Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past“This wonderful monograph treats a subject that resonates with anyone who studies the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and particularly Palestinian nationalism: that how Palestinian history is remembered and constructed is as meaningful to our understanding of the current struggle as arriving as some sort of ‘complete empirical understanding’ of its history. Swedenburg . . . studies how a major anti-colonial insurrection, the 1936–38 strike and revolt in Palestine [against the British], is remembered in Palestinian nationalist historiography, western and Israeli ‘official’ historical discourse, and Palestinian popular memory. Using primarily oral history interviews, supplemented by archival material and national monuments, he presents multiple, complex, contradictory, and alternative interpretations of historical events. . . . The book is thematically divided into explorations of Palestinian nationalist symbols, stereotypes, and myths; Israeli national monuments that simultaneously act as historical ‘injunctions against forgetting’ Jewish history and efforts to ‘marginalize, vilify, and obliterate’ the Arab history of Palestine; Palestine subaltern memories as resistance to official narratives, including unpopular and controversial recollections of collaboration and assassination; and finally, how the recodification and revival of memories of the revolt informed the Palestinian intifada that erupted in 1987.” —MESA Bulletin |
Contents
| 1 | |
2 Scenes of Erasure | 38 |
3 Popular Nationalism | 76 |
4 Memory as Resistance | 107 |
Accommodation and Collaboration | 138 |
IntifadaThawra | 171 |
Fabulous Images | 202 |
Afterword 2003 | 211 |
Notes | 217 |
Bibliography | 241 |
Index | 259 |
Other editions - View all
Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past Ted Swedenburg No preview available - 1995 |
Common terms and phrases
Abd al-Rahîm Abû Durra Abû Fâris According accounts Acre activists activities al-'Awad Al-Fajr al-Husaynî al-Qassâm Alî armed army asserted Ayn Hawd Baytam Beirut Benvenisti British campaign claimed collaborators colonial culture Druze elite fallâhîn Faysal faza fighters forces Galilee Gaza Gaza Strip Haganah Haifa Hâjj Amîn hijab Husaynî Ibrâhîm insurgency interviewed intifada involved Israel Israeli Izz al-Dîn Jerusalem Jewish Jews Jinîn Kafr Khalidi killed kûfiya Kuwaykât land leaders leadership Masada military Mufti Muhammad mujahidîn Muslim Nablus narrative Nashâshîbî national movement nationalist nationalist discourse Occupied Territories official organized Palestine Palestine Post Palestinian Arab Palestinian national Palestinian Women past peace bands peasant political popular memory Porath Press Qassâm Rabbâh Ramallah rebel commanders rebellion refugees revolt rural Sâlih Sayigh Shaykh Shuqayrî significant Sonia story struggle subaltern thawra thuwwâr tinian tion traitors Tûlkarm urban West Bank Western Ya'bad Yad Vashem Yadin York York Guardian Zionist
Popular passages
Page 27 - The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over.
Page 76 - I have done that," says my memory. "I cannot have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually, memory yields.
Page xiii - States : the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Research Council. The...
Page 8 - In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct...
Page 3 - But the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual's subjective life.
Page 50 - Israelite civilisation. . . . [The excavations show how] the Bible has not misrepresented at all the abomination of the Canaanite culture which was superseded by the Israelite culture.
Page 18 - This takes me to a general argument implicit within the study of the subaltern in the context of decolonization: if the story of the rise of nationalist resistance to imperialism is to be disclosed coherently, it is the role of the indigenous subaltern that must be strategically excluded. Then it can be argued that, in the initial stages of the consolidation of territorial imperialism, no organized political resistance was forthcoming. Through access to the cultural aspects of imperialism, the colonized...
Page 52 - Even the veterans and the more cynical among us stood frozen, gazing in awe at what had been uncovered; for as we gazed, we relived the final and most tragic moments of the drama of Masada.
Page xxviii - Nietzschean than realist or hermeneutic, all constructed truths are made possible by powerful "lies" of exclusion and rhetoric. Even the best ethnographic texts — serious, true fictions — are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully control.