The Middle Class and the Land Struggle in Palestine (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2023
By tracing Zionist and German Templer efforts to buy arable private property in Palestine between 1897 and 1922, I show the ways in which the changing balance of Ottoman and Levantine forces over land and labor-as well as political and economic institutions and social structures-facilitated settler-colonialism in northern Palestine. In this article, I examine official records of the Ottoman state, Jewish organizations, and Levantine, Jewish, and Templer real estate papers. I argue that changing capitalist practices in northern Palestine, driven especially by interactions of Beirut-based companies with the changing global capitalist market, facilitated settler-colonialism in the region. Specifically, Ottoman state-sponsored violence during World War I increased peasant dispossessions in the fertile region of northern Palestine, already in progress since at least the mid-19th century, making settler colonies possible.
2016
Israel is often praised for its agricultural and water model, and has used this recognition to better its international standing. However, this takes a historically shallow and uncritical look at the development of Israeli agriculture. Throughout its development Israel’s agricultural and water systems have been built off systemic Palestinian land confiscation, water grabs, and diminishing Palestinian agriculture. This development is not accidental, but the basis of the agricultural development of the Israeli state and pre-state formation. This study takes a historical and ecological look at Israeli agricultural development, how it has changed throughout the history of the Zionist project and the state of Israel, and how it has impacted the socio-ecosystems and landscape of Palestine. To do this, this study uses a multifaceted framework combining food regime theory of global agricultural markets, water paradigms on the sanctioned discourse of water management, and the ideas of settler colonial studies and the shared narratives and strategies of settler states. Using this framework, it then dissects the history of the Zionist and Israeli agricultural settlement into five periods, based on the changing modes and methods of this settlement development and analyzes agricultural development within these timeframes. It then looks at the impacts of this agricultural development on Palestinian socio-ecosystems and landscapes such as changes in patterns of tenancy, water systems, agricultural and grazing systems, and land cover/land use. From this research this study asserts and concludes that throughout its history Israeli agricultural development’s main use and goal was as method to gain, hold, and settle the land of Palestine. Also this large-scale agricultural settlement, clearing, and transforming the previous forms of land use and environmental interaction, radically impacted the socioecosystems and landscape of Palestine. While the place of agricultural settlement has changed, shifted, and has fallen from its place as the privileged and preferred mode of settlement, it continues to be used within Israeli settlement strategies.
Journal of Political Ecology, 2024
From 1919 through the early 1950s, agricultural scientists affiliated with the University of California and agricultural scientists setting up settlements in Mandatory Palestine traveled between California and Palestine on a series of research trips. Building on conversations in historical political ecology and critical political ecologies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, this article sets out to answer: how was agricultural science part of the project of settler colonialism in both California and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century? Through an analysis of archival materialsfield notes, professional and personal correspondence, and scholarly and popular media publications by US and European Jewish Zionist scientists-I argue that these scientists naturalized and made universal racial hierarchies through transnational technoscientific collaboration. US and Zionist scientists engaged in exchange and debate in two topics: the proper physical organization of and location of farms, and; the concept of carrying capacity of the land of historic Palestine. In both, agricultural science was used as an objective reason to elevate Western ideologies of proper cultivation and capitalist yield. This justified the dispossession of Palestinians from their land because they were "poor stewards." This historical case study holds implications for contemporary issues around land and population by Zionists in Israel today, and related debates in global sustainable development at large.
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In this article, I argue that the conditions of the post-Oslo era contributed to the land commodification processes in Palestine. Instead of having the land at the very center of production and reproduction, rural Palestine has become a real-estate commodity stripped of its communal solidarity. Treating rural Palestine as an abstract commodity threatens the quality of life and time, and jeopardizes all these possibilities beyond the exchange value. In my opinion, the de-marginalization of rural areas can be achieved by the reversal of what i refer to as ”the colonial condition,” and by enhancing socioeconomic and cultural rural interdependency.
CONFRONTING A COLONIAL RULE OF PROPERTY: THE AL-SAKHINA CASE IN MANDATE PALESTINE
Arab Studies Journal (Vol xxvii, no. 1, Spring 2019), 2019
ARTICLES The struggles for and on land in Palestine are pressing concerns. The political realities of this ongoing struggle, combined with new critical approaches to law and settler colonialism, have made it an arena rich with scholarship. Yet despite the wealth of knowledge that has been produced, scholars continue to overlook perceptions of property and popular action in the face of dispossession. The experiences of villagers in al-Sakhina in the Beisan valley in the 1930s and early 1940s reveal how rural Palestinians gained and lost property rights, fought for tenancy rights and communal preservation, and eventually were able to secure access to alternative government-owned land. Building on previous work on the struggle for tenancy rights under British rule, 1 this article draws attention to how popular conceptions and strategies can reshape our temporal and thematic understandings of land and settler-colonial politics in Palestine. The legacy of the past is relevant to the present. Critical approaches to colonial and settler-colonial conceptions of land have revealed how a rule of property, with its universalistic rhetoric, Munir Fakher Eldin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University.
Mediterranean Historical Review 36:2, 2021
From 1950 through 1953, Palestinian olive oil producers in Israel struggled against the state’s efforts to impose discriminatory marketing conditions on them. The confrontation took place under the government’s rationing policy and strict supervision of the Palestinian population, which at the time was subject to military rule. A coalition of state agents and public and private institutions cooperated in supervising and utilizing Palestinian oil production. The authors’ aim is to trace the actors in the “oil issue”, their diverse interests, and political motives, in order to contribute to the understanding of the Palestinian experience in Israel at the beginning of the 1950s. They focus their attention on the agency of the Palestinian oil producers, which primarily took the form of resistance. They argue that in the struggle to establish their rights, oil producers often utilized legal and parliamentary means enabled by the state. They were also aware of the gaps and disagreements within the coalition that confronted them, and managed to use them for their own advantage. Thus, they subverted a central idea of Zionist ideology – its claim to entitlement to the land – and they challenged the political ethnocratic practices applied to assert that claim.
PhD dissertation, 2016
This dissertation is a socio-historical statistical study of the implementation and adoption of Tanzimat-era land-tenure reforms in the Palestinian countryside. It addresses three main questions: (1) what was the character of rural property tenure in mountainous regions of Palestine; (2) to what degree were modernizing property-reform measures adopted by the rural populace; and (3) how did the reform affect rural property-tenure and economic wellbeing? The 1858 Land Code was one of a series of Tanzimat reforms that together formalized individual title to property and land tenure. Yet, due to the dearth of accessible documentation, little is known about the implementation of these reforms. Among historians of Palestine, in the absence of proof to the contrary there is broad consensus that the reforms failed. It is widely argued that villagers evaded land registration en masse, either because they did not understand the significance of the reform or feared that increased taxation or conscription would result from property registration. This study brings to light and analyzes a property-value and property-tax assessment register (Esas-ı Emlak) compiled in 1876 (1292 maliyye) for the villages and rural agricultural lands of the large Halilürrahman (Hebron) district, south of Jerusalem. It permits, for the ix first time, systematic investigation of the implementation of property-tenure reforms in Palestine at a district-wide level. This study demonstrates that many rural agriculturalists in rural Hebron had independent economic power and landed wealth above subsistence levels. Hebronites were invested in implementing modernizing reforms to protect their landed assets, which they registered with the emlak, property-tax commission as individual holdings and as communally owned properties. While it is commonly understood that traditional, communal land-tenure arrangements (musha') were disallowed after land reform, this study demonstrates how it was incorporated into reform and protected the rights of shareholders. It also argues that property-tenure reform needs to be understood as a process, not an event. Villagers have rarely figured as subjects of Ottoman histories. This study exploits the emlak register together with sharia court cases and 1905 Ottoman population registries to flesh out a picture of late-Ottoman villages, villagers, and rural society from below in southern Palestine.