Does Israel Deny Palestinian Refugees the Right of Return and Their Property? Reading the 1974 Vote, the Statutes and the Land Record

Israel was one of 8 delegations recorded against United Nations General Assembly resolution 3236 on 22 November 1974. That text “reaffirms also the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property” and passed by 89 votes to 8, with 37 abstentions. Israel’s statutes set who may enter by right: the 1992 Basic Law entitles citizens, not every person, to enter, and the Law of Return of 1950 grants the right to Jews and, since 1970, to named relatives. On property, Forman and Kedar (2004, peer-reviewed) trace how two 1950 statutes moved absentee land through a Custodian and a Development Authority to the state and the Jewish National Fund, and they record that no agreed figure exists for how much land changed hands.

Key Findings

• On 22 November 1974 the General Assembly adopted resolution 3236, which reaffirms the Palestinians’ “inalienable right … to return to their homes and property,” by 89 votes to 8 with 37 abstentions, and Israel voted against (United Nations General Assembly, 1948 to 1975, recorded vote on 3236, A/PV.2296).
• Section 6(b) of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (Knesset, 1992) entitles “Every Israeli citizen who is abroad” to enter Israel; section 1 of the Law of Return (Knesset, 1950) gives “Every Jew” the right to come as an oleh, and section 4A, added on 10 March 1970, extends that right to a child, grandchild and spouse of a Jew.
• In the first year of the 1953 Land Acquisition Law, some 1.2 million dunams were expropriated, 704,000 of them taken from the Custodian of Absentee Property (Forman and Kedar, 2004, peer-reviewed).
• Forman and Kedar (2004) record that “There is no one agreed-upon figure for the land that moved from Arab hands to the state in the wake of 1948”; the estimates by other bodies that they list run from 4.2 million dunams to 19 million.
• The 1995 Interim Agreement (Israel and the PLO, 1995, in the text published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a party to it) lists refugees among permanent-status issues, with negotiations due to begin “not later than May 4, 1996.”

Has Israel accepted a Palestinian right of return?

Israel recorded a vote against General Assembly resolution 3236 on 22 November 1974, according to the verbatim record of the 2296th plenary meeting (A/PV.2296, paragraph 110).

The resolution passed by 89 votes to 8, with 37 abstentions. Its paragraph 2 “reaffirms also the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.”

The vote was taken by roll call, so each delegation’s position is on the record by name. The tallies are shares of the 134 delegations that recorded a position, not of the whole membership: 89 in favour, 8 against and 37 abstaining sum to 134. Israel’s recorded vote is its own position on the right as paragraph 2 words it, including the word “inalienable” and the call for return.

The same position appears in summary form outside the Assembly record. The Anti-Defamation League, an advocacy organization whose mission is opposing antisemitism, summarized Israel’s position in a 2022 backgrounder as rejecting a legally enforceable Palestinian right of return to Israel and treating refugee return as a matter for negotiated settlement rather than unilateral entitlement. That summary is the League’s description of the position, while the 1974 roll call is the position as Israel’s delegation recorded it.

The wording Israel voted against, and the instruments that frame it, are read in full in resolution 3236’s text and the 1974 vote. The sections that follow turn from the vote to what Israel enacted: who its statutes entitle to enter, and what its 1950 laws did with the property of people classed as absentees.

Who says refugees must be allowed home, and since when?

The United Nations General Assembly first set out the claim on 11 December 1948. Paragraph 11 of resolution 194 (III) says that refugees “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” The claim that Assembly texts call for return is therefore accurate on the record, and it dates from the Assembly’s third session.

The same paragraph pairs return with payment. It provides that “compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” Return is framed for refugees “wishing” it, and compensation for those choosing otherwise. The operative verb is “should be permitted.”

The 1974 text uses stronger language. Resolution 3236 speaks of an “inalienable right” and “calls for their return.” A year later, on 10 November 1975, resolution 3376 (XXX) created the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, “composed of twenty Member States,” and asked it to recommend “a programme of implementation” for the rights in paragraphs 1 and 2 of 3236, reporting “no later than 1 June 1976.”

The scope of “their homes and property” is read in more than one way. W. Thomas Mallison and Sally V. Mallison, in a 1979 legal analysis published at the Committee’s request, read the phrase in 3236 as covering the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967. Their study states that “The views expressed are those of the authors,” and it is an argument rather than a Secretariat finding.

Two organizations hold the claim in current form. Amnesty International, in a May 2019 press release, described Israel’s refusal to grant Palestinian refugees a right to return as having fuelled seven decades of suffering. Human Rights Watch published a statement on 15 May 2023 titled “75 Years Later, Israel Blocking Palestinian Refugees’ Return.” Both are advocacy organizations stating their own positions. The instruments on the record are the three Assembly texts of 1948, 1974 and 1975.

Whom does Israel’s Basic Law entitle to enter the country?

The Knesset’s Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, adopted in 1992, entitles “Every Israeli citizen who is abroad” to enter Israel, in section 6(b) of the English text the Knesset publishes. Section 6(a) frees “Every person” to exit. Exit is extended to everyone, and entry is defined by citizenship, so a refugee who does not hold Israeli citizenship has no entry entitlement under this clause.

The Knesset labels this translation unofficial in the document’s second line: “This unofficial English translation of the basic law includes all the amendments adopted through May 1, 2022.” The same page directs readers to the Hebrew text in the National Legislation Database for the operative law, so the Hebrew governs and the English is an aid.

The entry clause is one of six enumerated rights. The complete text lists dignity, life and body (sections 2 and 4), property (section 3), personal liberty (section 5), exit and entry (section 6), and privacy and intimacy (section 7), and no others. A search of the complete English text returns zero occurrences of “equal”, “discrimin”, “religion”, “race” and “nationality”. That absence is a fact about the text of the law. The equality rule in Israeli law is judge-made, as the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ka’adan (2000) shows in the next section.

The law states its purpose in section 1a: “to protect human dignity and liberty, in order to embed the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, in a basic law.” Section 1 grounds the rights in “the recognition of the value of the human being” and says they “shall be upheld in the spirit of the principles included in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.” Section 11 obliges “Each and every government authority” to respect the rights the law lists.

For entry by right, then, the Basic Law draws one line, at citizenship. A separate statute, enacted 42 years earlier, governs entry by descent.

Who does the Law of Return let settle in Israel?

The Knesset’s Law of Return, 5710-1950, opens with one sentence in section 1: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh,” a word its translator glosses as “a Jew immigrating, into Israel.” Passed on 5 July 1950, it is the statute that grants entry by descent rather than by citizenship.

The English text of the Law of Return published by the Knesset is a scan from the series Laws of the State of Israel, and it is marked neither official nor unofficial. The Prime Minister’s Office designates it “the full text of the Law of Return, 1950.”

An amendment passed on 10 March 1970 widened the circle. Section 4A(a) vests the same rights in “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.” Section 4A(b) makes it “immaterial” whether the Jew through whom the right is claimed is alive or has immigrated.

The same amendment inserted a definition in section 4B, which operates separately: “For the purposes of this Law, ‘Jew’ means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” Section 4B defines who is a Jew for this statute, and section 4A extends rights to named relatives who need not be Jewish.

The Supreme Court described this structure in Ka’adan v. Israel Land Administration, decided 8 March 2000. Paragraph 31 states that “members of the Jewish nation were granted a special key to enter (see the Law of Return-5710-1950), but once a person has lawfully entered the home, he enjoys equal rights with all other household members.” The English text is the Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project’s translation.

What did Israeli law do with refugee property in 1950?

The Knesset enacted two statutes in 1950 that governed the property of people classed as absentees, according to legal historians Geremy Forman and Alexandre Kedar (2004, peer-reviewed): “The Knesset enacted the Absentee Property Law in March 1950 and the Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law in July 1950.” Together, on their account, the two laws formed a chain running from a Custodian to the state.

The authors set out the sale powers each statute conferred: “The Absentee Property Law empowered the CAP to sell land to the DA alone, and the Development Authority Law empowered the DA to sell land to the state and the JNF.” CAP is the Custodian of Absentee Property, DA the Development Authority and JNF the Jewish National Fund. They describe the Development Authority as an intermediary, legally defined as extragovernmental, that funnelled expropriated land to the state and the Jewish National Fund. The buyers named in that description are the Development Authority, the state and the Fund.

This is the authors’ account of the statutes, built from Israeli legislation, archival documents and Knesset proceedings, and it is quoted here as their description rather than as the statutory wording. Forman and Kedar divide the process into four phases over 12 years, from 1948 to 1960, each closing with a major statute.

Their baseline shows the scale the statutes worked on. By 1948, on their figures, 1.5 million of Mandate Palestine’s 26.3 million dunams were “Jewish owned.” Israel’s borders then enclosed 20.6 million dunams, of which about 13.5%, or 2.8 million dunams, was under formal state or Jewish ownership. The rest of the land inside those borders is the land whose legal status the 1950 statutes and their successors reshaped.

The enacted texts, the claims later filed and the valuations recorded for that property are read separately in the record of Arab property and the absentee law. The question for this report is narrower: whether the 1950 chain returned property to its former owners. The powers Forman and Kedar describe ran from the Custodian to the Development Authority, and from the Authority to the state and the Fund.

Who counted as an absentee, and did it include citizens?

Forman and Kedar (2004) record that the absentee category reached back to 29 November 1947, the date of the General Assembly’s partition resolution, and that it covered people who stayed: “practically no Jewish Israelis, but tens of thousands of Arab Israeli citizens, were classified as absentees, assuming the paradoxical legal identity of ‘present absentee’.”

The definition, as the authors give it, has three limbs. An absentee was anyone who, on or after 29 November 1947, had been “(a) a citizen or subject of one of the Arab countries at war with Israel; (b) in any of these countries, or in any part of Palestine outside the jurisdiction of the regulations; or (c) a citizen of Palestine who abandoned his or her normal place of residence.”

The authors place that definition in the 1948 Absentee Property Regulations, which the March 1950 statute replaced and carried forward. The date and the three limbs therefore belong to the 1948 regulations first and to the 1950 law by continuation.

The third limb is what brought citizens within the rule. A person who left a home for another place inside what became Israel, and who later became an Israeli citizen, could fall under “abandoned his or her normal place of residence” without ever leaving the state. The result Forman and Kedar describe is a legal status in which a person present in Israel and holding its citizenship was, for property purposes, absent.

The size of that group is relayed rather than measured in their paper. Forman and Kedar take from Hillel Cohen’s 2000 work the figure that roughly 15% of Israel’s Arab citizens held present-absentee status. That share is Cohen’s, and its base is Israel’s Arab citizenry, not the refugee population outside the state.

The category of “refugees” and the category of “absentees” therefore do not coincide. Refugees who left the territory fell under the first two limbs or the third; citizens who moved within it fell under the third. The property rule applied to both, while the entry statutes in the previous sections apply only to those outside the state.

704,000 dunams passed from the Custodian in one year

Forman and Kedar (2004) record that in the first year of the 1953 Land Acquisition Law some 1.2 million dunams were expropriated, of which 704,000 dunams were taken from the Custodian of Absentee Property.

The authors state that it is not clear how much of the 704,000 was land of present absentees.

The same first-year total contains a second subset. Of the 1.2 million dunams, 311,000 came from private ownership, and 304,700 of those from Arab owners. Both the 311,000 and the 704,000 are parts of the 1.2 million, not additions to it, and the two are never summed into a larger figure.

Compensation under that mechanism is recorded in dunams, not in claimants. Forman and Kedar compile it from Liskovski’s 1959 figures, Kretzmer’s 1990 study and Bauml’s 2002 study: compensation had been paid for 64,500 dunams by 1959, about 170,000 dunams by 1970, and 198,000 dunams by 1988. Those figures belong to the three named authors and measure land compensated under the 1953 law, not refugees compensated.

The authors close the chain in late July 1960, when the Knesset enacted Basic Law: Israel Lands, the Israel Lands Law and the Israel Lands Administration Law. That legislation consolidated state, Development Authority and Jewish National Fund holdings into one category, “Israel Lands,” under a single administration. Their history ends at that point, and the 1960 consolidation is the last event in the property chain that their paper documents.

Does Israel’s 1992 property guarantee reach the 1950 laws?

Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty states in section 3 that “The property of a human being shall not be violated,” but section 10 sets a 1992 cutoff: “This Basic Law shall not affect the validity of any law that existed prior to the inception of the Basic Law.” The 1950 absentee and Development Authority statutes, and the 1953 Land Acquisition Law, all predate that cutoff.

The Supreme Court has applied section 10 to an older instrument in terms that show how the clause works. In HaMoked v. Minister of Defense, delivered 31 December 2014, Justice Hayut wrote that Regulation 119 of the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, 1945 “currently forms part of Israel’s positive law, and its validity is maintained by virtue of the Preservation of Laws clause under section 10 of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, even if it is inconsistent with the provisions of the Basic Law.” Justices Rubinstein and Sohlberg sat with her. The English is the Cardozo project’s translation, and the Hebrew is the authoritative text.

That holding concerned Regulation 119, a power to forfeit and demolish houses, and not the absentee statutes. What it establishes is the Court’s reading of section 10: a law in force before 1992 keeps its validity even where it conflicts with the Basic Law’s rights.

The law’s limitation clause in section 8 governs violations of its rights by later legislation, and Israeli state bodies render it differently. The Knesset’s unofficial English text reads “a law that corresponds to the values of the State of Israel, which serves an appropriate purpose, and to an extent that does not exceed what is required.” Israel’s Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Israel’s 14th periodic report to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (2010, paragraph 377), a compliance report published by a party to the treaty, render it as “a statute which befits the values of the State and is intended for a proper purpose, and then only to the extent required.”

Section 8 and section 10 address different laws. Section 8 sets the test for a law that violates a protected right after 1992. Section 10 preserves the validity of every law that existed before it, whatever its content. The property guarantee in section 3 therefore operates prospectively, and the statutes that moved absentee property into state hands between 1950 and 1960 sit on the far side of its cutoff.

How much refugee land is at stake, on whose count?

Forman and Kedar (2004) state that “There is no one agreed-upon figure for the land that moved from Arab hands to the state in the wake of 1948,” and the estimates they list run from 4.2 million dunams, the low end of the range given by Israeli officials and researchers, to 19 million in the work of Hadawi.

The authors list the estimates without choosing among them, and each figure belongs to the body that produced it.

The highest estimate is about four and a half times the lowest, and the Conciliation Commission’s own two figures, 13 years apart, differ by more than half. These estimates measure land abandoned or lost, a different object from land processed through the absentee-property system. No total for the land that passed through the absentee system is published by any body cited here, and a figure of roughly 2 million dunams for that object circulates without a located source.

A separate 1951 document by the same Commission counted something narrower still. Its Sampling Survey of Abandoned Property Claimed by Arab Refugees (A/AC.25/W/60, 12 April 1951) recorded that “The total of land claimed by the 55,400 claimants … is 3,508,540 dunums,” covering refugee families in Jordan only. Of that total, 2,000,000 dunums were claimed cultivated land, a claim figure and not a transfer figure. The same survey found that “Ownership of houses is claimed by 49,500 families,” 59% of the 84,000 refugee families in Jordan, though its own table totals 49,000. The survey states its limit plainly: “It must be noted that the claims on which the survey is based were unchecked and not documented.”

What did Israel and the PLO sign about refugees in 1995?

Israel and the PLO signed the Interim Agreement on 28 September 1995 and wrote into Article XXXI(5) that permanent-status negotiations covering “refugees” would begin “not later than May 4, 1996,” according to the text published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a party to the agreement. The date records what the text promised.

The full list in Article XXXI(5) reads: “Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, relations and cooperation with other neighbors, and other issues of common interest.” Refugees appear in that list as a subject for negotiation between the two signatories, not as a matter either one settled in the interim text.

Article XVII(1) removed the subject from the Palestinian Council’s jurisdiction for the interim period. The Council’s jurisdiction excludes “Jerusalem, settlements, specified military locations, Palestinian refugees, borders, foreign relations and Israelis.” The refugee question was therefore held outside the interim arrangements altogether.

Article XXXI(6) preserves both parties’ positions in identical terms: “Nothing in this Agreement shall prejudice or preempt the outcome of the negotiations on the permanent status to be conducted pursuant to the DOP. Neither Party shall be deemed, by virtue of having entered into this Agreement, to have renounced or waived any of its existing rights, claims or positions.” The clause binds Israel and the PLO equally. On its face, Israel kept the position recorded in its 1974 vote, and the PLO kept its claims on return and property.

The agreement was witnessed by the United States, the Russian Federation, Egypt, Jordan, Norway and the European Union. Article XXXI(13)(a) makes “all Annexes, Appendices and maps attached hereto” an integral part of the instrument. The text is bilateral, so its provisions on refugees are the two parties’ shared terms, published here in the version one party released.

Methodology and limitations

The evidence draws on three source types, each labelled where cited. Primary and official records supply the Assembly texts and the recorded vote on resolution 3236; the English texts of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and the Law of Return published by the Knesset; two Supreme Court judgments, Ka’adan (2000) and HaMoked (2014); the Conciliation Commission’s 1951 sampling survey; the 1995 Interim Agreement; and Israel’s 2010 report to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a party’s own filing. Peer-reviewed research supplies the land history: Forman and Kedar (2004), an archival legal history built from Israeli legislation, archival documents and Knesset proceedings.

Translation status varies. The Knesset labels its Basic Law translation unofficial, and the Hebrew governs. The Law of Return pages are scans of the Laws of the State of Israel series, marked neither official nor unofficial, and section 2(b) of the 1950 page is the text as enacted, not as later amended. Both judgments are quoted from the Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project’s translations and cited by paragraph. The Interim Agreement is quoted from the text one of its two parties published.

The 1950 statutory sequence and sale powers are quoted from Forman and Kedar’s description, not from the statute texts. Their history ends in 1960. Several figures in their paper are relayed from other authors (Cohen on present-absentee status; Liskovski, Kretzmer and Bauml on compensation; the Conciliation Commission, Hadawi and Israeli and Arab researchers on land totals), and each is attributed to its originator. The land estimates measure land abandoned or lost and use different scopes and dates. The 1951 sampling survey covers refugee families in Jordan only, extrapolates from samples of 400, and rests on claims its authors describe as unchecked.

The Mallison study (1979) is an argued legal analysis whose authors state the views are their own. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2022 summary is an advocacy organization’s description of Israel’s position. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are named as holders of the claim, dated, and not used as evidence.

Conclusion

Does Israel deny Palestinian refugees the right of return and their lost property? On its own record, Israel voted against the right as the General Assembly stated it in 1974, by name, in a roll call that passed 89 to 8. It wrote entry by right for its citizens in 1992, for Jews in 1950, and for their children, grandchildren and spouses in 1970.

The property record runs in one direction across a dozen years. Two 1950 statutes, on Forman and Kedar’s account, moved absentee land from a Custodian to a Development Authority and on to the state and the Jewish National Fund; the absentee rule reached tens of thousands of Arab citizens who never left; 704,000 dunams passed from the Custodian in a single year after 1953; and the 1960 consolidation folded the holdings into Israel Lands. The 1992 property guarantee stops at its own section 10, and no agreed total exists for the land at stake, with estimates spanning 4.2 million to 19 million dunams.

The one instrument both sides signed, in the text a party to it published, placed refugees in negotiations due to begin by 4 May 1996 and preserved every claim either party held. A right affirmed by the Assembly in 1948 and 1974, a statute book that closed its property chain in 1960, and a signed promise to negotiate: when a refugee’s grandchild asks what the record entitles them to, which of those three documents answers?

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Palestinian refugees are registered today?

UNRWA, the UN agency serving Palestine refugees, reports on its own registration rules that about 5.9 million people were eligible for its services in 2025, against about 750,000 it was assisting when it began operations in 1950. The 2025 count includes descendants under the agency’s rules, so the two figures count different populations.

Which delegations voted with Israel against resolution 3236?

The verbatim record of 22 November 1974 (A/PV.2296, paragraph 110) lists 8 votes against: the United States, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Iceland, Israel, Nicaragua and Norway. The other 126 delegations recording a position voted in favour or abstained.

Was the PLO’s observer status decided in the same vote?

No. Resolution 3237, adopted at the same meeting, invited the PLO to participate in the Assembly “in the capacity of observer” and passed by 95 votes to 17 with 19 abstentions. It was a separate roll call with a wider opposition than the 8 recorded against 3236.

Does the Law of Return’s definition of a Jew reach other Israeli registers?

Yes, through the same 1970 amendment. It inserted section 3A(b) into the Population Registry Law, 5725-1965, giving “Jew” “the same meaning as in section 4B of the Law of Return” for that law and “any registration or document thereunder.” Section 3A(a) leaves contested cases open to a “declaratory judgment of a competent court or tribunal.”

What did the Supreme Court order in Ka’adan?

The Court declared on 8 March 2000 that the State “was not permitted, by law, to allocate state land” for the settlement of Katzir “on the basis of discrimination between Jews and non-Jews.” Its remedy, in paragraph 40B, required the State to consider the petitioners’ request “on the basis of the principle of equality,” not to admit them. Justice Kedmi dissented only on whether the ruling reached past allocations.

Who was asked to act on resolution 3236 after 1976?

Resolution 3376 (XXX) of 10 November 1975 asked the Security Council to consider the question “as soon as possible after 1 June 1976,” the date by which the twenty-member Committee was to report. The resolution set the sequence of bodies and dates; it did not itself set a mechanism for return.

Why do refugees in Jordan dominate the 1951 property survey?

The Conciliation Commission’s survey worked from fact-sheets a relief agency issued to the 84,000 heads of refugee families in Jordan, about 540,000 persons. It transferred random samples of 6,400 to statistical sheets and found that samples of 400 brought deviations within eight per cent of the median, so its figures describe that population alone.

Sources

• Anti-Defamation League, 2022. Palestinian Refugees. Backgrounder. https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/palestinian-refugees. Monitoring and advocacy organization.
• Forman, Geremy and Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar, 2004. From Arab Land to ‘Israel Lands’: The Legal Dispossession of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22(6), 809 to 830. DOI 10.1068/d402. Peer-reviewed.
• Israel and the PLO, 1995. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, signed at Washington DC, 28 September 1995, with Annexes. Text published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. https://www.gov.il/en/Departments/General/the-israeli-palestinian-interim-agreement. Official or primary record, published by a party to the agreement.
• Israel, Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2010. Israel’s 14th periodic report to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, paragraph 377. gov.il. Official record, a party’s own submission to a United Nations treaty body.
• Israeli Supreme Court, 2000. HCJ 6698/95 Ka’adan v. Israel Land Administration, judgment of 8 March 2000. English translation, Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project. https://versa.cardozo.yu.edu/sites/default/files/upload/opinions/Ka’adan%20v.%20Israel%20Land%20Administration.pdf. Official or primary record (court judgment).
• Israeli Supreme Court, 2014. HCJ 8091/14 HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual v. Minister of Defense, judgment of 31 December 2014. English translation, Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project. https://versa.cardozo.yu.edu/opinions/hamoked-center-defense-individual-v-minister-defense. Official or primary record (court judgment).
• Knesset, 1950, amended 1970. Law of Return, 5710-1950, and Law of Return (Amendment No. 2), 5730-1970. English texts published by the Knesset. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns1_return_eng.pdf and https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns7_return_eng.pdf. Official or primary record (enacted legislation).
• Knesset, 1992, amendments through 2022. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, 5752-1992. Unofficial English translation published by the Knesset. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawLiberty.pdf. Official or primary record (enacted legislation).
• Mallison, W. Thomas and Sally V. Mallison, 1979. An International Law Analysis of the Major United Nations Resolutions Concerning the Palestine Question. ST/SG/SER.F/4. Published at the request of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. Legal analysis, views of the authors.
• United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1951. Sampling Survey of Abandoned Property Claimed by Arab Refugees. Working paper prepared by the Secretariat, A/AC.25/W/60, 12 April 1951. https://unispal.un.org/pdfs/AAC25W60.pdf. Official and primary record (intergovernmental commission working paper).
• United Nations General Assembly, 1948 to 1975. Resolutions 194 (III), 3236 (XXIX), 3237 (XXIX) and 3376 (XXX), with the recorded vote on 3236, A/PV.2296, paragraph 110, 22 November 1974. Official Document System, documents.un.org. Primary and official record (resolution texts and a recorded vote).