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From Mortgages to Foreclosure: Financialized Urbanization as Allotment in the West Bank
Abstract
This paper examines the process of financialized-urbanization in the West Bank as form of colonial biopolitics that presupposes further dispossession. The paper bridges frameworks from American Studies and Critical Geography to analyze the processes of urbanization and the recent push for mortgages in the West Bank within the long duree of settler colonial dispossession and capitalist expansion. The paper rejects the boundaries of methodological nationalism and deploys a genealogical method, situating the colonization of Palestine within the variegated trajectories empire. Thus, the paper traces technologies of dispossession and confinement (mortgage) to their colonial origins to draw out the continuities of settler colonial relations embedded within contemporary real estate development. The paper draws from a vast history that spans the development of the mortgage during the 12th century, British colonization of Turtle Island, Indian allotment, and the legacy of land tenure in Hawai’i. By examining housing’s role in the massive expansion of debt in the West Bank over the previous decade, the paper asks to what extent this financialized-urbanization is tied to Israel’s larger settler colonial project, using debt as a mechanism of control and dispossession. This paper uses Palestine as an entry to understand how biopolitics functions as a modality of the settler colonial logic of elimination. In 2008, the Palestinian National Authority implemented an Affordable Housing program, coupled with the creation of a mortgage facility that targeted low and middle-income families. As a form of colonial biopolitics, the process of urbanization and the shift to pre-fabricated single family units - as opposed to incremental building - fundamentally changed the way Palestinians relate to land - through new land tenure systems- and most importantly each other - through credit relations. The West Bank demonstrates the convergences of these forces providing an opportunity to examine the intersections and departures between the logic of elimination, biopower, and the logics of capital. Housing is not only a site of research, but rather a network of institutions that converge to manage contemporary social and political life. I frame the developments in Palestine as a co-constitutive project between the US and Israel, wherein both colonies exchange knowledges and technologies of repression, making Palestine a crucial site to theorize the persistence of settler colonial practices in the US. While this paper builds on histories of conquest in North America, this paper will likewise seek to place Palestine within dominant discourses of settler colonialism in American Studies.
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