Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine(Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures)

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland. Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds, Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible. Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice.

About the Author :
Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Review :
"Plots and Deeds reconceptualizes land justice from the ground up, elucidating the multifaceted ways that Palestinian farmers in the West Bank enact agrarian self-rule despite settler colonial dispossession. With a political economic lens, and engagements with environmental anthropology and Indigenous studies, this book transforms Palestine studies and agrarian studies." --Amahl Bishara, Tufts University "A remarkably honest, thoughtful, and conceptually transformative analysis of peasants and land that bridges the fields of Palestinian and global agrarian studies. Historically informed, ethnographically robust, and gracefully written, Paul Kohlbry's Plots and Deeds is a must read for understanding the contradictions and potential futures of land justice in Palestine and beyond." --Beshara Doumani, Brown University "With ethnographic eloquence, Plots and Deeds provides a ground-up understanding of how Palestinian peasants work to ensure the viability, value, and future of land in the face of efforts to annihilate it. This is the work of land justice--a concept and method with which Paul Kohlbry reinvigorates anthropological approaches to agrarian life and labor." --Sarah Besky, Cornell University