Settler-colonial dispossession in West Jerusalem: between the personal and the collective

This article analyzes a spontaneous encounter between a Palestinian refugee-stepping over the threshold of her childhood home for the first time in seventy years, following its expropriation-and the current Israeli Jewish owner. This unusual encounter led us to propose a new understanding of dispossession based on both its personal (symbolic-emotional) and collective (economic-political) meanings. The former dimension is expressed in the Palestinians' acts of remembering and visiting their pre-1948 homes, not only as a reflection of the past and a nostalgic impulse, but also as a way of shaping, intervening in, and influencing the present. The latter, collective meaning, explores the multiplicity of dispossession processes in a settler-colonial society in which the capitalist mode of production already existed before the settlers arrived. This article focuses on one particular form of dispossession through a micro-geographical study of one house in Jerusalem that was once a Palestinian family home. We also offer an expanded interpretation of dispossession as personal and collective by analyzing three modes of experience relating to dispossessed property: settler-colonial property, stolen property, and property as nativeness.