Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Not Dead, Not Even Past

There's a recent, 2003, book out that claims "The Palestinian past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past".

It's entitled "Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past" by Ted Swedenburg, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas.

It's described thus:

“This wonderful monograph treats a subject that resonates with anyone who studies the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and particularly Palestinian nationalism: that how Palestinian history is remembered and constructed is as meaningful to our understanding of the current struggle as arriving as some sort of ‘complete empirical understanding’ of its history. Swedenburg . . . studies how a major anti-colonial insurrection, the 1936–38 strike and revolt in Palestine [against the British], is remembered in Palestinian nationalist historiography, western and Israeli ‘official’ historical discourse, and Palestinian popular memory. Using primarily oral history interviews, supplemented by archival material and national monuments, he presents multiple, complex, contradictory, and alternative interpretations of historical events. . . . The book is thematically divided into explorations of Palestinian nationalist symbols, stereotypes, and myths; Israeli national monuments that simultaneously act as historical ‘injunctions against forgetting’ Jewish history and efforts to ‘marginalize, vilify, and obliterate’ the Arab history of Palestine; Palestine subaltern memories as resistance to official narratives, including unpopular and controversial recollections of collaboration and assassination; and finally, how the recodification and revival of memories of the revolt informed the Palestinian intifada that erupted in 1987.”


Just against the British?

And over 500 Jews weren't killed in what I call 'Saba Intifada' - the Grandfather Intifada? Jewish-planted trees weren't uprooted by the thousands, wells weren't blocked, fields weren't set alight, etc., etc. etc.?

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