It is no secret that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is over land. As such, a great deal of academic, activist, and institutional research has been oriented (explicitly or implicitly) by property, detailing histories of ownership, theft, and future compensation that will undergird any final settlement of territory and borders. I take a different approach, asking instead: what is it that constitutes private property? This paper follows several Palestinian surveyors who work to “translate” (Nadasdy 2005) the Ottoman kushan (title) to the Israeli military courts as private property. After 1979, Israel began seizing unregistered, uncultivated areas as "state land". This adversarial process of land registration shifted the burden of proof to the landowner who was called upon to furnish evidence of title or cultivation in order to prove, to the satisfaction of the authorities, that the land was private and therefore exempt from expropriation. In the early 1980s, several surveyors realized that Israeli military courts would accept the Ottoman kushan as evidence of private property. However, there was a problem. Created in the late 1800s, the kushan was not connected to a cadastral map but only contained a written description of borders. As such, changes in cultivation, shifting sources of livelihoods, and the movement of people rendered it illegible as proof of property. In response, surveyors developed a type of forensic historical anthropology, working to recreate chains of ownership, trace kinship, test soil, and generate new maps. These practices unearth material histories and their associated social relations in order to render the kushan as a recognizable form of private property in the eyes of settler law. The result is not simply more proof, but the production of a novel, if tenuous, configuration of property that expands the conditions of possibility for land defense. Attention to these practices has several scholarly implications. First, while a large body of literature has demonstrated that the category of state land is dynamic and fluid, it imbues private property with stability, as a result leaving Palestinian responses to expropriation under-theorized. Second, it challenges accounts – which often take the liberal norms of international law as a starting point – that Israel/Palestine is best understood as a conflict over ‘who owns what’. Instead, looking to the histories and dynamics of other settler colonies, I argue that land struggle is a battle over the grounds of what constitutes property in the first place.