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Reviews of Books on the Origins
of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

1. Review of Gershon Shafir's Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 4 (Oct. 1991), 1253-1254.

Gershon Shafir begins his study by noting that it "was engendered by the dislocating experience of growing into maturity as part of the Israeli generation of 1967" (p. xi).  This work contributes to an emerging literature that revises earlier accounts of Israeli development in light of recent history as well as access to new archival materials and comparative theoretical frameworks.  It is based on the author's belief that "historical sociology should be viewed as an integrated enterprise of historically grounded theory formation, i.e. the generation of theoretical propositions and concepts by means of the analytical ordering of the past in its relation to the structures of the present-day society" (p. xiii).  Accordingly, Shafir engages in a dialogue primarily with other Israeli sociologists and historians about the process of state and nation formation in modern Israel.

Basic to this study is the argument that modern Jewish settlement in Palestine must be understood in its own terms rather than through the prism of Zionist ideology.  Shafir argues that, from the beginning, conditions in Palestine itself determined choices regarding land, labor, and patterns of settlement.  These in turn helped create the institutions and organizations central to the modern state of Israel.  Thus, Shafir seeks to convince the reader that "what is unique about Israeli society emerged precisely in response to the conflict between the Jewish immigrant-settlers and the Palestinian inhabitants of the lands" (p. 6).  It is this perspective that guides the author's work and gives his argument coherence.  Although others may disagree with his choice and use of the evidence, this book is a very cogently and intelligently argued presentation.  Shafir succeeds both in conceptualizing the discussion of Israeli history in direct relationship with that of the Palestinian Arab community and in showing that our understanding of the Jewish community of Palestine is singularly distorted by studies that ignore the impact of immediate conditions on its evolution.

The author chose to limit his study to the last period of Ottoman government in Palestine.  In his survey of this period, Shafir seeks to place Zionism in the context of outside intervention by a variety of forces in the Ottoman empire and the patterns of economic dependence that developed.  This perspective allows Shafir to focus on his primary concerns of land acquisition and labor employment as providing the foundation for continued Jewish settlement in Palestine.  Moreover, Shafir's analysis permits him to point out and discuss alternative positions taken within the Jewish community itself with regard to policies of labor employment and agricultural cultivation.  His chapter on the role of "natural workers" from Yemen between 1909 and 1914 is particularly suggestive in arguing his central thesis that "the status and class position of Jewish groups in early Israeli society was bound up, and maybe for some groups and strata still is, with the broader national conflict between Jews and Arabs" (p. 120).  Far from being independent of that conflict or in a position to ignore the Arab population, Shafir argues that awareness of competition with Arab labor and vulnerability to economic forces shaped the choices made by earlier settlers and helped determine which groups would become dominant in the emerging nation and eventually in the state.

In the last several chapters of the book, Shafir extends his analysis of land and labor conditions to show that the emergence of trade unions, political parties, cooperative settlements, and military forces must also be understood in the context of the specific conditions with which their membership was dealing in Palestine and within the Jewish community itself.  Although this discussion is necessarily limited, it is sharply focused again on the author's central argument.  In the concluding chapter, Shafir attempts to link his historical presentation to the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and specifically the role of the labor movement in that conflict.  His position is clearly stated and reminds the reader that this is a study undertaken with a view to understanding the past in its relation to current Israeli realities.  Shafir's work makes a notable contribution to the literature on Israeli history and development by broadening the framework of discussion.

Ylana N. Miller
Duke University


2. Review of Barbara Smith's The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy 1920-1929 (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993).

Source: Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 1996) pp. 90-91.

The book under review falls into a growing body of studies which establish that salient aspects of the Arab-Zionist conflict began considerably earlier than had heretofore been believed.  These include works such as Neville Mandel's The Arabs and Zionism Before World War I, Nur Masalha's Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, Muhammad Muslih's The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, the late Alexander Scholch's Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882, Gershon Shafir's Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, and Anita Shapira's Land and Power: The Zionist Recourse to Force, 1881-1948, among others.  These books have probably done more to deepen our understanding of the origins of this conflict than the various "revisionist" works focusing on the period around 1948, because important though the latter were, they have simply confirmed, using Israeli, Zionist, and Western sources, what Arab sources have been saying all along about much that happened in that climactic period.

Barbara J. Smith sets out to show that on the economic plane the Jewish "state within a state" in Palestine, far from being established as a response to escalating conflict between the communities in the 1930s, existed ideologically and institutionally at the end of the 1920s, and that "the economic partition of Palestine predated geographical partition by many years and was well under way by the end of the 1920s" (p. 3).  She does so successfully in a book which focuses on British economic policy in Palestine for a single decade, illuminating the single-minded devotion of the Zionist movement to separatism and exclusiveness on the economic plane as in others, and its relative success in bending sometimes reluctant British officials to its will.  Although the book deals hardly at all with the Arab economy of Palestine or the Arab reaction to Zionist separatism and British policy in its favor, it nevertheless shows clearly the almost entirely negative impact on these policies on the Palestinian majority of the country.

This book provides a welcome antidote to the large body of older work which tended to ignore these factors and took at face value the British/Zionist assumption that support of a separate Jewish economy in Palestine would affect the Arab population positively, presumably through some unexplained "trickle-down" effect.  It also illustrates that in the 1920s, when British policy operated on this assumption, this was in fact an utterly false assumption.  Smith shows why only an entirely different type of Zionist colonization, involving what Shafir calls the mixed and the plantation models, would have resulted in a positive effect of Zionist economic activity on the Arab population, although even then the Arabs would have remained strictly subordinate.  Instead of this "traditional" colonial objective, Zionism aimed at a purely Jewish settler society, with Jewish labor only allowed on land hold "inalienably" and "in perpetuity" for the exclusive use of the Jewish workers, and the British-controlled government service constantly pressured to hire the maximum number of Jews and the smallest possible number of Arabs.

What Smith succeeds in doing in The Roots of Separatism is to show that while the aspiration to achieve such a state of affairs antedated the Mandate, it could only be fully achieved in the shadow of British power, and that as a result of British policies, the economic bases for a separate Jewish state in an Arab country were already largely in place by the end of the 1920s: "British policy . . . provided from the beginning of the Mandate a propitious environment for the growth of a larger and more homogenous Zionist enclave, which in turn led to the bifurcation of Palestine's economy" (p. 4).  She does this by examining finances, immigration, land purchase, and industry, showing how in each sphere the British were faithful to the injunctions which they had laid down for themselves in the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate.  The constant bias in favor of Zionism and the constant slighting of Arab aspirations, the racist undertone of British policy as directed at both Arabs and Jews, the constant carping of the Zionists that the British were not doing enough for them, all of these things emerge clearly from Smith's book.  They emerge not on the political level where we are familiar with them, but in terms of economic policies which were at least as crucial as political ones to establish itself in Palestine and ready itself to achieve exclusive hegemony over the country.

This is a lucid and well-written book, which will be of immense use to specialists, students, and more casual readers alike.  It is not without flaws: It ends abruptly and would have benefited from a concluding chapter; and Smith makes a few mistakes regarding the Arab sector, which is not her focus (the newspaper Filastin was published in Jaffa, not Haifa [p. 131]; the holder of the Huleh concession was Salim Ali Salam [p. 125]), but these are minor matters compared to the achievement embodied in this book which reveals comprehensively how the economic basis for a Jewish state in Palestine was laid down as a direct result of British policies in the 1920s.

Rashidi Khalidi
University of Chicago


3. Review of Beshara Doumani's Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 3 (June 1998), 935.

The need to rediscover Palestine arises, Beshara Doumani believes, from the hitherto prevailing vision of the Ottoman period as one of oppression-produced stagnation until economic, political, and cultural interventions of European origin initiated modernization.  The Palestinians, it has been believed, "played little or no role in the shaping of their history" (p. 7), so Doumani seeks "to write the inhabitants of Palestine into history" (p. xi).  For this purpose, he has chosen to investigate one of the scores of regions that made up the hinterland of the Ottoman Empire, Jabal Nablus, the economic and sometimes political center of Palestine during much of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century.  The region consisted of a central city tied to surrounding villages by economic networks between merchants and peasants whose "social and political dynamics" (p. 21) gave the region a sense of identity.  Merchant-peasant relations are evidenced in the records of the Islamic court and the Advisory Council and in family papers and the memoirs of some of the inhabitants.  Doumani begins with an overview that sketches an ideal Jabal Nablus and relates the political and economic developments of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which produced basic changes.  He then proceeds to examine, in turn, the "social lives" of the commodities that were crucial to the livelihoods of the Jabal's people: textiles, cotton, olive oil, and soap.  Each chapter provides valuable information that is usually new and always clear.  The organization of the book, however, results in repeated statements of some general ideas in varying formulations, so that their precise meaning is sometimes ambiguous.

Doumani, like other recent investigators, finds that the people of the Jabal adjusted to integration into a Europe-based international economy so as to escape the disastrous effects that have, until recently, been ascribed to it.  These economic developments, he believes, generated radical changes.  The thrust of Doumani's argument is that the growth of merchant wealth enabled the merchants to gain control of the rural surplus, hitherto the monopoly of the urban ruling families and the rural subdistrict chiefs (a purely military-political class whose members survived only if they adjusted to the new economic realities).  The result was a new, merchant-dominated class of urban notables.  At the same time, well-to-do peasants became merchants and moved to town to join the new class of notables, despite conflicts of their own, joined in opposition to peasant resistance.

Actually, the new elite was not quite so new.  As Doumani notes, there was never a sharp line between the merchants, religious leaders, and landowners who were members of this notable class.  Scattered through the book are examples of the old ruling families engaging in religious study and commerce soon after they settled in Jabal.  The lists of soap factory owners given as evidence (pp. 210-213) comprise members of the old elite and merchants who were connected to each other and to the old elite by marriage or political and commercial ties.  On one occasion, Doumani corrects himself: "By the 1850s a new merchant-dominated elite--or, more accurately, a fluid alliance between influential members of the merchant community, key ruling families (both urban and rural), and the top religious leaders--had emerged" (p. 135).  The loss of military and administrative status by the old ruling families was the result more of the creation of a modern army by the Ottomans than of the economic forces favored by the author.

Doumani has made a major advance in the study of social class and relations in modern Arab history.  He has deepened our understanding of the effect on Palestine of economic relations with Europe.  Most importantly, he provides a new and much better informed account of the meaning and significance of the family.  Entirely new to this reviewer is Doumani's convincing portrayal of the human networks engendered by commodity production and trade, networks that bound various occupational and socio-economic elements of the city to each other and the peasantry to urban elements.

C. Ernest Dawn
University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign


4. Review of Rashid Khalidi's Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Source: Middle East Policy Council, Vol. 6, No. 3 (February 1999)

Discussing the historical evolution of Palestinian nationalism is a project fraught with perils both political and analytical. The highly charged atmosphere of the long Israeli-Palestinian conflict causes the question to be considered through the prisms of mutually exclusive political and ideological narratives, not only between the two sides but also within each community. Analytically, it is impossible to fix a specific date for the inception of Palestinian nationalism as we now know it, as it developed over time simultaneously with other ideologies of identity, including Arab nationalism, the nationalisms of the individual Arab states, and various versions of political Islam.

Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago grapples with these perils in Palestinian Identity, a valuable contribution to the literature on this subject. Khalidi has previously written and edited several important works on the early development of Arab nationalism as well as a treatment of the Palestine Liberation Organization's decision making during the 1982 war in Lebanon. Moreover, he is a scion of one of Jerusalem's most prominent families and has acted as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid conference. He is thus well positioned to treat the issue of Palestinian identity's development over the long term, especially the role of the Jerusalem-based Palestinian intellectual elite in the nineteenth century and the major trends in the Palestinian national movement in recent decades.

Palestinian Identity is devoted in large part to the various cultural, social, intellectual and political factors that fed the crystallization of a distinct Palestinian identity over the course of the nineteenth century. Of eight chapters, the first two concern introductory issues, including the contrasting narratives of Palestinian identity, four examine the nineteenth century, and only the last two deal with the twentieth. Of these two, the first (chapter 7) considers 1917-1923 -- that is, from the onset of the British occupation of Palestine in World War I to the formal grant of the League of Nations Mandate -- as the "critical years" in the formation of Palestinian identity. Only the last chapter discusses the period that has been the focus of so much of the literature on Palestinian nationalism, the years since the establishment of Israel and especially since the "rebirth" of Palestinian nationalism in the 1960s with the founding of the PLO. This emphasis is hardly accidental. It is Khalidi's central thesis that Palestinian identity, far from being a product of the 1947-49 nakba was in fact constructed over a long period of time, most importantly during the nineteenth century.
While this claim should hardly be surprising to serious students of the evolution of Arab identities, it is one that needs to be reiterated because of the persistent denial of the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism or even the existence of the Palestinians as a distinct people. On the one hand, this denial is absolute, as in Golda Meir's notorious remark that the Palestinians did not exist, or Joan Peter's more recent tendentious (and largely fraudulent) book claiming that the Palestinian Arabs were predominantly if not exclusively recent immigrants from neighboring regions. Indeed, it is a sad comment on the state of at least popular discussions of the Arab-Israeli conflict that Khalidi, writing after the official Israeli acknowledgement of Palestinian national aspirations and recognition of the PLO as their representative in the 1993 Oslo accords, is forced to refute the spurious claims of From Time Immemorial.

A more subtle denial of the validity of Palestinian national identity is the claim that it arose solely as a response to the post-1882 Zionist settlement of the coastal regions of the country. Khalidi demonstrates that there was a widespread consciousness of Palestine as a distinct region at least as far back as the mid-eighteenth century and that this consciousness heightened over time, notwithstanding the fact that the territory was subdivided among a variety of Ottoman administrative districts. Here a central role was played by the notion of Jerusalem as a city holy to not only Judaism, but also Christianity and Islam, and the function that the city served as an administrative and economic hub in the life of the peoples inhabiting what came to be Palestine during the Mandate.

With his stress on the nineteenth century and his constructivist approach (i.e., that identities are not primordial but rather the results of specific historical experiences), Khalidi contends with not only exclusivist (and largely abandoned) Zionist denials of Palestinian existence but also varying Palestinian, Arab and Islamist narratives. For some Palestinian nationalists, the "Palestinian nation" has existed since the time of the Canaanites; for extreme Arab nationalists, Palestine is only a small part of the broad Arab homeland; and for the Islamists, the move toward Arab and local identities was a denial of the allegedly pure Islamic character of the Ottoman Empire. Khalidi dismisses these polemics in detail, while at the same time recognizing that an individual Palestinian, and perhaps most Palestinians, could simultaneously hold Palestinian, Arab, Ottoman and Muslim (or Christian) identities, not to mention local (Jerusalem, Hebron, Nablus) identities without any sense of contradiction. The institution of the Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration's promise to the Zionist movement, and the results of 1947-48, which broke the Palestinian leadership and dispersed a large portion of the Palestinian people, obviously reinforced a more specifically "Palestinian" element in Palestinian identities. These others persist, however, as evidenced by the resurgence of an Islamist identity among the partisans of Hamas, or the local identities to lost villages and towns held by the refugees of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.

To be sure, Khalidi's own narrative privileges to a certain extent the Palestinian elite, especially that of Jerusalem, and within that, especially the Khalidi family. In part this is an artifact of the sources available to him, in particular the rich resources of the Khalidi family library in Jerusalem. But the author does not neglect popular manifestations of Palestinian identity, as shown in his chapter (chapter 5) on how the (mostly illiterate) Palestinian peasants resisted their dispossession at the hands of the new Zionist immigrants. Likewise, while most of the population remained illiterate until recently, the popular press played a major role in the debate over Zionism's implications for the future of Palestine, a subject ably treated in Khalidi's chapter 6.

The ultimate future territorial disposition of what was once known as Palestine remains to be determined; much depends on the result of the May 1999 Israeli elections, the American commitment to implementing the Oslo, Hebron and Wye accords, and the maturing of a new generation of Palestinian leaders. But the reality of the existence of a strong, territorially rooted Palestinian nationalism can no longer be denied. Rashid Khalidi's Palestinian Identity provides a substantial understanding of the roots of this nationalism and of why its claims must be considered in any solution of this conflict.

Geoffrey D. Schad
University of Pennsylvania