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Informal networks are an elusive and hidden factor in every society. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring recently highlighted their power and scope from Iraq to Morocco, exposing how family and clan networks wield influence behind institutional facades. While many studies of Middle Eastern societies solely analyse formal structures and official governing bodies, this book illuminates longstanding informal social systems by examining the sociopolitical history of the Palestinian highlands, known from 1950 as the West Bank. By studying family-based networks in cities like Jerusalem, Nablus and Hebron, Harel Chorev-Halewa shows how their influence has receded more slowly and less dramatically in recent generations than is commonly believed. He also connects individual elite families to the broader landscape of informal networks, comprising inter-familial alliances, collective economic systems, Sufi orders and customary law - all of which make up the unseen 'familial order.' Unfolding chronologically, this book spans a period of immense change from the Late Ottoman period to the present day, asking: How did Palestinian informal networks adapt to new realities?Why and how did they endure? And what does this say about modern Palestinian national politics in particular, and Arab societies in general? Offering an original and innovative look at informal networks in Palestine, this study is of crucial importance to scholars of Middle East studies, Palestine studies, political science and anthropology.
Whether buried underfoot or strung overhead, electrical lines are omnipresent. Not only are most societies dependent on electrical infrastructure, but this infrastructure actively shapes electrified society. From the wires, poles, and generators themselves to the entrepreneurs, engineers, politicians, and advisors who determine the process of electrification, our electrical grids can create power—and politics—just as they transmit it. Current Flow examines the history of electrification of British-ruled Palestine in the 1920s, as it marked, affirmed, and produced social, political, and economic difference between Arabs and Jews. Considering the interplay of British colonial interests, the Jewish-Zionist leanings of a commissioned electric company, and Arab opposition within the case of the Jaffa Power House, Ronen Shamir reveals how electrification was central in assembling a material infrastructure of ethno-national separation in Palestine long before "political partition plans" had ever been envisioned. Ultimately, Current Flow sheds new light on the history of Jewish-Arab relations and offers broader sociological insights into what happens when people are transformed from users into elements of networks.
This thesis investigates the relationship between water resources, networks and territory under changing relations of rule in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories. It focuses on the creation of uneven patterns of water infrastructure development since Israeli occupation of the territory in 1967, and on their perpetration following the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority in 1995. This is produced by the interplay of three different imperatives of water resource development: a military-strategic and territorial one, represented by the Israeli Civil Administration, one based on national sovereignty over resources and universal water rights, represented by the Palestinian National Authority, and one based on technical efficiency of the sector, promoted by some international development institutions. The relative strength of these three actors in relation to each other, which in turn is influenced by the political history of the region, determines the physical outcome of water resource development.Keywords. water, infrastructure, colonialism, Palestine, Israel.
Electricity is an integral part of everyday life—so integral that we rarely think of it as political. In Electrical Palestine, Fredrik Meiton illustrates how political power, just like electrical power, moves through physical materials whose properties govern its flow. At the dawn of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both kinds of power were circulated through the electric grid that was built by the Zionist engineer Pinhas Rutenberg in the period of British rule from 1917 to 1948. Drawing on new sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and several European languages, Electrical Palestine charts a story of rapid and uneven development that was greatly influenced by the electric grid and set the stage for the conflict between Arabs and Jews. Electrification, Meiton shows, was a critical element of Zionist state building. The outcome in 1948, therefore, of Jewish statehood and Palestinian statelessness was the result of a logic that was profoundly conditioned by the power system, a logic that has continued to shape the area until today.
Drawing on previously unused primary sources, this book paints an intimate and vivid portrait of Palestinian society on the eve of modernity. Through the voices of merchants, peasants, and Ottoman officials, Beshara Doumani offers a major revision of standard interpretations of Ottoman history by investigating the ways in which urban-rural dynamics in a provincial setting appropriated and gave meaning to the larger forces of Ottoman rule and European economic expansion. He traces the relationship between culture, politics, and economic change by looking at how merchant families constructed trade networks and cultivated political power, and by showing how peasants defined their identity and formulated their notions of justice and political authority. Original and accessible, this study challenges nationalist constructions of history and provides a context for understanding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It is also the first comprehensive work on the Nablus region, Palestine's trade, manufacturing, and agricultural heartland, and a bastion of local autonomy. Doumani rediscovers Palestine by writing the inhabitants of this ancient land into history.
"In the years following Israel's 2008-9 "Operation Cast Lead" assault on the Palestinians of Gaza, a new kind of student movement emerged on U.S. campuses, in solidarity with Palestinians seeking to fully exercise their human and political rights within their historic homeland. These students have brought national attention to "BDS", the worldwide campaign in support of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel until it abides by international law. Nora Barrows-Friedman traveled across the United States in 2013-2014 interviewing the young organizers at the core of this movement and documenting the political legacy these activists have built in the face of considerable opposition."--Page 4 of cover.
This book explores the political economy of Palestine through critical, interdisciplinary, and decolonial perspectives, underscoring that an approach to economics that does not consider the political—a de-politicized economics—is inadequate to understanding the situation in occupied Palestine. A critical interdisciplinary approach to political economy challenges prevailing neoliberal logics and structures that reproduce racial capitalism, and explores how the political economy of occupied Palestine is shaped by processes of accumulation by exploitation and dispossession from both Israel and global business, as well as from Palestinian elites. A decolonial approach to Palestinian political economy foregrounds struggles against neoliberal and settler colonial policies and institutions, and aids in the de-fragmentation of Palestinian life, land, and political economy that the Oslo Accords perpetuated, but whose histories of de-development over all of Palestine can be traced back for over a century. The chapters in this book offer an in-depth contextualization of the Palestinian political economy, analyze the political economy of integration, fragmentation, and inequality, and explore and problematize multiple sectors and themes of political economy in the absence of sovereignty.
What does freedom look like from inside an Israeli prison? The walls of the cell are etched with the names of the prisoners who came before. A bird perches on the cell window and offers a deal: "You bring the pencil, and I will bring the stories," stories of family, of community, of Gaza, of Palestine. Mohammad Sabaaneh brings uses his striking linocut artwork to help the world see Palestinian people as human, not as superheroes or political symbols.
Seeing the camp as a persistent political instrument in Israel–Palestine and beyond The Common Camp underscores the role of the camp as a spatial instrument employed for reshaping, controlling, and struggling over specific territories and populations. Focusing on the geopolitical complexity of Israel–Palestine and the dramatic changes it has experienced during the past century, this book explores the region’s extensive networks of camps and their existence as both a tool of colonial power and a makeshift space of resistance. Examining various forms of camps devised by and for Zionist settlers, Palestinian refugees, asylum seekers, and other groups, Irit Katz demonstrates how the camp serves as a common thread in shaping lands and lives of subjects from across the political spectrum. Analyzing the architectural and political evolution of the camp as a modern instrument engaged by colonial and national powers (as well as those opposing them), Katz offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of Israel–Palestine, highlighting how spatial transience has become permanent in the ongoing story of this contested territory. The Common Camp presents a novel approach to the concept of the camp, detailing its varied history as an apparatus used for population containment and territorial expansion as well as a space of everyday life and subversive political action. Bringing together a broad range of historical and ethnographic materials within the context of this singular yet versatile entity, the book locates the camp at the core of modern societies and how they change and transform.