From Terra Nullius to Ethno-Public Land: Market Dependence and the Dispossession of Palestinian Bedouins

Abstract

This thesis examines how the Israeli state restructures land relations in the Naqab through the Dead Negev Doctrine; a legal and discursive framework, employing colonial narratives and redemption myths to reclassify vast territories historically inhabited by Palestinian Bedouins as mawat, creating a localized iteration of terra nullius, understood as empty and uncultivated land. Drawing on Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Political Marxist framework of capitalism as a system of social-property relations rooted in market dependence, the thesis situates the doctrine within a broader settler-colonial and capitalist project. Rather than relying on classical privatization, Israel enforces dispossession and market dependence through a racialized system of public land management – an ethno-public land regime – as a flexible instrument of colonial capitalist power and intersection. The analysis traces the historical evolution of land law from Ottoman and British precedents to Israeli legal innovations that invalidate communal landholding. The thesis shows how Zionist legal and planning institutions function as state-capitalist mechanisms to expropriate Bedouin lands, displace Indigenous communities, and facilitate Jewish settlement under the banner of public ownership and development. This regime recasts Bedouin ecological practices and kin-based governance as illegality or inefficiency, dismantling the non-market basis of Bedouin autonomy and forcing integration into wage labor, welfare dependence, and urban peripheries. By examining these dynamics through a historical materialist lens, the thesis demonstrates that Israeli settler colonialism is not merely a nationalist or demographic project but a capitalist one, transforming land relations to produce a dependent, proletarianized Indigenous population without conferring property rights. It argues that the Dead Negev Doctrine is not an anomaly, but a contemporary expression of primitive accumulation and capitalist enclosure, mediated by legal abstractions, racialized public institutions, and planning regimes. The study contributes to broader debates on settler colonialism, and the political economy of dispossession, offering a historically grounded framework to understand how colonial legal structures can be mobilized to create capitalist outcomes in the absence of private property.