A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (review)
This is a book-length interpretive essay that addresses the modern history of Palestine as a region of the Ottoman Empire, as a British Mandate, as Israel with leftover Arab fragments in the West Bank and Gaza, and as Israel with the occupied territories. The history of this small, beguiling and tragic country is much-covered terrain. This book's distinctive contributions flow from the author's assumptions (1) The country [End Page 333] (Palestine) can be treated as a unit of history despite the political vicissitudes of the last 150 years; therefore histories of Israel (alone) or the Palestinians (alone) after 1948 are incomplete. (2) The history of Palestine is not coterminous with the history of its nationalisms and national movements (Arab or Jewish). (3) The history of Palestine needs to be addressed from the perspective of its non-elites and non-politicians to understand its populations' worldviews, cultures, and formative experiences. (4) The history of the country includes (after 1948) refugees living outside of it, who nevertheless continue to make Palestine (or its memory) a focus of their identities. Pappé writes with unabashed and undisguised sympathy for those who have been marginalized or excluded by nationalist-centered modernity. Although critical of both the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab national narratives, Pappé more often than not interprets and presents events in terms that will resonate more easily with sympathizers of mainstream Palestinian rather than mainstream Israeli perspectives.
Because the author works consciously outside of the modernization-inspired nationalist framework—citing his intellectual debt to subaltern studies instead—he raises issues about the standard narratives and poses problems that are rarely addressed in the standard general literature: the differential effects of Ottoman state-building and Eurocentric modernity on Arab peasants, merchants, and landowners; the persistence of cooperation and shared lives across ethnic and religious boundaries in Palestine; the relationship of Israeli and Palestinian nationalist elites to subaltern groups within their respective national communities; and suppressed or alternative narratives to the hegemonic nationalist ones.
The last point illustrates the author's activist agenda in writing this book. It arose, he relates, from his experiences of teaching history at Haifa University, where he struggled to identify themes that his Arab and Jewish students could absorb and consider as they faced the challenge of understanding their shared country and the prospects for building a more humane future out of the tensions and wreckage of the present. The point is less to suppress or deny national(-ist) narratives than to indicate that other frameworks for considering the past, present, and future also exist.
Readers may wish that the book had more footnotes to permit certain contentions or interpretations to be checked more closely, or to provide clarifications. The book assumes a basic familiarity with standard historical narratives, but those familiar with them—regardless of their political sympathies—will find much to ponder in this work.
