Palestine
The Exile Bourgeoisie of Palestine
‘Umar ‘Aqqad is planning to export bottled water from Saudi Arabia. Not the kind of project you might expect in a desert kingdom where water is scarce. But then, ‘Aqqad is one of the shrewdest and most successful businessmen in the region. Not coincidentally, he is also a Palestinian. For Palestinians, stateless and living by their wits, have been among the leading capitalists of the Middle East. Their number has included Beirut’s greatest banking genius, partners in the foremost contracting firms of the Gulf, Jordan’s top banker, and several of Saudi Arabia’s leading managers and industrialists.
Before Their Diaspora
Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876-1948, introduction and commentary by Walid Khalidi, (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984).
Before Their Diaspora gathers some 400 photographs to present a portrait of Palestine, its people and their culture, from the late 19th century—he last years of Ottoman rule—until the end of the British Mandate in 1948.
No Going Back?
During the early stages of national political formation in the Middle East, when crises prevail and mass mobilization is a major organizing strategy, political movements often recruit women and the domestic sector into the political arena. Continuous crises, from which the domestic sector is not immune, compel women to participate. This was the case in the pre-1982 Palestinian community in Lebanon.
Smith, Palestine and the Palestinians
Pamela Ann Smith, Palestine and the Palestinians, 1876-1983 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).
Becker, The PLO
Jillian Becker, The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).
Welcome to the weird world of Ms. Jillian Becker—a world in which the PLO wreaks senseless vengeance on the hapless Palestinian people, PLO prison officers decorate their offices with blood-daubed Stars of David (pp. 146-47), generally elusive victims of PLO violence have their genitals or breasts cut off, or are ripped mercilessly limb from limb, etc. This is a universe where, in the author’s words, “dynamic ‘First World’ cultures come up against and clash with stagnant ‘Third World’ cultures.” (p.5)
Benvenisti, The West Bank Data Base Project
Meron Benvenisti, The West Bank Data Base Project: A Survey of Israel’s Policies (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1984).
This book, by the former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, is the first major commercial publication of the small but industrious West Bank Data Base Project (WBDBP). The project constitutes an attempt to collect and collate an accurate and comprehensive data base which will enable “[us] to focus on fast changing conditions in the territories and, in so doing, prevent the political discussion and decision-making process from being overtaken by events.” (p. ix) This meritorious claim has received the imprimatur of no lesser figures than former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Special Envoy Philip Habib.
Cobban, The PLO
Helena Cobban, The PLO: People, Power and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1984).
The Amazing Road
The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry, collected and translated by A.M. Elmessiri, illustrated by Kamal Boullata, Arabic calligraphy by Adel Horan, (Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1982).
Hussein Hangover
Diplomatic activity on the future of the occupied West Bank and Gaza has again assumed a high profile. The luminaries traveling on this particular mission are jetting around the globe — King Fahd in Washington, Hussein in Algiers, and the US and the Soviet Union in Vienna.
The people at the heart of the discussion, the population of the occupied territories, still suffer from the lull that has gripped the West Bank and Gaza since the war in Lebanon. Initiatives, not to speak of solutions, seem far removed from the curfewed alleyways of Dheisheh refugee camp, the huckster-thronged streets of the Old City of Jerusalem or the solemn night streets of Ramallah and Nablus.
Squaring the Palestinian Circle
Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar and close observer of PLO affairs, is presently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. He recently completed a book on the PLO experience in Lebanon. Nubar Hovsepian and Joe Stork spoke with him in late January 1985.
How would you describe the balance of forces within the Palestinian movement today?
From the Editors (January 1985)
We would like to begin this first issue for 1985 with heartfelt thanks to our readers for your very strong support over the past year. Your unprecedented generosity in response to our fundraising appeals was essential to our work, and we appreciate very much the confidence this expresses for MERIP’s future. In this coming year we will continue to count on your help. The need for a strong, critical perspective on US policy in the region will be more important than ever as the Reagan administration begins its second term. We are grateful to know that you are with us. One innovation we are planning for this year is a special newsletter for those who contribute $50 or more to MERIP’s work. The first issue will appear shortly.
Letter from the West Bank
Driving through the West Bank on Land Day, March 30, we pull to the side of the road outside Balata refugee camp, on the outskirts of Nablus. In the valley, two bulldozers move slowly against the backdrop of the Nablus hills, plowing a new road through wheatfields. Spring has come early this year, and in the heady sunlight we make our way through the knee-high wheat to ask two burly Israeli soldiers, clearly enjoying their duty of guarding the bulldozers, why the authorities were building a new road parallel to two existing roads.
Visualizing History
Sarah Graham-Brown, The Palestinians and Their Society, 1880-1946 (New York: Quartet Books, 1980).
Khalidi and Mansour, Palestine and the Gulf
Rashid Khalidi and Camille Mansour, eds., Palestine and the Gulf (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1982).
Books on Palestine and Human Rights
Raja Shehadeh and Jonathan Kuttab, The West Bank and the Rule of Law (Geneva: International Commission of Jurists, 1980).
David H. Ott, Palestine in Perspective: Politics, Human Rights and the West Bank (London: Quartet Books, 1980).
Owen, Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine
Roger Owen, ed., Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982).
“The People Have Refused to Back Down”
Azmi Shuaibi is a dentist and a leading member of al-Bira municipal council, now disbanded by the Israeli military government. He comes from a peasant background, from the village of Dayr Ghassana in the West Bank, and was educated at Cairo University. He was elected to al-Bira municipal council on a pro-Palestine Liberation Organization slate in the 1976 election. Since 1977, he also represented the Ramallah-Bira section of the Palestinian Dentists’ Association. In the city council, he was responsible for the public library and its wide-ranging cultural activity, and for the secondary school committee. Shuaibi has been imprisoned several times for his political activity. Until recently he was under town arrest, which prevented him from leaving al-Bira or the West Bank.
Halabi, The West Bank Story
Rafik Halabi, The West Bank Story (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).
Rafik Halabi is a Palestinian-Israeli Druze. He writes at times with the viewpoint of an Israeli soldier and a former aide to Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, sometimes as an Arab villager. The West Bank Story explores several themes. Drawing on his experience covering the occupied territories for Israeli television, Halabi offers a journalistic account of the occupation’s history, its political figures and its radical “Palestinization” (or “de-Jordanization”). Another theme is the impact of the occupation on the occupying society.
Cohen, Political Parties in the West Bank Under the Jordanian Regime, 1949-1967
Amnon Cohen, Political Parties in the West Bank Under the Jordanian Regime, 1949-1967 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).
The Lebanon War and the Occupied Territories
Until the war in Lebanon, official Israeli policy toward the Palestinians under its occupation rested on the premise that the PLO was the only obstacle on the road to what Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir called “the fullest advancement of the process that began in Camp David.” [1] The elimination of the PLO, according to this logic, would produce Palestinians willing to take part in an Israeli-defined autonomy. Through the so- called Civil Administration, then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had started the process of extirpating “PLO influence in the territories.”
