Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror
Gary Fields, Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017) 404 pp., $29.95 (paper).
On February 16, 2018, the International Middle East Media Center reported that, on the previous day, Israeli soldiers had attacked a group of Palestinians who were planting olive trees in a village named Beita, south of the West Bank city of Nablus.1 Using concussion grenades and teargas, the soldiers caused many of the Palestinian civilians to seek medical treatment for toxic gas inhalation.
According to Palestinian sources, the Israeli military’s violence is part of an effort to confiscate the land from the villagers—ostensibly to repurpose the land for Israeli needs as part of the ongoing effort to dispossess Palestinians and expand Israeli settlement and control. In this regard, what took place in Beita is part and parcel of Israeli settler colonialism, an endeavor that has resulted in massive dispossession of the Palestinian population. As Gary Fields, a professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, notes, “In 1947, the footprint of land ownership for Jewish settlement in Palestine amounted to roughly 8 percent of the land surface. Today, Jewish settlements and the infrastructure supporting them in Israel and Occupied Palestine proliferate on roughly 85 percent of what was the Palestinian landscape” (18).
For Fields, the roots of this massive land theft are far deeper than the Israel-Palestine conflict and more geographically extensive than the contested spaces normally associated with it. To demonstrate this, the author of Enclosure takes his readers on a long journey—one that begins in Medieval England, that then goes to the settler colonization of Amerindian landscape of what is today the United States in the 1600s, and that only thereafter arrives in Israel-Palestine. In all three cases, Fields illustrates, those engaged in the process of land dispossession, directly or indirectly, employed a narrative of “improvement” in the effort to re-territorialize the space they coveted. In making sense of this, Fields draws on what he characterizes as “one of the most salient theoretical notions in cultural geography, the notion of imaginative geography” (20), a concept developed by Edward Said.
The bounding of space in the form of private property dovetailed with the emergence of capitalism as understood by Adam Smith. His argument that capitalist expansion required specialization was consistent with a perceived need to increase the division of land into privately-held parcels to facilitate the undertaking of distinct tasks. The enclosures inspired by such thinking helped to transform land from a bundle of rights held in common to a “thing,” an entity that could be bought and sold and held by individuals as property.
The mid-16th century was key to this transformation, one involving a shift in the very meaning of improvement. By that time, argues Field, the term meant three things: turning land into profit, enclosing and cultivating it, and making land more valuable by doing so. Also key were three “technologies of force”—maps, law, and landscape architecture. A cartographic revolution, one also fueled by empire-building, facilitated the emergence of estate maps, which added precision and legitimacy of the claims those seeking to drive commoners off their land. New legal instruments aided the process of primitive accumulation/dispossession, giving rise to Marx’s observation that “the law itself becomes the instrument of theft of people’s land” (quoted in Fields, 78). And landscape architecture—in the form of “a more geometrically regularized pattern of privately owned spaces” (16), along with stone walls, hedgerows, and fences in the case of England—altered the very materiality of the landscape. The result was, by the nineteenth century, the bounding of land was highly discernible on the English landscape: “Where there was once free access and the ‘right to roam,’ now there was trespass and closure. What initially was only imagined had become part of the landscape” (91).
The English imaginary of enclosure travelled, arriving in the Americas in the early 17th century. There, English settlers encountered an Amerindian population that employed flexible notions of territory and boundaries, ones that marked use not possession. As such sovereignty was also flexible—in addition to mobile. When indigenous villages moved—to take advantage of more fertile soils, for example--so, too, did where they exercised control over the landscape. This lack of fixed attachment to land, of a clearly delineated territory, meant, in the eyes of the settlers, that Indians could not claim property rights, helping to facilitate the settlers’ view of the land as “empty” and thus open for the taking. As in England where commoners were often characterized as “savages,” Indians were cast as animals (of the non-human sort), which furthered the notion that they were undeserving of rights of possession.
The rapid growth in colonial settlers—from 250,000 to 3.2 million between 1700 and 1790—led to intensifying encroachment on Native lands and increasing pressure on Indians to sell their land—typically on unfavorable terms—not least so as to avoid having covetous settlers as neighbors. Deforestation by colonists—for fuel and for timber to export or construct their settlements—damaged hunting opportunities, while the building of roads, towns, and farms (and land for domesticated animals) created spaces (what constituted “improvement”) where Indians were not allowed, thus furthering their dispossession. Such pressures, coupled with vigilantism by settlers led some Native groups to believe “that they had no choice but to negotiate terms of removal” (166).
The colonial legal system was of little helTo the contrary, it facilitated the taking of Native land. As Fields writes in relation to Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790—which made the U.S. government the only party allowed to undertake and oversee transactions with Native groups—“If the language of the act seemed to protect Indian nations from unscrupulous speculators and to elevate the government as s fair-minded party to the process of Indian land sales through treaty, such an interpretation would be naïve. . . . [T]he U.S. government was not purchasing land. It was seizing it under the legal fiction of ‘agreements’ with Indians” (149).
Fields emphasizes the agency that Native peoples exercised in their encounters with English colonists. “Native societies participated in shaping the contact with colonists by choosing to trade with the newcomers, based on long-standing practices of exchange with other groups and traditions of reciprocity.” But as the returns on these exchanges declined and the demographic weight of the settlers grew, Indians became increasingly “less capable of resisting the seemingly insatiable ambitions of Anglo-Americans for land” (112).
Israel has used a repertoire similar to that employed in England and what became the United States, but greatly refined the “technologies of force” in its ongoing project of colonizing Palestinian land. Cartography has produced a new (Zionist) spatial imaginary and the invention of new place names has helped to mentally erase (among Israelis and their supporters abroad) “a dominant 1,200-year-old Arabic-speaking socioeconomic life on the land with its own descriptive Arabic toponymy” (224). As demonstrated by Eyal Weizman in his tremendous work Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, built forms on the landscape (what Fields, drawing on the works of geographers Christopher Philo and Don Mitchell, “power materialized” [7]), have played a considerable role in “communicating” Israeli ownership and cutting off Palestinians and the places they inhabit and work from one another. Meanwhile, Israeli “lawfare” has provided a legal veneer to the project of dispossession, a process characterized by Fields as “one of organized plunder under cover of meticulously conceived legal procedures” (238).
Throughout what is a book of great empirical richness, Fields shows the importance of intellectual work, of the development of new “ways of seeing”—and associated ways of acting—that have created a new world, one of hard lines on the ground, lines brought about by projects of “improvement” of a highly destructive sort. The story that Fields so capably tells of capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism is hardly uplifting, but it is an invaluable one given the prodigious research he draws upon and presents and the illuminating connections he makes between three distinct cases.
In the end, Fields contends that enclosure processes “have reached their conclusion” in the case of English commoners and Native Americans” (an assertion many Native Americans, among others, would certainly challenge). In Palestine/Israel, however, the story continues to unfold, he says, and, thus, the landscape is “still open to change” (318) given that, à la Foucault, he sees resistance ever-present in the face of power.
If that hopeful sign with which Fields concludes his fascinating book is true, it certainly applies to all three cases—and elsewhere.
Joseph Nevins
Department of Earth Science and Geography
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York
jonevins@vassar.edu
Footnotes
1 IMEMC News, “Israeli Soldiers Attack Palestinians Planting Olive Trees Near Nablus, Injure Many” http://imemc.org/article/israeli-soldiers-attack-palestinians-planting-o...