Plots and Deeds: Anti-Colonial Ownership and the Making of Palestinian Land Defense
Plots and Deeds tells the story of Palestinian land defense in the West Bank, beginning shortly after the 1967 occupation and continuing to the present day. It is a historical and anthropological account of how Palestinians turn ways of using and owning rural land into means of holding territory, and how these practices emerge not only in relation to direct forms of coercion and violence, but also through the dispersed, abstract power of global markets and liberal rights. My fundamental concern is why private property can bring about dispossession and loss, and yet still be absolutely essential for Palestinian land defense. How might this apparent contradiction demand a different approach to the land question in Palestine, and how in turn could it contribute to our critique of capitalism and settler colonialism?
Land defense confronts the contradictory results of Palestinian inclusion in capitalist markets and legal regimes. Scholarship about land and colonization frequently takes property and capital to be interlocking mechanisms of dispossession that result in exclusion, expulsion, and abandonment. But it is destructive inclusion that produces the terrain of land struggle in the West Bank. First, the Israeli state mediates forms of market dependency that shape how Palestinian land is used, who uses it, and what sorts of rights and obligations these users have to one another. Second, Israeli land confiscations and acquisitions force Palestinians into the Israeli legal system. The law demands an answer to a deceptively simple question: “who owns this plot of land?” Palestinians must answer by constantly establishing private ownership in ways acceptable to settler law. These modes of inclusion break down rural political economies and social relations. They atomize individual owners and subject them to impossible thresholds of evidence. And they threaten to reduce the national struggle to a problem of property ownership. But for many Palestinians, the market seems to offer goods, employment, and wealth, while property promises the rights and protections they so desperately need. Inclusion creates subjugation and dependence, but also holds out the possibility of freedom and autonomy.
Plots and Deeds explores three different types of land defense projects, each of which has made the tension between private property and collective territory uniquely visible. The book begins with projects that sought to bolster peasant cultivation to prevent land loss in the 1980s. After the 1990s, Palestinians built on these experiences to develop new modes of maintaining subsistence cultivation and incorporating growers into international markets. It then moves onto the problem of land sales. It explores land defense efforts to prove ownership and rebuild social ties damaged by settler claims in the 1980s, and then examines how post-Oslo legal regimes and land markets transformed these practices after the 1990s. It concludes in the 2000s with Palestinian real estate and land titling. These efforts turn to capital accumulation and privatization as a means of fortifying what remains of Palestinian territory against future Israeli confiscations and purchases. In all of these projects, conflicts of class, generation, and gender between Palestinians become inseparable from different territorial struggles with the Israeli state. As a result, the property owner is a central concern, alternatively celebrated or condemned, empowered or policed. A dangerous but inescapable political subject, the owner is both crucial to collective political survival and the means by which political community is broken apart.
Land defense is best understood as a mode of salvage in which Palestinians build on the wreckage of the past and move toward an uncertain future. They refashion older forms of land tenure, land use, and modes of social organization to confront new legal and market difficulties. They work across overlapping jurisdictions, ambiguous categories of property, and a fragmentary and dispersed archive to establish configurations of ownership. And they bring these efforts together in projects, drawing on a shared repertoire of practices whose origins can be traced back long before the occupation began, and which have circulated through the West Bank, across Palestine, and around the globe. Salvaging what they can from the ruins of the agrarian economy and the remains of successive legal systems, Palestinians navigate the asynchronous temporalities of capital and law in hopes of securing durable presence and ownership.
Land defense upsets standard periodization and typical dichotomies between village and city, resistance and collaboration, and inclusion and exclusion. Palestinian real estate ventures absorb rural practices and cultural symbols as they dispossess Palestinian villagers in the name of saving territory. Land defense grounded in traditional agriculture rebuilds communal forms and sensibilities through the world market. Collective struggles against settler purchases both rest on private property and contend with the individualizing force of market logic. Through the very ownership claims that are rejected by the Israeli courts, land defense sutures together political alliances and grounds Palestinian demands for inclusion into civilizational narratives of progress and recognition as rights-bearing subjects. Land defense, in short, is a way of making a future, albeit on less than ideal terms. It draws on the past, transforming it as it encounters new conditions and ideas. There is not a single, authentic form of land defense, and those defending the land do not agree on what Palestine should be or who it should be for. Land defense can establish durable forms of collective survival, perhaps even flourishing, and it can also be implicated in exclusion and damage. Why certain paths are held open and others are foreclosed, why some visions find purchase and not others, is what this book is about.