Israel was "inspired" by Pakistan in enacting laws to seize the property of fleeing Arabs in 1948, similar to what the newly born Islamic Republic employed to expropriate the property of migrating Hindu and Sikh minorities, according to excerpts from a new book.
In the government debates to decide what to do with the Arab "abandoned property," Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's special adviser Zalman Lifshitz, argued for the permanent use of refugee property for the political and economic benefit of the new state, excerpts from the book, "Drawing Fire: Investigating the accusations of apartheid in Israel" by Benjamin Pogrund, published in Ha'aretz said.
Lifshitz argued that countries in similar situations, such as Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, had taken on vast powers to liquidate refugee property for state use and he urged the Israeli government "to proceed in a similar manner" as "there is no shortage of precedents".
However, the special adviser is said to have focused especially on Pakistan, the Islamic Republic which had come into violent existence in 1947.
"There too, as in Palestine, Britain had ended its rule. There too, the coming of independence set off inter-communal strife which led to the flight of large numbers of refugees and the entry of large numbers of supporters," writes Pogrund, who has studied apartheid in South Africa.
The difference, however, was in the figures. While the India-Pakistan conflict gave rise to 13 million refugees, in Israel the figure was only 750,000.
It cannot be said if Lifshitz was aware of the irony of the new Jewish state, says Pogrund, using the legal techniques of a new Muslim state to deprive its own mainly Muslim refugees of their properties, he says.
Pakistani lawmakers, Pogrund notes, had drawn on UK's Trading with the Enemy Act, but had also introduced new elements to assist expropriation and transfer of ownership.
These laws created a mechanism for seizing Hindu and Sikh refugee property in Pakistan and its reallocation for the settlement of Muslim refugees from India.
The special adviser to Ben-Gurion presented his report in March 1949 and the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) duly enacted laws later that year.
The legal machinery to appropriate Palestinian refugee land, the author says, was "based squarely" on the Pakistani legislation of 1948.
