Description
Counterinsurgency techniques of the British Empire, and empire per se and subsequent pacification strategies target land-based attachments of indigenous communities. Geographic collective punishment is a racializing police mechanism which includes practices such as razing homes, restricting employment, reducing supplies of electricity and search-and-seizure operations and misdemeanour arrests. Policing and collective punishment share a genealogy of segregating and controlling targeted populations based on perceived shared characteristics, whether it is the lack of economic productivity (Neocleous 2011) or perceived misuse of land (Bhandar 2018). This paper explores genres of justice and reconciliation which do not rely on the generation of suspicion and the destruction of empathy within communities. Ideas of justice within pre-colonial and land-based communities provide alternatives to militarised land use. Military orders for example give the Israeli state full ownership of water resources, which led to the drilling of wells next to vital springs and the theft of water from principle freshwater reservoirs (Mason and Dajani 2019). This paper surveys notions of land-justice at multiple sites in Palestine, including tribal justice, the Palestinian Civil Police, Sharia court system and Israeli police system and how they espouse different conceptualisations of the individual, universal, relational and communal.
