Law, Life Writing, and Historical Imagination in Palestine

This paper focuses on approaches to histories of law, law enforcement, and lawbreaking in Palestine that aim to write Palestinian history in terms recognizeable not only to historians in American universities but, more importantly, to Palestinians themselves. This entails making Palestinian experiences the starting point of historical inquiries, turning Palestinians from objects of inquiry to historical subjects, and disrupting the neat categories that characterize Zionist and British colonial and Palestinian nationalist frameworks. Palestinians who served in the British-run police force (1920s–1940s), for example, defy easy categorization as either criminals or heroes, collaborators or resistors. Instead, their life trajectories shed light on the messiness of history–the complex and complicated Palestinian experiences so often flattened under Palestine’s symbolic weight.

Researching these policemen led me to the diaries of a Palestinian villager who served in the British-run police. His diary, however, extends beyond the British period and includes material unrelated to policing. Struggling to make sense of this source on its own terms, challenged by its elusiveness and allusiveness, encouraged me to think about the history it narrates. From this perspective, all kinds of sources produced by Palestinians—diaries and memoirs, but also reconciliation agreements and petitions, fiction and poetry—emerge not merely as “raw data” to be mined for historical details, but ways of conceiving and doing history. These sources lead us to different beginnings, connections, and geographical and social maps than those produced by colonial power. Their histories are intimately intertwined with regional developments and illuminate the degree to which severing Palestine from its Arab and Middle Eastern milieu is an effect of colonial power, which sees all things in relation to “Western” interests. Most of all, in a move informed by Indigenous Studies, this approach positions Palestinians not only as historical subjects, but as producers of theory, generating new analytic frameworks.