Al-Lajjun: A Social and Geographic Account of a Palestinian Village During the British Mandate P eriod (original) (raw)
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Lajjun: Forgotten Provincial Capital in Ottoman Palestine
Levant
During the 16th century CE, the town of al-Lajjun in the Marj ibn ‘Amir (the Jezreel Valley), served as one of Ottoman Palestine’s provincial capitals under the administration of the Turabay Dynasty (1517–1688 CE), and was an important centre on the imperial highway between Damascus and Cairo. However, the town of this period has never been the subject of historical investigation. This paper seeks to bring together, assess and synthesize, rarely accessed Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources, along with oral histories and an archaeological survey, to provide the first comprehensive historical account of Turabay al-Lajjun and its ultimate demise in the 19th century CE.
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 47:2 (2020), 264-281, 2020
During the Mandate period (1920–1948), Haifa attracted thousands of Palestinian rural migrants, who constituted a significant portion of its Arab population. The article examines the experience of rural migrants in urban life and the influence of this social group on urban society. I argue that rural migrants contributed to Haifa’s economic development, participated in political and cultural activity and formed a connecting link between the city and their villages of origin. Rural migrants played a significant role as agents of change in Palestinian society, owing to the conjunction of rural and urban characteristics in their daily life. To demonstrate this, I focus on three arenas of their agency: the labour market, civil society and militias during the Arab Revolt. Their involvement in civil associations and in the Arab Revolt was central to their construction of modernity, and they disseminated it in widening circles in their villages of origin and among their acquaintances in the city.
This article critically discusses the image and the imagining of the Arab village produced by two cultures, the national-Zionist from the 1930s onwards, and the national-Palestinian during the last decade. Unlike fellow theorists and researchers, we are reluctant to be satisfied with the claim that throughout history the Jews, establishing their identity vis-à-vis the rural and oriental 'other', perceived the Arab village in an inversely mirrored manner. Instead, we suggest that it took the Arab village only a few years to transform from an object which represents the 'other' and a signifier of the backward enemy, to what we would define as 'still life', a-historical and de-politicised. The Arab village, we would argue, became an object, a source of colonial imagination in the Israeli architectural culture, which sought the 'local' in order to establish a national identity, without associating it with its creator, the Arab society. Within this framework, we also suggest that through a process of 'mutual contamination' the Arab village is perceived and politically re-constructed by Palestinian architectural discourse and practice within the boundaries of Israel.
A Village of Palestine Heritage – Al-Dhahiriya Palestine
WIT Transactions on State-of-the-art in Science and Engineering, 2016
In 2009, Palestinian historian Bshara Domani identified a popular phenomenon among Palestinians called 'the archive fever'. During the last 40 years many researchers and artists searched through their old pictures and Archival collections; in addition they tried to conduct interviews with the old people and collect data of the old buildings and the demolished villages. Clearly, this is difficult for people who lost their geography, most of their cities, half of their villages and were expelled from their land. These people-the Palestinians-are trying to describe their history which was not allowed to be narrated at the time of Israeli occupation in 1948. The project of 'documenting and rehabilitating the old centres of the Palestinian villages' aims at exploring the current status of 800 village centres which survived after the 1948 war and which contained an independent, self-sufficient lifestyle. The Palestinian villages endured for centuries using primitive skills that offered a sustainability model developed by the residents. This article is a visual and practical tour in a part of the Palestinian rural area and a clear evidence in the 21st century on the remaining distinctive architectural heritage that is under threat. It is also an attempt to increase the awareness and finding the right solutions to rehabilitate the Palestinian villages. For centuries, the architecture in the Palestinian villages was described as 'spontaneous simple architecture', and until the 1920s, the mountains of the West Bank was the heart of rural life in Palestine. Al-Dhahiriya village-the example which is studied in this article-is a small village located in the south of West Bank. The old core of Al-Dhahiriya will be analysed in this article.
PhD dissertation, 2016
This dissertation is a socio-historical statistical study of the implementation and adoption of Tanzimat-era land-tenure reforms in the Palestinian countryside. It addresses three main questions: (1) what was the character of rural property tenure in mountainous regions of Palestine; (2) to what degree were modernizing property-reform measures adopted by the rural populace; and (3) how did the reform affect rural property-tenure and economic wellbeing? The 1858 Land Code was one of a series of Tanzimat reforms that together formalized individual title to property and land tenure. Yet, due to the dearth of accessible documentation, little is known about the implementation of these reforms. Among historians of Palestine, in the absence of proof to the contrary there is broad consensus that the reforms failed. It is widely argued that villagers evaded land registration en masse, either because they did not understand the significance of the reform or feared that increased taxation or conscription would result from property registration. This study brings to light and analyzes a property-value and property-tax assessment register (Esas-ı Emlak) compiled in 1876 (1292 maliyye) for the villages and rural agricultural lands of the large Halilürrahman (Hebron) district, south of Jerusalem. It permits, for the ix first time, systematic investigation of the implementation of property-tenure reforms in Palestine at a district-wide level. This study demonstrates that many rural agriculturalists in rural Hebron had independent economic power and landed wealth above subsistence levels. Hebronites were invested in implementing modernizing reforms to protect their landed assets, which they registered with the emlak, property-tax commission as individual holdings and as communally owned properties. While it is commonly understood that traditional, communal land-tenure arrangements (musha') were disallowed after land reform, this study demonstrates how it was incorporated into reform and protected the rights of shareholders. It also argues that property-tenure reform needs to be understood as a process, not an event. Villagers have rarely figured as subjects of Ottoman histories. This study exploits the emlak register together with sharia court cases and 1905 Ottoman population registries to flesh out a picture of late-Ottoman villages, villagers, and rural society from below in southern Palestine.
israel studies, 2010
Colonial governments frequently employed policies that either developed colonies for the benefit of the colonial power or neglected areas not viewed as contributory. Land laws and settlement policies were instrumental tools for the extension of governmental control to marginal regions under the sequential regimes that ruled the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries. Our case study of the Baysan valley in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine examines relations between the government and indigenous Bedouin nomads, and between the Zionist movement and the Bedouin, focusing on land access, ownership, and settlement patterns of the Bedouin tribes between 1831 and 1948 and their sedenterization. We show that the policies of the Ottoman Sultan Abdül Hamid II and the British Mandatory Ghor Mudawarra Land Agreement led to a unique process of settlement in the Baysan valley with extension of land ownership to local inhabitants by the colonial government. The study is part of a broader investigation of Colonial rule, nomads, land law, and land and settlement policy in the Middle East.