ENCLOSURE by Gary Fields

Enclosure marshals bold new arguments about the nature of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. Gary Fields examines the dispossession of Palestinians from their land—and Israel’s rationale for seizing control of Palestinian land—in the contexts of a broad historical analysis of power and space and of an enduring discourse about land improvement. Focusing on the English enclosures (which eradicated access to common land across the English countryside), Amerindian dispossession in colonial America, and Palestinian land loss, Fields shows how exclusionary landscapes have emerged across time and geography. Evidence that the same moral, legal, and cartographic arguments were used by enclosers of land in very different historical environments challenges Israel’s current claim that it is uniquely beleaguered. This comparative framework also helps readers in the United States and the United Kingdom understand the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the context of their own histories.

From "This Land is Our Land" by Raja Shehadeh in The New York Review of Books (January 18, 2018)

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, a series of legal developments in the Ottoman Empire - which ruled Palestine until 1917 - had enabled the growth of large land holdings. They included the promulgation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which attempted to eliminate the musha system, whereby land was held in common, and required that the cultivator-turned-owner register his land with Treasury officials. Two things dissuaded him from doing so: the desire to avoid paying taxes on their land and the fact that the land registry was based in far away Beirut and Damascas.

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I had seen the settlement master plan that the Jewish Regional Council in the West Bank had drawn up in cooperation with the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization. According to this plan, 80,000 Israeli Jews were to be settled in the West Bank by 1986 in the twenty-three settlements and twenty outposts. Ariel Sharon, then Israel's minister of defense, declared that "we are going to leave an entirely different map of the country that it will be impossible to ignore."

The custodian of absentee property had transferred Albina's [a client of the author] land to the Zionist agency with a long-term lease, because it was deemed to be state land. When I proved before an Israeli court that the land was privately owned by Albina, the judge decided that the transaction had been "in fact standard, strong and binding and this in spite of the fact that we concluded in our opinion that the ownership of the said land belongs to the appellant." 

The Israeli judges based this oddly contradictory decision on Article 5 of Military Order 58, according to which "any transaction carried out in good faith between the Custodian of Absentee Property and any other person, concerning property which the Custodian believed when he entered into the transaction to be abandoned property, will not be void and will continue to be valid even if it were proved that the property was not at that time abandoned property." The presiding judge did not concern himself with the question of how the custodian could "in good faith" have believed that Albina's land was abandoned. The custodian had, after all, had access to the area's land registry, which was confiscated by the Israeli military immediately after the occupation. A circular fated November 14, 1979, restricted public access to land records. Such records are still restricted for most of the land in the West Bank that Israel controls.