Free The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty by Ilan Pappé

Foreword
    This book is a political biography of the Husaynis, the leading clan in Palestine for many years. The family appears here as an informal political organization whose activities have dominated Palestine’s political history for almost 250 years.
    Although historians have followed the trajectories of such elites quite successfully in the past, they have never focused on one particular family. 1 Historians’ central interest has shifted over time from families as political elites to families as identifiably crucial social units. Historicizing a family is a fairly new scholarly approach, although one quite familiar in fictional works from both the Arab world (such as those of Naguib Mahfouz) and in Europe (such as those of Thomas Mann). In this respect, the scholarly venture is orientated toward the non-elite – part of an attempt to write ‘a history from below’. 2 This biography of the Husaynis is inspired by, but does not reflect, the new scholarly focus on the Middle Eastern family and its place in the local society.
    Since this book focuses on elite history, it therefore does not examine the family’s internal dynamics, structure, rivalries and other features that characterize social research on the family in Middle Eastern history. These are all worthy subjects that will surely be explored by others in the future. The purpose here, however, is to analyze this Palestinian family, the Husaynis, as the most significant informal political association prior to the appearance of national movements and political parties – a political organization whose narrative is representative of Palestine and the Palestinians over a period of two and a half centuries.
    The family became an affiliation, and its name allowed individuals to wield influence and establish leading positions in their localand later national society. All the positions that could affect society in Jerusalem and eventually in Palestine as a whole could only be obtained through the family’s power base. As such, its members are considered here according to their political weight inside and outside the family. The central figures of this narrative are those individuals who held official and unofficial positions as the heads of the family. Only a few Husaynis who were less politically significant are mentioned (for instance, poets, writers and successful businessmen). This leaves, of course, much research to be done in order to achieve a more focused view on the social history of the family.
    A political biography of a large family offers a historical perspective with many advantages for writing a fresh historiography of Palestine. It enables historians to detect patterns of continuity over fault lines that, in hegemonic narratives of Palestine, seem decisively to divide the country’s history into modern and pre-modern periods or Zionist and pre-Zionist histories. The family’s political history is one way, by no means the only one, of telling the story of the continued human and cultural presence in the land of Palestine. By focusing on the Husaynis throughout their transformation from a provincial Ottoman elite into the leadership of a national movement, this biography is, I hope, a constructive way to demonstrate how Palestinian society existed and developed before the Zionist settlement or the British occupation began.
    Which brings me to the second principal motivation for writing this book. I wanted to tell the story of Palestine through the history of its leading family as a way to correct the common so-called truisms and to challenge some of the conventional mythology about its past. There is no need to elaborate here on why Palestine’s past is relevant to the contemporary Middle East and beyond, but it is still necessary to gain a better understanding of this history.
    By studying the Husaynis, one recognizes that Palestine was never an empty territory waiting for a landless people to inhabit it. Palestinian and other historiographies