We know quite a lot about the 1948 war that created a Jewish state in most of historic Palestine, and brought about the depopulation of the majority of the land’s Arab inhabitants. Historians have reconstructed the battles, narrated the state of mind of the political and military leaders, and even exposed the atrocities. However, few historians have told the stories of the subaltern classes of non-elites during the war, and how they perceived reality while events were unfolding. We know very little about the “ordinary,” enlisted soldier—Jewish or Arab—who fought in 1948 and how he perceived himself and the reasons for which he was fighting. This paper focuses on the Arab volunteers who came from all over the Arab world to fight in solidarity with Palestinians as part of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA). Using the personal letters they wrote or received from their families and friends, I am interested in learning who these volunteers were, and what made them feel attached to Palestine—a place some of them had never visited. I am also interested in how they perceived Zionism, the West, and the other Arab regimes that sprang up in the Middle East after the demise of the Ottoman Empire.

This paper examines three issues relating to the music – recorded and live – broadcast on the state-owned, Arabic-, English-, and Hebrew-language Palestine Broadcasting Service between 1936 and 1948: the challenge of obtaining enough gramophone records to please the station’s audience, the difficulty of determining and making appropriate copyright / royalty payments, and the ongoing problem of labor relations and contract negotiations with the PBS’ in-house and freelance musicians. It juxtaposes these with the budgetary limitations and pressures to economize placed on the PBS, as well as logistical issues of shipping and availability (for gramophone records) and foreign payments (for musicians and recording companies) that arose with the outbreak of World War II. It connects these three strands to Palestine’s evolving listening practices, including a culture of connoisseurship indicated by demands for variety as well as quality in recorded music – and expressions of dismay at hearing the same recorded piece repeated more than twice in one week. It further connects them to the professionalization of musicians, which included both European Yishuv immigrants accustomed to professional treatment and also Palestinian (and other Levantine) musicians still struggling to consolidate their position among the professional classes. Finally, it uses these strands to excavate the history of the Palestinization of European concepts of intellectual property rights, arguing that copyright and royalties negotiations reflected a synthesis between station administrators’ application of British concepts and Yishuv immigrants’ experience with German and Central European property rights laws, as well as the lingering effects of early Arab-world and European recording companies like Baidaphon and Pathé. Using documents from the British National and Israel State Archives, as well as private collections and period newspapers, this paper traces the history of these three PBS music-related issues, illustrating their connection to developments in Mandate Palestine, including evolving listening practices, the respect of intellectual property rights, and the professionalization of musicians, which affected both Arab Palestinians and the Yishuv. In doing so, it contributes to a broader argument about the Palestine Broadcasting Service and its role in the shaping of Palestinian society – a role that it played for both communities, and in the case of music and musicians, a role in which members of both communities were closely involved.

‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam Remembered? In a recent challenge put forth in the journal History Compass, historian Laila Parsons draws attention to the paucity of micro-narrative histories of the Middle East. Instead, academics in history and area studies departments in the post-Foucault, post-Said era have turned to critiquing histories of the Arab world by deconstructing their ability to narrate anything at all. This assertion that nationalism, colonialism and orientalism are discursive traps that seem to be inescapable has dampened the ability for contemporary historians to produce work with coherent narratives that capture any sort of discrete “past”. In this paper I will explore the textual life and death of Palestinian national icon ‘Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. Little is known of the man who has become revered by Palestinian nationalists of all political stripes: he was born in Syria, educated at al-Azhar, ministered in the rapidly growing slums of Mandate Haifa and was killed in a gun battle with British forces near the Palestinian town of Jenin. However, as Ted Swedenburg points out, the literature on Qassam usually imbues in his story an ideology (Islamist, Socialist, Pan-Arabist, Palestinian Nationalist etc.) that can be self-serving to the author and at times anachronistic. The sort of literary analysis done by Swedenburg is important in framing how Qassam gets politicized in the years since his death, but what is lacking is an analysis of the historiography of the Qassam narratives. In this paper I will address this historiographical gap by looking at a number of biographies of Qassam with particular attention to how they mine and interpret their sources. These secondary sources include biographies produced in English such as those by Bashir Nafi, and Abdallah Schleifer, as well as his Arabic biographies by Sami?h? H?ammu?dah, Baya?n Nuwayhid? al-H?u?t, and Abd al-Satta?r Qa?sim. In doing so I hope to map the contours of Qassam’s life by looking at how his life story has been narrated and where the narrative gets neatened and the historian’s “inventive faculty” shines through. My goal is to explore the points where these narratives come together and where they diverge, ultimately deconstructing the Qassam stories in a way that makes a particular appeal to a new style of writing history. One that acknowledges the many difficulties inherent in producing micro-narratives that are self-aware of the theoretical and methodological hurdles that Parsons describes.

The eye disease trachoma was a significant public health problem in Mandate Palestine. This paper investigates how the Hadassah-sponsored health campaign against trachoma in the Yishuv became a focal point in considering the relationships between Jewish and Arab identities, cultures, and environments in an era of nationalist development, both in terms of constructing the campaign itself and in the physician-patient encounter. This locus of complex interactions comprises how ophthalmologists both contributed to and resisted Orientalist conceptions of trachomatous patients, how medical campaigns in the Yishuv set the stage in creating the ethnic hierarchies that appear in health policies post-statehood, and in understanding how ophthalmologists were uniquely situated to serve as “Orientalist experts”. To convey the range of attitudes ophthalmologists had towards their Middle Eastern Jewish patients, I will draw on the analytic frame of "The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State" by sociologist Gil Eyal, who argues against the standard European supremacy attitude of early Zionism by explaining types of hybrids that both “marked and transgressed” the line between Jew and Arab. I posit that the relationship between ophthalmologists and their patients serves as yet another focal point that permitted a horizon of possible relationships with the Orient. Hadassah physicians were intent on eradicating the disease and providing the best care, even though they provided cultural and social arguments for the etiology of trachoma. This dichotomy reveals the tension within the medical project as a whole: although the trachoma campaign was part of a nationalizing and westernizing mission, it also served as an occasion to reinforce the separation of anything “Arab”. The epidemiology of trachoma lended itself to be constructed as a disease that was uniquely receptive to biological, cultural, and social interventions. Pulling primarily from the Hadassah Medical Organization papers at the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem, I analyze the role and practices of the “circuit ophthalmologist” (rofe noded)—who traveled to rural settlements and moshavot as part of Hadassah's "war against trachoma"—in order to explore the role of colonial medicine in the formulation of ideas about race and difference.