Alienations and Articulations: Tracing Israeli Land Policies Through History

Abstract

Contemporary conversations about Palestine and Israel often place land and claims to land at the center of the conflict; however, such discussions rarely concern the structures of land policy and ownership at play. Reflecting on Israel’s recent dispossession of the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in the Naqab, this paper takes a historical approach to understanding the land tenure systems of Israel and the previous governing regimes over Palestine. Through a comparative analysis of Ottoman, British, and Israeli land laws, this piece shows how Israel’s ability to alienate and accumulate Palestinian land as state property was facilitated by the land systems that preceded it. The centrality of western forms of articulating ownership, especially land cultivation, thread together the land policies of these three regimes. While the implications of such articulations on the native Palestinians varied between Ottoman, British, and Israeli rule, the continuity between the three ultimately provided Israel the space to manipulate conceptions of ‘abandoned’ and ‘waste’ lands to their benefit as they dispossessed Palestinians of their property from the inception of the state to today.