Review of Middle East Studies (v. 5) Tapa blanda

150 Pages·1992·63.582 MB·English

by  Glenn Bowman (volume editor), Aziz Al-Azmeh (editor), Fanny Colonna (editor)

EDITORIAL STATEMENT
An issue of the Review reappeared in 1988 after ten years' absence.
That was intended to be the first in a new regular series. We were diverted
from that project by changes and uncertainties in publication arrangements.
We have now secured regular publication with Scorpion and intend to bring out
two issues a year. Each issue will have a theme, and those in preparation
include: Economic and Political Restructuring in the Middle East; the
Military in Politics; Women and Gender; Secularism.
In an introduction to Volume 4, 1988, we gave an explanation of the history
and current objectives of the Review. This relaunch calls for another.
The Review of Middle East Studies was conceived as a forum for radical
critique, drawing on theoretical and comparative resources from mainstream
social sciences and history. It is related to the Middle East Study Group,
which has been meeting since the early seventies, although the articles are
not exclusively drawn from members. The first three issues were published
between 1975 and 1978. Our project at that stage was to present a consistent
theoretical and political critique of traditional approaches to Middle East
studies, dominated then by conservativbe scholars and researchers, mostly
insulated from the theoretical currents of mainstream history and the social
sciences. The critique was directed primarily against "orientalist"
perspectives which essentialised Islam as society, culture and history
conceived as a unified totality in contrast to the "West". We favoured a
universalist approach, using general conceptual tools to analyse the
specificities of social and cultural configurations.
These ideas found favour with a new generation of students and
researchers in the 1970s and 1980s, and contributed to a general
reorientation of perspectives in the field. The task of critique was not
thought to be necessary any longer. Members of the Middle East Study Group
pursued work on vaious substantive projects of their own, the Group becoming
increasingly a supportive seminar. The Review lapsed.
The developments in the Middle East following the Iranian Revolution of 1979
and the resurgence of the Right in the Western countries altered the
intellectual landscape of Middle East studies. There is a kind of
intellectual
and political symbiosis between Islamist ideologies and Western conservative
thought on the region. Both sides endeavour to characterise Islam as a
coherent cultural and historical unity, only superficially disrupted by the
Western impact, and now returning to its true heritage. Islamist "resurgence"
seemed to lend credence to these positions, sending conservatives into
triumphant "I told you so" declarations. The increasingly complex and
turbulent configurations of Middle East societies and politics require much
more subtle and nuanced analyses than can be provided by these panaceas. We
need an analytical stance which distances itself from the breathless chase
after the succession of events, so common in contemporary Middle East
studies, and which offers more considered and reflective explications from
deeper historical and socio-cultural perspectives.
It was in response to this felt need that the Review was relaunched in
1988 with an issue on "Islamism and Nationalism". Since then the cataclysmic
events of the recent Gulf war have intervened, bringing untold destruction
and social dislocation to Iraq and Kuwait while leaving the despotic regimes
still in control. The Saddam regime is still capable of mounting massacres
and atrocities against the long suffering Iraqi people and the family
oligarchies of the Gulf are still firmly in place backed up by the "New World
Order", a euphemism for American hegemony unencumbered by the Soviet
challenge, cynically pursued with little regard for basic political
decencies. The new order in the Middle East looks remarkably like the old.
The political problems and the concomitant human sufferings are accentuated.
Witness the Palestinian dilemma (the subject matter of this issue), now more
acute than ever and no nearer a solution. There is no shortage of
commentaries and explanations of these events, no doubt necessary and useful.
The task we have set this Review, however, is to examine processes behind the
events and to take a longer term historical perspective. In that we need the
support of colleagues, scholars and researchers who share these objectives.
We call on them to send us papers and suggestions for consideration.
The Editorial Group
WEST BANK AND GAZA STRIP SOCIAL FORMATION
UNDER JORDANIAN AND EGYPTIAN RULE (1948-1967)
JAMIL HILAL
This paper aims at providing an outline of the socio-economic situation
prevailing in the two regions of Palestine which remained unoccupied by
Israel when it was established in 1948. These two regions, which came to be
known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were both abruptly severed from
the rest of Palestine under Israeli occupation, and in 1948 fell under
different systems of political control. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan,
and the Gaza Strip was administered by Egypt. Specific modes of production
and class formation emerged in both regions, and in both cases the nature of
the dominant political power played a significant role in the changes in the
economic structure and class formation.
The paper sets out to determine the significant factors that came to shape
the socio-economic situation in the two regions during the period from 1948
to 1967. This should be helpful in any examination of the nature of socio-
economic change brought about by the Israeli occupation of the two regions
since 1967, changes which, I believe, cannot be fully explained without
reference to this previous period of rapid transformation.
I. Palestine on the eve of the establishment of the Israeli State
During the 1920s and the 1930s, Palestinian society, under the impact
of British colonialism and Zionist colonization, witnessed a rapid process of
class conversion and socio-economic differentiation. The Zionist movement
developed a capitalist, `enclosed' economy within the larger Palestinian
economy. Jewish land purchase (mainly from absentee landowners in Beirut and
Damascus) acted in many respects to block or disrupt the typical process of
peripheral capitalist development which colonial capitalist penetration has
engendered elsewhere. By the 1940s, the Jewish capitalist enclave came to
dominate the manufacturing sector of the economy of the country and at least
three-quarters of its foreign trade. The main capital inflow to Palestine was
Jewish. By 1939, the number of Jewish industrial establishments exceeded
those of Arab establishments by two and a half times, employing three times
the number of workers, while the Jewish population was less than 30 per cent
of the total population of the country. The exclusiveness of the Zionist
capitalist economy (with its policies of `Hebrew labour',`redeeming the land'
and `buying the produce of the land') displaced a sizeable section of the
peasantry and blocked the transformation of that peasantry into wage
labourers within the Jewish sector of the economy in both industry and
agriculture.
Nevertheless, the growth of the Jewish capitalist enclave and the acquisition
of Arab land, together with the ongoing colonial incorporation of the economy
into the international capitalist market and the needs of British colonialism
(strategic as well as economic), particularly during World War II, gave rise
to a large-scale rural to urban migration which doubled and sometimes tripled
the Arab population of the main cities and towns in Palestine between 1922
and 1945. By 1945, the number of people living in shanty towns around the
towns of Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem reached, according to reliable estimates,
over 111,000 or nearly 8.5 per cent of the total Arab population. The
percentage of the urban population rose from 29 per cent in 1922 to 34 per
cent in 1944. These factors led to the growth of a sizeable wage labour force
in industries, artisan shops, construction, British military installations,
foreign concerns, roads, railways, ports, etc.. By 1946, it was estimated
that the Arab wage labour force numbered not less than 130,000. Some 20,000
to 30,000 of this labour force was organized in the Palestinian labour
movement.
By 1936, the process of land selling by absentee landlords to Zionist
settlers was almost completed (1). At the same time, at least 30.7 per cent
of Arab peasants had no land at all, while large landowners with holdings
exceeding 5,000 dunums owned 19.2 per cent of all cultivated land. Small
holdings (less than 100 dunums) formed 92 per cent of all holdings and 37 per
cent of the land. The degree of capitalist penetration of the rural
Palestinian economy can be gauged from the fact that by the early 1930s, some
55 per cent of all Arab agriculture was directed to, and absorbed by, the
capitalist market. Even small peasants had to market an average of 20 per
cent of their agricultural produce (2). Some of these peasants found
employment in construction, railways, ports, petroleum refinery, British
military installations, foreign concerns and seasonal employment in public
works. Others turned to wage labour in the citrus groves owned by Arab large
landowners.
The undermining by Jewish competition of Palestinian handicraft and
traditional industries and the absence of government protection drove Arab
capital away from investments in industry towards investments in the
production of export crops (especially citrus), in construction and in the
import-export trade. However, some capital, especially that accumulated
during World War II, was invested in the mechanization of traditional
industries (soap, tobacco, wood, textile, food and beverages, etc.) directed
mainly to the domestic market as well as in the establishment of new
industries such as textiles and furniture. The number of Palestinian
industries more than quadrupled between 1939 and 1942, doubling the number of
Arab workers employed (3). Thus an urban proletariat did emerge in the major
towns, but because of its exclusion from employment in the relatively
developed Zionist industrial sector, especially after 1936, its size, growth
and structure remained constrained by the severe conditions arising from the
British colonial policy - and the political upheavals and uprisings against
this policy - as well as from Zionist colonization.
Available figures indicate that the ratio of the Palestinian labour force
engaged in agriculture decreased from 59 per cent in 1931 to 51 per cent in
1945. At the same time, the number of wage labourers employed in the various
industrial or semi-industrial enterprises, artisan workshops and public works
increased from 40,000 in 1935 to 64,000 in 1942, forming 19 per cent of total
Arab labour force (4). The Histadrut estimated the Arab wage force employed
outside agriculture, fishing and services at around 100,000 in 1946 (5). In
1945, nearly 15,000 of the Arab Palestinian labour force were classified as
skilled workers (6), indicating an improvement in the composition of wage
labour.
The emergence of an urban proletariat and a relatively extensive class of wage labourers
especially during the 1940s did not, however, lead to significant changes in the class nature of
the political leadership in Arab Palestine. It is true that political parties representing the newly
formed working class did emerge, for example the Palestinian Communist Party (which adopted
the name National Liberation League after a split in 1943), and did play an increasingly
noticeable role within the Palestinian national movement for independence. So did populist
leaders like `Izz al-Din al-Qassam who directed his efforts to organizing workers and poor
peasants and began to challenge the established leadership before he was killed in 1935 by the
British forces and his movement crushed. The leadership of the national movement remained,
nevertheless, in the hands of the representatives of large landowners and merchants, who were
closely interconnected, despite the rise of an active and organized labour movement (7). The
emerging manufacturing bourgeoisie and the rising urban intelligentsia
accepted and retained the role of a junior, and largely uninfluential,
partner.
This dominance by large landowners and merchants can be seen from an
examination of the class position of the political leadership of the
Palestinian national movement at this period. The Arab Higher Committee, from
its formation in 1936 to the establishment of Israel in 1948, constituted the
leadership of Palestinian national movement. Twenty-eight of the thirty-two
men who held influential positions in the Arab Higher Committee during this
period were from large landowning families or urban notables who derived
their social and political influence from titles and positions acquired or
granted during the Ottoman period. The remaining four were classified as
representing the industrial and financial bourgeoisie. The dominant group,
large landowners and merchants, represented two-thirds of the total. No
representative of the working class or the peasantry ever succeeded in being
elected to the Committee (8).
In summary, it can be said that the Mandate period witnessed the rise to
dominance of the capitalist mode of production over other modes within the
conditions engendered and maintained by British colonialism and Zionist
settler-colonialism. A sizeable class of Palestinian wage workers emerged. By
the 1940s, the total Palestinian wage labour force expanded to include about
a third of the entire male Arab population of working age. This means, in
effect, not less than 45 per cent of the total labour force (9). A class of
large landowners employing wage labourers for the production of citrus and
other crops retained and strengthened their control over most of the
cultivated Arab land. The period also witnessed the emergence of Arab
industrial capital on a small scale, employing about 10,000 wage workers.
Merchant capital linked to land ownership remained the dominant form of
capital and its representatives maintained political control of Palestinian
society, utilizing the colonial situation itself in maintaining this control.
But the economic, political and military conditions imposed on Palestine by
the dual colonial process were to lead in 1948 to the fragmentation of
Palestinian society and to drastic changes in the class structure and
political situation of the various Palestinian communities which came into
existence as a direct consequence of the establishment of Israel.
II. The West Bank Under Jordanian Rule
1. Mechanisms of annexation
With its dismemberment from the rest of Palestine in 1948, and the
consequent severing of all its economic connections and communication
networks with the other parts of the nation, what came to be known as the
`West Bank' - already one of the more underdeveloped regions of Palestine -
achieved all the features of a dislocated economy (10). It had lost its
primary domestic market and the source of supply of a variety of products
since the area in which Israel was established was the more developed in
capitalistic terms (11). It had also lost access to Mediterranean ports and
was cut off from the all-Palestine network of transport and communications.
Moreover, thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank lost their jobs,
professions, property and businesses (especially in West Jerusalem) when they
were cut off from the cities and towns that came under the control of Israel
(12). A significant percentage of peasants and farmers in the border villages
(13) lost the fertile land which lay on the opposite side of the 1949
armistice line between Jordan and Israel.
Many factors contributed to the annexation of the West Bank and
maintenance of Jordanian control over it, despite widespread Palestinian
dissatisfaction with the Hashemite regime and the thirst for independence.
The Palestinian bourgeoisie had been divided and weakened by the collapse of
the Palestinian national movement, by the ties that the Palestinian notables
and bourgeoisie had established with the then colonized Arab regimes, and by
the lack of support provided by a British administration devoted to the
encouragement of Zionist colonization. The politically discredited notables
and bourgeoisie of the West Bank, having lost some of their landed property,
firms, and trade links, and having had their ties with other Palestinian
bourgeoisie cut, hurried to support the annexation of the West Bank because
of the benefits they believed would devolve from partnership with the
Jordanian monarchy. Thus the Jericho conference of 1949, organized and
attended by the local notables and representatives of the West Bank
bourgeoisie, called for the `unification' of the West Bank with the East Bank
under the leadership of the Hashemite monarchy. The East Bank not only
provided an additional market for their activities but also a necessary
outlet to the wider Arab market.
The emigrant Palestinian bourgeoisie who moved from the now occupied
part of Palestine found in `unification' an outlet for investing the
financial capital and assets they still controlled and owned - capital that
amounted to no less than JD 20 million ($ 50 million), most of which was to
be invested in the East Bank (14). Thus, while Amman prospered, East
Jerusalem languished (15). Arab Jerusalem declined from being the largest
city just before the annexation of the West Bank to third place after Amman
and the adjacent city of Zarqa in 1961. As a fast growing metropolis, Amman
had, by 1961, a population four times that of Jerusalem and had become the
dominant commercial, industrial and administrative centre of the East and
West Banks (16). Not only did the Jordanian government invest heavily in the
East Bank but it also encouraged most of the emigrant and West Bank
Palestinian bourgeoisie to do the same.
The annexation of the West Bank could neither have been accomplished nor
sustained without the systematic use, or the threat, of repression. The
formal annexation took place while the Jordanian army, which had entered the
region during the 1948 war, was in control of the West Bank. As an army it
was established, and its growth and function supervised, by the British
colonial authorities. Since the early 1930s, when it was reorganized and
expanded, it had appropriated the larger part of the budget of the budding
state in Transjordan. In 1940-1941, the Jordanian army absorbed 21 per cent
of total government expenditure for that financial year. In 1943-1944, the
proportion rose to nearly 63 per cent and reached 66 per cent in the year
1948-1949, when the West Bank was annexed (17). Not only did the army's share
of the budget increase during the period of annexation, but its size was also
doubled from around 6,000 at the beginning of 1948 to 12,000 by the beginning
of the year 1950 (18) while its budget rose from JD 2.9 million in 1948-1949
to JD 4.3 million in 1949-1950 (19). The size of the Jordanian armed forces
was doubled once more within a period of six years, to rise to 25,000 in
1956, and then to 60,000 in 1967 (20).
The armed forces were used as an instrument of internal control and for
the perpetuation, especially after the annexation of the West Bank and the
influx of Palestinians to the East Bank, of the Jordanian political system.
This system was supported and aided by imperialist centres, not simply for
its political role in the eastern Arab region, but also because it could act
as a major instrument in dissolving the Palestinian national movement and
containing the Palestinians. Before the Israeli occupation of the West Bank
in 1967, Jordan had the largest Palestinian population anywhere, representing
65 per cent of Jordan's resident population, and not less than 45 per cent of
all Palestinians. After its annexation of the West Bank, the Hashemite
monarchy imposed `integration' on these Palestinians. The granting of
Jordanian citizenship to Palestinian refugees and to indigenous residents of
the West Bank was a measure intended to obstruct any political or
organizational expression of Palestinian national identity. Opposition
parties were continually harrassed, their leaders and activists jailed, and
in 1957 all were banned. The West Bank was divided into a number of
administrative units controlled by Amman as a way of keeping the West Bank
fragmented.
The dependence of the Jordanian army (comprising 3.5 per cent of the
total population of the East and West Banks in 1967, and about 16 per cent of
the active labour force) on imperialist resources for armament, training and
financial support, was one of the major mechanisms for the incorporation of
Jordan into the world capitalist system and the restructuring of its economy
accordingly with all the known characteristics of `underdevelopment'. From
the early 1920s, the Jordanian army was allocated the task of incorporating
by force the divergent regions and productive areas of the Emirate of
Transjordan and of subduing the tribal nomadic areas which had remained for
centuries outside centralized political control and were thus resistant to
the encroachment of capitalist market forces, production and property
relations. In the 1930s the main component of this army was recruited from
these nomadic tribal areas, while earlier recruitment had been from peasant
areas dominated by petty commodity production. During the period 1949-1966,