Zachary Lockman

Railway Workers and Relational History: Arabs and Jews in British-Ruled Palestine

During the period of Ottoman rule over the Arab East, from 1516 until the end of the First World War, the term Palestine ( Filastin ) denoted a geographic region, part of what the Arabs called al-Sham (historic Syria), rather than a specific Ottoman province or administrative district. By contrast, from 1920 to 1948, Palestine existed as a distinct and unified political (and to a considerable extent economic) entity with well-defined boundaries. Ruled by Britain under a so-called mandate granted by the League of Nations, Palestine in that period encompassed an Arab majority and a Jewish minority.

Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir

From roughly the 1930s into the 1970s, labor-Zionist ideology, parties and institutions played a central role in the Zionist movement in Palestine, and then from 1948 in the State of Israel, manifesting one crucial way in which the Zionist project differed from other comparable settler colonial enterprises. Gershon Shafir’s 1989 book Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 argued forcefully that it was labor Zionism’s encounter with the land and labor markets in late-Ottoman Palestine, rather than abstract ideology, that led it to adopt a strategy based on the exclusion of indigenous Arab labor and economic separatism. This trajectory, he argued, also ultimately conduced to most Zionists’ acceptance of territorial compromise in 1948. Shafir thereby offered a powerful alternative to idealist and romanticised approaches to early Zionism in Palestine. However, using as a foil a comparison that a leading labor-Zionist thinker drew in the late 1920s between the Jews of Palestine and the white minority in South Africa, it is possible to see what Shafir’s prioritisation of labor Zionists’ adaptation to local conditions in Palestine and his depiction of the pre-1914 period as crucially formative for Zionist/Israeli history elides, particularly the central role of coercion and state violence (by the Zionist movement and Israel but also by the British colonial state and, later, the United States) in making possible the attainment and perpetuation of a Jewish state that now dominates all of Palestine and continues to subordinate the indigenous population. From this perspective, the period of labor-Zionist `moderation’ can be seen not as the norm from which post-1967 Israel has regrettably departed, but as one phase in a longer history frequently characterised by a logic of dispossession, expansion and domination.

Did the Events of 9/11 Change the Field of Middle East Studies? Pensée 1: Of Course—But How?

The short answer to the question as posed is, Yes, of course, 9/11 changed the field of Middle East studies. However, the next question we need to ask is, In what ways have the events of 9/11 (and all that they set in motion, in the United States and internationally, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq) actually affected our work as scholars, students, teachers, resource specialists, and so forth, whose primary focus is the Middle East and/or the Muslim world, as well as the institutions, networks, and field(s) with which we are engaged? Space limitations allow me to offer only a few brief thoughts.

The Egyptian nationalist movement and the Syrians in Egypt

By the end of the nineteenth century, members of the small Syrian community in Egypt had come to play a disproportionately large role in the government bureaucracy, in journalism and in business. This aroused the resentment of many educated young Egyptian nationalists, who saw the Syrian immigrants as competitors for government and professional positions. At the same time, newspapers published by Syrians were among the most outspoken supporters of the British occupation regime. Syrians were therefore the target of indiscriminate attack by nationalist leaders as agents of imperialism and enemies of Egypts struggle for independence. But the hostility thus engendered was short‐lived, and the tolerant attitude of the nationalist movement from 1919 onward and a common language and culture made it possible for Syrians to assimilate into Egyptian society.