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Contested Historical Interpretations of Palestine |
| Reprinted from the Middle East Studies
Association Bulletin, Summer 2002 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards). Copyright 2002 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America |
| Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory
Palestine, by Deborah S. Bernstein. (SUNY Series in Israeli Studies) 277 pages, photos, notes, bibliography, index. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. $23.95 (Cloth) isbn 0-7914-4540-2 The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, edited by Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim. (Cambridge Middle East Studies) 235 pages, maps, notes, bibliography, index. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001. $54.95 (Cloth) isbn 0-521-79139-1 Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine, 1918-1948, by A. J. Sherman. 245 pages, photos, notes, bibliography, index. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. $17.95 (Paper) isbn 0-8018-6620-0 Pangs of the Messiah: The Troubled Birth of the Jewish State, by Martin Sicker. 280 pages, bibliography, index. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. $55.00 (Cloth) isbn 0-275-96638-0 The fierce contest to control the land of Palestine is mirrored in the fierce contest over its history. Competing Zionist and Palestinian national narratives underscore the righteousness of each side’s cause while delegitimizing the legitimacy of the Other. Despite the long-standing polarized narratives, scholars increasingly engage in critical―and self-critical―analyses of the history of Palestine. The first two books under review contribute significantly to that literature; the second two books are curiosities, in quite different ways. I will address those two books first. Sherman’s Mandate Days offers an intimate picture of the lives of British officials and their families from the time that the British instituted their military occupation in 1918 through the last bitter days of the British evacuation in May 1948. Based on the premise that the thirty year imperium was “the product of expedient but incompatible undertakings made to Arabs and Jews” in World War I (p. 11), Sherman depicts the efforts of British officials to maintain their version―and vision―of orderly rule in an increasingly disorderly environment. The British assumed that they had a natural authority to rule, sometimes expressed “casual contempt and feelings of superiority” (p. 26) over the Arabs, and had “no great sympathy” (p. 27) for Zionist aspirations. The more Arabs and Jews challenged British authority, the stronger was the rulers’ impulse to punish them and to impose order as well as to retreat into their own rigid and ranked social life and administrative routines. Other scholars have analyzed the actual policies pursued by the British.[17] The value of Sherman’s book lies not in analyzing or describing actual British policies but in revealing the personal views of the increasingly beleaguered British, as expressed in their diaries and letters home. These personal records are particularly revealing in depicting their frayed nerves during the final years and in expressing “emotion[s] quite at variance with [their] imperturbable public persona” (p. 221). They bewailed the catastrophic ending to the mandate, angry that they had simply abandoned power and fled instead of smoothly transferring the administrative systems to their Jewish and/or Arab successors. If Mandate Days fails to engage in a scholarly debate with its raw material and to critique the political assumptions that underlay British policy, Sicker asserts his politics on every page of birth-Pangs of the Messiah. He declaims his intent to challenge mainstream Zionist “apologetics” which, in his view, have “little or no place for inconvenient facts or dissonant voices” (p. x). His voice comes from the Revisionist right. Palestinian Arabs consistently engaged in “mischief making,” “disorders,” and “riots” that employed “mobs” and led to “pogroms.” The British “placated,” “appeased,” and “colluded” with the Arabs throughout their rule and continuously “betrayed” their commitments to the Jews. Zionist Organization leader Chaim Weizmann never stood up to the British; indeed, he usually “collaborated” with the British and he “betrayed” his own people by accepting the principle of territorial partition in 1937 and 1947. Only the Revisionist Vladimir Jabotinsky understood that the Zionists must end their “passivity” and force the Arabs to realize that they could not “prevent the emergence of a powerful Jewish state” (p. 127). Sicker praises Lehi and the Irgun for their “dramatic operations” (p. 212) against the Arabs and British, which forced the British to depart. His dry account of the Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel contrasts with Sherman’s British officials, who agonized in terror and shock over the huge human losses caused by the blast. Ultimately, Sicker’s polemical screed offers nothing new for the serious scholar. He rehashes standard Revisionist texts and shows no interest in addressing (or even acknowledging) the critical literature that has been produced in the past decade. One turns with relief to Bernstein’s richly textured account of the complex relations between Jewish and Arab laborers during the mandate. Her analysis of urban workers in the mixed city of Haifa complements Gershon Shafir’s groundbreaking Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914,[18] which addressed the issue of agricultural labor in the pre-mandate era. Bernstein’s analysis also draws in part on Zachary Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 and Michael Shalev’s Labour and the Political Economy in Israel. [19] Bernstein argues that it is misleading to focus on the Jewish community alone, as “a separate, autonomous, and isolated entity” (p. 4). The Jewish nationalist struggle to construct boundaries that would isolate their community from the Arabs was embedded in contexts that shifted over time. She depicts the dynamic interaction―and tension―between the two communities by detailing labor relations in four arenas: the construction and manufacturing sectors and the government-run port and railway systems. Construction was central to the “process of creation” (p. 83) of the Jewish national home. Bernstein recounts the steps by which the Zionist labor movement successfully pressured Jewish contractors to hire unionized Jewish workers instead of inexpensive and skilled Arabs. Militant pickets were not needed in order to expel Arabs from the Jewish manufacturing sector, since those industrialists largely hired Jews from the start. Not surprisingly, in the few instances in which Arabs worked in Jewish factories (namely, a match and a tile factory, and Nesher Cement’s quarries), the General Federation of Jewish Labor (Histadrut) did not assist the Arab workers to better their work conditions. National solidarity trumped class solidarity in both construction and industry. Nevertheless, an exclusionary approach could not be applied in the government sector, which employed large numbers of Arabs. Rather, the Zionist movement sought to acquire a niche for Jewish workers in the operations at the bustling Haifa port. Ultimately, they acquired not just a niche but even control over valuable customs storehouses―and entry gates separate from the Arab laborers. The railways offered the sole counter-example: Jewish and Arab trainmen, mechanics, and laborers worked side-by-side and sought the same economic goals. But their efforts to form a common, apolitical labor organization were stymied by the highly politicized environment. Bernstein’s nuanced analysis of the micro-politics inside these arenas adds important insights into the operation of Avodat Ivrit (Hebrew labor), the separatist dynamics that underpinned it, and the collective reactions by Arabs whose livelihood and economic development were threatened by this exclusivist process. (The Arabs do not, however, come alive as people and actors, despite Bernstein’s concern to emphasize the interactive dimensions of the labor market). Finally, Rogan and Shlaim have assembled a valuable collection of essays on the war in 1948, which they term “a defining moment for the region as a whole” (p. 1). Recent writings have focused on why and how Palestinians became refugees. Rogan and Shlaim do not ignore that dimension, but they extend the analysis further by addressing the political dynamics inside Egypt (Fawaz A. Gerges), Iraq (Charles Tripp), Syria (Joshua Landis), and Transjordan (Rogan), which had a decisive impact on those governments’ diplomatic and military actions. Benny Morris revises his analysis of Zionist thinking on the expulsion of Palestinian refugees. Based on Zionist documents from the 1930s, he argues that “the crystallization of the consensus in support of transfer…helped pave the way for the precipitation of the Palestinian exodus in 1948,” an exodus that was “triggered by explicit acts and orders of expulsion by Jewish/Israeli troops” (p. 56) to a greater extent than he previous acknowledged.[20] Nonetheless, despite new evidence from military archives concerning Operation Hiram in the upper Galilee in October 1948, Morris still does not view expulsion as a centrally-directed policy. Laila Parsons challenges Morris by comparing the treatment of the Druze, who were not expelled, and Muslims, who were deported even when they did not resist the Jewish armed forces. She concludes: “the evidence...of preferential treatment towards the Druze…buttresses the arguments for design and against randomness” (p. 69). The essays on Arab regimes unpack the stereotypical image of a monolithic Arab world intent on destroying the nascent Jewish state. Shlaim notes that the “traditional Zionist version…presents the 1948 war as a simple, bipolar no-holds-barred struggle between a monolithic and malevolent Arab adversary and a tiny peace-loving Jewish community” (p. 79). In reality, the Israeli armed forces fielded 35,000 troops, as against 25,000 Arab troops, as early as mid-May 1948 (p. 81). And the Arab armed forces were not united, either politically or militarily. The governments in Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia focused on containing the political ambitions of Transjordan’s Emir Abdullah. The Syrian government was terrified that Abdullah would absorb Syria as part of his Greater Syria Project and therefore feared committing many troops to assist the Palestinians. The Egyptian king, who sought to prevent Abdullah from seizing Palestine, ordered his soldiers into battle over the objections of his senior commanders. And the Saudi regime showed its displeasure by massing troops on the Transjordanian border. Abdullah himself aimed to implement his secret agreement to divide Palestine with the Zionist movement, while simultaneously defeating his bitter rivals―the Palestinian Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Egyptian king. And the Iraqi regent, with his family ties to Abdullah, sought to maintain Iraq’s pan-Arab image and support Abdullah, while not enabling the Transjordanian monarch to become too powerful. These intricate rivalries―as well as the need to respond to public outrage over the expulsion of Palestinians in the spring of 1948―sucked the rulers into a war for which they were completely unprepared. Tripp’s observation about the “disjunctions between the rhetorical and material aspects of Iraqi politics” (p. 146) applies equally to the other Arab regimes. The Palestinians disappear as actors in these accounts. Even Rashid Khalidi views their defeat in 1948 as “a foregone conclusion” (p. 30), given the way in which the mandatory system prevented them from developing representative national institutions, compounded by the “crippling” destruction (p. 29) of their socio-economic and political structures during the 1936-39 revolt and their confrontation with the highly-mobilized Jewish society. Better political leadership and more astute political calculations might have marginally improved their situation, but could not have altered the outcome, in his view. In the end, Edward Said restores the human dimension: the refugees who were “scarred forever,” their “lives broken” (p. 206), and his indomitable aunt who devoted herself to assisting the refugees who poured into Cairo. Said aspires to a new political dynamic that will put the needs and aspirations of the individual human being above those of the self-absorbed collectivity, whether Zionist or Arab. He hopes that two contrapuntal histories will lead to a composite identity and a common citizenship (p. 218). Just how far we remain from that vision is all too evident in the militarized, polarized environment that overwhelms today’s Israel and Palestine. |
| [17]
One might note John J. McTague, British Policy in Palestine, 1917-1922 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), for his insights into the British military administration; Naomi Shepherd,
Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine, 1917-1948 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), for her focus on the ways in which Palestine was ruled essentially as a Crown Colony and the limited efforts to invest in health and education for the Arab majority; and Martin Kolinsky,
Law, Order and Riots in Mandatory Palestine, 1928-1935 (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1993), which delineates the failed efforts to contain escalating Arab protests against the Zionist project. [18] Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, rev. ed. 1996. [19] Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996; and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. [20] The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). |
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