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Paradise Not Lost: Palestinian Utopian Thinking in the British Mandate Period
Abstract
This paper focuses on Palestinian Utopias, a small yet distinct strand inside the vast corpus of Palestinian political thought in the 20th century. I show that during the1930s and 1940s, utopian writing emerged as a common form among Arab men of letters to articulate an Arab and distinctively Palestinian future. I will discuss four published works and archival material, all of which stand on the border between literature and political thought. The first work I focus on is Ru?yay, (My Vision), a short utopian novel by historian ?Arif al-?Arif, published in 1943. In the novel al-?Arif narrates in great detail his imaginative, science-fiction style journey to a futuristic Arab Empire in the third millennium CE. A second work is a booklet by author and translator Qustantin Thiyuduri, Filastin wa-Mustaqbaluha, (The Future of Palestine, 1930). Thiyuduri proposed a unique vision of Palestine as a bi-national state for Arabs and Jews. The third work is a political booklet by Antun Ya?kub al-A?ma, an eccentric and relatively unknown author from Bethlehem, who offered to turn Palestine into "The Esperanto State". I add to this corpus the better-known novel Mudhakkirat Dajajah (Memoirs of a Hen, 1943), by Ishaq Musa al-Husayni. Mudhakkirat Dajajah tells the tale of a benevolent hen that preaches peace and harmony in the face of expulsion from the chicken coop. To complete the picture, I use archival material to understand the background of the authors and to explore the possibility that they knew of each other’s works, and wrote variations of one another’s ideas, as part of their belonging to a Palestinian republic of letters. Ultimately, my argument is that these works shed new light on early Palestinian political thought, since they are a demonstration of ideological, clear, and explicit answers to burning questions for Palestinians of the Mandate period. Among these questions are: What should be the nature of the regime of post-mandatory Palestine? What would be the basis of sovereignty in the country? And how were the settlers that were already inside Palestine and demanded ownership of the land for themselves to be naturalized?
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None