Finally, I've lived in Southern California for sixty years and I've never encountered a Mexican (legal or illegal) trying to claim their neighbor's house;
Therein lies the rub. What were the property rules in pre-Israel Palestine? What houses were claimed? I'm unaware of nomads having houses.
I don't think too many nomads were living in Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa during the Nakba of 1948.
Uri Avnery was there after beginning his service to the State of Israel as a teen-aged member of the Irgun. In this
May 2008 article Uri reveals his thoughts on "the cynicism and lawlessness that have infected (Israel) in the 41 years of occupation."
"In my view, the corruption was born together with the state, and not by accident. A lot has been said about the Naqba on the occasion of Israel's 60th anniversary. But one phenomenon that accompanied the Naqba is consistently ignored: the massive theft of abandoned Arab property.
"In the course of the 1948 flight and expulsion, some 100 to 150 thousand Arab families abandoned their homes. Many of them lived in simple dwellings, but not a few were living in elegant houses in Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa. What happened to the interior of these homes? To the tens of thousands of expensive carpets, fauteuils, refrigerators, wardrobes, pianos? Where did the inventories of shops and stores go?"
"They disappeared..."
"That was no secret. We knew and talked about this at the time. For years one could see the sofas and armchairs covered with velvet draping in private living rooms and offices. But the phenomenon was never investigated, and later on was smothered and suppressed..."
"The theft in broad daylight of the property abandoned by individuals already violated the ethos that was accepted before the foundation of the state. The denial and suppression made it worse. But the large-scale corruption, whose bitter fruit we see now in all its ugliness, started indeed with the occupation in 1967."