Selling Holy Land: Palestinian Christian activism in the Old City of Jerusalem

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The first aim of my fellowship project is to develop and disseminate the findings of my doctoral dissertation on the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, an ancient church that is today racked with conflict, both inside and outside its walls. The patriarchate is divided between a lay population of Palestinians and a hierarchy controlled by Greek monks. This division has been a source of struggle for over a century, and it can be traced both through the political history of Palestine/Israel and the deeper history of the Eastern church.For decades now, researchers, journalists, activists, and clergy have struggled to understand this conflict and to resolve it, with little success. My doctoral research thus attempted to approach the subject from a different angle. My research suggests that the difficulties in understanding the church conflict are related to a broader analytical problem. The institutions of the Greek hierarchy on the one hand and Palestinian society on the other are frequently assumed to be opposed and independent, each always seeking to supplant the other in administration of the church patrimony - including its considerable real estate holdings. But I found this assumption to be incorrect. As it turns out, over the course of centuries of Ottoman rule, these institutions transformed in important ways, effectively merging the church and the Palestinian family into a single, unified whole. Following from these observations, my doctoral dissertation examines the merger of the family and the church in a number of different contexts, including canon law, property regulations, ritual experience, and hospitality relations. In doing so, I was able to begin establishing a more effective framework for understanding the conflict between the laity and the higher clergy. My thesis, however, stops short of applying this new framework to ongoing political disputes. In the middle of my fieldwork, a new phase of the conflict erupted into the public sphere: Israeli newspapers published leaked documents outlining the sale and lease of several large tracts of church land to Israeli settlement organisations, developers, and the state. Protests of a scale not seen in years spread across the country and Palestinian activists launched a renewed campaign to depose the patriarch. I collected legal documents, interviewed activists and lawyers, and attended numerous conferences, protests, and press events to publicize the movement's aims and provoke the Palestinian public into action. Now that I have established a solid empirical basis for understanding the patriarchate's structure, I am prepared to begin addressing the political dynamics of the church more explicitly. My fellowship will thus not only consolidate my PhD research but also pivot towards larger political questions. I plan to do this by studying the literature on religious activist movements in the Middle East and the Orthodox Christian world, as well as on the religious property. I will work with my departmental mentor to apply my larger approach to the patriarchate's structure to the political discourses and behaviour of the activists, the clergy, and the state. Towards the end of the fellowship period, I will bring the different strands of my fellowship year together by organizing a workshop with a small number of specialists working on the patriarchate in different disciplines who all share an interest in addressing the current crisis. This will form the basis for a new field project in which I will return to Jerusalem after the fellowship year to investigate the property issue in more depth.In sum, the fellowship would provide me with a crucial transition period in which to share the findings of my PhD and establish myself as a researcher while also preparing for the next phase of my career, setting me up to pursue a long-term project that will make an impact both in the academy and the patriarchate itself.