Little scholarly attention has been paid to the financial impact of the 1917 transition from Ottoman to British rule in Palestine. Less consideration still has been accorded to the range of tactics employed by ordinary Arab Palestinians – peasants, salaried middle classes, merchants, businessmen – to defend themselves against the financial disadvantages inherent in this change in regime. This paper has two goals. First, it examines the impact of two key financial aspects of the Ottoman to Mandate transition: the decision taken by British administrators immediately after their arrival in Jerusalem to outlaw all Ottoman currencies and impose the Anglo-Egyptian pound as the sole legal tender in the areas under their control; and the decision, taken shortly after the Mandate’s establishment, to close the Ottoman Agricultural Bank and collect all loans outstanding on its books. This talk then examines how ordinary Arab Palestinians fought to defend their interests in light of these two policies. It argues that, despite prevailing British and Zionist attitudes as to the “simplicity,” “backwardness,” and “lack of financial sophistication” of the Arab Palestinians at the time, the archival evidence shows that even impoverished peasants displayed an understanding of complex financial matters and a keen sense of the economic protections owed to them by the colonial state. And when such protections proved to be lacking, Palestinians of non-elite backgrounds used protests, petitions, and litigation to fight for their rights. This talk draws from material found in the Barclays Bank archives, the archives of the Shehadeh Law Firm in Ramallah, the Israel State Archives, and the National Archives of the United Kingdom, as well as oral interviews conducted in Palestine and Israel. The talk ultimately hopes to raise broad questions about financial and property rights for the stateless and colonized people of the early 20th century.

Recent interventions in the scholarship on the Great Revolt in Palestine (1936-39) have focused in great detail on the extensive repression meted out to Palestinian communities by British forces, sometimes arguing that this, rather than alleged defects or tribalism of the revolt’s leadership, was the cause of the rebellion’s downfall. Regardless of its merits or shortcomings, this literature has done much to illuminate and interrogate the colonial state. By contrast, comparatively little new research has been done into the political organization and social mobilization that undergirded the uprising. This paper argues that the organization of the rebellion was central to its effectiveness and remarkable endurance against considerable odds. Although for good reason the Great Revolt is seen as an armed campaign, it was far more than this. Looking primarily at the second phase of the revolt (1937-39) and based mostly in published Arabic memoirs and captured rebel documents contained in the Central Zionist Archive, this research highlights popular, largely non-violent participation in the revolt. Specifically, it examines the use of strikes in urban centers and the formation of village committees in rural areas, neither of which has garnered much prior attention. Both practices embodied broad rebel aims: disaffiliating from the colonial regime, promoting indigenous self-governance, and aiding the rebellion. Urban strikes were launched to protest military outrages, the tactics of the counterinsurgency, and colonial political initiatives, and resulted in a contest of wills to control cities, towns, and their populations, with the government often fighting back with curfews and other punishments. Strikes, which recalled the unprecedented general strike of 1936, were smaller afterwards but clearly recognizable as a form of civil disobedience and rebel solidarity. In the countryside, where the government acknowledged that it had lost “contact” with most of the country’s Arab population, rebels established village committees to manage and coordinate local affairs. As such they mobilized men and materiel while keeping tabs on informants, but they also served local interests like the preservation of order, in which capacity they could make demands on insurgent fighters. Two preliminary conclusions that this research raises are that non-violent forms of participation in the revolt were widespread and have been overlooked in its second phase and that the rebels succeeded where the state failed at developing ground-level capacities that could reach into and mobilize communities. The paper explores these practices.

This paper examines modes of extralegal justice during two periods of widespread anticolonial uprising in Palestine: the 1936–39 revolt against British rule and Zionist colonization; and the 1987–91 intifada against Israeli rule. During each uprising, Palestinians disengaged from colonial institutions—including the police and courts—and turned to alternative practices, drawing on traditions of customary law (‘urf) and communal reconciliation (sulh) that predated colonial rule, to serve Palestinian communities and resist British and Israeli authorities. Sulh and related forms of conflict resolution accrued legitimacy by referring to practices predating the Zionist settler-colonial project, but other factors also made them powerful tool within Palestinian uprisings. Sulh’s decentralized and personalized authority, which derive from mediators’ status and disputants’ willingness to engage them in reconciliation, proved well suited to the necessities of anticolonial struggle. Reconciliation practices also fortified communities by emphasizing the equality of disputants and an ethos of communal (rather than individual) justice. Meanwhile, anticolonial leaders—many of them marginal within pre-uprising power structures—gained authority by engaging in mediation, integrating new social formations into preexisting traditions and offering stability in highly unstable periods. Sulh thus conferred legitimacy on decidedly untraditional power arrangements. Palestinians during the 1936–39 revolt and the intifada also employed disciplinary violence to coerce those who benefited from the colonial order to abandon it and to ensure adherence to alternative systems. Groups formed to safeguard the uprisings, their ranks drawn largely from economically marginalized young men. These police-like forces frequently engaged in uneasy relationships with those they policed, especially those who found the material impact of anticolonial revolt onerous. At times, they also clashed with the political leadership of the uprisings, which sought to direct and restrain the activity of youth activists. In each uprising, as internal and external pressures exacerbated divides within Palestinian society, violence became increasingly undisciplined, exposing gender and class hierarchies obscured by sulh’s inclusive rhetoric. This paper draws on memoirs and diaries, press accounts, oral histories, and rebel communiqués from both uprisings to examine the tensions that emerged between the struggle for sociopolitical transformation, on the one hand, and efforts to assure Palestinians’ security and stability, on the other. In doing so, it highlights the complex intra-Palestinian dimensions of these uprisings, illuminating local strategies for—and obstacles to—forging alternatives to colonial justice.

Despite the extensive focus on Jerusalem in Palestinian history, very little attention has been given to Arab Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. The majority of work on Jerusalem after the Nakba focuses on the loss of its western neighbourhoods, the “New City.” This paper discusses how Palestinians in Arab Jerusalem continued to reproduce their material worlds, discourses and meanings in the aftermath of the Nakba, particularly during the first decade after 1948. The paper gives an overview of the destructive consequences of the colonization of Palestine on Arab Jerusalem, which was rendered a city of refugees, located at the border with its lost homeland under the rule of Jordan. In particular, it highlights the results of the New City’s displacement and occupation on Arab Jerusalem, which left its residents without essential infrastructure, a city centre, the townhall, and other significant urban assets. In light of this loss, the paper describes how different social groups in the city, including refugees and the poor as well as merchants and property owners, negotiated within the city’s public space for strategies to survive and revive its destroyed economy. The paper embarks on a journey into what became the city-centre of Arab Jerusalem, starting from Bab al-‘Amoud [Damascus Gate], the main gate of the Old City, through the main street leading to Bab al-Sahrih [Herod’s Gate] and Salah al-Din street. Drawing on the records of the municipality of Arab Jerusalem and Palestinian press accounts, the paper highlights how different social groups used petitions, essays in the local press and mediation to engage the municipality and reproduce their city as a productive space. For instance, merchants in Bab al-Sahrih petitioned the authorities to cancel colonial mandate planning policies that prevented the development of the areas surrounding the Old City, and poor vendors pleaded with the municipality to allow them to use the gaps in the Old City’s walls to set their booths as they did not have the financial means to rent shops. Indeed, the strategies of survival and revival that allowed for the material and conceptual (re)making of Arab Jerusalem after the Nakba, were at the heart of Palestinian world- and identity-making in localities that were not destroyed in 1948 yet lived under the conditions of national loss.