[2] The suggestion for these files came from Luria Ben-Zion, an historian from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who wrote in 1940 to the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that "This would greatly help the redemption of the land".
Yossef Weitz, the head of the JNF settlement department immediately suggested that they be turned into a "national project".
The main criteria for inclusion were participation in actions against the British and the Zionists, and affiliation with a Palestinian political party or leader.
According to Pappé[3] in the late 1940s these files contained 'precise details [...] about the topographic location of each village, its access roads, quality of land, water springs, main sources of income, its sociopolitical composition, religious affiliations, names of its mukhtars, its relationship with other villages, the age of individual men (sixteen to fifty),' an index of hostility based on the level of the village's participation in the revolt of 1936, and a list of everyone who had been involved in the revolt with particular attention for those who had allegedly killed Jews.
[2] According to Pappé, during the 1948 war, after the occupation of a village, if possible, the people on the list were identified, usually by an informer wearing a cloth sack over his head, and often shot on the spot.