Baptiste SellierWhile the world watches Israel’s destruction in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, through airstrikes, mass starvation, and the targeted killing of civilians, another invasion has been unfolding in silence. It advances with legal decrees and property registers, quietly stripping Palestinians of their land.
The State of Israel is built on a gigantic, ongoing theft: the theft of a whole country, Palestine, from its people, the Palestinians.
They have been continuously dispossessed since the beginning of the Zionist settlement and replacement colonial project more than a century ago.
Israel was founded in 1948 through the military conquest of two-thirds of Mandatory Palestine, which had been ethnically cleansed of its inhabitants.
It was a very profitable operation.
While Jews owned only seven to eight percent of Palestine's lands before 1948, Israel seized more than 90 percent of the land and properties under its control from expelled Palestinian inhabitants.
These included around 900,000 refugees who were never allowed to return, 75,000 internally displaced, and many others who remained but lost their property.
Up to 531 Palestinian localities were destroyed or depopulated, leaving empty 20,350 km2 of land.
Such a vast theft needed to be managed to organise the looting.
It also needed to be hidden, as it constituted a flagrant violation of human rights and international law, undermining the image of the new state.
That is why Israel rapidly built a legal arsenal to give the theft an institutional legitimising frame.
This framework was designed to mask its injustice and to rationalise the allocation of Palestinian resources in accordance with a planned colonisation policy.
Central to this legal and administrative structure, the 1950 Absentee Property Law placed all properties of Palestinian refugees under the administration of the State of Israel.
A Custodian of Absentee Properties was created, working alongside institutional bodies like the Development Authority, to regulate the allocation and use of Palestinian lands and properties, whether exploited, settled, or kept as reserves for further expansion.
This law defined an “Absentee” as anyone who left their property during the 1948 war and took refuge outside of the territory under Israeli control.
This included most who fled to neighbouring states and to other parts of Palestine, many of whom were packed in the small territory later known as Gaza, where refugees and their descendants make up more than 70 percent of today’s population.
Passed the same year, The Law of Return, which guarantees every Jew the right to immigrate and become a citizen of Israel, mirrors the Absentee Law.
One enables mass Jewish immigration and settlement; the other legalises the dispossession of Palestinians and forbids them from returning home.
This is mass replacement.
Present-absentees and expansion of the law
Part of the theft of land and property from Palestinians who remained under Israeli rule was made possible by an annex to the Absentee Law.
It classified internally displaced persons as “present-absentees”.
Many were transformed into social housing tenants in the areas where they were concentrated, often in homes and lands belonging to other Palestinians declared “absentee,” and sometimes in their own former houses.
They were granted the status of “protected tenants”, which supposedly guaranteed them protection from eviction.
But this status could only be transferred to the second generation,
Nowadays, third and fourth generations cannot benefit from this protection and may be forced to move elsewhere.
Their residential vulnerability is greatest in city centres that Israel seeks to develop for tourism and gentrification, such as Haifa, Jaffa, or ‘Akka, where Palestinian social tenancy is significant.
In the same colonial logic, the Absentee Law was applied to the Palestinian lands occupied after the taking control of the rest of the country in 1967.
The definition “Absentee” was adapted to include the newly displaced and refugee population, around 250,000 people.
Since the illegal annexation of occupied East Jerusalem, many Palestinians living in other parts of the occupied West Bank and in Gaza have lost, or can lose, their properties.
These are transferred to the state as absentee and present-absentee properties, along with the loss of residency rights.
The Absentee Law is not the only legal instrument used to seize Palestinian land.
It is part of a much wider apparatus that includes laws enabling forced evictions, demolitions, fines, and detentions.
The overarching aim is to reduce, concentrate, contain, and fragment the Palestinian presence on colonised territory.
This is done by denying access to land, construction, and repairs, pushing Palestinians into ‘illegality’ and forcing them into ever-decreasing, overcrowded, reserve-like areas in territories occupied since 1948 and 1967.
It is constitutive of the ongoing catastrophe, in Arabic al-Nakba al-Mustamirra, that Palestinians have endured since the beginning of the Zionist colonisation.
Unmasking the legal front of colonialism
The Israeli recourse to legal formalism to frame and justify land theft from its people is not unique.
It has been extensively used by colonial powers like Spain, Portugal, Britain, and France worldwide, as by their independent settler colonies like Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the United States—where legal mechanisms like the US Homestead Acts facilitated the massive seizure of Native American lands and their displacement.
While in Algeria, French colonial authorities enacted a series of laws to legitimise and facilitate the widespread dispossession of indigenous lands and their transfer to settlers.
But such legal measures always betray the injustice they conceal.
If there were no injustice, there would be no need for laws to justify it.
Examining these provisions only underlines the primary illegitimacy of colonial theft, as they uncover its reality and extent.
Israel’s land and planning laws reveal the total character of its colonial order.
This order not only exerts an ostensibly visible violence, as in the complete destruction of Gaza and the mass murdering of its inhabitants, but also a quieter violence that permeates daily life for Palestinians.
At best, Palestinians are allowed to occupy a subordinate, marginal, and dehumanised position within this order.
Their spatial, demographic, cultural, socio-economic, and political development is to be permanently suppressed.
Over decades, or in a matter of months through mass bombing, Israel works to erase the Palestinian people, whom it views as an existential threat.
Yet despite the weight of colonial violence, Palestinians have maintained their presence in the country, the region, and across the world.
Palestine and its people have not disappeared; the ‘absentees’ are still present.
Their steadfastness shows the strength of their resistance, which a century of colonisation has not extinguished.
Their lives and identities remain tied to their land and places, above all to Jerusalem, Al-Quds.
There is an Israeli demographic anxiety over the increasing Palestinian population in all of Palestine, despite restrictions on movement and settlement.
Meanwhile, Israel’s global image is catastrophic. Many Jewish Israelis are considering leaving.
Allowed by the complicity of so many States, the ongoing genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza, notably performed through starvation, expresses the impotency of a colonial rule reduced to such a level of abjection.
There will never be peace without justice. The Palestinians' right of return, sanctioned by international law, is essential to restoring justice and ending the colonial regime imposed on Palestine.
It means restoring freedom, self-determination, and their ability to live anywhere in their country, Palestine, along with the restitution or compensation for what was stolen.
Uncovering the legal mask of Israel’s colonial replacement policy is one step towards addressing Palestinian rights and towards ensuring such horrors never happen again, in this region or anywhere else.
