This course is designed to cover the transformations of the land law in Palestine since the Ottoman Tanzimat, from a multidisciplinary perspective combining political philosophy, law, and history. The course aims to explain how the law functions as a political ground for competing local, state, and colonial visions of property and sovereignty. The course sheds light on the historical context of Ottoman integration in world economy and the impact of capitalism, as well as European settler colonialism in Palestine, without reducing the history of the law to these factors, leaving room for investigating Palestinian social history and agency. The course aims also to shed light on how Israel selectively interprets and uses parts of the Ottoman and Mandate legal heritage to expand the Zionist settler colonial project.
