The Palestinians

Zed Books Ltd

Contents

The Peasant Past

Romantics to the contrary, it is not easy for a peasantry to engage in sustained rebellion. Peasants are especially handicapped in passing from passive recognition of wrongs to political participation as a means of setting them right.

E. Wolf

The [Palestinian] peasants are more prone to action and to revolt entailing self-sacrifice than other groups of society.

A.W. Knyyali

'We Lived in Paradise'

'We lived in Paradise': this remark, so often heard from older Palestinians in the refugee camps, would be dismissed by many as mere sentimentality. It is true that these dispossessed peasants have recalled their homes in Palestine from a present so bleak that their poverty and class oppression there tend to be blurred. But there is truth in their view of peasant life as good, for, in spite of poverty, 'our land provided us with all our needs'. Village and clan solidarity formed a warm, strong, stable environment for the individual, a sense of rootedness and belonging. The proof of the strength of peasant social relations is that they survived in dispersion and helped Palestinians themselves to survive. They formed, too, an unbreakable umbilical cord that ties newborn Palestinians to the country that formed their forebears.

If the dominant image is one of Paradise Lost, probing into the people's recollections of village life brings up a wealth of concrete detail that gives depth and solidity to the picture. Anthropologists have often commented on the print-like memories of illiterate people. Where camp Palestinians are concerned there are two other social factors that reinforce group memory: the continuation of village groupings in the camps; and the daily gatherings of kinsfolk and neighbours in which conversation reverts back to Palestine, as a magnet needle points north. There is no detail of village life, from crops to quarrels, that people cannot remember in microscopic detail, in spite of – or perhaps because of – the completeness of their severance from their past.

Reconstructing this past through the views of contemporary camp Palestinians has several values. As folk history, it corrects the biases of the official historians. Most books on Palestine, even those not exclusively Zionist, have given little place to peasant conditions and culture. Even when writing of the uprising of 1936–39, essentially a peasant rebellion, there is a tendency either to skim over the peasants' role, or to view them as 'brigands', 'armed gangs' or 'wild young men'. It is not surprising that camp Palestinians who have reflected on their past feel that their true history is well expressed by a self-educated labourer from Nahr al-Bared camp in Lebanon:

The problem is that there is a break between Palestinian traditions and us. I am a Palestinian, yet if you want me to remember Palestinian traditions, it's very little. Between my reality and the false history they've taught us there's no connection.

Yet the same man, who left Palestine at the age of seven, could remember vividly many details about his village:

If you ask me about my village, I can remember the most important things, and even the small ones. I think the reason for this is deprivation. Second, our families would always talk about the past, and about their land, so that these things are impressed on the mind of the Palestinian child. He feels the difference between that life and this. He longs for that life to continue, and to make his own life a part of that country [Palestine].

Re-creating Palestine through memory was not only a natural reaction to forcible separation, it was also a way – the only way – of passing on to children the homes that were their inheritance, even though they might be hawking Chiclets on the beaches of Beirut. At the same time there is a political element in this remembering, a denial of Zionist power to appropriate the peasants' environment and turn it into an armed fortress against them. Ex-peasant Palestinians know well that most of their villages have been erased or turned into Israeli settlements, but this knowledge does not sever their ties with the land; instead it politicizes them. When the Palestinian quoted above says he 'longs to make his own life a part of that country', this, for him, involves political action: joining a Resistance group, defending his camp, organizing with fellow workers, working for the Return.

Militants in the camps tend to dismiss as unproductive the aimless mourning of the jeel Falasteen: 'All their talk is about their own particular case, their land, their trees, their home, their position ...' 'Old men, they used to speak about Palestine, their crops, their cows. Now they speak about the Revolution. But it is empty, useless.' At the same time, this remembering was a vital link with their country for young Palestinians born outside it. Something of the impact on them of their parents' tenacious holding-on to Palestine can be felt in this quotation from a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl:

Once at home – it was when Abu Ammar went to the UN – the conversation changed to the past, and how they used to live. And when they spoke, they wept, because of their attachment to their country. Whoever sits with them can understand more about Palestine than from going to meetings, because they lived the life ... But what affected me most was their weeping, because their land was so dear to them.

Darkening crisis

The goodness of life before the Uprooting is only one side of the coin. Side by side with the image of Paradise Lost stands a counter-image of darkening threat and crisis. It is very definitely not a Golden Age that is remembered, it is foreign occupation, oppression, violence, anxiety. Even though the villages kept much of their self-sufficiency, the effects of the Zionists' pressure on land and their boycott of Arab labour were felt from early on in the Mandate. It was the peasants who rioted in Jaffa in 1921 and in Jerusalem in 1929; it was the peasants who followed Sheikh Qassam into the hills above Haifa in 1935, and who bore the brunt of the Great Rebellion of 1936–39. There are still old men in the camps who fought in that uprising, and everyone over the age of thirty-five can recall the crescendo of violence that preceded the Uprooting of 1948. Thus when people are not emphasizing the contrast between their present reality as refugees and their past as peasants in Palestine, there is no tendency to paint the past in unreal colours. On the contrary, they emphasize the continuity between the struggle in Palestine before the Disaster, and the struggle outside it afterwards. They have an image of Palestine as a continual target of invasion, as a precious land coveted by others; and linked to this image stands another of tenacious peasant struggle to hold on to their land, in spite of the superior force of the enemy, and the weaknesses of Palestinian/Arab leadership. It is in the historical continuity of this struggle that contemporary militants place themselves. And in this time-view, the present phase of dispersion is simply the most extreme of many forms of oppression that Palestinians have survived.

For even though the peasants were the backbone of Palestinian resistance to British occupation and Zionist immigration (just as their children have formed the fighting base of the Resistance movement today), they were also deeply embedded in a social structure and way of life that prevented them from understanding the full measure of the threat that faced them. They had lived under many occupations, but none had ever displaced them from their land. They knew the Zionists aimed to possess Palestine, but they could not imagine a world in which such a thing could happen. Their belief in themselves, their ignorance of Zionist power (based on organization, not numbers), their old-fashioned concept of war, their naive dependence on Arab promises of help: all these prevented them from fully understanding what was happening in the 1940s, as Zionist preparations to take over the state mounted. Looking back at their peasant parents, today's Palestinians see them as goodhearted and patriotic, but politically unconscious. For the generations born outside Palestine, the jeel al-nekba, political consciousness is the supreme good, the key to successful struggle. Sacrifice, steadfastness, faith – all the traditional peasant virtues – are still needed as the moral basis of struggle. But the lesson of the Disaster was that these qualities were not enough; they had to be guided by a correct political ideology, which could only be the product of consciousness. Only with consciousness would the defects of earlier uprisings be finally eliminated:

They told us, 'Palestinians you fought.' It's true we fought, but how did we fight? Under what political line did we fight, under which leadership, and with what programmes? All these were missing.

Village worlds and consciousness

The heart of rural society was the village ... The majority of Palestinians were gathered into somewhat more than one thousand villages of varying size and fortune. After the extended family, the village was the most important unit in the fellah's life. Its functions were not only social and economic, but, in the broadest sense, political as well.

The division of the fellaheen class into village units is the first determining factor to be grasped in understanding their social organization and consciousness. While the class category of fellah was commonly used, by the peasants themselves as well as other classes, to denote a hereditary occupation, place of residence, social status and way of life, it did not indicate more than an embryonic class consciousness. For, in identifying himself and his loyalties, the peasant would always refer to his village. A militant who has worked both among peasants in Egypt and among the sons of Palestinian peasants in the Resistance Movement points out this fundamental difference between the two:

At first I didn't notice any similarities between Palestinian and Egyptian peasants. Perhaps what surprised me most about Palestinians was their mobility; later I discovered that they are more attached than I thought to the land, to localities. I was faced by the problem of their regionalism: this one comes from Nablus, that one from 'Allar. They are deeply attached to their village, their first circle of belonging. The Egyptian peasant never says where he comes from unless he is asked repeatedly, and even then he never gives the name of his village, but the name of his province or its capital. But the Palestinian names his village first.

The strength of village identification is clear from the way it has persisted in the camps. Quite small children usually know what village they come from, and village consciousness persists in spite of the fact that it has been overlaid by a Palestinian national consciousness, imbued by the Resistance movement.

While there are political and ecological factors that account for the difference between Egyptian and Palestinian peasants described above (particularly the weakness of central state power in Palestine, compared with its strength in Egypt), there are also factors internal to Palestinian peasant culture, particularly the population stability of villages. Their four or five constituent families remained the same for generation after generation. Few came and few left, except through birth and death. The occasional wealthy farmer who migrated to the city would keep his family home and plot in the village; and later in the Mandate, when pressure on land forced marginal peasants to seek work in the cities, they remained peasant commuters rather than becoming urbanites. Village officials, such as the mukhtar and the imam, were usually chosen from the local population – only teachers, because of the low level of schooling provided to the villages, were generally outsiders. In the absence of a landed feudal class, and the rarity of urban-to-rural migration, Palestinian villages were socially homogeneous, with relatively slight internal socio-economic differentiation. A village was 'a family of families', closely linked by a common history and continuous intermarriage.

The solidarity of the Palestinian village persisted because of the way it satisfied two sets of needs: those of the state for cheap administration, and those of the peasants for security. From the peasants' perspective, the stability and cohesiveness of village population fulfilled at least three vital functions: defence; continuous exploitation of the soil by families whose rights in land were based on custom, not legal documents; and a suitable milieu in which to carry on their distinctive cultural and social life. Here, for many reasons, the distinction between kin (qaraeb) and strangers (gharaeb) was crucial. Peasant culture, particularly the concept of family honour, depended for its maintenance on a community whose ancestors had lived together, and whose descendants would continue to live together for all foreseeable time. The key to the preservation of values lay in each family's need for the respect of its neighbours.

An illustration of village cohesiveness is given by Artas, a small village near Jerusalem, which was partially destroyed in a feud in the mid-nineteenth century, its families migrating to other villages in the vicinity. When several decades later they returned to rebuild Artas, all but one of the original families took part in the reconstruction. After the Uprooting the same 'grouping' instinct was a major factor in reconstituting large fragments of Palestinian villages in the camps. A man who had taken part in negotiating a camp site for his village told me that they decided to act collectively because this was the best way to secure their rights. From time immemorial Palestinian peasants had found solutions to their problems in village-based collective action.

The village as administrative unit

Under both Ottoman and British rule the village-as-unit was maintained as the most economical way of taxing and controlling the peasantry. In the Ottoman system, to save the salaries of officials, tax collecting was farmed out to bidders at annual public auctions, usually to city merchants and moneylenders. Villages were also expected to supply conscripts for the Turkish Army. These two forms of oppression were accepted by the peasants as part of their fate, and the medium of extracting both was the villages' own authority figures, its shuyookh, wujaha', and makhateer. The economy of the system is clear from this description:

The government gave the tax farmer a free hand to squeeze what he could from the peasants and, when needed and convenient, would give him the sanction of troops. In return ... the tax farmer took over many of the police duties of the government.

Because of the rarity of visits by Turkish officials to the rural areas, and the absence of a local landed aristocracy, class oppression of the peasantry in the Ottoman period was sporadic and diffuse rather than direct. Under the British, tax-farming was abolished and control of the villages became tighter through the proximity of the occupation army's encampments, the frequent visits of district officers, and pressure upon village mukhtars to play a stronger official role. As peasant resistance to the Mandate grew more militant, the law and practice of 'collective punishment' was introduced in an attempt to prevent villages from assisting the 'rebels': every house in a village suspected of sheltering the mujahideen would be blown up.

In its relationship to authority, the village also strove to present a united front, patching up feuds to send a strong collective delegation to the wali, or District Officer. The son of a former mukhtar expressed this fundamental rule of village politics when he said: 'We might have twenty men lying on the ground (from a local quarrel), but when the British came to investigate, we would face them as one man.'

Village defence

The village revealed its defence function in its position and layout. The frequency of foreign invasion and bedouin raids, as well as the danger of malaria in the plains, made the peasants choose hill positions for their villages. From these strongpoints they would send out colonies (khirbeh) to the plains (where the soil was more fertile and the rainfall more plentiful) whenever strong central government made it reasonably safe to do so. Unlike many villages in the Mediterranean area, those of Palestine were not walled, but the clustering of their solid, stone-built houses in close formation, with walls almost a metre thick and flat rooftops from which lookout could be kept and stones hurled, made them a formidable obstacle to most attackers. Their invisible defence was their militancy. It was obligatory that every 'son of the village' should respond instantly to the call for defence or attack, without hesitation. Two strongly held peasant values upheld this kind of instant action: rujuliyyeh (courage, manliness) and wajib (duty, obligation). It was this spirit of collective militancy, called faza', that made whole villages descend on the cities to protest an injustice to one of their sons. A man of forty-two, from a village near Acre, remembers walking down as a child of five or six, with all the men of the village, to protest against the shooting by Jewish terrorists of one of their members in the police force.