Robert Nichols in conversation with Kelly Aguirre, Phil Henderson, Cressida J. Heyes, Alana Lentin, and Corey Snelgrove

As I finish Robert Nichols' Theft is Property! sitting in the fortress that "Australia" has become ever more apparently under COVID-19, residents of the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem are demolishing their own homes to avoid the USD6,000 fine imposed by the municipality if they did not do so in advance of the deadline set by an Israeli court. The calculated perversity of the primacy placed by European settler rule on the possessive is laid bare (Moreton-Robinson 2015). As in Sheikh Jarrah, Lyd, Haifa, and elsewhere around colonized Palestine, Palestinians' claims to occupancy are rejected by the enforcement of a prior claim bearing no more legitimacy than the fact that it is wielded by a burlier party, the Israeli state, backed by its strong-arm allies. Recalling this allows me to do two things: first, to note straight away the applicability of Nichols' highly detailed and meticulously historicized account of dispossession, as both an analytical tool for growing our understanding of Anglo-settler colonialism and for conceptualizing Indigenous practices of "expressive insurgency" (Nichols 2020: 159). Second, it permits me to place myself in relation to these discussions.