The political geography of memoricide: Embodied memory and the struggle over olive trees in Area C, West Bank

This article provides a critical, decolonial analysis of ongoing settler-colonial violence in Area C of the occupied West Bank, focusing on the material and epistemic struggles surrounding Palestinian olive trees. Theoretically grounded in the concepts of memoricide, politicide, and embodied memory, the study investigates how state-led apparatuses of dispossession dismantle indigenous socio-ecological knowledge. Methodologically, it develops a rigorous qualitative discourse analysis of a systematically gathered corpus of subaltern testimonies and institutional documentations spanning from 2017 to mid-2026. The empirical findings reveal that spatial erasure operates through a multi-layered mechanism. While the direct, spectacular uprooting of ancient olive trees marks an immediate physical loss, a secondary, more insidious register of memoricide is executed through the structural enforcement of agricultural monoculture. This forced ecological flattening is further accelerated by contemporary digital-bureaucratic statecraft (most notably the May 2026 online land registration system ), which compels farmers to use resilient olive groves as desperate political placeholders to legally defend their land against imminent expropriation. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that spatial confinement operates as an epistemic project of historical cancellation that narrows the parameters of indigenous life, while simultaneously illustrating that the subaltern act of replanting remains an indelible, embodied reality of counter-geographic resistance.