My thanks to Joel Beinin, Beshara Doumani, Joel Migdal, and the editors of Comparative Studies in Society and History for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. This version was completed while I was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, for whose financial support and intellectual stimulation I am grateful.

¹ Much of what follows also applies to the literature on Palestine in the late Ottoman period and to Israel and the Palestinians inside and outside what had been Palestine after 1948 as well. But it is especially relevant to the four decades during which Palestine existed as an administratively unified entity, before partition, war, Palestinian displacement, and massive Jewish immigration radically altered the terms of the interaction between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. For surveys of the field, see Stein, Kenneth W., “A Historiographic Review of Literature on the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” The American Historical Review, 96:5 (09 1991), 1450–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Khalidi, Tarif, “Palestinian Historiography: 1900–1948,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 10:3 (Spring 1981), 59–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Doumani, Beshara B. important essay, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 21:2 (Winter 1992), 5–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 1Google Scholar.

³ Asad, Talal, “Anthropological Texts and Ideological Problems: An Analysis of Cohen on Arab Villages in Israel,” Review of Middle East Studies, [ (1975), 14 n. ]1Google Scholar (also excerpted in MERIP Reports, 53 [09 1976]Google Scholar). See also Shafir, Gershon, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1–7Google Scholar.

⁴ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1978, 13Google Scholar; first published in Hebrew, as Miyishuv limedina: yehudei eretz yisra’el bitequfat hamandat keqehila politit (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 1977)Google Scholar.

⁵ For example, ‘al-Kayyali, Abd al-Wahhab, Ta’rikh filastin al-hadith (Beirut: Al-Mu’assasa al-‘arabiyya lil-dirasat wa’l-nashr, 1970Google Scholar), or Nakhlah, Muhammad, Tatawwur al-mujtami’ ft filastin (Kuwait: Mu’assasat Dhat al-Salasil, 1983)Google Scholar.

⁶ “Israel: Conflict, War and Social Change,” in Creighton, Colin and Shaw, Martin, eds., The Sociology of War and Peace (Houndmills, Hampshire: The MacMillan Press, 1987), 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ For example, research on the gendered character of those identities, discourses and practices has gotten underway only recently.

⁸ The Israeli scholars who have pioneered what might be called the revisionist tendency ofIsraeli historiography include Baruch Kimmerling, Gershon Shafir, Michael Shalev, Lev Luis Grinberg, Tamar Gozanski, Shlomo Swirski, Ella Shohat, and the contributors to the now-defunct journal Mahbarot limehkar velebikoret. For a discussion of some of the revisionist works on the events of 1947–49 and of the political conjuncture out of which they emerged, see Lockman, Zachary, “Original Sin,” in Lockman, Zachary and Beinin, Joel, eds., Intifada: the Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation (Boston: South End Press, 1989)Google Scholar; see also Silberstein, Laurence J., ed., New Perspectives on Israeli History: the Early Years of the State (New York: New York University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

Given the dispersion, statelessness, and subordination that characterize Palestinian life, the continuing centrality of the struggle for national self-determination and the limited resources at the disposal of most Palestinian scholars, explicit revisionism has perhaps not surprisingly been less in evidence among Palestinians. Nonetheless, a number of studies manifest what I call a relational approach, most notably Zureik, EliaThe Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979Google Scholar). A number of other Palestinian scholars have produced studies which depart from conventional narratives in approach and choice of subject, including Salim Tamari, Musa al-Budayri, Mahir al-Sharif, ‘Abd al-Qadir Yasin, Philip Mattar, and Muhammad Muslih. Various Palestinian research centers and institutions of higher education have in recent years also published important work in Arabic on aspects of Palestinian social and cultural history.

Among works produced by scholars who are neither Israeli nor Palestinian, pride of place belongs to Roger Owen's edited volume. Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and especially to his introduction, which explicitly discusses various conceptualizations of Palestinian history. Innovative work has also been produced by Talal Asad, Theodore Swedenburg, Rachelle Taqqu, and Joel Beinin. This survey is of course by no means exhaustive.

⁹ “The Perils of Palestiniology,” Arab Studies Quarterly, 3:4 (Fall 1981), 403–11Google Scholar. The subsumption of Palestinian identity, agency, and history is obviously related to the longstanding disparity in the relative power and status of Israeli Jews and Palestinians. While the former are \ citizens of an established nation-state, most of the latter live under alien (and often repressive) rule, whether within or outside their historic homeland, and as a people are still denied national self-determination in any part of Palestine.

¹⁰ The catastrophic disruption of Palestinian Arab society in 1947–49 and the consequent destruction of many of the source materials from which Palestinian social and cultural history might have been reconstructed, combined with the relative abundance of material on the Jewish side, make it very difficult to avoid privileging the history and perspectives of the Yishuv—a skewing which my own research presented here does not, I admit, entirely escape.

¹¹ Palestine Railways, Report of the General Manager, passim.

¹² This discussion of the railway workers is drawn from a larger research project which explores interactions among Jewish and Arab workers, trade unions, labor movements, and leftist political parties during the mandate period.

¹³ The Syrians were not, of course, actually considered foreign until Britain and France divided up geographic Syria into the four new political entities of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan. On the railway workers in the early postwar period, see Farah, Bulus, Min al-uthmaniyya ila al-dawla al-ibriyya (Nazareth: al-Sawt, 1985), 40–46Google Scholar.

¹⁴ See the transcripts of interviews with Yehezkiel Abramov (April 9, 1972) and Efrayyim Shvartzman (March 20, 1972), Center for Oral Documentation, Archive of Labor and Pioneering, at the Lavon Institute for the Study of the Labor Movement, Tel Aviv [hereafter cited as AL].

¹⁵ From its inception at the turn of the century and with diminishing consistency up to 1948, the labor-Zionist movement tended to use Hebrew (‘ivri) instead of Jewish (yehudi) to refer to itself and its project. This was an expression of labor Zionism denigration and rejection of Diaspora Judaism, which it associated with statelessness, powerlessness, and passivity, and its exaltation of the (suitably mythologized) ancient Hebrews as a socially normal and politically sovereign nation living in its homeland and working its soil. By conceiving of themselves as Hebrews, a new and different type of Jew living in the Land of Israel and free of the defects allegedly produced by two thousand years of exile, these Zionists meant to emphasize thenauthenticity and their rootedness in Palestine.

¹⁶ Gershon Shafir has analyzed most effectively how labor-Zionist ideology, and the practices and institutions associated with it, were strongly shaped by the markets for labor and land in which the immigrants of the second Aliya (wave of Jewish immigration) found themselves when they arrived in Palestine between 1903 and 1914 (see his Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict).

¹⁷ For a classic statement of the doctrine of Hebrew labor, see Ben-Gurion, David, ‘Avoda ‘Ivrit (Tel Aviv: Histadrut, 1932)Google Scholar, translated into English and published in London as Jewish Labour at about the same time. Ben-Gurion went so far as to accuse Jewish private employers (mainly citrus farmers) who preferred Arab to Jewish workers of “economic antisemitism.” On the campaigns to impose Hebrew labor on Jewish farmers, see Shapira, Anita, Hama’avak hanikhzav: ‘avoda ivrit, 1929–1939 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uhad, 1977)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Haifa's population rose from some 18,000 in 1918 to nearly 100,000 by 1936. On the city's development in this period see Seikaly, May, “The Arab Community of Haifa, 1918–1936: A Study in Transformation” (Ph.D. disser., Somerville College, Oxford University, 1983)Google Scholar, and Joseph Vashitz's uneven but useful study, “Jewish-Arab Relations at Haifa under the British Mandate” (unpublished manuscript, kindly provided by the author).

¹⁹ Some went so far as to depict the Jewish proletariat in Palestine as the vanguard of a mighty movement which would liberate the oppressed workers of the entire Arab East, though this theme, not unpopular early in the decade, faded away thereafter. See for example Ben-Gurion's August 1921 theses for the Ahdut Ha’avoda party congress, first published in issue 91 of the party organ, Kuntres, and later republished in Anahnu veshcheineinu (Davar: Tel Aviv, 1931), a collection of his essays and speeches on the Arab question, 61–62.

²⁰ See for example his speech published in Kuntres, 106 (January 1922).

²¹ AL, protocols of meeting of the executive committee of the Histadrut [hereafter EC/H], December 20, 1920.

²² On the Egyptian labor and nationalist movements in this period, see Beinin, Joel and Lockman, Zachary, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), chs. 4–5Google Scholar.

²³ Din veheshbon lave’ida hashlishit shel hahistadrut (Tel Aviv, 1927), 155Google Scholar.

²⁴ Kuntres, 165 (March 4, 1924).

²⁵ The only serious study of this party is Elqana Margalit, Anatomia shel smol: Po‘alei Tziyon be’eretz yisra’el (1919–1946) (Y. L Peretz: Jerusalem, 1976Google Scholar).

²⁶ The available figures are not entirely consistent or reliable, but at the end of 1924 the union was apparently comprised of some 529 Jewish and Arab railway workers, out of a work force of almost 2,400. Almost all the Jews, but only 10 to 15 percent of the Arabs, employed on the railroad belonged to the union; most if not all of the Arab union members seem to have been skilled or semiskilled workshop workers, foremen, and other more or less permanent personnel from the running and traffic departments. On the size and composition of the union membership, see AL 104/25a, memorandum of the URPTW to the general manager, Palestine Railways; AL 208/14a, Central Committee of the URPTW to EC/H, November 30, 1924; AL 237/1; and also the figures given in Din veheshbon, 64. None of these figures include the unionized postal and telegraph workers, whose numbers were in any case much smaller.

²⁷ On these ongoing efforts, see for example EC/H, October 10, November 7, 1922; secretariat of the Histadrut executive committee [hereafter abbreviated as S/EC/H], October 25, 1925; Central Zionist Archives, S9/1424a, NURPTW to the Zionist Executive, November 1929; Meirowitz to the Labor Department of the Jewish Agency, March 28, April 27, 1930.

²⁸ On shop-floor sentiments, see Farah, , Min al-uthmaniyya, 42–43Google Scholar.

²⁹ AL 208/14a, CC/URPTW to EC/H, November 30, 1924, ani Haifa, 6 (January 1, 1925, 43–44; interview with Avraham Khalfon, January 29, 1976, AL, Center for Oral Documentation.

³⁰ I discuss this question more fully in “We Opened Up the Arabs' Minds: Labor-Zionist Discourse and the Railway Workers of Palestine, 1919–1929,” Review of Middle East Studies, 5 (1992)Google Scholar.

³¹ On the emergence of the PAWS, see Haifa, 15 (April 30, 1925), 117–8; Filastin, March 6,1925; al-Yarmuk, October 22, 1925; al-Budayri, Tatawwur; and Yasin, Tainlirikh.

³² Though it may sometimes be anachronistic, for the sake of clarity and consistency I will use AURW throughout to denote the Arab railway workers organized within PAWS.

³³ Though the Jewish-led union was known between 1927 and 1931 as the National Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers, for the sake of clarity I will henceforth refer to it as the IU.

³⁴ See for example AL 237/24, Grobman to Ben-Tzvi. May 1928; AL 2O8/815a, Dana to S/EC/H, January 6, 1935.

³⁵ See for example AL 490/3.

³⁶ In a Hebrew-language leaflet issued by PAWS, AL 237/21, September 29, 1928.

³⁷ Farah, , Min al-cuthmaniyya, 41Google Scholar.

³⁸ Oral interview, May 14, 1987.

³⁹ In our interview Abramov used the Yiddish term der Araber, reflecting the widespread use of that language among new immigrants from Eastern Europe. By contrast, Abramov noted, the Arabs were more respectful of Jewish coworkers and referred to them by name.

⁴⁰ Cotterell, Paul, The Railways of Palestine and Israel (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Tourret Publishing, 1984), ch. 5.Google Scholar

⁴¹ AL 237/26b, Berman to EC/H, May 3, 1940; AL 237/16, IU, central committee meeting of November 9, 1940.

⁴² Hashomer Hatza‘ir archives, Aharon Cohen papers, 6 (5), “ ‘Al hashvita bevatei hamal’aha shel harakevet”; AL 208/3660, “Hashvita bevatei hamal’aha behaifa”; Filastin, February 5, 1944; Mishmar, February 6, 1944; Haqiqat al-Amr, February 8, 1944; Palestine Post, February 6, 1944.

⁴³ June 17, 1945.

⁴⁴ See the Palestinian press for April 1946; AL 425/33, joint leaflet of the PKP and NLL, April 18, 1946; AL, EC/H, April 24, 1946; Israel State Archives, 65/779, Arab Workers' Congress, Bayan, April 25, 1946.

⁴⁵ This is not to say that the Zionist leadership actually desired or expected the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state. The Jewish Agency, the de facto leadership of the Yishuv, had in fact secretly reached an informal understanding with King Abdullah of Transjordan whereby the king would occupy and annex much of the territory assigned to the Arab state. See Shlaim, Avi, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ See the report of the committee of inquiry appointed by Haifa's Jewish community, AL 250/40-3-9, and contemporary press accounts. Although the Jewish Agency promptly denounced the Etzel attack outside the Haifa refinery as an “act of madness,” it also authorized its own military force, the Hagana, to retaliate for the massacre of Jews at the refinery by attacking and killing Arab civilians in the outlying village of Balad al-Shaykh on December 31.

⁴⁷ Oral interview with Efrayim Krisher, a former leader of the Jewish railway workers' union, May 13, 1987.

⁴⁸ The best work on the causes of Palestinian displacement is Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); on Haifa in particular, see pages 73–93Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Cohen, AharonIsrael and the Arab World (London: W. H. Allen, 1970Google Scholar) is a classic of this genre, as it contains much useful information.

⁵⁰ See Swirski, Shlomo, Israel: the Oriental Majority (London: Zed Press, 1989Google Scholar), and Shohat, Ella, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” in Social Text, 19/20 (Fall 1988), 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵¹ I explore this question in “Exclusion and Solidarity: Labor Zionism and Arab Workers in Palestine,” in Prakash, Gyan, ed., After Colonialism: Imperialism and the Colonial Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

⁵² Itamar Even-Zohar's work on the evolution of Hebrew culture in Palestine suggests one path along which a relational approach to Palestinian culture might be developed. See “The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882–1948,” Poetics Today, 11:1 (Spring 1990), 175–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his other articles in that same issue.