Join us for a webinar launch of issues 88 and 89 of the Jerusalem Quarterly, themed "Who Owns Palestine?"
Date: Wednesday June 29, 2022
Time: 9am CT | 10am ET | 3pm UK | 4pm Belgium | 5pm Palestine
"Who Owns Palestine?" addresses the past, present, and future of ownership and 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 predate 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 of 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.
Photo credit: Anne Paq
