Download PDF | Lorenzo Kamel - Imperial Perceptions of Palestine_ British Influence and Power in Late Ottoman Times-I.B. Tauris (2015).
312 Pages
Lorenzo Kamel is a research fellow at Bologna University and Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
INTRODUCTION THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ` THE OTHERS'
Do the Palestinians, the Israelis, know how much they are extraneous to their current history, to their present? And do we know? Do they know the extent to which they are not victims one of the other, but that each is a victim of a history which is declared passed, but has remained suspended [...]?1 Viviane Forrester Despite being focused on a relatively distant past, Imperial Perceptions of Palestine is a book that speaks to and sheds light on the present. It is articulated in ten thematic chapters all connected to a central thread: the dynamics and the intrinsic consequences of the process of simplification of Palestine and its inhabitants under British influence. The process of simplification is about the tendency to define, indeed rationalize, the other in terms more suitable, comprehensible and useful to the self. It developed hand in hand with the increasing British penetration in the region and reached its apex in the five years immediately preceding the British mandate for Palestine. The process of simplification has had in ‘biblical orientalism’ one of its most powerful manifestations. ‘Biblical orientalism’ – an underresearched variant of orientalism,2 to which Edward Said (1935– 2003) did not devote the attention one might have expected – can be defined as a phenomenon based on the combination of a selective use of religion and a simplifying way to approach its natural habitat: the ‘Holy Land’.
Between the 1830s and the beginning of the twentieth century this attitude triggered a flood of mainly British books, private diaries and maps. This enormous production, alongside a wide range of phenomena such as evangelical tourism, generated the idea of a meta-Palestine, an imaginary place devoid of any history except that of biblical magnificence. ‘Biblical orientalism’ was already present in the maps published in the first modern atlas by Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527 –98). In the sixteenth century Ortelius instilled in black and white the concept of a Palestine devoid of history except that of biblical gloriousness. It is, however, only in the second half of the nineteenth century that this approach found its ideal ground and was converted into imperial politics relating to the area. It is then that both the ‘shadowing’ process with regard to the local populations, and the impression that the history of the major villages and cities of the region had its point zero in biblical times, gained their most influential formulations.4 The original nucleus of this book developed with the aim of deconstructing this perception by observing the process through which a local complex reality has been simplified and denied in its continuity. The process of simplification has two dimensions: it is a mindset, as well as a policy. The book chapters are therefore linked to one another accordingly: the first dimension concentrates on how the perception of Palestine developed in Britain in the period under analysis (1850s– 1923). The second focuses on the process by which the Palestinian context has been simplified through a reshaping of the institutional and normative frames of the local life world in relation to identities, land tenure, toponymy, religious titles, institutions, borders and other major aspects connected to the local reality. Both processes have been analysed through study of a large number of oral sources and documents from 17 archives scattered across Israel, the Palestinian territories, England, Turkey, Egypt, the USA and Italy. The book is ideally divided into five parts, which follow a chronological as well as analytical order. The first part (Chapters 1–3) focuses on the development of basic British interests in, and biblical perceptions of, Palestine in the mid-nineteenth century, which set the ground for British policies of ‘simplifying the other’. This took place through a process of denial and, more generally, through the rationalization of the local reality,5 as for instance in the land tenure issue (Chapter 3)
l Figure I.1 J. MacGregor, The Rob Roy on the Jordan (London: Murray, 1904). The image represents an example of the effects that the inclination to standardize the complexity of the ‘other’ had within the Palestinian context. It is placed on the frontispiece of the book with the caption ‘Captured on Jordan by the Arabs of Hooleh [Hula]’. John MacGregor (1815 –92) visited Palestine in 1868 – 9. The ‘naked and black’ figures immortalized on the image are the Arabs who attacked his canoe in the Hula Valley. In describing them MacGregor noted that ‘their heads were like cocoa-nuts, with only one hair-lock left at the top, for Mahomet to hold them by at last’ (p. 4).
The second part of the volume (Chapters 4– 6) brings in the Zionist movement in Palestine, often misrepresented, without which the process of simplifying the local reality cannot be fully understood. It starts with outlining the Zionist approach to the land, moves to the British – Zionist relationship, before examining its effects on the region. Part 3 (Chapters 7 –8) takes on board the creation of the mandates system, a meaningful turning point that, on the one hand, provided the legal international legitimization to the process of standardization examined in the previous chapters, and, on the other, enabled a ‘cherrypicking process’ – that is, the selection of a few ‘natural representatives’ from the local populations.
Based on these developments, the fourth part (Chapter 9) analyses the construction of institutions, religious titles and leaders – Fays˙ al (1885–1933) and H˙ ajj Amı¯n al-H˙ usaynı¯ (1895– 1974) first and foremost – by the British, which, in line with their interests, simplified local political structures and marginalized the Palestinian people and their expectations. Rather than denying agency to the local population, the sources of the time show their efforts – often unsuccessful – to shape a different course. While the first nine chapters largely focus on the top-down process by which present-day Israel/Palestine, and more generally the whole region, was essentialized between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the last chapter (part 5) goes beyond this and examines the growing bottom-up process through which the people are now trying to emancipate themselves from this process of simplification. This process gives a voice to the Palestinian people’s attempt to write (or rewrite) history from below through museums, archives and cultural associations. In this last historical phase great swathes of Palestinian society have in fact demonstrated a willingness to correct the historical deficit triggered mainly by the colonial past.
This may be understood as a growing internal need to bring Palestinians back into their history, or as an effort to emphasize a local reality that has grown for centuries in the name of a continuity and which has been too often overlooked or denied; or as an attempt to recover a local milieu and a way of life rooted in what in Western languages is only able to find expression in a complete way through the concept of Heimat – which in German does not refer to one’s country or nation, two abstract ideas that are too far-reaching and distant, but rather to a place in which our most profound memories are rooted. Finally, it is important to note that this volume is part of a much broader picture. It is to be hoped that it will facilitate a deeper understanding of the dynamics that the entire Eastern Mediterranean – an expression that in this volume is preferred to the more diffused Middle East, due to the colonial connotations of the latter – is currently experiencing. The process through which the history of the whole area has been simplified between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century has now reached its point of no return. In a effort to shed light on the present and the foreseeable future, a number of scholars are today resorting to the thesis of the ‘end of the Sykes-Picot order’. If this claim has a meaning is mainly because the Sykes-Picot system postponed the rising of a new order shaped from within the region. Rather than linking what is happening in the Eastern Mediterranean to the end of the Sykes-Picot order it would be therefore more accurate to refer to the final point of an historical impasse that lasted for almost one century. Each of the populations in the area are now expected to find their own peculiar way to get back into history, rediscovering the permeability and the specificities that for millennia characterized daily life in the region. Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies Cambridge (MA)
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