In December 1948, Eliezer Kaplan, the finance minister of the six-month old state of Israel issued what he called “Emergency Regulations on the Property of Absentees.” These regulations, later promulgated into law by the Israeli parliament in 1950, defined “absentees” as, essentially, all Arab Palestinians who had either fled Palestine, or remained in what became Israel or its militarily occupied territories, in 1948. These regulations were then systematically used by the Israeli state to strip all such legally defined “absentees” of their physical and financial property. While scholars and activists have detailed how these regulations were used by the State of Israel to dispossess Palestinians of their lands and physical assets in the years following the nakba, this talk will detail the less well-known application of these regulations to strip the “absentees” of their financial assets: stocks, bonds, investments, insurance policies, and even, in some cases, their liabilities, usually mortgages. The paper will examine how international bankers and British colonial officials implicitly sanctioned this dispossession; it will also underline how international banking law prevented the Palestinians from suing for their rights. The talk ultimately hopes to raise broad questions about property rights for the stateless in the 20th century. The material for this talk is drawn from a variety of sources, ranging from private (Barclays Bank) archives, to the archives of the Shehadeh Law Firm in Ramallah, to official Israeli State Archives, to the British National Archives. An important portion of the material is also derived from oral interviews in Palestine and Israel.