Enclosures from Below: TheMushaa’in Contemporary Palestine

Abstract

This article traces the declining fortunes of the mushaa’, a once‐prominent Levantine culture of common land. Palestinians managed to resist attempts by the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate to break up the mushaa’. Under Israeli colonization, the remaining commons are now subject to another type of appropriation: individual Palestinian contractors seize hold of mushaa’ land and build on it. This article introduces the concept of “enclosures from below”, whilst looking at the dynamics of seizure of the commons by Palestinian refugees, who once were peasants practising mushaa’ on their lands and are now landless, some having become expert contractors. I show that the contractors consider their actions to be a form of resistance against the settler colonial project, manifested in the advancing of the Wall and settlement expansion. This is described through a case study of the Shu'faat area in Jerusalem. Changing uses of mushaa’ land reflect wider tendencies in the Palestinian national project that has become increasingly individualized.

Qualitative methods III: On different ways of describing our work

“…Of those that did, in roughly half the cases the argument was that this should involve the same method in other contexts. Alkhalili (2017), for example, encourages us to explore whether 'enclosure from below' works in a similar way elsewhere to how it was observed to happen in their Palestinian case. Kelsey et al (2019) say more social groups should be looked at in terms of how they do budget shopping.…”

Unspectacular spaces of slow wounding in Palestine

“…This has meant that several, predominantly rural, Palestinian "Area C" communities have become targets of land seizure, often followed by, or proceeding through, restrictive re-zonings, expulsion of farmers from their lands, forced displacements, demolitions, apartheid policies regarding the use of roads and other infrastructure, and the violence of settlers inhabiting Palestinian lands. As an outcome, several Palestinian households, even entire villages, have become systematically isolated and strangulated into sites and pockets of intensified colonial extremity (see Alkhalili, 2017;Allegra et al, 2017;Joronen, 2019). Certainly, as Cohen and Gordon (2018) recall, Zionist leaders have long understood that effective control and seizure of Palestinian lands requires a significant civilian presence in the occupied territories.…”

Owning the Homeland: Property, Markets, and Land Defense in the West Bank

“…As a result, an era was ushered in that witnessed the predominance of the capitalist ethos in which the market trumped the national interest, the destruction of collective institutions alongside the rise of market-driven individualism, and the institution of private property on the ruins of the commons. 4 Scholars on the Left continue to explore conceptual alternatives and political approaches (explicitly or implicitly) outside of state and capital, either in the grassroots organizing of the 1970s and 1980s or communal forms of village solidarity. 5 If village protests embody the essence of Palestinian resistance, TABO appears as its negation, the neoliberal culprit par excellence, deserving of little more than censure.…”