Shadow Spaces: Territory, Sovereignty, and the Question of Palestinian Cultivation A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Omar Loren Tesdell IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Vinay K. Gidwani and Bruce P. Braun August 2013 © Omar Tesdell 2013 Acknowledgements The writer of a Ph.D. dissertation incurs many debts. I am grateful to the people who have offered their advice, insights, material support and moral encouragement. Any attempt to give a full accounting falls woefully short. Any flaws are mine alone. Vinay Gidwani and Bruce Braun have been exemplary mentors and advisers who supported me in this project from the outset. Any worthy insights afforded by this thesis bear the marks of their scholarly rigor and critical awareness. They always demanded higher standards, and I think I can say now that I am grateful for it. My indefatigable committee of Eric Sheppard, Nabil Matar, Paul Porter and Salim Tamari shaped and molded this thesis skillfully. I would also like to thank an amazing group of scholars at the University of Minnesota for their mentorship, Abdi Samatar, Ajay Skaria, Qadri Ismail, Simona Sawhney, David Faust, Shaden Tageldin, Michael Goldman, Richa Nagar, Helga Leitner, David Pellow, Nick Jordan, and the late Bud Markhart. I was fortunate to be surrounded by an exceptional group of colleagues at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere whose friendship I depend upon: Dinesh Paudel, Abir Bazaz, Ivan Transito, Ursula Lang, Chris Strunk, Basil Mahayni, Ilona Moore, Marv Taylor, Joe Getzoff, Ivan Bialostosky, Corbin Treacy, Mohammad al-Qaisi, Kareem Rabie, Omar Jabary Salamanca, and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins. I am grateful to the staff of the Wilson Library Interlibrary Loan office, Magrath Library, Borchert Map Library, and Ames Library for South Asia, for their provision of incredible resources for my work. I wish to thank Bonnie Williams, Jodi Larson, and Glen Powell for their patient help with my numerous questions. The Department of i Geography and the University of Minnesota furnished an exciting and privileged space of scholarly inquiry, where rigor was felicitously matched with critical consciousness. The research for this dissertation was made possible by the financial support of the Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF), a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Minnesota, a Palestinian American Research Center Fellowship, an Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) fellowship, and other financial support from the Department of Geography and the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota. I am indebted to the people of Iowa and Minnesota for their support of public research universities. Like many people, I pertain to families that include both victims and beneficiaries of colonialism and the various educational institutions it produces. Recognizing the relationship of educational institutions and colonialism, this dissertation cannot but engage that entangled history of knowledge production. Several national organizations and community groups in Palestine provided logistical support. I would like to acknowledge the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, Applied Research Institute- Jerusalem, and Union of Agricultural Work Committees among others. I thank Yusuf Abu Rayyan, Abu Alaa, Nader Hreimat, Jad Ishaaq, Abu Nuwwab, Nadia al-Botmeh, Firas Badran, Nassir Abu Farha, Abdel Rahman and Fuad Abu Seif for their kind assistance. My study is particularly indebted to Said Daghir, George Kurzom, Adel Breegth, Raja Shehadeh, Khader Khader, and Um Hikmat for their friendship. My Ph.D. was made possible through an inspiring community of friends: Ra’ed, Dan, Lois, Nate, Katie, Mahmud, Abed, Majed, and John, as well as Imad, Eyad, Iskandar, Danna, Aisha, Ziad, Iyad, Vivien, Alaa, Sahar, Khaled, Sandi, Alessandro, Anton, and Ali. ii My debts to family members are myriad. My aunts, uncles, in-laws, and numerous cousins made this study possible with their generous encouragement and sustenance. The courageous spirit of my maternal and paternal grandparents, refugees from Al-Lydd and Midwestern seekers of justice and peace, inspires me each day. I am especially indebted to my brother for his steadfast friendship and assistance. Words can only gesture at the unconditional support that I received from my parents. They showed by example that love is a force greater than all others. It to my parents, Bahjeh and Lee, that this work is dedicated. Finally, I wish to thank Elizabeth and our son Ziad for their love and solidarity. More than anyone, they bore the burdens and shared the joys of this study period. They are my unwavering condition of possibility and for that I am forever grateful. iii Dedication For my parents iv Abstract Practices of cultivation and control over land are deeply entangled matters in Israel- Palestine. By the turn of the twentieth century scientists had begun to systematically examine the cultivation practices of Arab farmers. Around the same time, the area was the scene of major land struggles as both Palestinian Arabs and Zionist groups sought to establish control over land. In the study of modern Historic Palestine, the cultivation practices of Palestinians and the contest for control over land have each constituted abundant but generally separate scholarly arenas. However, the relationship between the two furnishes a productive sphere of empirical and conceptual inquiry into the broad set of relations between forms of political community and claims to land. The entangled relation is illustrated by the legal distinction between cultivated and uncultivated land, which is an important basis for the reclassification and appropriation of land by Israel. Thus, I argue that the question of cultivation, both of land and of people, emerges as a central problematic in the imagination of Israel-Palestine as a geographical realm. This dissertation explores the question of cultivation through two central modes of inquiry. Cultivation in the first sense is understood to be an abstract concept that allows the state to enact technologies of rule. Cultivation in the second sense is a concrete practice of farmers who leverage the capacities of the land to affirm claims to territory. Drawing from literary and historical concepts as well as fieldwork, I show that modern colonialism requires the classification and adjudication of cultivation practices to justify land appropriation. I further illustrate that this reliance on cultivation paradoxically produces a site of contestation that at once engages and unsettles legal categories. v This study requires rethinking the history of cultivation not as linear development but rather through a series of contingent moments or shadow spaces. These moments produce a narrative that summons traces of past events and folds them into the present. More generally, such an understanding of history and geography enables me to explore not only what was foreclosed at a given conjuncture, but also better understand the present condition. vi Table of Contents List of figures……………………………………………………......………viii Introduction: Toward a Vernacular Theory of Shadow Spaces…….…..…….1 PART ONE: CULTIVATION AS ABSTRACT CONCEPT Chapter 1: Emergence of Cultivation as Index………………………..………27 Chapter 2: Cultivation and the Juridical Order……………………..…………72 PART TWO: CULTIVATION AS CONCRETE PRACTICE Chapter 3: On the Durability of Rainfed Farming. …………….…………….114 Chapter 4: Cultivation and Infrastructures of Recalcitrance………….………163 Conclusion: Thinking Shadow Spaces……………………………………….199 Works cited……………………………………………………………...…….206 vii List of Figures Figure 1: Crop Yields from Elazari-Volcani (1930)……… ………………52 Figure 2: Photographs from Elazari-Volcani (1930)……… ………………53 Figure 3: Photographs from Elazari-Volcani (1930)……… ………………57 viii Introduction // Toward a Vernacular Theory of Shadow Spaces Being young, I could not ascertain what was wrong or right, whether as a son I was responsible for fate itself. To me, the Spirits were ever-present regardless of ceremony. They and no one else decided. Could they not forgive? Or was that a Western concept? 1 Ray A. Young Bear, “Black Eagle Child,” 1992 Come let us divide the light by the force of the shadow Take what you want of the night and leave for us two stars to bury our dead in the celestial sphere Take what you want of the sea and leave for us two waves to catch fish Take the gold of the earth and the sun and leave for us the land of our names2 Maḥmūd Darwīsh, “Khuṭbat al-Hindi al-Aḥmar” (Speech of the Red Indian), 1992 On the 500th anniversary of the Columbian encounter Introduction Around 1923 the residents of Tel al-͑Adas, an Arab village on the sprawling Marj Ibn ͑Amer plain near Nazareth, were expelled by the new owners of the village land, the Palestine Land Development Company. One thousand hectares of farmland had been purchased by representatives of the Zionist movement from a Lebanese businessman who sold the area to subsidize investments elsewhere. The sale would appear to be a fairly pedestrian event in the history of land speculation in Late Ottoman Palestine were the 1 (Young Bear, 1992, p. 61) 2 Translation by the author from the Arabic (Darwīsh, 1992) 1 buyers not planning to expel the local peasants and settle the area with non-Ottoman subjects. Still more intriguing and salient however, is what happened between the sale in 1916 and the