Presentation short abstract

This paper uses the rubric of primitive accumulation to discuss the transformation of Palestine in 1948-49, describing the paths of the parts of the country which came under Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian rule and analysing the Nakba as a particularly stark and violent instance of a global process.

Presentation long abstract

Between 1931 and 1961 the population of Palestine was two-thirds rural; by 1961 it was two-thirds urban. The uprooting of the local peasantry was primarily an outcome of the Nakba of 1948-49. This paper takes up the Marxian rubric of "primitive accumulation" to analyse the eco-political transformation of the country in this period, which diverged from the Eurocentric stereotype of the transition to capitalism insofar as the majority of this peasantry was not absorbed into the industrial workforce but "encamped" as a surplus population. The paper discusses the differential agrarian trajectories of the parts of the country which came under Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian rule after the Nakba. In what became Israel, lands ethnically cleansed of their indigenous owners were turned over to capitalist agriculture organised in cooperatives and collectives (kibbutzim and moshavim respectively), while the remaining Palestinians were proletarianised. In the West Bank, the local peasantry managed to hold on to most of its land, though incoming refugees remained landless. In the Gaza Strip, finally, hundreds of thousands of refugees were crowded onto a small parcel of land incapable of supporting them agriculturally. Rather than seeing the case of Palestine as exceptional or unique, I argue that it is a particularly stark and violent case of the long-term global process of primitive accumulation. The capitalist-colonial transformation of agriculture, in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere, finds its mirror image in the entombment of the dispossessed in open-air prisons like Gaza, and their subjection to genocide if they resist.