Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Finding their Voice
I only just began reading the book Palestinian Identity by Rashid Khalidi, and already I have come across yet another similarity between the American Indian colonial experience and that of the Filastin fellahin. In examining the period prior to the first world war--a time of intense conflict between indigenous peasants and mostly Russian Jewish settlers--Khalidi draws readers attention to the fact that Palestinian peasant farmers and herders were still living under a communal usufruct of land tenure, and that recent changes in land law enacted by the Ottoman empire left them entirely unprotected from absentee merchant landlords, like the Sursuq family of Beirut, that had purchased vast areas from the Ottoman state.
With the advent of the Zionist rural colonization by belligerent immigrants relocated through the efforts of the Jewish National Fund, the fellahin--having only recently adapted to the status of tenant or laborer--found themselves suddenly homeless and unemployed on lands they and their ancestors had cultivated or grazed in common, and more importantly, lands they believed were still theirs. Largely illiterate and relatively powerless compared to their urban countrymen in cities like Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Gaza, the fellahin themselves were unable to counter the steady Zionist propaganda of the previous century culminating in the entirely misleading notion of "an empty land for a landless people."
To be fair, notable families and religious leaders, as well as Arabs from the surrounding area of the eastern mediterranean, made overtures to both the Ottoman state and the post-World War I European inheritors of the Arab provinces, but the fix was already in, and by the time the British assumed control of what was termed the Palestine Mandate, the indigenous peoples of the land of Palestine had completely lost any voice in their own affairs.
Perhaps, as the stewards of the Holy Land, the people of Palestine--Muslim, Christian, and Jewish--had become blinded by their millenia of coexistence, and like the indigenous of North America, were inevitably unprepared for the shock and subsequent trauma of dispossession by European settlers. The story, of course, does not end there, and I look forward to learning more about the construction of modern national consciousness amongst the nation of Palestine.
With the advent of the Zionist rural colonization by belligerent immigrants relocated through the efforts of the Jewish National Fund, the fellahin--having only recently adapted to the status of tenant or laborer--found themselves suddenly homeless and unemployed on lands they and their ancestors had cultivated or grazed in common, and more importantly, lands they believed were still theirs. Largely illiterate and relatively powerless compared to their urban countrymen in cities like Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Gaza, the fellahin themselves were unable to counter the steady Zionist propaganda of the previous century culminating in the entirely misleading notion of "an empty land for a landless people."
To be fair, notable families and religious leaders, as well as Arabs from the surrounding area of the eastern mediterranean, made overtures to both the Ottoman state and the post-World War I European inheritors of the Arab provinces, but the fix was already in, and by the time the British assumed control of what was termed the Palestine Mandate, the indigenous peoples of the land of Palestine had completely lost any voice in their own affairs.
Perhaps, as the stewards of the Holy Land, the people of Palestine--Muslim, Christian, and Jewish--had become blinded by their millenia of coexistence, and like the indigenous of North America, were inevitably unprepared for the shock and subsequent trauma of dispossession by European settlers. The story, of course, does not end there, and I look forward to learning more about the construction of modern national consciousness amongst the nation of Palestine.
