Content area
Full Text
Armed Struggle and the Search for State - the Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 by Yezid Sayigh. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp.xxxiv + 953, bibliography, index. L70.00.
In the twentieth century the territorial national state has been a powerful model and framework for political activity. Some have tried to challenge it, hoping to redirect the resources and social energy it seems able to command to more universal, less particularistic ends. Rarely have these challenges succeeded. More common has been the attempt by people and peoples across the globe to aspire to statehood on this pattern, seeing in it the key to their own self-realization and the condition of their recognition by others similarly constituted. This has been no less the case for the Palestinians than for others. The peculiarity of their misfortune lay in the fact that they were deprived of their territories at a time when their collective sense of national identity was still at a formative stage. The year 1948 meant dispossession, fragmentation, exile and annexation. It scattered many of the Palestinians themselves, divided the territory of the brief historical entity that had been Palestine between three different states and seemed to be a prelude to the disappearance of anything distinctively Palestinian. Yet 50 years later, something that looks very like a Palestinian state is emerging in parts at least of that territory.
The process whereby this transformation occurred forms the subject of Yezid Sayigh's superb and powerful book. His is an achievement of the first order. Not only does he succeed in guiding the reader with clarity through the complexities of Palestinian politics, but, in his unparalleled use of primary sources and of interviews with many of the participants, he provides an authoritative account of the development of many facets of the Palestinian national movement during these years. Equally importantly and richly satisfying intellectually, he uses the history of the Palestinian national movement since 1948 to argue his thesis that `the armed struggle provided the political impulse and organizational dynamic in the evolution of Palestinian national identity and in the formation of parastatal institutions and a bureaucratic elite' (p.vii). This is a bold and interesting argument, made all the more so by being conceptually linked to his other major theme. This holds that...