What do you think?
Rate this book
Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property
How the Nakba was marked not just by forced expulsions but also widespread looting of Palestinian property
During the 1948 war, looting was a general and widespread phenomenon whereby Israeli fighters and residents alike plundered Palestinian property - including homes, shops, businesses, and farms - left behind by those who were expelled or fled during the war.
This bitter truth was then silenced and forgotten by the Jewish public in Israel over the thousands of shops and tens of thousands of homes and buildings were pillaged by the Jewish residents of the country during and after the war.
The pillage of Palestinian property was carried out by tens of thousands who stole the belongings of those who had been their neighbours. However, this mass looting has implications that go far beyond the personality or moral fortitude of those who took part in it. The widespread looting served a political agenda that sought to empty the country of its Palestinian residents. It should be seen in its context as an aspect of the prevailing policy during the war - a policy that sought, among other things, to crush the Palestinian economy, destroy villages, and to confiscate and sometimes destroy crops and harvests remaining in displaced villages.
The participating Jewish public became a stakeholder in preventing Palestinian residents from returning to the villages and cities they left, and as such, was mobilized to support a political agenda that pushed for segregation between Jews and Arabs in the early years of statehood.
During the 1948 war, looting was a general and widespread phenomenon whereby Israeli fighters and residents alike plundered Palestinian property - including homes, shops, businesses, and farms - left behind by those who were expelled or fled during the war.
This bitter truth was then silenced and forgotten by the Jewish public in Israel over the thousands of shops and tens of thousands of homes and buildings were pillaged by the Jewish residents of the country during and after the war.
The pillage of Palestinian property was carried out by tens of thousands who stole the belongings of those who had been their neighbours. However, this mass looting has implications that go far beyond the personality or moral fortitude of those who took part in it. The widespread looting served a political agenda that sought to empty the country of its Palestinian residents. It should be seen in its context as an aspect of the prevailing policy during the war - a policy that sought, among other things, to crush the Palestinian economy, destroy villages, and to confiscate and sometimes destroy crops and harvests remaining in displaced villages.
The participating Jewish public became a stakeholder in preventing Palestinian residents from returning to the villages and cities they left, and as such, was mobilized to support a political agenda that pushed for segregation between Jews and Arabs in the early years of statehood.
349 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 24, 2024
13 people are currently reading
329 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 12, 2025
In the grand scheme of things, I don’t have an enormous amount to say about Loot. Certainly, this is not about to be a long* review by any stretch of the imagination, but I did want to write down my thoughts on it at the very least. Much of my criticism of this one comes down to language, specifically the language it uses to describe the Nakba.
Let me first note that there is one positive I want to note here, which is just how incredibly detailed this survey is, and (somewhat in opposition to a point I’ll note later) the number of Zionist sources it uses. I say this because sometimes it’s useful to see what the original colonisers believed or did not believe they had to hide about their so-called mission. When Zionists of today try to prevaricate, you can always point back to the Zionists of the past who were happy to boast of their violence.
I am firmly of the opinion that, particularly for nonfiction, you ought to read an entire book before you judge an author’s argument, but that was distinctly tested by the act of reading this one. I was, I feel, eventually proven right on that front (the second part of it, the actual analysis, was interesting), but it took me a long while to get there. But, hey, now I can write a fully informed review of it all (haha).
I made a lot of notes while reading this one, most of them falling into one of two major themes. The first is the language this book uses surrounding the Nakba. The second is the relative lack of Palestinian voices (remember that point in opposition I mentioned?). Let’s start with the first.
From the very beginning of this book, it’s clear that this author is not anti-Zionist. This is not entirely unexpected, I grant, but I had a small kernel of hope to start with. That was almost immediately crushed by the introduction and its repeated descriptions of the Nakba as the ‘independence war’. In fact, the sole use of the word Nakba in this book comes in this assertion:
‘[...] some authors, like me, employ the term ‘Independence War’, others use ‘Nakba’ [...]’
As though these are merely interchangeable terms, the usage of which does not instantly establish your political position. Thereafter, I couldn’t help but repeatedly pick out the ways in which this book whitewashes ethnic cleansing. These included: downplaying the activities of the nascent IOF, mentions of tactics employed without telling us what those tactics were (Raz says, early on, that ‘by design, there is no reference, beyond a general description, to how a given city (or village) was conquered’), and the insistence on pairing every example of Zionist violence with “but the Arabs were violent too”.
After fifteen months of watching the Zionist-aligned Western media contort itself into impossible shapes to avoid calling a spade a spade, we are surely now near experts in how language works to manipulate perception. There were many such examples I noted in this book; here are a few to give you an idea.
‘[...] about 650,000 people left Mandate Palestine and went into exile [...]’
‘[...] the war forced them into exile [...]’
‘[...] the emptying out of the Arab villages [...]’
‘[...] Arabs were told to leave the area [...]’
‘[...] conquered two villages [...]’
I’ll stop here, but you get the picture. If you don’t get the picture, might I take this moment to direct you (to begin with) to Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which is an infinitely better scholarly work.
To return to my second point, there is a dearth of Palestinian voices in this one. I will allow that, given what’s survived, what’s permitted to survive in archives, this is not entirely unexpected. There are a few examples in the evidence section from Palestinians, so it’s not entirely at zero, but there’s absolutely no citing of Palestinian scholars amongst the analysis. A book about oppression, by the oppressor, is not really a book about oppression at all.
So it’s no surprise that, once I realised this is a book for Zionists, it became a lot easier to read. I stopped expecting it not to take a liberal Zionist perspective. I wasn’t surprised when this book tried to ‘credit’ the Zionist government for not expelling Palestinians in Nazareth, nor when it claimed that we should be grateful to Sheetrit from the Ministry of Minorities for opposing Ben-Gurion (and trying to “save Zionism”). This is not a book for anti-Zionists. This is a book aimed at so-called liberal Zionists, so they can feel good about opposing the dispossession of Palestinian belongings, while disregarding that the very land they stand on is dispossessed too. A fitting quote for here is actually from Ben-Gurion (though I doubt in the way he intended): ‘A state cannot be built or maintained by a population that steals from another population.’
It’s interesting here what Ben-Gurion (and, by extension, Raz) consider stealing. Raz has limited his investigation and analysis into moveable possessions and the occasional home. Not land, because it’s a land without people for a people without a land, except in references to ‘legal expropriation’. Raz neglects to convince us that this is at all different from what he describes as looting, because it’s not in the book’s remit (i.e. moveable possessions). The one concession he makes is to say that ‘the social legitimacy of the efforts to expropriate land helped to blur the fundamental injustice of such activity’. The activity is only socially legitimate if one believes in the legitimacy of the settler-colonial project and its ‘laws’. That is the fundamental assumption made here, that ‘Israel’, built on theft and murder, is a legitimate state and should be treated as such. In taking that as our starting point, Raz’s entire analysis becomes null and void.
Raz concludes with the idea that the fact of so many early colonisers taking part in the plundering forcibly (or not so forcibly, in my opinion) tied them to the political position of expulsion and no return. To revert on this would mean to accept their own criminality, which they would be unlikely to do. This is an interesting conclusion, but I feel it is undercut by the narrowness of its analysis. Again, we come back to legitimising the view of the Nakba as an ‘independence war’. The entire enterprise is illegitimate and to take a blinkered view by only looking at the plundering renders this a partial analysis at best. Furthermore, many of the quotes cited in this book are concerned with the looting and plunder not because of its being a crime, but because it makes the Zionists look bad, not because they opposed the settler-colonial project. That is the state that Raz is defending. And, I think, it sums the book up: it’s not concerned with the violence against Palestinian bodies, but their possessions. It details the stealing, but glosses over and sometimes even works to obscure the death and horrors inflicted on Palestinians. This is not to say the looting wasn’t important, but in not considering it in context with the rest of the violence, this book is severely lacking.
To leave you with one, very apt, Zisling quote for this one: ‘It’s been said that there were cases of rape in Ramle. I can forgive rape, but I cannot forgive other acts [looting] which seem to me much worse.’
*So. I lied.
Let me first note that there is one positive I want to note here, which is just how incredibly detailed this survey is, and (somewhat in opposition to a point I’ll note later) the number of Zionist sources it uses. I say this because sometimes it’s useful to see what the original colonisers believed or did not believe they had to hide about their so-called mission. When Zionists of today try to prevaricate, you can always point back to the Zionists of the past who were happy to boast of their violence.
I am firmly of the opinion that, particularly for nonfiction, you ought to read an entire book before you judge an author’s argument, but that was distinctly tested by the act of reading this one. I was, I feel, eventually proven right on that front (the second part of it, the actual analysis, was interesting), but it took me a long while to get there. But, hey, now I can write a fully informed review of it all (haha).
I made a lot of notes while reading this one, most of them falling into one of two major themes. The first is the language this book uses surrounding the Nakba. The second is the relative lack of Palestinian voices (remember that point in opposition I mentioned?). Let’s start with the first.
From the very beginning of this book, it’s clear that this author is not anti-Zionist. This is not entirely unexpected, I grant, but I had a small kernel of hope to start with. That was almost immediately crushed by the introduction and its repeated descriptions of the Nakba as the ‘independence war’. In fact, the sole use of the word Nakba in this book comes in this assertion:
‘[...] some authors, like me, employ the term ‘Independence War’, others use ‘Nakba’ [...]’
As though these are merely interchangeable terms, the usage of which does not instantly establish your political position. Thereafter, I couldn’t help but repeatedly pick out the ways in which this book whitewashes ethnic cleansing. These included: downplaying the activities of the nascent IOF, mentions of tactics employed without telling us what those tactics were (Raz says, early on, that ‘by design, there is no reference, beyond a general description, to how a given city (or village) was conquered’), and the insistence on pairing every example of Zionist violence with “but the Arabs were violent too”.
After fifteen months of watching the Zionist-aligned Western media contort itself into impossible shapes to avoid calling a spade a spade, we are surely now near experts in how language works to manipulate perception. There were many such examples I noted in this book; here are a few to give you an idea.
‘[...] about 650,000 people left Mandate Palestine and went into exile [...]’
‘[...] the war forced them into exile [...]’
‘[...] the emptying out of the Arab villages [...]’
‘[...] Arabs were told to leave the area [...]’
‘[...] conquered two villages [...]’
I’ll stop here, but you get the picture. If you don’t get the picture, might I take this moment to direct you (to begin with) to Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which is an infinitely better scholarly work.
To return to my second point, there is a dearth of Palestinian voices in this one. I will allow that, given what’s survived, what’s permitted to survive in archives, this is not entirely unexpected. There are a few examples in the evidence section from Palestinians, so it’s not entirely at zero, but there’s absolutely no citing of Palestinian scholars amongst the analysis. A book about oppression, by the oppressor, is not really a book about oppression at all.
So it’s no surprise that, once I realised this is a book for Zionists, it became a lot easier to read. I stopped expecting it not to take a liberal Zionist perspective. I wasn’t surprised when this book tried to ‘credit’ the Zionist government for not expelling Palestinians in Nazareth, nor when it claimed that we should be grateful to Sheetrit from the Ministry of Minorities for opposing Ben-Gurion (and trying to “save Zionism”). This is not a book for anti-Zionists. This is a book aimed at so-called liberal Zionists, so they can feel good about opposing the dispossession of Palestinian belongings, while disregarding that the very land they stand on is dispossessed too. A fitting quote for here is actually from Ben-Gurion (though I doubt in the way he intended): ‘A state cannot be built or maintained by a population that steals from another population.’
It’s interesting here what Ben-Gurion (and, by extension, Raz) consider stealing. Raz has limited his investigation and analysis into moveable possessions and the occasional home. Not land, because it’s a land without people for a people without a land, except in references to ‘legal expropriation’. Raz neglects to convince us that this is at all different from what he describes as looting, because it’s not in the book’s remit (i.e. moveable possessions). The one concession he makes is to say that ‘the social legitimacy of the efforts to expropriate land helped to blur the fundamental injustice of such activity’. The activity is only socially legitimate if one believes in the legitimacy of the settler-colonial project and its ‘laws’. That is the fundamental assumption made here, that ‘Israel’, built on theft and murder, is a legitimate state and should be treated as such. In taking that as our starting point, Raz’s entire analysis becomes null and void.
Raz concludes with the idea that the fact of so many early colonisers taking part in the plundering forcibly (or not so forcibly, in my opinion) tied them to the political position of expulsion and no return. To revert on this would mean to accept their own criminality, which they would be unlikely to do. This is an interesting conclusion, but I feel it is undercut by the narrowness of its analysis. Again, we come back to legitimising the view of the Nakba as an ‘independence war’. The entire enterprise is illegitimate and to take a blinkered view by only looking at the plundering renders this a partial analysis at best. Furthermore, many of the quotes cited in this book are concerned with the looting and plunder not because of its being a crime, but because it makes the Zionists look bad, not because they opposed the settler-colonial project. That is the state that Raz is defending. And, I think, it sums the book up: it’s not concerned with the violence against Palestinian bodies, but their possessions. It details the stealing, but glosses over and sometimes even works to obscure the death and horrors inflicted on Palestinians. This is not to say the looting wasn’t important, but in not considering it in context with the rest of the violence, this book is severely lacking.
To leave you with one, very apt, Zisling quote for this one: ‘It’s been said that there were cases of rape in Ramle. I can forgive rape, but I cannot forgive other acts [looting] which seem to me much worse.’
*So. I lied.
June 6, 2025
Important book for Jews and non-Jews alike.
January 24, 2025
It's uncommon that a book published in this day and age adds anything substantially new to our understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict, but this book is that rare pearl.
March 19, 2025
Well researched and enlightening. I was unaware Jewish soldiers and regular citizens systematically looted abandoned Arab homes and businesses during and after the 1948 war.
August 30, 2025
It is so boggling that it talks about looting and taking and possessing others’ or Arab as he likes to say, stuff and land and their housings and everything they once owned. And yet he treats the Nakba as a matter of label and opinion and of course choosing and privileging the war of Independence. Oh my god. What makes me think that this book is interesting that it is quite telling that language no matter how much one maneuvers, it betrays and leads to the truth. Very telling the details of looting that never match a “war of independence”. So so much notes but would preserve my energy.
November 17, 2025
The book demonstrates that Israel is a country based on theft. While this is not news, the remarkable amount of Israeli sources cited shows that plunder of Palestinian moveable property by both civilians and soldiers occurred on a massive scale. Authorities did not stop it because it conveniently contributed to the plan of expulsion of the Palestinians. Some members of the government recognized the similarities with how Jews were treated by the Nazi and wanted to do something about the extensive looting, not for the sake of the Palestinians, but rather for the sake of Israel’s moral character and image. The latter aim seems to be shared by the author who completely ignored the Palestinian perspective and by his own admission wanted to contribute to the redemption of Zionism by forcing a reckoning with its moral failures. I found this and the general Israeli perspective of the book (which mostly calls Palestinians “Arabs” and refers to the Nakba as “the war of independence”) deeply disturbing, even more so considering the author is apparently a member of the intellectual left in Israel and a self-described human rights and peace activist. Notable quote (p 294) by David Ben-Gurion: “A state cannot be built or maintained by a population that steals from another population. If such a state is created, things will not go well”. No kidding.
March 23, 2025
a very informing and important read. however, a lack of Palestinian primary sources and voices on the subject matter would have improved the narrative.
this is an academic work presented with references from the oppressor with limited input from Palestinian historical record or personal accounts. however, absolutely still worth the read to understand the atrocities committed.
—-
“the plunder of property served Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's policy of removing Arab residents from the State of Israel and helped him realize it. The plunder of Arab prop-ety was only one aspect of a broader policy of Arab expulsion, and it fit rogether with other aspects of this policy mentioned briefly at various points in this book: the desiccation of Arab orchards through the removal or theft of irrigation pipes and motors; the burning of crops; the killing of work animals; and the physical destruction of villages. Together with the plunder of Arab property, these practices that destroyed Palestinian workers' and farmers' means of production decimated the Palestinian economy. In other words, Palestinian refugees had nothing to which to return.”
this is an academic work presented with references from the oppressor with limited input from Palestinian historical record or personal accounts. however, absolutely still worth the read to understand the atrocities committed.
—-
“the plunder of property served Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's policy of removing Arab residents from the State of Israel and helped him realize it. The plunder of Arab prop-ety was only one aspect of a broader policy of Arab expulsion, and it fit rogether with other aspects of this policy mentioned briefly at various points in this book: the desiccation of Arab orchards through the removal or theft of irrigation pipes and motors; the burning of crops; the killing of work animals; and the physical destruction of villages. Together with the plunder of Arab property, these practices that destroyed Palestinian workers' and farmers' means of production decimated the Palestinian economy. In other words, Palestinian refugees had nothing to which to return.”
May 3, 2025
True, it's not on the same level as rape, murder of the helpless, loss of home and homeland, but there just is something so creepy about looting things left behind by neighbors. It's like a serial murderer who keeps something personal from each victim he kills. Raz outlines how humankind's worst impulses were perhaps encouraged, then harnessed in the service of a political goal. He cites a lot of primary source material chiefly from Israeli sources, plus a few others (such as Village Statistics 1945) needed for background. He also argues persuasively why the looting he studies here differs from other instances of looting. We have read of the concentration camp commandant gifting his wife a fur stolen from a victim he killed, or the wife asking her Russian soldier husband to bring her back a dishwasher from his Ukraine tour. When you loot your neighbor's possessions you are saying they will never be your neighbors. The loot is referred to as "enemy property". Looting is, as one eyewitness said, "a moral collapse".
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews