Cairo Papers Talk Series | Palestine: Confronting Genocide — Al Bassoul and Al Khazouq: Defying Colonial Violence on the Land

This intervention, by Yasmeen Qadan of Birzeit University, explores life within the Palestinian village amidst the violence of colonial infrastructure, with a focus on planting practices as a form of dwelling and inhabiting the land. Colonial authorities sought to eradicate these practices by formalizing landownership through registration, transforming lands into mapped plots to govern both the land and Palestinians. Central to this analysis is the plant called “Al-Bassoul”, which peasants used as a boundary marker for olive trees distributed among families. These boundary plants symbolize social institutions responsible for resource allocation and conferring legitimacy to social groups according to cultural norms. Despite official land legislation, local land names associated with specific plants reveal relational and environmental meanings that challenge colonial narratives, illustrating how local knowledge and practices undermine the dominance of colonial and capitalist discourses and serve to reestablish a deeply rooted relationship with the land that resists erasure.
 

About the series: 
Palestine: Confronting Genocide
Cairo Papers in Social Science, The American University in Cairo

More than two years since the onset of the most recent genocide in Palestine, suffering, destruction, starvation and massive displacement have remained an everyday reality in Palestine. The vast numbers of the dead, the wounded and the missing continue to rise, along with the ruination of all aspects of living, from buildings, infrastructure, to food, water, health, educational and religious institutions. What does it mean to live and to witness a genocide? What does it mean to describe an everyday of genocide? How can the current genocide be situated in the global political cartography of power? Have previously recognized categories and paradigms, such as international law, humanitarian law, democratic rule, morality and ethical responsibility, among others, been emptied out of meaning? How do we read the current moment in the long durée of settler colonialism in Palestine, imperial desires and resistance? Is this genocidal moment unprecedented or an intensification of a long process of extermination and subjugation that has been unfolding for decades? How to understand what is happening in Palestine next to what is happening in Syria, in Sudan, in Yemen, in Libya, in Lebanon and Iraq, and so on? What have been new registers of resistance, as they have been unfolding throughout the years? How do the social sciences and humanities confront the possibilities and limits of knowledge in the face of the horrible and the unfathomable of genocide?

Make sure to catch our upcoming talks on the following dates:

• Saturday, November 29, 2025 | 7–9 PM – By: Raef Zreik

• Saturday, December 6, 2025 | 7–9 PM – By: Sherene Seikaly