Israel has built about three hundred and…

Israel has built about three hundred and seventy new Jewish settlements between 1948 and 1953, and an estimated three hundred and fifty of the settlements have been established on what is termed abandoned Arab property.

The fleeing Arabs had emptied thriving cities such as Jaffa, Acre (Akko), Lydda (Lod), and Ramla, plus "338 towns and villages and large parts of 94 other cities and towns, containing nearly a quarter of all the buildings in Israel."

To the Israeli Arabs, one of the more devastating aspects of the loss of their property is their knowledge that the loss is legally irreversible.

The early Zionist settlers—particularly those of the Second Aliyah—adopted a rigid policy that land purchased or in any way acquired by a Jewish organization or individual could never again be sold, leased, or rented to a non-Jew.

The policy had gone so far as to preclude the use of non-Jewish labor on the land.

This policy had been carried over into the new state.

At independence, the State of Israel succeeded to the "state lands" of the British Mandate Authority, which had "inherited" the lands held by the government of the Ottoman Empire.

The Jewish National Fund was the operating and controlling agency of the Land Development Authority and ensured that land once held by Jews—either individually or by the "sovereign state of the Jewish people"—did not revert to non-Jews.

This denies Israel's non-Jewish, mostly Arab, population access to about ninety-five percent of the land.