Exiled in 1948, Palestinians were robbed of their private property when looting became weaponized

During the 1948 War, Israeli fighters and residents alike plundered Palestinian homes, shops, businesses, and farms. This bitter truth was then suppressed or forgotten over the coming years.

Tens of thousands took part in the pillage of Palestinian property, stealing the belongings of their former neighbours. The implications of this mass looting go far beyond the personality or moral fibre of those who took part. Plundering served a political agenda by helping to empty the country of its Palestinian residents. In this context, it was part of the prevailing policy during the war - one designed to crush the Palestinian economy, destroy villages, and to confiscate and sometimes destroy crops and harvests remaining in the depopulated zones.

The participating Jewish public became a stakeholder, motivated to prevent Palestinian residents from returning to the villages and cities they had left. These ordinary people were mobilized in the push for the segregation of Jews and Arabs in the early years of statehood.

With painstaking original research into primary sources, Adam Raz has brought to light a tragic moment in the history of a conflict that roils the region and the wider world. As the details of the Nakba are understood and documented, redress for Palestinian grievances comes closer to reality.

"The dark sides of the War of Independence are illuminated in a book on the massive Jewish looting of Arab property then, showing the link between the plunder and Ben-Gurion's policy to rid the country of its Arab residents." - Haaretz

"Historian Adam Raz has produced groundbreaking research." - Haaretz

"An important addition ... Raz has written a book that successfully provides the evidence to break through the 'conspiracy of silence' about the origins of the Israeli state." - Counterfire

"Groundbreaking ... This book is powerful, and Loot will fascinate those wanting to comprehend both history and today's reality." - New Arab

"Given the ongoing efforts to erase Palestine's past and conceal Israel's treatment of Palestinians, this book is an important contribution to uncovering the reality on which the Zionist state was founded." - Labour Hub

"Astonishing: this book is an important contribution to revealing the reality on which the Zionist state was founded" - Al Jazeera

"For decades, there were few Jewish Israelis who would speak openly about how Zionist forces displaced and killed Palestinian civilians during what Israelis call their War of Independence. That changed in the 1980s with the arrival of a generation of scholars known as the New Historians. Though their scholarship remains taboo in Israel, their output continues. "Loot," by Adam Raz, published in Hebrew in 2020 and recently translated into English by Philip Hollander, offers an important contribution to the tradition." - New York Times