JPS “Hidden Gems” and “Greatest Hits”: Rise Up and Write; Palestinians Making History

Abstract

Perusing JPS’s fifty years of documenting Palestinian history, this essay reminds us that history is both “what happened” as well as “the narration of what happened.” Anchoring his selection in that perspective, Alex Winder identifies Charles Anderson’s “State Formation from Below and the Great Revolt in Palestine” (2017) as a JPS “hidden gem,” and Tarif Khalidi’s “Palestinian Historiography: 1900–1948” (1981) as a “greatest hit.” Relying on primary sources by participants in the rebellion and highlighting the history of the revolt, Anderson shifts the focus of traditional accounts of the revolt from the mostly ineffective role of Palestinian notables and elites to the successes of the rebels. In a similar vein, Khalidi’s article paints a picture of a rich and vibrant Palestinian intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century that reverses the conventional view of the colonized as reactive and of the colonizer as the primary agent of history.

Keywords:

• Palestinian Indigeneity
• de-exceptionalization
• Great Revolt
• Palestine studies
• intellectual history

Notes

1 I draw this phrasing from Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who continues: “The first meaning places the emphasis on the sociohistorical process, the second on our knowledge of that process or on a story about that process.” Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 2.

2 Perhaps the most significant historiographical contribution, whose focus on Ottoman Palestine places it beyond the scope of this essay, is Beshara Doumani’s “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” JPS 21, no. 2 (Winter 1992): pp. 5–28, https://doi.org/10.2307/2537216. Other historiographical works include: Joel Beinin, “Forgetfulness for Memory: The Limits of the New Israeli History,” JPS 34, no. 2 (Winter 2005): pp. 6–23, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2005.34.2.006; Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg, “Popular Culture, Relational History, and the Question of Power in Palestine and Israel,” JPS 33, no. 4 (Summer 2004): pp. 5–20, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2004.33.4.005; and Lorenzo Veracini, “The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation,” JPS 42, no. 2 (Winter 2013): pp. 26–42, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2013.42.2.26. Notable works of history (of the “what happened” ­variety) appearing in JPS are too numerous to list here.

3 Charles W. Anderson, “State Formation from Below and the Great Revolt in Palestine,” JPS 47, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): pp. 39–55, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2017.47.1.39.

4 Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). The other foundational English-language work on the revolt, which appeared some two decades before Swedenburg’s, was a translation of Ghassan Kanafani’s pamphlet, The 1936–39 Revolt in Palestine (New York: Committee for a Democratic Palestine, 1972), http://pflp-documents.org/documents/PFLP-Kanafani3639.pdf. More recently, Matthew Kraig Kelly and Matthew Hughes have published books focusing on Britain’s efforts to quash the revolt.

5 Charles W. Anderson, “The Suppression of the Great Revolt and the Destruction of Everyday Life in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly 79 (Autumn 2019): pp. 9–27, https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/Pages%20from%20JQ%2079%20-%20Anderson.pdf; and “From Petition to Confrontation: The Palestinian National Movement and the Rise of Mass Politics, 1929–1939” (PhD diss., New York University, 2013).

6 For a similar approach to the 1929 Buraq Revolt, see Rana Barakat, “The Jerusalem Fellah: Popular Politics in Mandate-Era Palestine,” JPS 46, no. 1 (Autumn 2016): pp. 7–19, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2016.46.1.7.

7 Anderson, “State Formation from Below,” p. 45.

8 Anderson, “State Formation from Below,” p. 47.

9 Anderson, “State Formation from Below,” p. 49.

10 Tarif Khalidi, “Palestinian Historiography: 1900–1948,” JPS 10, no. 3 (Spring 1981): pp. 59–76, https://doi.org/10.2307/2536460.

11 Khalidi, “Palestinian Historiography,” p. 60.

12 Khalidi, “Palestinian Historiography,” p. 59.

13 Khalidi, “Palestinian Historiography,” p. 76.

14 Khalidi, “Palestinian Historiography,” p. 60.

15 Khalidi, “Palestinian Historiography,” p. 61.

16 As Makere Stewart-Harawira writes, there is

nothing new about the idea that Indigenous people conduct research . . . Arguably what might be new, at least as far as the last thirty or so years are concerned, is the formalizing and positioning of Indigenous research as both an act of re-claiming Indigenous sovereignty and authority and as an anti-colonial process of engagement by Indigenous scholars and researchers with mainstream, western science, an engagement that is transforming western research. At the same time, Indigenous researchers claim their ways of knowing and doing research as valid, legitimate and essential ways of understanding and interpreting the world.

See Makere Steward-Harawira, “Challenging Knowledge Capitalism: Indigenous Research in the 21st Century,” Socialist Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 2013): p. 39, https://doi.org/10.18740/S43S3V.

17 See Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine”; and Rana Barakat, “Writing/Righting Palestine Studies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Resisting the Ghost(s) of History,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2018): pp. 349–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2017.1300048.

18 Barakat, “Writing/Righting,” p. 358. She draws here on Robert Warrior’s framework of “Indigenous sovereignty.”

19 In this it overlaps and builds upon Adnan Abu-Ghazaleh’s “Arab Cultural Nationalism in Palestine during the British Mandate,” JPS 1, no. 3 (Spring 1972): pp. 37–63, https://doi.org/10.2307/2535866.

20 Khalidi, “Palestinian Historiography,” p. 64.

21 Khalidi, “Palestinian Historiography,” p. 65.

22 Doumani’s “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine” is a classic example of this critical work. Among more recent examples, see: the publication of excerpts of George Mansour’s “The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate” (1937) and Fayez Sayegh’s “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine” (1965) in the special issue of Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012) titled “Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” and coedited by Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour; the June 2018 colloquium, “Palestinian Historians/Historians of Palestine: Writing under the Mandate and Beyond,” organized by Sarah Irving at King’s College, London, https://tibawiatkings.wordpress.com/home/; Seraj Assi, The History and Politics of the Bedouin: Reimagining Nomadism in Modern Palestine (New York: Routledge, 2018), chap. 4; and Salim Tamari, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex Winder

Alex Winder is a visiting assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies at Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies. He is executive editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly.