The Land and Us: Exploring Contested Landscapes and Identity Formation in the West Bank

Using the case of the West Bank as a site of overlapping narratives of Palestinian and Israeli national identities, this project will contribute to the conversation on ideology and landscapes by exploring the manner in which a common physical territory is able to inform conflicting national identities. Building on the extensive literature that posits landscapes as imbued with political, cultural and legal ‘meaning’, it will challenge the perception of a landscape as merely incidental to, or an outcome of, certain ideologies. Instead, by claiming that a landscape, once instilled with meanings, is able to continually perpetuate and generate the ideology written into it, this project will elevate the landscape as a central figure in national identity formation.