Tag land
Randa Wahbe: By detaining the cadavers of Palestinians, Israel turns the dead body itself into a site of domination. It is not enough for Israel to kill or eliminate the living Palestinian, it is necessary to dehumanize and degrade the body in order to control it.
To mark the launch of The Nakba Files, three of the site’s Editors — Hassan Jabareen, Katherine Franke, and Suhad Bishara — share their thoughts on the Nakba, the law, and what lies in between.
Suhad Bishara: The story of the Nakba often focuses, rightly so, on the 750,000 Palestinian refugees who were exiled, as well as the destruction of their villages and loss of their lands. Less well-known is how the state of Israel confiscated the land of even those Palestinians who never left.
The Green Line runs between the villages of Lifta and Beit Iksa but also ties them together. As a porous and contingent boundary, the Green Line is a reminder that the Zionist project has always needed the flexibility to choose, combine, and discard different legal regimes in order to carry out its aims and to produce justifications for its actions.