Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel

385 Pages·2012·2.039 MB·English

by  Mark LeVine, Gershon Shafir

Struggle and Survival
in Palestine/Israel

Edited by
Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
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University of California Press
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University of California Press, Ltd.
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© 2012 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Struggle and survival in Palestine/Israel / edited by Mark LeVine and
Gershon Shafir.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-26252-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-520-26253-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Palestine—History—1799–1917. 2. Palestine—History—1917–1948. 3. Palestine—Social conditions—19th century. 4.
Palestine—Economic conditions—19th century. 5. Palestine—Social conditions—20th century. 6. Palestine—Economic
conditions—20th century. 7. Cities and towns—Palestine—History. 8. Jews—Palestine—History—19th century. 9. Jews—
Palestine—History—20th century. 10. Palestinian Arabs—History—19th century. 11. Palestinian Arabs—History—20th
century. 12. Arab-Israeli conflict—Influence. I. LeVine, Mark Andrew, 1966– II. Shafir, Gershon.
DS125.S77 2012
956.94—dc23
2012006363
Manufactured in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed
this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and
manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
To Alessandro, Francesca, Elliot, and Asher, for the stories they have yet to tell
CONTENTS
Foreword by Edmund Burke III
Introduction: Social Biographies in Making Sense of History
Gershon Shafir and Mark LeVine
PART ONE. VOICES OF THE OTTOMAN PAST: FROM THE MOUNTAINS TO THE SEA
1. “Left Naked on the Beach”: The Villagers of Aylut in the Grip of the New Templers
Mahmoud Yazbak
2. The Sephardi Entrepreneur and British Vice-Consul Haim Amzalak
Joseph B. Glass and Ruth Kark
3. A Musician's Lot: Wasif Jawhariyyeh's Old Jerusalem
Salim Tamari
4. Revolutionary Pioneer: Manya Shochat and Her Commune
Gershon Shafir
PART TWO. FROM EMPIRE TO EMPIRE: PALESTINE UNDER BRITISH RULE
5. Hero or Antihero? S. Yizhar's Ambivalent Zionism and the First Sabra Generation
Nitsa Ben-Ari
6. “A Son of the Country”: Dr. Tawfiq Canaan, Modernist Physician and Palestinian
Ethnographer
Philippe Bourmaud
7. The Ordeal of Henya Pekelman, a Female Construction Worker
David De Vries and Talia Pfeffermann
8. “A Nation in a Hero”: Abdul Rahim Hajj Mohammad and the Arab Revolt
Sonia Nimr
9. Hillel Kook: Revisionism and Rescue
Rebecca Kook
PART THREE. A STATE IS BORN; A NATION IS DISPERSED
10. Matar ‘Abdelrahim: From a Palestinian Village to a Syrian Refugee Camp
Rochelle Davis
11. Joseph Spronz: From the Holocaust to a Safe Shore
Gershon Shafir
12. The Trees Die Standing: A Story of a Palestinian Refugee
Ramzy Baroud
13. The Brief Career of Prosper Cohen: A Would-Be Leader of Moroccan Immigrants
Yaron Tsur
14. A Tale of Baghdad and Tel Aviv
Aziza Khazzoom
15. Is Slavery Over? Black and White Arab Bedouin Women in the Naqab (Negev)
Safa Abu-Rabia
PART FOUR. A LAND OCCUPIED AND LIBERATED
16. Of Possessions and Dispossessions: A Story of Palestinian Property in Jewish Israeli
Lives
Rebecca L. Stein
17. The Rise and Fall of the Russian-Speaking Journalist in Israel
Nelly Elias and Julia Lerner
18. The Village against the Settlement: Two Generations of Conflict in the Nablus Region
Moriel Ram and Mark LeVine
19. Majed al-Masri in Two Intifadas in Nablus
Lætitia Bucaille
PART FIVE. AN IMPOSSIBLE PEACE, A SHARED FUTURE?
20. Benni Gaon: From Socialist to Capitalist Tycoon
Michal Frenkel
21. From Religion to Revenge: Becoming a Hamas Suicide Bomber
Bader Araj
22. Yigael Amir: The Making of a Political Assassin
Michael Feige
23. Mais in the War of the Words
Erin F. Olsen
24. Jonathan Pollak: An Anarchist “Traitor” in His Own Society
Neve Gordon
25. Abu Ahmad and His Handalas
Ala Alazzeh
List of Contributors
Index
FOREWORD
It is with great pleasure that I welcome Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir's Struggle and
Survival in Palestine/Israel to the library of works in the emerging genre of social biography.
At a time when many are frozen in place by fear of change and outdated ideologies, this book
offers a wealth of portraits of individuals—Jews, Muslims, Christians, others—caught in the
talons of history. The more we focus on individual lives, I believe, the less convincing the
standard narratives of the Israel/Palestine drama become and the more the common humanity of
all of the participants is evident. How and why people did things, as well as the often
unforeseen consequences of their actions, are not readily explained by the standard toolbox of
the social sciences. By plunging us into the biographies of ordinary (and not so ordinary)
Israeli and Palestinian men and women, this book provides a salutary alternative to the
limitations of structural approaches (the state, the economy, culture) to the tangled history of
Israel/Palestine. LeVine and Shafir provide us with a varied canvas of human interactions that
constitutes the backdrop of the present impasse.
Upon consideration, the choices individuals make under duress turn out to be far more
imaginative, and their consequences more far reaching, than is generally appreciated. The
individuals whose lives are recounted in this book pose a continual challenge to not just our
historical but also our moral imaginations. Thus the sudden decision to resist authority
(whether the colonial or the post-colonial state), like the rustling of butterfly wings that gives
birth to a typhoon, can have enormous unforeseen historical consequences. The survivor who
becomes an oppressor, the Palestinian peasant who undergoes multiple exiles—these are
paradigmatic experiences too, even as they are individual destinies. So are the
interconnections of individual Israeli and Palestinian lives through friendship and antagonism,
dependency and superiority.
While the authors of the individual life stories contained in these pages are scrupulously
aware of the deep ironies that often underlie their subjects, there is also no turning away from a
recognition that the separate power spheres in which the lives of Israelis and Palestinians
evolve and revolve have shaped different chances for all. In this sense, power, both political
and personal, structures the lives of all of the protagonists. Even the least-advantaged Israelis
have recourse to the authorities and the state in ways that have bestowed upon them options
superior to those of the great majority of Palestinian men and women, just as some Palestinians
have enjoyed more fortunate personal and political endowments than others.
Many of the biographies gathered here are haunted by the contrast between individuals’
early expectations and how their lives actually unfolded after massive historical changes
disrupted long-meditated calculations. Others provide examples of how disastrous events have
given rise to stubborn refusals to bow down. In the process we learn that experiences of
sociological marginalization cannot explain human outcomes, even though such experiences
may exact a stiff price. Nor is being a member of a group a reliable predictor of behavior. A
consideration of the human stories contained in this volume undermines the standard “who did
what to whom first” narrative according to which different sides have sought to establish their
position as superior. Rather than shaped by stable moral binaries, the protagonists are better
understood as driven by different, often shifting subjectivities that can be (and often are) out of
step with dominant ideologies and expectations. If readers emerge from these pages with a
lively sense of the humanity of all sides, this book will have accomplished its mission.
Social biography, by introducing us to the intersubjectivity that underlies all human
interactions, has the potential to help us to see what Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic
(1973), called the very conditions of possibility of the contemporary world. People trump
politics every time.
Edmund Burke III