Paul Kohlbry, Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2026).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Paul Kohlbry (PK): I wrote this book for a few reasons. The first was that I had a question I wanted to answer. This question, broadly put, is about the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. Before I started graduate school, I worked in Palestine for a while. This was during the highpoint of the neoliberal state-building period. If you lived in Ramallah, you would be seeing luxury real estate development, advertisements for bank loans, and new malls and car dealerships. Then you could drive a half hour into the countryside and find yourself in the middle of protests taking place against Israeli land dispossession, with soldiers tear gassing villages and shooting unarmed kids. The book is an attempt to make sense of the relationship between capital and violence, between urban and rural, and between liberalism and anti-colonialism.
The second reason was a political commitment and, along with it, a political dissatisfaction. Like many young people in the United States, my relationship with Palestine began through the solidarity movement. This background shapes my research and teaching, both in the questions that I ask and the impact that I hope the book will have. I do not have any illusions about the extent of that impact, but I do think that understanding and analysis inform political action, and I hope to give both to my students and readers. The dissatisfaction is with how, both in activist and scholarly circles, Palestine is understood and talked about. I think that the recourse to human rights and international law, alongside tropes about who Palestinian farmers are and what they are doing, has really limited our understanding and imagination. I think that Plots and Deeds can offer some tools for thinking more deeply and more imaginatively about what rural people are facing, and what meaningful support could look like.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
PK: The book is about the social, environmental, and economic transformation of agrarian places. The background here is dispossession, or what I call agrarian annihilation. That is the first chapter. But the rest of the book is about how rural people, especially farmers, think about these violent transformations, and what they do about them.
In terms of literatures, there are two big ones. The first is an attempt to think across settler colonial studies, which at this point is very well established in Palestinian studies, and Marxism, specifically a Marxist anthropology. I do so through foregrounding property, labor, and value. What I am most interested in are the kinds of politics and projects that emerge at the intersection of social questions (around, say, gender or class relations) and national questions (about sovereignty or liberation). Land is one particularly privileged lens through which to see all of this, bringing together as it does deep personal and familial relationships, communities, and national territory.
The second literature is agrarian studies. I hope to convince readers of Plots and Deeds that there needs to be more of a conversation between the fields of agrarian and Palestinian studies. Today, there is a great deal of interest in Palestinian studies (and it is hardly unique in this regard) in questions of environment and ecology. This is a good thing but, as readers of the book will see, I find that there are some serious shortcomings, especially with how scholars talk about (or do not talk about) agrarian political economy and property ownership when they talk about agriculture, food, and land. I hope Plots and Deeds will demonstrate how we might address those questions, how we might re-read some of the older (and in my mind, still very valuable) writing on agrarian change in Palestine, and what an engagement between agrarian and Palestinian studies might offer to everyone.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
PK: When I started this project as a graduate student, I was thinking of it much more along the lines of political anthropology. I was really reading about and foregrounding the state, governance, and law, and so my early research proposals and fieldwork were really focusing on land titling and property. As I became more familiar with agrarian studies, I was able to both get something different out of my early fieldnotes and also reorient my research such that I could be more attentive to questions of land use and farming.
What this all means for Plots and Deeds is that some of the issues around the state and law move to the background. I have published on these topics more in journals where I have looked explicitly at legal contestation and evidence, land titling, and real estate development. But in the book, I have tried to foreground how rural people are thinking about land ownership and labor, and how they are drawing on, reworking, and changing peasant farming practices, land tenure, and ethics to make political claims and create collective projects.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
PK: I have three main readerships in mind. The first is students, especially the sorts of students who care very deeply about Palestinian rights, but do not know very much about the place and its people. For them, I have written this book to be as accessible as an academic book can be: I try to define all the terms of art and leave much of the more in-the-weeds debates in the footnotes. The book has an arc that I think rewards reading cover-to-cover, but I know that full books do not often appear on undergraduate syllabi, so I wrote it such that, hopefully, each chapter makes sense on its own.
The second readership are people in Palestinian studies. I would be very happy if this book helped strengthen the dialogue between Palestinian and agrarian studies and provide some tools, or even inspiration, for other scholars to write more about agrarian life. There are many things I would have done differently if I could start over, so I hope that others are able to get at the many things that I did not get deep enough into, or missed entirely.
The third is for those in the land and food justice worlds, especially in the United States. I think that since 2023 we have seen more extensive interest and involvement of these organizations and movements in Palestine solidarity. Plots and Deeds does not have any prescriptions on what is to be done, but I think it can offer some helpful concepts and questions to those trying to support agrarian livelihoods and land defense in Palestine.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
PK: These days I am mostly working on teaching and raising my toddler. But I am in the early days of a project on war and food systems. It begins in Palestine but is ultimately transnational. To this end, I am planning research trips to some GCC countries and East Africa. There are some important, and very alarming, trends in investment, technology, labor, and land acquisition that create links across this region, and I hope to soon start trying to figure out what they are, and how to research them.
J: What did you enjoy about research?
PK: One of the most difficult and rewarding parts of ethnography is that you get to talk to so many people who are really good at, and usually have thought very deeply about what you are talking to them about. I had to learn a lot about law to even begin to be able to talk to lawyers, surveying to talk to surveyors, and agriculture to talk to farmers. It was difficult and often, especially at the beginning, embarrassing. But it is also so rewarding because I got to learn so much from people, many of whom I might not have otherwise encountered and, even if I had, might not have the chance to talk with about certain things. Plots and Deeds is a book about violence and loss, and people shared with me some of the horrible things that happened and are happening to them and their families. But what I hope comes through as well is the knowledge, creativity, values, and commitment that make life on the land worth living and defending.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction: Recentering Peasants, Rethinking Land, ages 1 to 7)
I did not come to Palestine intending to write a book about land or peasants. Instead, I came as a young activist. I knew little about farming, and my knowledge about rural Palestine largely came from reports detailing the many human rights violations those living there had experienced. I lived in the city of Ramallah in the mid-2000s and worked for the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, better known as Stop the Wall. It was the protests in highland villages like Nil’in, Bil’in, and Nabi Saleh against Israel’s theft of their land and water that introduced me to one aspect of life in rural Palestine. Over time, I came to learn that these protests were part of a century-long tradition of popular resistance that had made the peasant an important figure for anti-colonial politics and international solidarity.
What was happening in these villages seemed at odds with what was happening in Ramallah. Financed by Western donors and international financial institutions, the Palestinian Authority (PA)—the nonsovereign government that has administered parts of the West Bank since the 1990s—embarked on a new sort of nationalist program in which private sector development and liberal markets were supposed to lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state. After the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the city, Ramallah became the epicenter of what has come to be known as “neoliberal Palestine.” Banks began to provide mortgages and personal loans. Luxury housing and commercial buildings seemed to be sprouting everywhere. New bars and restaurants opened to serve the growing numbers of entrepreneurs, consultants, diplomats, and activists like me. Visitors to Ramallah were often shocked by the sight of Palestinians driving luxury cars or sipping cappuccinos. A gulf seemed to be appearing between the “bubble” of Ramallah and the refugee camps and villages who supplied the city with cheap labor, and where military occupation was still very present.
But rural places were changing too. Working with Stop the Wall gave me the opportunity to visit highland villages across the West Bank, and by the late-2000s I was visiting Nabi Saleh to interview young protestors who had been shot by Israeli soldiers. Driving through the village at that time, I encountered the aftermath of these protests. Black circles had been burned into the road by flaming tires, spent tear gas grenades were strung together and displayed like strings of Christmas lights on the walls lining the street, and windows were boarded up to protect against bullets and shells. On certain days, I could smell the lingering stench of sewage left behind by the chemical “skunk” water that Israeli troops sprayed indiscriminately on demonstrators and homes. A few years later, just a stone’s throw away from a military observation tower at the village entrance, I noticed that something else had appeared: three billboards for a new Palestinian real estate development in the area. For low monthly payments, they offered Palestinian buyers land with a title deed. While these advertisements include the traditional agrarian imagery of olive trees and terraced hillsides, they were offering something very new: single-family homes, secure property rights, and great returns on investment.
I began research for what eventually became Plots and Deeds to understand this jarring confluence of rural land defense, settler colonial dispossession, and capitalist real-estate development. This research project soon took me a bit further north of Nabi Saleh, to the villages of Bruqin, Qarawat Beni Zayd (Qarawa for short), and Farkha. In the hills shared by these three villages, I met farmers who had founded a cooperative to sell organic olive oil and established an experimental farm. On the hill across from that farm, I found that developers were converting agricultural land into real estate. Nearby, I spent time with the young communist activists organizing voluntary work crews to reclaim and replant land so as to prevent the Israeli authorities from confiscating it. And I accompanied the PA surveyors who were slowly mapping and titling the area. I found that many of the forces that are transforming Palestine, and indeed rural places across the planet, were converging in the central highlands.
Fieldwork allowed me to talk to the people living in these villages and pay closer attention to the landscape. One warm summer night in 2013, I was walking outside of Bruqin with a companion from the village. We could see the lights of the nearby settlement and military tower keeping watch over the area. Shortly before my arrival, the Israeli government had confiscated more land from the village to expand the nearby settlement. Earlier in the day, I had met farmers who had been attacked by soldiers, evicted for trespassing on their own land, and had crops polluted by sewage that flowed from the Israeli homes and factories on the hilltops. Pointing to the ground in front of us, my companion told me that the men and women of the village had once planted these hilltops with seasonal crops, taking advantage of every bit of arable land. Gazing at rocks and overgrown bushes, it was hard for me to imagine that anything had ever grown there.
Several years later, on a cloudy spring day, I was visiting the land of a farmer in Qarawa. His plot was planted with olive saplings as well as beans, peas, and other vegetables. On one terrace sat a small, cinderblock structure that provided a shaded spot where one could sit and enjoy a meal. The day he invited me to visit, we sampled some of the fruits and vegetables while his older children worked, one taking a weed-whacker to the spring grass, and the other encouraging a donkey, hitched to a plow, to stay its course. He did not have plans to invest heavily in agriculture, he told me, and farming had become more of a “hobby.” Instead, he said, he thought of his land “as an investment, as real estate” that he would one day pass on to his children.
Land confiscation, environmental damage, and military violence in places like Bruqin has been very well-documented for a long time. The activists and organizations that have been doing this documenting are part of human rights movement that, since the 1980s, has worked tirelessly to gather evidence of Israeli crimes and advocate for the rights of Palestinians. As a result of their work, what Israel does to Palestinians in the occupied territories is no longer hidden from public scrutiny. Another result is that everyone—from legal experts to radical activists to interested observers—now talks about justice in Palestine through the frameworks of human rights and international law.
Land commodification in places like Qarawa has received far less attention. Part of the reason for this has to do with the pervasiveness of human-rights thinking, which means that researchers pay scant attention to economic issues unless those issues are directly related to the Israeli occupation. But even among the recent revival of “political economy” in Palestinian studies, there is little discussion of the transformation of land ownership in Palestine’s villages. This absence is made even more troubling given that land has a great deal of personal and political importance for Palestinians, in addition to being the most valuable financial asset that many own. As a result, critical scholarship on political economy has yet to explore what changes to the land mean for those who live in villages like Bruqin and Qarawa, or how the confiscation of land on one hilltop might be connected to its commodification on the other.
When we begin to map connections between land grabs, settlement expansion, rising prices, and real estate speculation, the outlines of what I call agrarian annihilation come into view. Like others across historic Palestine, the people that live in the central highlands have experienced the decimation of their land base. Israeli colonization and incorporation of villagers as wage labor has driven both the dispossession and devaluation of agricultural land. These processes have inadvertently created opportunities for Palestinian developers, with increasing land sales putting new pressures on peasant farming. Together, coercive state actions and the invisible (but no less important) power of capital dispossess rural landowners while making agrarian livelihoods increasingly unviable—even unthinkable—for those that have managed to hold onto their land. Calling this process “agrarian change” is an understatement, as sometimes the changes are so drastic that it is impossible to know that agrarian activity existed in certain areas in the first place, much less if they could be possible in the future.
How are those facing annihilation demanding justice? In the highlands, peasant land tenure and farming practices are intertwined with land defense, and together they provide an ethical and political repertoire for what we should think of as land justice. The struggles I explore in the chapters that follow include claiming private property, losing village control over land, asserting the rights of cultivation, and reestablishing collective agrarian presence. And while I will argue that it is illuminating to understand them as peasant struggles, those involved in them bear little resemblance to the heroic revolutionaries or tragic victims that populate so many agrarian imaginaries. Instead, they engage with colonial law, treat land as a commodity, rework traditional farming practices, and transform rural landscapes. They teach us that land justice is fundamentally a demand for return—both the return of the land that was taken, and a return to the land—that emerges from ordinary practices and small experiments that are transforming agrarian life.