Real Estate Development in Palestine: A Vehicle of Debt and Technology of Displacement
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Across multiple empires and many US administrations, the solutions posed to the question
of Palestine have merely displaced the deeper crisis it obscures. At its core, this
crisis is one of land dispossession that separates Palestinians from their land and
from one another.
This talk locates the Trump administration’s push to “resolve” crises imposed by Israeli
settler colonialism within nearly two decades of Palestinian led, and US backed, strategies
of financialized real estate development in the West Bank. Under the guise of state
building, policies of economic abandonment and organized violence work in tandem to
generate crises that invite investment and allow state power to intervene on the everyday
lives of Palestinians. Rather than resolving the crises of Israeli state settler colonialism,
these so-called solutions displace them to the future to reproduce settler colonial
relations in the present. Such solutions defer Palestinian freedom to a horizon kept
perpetually out of reach.
Through a geographical materialist approach, this talk reveals how real estate development
and strategies of financial inclusion have long served as a spatial fix to the Palestinian
Authority’s crises of land, labor, finance, and state authority in the West Bank.
These measures reflect a false promise of statehood and Palestinian sovereignty put
forth by the United States, Israeli state, Palestinian Authority, and international
donors. In reality, they expand Palestinian vulnerability to land theft while enabling
a financial class of real estate investors and state actors to profit from this increased
risk.
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