Israel accused of trickery to snatch refugee lands


A march near the destroyed Palestinian village of Saffuriya by internal refugees marking the anniversary of the Nakba (MEE/Jonathan Cook)

Jonathan Cook-Thursday 25 February 2016


Palestinian families warned of subterfuge designed to pressure them into signing over to Israel their rights to 1948 property 

ACRE, Israel - Palestinian leaders in Israel have warned that they suspect the Israeli government is behind recent efforts to trick the families of refugees from the 1948 war into signing away the rights to their lands.

The alert has been issued to an estimated 300,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel descended from refugees who were forced out of their villages during the 1948 war but remained inside the new Israeli state’s borders.

Palestinians refer to the dispossession of their homeland as the Nakba - the word for “catastrophe” in Arabic.

Experts say that Israel has been working to pressure refugees into selling the title to their lands for decades as a way to undermine a Palestinian right of return, one of the key demands in any peace agreement.

“Israel has a strong interest in reducing the number of refugees with a claim on these lands so that in the event of an agreement the issue of a Palestinian right of return is weakened,” said Hillel Cohen, a researcher on the Palestinian refugee issue at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“Israel hopes to be able to say to the international community, ‘But the refugees sold their land - where can they return to?’”

Khaled Suleiman, aged 64 and from the Israeli coastal city of Acre, told Middle East Eye his family was among those approached by lawyers trying to persuade them to sell.

Nearly 800,000 Palestinians like Suleiman’s parents became refugees in 1948 and were stripped by Israel of their rights to any property they could not carry with them, under legislation from 1950 known as the Absentee Property Law.

Barred from villages

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