Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror - Hardcover

Fields, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520291042 ISBN 13: 9780520291041

Publisher: California University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Enclosure marshals bold new arguments about the nature of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. Gary Fields examines the dispossession of Palestinians from their land—and Israel’s rationale for seizing control of Palestinian land—in the contexts of a broad historical analysis of power and space and of an enduring discourse about land improvement. Focusing on the English enclosures (which eradicated access to common land across the English countryside), Amerindian dispossession in colonial America, and Palestinian land loss, Fields shows how exclusionary landscapes have emerged across time and geography. Evidence that the same moral, legal, and cartographic arguments were used by enclosers of land in very different historical environments challenges Israel’s current claim that it is uniquely beleaguered. This comparative framework also helps readers in the United States and the United Kingdom understand the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the context of their own histories.

About this title

Review:

"Reading Enclosure brings home the tragedy of such immense and irrevocable destruction."--New York Review of Books

"The author utilizes a historical-comparative methodology to produce a trajectory of today's Palestinian loss since the time of legal land reforms in England. In this book, the story of the Palestinian landscape becomes a mirror onto which other histories are projected."-- (03/01/2018)

"A unique exploration of the development of the Israeli culture of land grabs and the historical legal framework and precedents that have allowed Zionist policies to continue unimpeded."--Middle East Monitor (10/29/2018)

About the Author:

Gary Fields is Associate Professor of Communication at University of California, San Diego.

About this edition

• Publisher: California University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0520291042
• ISBN 13: 9780520291041
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 424