Center for Middle East Studies

2020 Workshop | Who Owns Palestine?

Who Owns Palestine?

This workshop invited papers on the past, present, and future of ownership and on what it means to “own”  Palestine. On the material level, the use and distribution of immovable property in the context of gender, generation, and class relations pre-date colonial rule and structure the different struggles against settler colonialism. For Palestinians within historic Palestine, private land ownership is the primary form of wealth and a perceived barrier (albeit, often ineffective) against expropriation. For Palestinians who have been expelled or displaced, property ownership can bring stability and belonging as well as political fragmentation and social conflict. All of these processes have consequences on what it means to be Palestinian and to have a right to Palestine. On a discursive level, Palestine’s religious importance and strategic location has made it a laboratory for competing trans-national visions of civilizational, religious, and political futures since at least the nineteenth century. Notions of ownership are thoroughly enmeshed in contested practices of naming, drawing, mapping, archiving, digging, and performing Palestine. Changing academic frameworks of knowledge production also thrust the question of ownership into new domains of disciplinary power. 

NDPS welcomed paper proposals on a wide range of questions, including: Can Palestinians own Palestine under a regime of absolute private property? How does the right to own force the Palestinians, like other indigenous peoples, to prove ownership on the occupier’s terms? As the Palestinian Authority’s attempt to survey, register, and privatize unfolds, how is the relationship between ownership, social struggles, and wider collective territorial questions changing? What are the possibilities and limits of knowledge production shaped by these legal, political, and economic imperatives? How is ownership represented and claimed beyond documents and legal institutions?

Workshop Program

Panel 1: “Land and Settler Colonialism”

Panel 2: “Ownership Troubles”

Panel 3: “Spatiality and Heritage”

Panel 4: “Law and Ownership”

Panel 5: “Family and Property”