In the flood of commentary on Gaza, displacement, and Israel’s expanding settlement enterprise, one fundamental truth is often obscured: the Nakba did not end in 1948. It continues — and law has been one of its most powerful instruments.
That is the central argument of Stolen Nation: The Right to Reparation of Palestinian Refugees, a deeply researched and compelling new book by Dr. Lena El-Malak. Rather than treating Palestinian dispossession as a tragic historical episode, El-Malak shows how it has been sustained and normalized through legal systems that convert forced displacement into permanent, state-sanctioned ownership.
El-Malak is a commercial technology and data-privacy attorney and an independent expert in international and refugee law. Before entering private practice, she worked as a legal and development consultant in the Middle East, including with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Amman. She also writes as a descendant of Palestinian refugees — a perspective that gives the book both analytical depth and moral urgency. “I discovered over the years that the Nakba is ongoing,” she writes, reflecting on her encounters with refugee camps and the enduring trauma of displacement.
Dispossession as a Legal Regime
One of the book’s great strengths is its refusal to treat land loss as symbolic or abstract. El-Malak traces how Palestinian land ownership was systematically undermined through successive legal regimes — from Ottoman land classifications to British Mandate policies, and finally through Israeli legislation after 1948.
She shows how ambiguous land categories and incomplete registration systems were later weaponized to justify sweeping confiscations. At the center of this legal architecture lies Israel’s 1950 Absentees’ Property Law, which transferred the homes, farms, orchards, and businesses of millions of Palestinians to state-controlled bodies. This was not a neutral administrative measure; it was the legal consolidation of mass displacement.
Crucially, El-Malak argues that this confiscation is not a closed chapter. Under international law, it constitutes a continuing wrongful act. Because the violation continues, so too does the obligation to remedy it — through restitution of property and compensation for losses. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, she reminds readers, affirms these rights clearly. They are not aspirational claims or bargaining positions; they are legal entitlements.
This is not nostalgia. It is law.
Gaza and the Nakba Without End
What makes Stolen Nation especially urgent is its relevance to the present moment. Two-thirds of Gaza’s population are refugees or descendants of refugees from 1948. Since October 2023, Israel has again displaced nearly the entire population of the Strip, destroying vast numbers of homes, farmlands, and commercial areas.
El-Malak completed the book during this period of devastation. She notes that refugee camps in the West Bank, including Jenin and Nablus, have also been subjected to repeated assaults. The pattern is unmistakable: displacement followed by destruction, justified and entrenched through law.
As Lex Takkenberg, a leading authority on Palestinian refugee law, observes in the book’s foreword, El-Malak’s analysis is directly relevant to the unprecedented property losses Palestinians are experiencing today. Seen through this lens, reparations are not a matter for some distant “post-conflict” future. They are a present-day demand arising from ongoing harm.
The Failure of Negotiations
El-Malak is unsparing in her critique of the so-called peace process. From Madrid to Oslo to Camp David and Taba, Palestinian refugee rights were steadily stripped of their legal character and reframed as “final status issues” to be negotiated — and often traded away.
This shift had profound consequences. Binding rights were treated as obstacles rather than foundations for peace. Law was replaced by power. The result was not compromise, but erasure — and negotiations that collapsed precisely because they ignored justice.
Any future political process that once again sidelines refugee reparations, El-Malak argues, is destined to repeat these failures.
Law, Power, and Liberation
El-Malak does not romanticize international law. She recognizes that legal systems have often served imperial and settler-colonial projects. Citing legal scholar Noura Erakat, she notes that law can only serve an emancipatory function when it is wielded deliberately in the service of a political movement.
Abandoning law altogether, however, would mean surrendering the terrain to those who have long used it to entrench inequality. What Stolen Nation offers instead is a framework for reclaiming law — transforming refugee rights from moral appeals into enforceable demands in international forums, negotiations, and global advocacy.
Why Reparations Matter
The significance of El-Malak’s work lies in how it situates Gaza’s destruction within a century-long continuum of dispossession. By grounding Palestinian claims in established legal principles — restitution, compensation, and state responsibility — she makes clear that accountability is not optional.
If the international community is serious about ending cycles of displacement and violence, reparations cannot be deferred indefinitely. They must be the starting point.
Stolen Nation is not only a work of legal scholarship. It is a reminder that justice requires naming the crime, exposing its mechanisms, and refusing to accept dispossession as destiny. For readers seeking to understand Palestine not only as a humanitarian crisis but as a legal and moral reckoning, El-Malak’s book offers clarity — and a challenge that can no longer be ignored.