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Land, Livelihoods, and Agrarian Change in Israel/Palestine: Between Dispossession, Resistance to it, and Neoliberalism

par Panosetti, Fadia
Président du jury Berliner, David
Promoteur Roudart, Laurence
Publication Non publié, 2023-02-03

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

This dissertation is a study of contemporary agrarian transformations, crises, and struggles over land and other means of production and social reproduction in Israel/Palestine. Focusing on the rural highlands of Jerusalem, it provides insights into the multiple, yet contested, trajectories of agrarian change that have emerged in the West Bank as a result of, and in response to, processes of settler colonial dispossession, and explores how the land struggle shapes space, livelihood activities, and subjectivities in relation to shifting political, economic, and environmental circumstances. In order to do so, it brings agrarian political economy into dialogue with settler colonial studies and indigenous studies, and develops a combined analytical framework aimed at capturing how the struggle for access to, use of, and control over the land generates variations in Regimes of Land Use, Property, and Livelihoods (RLUPLs) across different historical junctures and geographical spaces. It specifically considers three historical junctures: the post-Nakba era, the post-1979 era, and the post-Oslo era; and two sites: the rural villages of Al-Walaja and Wadi Fukin.Based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2019 on these sites, this thesis draws on villagers’ histories and everyday experiences of dispossession and erasure, return and belonging, and collective forms of surviving on/with/through the land, as well as on archival materials and GIS mapping to investigate shifting RLUPL configurations. It shows that RLUPLs are shaped, on the one hand, by changing settler colonial modes of dispossession and, on the other hand, by the multiple and diverse strategies and practices that heterogenous Palestinian classes adopt to maintain presence and make a living in and against capitalist-(settler) colonial processes of dispossession, oppression, and exploitation. This thesis thus foregrounds the centrality of land and agrarian struggles for understanding the continuous character of settler colonial dispossession and the uneven nature of trajectories of agrarian change, and provides a nuanced account of the painful dilemmas that Palestinians, like many other indigenous, rural, and peasant communities around the globe, are confronted with in their quest for the recognition of their rights over land, territory, and means of living.