The property of the Arabs who are…

The property of the Arabs who are refugees outside the state and the property expropriated from the Arabs who remain in Israel has become a major asset to the new state. (According to Don Peretz, an American scholar, by 1954 "more than one-third of Israel's Jewish population lived on absentee property, and nearly a third of the new immigrants [250,000 people] settled in the urban areas abandoned by Arabs.")

A common procedure is for the Israeli military government to seize up to forty percent of the land in a given region—the maximum allowed for national security reasons—and to transfer the land to a new kibbutz or moshav.