This paper explores the convergence of agrarian change and settler colonial land dispossession during the 1980s in the West Bank. Drawing on interviews with villagers, lawyers, economists, and agronomists; archival materials; and Palestinian technical publications, it shows how Palestinians developed tactics and practices to defend land in the context of radical transformations to rural political economy and land law. I trace how a logic agricultural productivity created by law and market shaped these struggles, generating its constitutive tensions, limits, and possibilities. Processes of state land seizure and colonization became enmeshed in agrarian class formation after the 1967 occupation. Beginning in the 1970s, peasants were rapidly absorbed into Israel’s industrial economy as wage laborers, reducing the importance of rain-fed agriculture for village social reproduction. After 1979, the Israeli state introduced the doctrine of “state lands” to the West Bank, confiscating untitled land deemed to have been uncultivated for 10 years. As a result, productivity became a problem for Palestinians as rural producers facing rising costs and market competition, and as property owners whose control of land was now directly hitched to its use. Throughout the 1980s, agrarian land defense emerged as Palestinians began to develop novel approaches to agriculture, markets, and labor. Palestinian agronomists and economists elaborated a set of interventions that (they hoped) would bolster the economic viability of West Bank agriculture to slow, if not reverse, labor migration and land loss. Village residents shifted from field to tree crops and organized collective efforts to make due with market pressures. And youth volunteer organizations provided support with harvests and land reclamation, seeking to build collective efforts that would encourage the youth to return to agriculture. Agrarian land defense sought to define and discipline actions, needs, and desires that could make different forms of collective life possible in and against the compulsions of law and market. It took neither resistance or rural sociality as unchanging or natural. Instead, it emerged as people and groups dealt with tensions between private property and the national territory and divergences in individual and collective aspirations. I conclude this paper by considering how the contemporary fragmentation of collective politics and the slow collapse of West Bank agriculture has spurred critical scholars and political actors to remember, reconfigure, and mobilize the pasts of agrarian land defense.