"[4][5] Organizations defending the rights of Arab citizens of Israel also generally include the 110,000 Bedouin[3] forced to move in a closed area under military rule in the Negev in 1949 in their estimates of internally displaced Palestinians.
Under these laws, "absentee" property owners were required to prove their "presence" in order to gain recognition of their ownership rights by the Israeli government.
Some villagers like those of Ghassibiya, Bir'im and Iqrit made petitions to the Israeli High Court to have their property rights recognized which were upheld in the 1950s, but they were physically prevented from reclaiming their properties by military administrative authorities who refused to abide by the court rulings and declared the villages closed military zones.
In 1991, Israeli writer and peace activist David Grossman conducted several interviews with Palestinian citizens of Israel.
These were published in a book called in Hebrew: נוכחים נפקדים, romanized: Nokhekhim Nifkadim, lit.
As Nur Masalha puts it in his introduction: "Acquiring the paradoxical title of present absentees, the internally displaced had their property and homes taken by the state, making them refugees and exiles within their own homeland.