The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries

By 1979 there was a substantial literature on the Palestinian refugees and almost none of it contained a refugee speaking. Rosemary Sayigh’s first book was built the other way round: out of years of fieldwork in the camps of Lebanon, out of extended stays and long relationships with camp residents, and out of testimony quoted at length and left to carry the argument.

What it recovers is the part of the story that the political histories skip. The book begins in the village society of pre-1948 Palestine — family structures, land, the social conventions of a peasantry — then follows those same people through 1948 and into the camps, and traces how a rural population became, within a generation, a revolutionary one. Sayigh’s contention is that the resistance cannot be understood apart from that: it grew out of a people whose relation to their land was concrete, and who experienced the nation as a physical place rather than as an idea.

She called the method ethno-history, and she was explicit that she was not attempting neutrality — she treats the demand for objectivity as itself a colonial posture, and sets out instead to carry the voices of people the record had left anonymous. That is a position a reader should know about before starting, and it does not weaken the book, because what the book is offering is testimony rather than adjudication. The first edition carried an introduction by Noam Chomsky; he wrote the foreword to the 2007 reissue.

About the author

Rosemary Sayigh is an anthropologist and oral historian, born and raised in the United Kingdom. She married the Palestinian economist Yusif Sayigh and moved to Beirut, where advocacy work with Palestinian refugees turned into daily visits to the camps and then into decades of fieldwork. She is not Palestinian, and her place on this shelf is earned by method: she spent her working life ensuring that Palestinian refugees were recorded speaking for themselves, at a time when almost nobody else was doing it. Her later work includes Too Many Enemies (1993), Portraits of Palestinian Women (1992) and Voices of the Nakba (2021).

Details

• First published as Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries — A People’s History, Zed Press, London, 1979; 206 pages, ISBN 9780905762258
• Second edition, Zed Books, 2007, with a foreword by Noam Chomsky — 228 pages, ISBN 9781842779644

Where to find it

• In print from Zed Books, now an imprint of Bloomsbury.
• Held by most university libraries; the 1979 edition is readable in the Internet Archive’s print-disabled collection and available secondhand.