Further to your post, robomatic, here are some inconvenient facts that are conveniently ignored by those who selectively censure Israel for the refugees created by a war that was waged against it:


Over the years, almost 5,000 Arab landowners have sued for the land owned by them. Settlements have been awarded in one of three methods:

Return of the land itself, if possible; granting of a deed of ownership to an equivalent parcel of land, as determined by an objective property assessor and agreeable to the plaintiff, or monetary compensation, again according to a determination by an objective property assessor and accepted by the plaintiff.

This is on the public record, and has been for decades.

Since the Arabs of Palestine in 1948 legally owned a grand total of 8% of the Mandate land area, including in the West Bank and Gaza, it’s safe to assume that there aren’t many more legitimate claims that can be supported by the land registry records from the British Mandate.

The vast majority of land in the mandate was state land, which could not be bought, only leased, and the tenant had no claim of ownership on such land.

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At the Lausanne conference held in 1949, in the immediate aftermath of the 1947-1949 war that led to the creation of the refugee problem, Israel offered to take back 100,000 refugees, and pay the ones who were not allowed back for their abandoned properties- in exchange for a complete and final resolution of the conflict.

As has been their modus operandi from the beginning of the conflict the Arabs said no to this offer.

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Under Israeli law any Arab who can show that they owned private property that was lost in any of the wars with Israel gets it back or fair market compensation.

Israeli courts tend to be pretty supportive and quite a bit of land has been returned or paid for this way.