Summary
Zachary Lockman’s term for the approach that grasps the histories of Arabs and Jews in modern, especially mandatory, Palestine by studying how both communities were constituted and shaped within a complex matrix of economic, political, social and cultural interactions, and by larger processes affecting both (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 270-280).
Details
- Relational history is Lockman’s alternative to the Dual Society Paradigm: it problematises both Zionist and Palestinian nationalist narratives, moves beyond narrowly political history, and treats each community’s development as also shaped by shared processes — the specific form of capitalist development in Palestine from the mid-nineteenth century, markets for labour and land, Ottoman law and administration, and British colonial policies (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 270-272).
- Its emergence Lockman ties most importantly to the new interactions after Israel’s 1967 conquest of the remainder of mandatory Palestine, which led Israeli Jewish intellectuals to seek a demythologised past and Palestinian scholars to a deeper understanding of Israeli politics, society and culture; Introduction note 11 surveys the literature Lockman places in this turn, from Gershon Shafir and Michael Shalev to Elia Zureik’s internal-colonialism study of 1979, quoted at p.5 (emphasis in the original) for the two sectors being “interconnected in an asymmetrical relationship, mediated by the British presence” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 272-274, 372-390).
- On relational history Lockman cites Perry Anderson, “Agendas for Radical History”, Radical History Review, no. 36 (September 1986), while noting his conception is not identical to Anderson’s, and Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There? (1990), ch. 1 (Introduction note 10) (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 368-370).
- Lockman states the approach’s risk: focusing on mutually formative interactions may lose each community’s specificity and subsume Palestinian history within a Zionist narrative, the warning in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s “The Perils of Palestiniology” (1981); he holds the tension between a relational perspective and historical specificity to be unavoidable (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 276-280).
- In Lockman’s use, interactions are simultaneously discursive and material: structural economic relations and the representations through which people understood and justified their identities and actions must be studied together, against economistic reductionism (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 286-290).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Dual Society Paradigm, Zachary Lockman, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod