Zionism, Orientalism and Palestine by Saied

Zionism, Orientalism, and the PalestiniansAuthor(s): Haim GerberReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Fall 2003), pp. 23-41Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2003.33.1.23 .Accessed: 11/02/2012 18:36

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ZIONISM, ORIENTALISM, AND

THE PALESTINIANS

HAIM GERBER

The self-critical approach applied by Israel’s “New Historians” to the 1948war needs to be extended to the study of Palestinian history as a whole.Harking back to earlier periods and other sources, the author exposesthe Orientalist bias of the traditional Israeli historiography of Palestineby focusing on three of its common contentions: that there was no dis-tinct Palestinian nationalism, that Palestinian society was primitive andbackward, and that the speed of the Palestinian collapse in 1948 was afunction of inherent flaws in the society.

SEVERAL WRITERS ON Israel and its neighbors have suggested in recent yearsways to apply Edward Said’s fascinating thesis on the connection betweenOrientalism as a profession and deep-seated anti-Islamic attitudes in the Westin general. Aziza Khazum has shown how the history of the Jewish people inmodern times can fruitfully be described as a continuous series of “Oriental-izations,” that is, an elite trying to block the advance of an upcoming minoritygroup by dubbing it “oriental,” meaning devoid of “real” culture and hencenot worthy of equal treatment.1 Ella Shohat has applied the same idea to thehistory of early Zionist films, where the Arab is depicted as a brutal and cul-tureless creature whose objection to Zionism lacks rational grounding.2 Saidhimself first analyzed Orientalism as a cultural outgrowth of the West3 andthen started to apply that idea to the Zionist venture itself.4

This study follows in the footsteps of these scholars by holding Zionistrepresentations of Palestinian history up for comparison with the historicalreality on the ground. It was written within the context of the Israeli “NewHistory” that emerged in the 1980s and is based on the assumption that thenew critical mode of thinking and research is valid not merely for the 1948war, to which it has usually been limited, but to the entire length of Palestinianhistory. My starting point is not anti-Zionist or even post-Zionist; rather, it isa self-critical stance adopted as part of the realization that the process ofreconciliation between the two peoples living in the Holy Land will requirea thorough and painful revision of one’s own past and the past of the other.5

It is my conviction that using the Orientalist paradigm to reexamine repre-sentations of Palestinian history is not arbitrary, but rather is called for by the

HAIM GERBER is professor of Islamic History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Heis the author, among other books, of The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East. Anearlier version of this article appeared in the Hebrew periodical Hamizrah Hehadas[The New East], Jerusalem.

Journal of Palestine Studies XXXIII, no. 1 (Fall 2003), pages 23–41.ISSN: 0377-919X; online ISSN: 1533-8614.C© 2003 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved.Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press,Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

24 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

often simplistic and shallow approach that prevails in the literature. This ap-proach equally applies to (most) Israeli scholars who have dealt with thePalestinians. Thus, the real starting point of this study is Benny Morris’s anal-ysis of the reasons for the Palestinian disaster of 1948.6 This discourse isreplete with terms evoking primitiveness and social retardation, which arethrown out in all directions. No group in the society is spared, though thenotables take much of the blame for their divisiveness, regionalism, and nar-row self-interest. The peasants, too, are blamed. Thus, the “rural majority andits agricultural economy remained largely primitive and inefficient,” thoughunder British and Jewish influences there were beginnings of “innovationand modernization.”7 Similarly, Palestinian rural society was “largely apoliti-cal and uninvolved in national affairs.”8 What Morris calls “the fatal weaknessof Palestinian Arab society” is attributed to the society’s “lack of governinginstitutions, norms and traditions.”9

In Morris’s view, there could be no Palestinian cohesiveness for the sim-ple reason that there was no Palestinian nation: “[O]n the whole, save forthe numerically small circle of the elite, the Palestinians were unready forthe national message or for the demands that the national idea was to makeupon the community.”10 He continues:

Commitment and readiness to pay the price for national self-fulfillment presumed a clear concept of the nation and ofnational belonging, which Palestine’s Arabs, still caught up inthe village-centered (or at best a regional) political outlook,by and large completely lacked. Most Palestine Arabs had nosense of separate national or cultural identity to distinguishthem from, say, the Arabs of Syria, Lebanon or Egypt.11

Morris’s views on the Palestinians during the formative Mandatory periodare a continuation of earlier Israeli historians. Yaacov Shim‘oni’s book on theArabs of Palestine, for example, is largely a rehearsal of Zionist ideas on thePalestinians during the British Mandate. Unable to conceive of the possibil-ity that the indigenous population could have feelings of genuine national-ism, Shim‘oni sees every opposition to Zionism as “extremism” or a resultof “incitement.”12 Left to themselves, the Arab masses would have embracedZionism and recognized its total beneficence to them. Characteristically, thereis no hint of what this beneficence would consist of—given that the Zionistsdemanded the whole of Palestine. But in Shim‘oni’s version, what preventedthe Arab masses from seeing the “light” was that British officials in Palestinepoisoned their minds.13

Nor is a left-wing researcher like Y. Vaschitz much different. In his account,the fellah is not an individual but a sociological type, cunning, prone to cheat-ing, stubborn—all traits developed over generations of crushing oppression.Neither the characteristics nor their causes are empirically verified. Further-more, Vaschitz knows for a fact that there is no Palestinian nation and no

ZIONISM, ORIENTALISM, AND THE PALESTINIANS 25

objective difference between Palestinians and Syrians. As a Marxist, Vaschitzhad at his disposal a ready-made intellectual tool to explain away Palestinianself-perception: The landowners were afraid of the rise in the standard ofliving, businessmen were afraid of competition, and the masses were incitedby their leaders.14

To revert to Morris, one aspect of his Orientalism is that he feels no needto demonstrate, however cursorily, the origins of the societal characteristicshe describes. For him they are givens, the natural characteristics of a primitivesociety, just as the high degree of development in Jewish society was entirelynatural in his eyes, in need of no historicizing whatsoever. But the point ofthis study is precisely that all these givens need historicizing, that is, theymust be explained in context rather than seen as part of the natural orderof things. Such an approach will reveal that some of the seemingly “natural”characteristics of Palestinian society under the Mandate were not natural atall, but imposed on them by the nature of the Mandate; others are simpleOrientalizations. This study will attempt to expose some of these fallacies byfocusing on three common contentions: that there was no distinct Palestiniannationalism, that Palestinian society was primitive and backward, and that thespeed of the Palestinian collapse in 1948 was a function of inherent flaws inthe society.

THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM

It is fashionable today to claim that nationalism is a purely modern inven-tion, an ex post facto attempt to endow the nation with glory and legitimacy.This new fashion is mainly a reaction against a former generation of scholars(today pejoratively called “primordialists”), who held that nations and theircollective identities are ancient. In contrast, the newer approach in variousversions claims that modern nations were invented by the print revolution ofthe sixteenth century,15 or by the industrial revolution which destroyed theold village communities and imperial identities, creating the need for newones.16 While there is much to be said for these arguments (especially insofaras they challenge clearly outmoded and unconvincing orthodoxies), they tendto greatly overstate their case. I agree much more with Anthony Smith, whosuggested that while nations in the full sense are modern, most of them standon historical “shoulders” that existed long before the age of nationalism.

The newness of nationalism is claimed with particular vehemence in thecontext of the Arab Middle East.17 A recent rehearsal of the modernist viewwent so far as to claim that Middle Eastern nationalism was created by themodern state that came into being after the onset of the colonial phase inthe wake of World War I,18 thereby overlooking the rise of Arab nationalismin the late Ottoman period and the existence of a mature Syrian local na-tionalism before the coming of the French.19 Certainly, there is no denyingthat the shifting balance between pan-Arabism and local nationalisms in thetwentieth century were related to contingent factors, such as the rise and fall


of charismatic leaders like Egypt’s Nasir. The problem is that the modernistsin a Middle Eastern context join forces with Orientalists, who castigate Islamfor not having created a European-type society, and with Zionist historians,who claim that the “Palestinians,” if left to themselves, never would havedreamed of a Palestinian identity. Following Anthony Smith, it seems to methat history is as relevant to Arab Middle Eastern nationalism as it is to Euro-pean nationalism,20 and I will endeavor to demonstrate its relevance to thePalestinians as well, by looking into the historical documentation, a simplerequirement that the modernists have not fulfilled.

THE ORIGINS OF THE TERM “PALESTINE”

It certainly is not true that the concept of Palestine (Filastin) appearedonly after the emergence of Zionism and as a reaction to it. Though medievalPalestine was administratively subsumed under the province of Greater Syria,it also stood apart and was known as Jund Filastin, or the district of Palestine.By extension, its inhabitants also used the name to describe the “country”(ard or bilad) they were living in. This situation continued until 1250, whenthe Mamluk state ceased using the term administratively. In this they werefollowed by the Ottomans after 1517.21 While the old assumption was thatthe ancient term fell into oblivion, a growing body of evidence shows that itwas not forgotten. An early example is the late fifteenth-century book by theJerusalemite Mujir al-Din al-‘Ulaymi,22 who uses the term “Filastin” as a matterof course to describe his place of residence; the other name he uses, and quiteas often, is “the Holy Land” (al-Ard al-Muqaddasa). Though written in 1490,the book is a partial compilation of materials from past periods and shouldof course be used with great caution. Still, there is no doubt that these twonames were actual names of the country in Mujir al-Din’s time. The clearestcontext in which he discusses the term Filastin is as part of a geographicdictionary, though this is hidden away under the entry for al-Ramla, calledin medieval times Ramlat Filastin.23 The term is derived from the Philistinesof the Bible, though the boundaries of the land are those of Jund Filastin.24

In any event, there are enough indications that this was the actual name in1490. One example is when Mujir al-Din, while recounting the biography ofthe medieval saint ‘Ali b. ‘Alil, notes that he is buried near the village of Arsufnorth of Jaffa “in the land of Palestine (ard Filastin).”25

As mentioned above, Mujir al-Din also uses the term “the Holy Land” todescribe the country. In the Islamic tradition this probably goes back to theverse in Surat al-Isra where Moses tells his people: Ya qawm, udkhulu al-ardal-muqaddasa [O people, enter the Holy Land]. Mujir al-Din piles up historicalmaterials where the term is used anachronistically. Thus, the Israelite forefa-thers are said to have lived in the “Holy Land”;26 the crusaders conqueredthe “Holy Land” from the Muslims;27 and contemporary Nablus is a townin the “Holy Land.”28 Indeed, it could be claimed that the concept of “HolyLand” is even more important than the geographical term “Palestine,” since


it must have given the inhabitants a certain feeling of importance comparedto “ordinary” Muslim lands such as Syria or Iraq. This of course was greatlystrengthened by the existence in the country of one of the holiest places ofall Islam, the city of Jerusalem.

To return to the concept of Palestine, what Mujir al-Din shows is thatdespite the discontinuation of the official use of the term after 1250, thepopulation continued to use it, out of habit, which shows that identities canbe influenced by simple things like customs and not necessarily only by hardfactors such as the market forces of the Marxists. Also, it stands to reasonthat if the term “Palestine” was known to the population two and a halfcenturies after it ceased to be used officially, one can assume that it mighthave survived another five centuries as the name commonly used for thecountry by its inhabitants in the early twentieth century.

In fact, there are several surviving pieces of information that indicate thatthis may well have been the case. A major example is the seventeenth-centuryfatwa collection of Khayr al-Din al-Ramli,29 who uses the term “Palestine”when addressing people in the area who approached him for legal opinions.As he needed to communicate, his choice of term indicates its wide usageat the time, though we cannot know how far it went in the social hierarchy.It is also interesting that he also used the term “bilad,” often inflecting itin the form of “biladuna” (“our country”), which, while hardly constitutinga demand for independence, does indicate that a sociological identity termhad crystallized. While no other documents of comparable importance haveyet surfaced, there is a stream of minor indications that the usage of theterm continued. Thus, two very important legal scholars of eighteenth- andearly nineteenth-century Damascus refer to Khayr al-Din al-Ramli as the “greatscholar (‘alama) of Palestine”—interestingly, not “Southern Syria,” a termcompletely missing from the documentation of the period.30

A crucially important source that sheds further information on this issue isthe daily or periodical press, which started to appear in various cities in thewake of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. This press—and particularly themost avowedly political newspapers of the period, Filastin and al-Karmil,which began to appear in 1911—has been extensively mined to shed lighton the politicization of the Palestinian Arabs and their emerging reaction toZionism. But in this study we are interested in a slightly different topic—the prenationalist self-perception of the inhabitants of the country. The newpress began publication in 1908, when the Turkification policy of the newregime was not yet apparent or even extant, and shows that contrary to whatwe had previously assumed, the people of the period were well aware ofthe concept of nationalism, though the nationalism was mainly Ottoman. Thenewspapers also show that Zionism was still not taken seriously but seen asa passing episode, so that it did not yet seem to affect collective identity.Basically, then, the newspapers of this short period can be said to reflect thetraditional belief-system as transformed by the nineteenth-century moderniz-ing Ottoman reform. Astonishingly, however, the prevailing self-perception of


the inhabitants of the country at the time was that they were living in a coun-try called Palestine (not Southern Syria), that they were collectively referredto as Palestinians, and that their ethnicity was Arab.31

This brings us finally to Yehoshua Porath, the first scholar to have dealtwith the topic, who dated the first appearance of the term “Palestine” to1911, when it was published in Filastin.32 Though the term, as we have seen,actually turns out to have been in undisputable use at least two years before,what is of lasting value is Porath’s assessment, based on his review of itsusage between 1911 and 1914, that the term could not have been suddenlyinvented in 1911 and must therefore have been current in the country allalong. The material presented in this study indicates that this was indeed thecase. While some could argue that a limited number of references over timedoes not prove the continuous use of the term, I contend that the authors Icite all spoke the language fully known to the people around them. Had theterm died out, it is inconceivable that it would have been reinvented beforethe full flowering of nationalism.

THE RISE OF PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM

As to nationalism in the modern sense, Rashid Khalidi has shown quiteconvincingly, on the basis of a study of the Palestinian press after 1911, thatat about that time or in 1912 at the latest, full-fledged Palestinian nationalismmade its first appearance, propelled as it was mainly by Zionism. Nonetheless,as we have shown, the identity per se was not at all invented in response toZionism, just as the notion of nationalism—albeit Ottoman nationalism—wasnot new at the time, at least not to the educated elite. And however strangethe notion of Ottoman nationalism may seem to us today, for the Arab citizensof the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century it was apparently naturaland appropriate.

Be that as it may, local Palestinian identity clearly existed in the coun-try before the British and before Zionism. The importance of the Palestinianembrace of pan-Syrianism between 1918 and 1920 should not be overstated:it is clear that it was seen as a first step toward Arab nationalism, and thatFaysal, installed as king of Syria, seemed like a force capable of overpow-ering Zionism. As Porath maintains, it was a union of convenience, not adeep-seated union of hearts,33 and the Palestinians hastened to forget Syriawith Faysal’s ouster in July 1920. Clearly, Palestinianism was stronger amongPalestinians in 1920 than Syrianism. This is not to say that different circum-stances could not have propelled the Palestinians in another direction, butmerely that their former nonpolitical identity obviously played a powerful rolein the unfolding of events. In this sense, Ernest Gellner’s argument that thepast is irrelevant for the formation of modern national movements is grosslyexaggerated.

Morris is, of course, greatly mistaken in his claim that the Palestinians didnot have a feeling of being a nation during the Mandate. The two books by


Porath document this national activity in much detail, and a recent historical-anthropological study by Ted Swedenburg shows that common people par-ticipated in this movement.34 Ben Gurion himself reluctantly acknowledgedthe existence of an Arab-Palestinian movement in 1929; the unintended, buttremendously important historiographical value of his remarks, is that theyallude to “masses” of supporters, whereas Morris and others would have us

The Great PalestinianRevolt of 1936–39, thebiggest in the British

Empire in the twentiethcentury, is proof enough

that national feelingexisted and was quite

intense.

believe that Palestinian nationalism was confined tothe elite. The Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936–39, thebiggest in the British Empire in the twentieth centuryand well known to have been shouldered by the peas-ants, is proof enough that national feeling existed andwas quite intense. It is possible that Morris’s conclu-sion is partly based on the Palestinians’ surprisinglyweak aggressive force in the 1948 war, but other in-dependent factors should be examined and (possibly)ruled out, such as the way the British broke the backof Palestinian society during the Great Revolt.

An important aspect of the prenationalist Palestinian identity already al-luded to is the constant awareness of the threat posed by the Europeans-cum-Crusaders. On one level this awareness constitutes an interesting chapter inthe “invention of tradition” debate. As with other historical episodes having abearing on the present, the prevailing consensus among modernist scholarsis that the Crusades were completely forgotten soon after 1291, only to bereinvented again in the twentieth century.35 The truth is, however, that theywere never forgotten. Already Mujir al-Din (1490) mentions them at length.When he speaks about the waqf-tomb of the saint ‘Ali b. ‘Alil, he describesthe renovation undertaken by the waqf guardian as follows: “Then he rebuilta tower on the roof of the tomb, facing west, for the purpose of holy war inthe path of God, where he put weapons with which to fight the Europeans.”36

Full awareness of the imminent possibility of a crusade is also recorded inthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,37 while Rashid Khalidi’s discoveryof a 1701 petition where the notables asked the qadi of Jerusalem not toallow a French consul in the city was likewise connected to the memory ofthe Crusades.38 Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 was also perceived asa new crusade targeting Jerusalem and its surroundings.39 From this there isbut a short step to the famous campaign launched in the Ottoman parliamentby Shukri al-Asali in 1911, calling on the government to forbid the sale ofFule villagelands (in the Esdraelon valley) to the Zionists on the grounds thatthere was a Crusader castle in the middle of the area.40

The importance of these findings becomes clear in the context of AdrianHastings’s theory on the importance of religion to the development of na-tional movements.41 His main idea is that even within the same universalisticmonotheistic religion, certain communities underwent cultural developmentsthat differentiated them from other communities, and even if the matter wasas minor as a different script of the prayer book (the case of the Croats) it


sometimes made the community feel special enough to develop its own na-tionalism. This fruitful idea could easily be applied to the Palestinians. Theplace of Jerusalem in Islam, the need to defend it from the Crusaders (later theZionist Jews), and the responsibility placed on their shoulders in this respectby the entire Muslim community, constituted cultural capital not possessedby the Syrians or Iraqis. I would suggest that in these circumstances, the riseof a separate and aggressive Palestinian nationalism was, in the final analysis,inevitable.

SOCIETY AND CULTURE IN OTTOMAN PALESTINE

A second problematic feature of Zionist representations of Palestinian his-tory is the depiction of traditional Palestinian society as primitive and retro-grade. We shall divide the discussion of this topic between the earlier Ottomanperiod and the nineteenth century. Studies by more recent generations changeconsiderably the old image of Ottoman Palestine as a wilderness interspersedwith some swamps. One of the new studies, by Wolf-Dieter Hutteroth andKamal Abdulfattah, shows that only the heart of the Esdraelon valley andportions of the coastal Sharon plain were empty in Ottoman times.42 The restof the country was settled, and not at all sparsely. Furthermore, character-izing the entire Ottoman period from the sixteenth century onwards as oneof decline and stagnation is a myth. Amnon Cohen’s study of the Galilee inthe eighteenth century traces a large-scale economic boom, based primar-ily on cotton production destined mainly for the French market.43 BesharaDoumani’s study of the economic history of Nablus in Ottoman times like-wise shows a very energetic activity, mainly in the booming soap industrythat continued to grow throughout the period.44

The intellectual field, as well, was far from being a dry wilderness. Thoughnot enough is known in this domain, we do have the important example ofthe already cited fatwa collection of Khayr al-Din al-Ramli.45 Beyond the lightit sheds on premodern Palestinian collective identities, it has intrinsic valueas a book of legal thought and practice, attesting to the vibrant and opennature of Islamic law at this time of supposed general decline. Another andno less interesting aspect of Khayr al-Din’s career is the enormous influencehe wielded in the entire Middle East at the time. The madrasa he built andheaded in al-Ramla became a virtual pilgrimage site for scholars and men ofstate, who would come to stay for several months before returning to theirnormal lives.

Even the political field was not devoid of interesting and important devel-opments. Due to the weakness of the central Ottoman government, variousprovinces became semi-independent, under governors who preferred to in-crease their power in one province rather than be transferred to another.Seventeenth-century Palestine witnessed the rise of three virtually indepen-dent principalities, based in Gaza (the Ridwan family), Jerusalem (the IbnFarukh family), and Lajun (the Turabay family). These principalities were on


the whole friendly and cooperative among themselves, and even coalescedagainst external enemies in actual wars, as against Fakhr al-Din II of MountLebanon in 1623. An interesting point here is that toward the end of the cen-tury these dynasties were linked by marriage in a way that created a sort of“Palestinian” state.46

Much of Morris’s argument revolves around the role of the a‘yan, or nota-bles, an institution that has come under heavy attack from Palestinian scholarsas well.47 This institution is widely seen as the main culprit for almost every-thing bad in Palestinian history, but this seems an exaggeration. It must firstbe borne in mind that the notables are hardly a relic of a primitive age, butcame into being as part of the Ottoman administrative system in the provinces,a system that was sophisticated and even ingenious in more ways than one,and deserves our admiration rather than disapprobation. We know nothing ofthe rationale behind the institution at the time of its creation in the sixteenthcentury, and we can judge only the outcome. The basic idea was that theOttomans realized from the start the difficulty of running a vast empire solelyby officials sent from Istanbul, and instead nominated only the top office-holders, mainly governors and qadis. All the lower functions were filled bylocal people co-opted by the government. Then, according to the prevailingcustom whereby a son usually followed in the footsteps of his father, con-trol of these functions became a relatively secure family prerogative.48 Thisassociation between a family and an important administrative function gavesubstantial prestige to the holders, and in time a kind of urban aristocracycame into being, an interim layer between the distant central governmentand the local population. These officeholders were simultaneously part ofthe ruling elite and part of the ruled population. On the whole, they neverbetrayed the interests of the central government, so that the Ottoman govern-ment had faithful allies in the provinces, thereby making the governance ofthe Arab provinces smoother and cheaper than it would have been otherwise.

But it seems to me that it is not fanciful or naıve to claim that this elite alsosaw itself as representing the people vis-a-vis the government, as in the caseof the revolt in Jerusalem in 1825 when both the notables and the commonpeople rebelled against the Ottoman governor. This was an extremely efficientprovincial administration, and one cannot but note that it was also benign: itgave to the local population the crucial element of autonomy while makingthe Ottoman government something other than foreign rule. Furthermore,members of the local a‘yan families were not confined to serving in Jerusalem.Some rose to prominence in other provinces and reached positions closeto the top in Istanbul itself. An example is Musa al-Khalidi, who becameAnadolu Kazaskeri (the third highest post in the ulama hierarchy) in the1820s.49

An interesting and important dimension of the a‘yan institution was thateach of the important families in Jerusalem became in time the custodian ofa certain socio-economic function: The Husaynis became muftis and Naqibal-Ashraf and Hanafi muftis; the Khalidis became sharia court secretaries and


deputy qadis. Other families specialized in heading Sufi orders or oversee-ing holy tombs or administered large-scale waqfs. While “coups” (effectedthrough special connections in Istanbul) did take place, they were rare, anda sort of balance of power came into being among the various families, eachrecognizing the importance and contribution of the others. One can imaginethat as time went by, a sort of balance of honor, not just of power, devel-oped among the families, where the social and political niche of each becamesacrosanct and not to be tampered with by other families. In the light of this,we must register our complete disagreement with the widespread contentionthat the a‘yan constituted a relic of a barbaric and primitive social formation.Quite the contrary: it was an ingenious and life-giving institution. To the localpopulation it gave autonomy and a real measure of meaningful participationin the Ottoman political system; to the state it gave efficient administration atminimum cost.

If Palestinian society of the early Ottoman period did not deserve Morris’scategorization as “primitive,” it deserved it even less in the nineteenth century,when the country entered an accelerated pace of economic development asof about 1830. It is true that we are not talking about an industrial revo-lution. The tariff policies of the advanced industrial nations determined thebasic division of labor between Western Europe and the rest of the world.But within such limits, development was possible, and Middle Easterners,including Palestinians, were able to take part in it. For example, a formergeneration of economic historians held that the entire body of the traditionalcraft system in the Middle East was wrecked soon after 1825, when the in-troduction of steam navigation drastically lowered the cost of transportation.Later studies have shown that this was far from being so simple. The earlyindustrial revolution affected primarily the weaving and other textile indus-tries and had little impact on most of the traditional crafts. The entire foodindustry—evidently the most important traditional industry—was not sensi-tive to flooding by foreign products.50 Besides the various crafts and industriesthat held their own, we find an array of new professions and occupations.The new tourism industry, for example, gave rise to new inns and hotels,as well as tourist guides and photographers. Pharmacists, doctors, journalists,and even lawyers were other new professions in nineteenth-century Syria andPalestine. On the whole, one gets the clear impression that employment wasnow more available than before.51 This was also the conclusion of AlexanderScholch, who studied minutely the economic development of Palestine be-tween 1856 and 1882, and found substantial growth in commerce and craftproduction in all the cities and towns.52 This is borne out by the overall figuresof foreign trade, which in Jaffa, for example, had risen tremendously between1825 and 1875 and continued to rise to the end of the Ottoman period.53

There were also clear signs of entrepreneurial activities among the localand regional Muslim population. Already impressive, to my mind, is ThomasPhilipp’s recent work showing the phenomenal (though temporary) rise ofthe town of Acre during the governorship of Ahmad al-Jazzar in the late


eighteenth and early nineteenth century. During this period, the populationincreased from some 2,000 to 35,000, to become the third largest town in Syriaand Palestine. Such a phenomenal rise, obviously propelled by the cottontrade, should in my view be attributed to entrepreneurship, and shows that theregion’s inhabitants knew how to take advantage of new economic opportu-nities if allowed to do so by a sufficiently powerful and benign government.54

An impressive example of Arab-Palestinian entrepreneurship in the nine-teenth century was the production and export of Jaffa oranges.55 The exportof oranges to Europe began in earnest in the second half of the nineteenthcentury, and in the last twenty-five years of the Ottoman era it seems to havereached a frenzied pace. Orange groves expanded enormously, and wouldhave done so even more quickly were it not for a bottleneck in the formof a water shortage. To overcome this problem, Jaffa orange growers, mostof them Muslims, adopted the most sophisticated water technology availableat the time, introducing some 500 European water pumps in a sort of mini-industrial revolution.

Another interesting case of economic development at the time could beobserved in Gaza. Farmers and Bedouins in the region started in the lastquarter century or so of the Ottoman era to grow large quantities of barleydestined for the beer breweries of Europe. By the end of the period, about40,000 tons of barley were shipped annually from the virtually nonexistentport of Gaza to Europe.56

Finally, a word is in order concerning the “primitive” nature of Palestinianagriculture, seen as so central in Morris’s analysis. This agriculture was prob-ably as simple technologically as any at the time, and there is not much toadd to this point. But there is something to be said about Jewish agriculture,to which, obviously, the Palestinian model must be compared. The fact isthat we know enough about early Jewish agriculture in Palestine to warrantsome humility, particularly on the part of Israeli scholars. As is well known,the first agricultural colonies that were established in 1882 collapsed withina year, and were only saved from total ruin by the massive intervention ofBaron Rothschild, the French Jewish philanthropist, who single-handedly keptJewish agriculture in Palestine afloat until 1900. The less than successful natureof early Zionist agriculture is beautifully described by Ahad Ha‘am in 1891:

There are now about ten [Jewish] colonies standing forsome years, and no one of them is able to support itself. . . wherever I strived to look, I did not manage to seeeven one man living solely from the fruit of his land. . . .

In Palestine, as in all lands, the tiller of the land will eat itsfruit . . . the traveler can see on both sides of the road fertilefields and valleys covered with grains. The Arabs are work-ing and eating. . . . Grief has engulfed us alone. Why then?The real answer, that any clever man in Palestine knows, isthat the first colonists brought with them substantial idealism,


but they all lack the qualifications necessary for agricultureand cannot be simple farmers.57

All this goes to show that despite all the difficulties, the Palestinian econ-omy in the nineteenth century was in the throes of a dynamic change, andthat if the country failed to industrialize it was not because entrepreneurshipwas lacking.

Meanwhile, important socio-political developments were also taking place.It is now clear that the formerly much maligned Ottoman reforms were farmore effective in transforming the country than was previously realized.58 Inthe first place, much happened in the realm of law and order, particularly afterthe Crimean war, when army units were finally sent against the local powersthat had never accepted the authority of the central government, particularlyin the mountainous areas. These local forces were subdued one by one. Fromthe ‘Ama’ir family in Dura to the ‘Abd al-Hadi family in Nablus, local strong-men were routed and Ottoman authority was definitively established. In thelowlands, the Bedouin were subdued within a generation and either expelledeast of the Jordan or turned into settled farmers. The only local power elitethat did not feel the brunt of the Ottoman crackdown were the a‘yan fam-ilies of Jerusalem, but even they were transformed toward the end of theperiod, gaining in efficiency and becoming the backbone of a newly stream-lined Ottoman administration working in concert with the Istanbul-appointedgovernor. The hallmark of this administration was the council (village coun-cil, municipality council, administrative council). Recruitment for municipalcouncils was based on free elections, which contemporary descriptions showto have been truly democratic (though the nominating process left some roomfor the Ottoman governor).

Thus, Ottoman reform in the provinces created a true element of na-tion building for the Palestinians: from the bottom up, scores of adminis-trative, educational, judicial, and welfare institutions were established, all

Starting in 1876, therunning of the OttomanEmpire was based onparliaments, which,

however imperfect, werebased on free elections in

which the Palestiniansparticipated.

staffed by local Palestinians, all based on modern edu-cation and on rules of conduct anchored in new rulesand regulations. Even if these rules were in practiceonly partially adhered to, the resulting administrativeinfrastructure was nevertheless impressive. If one wereto compare the “Palestinianness” of the local adminis-tration of the late Ottoman period with that under theBritish mandate, there is hardly a doubt that the formerwould be ranked much higher.59

Moreover, Palestinians still participated in runningthe entire empire, which of course they did not under the British. Starting in1876, and then more regularly in 1908, the running of the Ottoman Empirewas based on parliaments, which, however imperfect, were based on freeelections in which the Palestinians participated. The parliaments, then, canprobably also be seen as modest beginnings of state building, and it would be


unfair to gloss over them just because they were nipped in the bud with thecoming of the Mandate. Historians have recently highlighted the achievementsof two of these parliamentarians, Yusuf Zia al-Khalidi and Ruhi al-Khalidi.Yusuf Zia became a member of parliament in 1876, and unexpectedly beganto function as an aggressive leader of a nonexistent opposition, criticizing thegovernment and calling for more democracy.60 Small wonder, then, that whenthe Ottoman parliament was dissolved in early 1877, Yusuf Zia was one of thefirst to be banished from Istanbul. It is noteworthy, too, that contemporariescompared him to the fiery intellectuals of the Paris Commune of 1870.

The other noteworthy parliamentarian was Yusuf Zia’s young nephew Ruhial-Khalidi, who became a member of the second Ottoman parliament after1908.61 He also was highly critical of the government and did not hesitate toexpress his views in parliamentary speeches. In this case, the main topic ofcriticism was the soft hand supposed to have been shown by the Ottomanstoward Zionism. It is interesting to note that Ruhi al-Khalidi, who knew someHebrew, wrote a book on the history of the Jewish people which includes achapter on modern Zionism. The book has not so far been published, andjudging from the extensive summary of it given in a study by Walid Khalidi,is not going to see the light of day any time soon. The reason for this isthe difference in mentality in those early days of the conflict. Thus, a writersuch as Ruhi al-Khalidi, though he believed the Palestinians’ right to theirland was unshakable, did not feel he had to harness even ancient history tothat fact and wrote with great sympathy about some heroic chapters in thepolitical history of the ancient Israelites. It is not entirely clear whether Ruhial-Khalidi’s friendly treatment of ancient Jewish history can be explained bya prepolitical naivete or whether it was motivated by some kind of ideology.One can suspect the former; but even so, such an ability and readiness tolook at the “other” from the inside, so to speak, is a rare commodity in thehistoriography of the conflict.62

Though both Yusuf Zia al-Khalidi and Ruhi al-Khalidi were notables, theirperformance in the service of their community seems respectable not to saycommendable. Their appearance in Jerusalemite society of the late Ottomanera bespeaks a certain level of political development, which certainly wasnot attained by Palestinian society during the Mandate. Both the politicaldevelopment in these earlier years and the quality of the emergent leadershipas exemplified by these two Khalidis surpassed anything witnessed under theBritish, when leadership of their stature was entirely absent. We shall try toexplain why later on; for now it is important to note that their very appearancein late Ottoman times shows that the later absence of leadership was not dueto some inherent defect in Palestinian society itself.

THE REASONS FOR THE PALESTINIAN COLLAPSE IN 1948

It is now time to return to Benny Morris’s analysis of the collapse of Pales-tinian society in 1948. It is the present writer’s contention that there were


several reasons for what befell the Palestinians in 1948, none of them re-lated to inherent flaws in the society. Some of the reasons were contingent,while others derived from their overwhelming weakness in the face of twoformidable opponents, one a world empire totally outside their league, andthe other a small force numerically, but unusually well-endowed in humanand economic terms and backed, both politically and economically, by pow-erful international forces. Let us review some of the factors in some detail.

One major short-term factor leading to the collapse of Palestinian societywas the demoralizing effect of the early flight of the Palestinian upper classfrom the areas under fire. Morris claims that a society behaving in such a wayfundamentally lacked cohesiveness. But there is no independent proof of this,and recent cases throw some doubt on Morris’s assumption. Was the large-scale flight of the residents of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel in the 1990s, inthe face of Katyusha bombardments from Lebanon, to be interpreted as socialdisintegration? And what about the flight of 100,000 Israelis from Tel Avivduring the Gulf War in the early 1990s? Could a more plausible explanationfor this flight be that these people simply had no active role to play in the area,in many cases had relatives in other parts of the country or could afford tostay in hotels or abroad, and therefore chose to leave the targeted area whilethe fighting continued? None of these factors applied for the Jewish society inPalestine in 1948, but all of them applied to the Palestinian upper class (theaverage Jewish economic income was of course higher than the Palestinianaverage, but very few individuals in the Yishuv were rich). The upshot isthat this factor has been blown out of proportion, and probably very littlemeaning can be attached to it in concrete sociological and historical terms.

Possibly the most unsettling of Morris’s claims is that the Mandate provideda nursery of state building that the Palestinians failed to take advantage of butwhich the Zionists exploited to the full. The truth is that this nursery did exist,but only for the Yishuv. Full elaboration of this point alone would require abook,63 but some factors can be mentioned. Tom Segev has recently shownhow the Mandate helped consolidate the Jewish polity, noting, for example,the closeness that existed between at least part of the British leadership andthe Zionist leadership, notably (though not only) Chaim Weizmann. The latteris even admired by some English leaders of the period. The overall impres-sion one gets is that the Yishuv was not really considered a society underoccupation, but a state within a state.64

It is interesting to compare the way Britain suppressed the two revolts thattook place in Mandatory Palestine, the Arab revolt of 1936–39 and the Jewishrevolt following World War II. The suppression of the Arab revolt was brutaland cruel, and was suppressed in ways that even some British officials de-scribed as not shaming the Nazis. These methods included the indiscriminatekilling of villagers near where British soldiers had been the victims of terroristacts, the stripping of women to make sure that they were not men in disguise,and tying village leaders on trains as human shields.65 Such acts against Jewswould have been inconceivable. Indeed, the suppression of the Jewish revolt


was almost a Boy Scout affair. The worst moment of this suppression was theso-called Black Saturday of June 1946, in which the British army searched forhidden weapons and arrested some second-rank Zionist leaders, who wereheld for a number of months and never brought to trial. Compare to this largenumbers of executions of the leaders of the Arab revolt and the forced exileof countless others for years on end. In 1948 most of the potential leadershipof the Palestinians was either dead, in prison, or in exile—hardly a “nurseryof state building,” and hardly equal treatment to that shown to the Zionistmovement. Morris does not give weight to this massive repression as a majorfactor in the collapse of Palestinian society.

We must also keep in mind the Greek tragedy-like nature of the Palestinianrevolt. Much smaller revolts, in Iraq in 1920 and in Egypt in 1919, propelledthese countries along the road to independence and statehood, while Britain’scommitment to Zionism made such an outcome inconceivable for Palestine.The White Paper of 1939, which seems to negate this conclusion, really cameto appease the Muslim world (India) in anticipation of the coming storm inEurope. That same gathering storm, of course, also meant that the Palestinianrevolt was totally ill-fated in terms of timing.

A major factor shedding light on the debate at hand is the history of ed-ucation in Mandatory Palestine.66 Britain’s differential treatment of the twocommunities in that domain is important both symbolically and practically,and it helps explain the collapse of Palestinian society in 1948. Whereas theeducation for the Palestinians was provided in the manner of a conqueringpower, the Jewish-Zionist community was given special treatment: it was ac-corded complete autonomy to handle its educational affairs as it saw fit. Thisobviously had some ideological background, insofar as the Jews were seennot as being under occupation so much as partners. This differential treat-ment had grave consequences for the nation-building processes in the twocommunities: while the Palestinians received a traditional and conservativeeducation that stamped out any nationalist and anti-imperial overtones, Jew-ish education was characterized by an ultra-nationalism that put the nationabove the individual and inculcated in students self-sacrifice as the highestvalue. Hatred and contempt for the British and complete discursive oblit-eration of the Palestinians were part and parcel of this educational system.Thus, the educational system under the Mandate superbly prepared the Jewsfor the day of reckoning, while it effectively tied the (cultural) hands of thePalestinians behind their backs in preparing for 1948.

But to my mind, the most important factor inhibiting any nation-buildingactivity by Palestinians under the Mandate was their failure to found a parlia-ment. It is well known that Britain offered them this possibility in the early1920s and again in the early 1930s. But was it a fair offer? There was no talk ofa usual parliament based on representation. The Palestinians were supposedto agree to parity between themselves and the Zionists, who by the end ofthe Mandate constituted only about a third of the population. No nation onearth would have acquiesced to such an offer.


The importance of this issue can be gauged by comparing Palestine toSyria in this regard.67 In terms of overall sociological structure, Syria andPalestine were quite similar: both had a powerful a‘yan class with identicalcharacteristics, the notable families in both countries having originated fromofficeholding and religious learning, with the partial addition of landlordismin the nineteenth century. The interests of the Syrian notables were just astraditional and conservative, but they were able to make a partial transforma-tion to the age of nationalism and fought the French vigorously throughoutFrance’s mandate over Syria. After the collapse of a popular revolt in 1927,the main arena of conflict for the Syrian elite was the Syrian parliament, whichthe French allowed them to found. While the elite was riven by enmities andfamily rivalries, the parliament afforded a strong political framework that tiedit together and prevented its atomization. It was therefore nothing other thanthe parliament that allowed the Syrian elite to conduct a relatively success-ful campaign that led to the country’s independence nineteen years after thecollapse of the 1927 national revolt. In other words, the main difference be-tween the functioning of the national movement in Syria and its Palestiniancounterpart was the latter’s failure to establish a parliament that could unitethe factions in the meaningful whole that certainly existed beneath the fis-sures. While the existence of a parliament in Syria imparted a nation-buildingcapability to the Syrian national movement, the negation of that possibilityfor the Palestinians spelled their doom.

Turning now back to the part played by the maligned Palestinian a‘yan inthe collapse of Palestinian society in 1948, it would be superfluous to reiteratethe divisiveness, animosity, and bitter clannishness that characterized theirmode of action during the Mandate. Nonetheless, since the situation waspretty much the opposite during the Ottoman period, when factions andfamilies respected one another and cooperated on official bodies such asthe administrative council with very little friction, it seems to me that onecan attribute the change to the difference between the British and Ottomanapproaches. Under the latter, each family occupied a niche that providedit with self-esteem and the esteem of others. The British, perhaps out of anOrientalist assumption that everything the Ottomans did was wrong, placed allthe power within Palestinian society in the hands of one individual, Haj Aminal-Husayni, who did not even really owe his job to his family. The carefullynurtured balance among the families was shattered overnight, and with it thekind of noblesse oblige aristocratic cooperation so beautifully described byAlbert Hourani. Honor, status, and probably even economic income were lostunder the British. Small wonder that what remained, in such conditions, wasall-out war and a complete inability to cooperate.

Turning the tables and looking briefly at the Jewish-Zionist society un-der the Mandate, the glowing terms Morris uses to describe it need seriousrevision and historicizing. For example, while the Arab society of Pales-tine was “normal” in that it had the usual range of classes and occupa-tions found in any traditional society, this was not at all the case for Jewish


society in Mandatory Palestine. With Jewish immigration regulated, under thearrangements agreed between the Jewish Agency and the British governmentonly professional people or those with some wealth were admitted. This rulewas enforced, at least to a point, and there is evidence that illegal immigrantswere deported.68 As a result, comparing the two populations in terms of edu-cation, political involvement, and so on is not entirely meaningful, especiallyif the implicit intention is to castigate and point fingers.

In sum, the critical mode of thinking applied to the 1948 war by Israel’s“New History,” which suggests that the traditional Zionist historiography wasbiased—in fact, “Orientalist”—in its portrayal of that conflict, has not been rig-orously followed by all its practitioners even to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.But the concept of self-critical research implicit in the New History is all themore in need of being extended to the entire length of Palestinian history.The empathy and reflexivity which have become the buzzwords of socio-historical research in the post-Saidian period should be embraced by Israeliand Palestinian historians alike in their mutual research. As an Israeli scholar,this writer has taken it upon himself to fulfill his part of this implicit mission.This study was intended as a small example of the task which lies ahead of us.

NOTES

1. Aziza Khazum, “Western Culture,Ethnic Stigmatization and SocialSegregation: The Origins of the EthnicInequality in Israel,” Israeli Sociology 1(1999), pp. 385–428.

2. Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: Historyand Ideology (Tel Aviv: Breirot Press,1991).

3. Edward Said, Orientalism (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1978).

4. Edward Said, The Question ofPalestine (New York: Vintage Books,1979).

5. Rashid Khalidi has recently followeda line of research very similar to the onesuggested in this study. See RashidKhalidi, “Arab Society in MandatoryPalestine: The Half-Full Glass?” in Historiesof the Modern Middle East: NewDirections, eds. Israel Gershoni, H. Erdemand U. Wokock (Boulder: Lynne Rienner,2002), pp. 229–46; idem., “ThePalestinians and 1948: The UnderlyingCauses of Failure,” in The War forPalestine, eds. Eugene L. Rogan and AviShlaim (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001), pp. 12–36.

6. Benny Morris, The Birth of thePalestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989).

7. Ibid., 8.8. Ibid., 9.9. Ibid., 15–16.10. Ibid., 17.11. Ibid., 17–18.12. Yaacoc Shimoni, Arvei Eretz Yisrael

(Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1947), pp. 240–330.13. Ibid., 275–76.14. Y. Vaschitz, The Arabs of Palestine

(Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1947), pp. 19,134, 336–37.

15. See Benedict Anderson, ImaginedCommunities (London: Verso, 1982).

16. See Ernest Gellner, Nations andNationalism (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1983).

17. See James Jankowski and IsraelGershoni, eds., Rethinking Nationalism inthe Arab Middle East (New York:Columbia University Press, 1997),particularly the chapters by Gershoni,Gelvin, and Halliday.

18. Juan R. I. Cole and Deniz Kandioti,“Nationalism and the Colonial Legacy inthe Middle East and Central Asia:Introduction,” International Journal ofMiddle East Studies 34 (2002),pp. 189–203.

19. James Gelvin, Divided Loyalties(Berkeley: University of California Press,1999).


20. For example, Anthony D. Smith,The Nation in History (Boston: BrandeisUniversity, 2000).

21. Yehoshua Porath, The Emergenceof the Palestinian-Arab NationalMovement, 1918–1929 (London: FrankCass, 1974), pp. 4–7.

22. Mujir al-Din al-‘Ulaymi, Al-Unsal-Jalil fi Tarikh al-Quds wa’l-Khalil, 2vols., (Najaf: al-Matbaa al-Haydariyya,1968).

23. Ibid., 2: 66–68.24. Ibid., 1: 105, 114, 146.25. Ibid., 2: 73.26. Ibid., 1: 65, 66, 94, 101.27. Ibid., 1: 303.28. Ibid., 1: 71.29. See Haim Gerber, “Palestine and

Other Territorial Concepts in theSeventeenth Century,” InternationalJournal of Middle East Studies 30 (1998),pp. 563–572.

30. Ibid.31. See, for example, articles in

al-Quds, 27 Nisan 1909; al-Nafiral-Othmani, 14 Haziran 1910; al-Najjah, 8Nisan 1910.

32. Porath, Emegence, pp. 4–7.33. Ibid., 84.34. Ted Swedenburg, Memories of

Revolt (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1995).

35. Bernard Lewis, History:Remembered, Recovered, Invented(Princeton: Princeton University Press,1975).

36. Mujir al-Din al-‘Ulaymi, 2: 72–73:Thumma ‘ammara burjan ‘ala dahral-iwan min jihat al-gharb lil-jihad fi sabilAllah ta‘ala wa wada‘a fihi alat al-harb liqital al-Afranj.

37. Amnon Cohen, “The Fortificationof Ottoman Jerusalem: The EuropeanDimension,” Kathedra, no. 63 (1992),pp. 52–64; Dror Zeevi, An OttomanCentury: The District of Jerusalemin the 1600s (Albany: State Universityof New York Press, 1996), pp. 10,32–33.

38. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity(New York: Columbia University Press,1998), p. 29.

39. Adil Mann‘a, “The Sancak ofJerusalem between Two Invasions” (Ph.D.diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem,1986), pp. 1 ff.

40. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity,pp. 107–9.

41. Adrian Hastings, The Constructionof Nationhood (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998).

42. Wolf-Dieter Hutteroth and KamalAbdulfattah, Historical Geography ofPalestine, Transjordan and SouthernSyria in the Late Sixteenth Century(Erlangen: Frankische GeographischeGesellschaft, 1977), maps.

43. Amnon Cohen, Palestine in theEighteenth Century (Jerusalem:Eisenbrauns, 1973).

44. Beshara Doumani, RediscoveringPalestine (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1995), passim.

45. See Haim Gerber, Islamic Law andCulture, 1600–1840 (Leiden: BrillAcademic Publishers, 1999).

46. See Zeevi, An Ottoman Century,chapter 2.

47. There are numerous studies on thea‘yan, and all of them are derogatory.See e.g. Salim Tamari, “Factionalism andClass Formation in Recent PalestinianHistory,” in Roger Owen, ed., Studies inthe Economic and Social History ofPalestine in the Nineteenth andTwentieth Centuries (Carbondale andEdwardsville: Southern Illinois UniversityPress, 1982), pp. 177–202; Issa Khalaf,Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalismand Social Disintegration, 1939–1948(Albany: State University of New YorkPress, 1991).

48. While we owe here the originalanalysis to Albert Hourani, the detaileddescription of how this system worked indaily life in various localities remains tobe done. In the case of Jerusalem, at leastthe groundwork for such a project hasbeen done, in the form of atraditional-looking modern biographicaldictionary of Palestinian a‘yan, composedby Adil Manna‘. This paragraphsummarizes his work in general. See AdilMann‘a, A‘lam Falastin fi awakhir al-ahdal-Uthmani (Beirut, Muassasat al-Dirasatal-Filastiniyya, 1995).

49. Ibid., 137–38.50. See Haim Gerber, Ottoman Rule in

Jerusalem (Berlin: K. Schwarz, 1985),pp. 62 ff.

51. Ibid., 69 ff.52. Alexander Scholch, Palestine in

Transformation: 1856–1882 (Washington:Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993).

53. Ibid., 92; Gerber, Ottoman Rule inJerusalem, p. 74 ff.


54. See Thomas Philipp, Acre: The Riseand Fall of a Palestinian City, 1730–1831(New York: Columbia University Press,2001).

55. Gerber, Ottoman Rule inJerusalem, p. 78 ff.

56. Ibid., 79–80.57. Ahad Ha‘am, “Truth from the Land

of Israel,” in Collected Works, vol. 1. AhadHa‘am (Jerusalem, 1947), p. 28.

58. I mainly summarize here myOttoman Rule in Jerusalem, passim. Thisis also the general line of the argument ofRashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity,chapters 1–3.

59. Adil Mann‘a records hundreds ofcases from the late Ottoman period oflocal Palestinians filling important localadministrative functions in variouslocalities and various levels.

60. See on him Rashid Khalidi,Palestinian Identity, p. 69 ff.

61. Ibid., 76 ff.62. See Walid Khalidi, “Kitab

al-Sionism, aw al-mas’ala al-sahyiuniyyali-Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidial-mutawaffa sanat 1913,” in HishamNashshabe, ed., Dirasat Filistiniyya(Beirut, Muassasat al-Dirasatal-Filastiniyya, 1988), pp. 37–82. In aprivate letter to the present writer WalidKhalidi states that he refrained frompublishing the entire manuscript becauseRuhi quotes extensively from classicalArabic sources (on Judaism and Jewish

history) and from modern encyclopedias(on Zionism) without identifying thepassages he transcribes verbatim, andwhich he intermingles with his owncommentary. According to Walid Khalidi,a scholarly edition would require ameticulous identification of these passagesand their sources, which are not credited,a “tedious and mechanical” undertakingfor which he has “not so far had thetime.”

63. Something of this nature hasalready been done by Barbara Smith, whoput more emphasis on the way theMandate advantaged Zionism, while I ammore interested in how the Palestinianswere disadvantaged, in real historicalways and in discursive-ideological ways.See Barbara Smith, The Roots ofSeparatism in Palestine (Syracuse:Syracuse University Press, 1993).

64. Tom Segev, One PalestineComplete (New York: Little Brown andCo., 2000), chapters 3,12, 15, andpassim.

65. Ibid., chapter 20.66. Ibid., passim; Ylana Miller,

Government and Society in RuralPalestine, 1920–1948 (Austin: Universityof Texas Press, 1985), pp. 90–118.

67. See Philip Khoury, Syria and theFrench Mandate (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1990), passim.

68. See Segev, One Palestine, chapter10.

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Zionism, Orientalism and Palestine by Saied

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