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The Commons of Palestinian Liberation Struggle
Abstract by Mr. Faiq Mari On Session VII-09  (Cooperatives in the Arab World)

On Thursday, November 14 at 11:30 am

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
In the 2010s in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank (WB) several initiatives of collective labor and property emerged, they built on similar initiatives from the 1970s-80s. Dominant local literature and institutions perceived them through a narrow definition of cooperatives and came to analyze them as predominantly income- generating economic initiatives. I propose reading these initiatives through the broader concept of the commons: collectively held resources put to the service of a community through the collective labor of its members. By doing so we can more accurately place these cooperatives along a spectrum of other practices to which they belong and by whom they were influenced: societal solidarity practices, and importantly the productive collectives of Palestinian liberation struggle. This paper contends that these cooperatives are political institutions and that their economic role is closely intertwined with their political outlook. By political I mean that they are concerned with contesting, directly or indirectly, power within Palestinian society and against the Zionist colonial project. They contribute to struggle over resources, values, and norms in Palestinian society. They do so through contributing to mass movements that lay claim to representation of the Palestinian people, through direct wresting of resources from the market and colonization, and through cultivating values and norms that facilitate the latter. At the same time, these cooperatives practice an everyday life that reflects what their members desire as an outcome to their struggle. These initiatives correspond to the political and economic condition aforementioned, and relate to the concept of “resistance economy” which reemerged in the same decade as an intellectual response to this reality. They build on the heritage of the 1970s-80s grassroots committees in the WB, particularly agricultural and women committees. The cooperatives’ roles in facing these conditions are: facilitators of broader mobilization, spaces for economic experimentation, income-generation, and land defense.
Discipline
Architecture & Urban Planning
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None