The Trump Administration’s “Deal of the Century” proposes to cantonize the West Bank, effectively giving “Area C” to Israel for the purposes of consolidating and providing permanence to major settlement blocs. The “deal” (constituted with virtually no input from Palestinians) in many ways acknowledges and codifies a process of expanding colonization of Palestinian land that has been under way for a century, but has ramped up in intensity. This colonization has not been without efforts at resistance from Palestinian and solidarity organizations. Through the combined lenses of “settler colonial studies” and the “theory of access” this paper seeks to analyze the modes of resistance. We find that Palestinians and allies use a diverse set of non-violent strategies to maintain presence and control land resources in the face ongoing efforts by Israeli and affiliated actions to expropriate land and resources. These include: land reclamation efforts so that Ottoman and British law cannot be invoked as rationale for land confiscation on the grounds that land has been abandoned; documentation of the ongoing colonization and violations of existing legal frameworks and norms; international solidarity – peace teams and accompaniment to witness, document, and accompaniment of Palestinians under threat of land expropriation and eviction; Palestinian community level mobilization to contest processes of colonization and expropriation; historical processes of place making, contestation, and creation of environmental imaginaries. Despite overwhelming power imbalances, these strategies play a key role in slowing Israeli processes of confiscation and expropriation.

Contemporary conversations about Palestine and Israel often place land and land claims at the center of the historical and ongoing conflict; however, such discussions rarely concern the structures of land policy and ownership at play. Reflecting on Israel’s recent dispossession of the Bedouin village of Umm el-Hiran in the Naqab, this paper takes a historical approach to understanding the land tenure systems of Israel and the previous governing regimes over Palestine. Land systems are more than a public versus private division of land or the zoning regulations governing an area; rather, land systems encompass a multi-layered process including valuation, registration, titling, and formulation of transfer regulations. Through a comparative analysis of the 1858 Ottoman Land Code, British land ordinances, and Israel’s Abandoned Property and Cultivation Laws, this paper demonstrates how Israel’s ability to alienate and accumulate Palestinian land as state property was facilitated by the multi-layered land systems that preceded it. Ottoman and British land systems outlined systems of categorization and documentation as a matter of determining the current state of land use, noting where and what type of land transfers were possible, but most importantly, they attempted to implement a standardized method of what is deemed and respected as claims to ownership. As these legal policies map the land, manners by which to articulate ownership come to the fore. More specifically, these laws show the centrality of western forms of articulating ownership, especially land cultivation, threading together the land policies of these three regimes. While the implications of such articulations on the native Palestinians varied between Ottoman, British, and Israeli rule, the continuity between the three ultimately provided Israel the space to blur the lines between terra nullius, “abandoned,” and “waste” lands to their benefit as they dispossessed Palestinians of their property from the inception of the state until today. Each element of the land tenure systems, from categorization to demarcation, gave rise to the space for Israel to conceive of land systems tool for property seizure and state property accumulation.

This paper is concerned with the manifestations of the waqf, the mechanism for endowing property in Islamic law, in the Sultanate of Oman, pertaining particularly to the city of Nizwa. The waqf is still a major feature of economic and social life in Oman, especially Nizwa. The waqf appears in Ib??? fiqh from an early stage, such as in the J?mi?a of Ibn Ja?far, and throughout the development of Ib??? fiqh, the elaboration of the waqf remained similar to that of its non-Ib??? Muslim counterparts. However, contrary to the case in Oman, in many other Islamic countries the administration and function of the waqf was dramatically transformed and in some cases eliminated by colonialization and nationalization. In my paper, I suggest that modern historiography about the waqf demonstrates that the status of the waqf is unique in Nizwa and Oman more broadly—it retains both a privileged social position and a practical functionality. While the government of Oman began the process of centralizing the administration of the waqf across the country in the late 20th century, the waqf in its myriad forms remains both practically and symbolically important in contemporary Nizwa and elsewhere in Oman. The significance of the waqf to Omani society is demonstrated both by studies on its history, such as Al-Waqf f? Nizw? , and by studies on Nizwa generally, such as Al-Salw? f? T?r?kh Nizw?. Both studies situate the waqf within both theoretical fiqh works from the pre-modern period and emphasize its significance to the social and cultural history of Nizwa. For example, Al-Waqf f? Nizw? specifically does not cover the modern period, but the project traces the development of the waqf in Nizwa from the early Islamic period to the beginning of the centralization undertaken by the sultans of the Ya?ruba dynasty (17th-18th centuries CE), a centralization that is mirrored in the contemporary period. The Salw? f? T?r?kh Nizw?, further, devotes the majority of the chapter on waqf to delineating its 65 types found in the city of Nizwa, ranging from endowments for the repair of mosques to the provision of study materials for students; this is despite the fact that many of these highly specific waqfs have been subsumed into general funds. As such, in this paper, I show that contemporary historiography can be used to show the way that the waqf has retained its social and political importance in Oman.

This paper will argue that scholars have misunderstood the emergence of property right—specifically, property right in regard to land and real estate—in the Ottoman Empire because we expect it to follow a model familiar from Western historiography. That is, we expect that property rights start with a politically elite class and trickle down to other groups. In the Ottoman Empire, however, property right was not characterized by an initial grant of security from monarch to the elites, but as a grant of security from the monarch to the peasants: instead of property right trickling down, it trickled up. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the right of tasarruf (peasant usufruct on the treasury lands known as miri land) became increasingly legally defined and protected from intervention by the state, its agents or other parties. It was characterized by a lifetime tenure and limited right of inheritance that favored vertical descendants. With the approval of an authority figure, it could be transacted with the payment of a large upfront fee and smaller yearly payments thereafter. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, these features served as a model of a specifically Ottoman property right that had spread to other social groups: artisans received this same property right ‘bundle’ in the form of gedik, urban renters in the form of icareteyn, and a‘yan in the form of the malikane. These features were the basis of the property right extended to all Ottoman subjects in the 1858 Land Code—which continued to refer to this right as tasarruf. Based on kanunnames, fatwas and texts of jurisprudence in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic produced between 1540 and 1858, the paper offers significant revisions to the current understanding of the history of property right in the Ottoman Empire. First, it puts the dissemination of the indigenous concept of tasarruf at the heart of the narrative rather than attempting to trace the origin of private property. Secondly, it draws attention to the central role of peasant cultivators in the evolution of property right and ultimately of political right, directly challenging the assumption that peasants are not a class with enough clout to make much of an impact politically. Finally, the paper cautions historians from normalizing specifically European narratives of state development and private property that privilege the role of a landed aristocracy.

From a variety of sources — archives, village books, and academic publications — it is argued in this paper that for too long academics have misunderstood the meaning of the mush?? institution and its abolition. Their view was based on the still dominant, but factually unfounded preconception that it was a peasant commune ‘astonishingly similar to the Russian mir’ a mind-set that precluded historians from grasping the true role of the mush?? institution in this region. I argue that the mush?? land title represented merely the attachment of a specific community to specific plots of land. In this context, ‘community’ often meant nuclear and extended families in suprahouseholds, or even the entire village. People in these communities tended to derive income from land according to recognized arrangements such as joint cultivation, mutual use of grazing lands, or land redistribution agreements. The comparison with mir was relevant only to one form of the institution, repartitioned mush?? — the practice of parcels substitution among cultivators in peasant communities — in which land redistribution varied according to specific ‘factors of production’ or to informal and formal property rights in the land. Moreover, mush?? did not prove less efficient than the Western-style system of land management imported under the Mandates, and was possibly more effective in contending with the Land Law of 1858 allowing seizure of lands that had not been cultivated for three years. In addition, all forms of mush?? imposed greater communal mutual support and responsibility on those involved, which significantly reduced risks in times of crisis. The historiography of the abolition of repartitioned mush?? has mistakenly been traced back to the Ottoman Land Code of 1858. Neither that Code, nor the records of Ottoman land registration, intended mush?? to be abolished. It is true that from 1911 the Young Turks deleted many Articles from the Code. These included Articles 15 to 17, which explained how to record collectively held lands, but even then no abolition was legislated. Instead, it was the abolition ordinances of the British and French Mandatory governments during the 1920s that began a conflict over land titles.