Sarah died in Kiriath-arba—now Hebron [Chevron]—in the land of Canaan; and Abraham proceeded to mourn for Sarah and to bewail her.
Then Abraham rose from beside his dead, and spoke to the Hittites, saying, “I am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial site among you, that I may remove my dead for burial.”
And the Hittites replied to Abraham, saying to him, “Hear us, my lord: you are the elect of God among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our burial places; not a single one of us would withhold his burial place from you for burying your dead.”
Thereupon Abraham bowed low to the people of the land, the Hittites, and he said to them, “If it is your wish that I remove my dead for burial, you must agree to intercede for me with Ephron son of Zohar. Let him sell me the cave of Machpelah that he owns, which is at the edge of his land. Let him sell it to me, at the full price, for a burial site in your midst.”
Ephron was present among the Hittites; so Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the hearing of the Hittites, all who entered the gate of his town, saying, “No, my lord, hear me: I give you the field and I give you the cave that is in it; I give it to you in the presence of my people. Bury your dead.”
Then Abraham bowed low before the people of the land, and spoke to Ephron in the hearing of the people of the land, saying, “If only you would hear me out! Let me pay the price of the land; accept it from me, that I may bury my dead there.”
And Ephron replied to Abraham, saying to him, “My lord, do hear me! A piece of land worth four hundred shekels of silver—what is that between you and me? Go and bury your dead.”
Abraham accepted Ephron’s terms. Abraham paid out to Ephron the money that he had named in the hearing of the Hittites—four hundred shekels of silver at the going merchants’ rate.
"Road to Nowhere: Israel’s Arab Citizens Fight for an Address," Elisheva Goldberg (November 10, 2020)
In 1950, the Knesset passed a law granting the state sweeping powers to appropriate and redistribute “abandoned” Arab land. The Absentee Property Law, based on an emergency regulation of the same name, applied to anyone who owned land in the state of Israel but left for any amount of time after November 29th, 1947—the day the UN passed a resolution allowing for Israel’s creation—for what might broadly be described as “enemy territory”: either in one of seven Arab countries listed by the law, or in an area not yet controlled by the state of Israel in the greater “land of Israel.” It deemed all such persons “absentee” property owners, and declared that land belonging to “absentees” could be confiscated by the state.
