Enclosure: Palestinian Landscape in a “Not‐Too‐Distant Mirror”

Abstract

This article develops an explanation for the fractured and partitioned landscape in Palestine by comparing it to the early modern enclosures in England, and framing this comparison within a theory of "territoriality." Territoriality is a practice of power and refers to the efforts of individuals or groups to reorganize the economic life, politics, and culture of a place by reshaping landscape. The argument is that the Palestinian landscape is part of a long-standing narrative in which groups with power seek to transform the economy, demography, and culture of territorial space through the time-honored territorial practice of enclosing land. Enclosure consists of two basic instruments: a legal element that redefines rights of property by reorganizing systems of use, access, and socio-economic relations on the land; and architectural elements that reshape the landscape itself. English estate owners and Israeli Zionists are parallel actor groups using law and the built environment to remake life on the landscape. Mobilizing the institutional power of property law and the material power of the built environment, these groups reorder land ownership, use, and circulation on the landscape in an effort to consolidate systems of control over subalterns and reorganize socio-economic life and demography in a place. By exploring the contours of this pattern, this article seeks to uncover a more general meaning in the enclosure landscape of Palestine today.

The Great War of Enclosure: Securing the Skies

“…Terra economica , then, defines capital's ontological preconditions of existence. Enclosure has elsewhere been used to conceptualize warfare and state violence (Shaw ), ongoing appropriations of nature (Johnson and Goldstein ), Palestinian occupation (Fields ), gentrification (Hodkinson ), and the violent co‐imbrication of biopolitics and geopolitics (Jeffrey et al ; Vasudevan et al ). Accordingly, there is a shared concern for understanding spatial injustice .…”

“…It is this contradiction that makes privatization and securitization inseparable forces. Rather than detail the intricacies of enclosure (see Fairlie ; Fields ; Neeson ; Sevilla‐Buitrago ; Thompson , ), this section paints broad historical strokes to understand atmospheric enclosure's key lines of descent.…”

“…Unlike in prior centuries, enclosure during this later stage converted open fields, pastures, and wastelands into spaces for “productive” agriculture. This led to the engrossment and amalgamation of smaller farms and the imposition of rents (Fields :223). In 1801, parliament passed the General Inclosure Act.…”

“…Key to enclosure's victory was an ideology of nationalistic “improvement”. Enclosure was underwritten by enlightenment ideals of progress, including John Locke's philosophy of economic improvement and private property (Fields :225). Large landowners, politicians, and the Board of Agriculture overwhelmingly agreed that private land was in the national best interest.…”

Dreaming with drones: Palestine under the shadow of unseen war

“…On the one hand, enclosure refers to a way of legal and symbolic power (Blomley, 2007); a form of social alienation (Arendt, 2013;Thompson, 1963); a mode of existence that "deworlded communities, village by village, like a coinage reducing all things to a common measure" (Thompson, 1991: 164); and a means by which we can understand the worlding of capitalist spaces, which aims "at securing the hegemony of a social group to the detriment of the autonomy of others" (Sevilla-Buitrago, 2015: 1005). On the other hand, it gestures towards a regime of imprisonment (Foucault, 1977;Linebaugh, 2014); warfare and state violence (Shaw, 2016); Palestinian occupation (Fields, 2010); and the violent imbrication of biopolitics and geopolitics (Jeffrey et al, 2012;Vasudevan et al, 2008). Since my intention in this work is to discuss the implications of enclosure-building via dronified skyscapes in Palestine and its impact on innocent civilians living in very violent situations, I align myself with the second group.…”