The collapse of the Palestinian-Arab Middle Class in 1948: The case of Qatamon. Middle Eastern Studies, 2007 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Qatamon, 1948: The Fall of a Neighborhood. Jerusalem Quarterly, 2011
Jerusalem Quarterly, 2011
The Qatamon neighborhood, in South-west Jerusalem, encapsulated the Palestinian-Arab Middle Class of the Mandate era. In April 1948 the neighborhood was conquered, during the first Arab-Israeli war, and later became a Jewish neighborhood. This article depicts the process that had led to its fall. It is a shorter, friendly version of the full article that appeared on MES in 2007.
Journal of Contemporary History, 2016
The Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate may be characterized as bourgeois and educated, similarly to bourgeois classes that have developed in the West in the Modern era. The bourgeois characteristics of the Palestinian-Arab middle class, and their influence on its historical trajectory during the Mandate era, have not been studied in depth yet. This article aims to focus on a local aspect of the rise of the middle class in the region in that period: the rise of the Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate, until the Palestinian-Arab Revolt (1936–9). The main hypothesis is that particular bourgeois social and cultural characteristics prevented the middle class full incorporation into the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, and even led to estrangement between the middle class and the national leadership, as well as members of lower strata, especially the villagers. Members of the middle class, mostly Christians but Muslims as well, espoused in their daily life modern habits, ideas, and customs, as a means to distinguish between themselves and other classes, similarly to their parallels in the West, and like their contemporaries elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, as has demonstrated Watenpaugh. Those gaps reached their climax during the years of revolt
Jerusalem 1948: the Arab Neighbourhoods and their Fate in the War
1999
This gathering brought together members of prominent Christian and Muslim families from Jerusalem and Jaffa, as well as Nablus. At the center of the gathering, standing, bareheaded and in a white suit, is Ya'qub Farraj, the doyen of the Palestinian Greek Orthodox community, who succeeded Musa Kazem Pasha al-Huseini as the head of the Palestine Executive Committee at the latter's death in 1934. In the first standing row, the second gentleman from the left is a leader of the Jewish Samaritan community of Nablus. Dr. Hassan Khalidi, a physician, and Suleiman Tuqan, later mayor of Nablus and defense minister in 1958 in the ill-fated Iraqi-Jordanian Confederation, are the third and fourth in the row, respectively. Standing behind Tuqan is Linda Khouri, mother of Hanna Nasir, current president of Birzeit University. To her left is Mitri Farraj who worked for the British Mandate administration as a District Commissioner in Nablus. Standing below Mitri Farraj and to the left of Ya'qub Farraj is Andoni Khouri, the mukhtar of the Greek Orthodox community in Jaffa and a timber merchant. The lady behind the priest is Evelyn Khouri Baramki, mother of Gabi Baramki, former vice-president of Birzeit University. The seated lady, second from the right, is Nada Khouri Farraj, Mitri's wife. The child she is h o l d i n g i s F u a d , f o r m e r l y representative for Jerusalem in the Jordanian parliament. Reprinted from , edited by Walid Khalidi. Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991.
Haifa’s lost Palestinian bourgeoisie
+972 Magazine , 2022
it is a story that exposes the deception of “coexistence” in Israel’s “mixed cities,” as well as the falsehood that Israel has brought democracy, progress, and economic prosperity to the Palestinians that remained. With that, it further challenges the binary narrative that identifies Israeliness with “modernity” and “the West,” as opposed to Palestinian, Arab, and Mizrahi identities that are so often identified as “anti-modern.
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.
The Middle Class and the Land Struggle in Palestine
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2023
This article discusses the rise and failure of private horticultural farming by Palestinian leaders and middle-class developers in the Beisan valley in the 1930s. This focus broadens and deepens our understanding of the colonial encounter in Palestine. Although the Palestinian middle class appears prominently in the political narratives of the struggle, this group has been paradoxically deemphasized in the social history of capital and settler accumulation and dispossession. By correcting this bias, the article seeks to develop a more inclusive narrative concerning private property in land in the settler-colonial predicament as a process of double loss: of Indigenous land relations and ecologies, on the one hand, and national life and territory, on the other. To do so, the article privileges an actor-based history, which captures both the development of political and economic practices and traditions, as well as the long and deep effects of governmental structures of dispossession.
Urban Geography, 2018
This article examines a unique, yet paradigmatic, case study of a colonial neighborhood in East Jerusalem that is undergoing a significant demographic transformation.1 The French Hill neighborhood, built in 1971, was one of the first settlements in East Jerusalem. Initially, it was populated primarily by upper-middle class secular-Jewish residents. This group has been steadily diminishing as two other distinct new groups moved into the neighborhood: Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Palestinians. This volatile social mix has caused intense inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic collisions. Based on qualitative and quantitative studies, we argue that the juxtaposition of colonial and neoliberal logics of space reveals a shared, yet fragile, middle-class identity. We suggest that this new geopolitical space of neighboring calls for a discussion of political conflict, housing and current colonial conditions that brings class back to our understanding of the production of contested space.
Introduction: The Transformation of Urban Mix in Palestine/Israel in the Modern Era
Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities: …, 2007
Introduction of Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities. Ashgate 2007. http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Mixed\_Towns\_Trapped\_Communities\_Intro.pdf http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754647324 Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities: Historical Narratives, Spatial Dynamics, Gender Relations and Cultural Encounters in Palestinian-Israeli Towns Edited by Daniel Monterescu, Central European University, Hungary and Dan Rabinowitz, Tel-Aviv University, Israel Series: Re-materialising Cultural Geography Modern urban spaces are, by definition, mixed socio-spatial configurations. In many ways, their enduring success and vitality lie in the richness of their ethnic texture and ongoing exchange of economic goods, cultural practices, political ideas and social movements. This mixture, however, is rarely harmonious and has often led to violent conflict over land and identity. Focusing on mixed towns in Israel/Palestine, this insightful volume theorizes the relationship between modernity and nationalism and the social dynamics which engender and characterize the growth of urban spaces and the emergence therein of inter-communal relations. For more than a century, Arabs and Jews have been interacting in the workplaces, residential areas, commercial enterprises, cultural arenas and political theatres of mixed towns. Defying prevailing Manichean oppositions, these towns both exemplify and resist the forces of nationalist segregation. In this interdisciplinary volume, a new generation of Israeli and Palestinian scholars come together to explore ways in which these towns have been perceived as utopian or dystopian and whether they are best conceptualized as divided, dual or colonial. Identifying ethnically mixed towns as a historically specific analytic category, this volume calls for further research, comparison and debate. Contents: Preface; Introduction: the transformation of urban mix in Palestine/Israel in the modern era, Dan Rabinowitz and Daniel Monterescu; Part 1 History, Representation and Collective Memory: Bourgeois nostalgia and the abandoned city, Salim Tamari; 'The Arabs just left': othering and the construction of self amongst Jews in Haifa before and after 1948, Dan Rabinowitz; 'We were living in a different country': Palestinian nostalgia and the future past, Jasmin Habib; Cross-national collective action in Palestine's mixed towns: the 1946 civil servants strike, David de Vries; How is a mixed town to be administered? Haifa's municipal council, 1940–1947, Tamir Goren. Part 2 Spatial Dynamics: Ethnic Urban Mix and its Contradictions: Planning, control and spatial protest: the case of the Jewish-Arab town od Lydd/Lod, Haim Yacobi; Heteronomy: the cultural logic of urban space and sociality in Jaffa, Daniel Monterescu; A nixed, not mixed, city: mapping obstacles to democracy in the Nazareth/Nazerat Illit conurbation, Laurie King-Irani; Exit from the scene: reflections on the public space of the Palestinians in Israel, Raef Zreik. Part 3 Gendered Perspectives on Mixed Spaces: Contested contact: proximity and social control in pre-1948 Jaffa and Tel-Aviv, Deborah S. Bernstein; Mixed cities as a place of choice: the Palestinian women's perspective, Hanna Herzog. Part 4 Cultural Encounters and Civil Society: ECooperation and conflict in the zone of civil society: Arab-Jewish activism in Jaffa, Amalia Sa'ar; Nationalism, religion and urban politics in Israel: struggles over modernity and identity in 'global' Jaffa, Mark LeVine; Mixed as in pidgin: the vanishing Arabic of a 'bilingual' city, Anton Shammas; Index. About the Editor: Dr Daniel Monterescu, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest. Dan Rabinowitz is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University. Reviews: ‘This excellent volume opens up an entirely new angle of vision on relations among Jews and Palestinians in Israel. By exploring the connections between urban space, nationhood, and modernity, it treats so-called “mixed towns” as both a metaphor for and an expression of the tensile sociology of the country at large. Essential reading for anyone interested in the Middle East, past and present.’ John Comaroff, University of Chicago, USA 'The authors…have drawn on a wide range of theories in order to provide a comprehensive explanation of the everyday life in mixed towns…This is an important contribution to the qualitative methods now being used in social research, the importance of which has only recently been widely acknowledged.' Geography Research Forum '…the book compels the reader to rethink paradigms that have come to characterize Israel/Palestine studies and to consider what is at stake for the future, given what the mixed town simultaneously erases and embraces.' Journal of Palestine Studies
Separatism, coexistence and the landscape: Jews and Palestinian-Arabs in mandatory Haifa
Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 52, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 79-101 Haifa was named a ‘mixed city’ by the British, who ruled Palestine from 1917 to 1948, in reference to the two national communities that inhabited the town. This definition was not neutral, and reflected the Brits aspirations to create national coexistence in Palestine among the diverse urban societies. Reality was more complicated. The basic assumption of this paper follows the idea that the bi-national urban society of Mandatory Haifa developed into dual society, albeit with much overlapping in economic and civil matters, but takes it one step further: through highlighting changes in the urban landscape, I wish to argue dominance of the national European modern Hebrew society over the Palestinian-Arabs and the traditional and oriental Jewish societies and ideas alike. The changes in the urban landscape tell us the story of Zionism's growing influence and dominance, and the way the urban landscape was used to embody Zionism's modern European ethos. The neighbourhood's segregation, therefore, represents not only the effort to separate but to create a modern national ‘sense of place’ that influenced the city development.