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

Abstract

This article examines the formation of land defense in relation to changing legal and economic conditions in the occupied Palestinian territories. It argues that as a result of settler capital and law, Palestinian land defense should be understood as emerging through, rather than apart from, private property. Specifically, it explores how private property and market forces shaped agrarian land defense (1970s-1980s) and real estate land defense (post-2007). In the 1970s and the 1980s, land defense sought to protect agriculture against market forces that drew Palestinians off the land and into wage labor in Israel. Beginning in the 1990s, the exclusion of Palestinians from Israeli wage labor and new forms of West Bank governance created the conditions for real estate land defense to appear. Taking the real estate project TABO as a case study, this article details its political logic, unexpected market effects, and social and economic limits. Owning the Homeland FOR THE PAST DECADE, village protests have captured the public imagination in the West Bank land war. Emblematic of this struggle is Nabi Salih: from the fading black circles left behind by tireburning to the spent tear gas canisters that are strung together and displayed for the benefit of passers-by, the remains of confrontation between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli soldiers are unmissable. 1 But beginning at the village entrance, a line of billboards tells a different story. Most of the advertisements, some of them bullet-riddled, are for TABO, a real estate venture devised by the Ramallah-based Union Construction and Investment (UCI) firm. 2 The advertisements all feature a young family. In one image, the man stands alone next to an ancient olive tree, a document in his hands, and the following caption overhead: "With monthly payments you'll have land with a title deed." According to TABO, Israeli "confiscations occur because there are no title deeds to prove the original owners," and therefore titled property is not only a lucrative investment, but also an effective means of protecting land from expropriation. 3 Along the road leading out of Nabi Salih toward Salfit, narrow roads wind upward to new hilltop properties that are transforming the countryside in the neighboring villages of Kafr 'Ayn, Qarawat Bani Zaid (Qarawa), Bruqin, and Farkha. Fluttering from the electricity poles lining the road, company banners proclaim, "The Homeland, We Are Its Owners."

Palestinian counter‐forensics and the cruel paradox of property

“…But unlike these settlers, Palestinians do not have recourse to the rights and promises of citizenship, and ownership is thus always permanently provisional. Finally, this living archive encompasses a century of land struggle against Zionist colonization, both before and after the foundation of the state of Israel (Kohlbry 2018). The 1970s and 1980s were a distinct conjuncture, and the surveyors were part of a broader land‐defense effort that drew on past experience and transformed it to confront the specific ways that colonization was then taking shape in the West Bank.…”

Selling Rural Palestine: Land Devaluation, Ethical Investment, and the Limits of Human Rights

“…It involves state expropriation (Levien 2018; Rabie 2021) as well as threats and indirect pressure (Fogelman and Bassett 2017; Lund 2020). Because land in these areas is often devalued, large‐scale acquisitions have the effect of raising prices and incorporating local people as active, if not always willing, participants in emerging land markets (Kohlbry 2018; Levien 2018).…”

“…It was striking, when I visited again in 2022, that the price was something that people still remembered. Second, as was the case for Rawabi (Rabie 2021), people reported that the use of brokers kept the extent of sales hidden in the beginning (Harb 2020; Kohlbry 2018). Doing so kept prices down, and it was not a popular tactic.…”