Palestinians and their Society: 1880-1946

By Sarah Graham-Brown. London: Quartet, 1980. 184 pp. $25.00 (cloth).

Reviewed by David Marcus

During the past 10 years, Palestinian life has achieved a new visibility in the West, where even the existence of a Palestinian people had been previously doubted and belittled. This is, first of all, the result of events. As the tragedy grinds on, it becomes clear that the Palestinians are the central Arab party involved. It also results in part, however, from the dissemination in the West of photographic documentation of the Palestinian past and present. Books that have vividly presented this photographic record include Walid Khalidi's Before Their Diaspora and Edward Said and Jean Mohr's After the Last Sky. To this distinguished collection one should add Sarah Graham-Brown's Palestinians and their Society: 1880-1946.

This fascinating collection comprises 258 historical photographs accompanied by a lucid narrative on Palestinian life and times to 1946, the year that "signaled the end of the era in which Palestinians could take any element of their society or their identity for granted," as Graham-Brown puts it. The focus of the book is not, however, the conflict with Zionism, which has too often been seen as the central shaper of Palestinian identity. Instead, the photos depict normal, everyday life in Arab Palestine under Ottoman Turkish administration and then under British mandate rule.

The photographic panorama encompasses the whole range of occupations, sects, and classes in Palestine. There are villagers, townspeople, and Bedouin; Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Jews; the poor, small merchants, and the wealthy. It is refreshing to see Palestinians as absolutely ordinary people who tend fields, work in factories, build houses, go to school, eat lunch, wait for trains, and celebrate weddings and religious holidays.

To accomplish all this, Graham-Brown has brought together photos from a variety of institutional and individual collections rarely displayed in public. These include the photographs from Oxford's Middle East Center and the Library of Congress's Matson Collection.

Graham-Brown's accompanying text describes the differing rhythms of village and town life, the changing Palestinian economy, and political developments within the Arab community. Her narrative is free of the unconscious bias that sometimes manifests itself when a Western author writes about another culture. She also grounds her narrative in concrete, meticulously documented facts, rather than generalities. While deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian people, Graham-Brown avoids cant and sloganeering.

There is a marvelous variety of images in this collection, evoking the full vivid breadth of everyday Palestinian life. Among the arresting images:

Two women grimace for the camera as they carry to market basketball-sized cauliflowers on their heads;
Shirtless men stand waist-deep in the ocean to wash their camels;
The faces in a nighttime village audience illuminated by the outdoor movie they are watching projected on a mosque wall in 1940;
A storyteller on an outdoor stagedecorated with murals and banners holds the attention of a Haifa street crowd.

This volume is more than just a record of a vanished past, however. It provides the reader with the historical context necessary to comprehend the contemporary Palestinian intifadah. The book also documents early Arab awareness of Zionism and resistance both to it and to British control, under which it was flourishing. This resistance culminated in great waves of direct revolt against British authority in the 1930's. Photos from that uprising provide several jarring images: police chase an enormous crowd of Arab protestors down a Jaffa street in 1933; in the just-evacuated public square, two policemen with clubs beat a man who has fallen down; Palestinian resistance fighters of the 1936-1939 rebellion against the British pose for the camera, some brandish rifles and one is holding a Palestinian flag; dust rises in villages near Ramle just after British soldiers have demolished houses in an act of collective punishment.

Images such as these flesh out the long historical background to the current uprising. Graham-Brown's work introduces the contemporary reader to the relatively tranquil and ordinary Palestinian past and thereby contributes to an understanding of the turbulent and extraordinary Palestinian present.

David Marcus is a Washington, DC-based freelance writer on Middle East affairs.