The Palestinian People

The Palestinian People The Palestinian People ❖ A HISTORY Baruch Kimmerling Joel S. Migdal HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2003 Copyright © 1994, 2003 by Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America An earlier version of this book was published in 1994 as Palestinians: The Making of a People Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-674-01131-7 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-01129-5 (paper) To the Palestinians and Israelis working and hoping for a mutually acceptable, negotiated settlement to their century-long conflict CONTENTS Maps ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xxi Note on Transliteration xxiii Introduction xxv Part One FROM REVOLT TO REVOLT: THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE EUROPEAN WORLD AND ZIONISM 1. The Revolt of 1834 and the Making of Modern Palestine 3 2. The City: Between Nablus and Jaffa 38 3. Jerusalem: Notables and Nationalism 67 4. The Arab Revolt, 1936–1939 102 vii Contents Part Two DISPERSAL 5. The Meaning of Disaster 135 Part Three RECONSTITUTING THE PALESTINIAN NATION 6. Odd Man Out: Arabs in Israel 169 7. Dispersal, 1948–1967 214 8. The Feday: Rebirth and Resistance 240 9. Steering a Path under Occupation 274 Part Four ABORTIVE RECONCILIATION 10. The Oslo Process: What Went Right? 315 11. The Oslo Process: What Went Wrong? 355 Conclusion 398 Chronological List of Major Events 419 Notes 457 Index 547 viii MAPS 1. Palestine under Ottoman Rule 39 2. Two Partitions of Palestine (1921, 1949) 148 3. United Nations Recommendation for Two-States Solution in Palestine (1947) 149 4. The Exodus of the Palestinians (1948) 159 5. A Refugee Camp Society (the Major Palestinian Refugee Camps, 1948–1991) 160 6. Israel and Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip 242 ix PREFACE In 1993, our book Palestinians: The Making of a People came out at a critical juncture in the history of the Palestinians, the onset of the Oslo peace process. It was the first full account of Palestinian society and politics from their origins to the present and, to our delight, garnered considerable interest in both the popular press and aca- demic journals, not least in the Middle East itself. In the ten years since the book’s publication, the Palestinians (and their partners in peace—and war—the Israelis) have experienced extraordinary highs and lows. The signing of the Oslo Accord in September 1993 was ac- companied by exultant hopes. Seven years later, the failure to ham- mer out a final peace agreement resulted in the outbreak of the bloody al-Aqsa Intifada, leading to the deepest despair. At the moment of this book’s publication, in the third year of fighting after the failure of Oslo, Palestinians and Israelis are once again at a fate- ful juncture. The choices before them are a fight to the end for the control of all of historic Palestine or a return to negotiations that will divide the land into two mutually accepted states. The Oslo peace process and the new Intifada have been defining xi Preface events for the Palestinians. Out of the peace negotiations came the Palestine Authority, the first-ever serious self-rule of Palestinians in Palestine, as well as new social dynamics that reshaped the Palestin- ian people. From the turmoil of the Intifada and Israel’s ferocious response have come mass poverty and near-destruction of Palestin- ians’ fragile political and social institutions. At the end of 2002, for example, three of every five Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza fall below the poverty line and two of three are dependent on inter- national humanitarian organizations for their survival. Our initial thoughts were to bring the story up to date by incorporating these changes into a second edition of the 1993 book. But the events and outcomes of the last decade were so momentous and decisive that we decided to combine the basic story from the 1993 edition together with an analysis of the last decade into a newly titled volume, The Palestinian People: A History. This new book integrates the pre- 1993 history with two new analyses. The first looks at what went right and what went wrong in the Oslo process and where Pal- estinians and Israelis find themselves now. The second addresses anew the complex position of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, whose relationship both to Israel and to other Palestinians has been shot through with ambiguity. Our approach in the 1993 book and in the current volume has been to reject the standard explanations for the remarkable emergence of the Palestinian people as a cohesive actor on the world scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Palestinian historiography asserted that Palestinians have always been a singular people whose solidarity and cohesion date back to the ancient Fertile Crescent; a mix of contemporary factors, including the 1967 Middle East war and the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization, accounted for the new high profile of Palestinians in the 1970s and 1980s. Con- versely, Israeli historians claimed that no self-identified Palestinian people ever existed, at least not until the Arabs of the area were chal- lenged by Zionism and Jewish settlement; Zionism’s, and later Is- rael’s, successes in the first two decades of existence brought about the newfound Palestinian solidarity. We put forth a very different explanation, relying heavily on xii Preface newly published but fragmented social scientific and historical material on the Palestinians. The construction of a self-identified Pales- tinian people in the second half of the twentieth century, we argue, was the result of two centuries in which Arabs at the grassroots level encountered, first, the powerful forces stemming from European markets and governmental administration, and later, Jewish settlement. New market forces, together with political forces pacify- ing Palestine and new, more efficient bureaucracies unifying it, uprooted Arab society. These forces led to new Arab settlement in the fertile plains and a society marked by the dynamic tension of coast and hill country. That tension was already evident in the mid- nineteenth century and marked the Palestinians through the entire twentieth century. The encounter with Jews and Zionism in the coastal areas, ironically, both distanced Arabs in the coastal towns from their brothers in the hill country economically and socially and yet moved them toward solidarity with those in the mountain villages. We hoped that the innovation of The Palestinian People, as with the earlier book, would be its scope, its success in bringing together scattered pieces of knowledge in already published works, and, not least of all, our particular perspective and interpretation. Neither of us saw this project as one whose most important contribution would be breaking ground in generating entirely new data on Pales- tinian society. We have relied largely on published material in order to write an integrative, synthetic account of the conditions that spawned a distinct Palestinian society and an analysis of what possi- bilities lie before that society in one of the darkest moments in its history. Only in a few instances did we fill in gaps by collecting new statistics or using unpublished documents. The particular perspective we bring to the pages that follow in- cludes four elements. First, we focus on change at the grassroots— the movement and distribution of people, their changing life cir- cumstances, their differing occupational structure, and the like— diminishing the weight of Palestinian central leadership while ele- vating the primacy of social processes at the level of everyday life. Second, we examine the dynamic interplay between various seg- xiii Preface ments of the society—town and country, hill and plain, secular and religious, Christian and Muslim, diaspora and Palestine-based, and others—rather than finding some unified, essential Palestinian character. Third, though we do not discount the powerful effect of Zion- ism in shaping Palestinian society, we place Zionism as only one among several key world historical forces, including capitalism’s in- sidious penetration of the Ottoman Empire, which began long before the appearance of Zionism. Finally, we recast the history of Pal- estine and Israel so that Jews, who had occupied center stage in most previous accounts, now have been relegated to the wings, dis- placed by Palestinians. All of a sudden, the former bit players and character actors have become the leading men and leading ladies. Our perspective on the emergence of the Palestinians has contin- ued to hold in the post-Oslo period. The analysis of the years since 1993 in Chapters 10 and 11 and parts of Chapter 6 is built on the dynamics of social change at the grassroots level and the interplay between that change and Palestinian central leadership, especially in the newly formed Palestine Authority. In particular, we argue, the emergence of two contending centers of power leading up to the 1987 Intifada—generated by young, educated secular and religious leaders with deep roots in West Bank and Gazan society—interacted with the new Palestinian government in unexpected ways, shaping the nature of social and political change. Ongoing tensions between religious and secular forces and between indigenous leaders and PLO forces coming from Tunis also defined the direction of Pales- tinian society and politics. The rapid changes in the West Bank and Gaza played off dynamics in other parts of Palestinian society—the more than one million Palestinian citizens of Israel and the diaspora communities. And all this occurred within the context of powerful outside forces, not least of which stemmed from the state of Israel. Our 1993 book appeared in the tumultuous diplomatic period leading up to that indelible moment on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin took the outstretched hand of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, as President Bill Clinton nudged them together.

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