Palestinian Workers Have a Long History of Resistance
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JVL Introduction
American academic and activist Joel Beinen has written extensively on the history of north Africa and the Middle East, particularly on workers’ and peasants’ struggles in the region, focusing most frequently on Egypt and Palestine.
He shows that the recent Palestinian general strike as another milestone in a long history of resilient resistance and provides an assessment of its strengths and weaknesses.
This article was originally published by Jacobin on Sun 6 Jun 2021. Read the original here.
Palestinian Workers Have a Long History of Resistance
The Palestinian general strike of May 18 fits into a much longer history of mobilization by Palestinian workers. From the British colonial years to the present, those struggles have faced harsh repression, but kept a spirit of resistance alive.
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This retrospective is inspiring and informative indeed, and I would like to supplement it by references:
1: Afula, where peasant resistance to landlord sales of traditional peasant usufructs began before World War One, described and analysed in Rashid Khalidi in Said and Hitchens’ Blaming the Victims (Verso). A pity references to this hero village are so scanty even in Pappe’s otherwise excellent The Forgotten Palestinians (Yale UP 2011); {Btw, why are RESIDENT landlords so sacrosanct? Often they are more oppressive than the dreaded absentees, as well depicted in William Hinton’s Fanshen and plentifully elsewhere; useful local comparators surely are the destruction of the peasantry in England and the peasant resistance in Ireland, at first in the north-east and later more widely, well described in the BICO’s Economics of Partition}. Alas, Palestine is in this regard more like England, or even the southern USA; Tony Greenstein has usefully updated in his blog the gruesome tale of the Zionist struggle for an Arabenrein Afula, still ongoing, as is (now mainly litigatory) resistance. See Stetson Kennedy’s useful account of the creation of Jim Crow by the old Slave Power (Cairnes’ book of that title, ca 1859) and the KKK (U Florida Press, Gainesville, 1995).
2: British (and especially Labour) imperialist war against the Palestinians, mainly 1936-9. John Newsinger in his article in that SWP theoretical journal in January 2017 (referenced on this JVL website) gives useful and appalling accounts not only of the brutal Bernard Montgomery’s war of annihilation, but also of the bloodthirsty incitement of Labour notables.
These are examples to analyse and to learn from notably in the current conjuncture of British and Zionist persecution of the Palestinians. Can we learn from the 110-year steadfast resistance of the the popular masses of Afula? Could a council in the UK hasten to twin with the remnants of that resistance, before only a corpse is left of the real people of Afula?
I found Joel Beinin’s article enlightening. So good to read about class struggles in Palestine/Israel and the contradictory forces at work. The new found unity of Palestinian workers is something to be applauded in the struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom, justice and human rights.
A fascinating article. But is it correct to define the Nakba as ‘the Arab-Israeli War of 1948’, which it does several times?
Surely this reduces the Nakba to a conflict of equals rather than the catastrophic displacement of 750,000+ Palestinian people from their homes and lands.