History and Politics of Nomadism in Modern Palestine (1882-1948) A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Arabic and Islamic Studies By Seraje Assi, M.A. Washington, DC May 30, 2016 Copyright 2016 by Seraje Assi All Rights Reserved ii History and Politics of Nomadism in Modern Palestine (1882-1948) Seraje Assi, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Judith Tucker, Ph.D. ABSTRACT My research examines contending visions on nomadism in modern Palestine. It is a comparative study that covers British, Arab and Zionist attitudes to nomadism. By nomadism I refer to a form of territorialist discourse, one which views tribal formations as the antithesis of national and land rights, thus justifying the exteriority of nomadism to the state apparatus. Drawing on primary sources in Arabic and Hebrew, I show how local conceptions of nomadism have been reconstructed on new legal taxonomies rooted in modern European theories and praxis. By undertaking a comparative approach, I maintain that the introduction of these taxonomies transformed not only local Palestinian perceptions of nomadism, but perceptions that characterized early Zionist literature. The purpose of my research is not to provide a legal framework for nomadism on the basis of these taxonomies. Quite the contrary, it is to show how nomadism, as a set of official narratives on the Bedouin of Palestine, failed to imagine nationhood and statehood beyond the single apparatus of settlement. iii The research and writing of this thesis is dedicated to everyone who helped along the way. Special thanks go to Professors Judith Tucker, Osama Abi-Mershed, Salim Tamari, Emma Gannage, and Zachary Lockman for reading and commentating on my thesis. Many thanks, Seraje Assi iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ....................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: The Original Arabs: British Perceptions of the Bedouin before the Mandate ....................................................................................................35 Chapter Two: The British in Palestine: The Rediscovery of the 'Arab Race' ..............71 Chapter Three: Nomadism as a Racial Domain: The Legacy of desert Administrators in Palestine ............................................................................................................. 110 Chapter Four: Aref al-Aref: Reimagining the Arab Nation ...................................... 158 Chapter Five: Zionist Perceptions of Nomadism ......................................................216 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 296 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................324 v Introduction My research examines contending visions on nomadism in modern Palestine, with special focus on the British Mandate period. By nomadism I refer to a form of territorialist discourse, one which views tribal formations as the antipode of national and land rights, thus justifying the exteriority of nomadism to the state apparatus. Drawing on primary sources in Arabic and Hebrew, I show how local conceptions of nomadism have been reconstructed by an emerging class of Palestinian and Zionist nationalists into new legal taxonomies rooted in modern European theories and praxis. By undertaking a comparative approach, I maintain that the introduction of these taxonomies transformed not only local Palestinian perceptions of nomadism, but perceptions that characterized early Zionist literature. The purpose of my research is not to provide a legal framework for nomadism on the basis of these taxonomies. Quite the contrary, it is to show how nomadism, as a set of official narratives on the Bedouin of Palestine, failed to imagine nationhood, let alone statehood, beyond the single apparatus of settlement. Three major, intertwined questions run through this study. First, how British, Arab and Jewish perceptions of nomadism have been shaped within the matrix of power relations in Mandate Palestine, one which involved British colonialism, Palestinian nationalism and Labor Zionism. Second, how perceptions of nomadism have been constituted within a web of discursive strands, such as race, nationhood, statehood, autochthony, modernity, settlement, and land rights. Third, how nomadism as a discourse on the Bedouin of Palestine has emerged across fields as diverse as raciology (or scientific racism), ethnography, anthropology, political economy, legal theory, and climatic (declensionist) narratives on tribal invasions. What I am 1 asking, in short, is: Can we treat nomadism as a field of historical inquiry, a formative discourse by which British officials, Zionist pioneers, and Arab nationalists imagined, managed and governed the Bedouin of Palestine? One way I approach these questions is by situating my research within recent developments in the field of Palestinian and Zionist historiographies. In what follows I outline the major themes, methods and sources in the field of Israel and Palestine Studies, and, most importantly, the ways in which modern scholarship on Israel/Palestine has recently departed from the nationalist and official narratives, which had dominated the field for half a century. Over the past three decades, historians of Israel/Palestine have embarked on two agendas of historical revisionism. On one side, the New Historians of Israel, or the Revisionists, from the late 1980s onwards, set out to debunk official narratives on the origins of the State of Israel. This revisionist trend, arguably referred to as post-Zionism, was inaugurated by a new generation of Israeli historians, notably Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, Hillel Cohen, and Baruch Kimmerling. Mining newly declassified government documents in Israeli and Zionist archives, these historians brought into question orthodox accounts of Israel's national history, Zionist ideology and the founding myths surrounding the Palestinian Exodus of 1948. Where the Revisionists most remarkably departed from Israel's official story is on the question of nationalism. As Avi Shalim points out, Jewish nationalism, as told by Zionist historians, was a "selective, simplistic, and self-serving" version of history that "served a dual function in instilling a sense of nationhood in Jews from various countries of origin and in enlisting international sympathy and support for the fledgling State of Israel. The one cause it 2 emphatically did not serve is that of mutual understanding and reconciliation between Jews and the Arabs."1 On the other side, Palestinian revisionists began to raise critical questions about the origins of Palestinian nationalism and national awakening.2 These historians have explored myriad aspects of Palestinian nationalism from the late Ottoman to the late Mandate period.3 A milestone was set by Rashid Khalid's seminal Palestinian Identity (1997). Drawing on local Arabic newspapers from the pre-state period, Khalidi shows how a collective sense of Palestinian identity was woven from diverse narratives on nationhood and peoplehood. His account departed from nationalist narratives on Palestinian identity by exploring multi foci of loyalty that ranged from Arab nationalism to Ottomanism to local patriotism, culminating in a Palestinian identity that was fluid and in flux, but never primordial or coherent.4 While this revisionist literature marked a welcome departure from nationalist orthodoxies, which had denominated both historiographies for the most part of the twentieth century, it still suffers from a host of limitations. One major shortcoming lies in its dualistic approach. In his discussion of the state of historical scholarship on modern Palestine, Zachary Lockman offers a substantial critique of what he refers to as the 'dual-society paradigm', which posits the existence in Mandatory Palestine of two essentially separate societies with distinct and 1 Avi Shlaim, "The War of the Israeli Historians," Annales, 59:1 (January-February 2004), 161-67; Kenneth W. Stein "A Historiographic Review of Literature on the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict," The American Historical Review, Vol 96 number 5 (December 1991), 1450-1465. 2 For a historiographic review, see Tarif Khalidi, “Palestinian Historiography: 1900-1948”, Palestine Studies 10(3) (1981): 59-76; Beshara Doumani, "Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History", Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 21 No. 2, Winter, 1992; (pp. 5-28). 3 Notably, Muhammad Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Adnan Abu-Ghazaleh, Palestinian Arab Cultural Nationalism (Brattleboro, Vt: Amana Books, 1991). 4 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 3 disconnected historical trajectories. According to Lockman, the dominancy of this paradigm had been predicated on two key factors: ideological and methodological. The former concerns the ways in which historians of modern Palestine have worked from within either Zionist or Arab- Palestinian nationalist historical narratives. The latter derives from the fact that only a few historians of modern Palestine have had a knowledge of both Arabic and Hebrew, the most widely spoken languages