Fields - Enclosure: Palestinian landscapes in a historical mirror

Enclosure began as a study of the walled landscape in Occupied Palestine that I found both hypnotic and horrifying on a trip to the region in 20034. Although at the outset I had no plans to use the trip as the basis for a book project, by the time I returned I had sketched out some preliminary ideas to compare this walled environment with other deliberately walled and partitioned territorial spaces around the world, from Melilla and Ceuta in Morocco to San Diego/Tijuana, where I live and work. What was striking to me in these three borderlands was how walls, as a distinct element of landscape architecture, convey such overt impulses of power in preempting people from moving across territorial space based on notions of otherness and difference. Indeed, these walled spaces seemed to be the paragon of landscapes embodying Power (Mitchell 2002) and Fear (Tuan 2013) woven together in an otherwise paradoxical story about re-bordering in the modern world. With Palestine/Israel, Spain/Morocco, and the United States/Mexico, I had what I believed were three compelling case studies of how fear and power become materialized into walls as part of a global effort to control certain groups of people. My book would be a comparative cultural geography of such walled territorial landscapes.

As I began fieldwork on the Palestinian case and listened to Palestinian farmers and the mayors of several Palestinian towns describing the Wall and its impacts, my thinking about the project shifted. Although the Wall in Palestine was, and remains, a symbol of power, fear, and control, these voices were revealing a far more salient story about the landscape, focusing on dispossession and the transfer of land from one group of people to another. Framed in this way, Palestines Wall, and the actors affected by it, become part of a historically long-standing narrative about rights to landand land hunger.

There is a well-developed literature on Palestine that situates the land hunger confronting these farmers in a broader historical and theoretical context: settler colonialism. Within this paradigm is a compelling body of work that engages the issue of Palestinian dispossession from the perspective of territorial landscapes and geographical space (Abu El-Haj 2001; Yiftachel 2006; Weizman 2007; Hanafi 2009, 2013). In this fundamentally spatial approach to dispossession, land is a contested resource, the focus of conflict between two main groups, as settlers from outside confront landholders in the place of arrival and seek to take possession of land already possessed and used. Broadly speaking, this model of settler colonialism describes what has transpired in Palestine while placing Palestinian dispossession in a more historically enduring narrative of similar cases.

One obvious precedent for the pattern of Zionist settlement in Palestine is the Anglo-American colonization of North America. Indeed, the ever-combative early Zionist Zeev Jabotinsky, in his essay The Iron Wall (1923), spoke honestly about the parallels of Zionist settlement in Palestine and the efforts of English and later American colonists to seize control of Native American land. Far from critiquing the phenomenon, however, Jabotinsky proffered a sobering and cautionary tale to his fellow Zionists, warning that just as Zionist settlers shared a common cause with their Anglo-American colonial counterparts, so too would Palestinians follow in the spirit of Native Americans and resist Zionists taking their land. In other words, the figure considered the inspiration of the modern Israeli Right provided an affirmation of the parallels between settler colonialism in America and Zionist settlement of Palestinein much the same way that anti-Zionist critics of Israel might argue.