Review

General Books

When and how did Arabs develop their present consciousness as Palestinians? By way of answer Khalidi takes us on a tour through his family's ancestral archive and library in Jerusalem. With this new material and his critique of prior opinion and scholarship, Khalidi, in an authoritative voice, gives "their story" to the newer generations of Palestinian youth (primarily those in the English-speaking diaspora) with few concessions to excuse or fantasy. In the process he reviews a century of Arab history and development of Palestinian identity. The book will serve multiple audiences: Palestinians who will inherit and lead their people in the future, advocates of the Arab position, third world students, neutral readers, students in general, Israelis and their supporters.	1
Khalidi is a good historian, and thus his works supersede the rhetorical sophistry of Edward Said and his acolytes. He begins his story by uncovering a Jerusalem Muslim Arab position against the intended visit of a French consul at Sidon to the holy city in 1701. To Khalidi this is the first expression of an Arab Palestinian consciousness. Khalidi does not note, however, that this negative position on the part of the local Muslim leadership is an attitude that will characterize the position of most Arabs in and around Palestine (Muslim and Christian) as he documents seriatim toward all foreigners until the end of the twentieth century. First it was the French on a diplomatic pilgrimage, then it was the revolt against Muhammed Ali, later the protest against Zionism, then a disillusionment with the Ottomans, next understandably the antipathy to the British, and after 1948 the negative reaction to occupation by Israel and Jordan. Khalidi here presents indirectly a continuous retrenchment, a forging under the twin pressures of outside control and infiltrating modernity of a nucleus of rejection rather than of accommodation or even adjustment. It is a sad story he tells. The heirs of early Muslim Arab conquerors are without the resources or the skills needed to preserve Islamic control of Jerusalem. For it is from Jerusalem that the first hints of a Palestinian consciousness appear.	2
Khalidi shows and explains the interplay between the inarticulate peasant population and the articulate urban families. The former are place bound, tied to their towns, villages and plots in continuation of an age-old tradition of rural conservatism. It was sufficient that they were Muslims, denizens of al-Shams and their local residence. Khalidi does not discuss the varieties of Arabic-speaking Muslims, Christians, Druze, Jews, and other ethnic groups such as Greeks, Armenians, and Turks who inhabit the land. Only the first three, Muslims, Christians and Druze, became Palestinians in his interpretation. [Actually all the others also were Palestinians by British decree during the Mandate period!] Nevertheless it is worthwhile to recall the mosaic in all periods. The urban elite that controlled religious law and property as well as commerce had its own extended family interests. These became identified with place and led to the great families' emergence as spokesmen for a Palestinian consciousness. What Khalidi shows is the extent to which the peasants, acting from their own local experiences and accordingly rebelling, pushed these leaders to new dimensions of consciousness that expanded from the administrative borders of Jerusalem to those of Filastin (in extent only a part of the larger British Palestine Mandate).	3
Khalidi is strongest in his analysis of the shift from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the British Mandate. Those two generations saw the introduction of modernization and change among the Jerusalem elite, the introduction of schools, the participation of locals in the Ottoman Parliament, i.e., the effects of the tanzimat as a liberalizing process. At the same time "Palestine," as Christians called it, was attracting millenarians in greater numbers than Israel was attracting traditional and Zionist Jews – so much so that Abdul Hamid invited a counter Muslim migration to the land. Khalidi ignores this competition and its effects; rather he focuses on the strident anti-Zionist rhetoric that begins to emerge by the end of the century. His innovative argument, based on a statistical sampling of leading local and regional newspapers (which flourished between 1908-1949), is that a Palestinian consciousness was in effect prior to WWI – contrary to current scholarly consensus – and that it became more Arabized as the new Ottoman strongmen [CUP] became less supportive of local interests. He argues that all the Palestinian Arab arguments against Zionism and foreign influence were in place prior to WWI, articulated by a modern educated militant urban elite and supported by an increasingly displaced and disaffected peasantry that was drawn to the urban slums of Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem.	4
University of Cincinnati   Steven Bowman

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