Munir Fakher Eldin in conversation with Ahmad Heneiti

Wednesday 17 June 2026, 13:00–14:30
Location: the Palestinian Museum & via Zoom
Language: Arabic

How can land in Palestine be understood beyond ownership—as history, politics, social life, and culture? From the Ottoman period onwards, this series traces how laws and administrative systems reshaped land governance by organising ownership, transfer, use, registration, and access. It also examines how legal frameworks were introduced, adapted, or carried over across successive periods, and how they continue to shape relations to land today.

Within this longue durée of law and land governance, the series turns to the transformation of Palestinian land under settler colonialism: confiscation, settlement expansion, spatial reorganisation, and the dismantling of Palestinians’ historical and social ties to their land. It moves beyond legal and archival histories to consider the social, cultural, and epistemic shifts that accompanied changes in ownership, disrupted ways of life, and forced severance from place.

How, then, might the land question in Palestine be understood: through legal histories of ownership and transfer; through archives that record people’s relations to land and its uses; or through the geographic and epistemic shifts that reshaped Palestinian space under colonial modernity?

The series also asks how Palestinian knowledge of land can emerge from lived and sensory relations to place, rather than from land as an abstract legal or political object. How can Palestinians speak today of lands confiscated or made inaccessible, and of a relationship forcibly severed from the everyday textures of place—its fields, wild plants, scents, paths, and inherited memory?