Looting Palestinian property since 1948
JVL Introduction
We are pleased to publish this review of Adam Raz’s book Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property, published by Verso. The book includes many details and shows that unrestrained looting took place in many parts of Palestine, In Jerusalem “The pillagers had taken so much plunder from Palestinian homes that they needed to protect it from other Jewish civilians who had also come to loot… It stopped only when there was nothing left to steal. What could not be taken, or was considered valueless, was smashed up. Entire libraries were torched…(and) in Jaffa… In a twelve-day period in June 1948, over 5,000 tons of goods were taken out of the city on trucks.” This looting was done by people “from every social stratum” and across many of the 550 villages that were ethnically cleansed in Palestine.
This legacy of looting has perhaps also let to the proliferation of unashamed selfies of soldiers rifling through Palestinian homes in Gaza, trying on women’s clothing and destroying much more.
LL
This article was originally published by Labour Outlook on Sun 24 Nov 2024. Read the original here.
A collective crime
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Thank you for publishing this summary of some of the shameful recent past of the still terrorising Zionist State of Israe, wnich those wno hypocritically repeat their line that Israel has a right to defend itself, regardless of the ghastly near total destruction and horrific indiscriminate mass killings of the displaced indigenous people, by overwhelmingly heavily armed and externally funded interloping colonisers, are dishonestly ignoring.