Abstract
This essay examines Palestinian “men of capital” in British-ruled Palestine. It lays out their historical erasure as the product of settler colonialism; the historiographic dominance of the aristocrat, the comprador, and the middle-class hero; and how nostalgia, mourning, and the idealization of pre-1948 Palestine have flattened social life. Elites were not homogenous landowners but worked in commercial and industrial ventures. These men (and to a lesser extent women) shaped a broader Arab nahda, or renaissance, as an economic project. This essay maps out the regimes of calculation that realized national economy as a space of surveillance. It argues that attention to how these regimes unfolded could destabilize the conventional depiction of the colonial body as the agent and the colonized body as its ephemeral shadow.
Notes
1 This article is adapted from Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine, by Sherene Seikaly.
2 See Saba, F. S. Letter to Secretary of Arab Higher Committee. Jerusalem. 5 April 1948. Israel State Archive in Jerusalem: AAD/RG65/al-Hussaini. The Arab Higher Committee was first constituted in 1936 in response to the outbreak of the revolt. In 1946, the Arab League reconstituted the Committee. See Mattar (Citation1992) and Pappé (Citation2004).
3 National Committee of Bir al-Sabi’. 1948. Letter to Secretary of Arab Higher Committee. Jerusalem. 17 March 1948. Israel State Archive in Jerusalem: AAD/RG65/al-Hussaini.
4 As I discuss in my book Men of Capital (Seikaly Citation2016), I have made a conscious choice here of calling these figures what they called themselves. As I suggest below, the categories of the “middle class” were in formation and were not categories of self-identification.
6 Personal interview with Fuad Saba, grandson of the elder Fuad Saba. 21 January 2013.
7 See also Alexander Scholch (1982, 56).
8 See article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, Versailles, 28 June 1919, in force 10 January 1920.
9 As Campos (Citation2009, 18) puts it: “Many memoires argued that ‘native’ Sephardi and Maghrebi Jews shared cultural, spatial, and everyday practices with their Muslim neighbors that sharply differentiated them from ‘newcomer’ Ashkenazi Jewish co-religionists.”
10 I am grateful to Max Ajl for pushing me on the processual and incomplete process of partition.
12 Herzl’s contemporary, the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am (Citation2004), warned as early as 1891 that the promise of an empty land was a myth: the truth from the land of Israel, as he titled his essay, was that every piece of tillable land was already being tilled. The Arabs, he explained, were not dupes, and they would most likely put up a fight. Across the political spectrum and several decades later in 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of the Revisionists, and the forefathers of the Likud Party weighed in on the debate about Zionism’s relationship to the Palestinians. Zionist colonization would not happen, he explained, without the use of force. The Arabs who lived on the land of Palestine would not accept the imposition of Zionism. See Jabotinsky’s (Citation2002) “The Iron Wall.”
15 Ronen Shamir (Citation2013) explores how electric currents, poles, and networks made politics rather than simply transmitting politics. The concession to the Athlit Salt Company lasted until 1928 when the government extended preferential treatment to the company’s poor quality and expensive salt in the form of a protective customs duty on the higher-quality and lower-cost salt from Egypt.
19 Metzer’s (Citation1998) postscript on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 is a continuation of these convictions: “The simple fact that the territories were economic lightweights meant that they stood to be the main beneficiary of the bilateral economic relations with Israel, which dominated their external trade. These relations were conducted under the control of the occupational administration.”
22 On approaching archives with skepticism, see Steedman (Citation2011).
23 On archival production as an act of governance, see Stoler (Citation2009).
25 An abridged list of such efforts includes but is not limited to: Abu-Ghazaleh (Citation1973), Budeiri (Citation1981), Graham-Brown (Citation1980), Khalidi (Citation1981), and Miller (Citation1985); and more recently, Ayalon (Citation2004), Fleischmann (Citation2003), Ghandour (Citation2010), Haiduc-Dale (Citation2013), Kabaha (Citation2007), Khalidi (Citation1997), LeVine (Citation2005), Lockman (Citation1996), Matthews (Citation2006), Norris (Citation2013), Stanton (Citation2013), Swedenburg (Citation1995), Tamari (Citation2005), and Tamari and Nassar (Citation2005).
29 See “Representations by the Arab Chamber of Commerce to the Control Department of Post War Trade,” 1945. Israel State Archive in Jerusalem: RG2/CSO/87/19.
30 The big landowning families in this period were: Khuri (Haifa), ‘Abd al-Hadi (Nablus), al-Taji al-Faruqi (Ramli), al-Ghusayn (Ramli), Baidas (Shaykh Mu’nis), Abu Khaddra (Jaffa, Gaza), Shawa (Gaza), Hanun (Tulkarm), Baydun (Acre), al-Fahum (Nazareth), al-Tabari (Tiberias), and Jarrar and Nimr (Nablus).
31 Khalaf (Citation1991) draws on the work of al-Hout (Citation1979). Khalaf surveys one hundred political figures, and her sample includes individuals in political institutions throughout the Mandate, including the various political parties, the Arab Executive, the Supreme Muslim Council, the Arab Higher Committee, the Muslim Christian societies, the National Committees, the Arab League, and delegations to the United Nations.
32 This definition of the nahda is adapted from Khater’s (Citation2001, 155) work Inventing Home. The call for “awakening” had wide resonance in pan-Arab movements as well as in Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian Arab nationalist movements. “Awake, O Arabs, and arise!” were the first lines of the 1868 ode “Tanabbahu wa istafiqu” by the Syrian poet Ibrahim al-Yaziji. George Antonius (Citation1938) was to later evoke these words in his treatise The Arab Awakening. This theme of awakening was to characterize the language of Arab nationalists and its historians for decades to come. In the wake of the 2011 uprisings and revolutions in the Arab world, this theme of awakening has again found dominance in intellectual and media circles.
33 For a taste of this debate, see Ince (Citation2013), Losurdo (Citation2011), Mehta (Citation1999), Mantena (Citation2010), Pitts (Citation2005, Citation2010, Citation2011), Muthu (Citation2003), and Sartori (Citation2006, Citation2008). Scholars have convincingly argued that the project of British and French liberalism cannot be fully understood outside of the material conditions of imperialism and colonial capitalism that informed it. Here, the shift is to trace not how European liberals understood and acted on the colonized but how colonized elites adapted a variety of ideas and practices to navigate the promises and dangers of economic growth.
34 Tarif Khalidi punctured this narrative by detailing Palestinian intellectuals’ turn to history.
35 Subhi Yassin, among others, speaks of the post-revolt period in Palestine as one of severe political stagnation. The “frustration trope” can be read in such works as Lesch (Citation1979) and Khalidi (Citation1997). For a critique of this narrative, see Eldin (Citation2008).
38 Here I am adapting Julia Elyachar’s critique of the use of neoliberalism as an epithet that stands for everything that is wrong with the present.
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