Paul Kohlbry, "Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2026)

Mar 20, 2026

Paul Kohlbry, Assistant Professor of Global Studies and anthropologist of agrarian life, discusses agrarian annihilation in Palestine. He explores land confiscation, the shift from peasant farming to real estate, and how property can serve both dispossession and defense. Listeners hear about reclamation projects, legal strategies, gendered inheritance, and what meaningful international solidarity might look like.

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ANECDOTE

Harab Reveals Competing Stories Of Ruin

Kohlbry documents the local term harab (ruined land) used for uncultivated plots, terraces collapsing, and untrimmed olive trees, which carries contested moral and legal meanings.
Ruined land can be blamed on owners, targeted for reclamation projects, or used by real estate buyers to justify purchases under Israeli seizure laws.

ANECDOTE

Experimental Farm Turned Ruin Into Community Hub

In Barja an experimental agroecological farm transformed a previously 'ruined' rocky plot into a training, subsistence, and market site that hosted school visits and community learning.
That reclamation used present labor and collective practice to regenerate threatened land and teach agrarian skills.

INSIGHT

Private Title Became A Forced Tool Of Defense

After 1967 Israel's legal declarations made private title the main route to resist confiscation, forcing Palestinians to translate traditional ownership into documents recognized by occupiers.
Titles can delay dispossession, make liberal-rights claims internationally, and serve as a basis for potential future restitution, despite frequent failures.

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The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland.

Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible.

Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice.

Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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