Private Property and Public Power in the Occupied West Bank

Levine‐Schnur, Ronit

doi:10.1515/eplj-2017-0007

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…To avoid granting Palestinians citizenship, Israel never declared formal sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Its legal system never recognized collective Palestinian legal claims (Levine‐Schnur 2017, 124), and unlike many other settler states, it has not adopted formal Indigenous rights frameworks. Nationally, Palestinians base legal claims against the Israeli state on private property, and activists and organizations often deploy a language of property rights violations to make Palestinian demands legible to international audiences.…”

Section: Land Property and Territorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead, it is an integral aspect of rationally using and allocating land. From the metropolitan core (Rabinowitz 1994) to the hinterlands (Levine‐Schnur 2017), Israeli law and administration deal with the problems that result as colonial expansion encounters Palestinians as property owners. Palestinian ownership can complicate zoning, investment, and construction, creating costly delays; it can shift the locations of neighborhoods and the paths of walls and roads; and it can even contribute to the collapse of planned ventures.…”

Section: Provisional Prospects and Universal Rightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Palestinian counter‐forensics and the cruel paradox of property

Kohlbry

2022

American Ethnologist

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In disputes between Palestinian landowners and the Israeli state, several Palestinian surveyors in the West Bank use Ottoman‐era deeds to establish preinvasion land claims. Through a distinct practice of counter‐forensics, these surveyors transform landscapes, documents, and local knowledge into evidence of property ownership. They seek to establish the fact of Palestinian ownership before Israeli invasion and to build a legal and political narrative in which the settler state marks a deviation from scientific objectivity, liberal norms, and international political community. Counter‐forensics is part of a living archive of land defense in which property claims are both provisional and universal. As surveyors move through the cruel paradox of property, they engage in an anti‐colonial legal practice that seeks to hold the collective territory of the nation through a technical negotiation over individual plots of land. Their efforts reveal how property rights fail to protect Palestinian land, as well as why these rights remain important for those who defend the land. [property, law, land, surveying, counter‐forensics, settler colonialism, West Bank, Israel/Palestine]

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Section: Land Property and Territorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Provisional Prospects and Universal Rightsmentioning

confidence: 99%