Titling in the Ruins

Abstract

Palestinian Authority (PA) land titling began in 2005 as a means of creating property and sovereignty. Titling projects are extending government control over Palestinians, but they cannot secure their lands from Israeli state and private power. This article is an ethnography of Palestinian land titling, focusing on the specific problems that fraudulent land transfers to Israeli settlers create for such property-making efforts. It argues that for Palestinian administrators and surveyors, the certainty of Israeli colonization reduces progress to a challenge of speed and gives rise to short-term fixes that defer insoluble legal and political problems. The result is a form of nonsovereign property that encourages land markets now and offers the possibility of securing land rights later. The disjuncture between the future that land titling promises and the present it creates is entrenching private ownership in the West Bank and, as land speculation threatens to erode Palestinian control over territory, inciting debate about its limits. Land titling is creating a new political temporality in the ruins of state-building, one that illuminates how legacies of colonial law and contemporary practices of land speculation shape loss, hope, and contestation in Palestine and across the global South.