Enclosure marshals bold new and persuasive arguments about the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. Revealing the Israel-Palestine landscape primarily as one of enclosure, geographer Gary Fields sheds fresh light on Israel's actions. He places those actions in historical context in a broad analysis of power and landscapes across the modern world. Examining the process of land-grabbing in early modern England, colonial North America, and contemporary Palestine, Enclosure shows how patterns of exclusion and privatization have emerged across time and geography. That the same moral, legal, and cartographic arguments were copied by enclosers of land in very different historical environments challenges Israel's current rationale as being uniquely beleaguered. It also helps readers in the United Kingdom and the United States understand the Israel-Palestine conflict in the context of their own, tortured histories.

"Reading Enclosure brings home the tragedy of such immense and irrevocable destruction." - New York Review of Books

"The author utilizes a historical-comparative methodology to produce a trajectory of today’s Palestinian loss since the time of legal land reforms in England. In this book, the story of the Palestinian landscape becomes a mirror onto which other histories are projected." - Journal of Palestine Studies

"“A unique exploration of the development of the Israeli culture of land grabs and the historical legal framework and precedents that have allowed Zionist policies to continue unimpeded.”" - Middle East Monitor