the area of Israel totaled about 240,000 dunums of which half were Arab owned. Most of the Arab orange groves were taken over by the Israel Custodian of Absentee Property. In 1951-52, former Arab groves produced some one and a quarter million boxes of fruit, of which 400,000 were exported. Arab fruit sent abroad provided nearly 10 per cent of the country's foreign currency earnings fromexports in 195 1. In 1949 the olive produce from abandoned Arab groves was Israel's third largest export, ranking after citrus and diamonds. The relative economic importance of Arab property was largest from 1948 until 1953, during the period of greatest immigration and need.(19)

These facts, fully supported by the Zionists' own statistical data, provide evidence that the assets built in subsequent years by Zionist immigrants to Israel are capitalized on the assets of usurped Palestinian property and possessions.

The Zionist authorities retained the fiction that they were acting as trustees for some of this property's absentee Arab owners for some time, but the history of the world has never shown a more massive example of fiduciary embezzlement by an alleged trustee of someone else's property. The crimes of the Custodian of Absentee Property are not merely textbook examples of the failure of a trustee to protect property in its charge, but classic examples of a trustee's looting of property in its care.

Gradually, according to their own admission, the Zionist authorities siphoned off the property of the Palestinian Arabs under the trusteeship of the Custodian.

The 1953-54 Government of Israel Yearbook admits that:

The properties under the control of the Custodian were an important source of employment; 185,600 work-days were provided in the urban sector, and 463,550 work-days in the rural sector ... The necessary action was taken during the year to effect the legal and orderly transfer of properties to the Development Authority.(20)

Any transfer of property without the consent of its rightful owner is illegal, and thus null and void.

The transfer of stolen goods by one receiver of stolen goods to another receiver of stolen goods cohfers no rights, interest or title in those goods.

But the Zionists tried to obfuscate the rightful ownership through such sham transfers. For example, according to their own official statement:

The area of absentee-owned plantations totals 126,000 dunums, comprising olives, grapes, figs, apricots, almonds and other fruit orchards. Of this total, 55,000 dunums are leased to settlements, 16,000 dunums to various lessees, and 55,000 dunums have been handed over to the Israel Plantations Corporation.(21)

The sole right to the stolen property belongs to its original Arab owners, who were criminally and forcibly robbed by the Zionists. According to Amin Jarjouria, an Arab Member of the Israeli Knesset:

Two days after the seizure of Jish, in the Safad district, the army surrounded the village and carried out searches. In the course of the search soldiers robbed several of the houses and stole 650 Palestinian pounds, jewelry and other valuables. When the people who were robbed insisted on being given receipts for their property, they were taken to a remote place and shot dead. The villagers protested to the local commander, Manu Friedmann, who had the bodies brought back to the village. The finger of one of the dead had been cut off to remove a ring?(22)

These criminal acts, revealed in the Knesset, are typical of the methods by which the Zionists came into possession of Palestinian Arab property and goods.

After a while the Custodian himself began to distribute the confiscated property. To begin with, Shafrir later reported, goods, materials and equipment were turnedover to the army, directly from the stores in the occupied towns. Merchandise which the army did not require was put up for sale. The sale was conducted by special departments instituted for the purpose, staffed, as much as war conditions allowed, by personnel trained in the principal branches of commerce. Other merchandise was sold through negotiation with merchants or industrialists, depending on the type of materials. "The army had the first choice of any goods and materials it might require," Shafrir said. "Next were the government office, the war disabled, the Jewish Agency, the local authorities and public bodies, such as Hadassah."The army also needed most of the workshop equipment such as cabinet-making shops, locksmiths-works, turneries, iron-works, tin-works and the like. Industrial plants which could be operated on their existing sites were leased out by contract, "whenever possible," according to Shafrir. Plants which no one wanted to lease were sold to the highest bidder.

"The sale of furniture, Shafrir said, "was an especially complex and difficult business and took a long time." The army had removed from the houses and obtained from the warehouses furniture worth tens of thousands of pounds for its offices, homes andclubs. A ministerial committee resolved to have the remaining furniture, which was mostly from warehouses, evaluated by professionals and furniture dealers, and sold to a variety of buyers at this valuation price. If any furniture was left after the general sale, the Custodian would determine the method of selling it. The priority list for buyers was as follows: the families of the war disabled, soldiers' families, government employees who had been transferred from Jerusalem, civilians who had been injured in the war, and last of all, ordinary civilians. "In reality," the Custodian later remembered, "the last category never got to purchase any of the furniture, because the higher categories bought practically all of it." (23)


Yosef Yaakobson - an orange grower, and later an advisor to the Ministry of Defense - suggested to Ben- Gurion that he expropriate a shoe-making plant from its Jaffa owner and turn it over to the shoe-making enterprise Min'al of kibbutz Givat Hashloshah. Ben-Gurion consulted the Minister of Finance and Kaplan expressed the opinion that the private property of Arabs who remained in Jaffa should not be expropriated. Ben-Gurion disagreed; in his opinion only the property found inside private residences should not be expropriated. Yaakobson told him that the army was removing goods from Jaffa property estimated at 30,000 pounds daily. Attorney Naftaly Lifshitz of Haifa informed him that in the banks of that city there were 1,500,000,000 pounds in deposits belonging to Arabs. "The banks are willing to turn this property over," noted Ben-Gurion, and so the government, too, took a hand in the division of the spoils.(24)

The purchasing power of this one and one-half billion Palestinian pounds of Arab deposits in Haifa banks alone gives a clue to the magnitude of the theft committed against the Palestinian Arabs.

The culpability and guilt of Israel in the looting, pillaging and plundering of the Palestinian Arabs' land and possessions is admitted by then Minister of Agriculture Aharon Cizling in a document sent by him to David Ben-Gurion on June 16, 1948:

Again and again in our meetings we discuss the issue of the abandoned property. Everyone expresses shock, bitter ness and shame, but we have yet to find a solution ... up to now we have dealt with individual looters, both soldiers and civilians. Now, however, there are more and more reports about acts which, judging by their nature and extent, could only have been carried out by (government) order. I ask ... on what basis was the order given (I hear it has been held back to dismantle all the water pumps in the Arab orange groves) .... If there is any foundation to the reports which have reached me, the responsibility rests with a government agency .... Meanwhile, private plundering still goes on, too.(25)

The response by the Custodian of Absentee Property to Cizling's complaint was as follows:

A widespread operation of dismantling the (water pump) engines had been carried out throughout the country. This had to be done in order to collect all the motors in the abandoned orange groves because of the many robberies, and so they could be put to use when they would be needed. (26)

In other words, Israeli officials admitted that they stole the water pump engines in question in order to ensure that the rank and file Zionists didn't steal them!

The effect of the Zionist looting of Palestinian Arab irrigation machinery was translated into later statistics concerning the Arab fanners remaining inside the so-called State of Israel. In 1975-1976,43 percent of Jewish land was irrigated; the figure for Arab land was 7.6 percent. In 1974-1975, Arab fanners cultivated over 20 percent of the crops but received only 2 percent of the water.(27)

No proof that the whole Zionist edifice is built on the foundation of land possessions belonging to the Palestinian Arabs is more damning than that found in the Official Zionist Archives. The Report of Custodian Dov Shafrir proving that the present Israeli inhabitants of Haifa and Jaffa are the beneficiaries of stolen Arab goods is a case in point:

With the intensification of immigration in the summer of 1948, the institutions which looked after the immigrants themselves began to demand that parts of the city which were still under occupation be made available to them. The property included warehouses and shops from which the merchandise had yet to be removed, as well as fully equipped workshops and plants. In Haifa the inspector's office began to issue apartments to the Absorption Department as early as July. The intention was to proceed through the city, quarter by quarter, allocating the apartments and business premises, after the goods had already been taken out of them. But the order was not followed. Hundreds of immigrant families were sent to take possession of apartments, and this caused confusion both in the collecting of goods and in the distribution of apartments. In Jaffa the situation was considerably worse. A certain part of the city was scheduled to be opened on September 10, and a particular allocation of houses was actually agreed upon - to be given to the Absorption Department, the army, the government officials who had been transferred from Jerusalem, and for the children of the settlements who had been evacuated during the war and who had been living in Tel Aviv schools, as well as to the soldiers' families. The Tel Aviv Absorption Department ignored this agreement and went ahead and organized a mass invasion of hundreds of families ... before the date that was originally agreed upon for the opening of the city to civilians. The government appointed a committee to handle the distribution of apartments in Jaffa. The committee met and reached authoritative conclusions. But once again no heed was paid to the proper agreement. This time the social welfare officers sent hundreds of soldiers' families. Thus the populating of Jaffa was achieved by continuous invasions and counter-invasions (of unauthorized immigrants).(28)

Tom Segev, who has researched the official Zionist Archives with exemplary objectivity, writes:

By established custom, whoever succeeded in placing a bed in a room and spending the night in it, acquired the right of possession. One day Avraham Amsalem, age 19, entered the house of Mohammed Abu Sirah in the Ajjami quarter, and, threatening the Arab with his submachine gun, invaded and occupied the hallway of his house. The man was brought to trial and in court he explained that he was about to get married and had nowhere to live. He was sentenced to five days in prison. A few weeks previously, a few score soldiers, some of them disabled, invaded Arab houses in Wadi Nisnas and Abbas Street in Haifa. Carrying arms, they appeared at six o'clock in the morning, and forcibly ejected the residents. Then they threw out their belongings and brought in their own. The police came and removed them, but by evening they had invaded other people's homes. They, too, had nowhere to live.

Not only Arabs were subjected to such violence. Moshe Yupiter, an Israeli immigrant, got his apartment from the Custodian, but he was constantly harassed by people who would present themselves, in twos and threes, as Jewish Agency officials, demand to inspect his rooms, check the lease agreement and ask other questions pertaining to the apartment. Yupiter sensed that they were not Jewish Agency officials, and more than once these "visits' ended in threats and curses:He was fearful. "There was no one to go to," he complained. "There is no civil police and the military police is far away from here," Custodian Shafrir confirmed that "the police help little and the military police not at all." After receiving permission from the Ministry of Police, Shafrir managed to recruit a few policemen of his own to work for his office.

Altogether, between 140,000 and 160,000 immigrants were settled in abandoned homes: in Jaffa some 45,000, in downtown Haifa about 40,000, and in Acre about 5,000. The man who was put in charge of resettling Acre was Mordehai Sarid. "We consulted a map," he later recalled. "I knew which houses I was getting and I worked wit hengineers to determine what we would do with each apartment. One place needed sinks installed, another required a coat of paint, while other places needed flooring and sewage." The expenses were covered by the Jewish Agency. One day Sarid asked about some immigrants and was told that they were "getting organized." "Splendid," he said, "let them get organized." One of his aides explained what the phrase meant. "They are stealing tables and wardrobes from abandoned houses."(29)

American Jews like to think that their contributions to the Zionist cause created the shops and factories in Israel on "empty" land. In fact, many of the shops and factories were already there, previously built by their Palestinian Arab owners. The land was not "empty," as American Jews were told, but emptied of its rightful inhabitants by Zionist violence. Tom Segev writes:

By the end of the year some 600 shops in Ramleh had been distributed to immigrants. Elkayam had no idea what a city might need, so he went to Tel Aviv. "I went through the streets and made a list of all types of shops," he related later. " estimated more or less how many groceries were needed, how many butcher shops, how many barber shops and how many cafes."The shops were then distributed, as he described it, by a special committee, giving first consideration to the disabled. But some of the shops were leased to people who could pay for them. By May 1949 some 8,000 people had been settled in Ramleh. In Lydda, too, some 8,000 were settled. At that time there was still no electricity in Lydda, and there was a water shortage. However most of the political parties had already opened offices and clubs in the town. Of the abandoned properties turned over to immigrants, those already operative were: a button manufactory; a carbonated-drinks plant; sausage, ice, textile and macaroni factories. (30)

Segev also recounts the situation in Jerusalem, giving the fate of the houses and apartments of the Palestinian Arabs that had been previously looted of their furnishings:

In Jerusalem the situation was the same. In April it was decided to allocate 400 apartments to government officials who would move to Jerusalem. They had a choice of homes in the better neighborhoods of Baq'a, the "German Colony" and the "Greek Colony." The Absorption Department got the poorer houses of Musrara and Lifta. Shaul Avigur, one of Ben-Gurion's closest advisors, was to be the absolute arbitrator in any disputes. The document detailing this division of property does not mention the elegant quarter of Talbieh. The houses there were given to senior officials, associates and people with important connections - government officials, judges, professors at the Hebrew University, etc. In Jerusalem, too, people were sent to take possession of empty houses. The immigrants' center in Baq'a sent them to occupy apartments assigned to government officials.(31)

Thus, the Zionist political and intellectual elite, and those with "connections" to that elite, were the receivers of stolen property for their personal residences. This self-same elite is constantly pontificating about Israel's "moral basis." When they return from their speechifying jaunts around the world, they do not return to what could be called their own homes or apartments, but to the homes and apartments of the criminally dispossessed Palestinian Arabs.

Ian Lustick describes properties looted and usurped by the so-called State of Israel.

These properties included extensive stone quarries, forty thousand dunums of vineyards, 95 percent of Israel's olive groves, nearly one hundred thousand dunums of citrus groves, and ten thousand shops, businesses, and stores. The abandoned olive and citrus groves were instrumental in alleviating the serious balance-of-payments problem which Israel suffered from 1948 to 1953.(32)

Tom Segev states:

Before long, the government decided to promote the settlement of immigrants in the abandoned villages of Galilee. In August 1948, the Ministerial Committee discussed the creation of 61 new settlements. The settling authorities recommended that only 32 of them, on some 30,000 acres, be built for the time being. Of those lands some 14,500 acres belonged to Arabs, 5,000 to the government, 5,000 to other owners, chiefly German and in one case to the Waaf; about 5,000 acres belonged to Jews. The Ministers considered the future of the Arab inhabitants and made suggestions for transferring them legally. The Minister of Agriculture described the legal arrangements as "a fiction."(33)

It should be pointed out that no Israeli can use the excuse that "he didn't know the property was stolen." Even David Ben-Gurion "ordered an inspection of all the kibbutzim and moshavim of Lower and Upper Galilee for an inventory of 'flocks of cattle and sheep, and other property taken from the Arab villages during the war, and after, crops, furniture and all other objects, were to be presented to the Minister of Defense. "(34)

The looting was total. As Tom Segev recounts:

And so tens of thousands of Israelis, soldiers and civilians, helped themselves to the spoils. One took an armchair, another a rug, a third took a sewing machine and a fourth - a combine; one took an apartment and another took a vineyard. Very quickly and easily a whole class - albeit a small one - of newly properous people appeared on the scene: merchants, speculators, contractors, agents of all sorts, industrialists and fanners. Some stole what property they could, others received theirs legally. A good many of he transactions fell into that grey area between what the law permitted and what was considered illegal, between outright robbery and official expropriation.(35)

With all due respect to Mr. Segev, it should be pointed out that under international criminal law none of the transactions dealing with the property stolen from the Palestinian Arabs was legal, or could possibly be legal. As Israeli poet Nathan Alterrnann wrote: "Theft had become a tolerated flavor of life."(36)

SPOLIATION OF SO-CALLED "PRESENT ABSENTEES"

On May 14,1948 35 European-born Jews, 1 Yemeni Arab Jew, and 1 Palestinian Arab Jew issued the so-called Declaration of Independence of the so-called State of Israel. In this Declaration its Zionist signers promised that they would "promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants ... uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens. without distinction of relieion. race or sex." It further called "upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship ..." It specifically expressed its readiness "to cooperate with the organs and representatives of the United Nations in the implementation of the Resolution of the Assembly of November 29, 1947..."(37)

In its General Provision the United Nations Resolution of November 29, 1947 stated:

A declaration shall be made to the United Nations by the provisional government of each proposed State before independence. It shall contain inter alia the following clauses:

General Provision

The stipulations contained in the declaration are recognized as fundamental laws of the State and no law, regulation or official action shall conflict or interfere with these stipulations, nor shall any law, regulation or official action prevail over them ...

Chapter 2 - Religious and Minority Rights

2. No discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex...

3. All persons within the jurisdiction of the State shall be entitled to equal protection of the laws ...

8. No expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State shall be allowed except for public purposes. In all cases of expropriation full compensation as fixed by the Supreme Court shall be paid previous to dispossession ....(38)

Totally contrary to the letter and spirit of the above promises pledged by the Zionist leadership, when assuming power in the so-called State of Israel they created for the Arabs remaining in the territory of that so-called State a status of "Present Absentee," a concept which in its very essence is alien to any rational standard of logic, let alone of justice.

Ian Lustick writes:

Much of the Arab land acquired by the Custodian of Absentee Property, by the Jewish National Fund, or directly by Jewish agricultural settlements and municipalities in the first years of the state's existence consisted of property owned by Palestinian Arabs who fled from one part of Israeli-controlled territory to another, or who for some other reason were assigned the status of "internal refugees" or "present absentee." In other words, although these Arabs were Israeli citizens, they were focibly prevented from reasserting possession over property declared to have been "abandoned." In 1949 approximately 75,000 of Israel's 160,000 Arabs were in this category.(39)

Tom Segev recounts the history of the so-called "Present Absentee" concept:

Starting in the latter half of 1948, the Ministry of Justice worked on the drafting of an Absentees' Property Law, giving the Custodian a share in the ownership of the property he had hithertocontrolled as a trustee, and authorizing him to transfer it to a newly established "Development Authority." The Ministry's draft proposed a literal definition of the term "Absentee," namely, one who was no longer present in the territory of the state. When the draft was brought before the Ministerial Committee, Moshe Sharett demanded that the definition be changed to designate anyone who had left his home after a certain date (November 29, 1947), regardless of where he might have lived thereafter. He drew attention to thousands of refugees who had left their villages and settled in Nazareth. If they were not defined as absentees, it would be necessary to let them return to their homes. Sharett also raised the possibility that Israel might one day seize Nablus on the West Bank, which was a "reasonable likelihood," he thought. In that case thousands of refugees would come within Israel's jurisdiction and they would demand to return to their homes and take back the properties they had abandoned. Sharett's reservation was accepted. Consequently, the definition in the law was changed to embrace all who had abandoned their usual "place of residence," even if they were still living in Israel. Some time after, the Custodian was authorized to sell the abandoned property to the development authority, and the Government of Israel authorized the latter to sell it to the Jewish National Fund. More than half a million acres were thus expropriated from their owners. A few thousand of these owners were actually living in Israel, yet the law defined them as absentees, even if they had only left their homes for a few days and stayed with relatives in a nearby village or town, waiting for the fighting to end. Later they came to be referred to as "present absentees." The majority of them were not allowed to return to their homes. Those refugees who were permitted to return to Israel after the war were also formally absentees and their property was not restored to them.(40)

Roberta Strauss Feurlicht comments:

Most of the land was expropriated, not only from Arabs who fled, but from Arabs who did not flee. Those who fled were not permitted to return, even if they went no farther than the next village. Arabs who never moved an inch had their land taken from them, usually without compensation. It is estimated that at least 40 percent of the land was confiscated from Arabs who were legal residents of Israel. An Israeli journalist described land seizures as "wholesale robbery in legal guise."(41)

The effect of this discriminatory application of so-called Israeli laws to the "Present Absentees" — who were all Arab Muslims and Christians, of course — was tragic and bred great resentment among them. Tom Segev documents:

In September 1951 the Custodian M. Porat - who had succeeded Shafrir - sent a secret report to the Minister of Finance. He wrote, "The fact that we are holding the property of legal residents of the country, who otherwise enjoy all the normal rights of citizenship, is a source of great bitterness and constant agitation among the Arabs who are affected by it. Most of the complaints made by Arabs against our department are made by "absentees" who see their property in the hands of others and can't bear it. These absentees try by every means to get their lands back, and offer to lease them even at exorbitant rents. In accordance with the general rule originally established ... our office does not lease the lands expropriated by the government to the present absentees, so as not to weaken our control over the properties in our charge, and this gives rise to complaints and bitterness. Clearly, this policy does not enhance a spirit of good citizenship among Arabs who returned, and the question arises whether the state, having allowed certain Arabs to come back, or approved their infiltration de facto, should provoke their extreme resentment and expose them to the inordinate incitement of certain political elements. In my opinion, it should not. That is to say - the government policy should make the legal definition of "absentee"match thenormal connotation of the word's meaning, i.e., a person who is absent. That should be the policy. It seems to me that at present there is no practical way of carrying out the policy I have suggested, at least with regard to real estate. The number of "present absentees" runs into the thousands, most of them owners of real estate. There are already new people living on some of these properties, particularly in the border settlements. Any attempt to return the properties to these absentees would, therefore, adversely affect thousands, or tens of thousands, of settlers, not tomention army camps and installations."(42)

The amount of land usurped from the so-called "Present Absentees" was huge. Claiming these lands to have been "abandoned" by their owners even though their owners were allegedly "citizens of Israel," at "least 250,000 dunums of the land classified as abandoned were in fact owned by Arab residents of Israel who had been assigned "absentee" status by the government under the Absentee Property Act of 1950."(43)

In the case of Arab villages such as Ghabasiyeh, "internal refugees" who had managed clandestinely to resume residence in their still-vacant villages were forcibly expelled. More houses were made available for Jewish habitation as a result of the removal of Arabs from their homes in the large "mixed cities" and their concentration in specified Arab quarters.(44)

Lustick summarizes:

Much of the Arab land acquired by the Custodian of Absentee Property, by the JNF, or directly by Jewish agricultural settlements and municipalities in the first years of the state's existence consisted of property owned by Palestinian Arabs who fled from one part of Israeli-controlled territory to another, or who for some other reason were assigned the status of "internal refugee" or "present absentee." In other words, although these Arabs were Israeli citizens, they were forcibly prevented from reasserting possession over property declared to have been "abandoned." In 1949 approximately 75,000 of Israel's 160,000 Arabs were in this category. One of the primary concerns of Israeli Arabs at this juncture was that the government allow "internal refugees" to return to their homes and/or reclaim their property.(45)

Rather than allowing the so-called "Present Absentees" to return to their homes, the Zionists created new so-called "legal" pretexts for confiscating their property:

The Government introduced a number of laws which did injustice to the Arab villagers and deprived them of about 1,000,000 dunums of land from which they and their families had made, though often with great difficulty, a bare living. Those laws, such as the law of uncultivated land, and so on can have but one aim: to deprive the Arab population of land which is then transferred to Jewish ownership and use. The Arab peasant clings to his land which he considers to be his soul. He regards, therefore, the laws depriving him of his land as the bitterest injustice done to him.(46)

Professor Elia T. Zureik writes:

In 1960, the Knesset enacted Basic Law: Israel Lands, which meant that state land is defined under the principle of the Jewish National Fund, whose original constitution stipulates the inalienable right of the Jews to the land.

Two principles of Zionist colonization, both incorporated in the constitution of the Jewish Agency, are especially resented by the Arabs. These are: (i) the principle that Jewish property is inalienable; no Zionist settler may dispose of his lease to anyone but a Jew; (ii) the principle carefully safeguarded by the powerful Jewish Federation of Labor, that only Jewish Labor may be employed in Zionist colonies. The net result is that, when the Jewish National Fund makes a purchase the Arabs lose not only the land itself but also any chance of being employed on this land.(47)

Thus the laws passed by the Israeli Parliament make a mockery of the solemn Zionist promise that "no discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex ..."

The original Absentee Properties Law did not discriminate in its wording - only in its practice. "Yohanan Bader, MK (Herut) stated, 'According to this law, the Israeli army is full of absentees .... Every man who went to war on or after November 29, that is to say, left his city - is an absentee, unless he has a certificate to prove that he is not an absentee."(48)

Needless to say, Jews could get certificates proving that they were not absentees, while Arabs could get no such certification. So much for the solemn Zionist promise of "equal protection of the laws."

Whether they were expelled from the borders of the Zionist State, or succeeded in remaining within those borders, the result was the same for Palestinian Arabs. To the Zionists they were "non-persons" entitled to no rights. Rights in the Zionist State belonged only to Jews -including the right to take over the homes of the Palestinian Arabs as their residences.

THE USURPATION AND DESTRUCTION OF ARAB HOUSES AND APARTMENTS IN TOWNS, CITIES AND VILLAGES

At the beginning of 1948 there were in Palestine 4 cities and large towns with mixed Arab and Jewish population. There also 8 cities and large towns which were wholly Arab. There were 833 Arab small towns and villages. There were 108 Beduin localities.

The Zionists occupied 526 small towns and villages as well as the 4 mixed cities and large towns and the 8 wholly Arab cities and large towns.

They totally destroyed and erased from the map of Palestine 425 small towns and villages and 67 Beduin localities. Therefore the total number of towns, villages and Beduin localities the Zionists erased from the map of Palestine is 492.

In all of the cities, large towns, villages and small towns occupied by the Zionists they destroyed or usurped the houses and apartment buildings, commercial buildings and the lands of Palestinian Arabs.

In 1948 the Palestinians in towns, cities and villages were living either in houses built by themselves or by their families or in apartments leased from Palestinian landowners. The following Tables provide an itemization of the Arab housing units in each town, city and village in the areas occupied by the Israelis in 1948, and an itemization of the Arab housing units either usurped or destroyed by the Israelis in these towns, cities and villages.

The itemization of Arab housing units was calculated for 1948 on the basis of the 1931 Census of Palestine: Populations of villages, Towns and Administrative Areas, published by the Government of Palestine in Jerusalem, and prepared by E. Mills, Assistant Chief Secretary and Superintendent of Census. (see the next two webpages (pages 356-369 in the book))

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