Samih K. Farsoun and Naseer Aruri. Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History.

Samih K. Farsoun and Naseer Aruri. Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History. 2nd edition. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2006, 467 pages. Paper, no price indicated.

THERE ARE MANY TREATMENTS, both historical and diplomatic, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but hardly any focusing on the Palestinians. Studies focusing on Israel as a political entity and thriving society abound, to the extent that we have been inundated with works on early Zionism, the Yishuv, the Israeli economy, and Israel's diplomatic history. Moreover, most Israeli studies are the work of Israeli scholars but the same dose not hold true to for treatments of the Palestinians themselves. Most Western-language works dealing with this conflict are either oblivious to Palestinian society in general or too eager to portray the Palestinians as inert actors. In addition, most general Middle East histories or political studies relegate Palestine, if it receives any mention at all, to the margins of their narrative. Palestine as a non-state entity usually registers a faint image on the radar screen of most historians and political scientists.

Studies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have always missed two significant factors: a sound theoretical basis on which to build their analysis, and the general willingness to investigate the inner workings of the beleaguered Palestinian society. Thus, even when we meet sympathetic treatments of this subject, the conflict is presented as that of two equally-valid rights. This distorted prism manages to place the historic "struggle" of the Israeli Jews on an even level with that of the Palestinian Arabs, so that there are no occupiers and occupied here, but merely two people with equally-valid claims to the same piece of land. This practice has been further distorted by ignoring evolutionary trends which were at work in Palestinian society long before the appearance of modern Zionists on the scene. Had these trends been subjected to the full glare of the scholarly scrutiny, however, they would have easily shed some light on the destructiveness of twentieth-century Western and Zionist domination. Among the most glaring lacuna in such works has been the absence of any discussion of the Palestinian economy and its inevitable transformation under the impact of powerful twentieth-century capitalist and racialist colonization.

This book is a unique and welcome addition to the literature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simply because it performs two unusual feats. The first is its emphasis on the political economy of Palestine, which examines and disentangles the nexus of politics and the economy of that region. The second is its consistent treatment of the history of this conflict as a classic case-study of the settle colonialism in the context of great power competition over one of the world's most strategic areas. The latter point may be a given for some scholarly sectors, but it certainly is not an unchallenged idea in mainstream Western studies. This should come as no surprise that the authors utilize the work of the Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling, who was among the first in Israel to challenge the main foundations of official Israeli historiography in the early 1970s, by apply theories of domination to the Yishuv's traditional narrative. Kimmerling rejected the exceptionalism of modern Jewish history by replacing it with the paradigm of "immigrant-settler" society. This book is also unusual because it covers the affairs of all segments of the Palestinian community, including the refugees in Arab countries, the Palestinians living within Israel, and the Palestinians living under the Palestinian National Authority. Written initially by the late Palestinian sociologist Samih K. Farsoun, and Christina Zaccharia, the book was eventually updated by Naseer Aruri who provided additional chapters on the Oslo Accords, the Second Intifada, Palestinian refugees and the right of return, the Jerusalem question, and the post-Oslo peace process. Aruri's political perspective has added a righ dimension to this study.

The authors also manage to situate the Palestinian historical narrative within the region and international politics of the region. Thus, we learn how the majority of Western writers, most of whom steeped in Biblical studies, managed to belittle and marginalize the history and significant contribution of the Palestinians even before Zionism came on the scene. This enabled Zionists such as Israel Zangwill in the early 1900s to perpetuate the myth of "a land without people, for a people without land." The Palestinians themselves, however, viewed the early Zionists through the prism of their own history, judging them to be no different than the European Crusaders. Indeed, it is easy to see from this study that Palestine was not as underdeveloped as the early Zionists and their Western allies initially claimed. To discover the nature of Palestinian society at the turn of the twentieth-century, one has to look into the economic and social conditions of that society. The authors demonstrate clearly the extent of European penetration of Palestine and its attendant "modernization" which resulted from a decade of Egyptian rule ending in 1840, and Ottoman attempts to bring a European-style development to its far-flung provinces such as Palestine. In short, the Palestinian economy was transformed from subsistence to a market economy, resulting in its involuntary integration into the world economic system. What resulted from this were coastal and urban development throughout the land, as well as, the rise of new classes. The land-tenure system was also capitalized and religious foundations and other embryonic institutions became more formalized. The Palestinians responded by modernizing their system of education and seeking a secular style of education, particularly as Western education and economic penetration became more evident. Both Palestinian Christians and Muslims were partners in this endeavor which also fostered a secular Palestinian identity.

We discover that Palestinians raised cotton, wheat, barley, and sesame, as well as, the inevitable olive trees which provided oil for a thriving local soap-making industry. Palestinians, additionally, made textiles and glass wares for export. Remarkably, when the textile industry of Nablus began to suffer from competition by Syrian and Egyptian imports, the city of Nablus executed a perfectly credible adaptive feat by switching to the manufacture of soap. Here, the authors benefited from a micro-socio-economic study of this industry and its underlying financial infrastructure which enabled it to develop and thrive by historian Beshar Doumani. Similarly, Hebron developed its exquisite glass-making industry, while Gaza specialized in trading in woven textiles, taking advantage of its location astride the Muslim pilgrimage route to Mecca. The development of capitalism and the consolidation of private property were the inevitable outcome of this economic revolution. Some cities, like Jerusalem, gained from this heightened economic activity and development in different ways. It became inundated with foreign pilgrims leading to the expansion of the construction industry and the city's charitable institutional base. Jaffa, on the other hand, was recognized by the end of the Ottoman period as a very important Mediterranean port. Palestine's prosperity attracted large numbers of immigrants, such as Circassians and Bosnians from Europe and Magrebis from North Africa, all of whom easily assimilated. By contrast as is well-known, Christian European and Jewish immigrants infused with the Zionist ideology, resisted assimilation.

Under the British Mandate government, not only did the floodgates of Jewish immigration open, but Palestinians also experienced the growth of a separate Jewish economy. Intent on conquering land and labor, the new Zionist arrivals created their exclusive economic monopolies, which, along with official and clear British favoritism, led to the rise of entrepreneurial landmarks such as the Rutenberg electrical concession and the Dead Sea Salt and Atlit salt extraction companies. The Dead Sea Salt concession, known as the Palestine Potash Company, was granted to Moses Novomeysky, a Russian Jew, while the Rutemberg concession went to a German Jew by the same name. Thus a Jewish-controlled industrial sector developed with British encouragement, which excluded any potential participation by Palestinian commercial and laboring classes. The 1920 founding of Histadrut, or the General federation of Jewish labor, formalized the system of excluding the Palestinian working and entrepreneurial classes. The Histadrut was not only a massive labor cooperative, but also a construction cooperative represented by Solel Boneh, a bank which later became Bank Hapoelim, and a credit, insurance, and publishing and marketing organizations.

The authors easily document and elaborate upon the extant of the nakbah, or the disaster of 1948. Having detailed the impact of the Mandate system on the Palestinian society and economy, they then make a case for the role of colluding Arab regimes and Palestinian chauvinist response in facilitating Israel's eventual control of 78% of Palestine and the resultant expulsion and flight of 850,000 Palestinians. They also document the catastrophic dimension of the refugee question by reminding the reader of the additional 600,000 refugees resulting from the 1967 June war. A closer look at another aspect of the nakbah further illustrates the disaster which has befallen those Palestinians who remained in their towns and villages under Israeli control. Indeed, often these also became internal refugees, having been prevented from returning to their original homes within Israel which they fled during the conduct of the war. Here, the authors accurately depict this segment of the Palestinian population as victims of internal colonialism. Both men and women living under the rule of the Israeli state became reduced to wage labor, while the women in particular were fated to toil in special maquildoras utilizing their unskilled labor in textile and clothing factories. The authors describe the Israeli system of control over this population by reference to the initial denial of the right of political participation, such as forming their own political parties, until they were cowed into submission.

The book also traces the rise and fall of the PLO, culminating in the signing of the Oslo Accords. This humiliating peace, as is evident here, meant little to the Israeli determination to continue with their quest of the land. The authors present the arguments of those Palestinians who defended the Oslo peace as the best deal we could get at the time, and those who rejected it offhand as detrimental to the pursuit of Palestinian national goals. The book not only presents a competent descriptive analysis of the first intifada, but also a comparison with the second, al-Aqsa intifada. There is a discussion of the two important subjects which Oslo deferred to the final status talks, namely the refugee's right of return and the Jerusalem question. The Israelis, of course, did not defer their expansion of illegal settlements within the Palestinian areas, nor did they abandon their established practice of the official assassinations and the demolition of Palestinian homes. For them, Oslo was business as usual.

This summary does not do justice to this book. Palestine and the Palestinians stands out among the vast literature on the Palestinian issue by its comprehensive approach and its insistence on normalizing the history of this land and its historic community. In a way, the book is reminiscent of the best studies on South Africa's multi-faceted history of colonial domination settler greed, the capitalization of the economy, and the forced retribalization of its people. Indeed, if South Africa was a classic case of deliberate and forced retardation of its natural development as a Black majority country, the Palestinian case packs more power because the inhibition of its Arab-majority status happened in the full glare of history, and is still continuing. There should have been no tolerance in the twentieth-century for settler-regimes, massive abuse of human rights, and racist development in the context of an over-militarized state. The horror of the Palestinian case will always remain in the world's tolerance of its tragedy at a time when international standards of conduct have been greatly transformed. This book will undoubtedly assume its rightful place as a classic study of the colonization and the near-total destruction of the Palestinians and their society.

By Ghada Hashem Talhami (1)

Ghada Hashem Talhami is D.K. Pearsons Professor of Politics and Chair of International Relations at Lake Forest College, Illinois.