Summary
The paradigm of historical interpretation, named and criticised by Zachary Lockman, that represents the Arab and Jewish communities in mandatory Palestine as primordial, self-contained and largely monolithic entities developing along entirely separate paths, interacting only in limited ways and only in conflict (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 254-268).
Details
- Lockman defines the model as positing “two essentially separate societies with distinct and disconnected historical trajectories” in mandatory Palestine; communal identities are treated as natural and pregiven rather than constructed within a larger field of relations, and each community’s development is explained by largely internal dynamics (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 254-256).
- Its classic statements in Lockman’s account are S. N. Eisenstadt’s Israeli Society (1967), in which Palestinian Arabs play virtually no role, and Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak’s Origins of the Israeli Polity, quoted for “two separate and parallel economic and stratification systems of different levels of modernization” maintaining only limited mutual relations; Michael Shalev is quoted calling the narrative it yields “profoundly conservative” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 256-260).
- The paradigm also informs most Palestinian and Arab scholarship, usually without explicit theorisation: Arab society appears as a preexisting, already-formed entity threatened, encroached upon and in 1947–49 largely destroyed by an expanding Yishuv, with interaction limited to political and military conflict (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 260-262).
- It allows one significant mode of interaction, conflict, and even conflict is treated, in Avishai Ehrlich’s quoted criticism, not “as a continuous formative process” shaping both societies but as an external appendix erupting from time to time (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 262-264).
- Lockman explains its persistence by few scholars knowing both Arabic and Hebrew, so most literature rests on sources in one language only, and by the grip of mythologised national pasts on both sides; its effects include rendering the communities’ mutually constitutive impact invisible and downplaying intracommunal divisions, intercommunal linkages and the gendered character of identities and practices (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 264-268).
- Lockman’s alternative is Relational History.
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Relational History, Zachary Lockman, Michael Shalev