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

already show that this land had long had a society and an economy. This book hopes to complement such historiographies by humanizing a landscape described by travelers such as Mark Twain as arid and uninhabited. The Husaynis’ continuous presence at the top of a complex social structure in Jerusalem throughout Ottoman rule (1517–1917) attests to the falsity of the common view of Palestine on the eve of Zionist settlement (1882).
    A third reason for choosing the Husaynis as the focus of this narrative was their leading role in the Palestinian national movement fromits inception around 1908 until the end of the British Mandate in 1948. By looking at the family, I hoped to gain much greater insight into the Palestinian struggle after the country was colonized by the Zionist movement and occupied by the British Empire. The family’s dominant political role in Mandatory Palestine forms a link in a continuum stretching back to the early Ottoman years. From the Husaynis’ perspective, one can better comprehend how the Palestinian political elite regarded the British presence and the Zionist movement: this point of view highlights the Palestinian predicament and failure, and consequently the tragic catastrophe of the 1948 Nakbah.
    Finally, this book is specifically geared towards a ‘Western’ readership. It was originally written in Hebrew in an attempt to challenge hegemonic Israeli–Jewish perceptions of the country’s history. In contemporary Israel, pre-1882 Palestine is still commonly viewed as having been an uninhabited land that was developed only when Zionism, and with it Western modernity, reached its shores. Moreover, Palestinian political life after 1918 has been portrayed in both scholarly and popular literature as that of primitive tribesman, fanatic Muslims and hateful sheikhs . The text in Hebrew attempted to humanize, not idealize, the Husaynis, both because of their paramount position and because they are relatively well-known (due to the accusation that al-Hajj Amin was allied with the Nazis in the Second World War, and more recently because of the politics of Faysal al-Husayni).
    In the West, and particularly in the US, similar views reign, and thus similar attempts are required to redress a biased and hostile image of Palestine and the Palestinians. This seemed to me an especially urgent task after 11 September 2001 and the second Intifada .
    Hopefully, other more scholarly benefits will emerge from this work as well. One such byproduct, but by no means its principal objective, is that it is among the few histories of Arab Jerusalem that cover both the Ottoman period and the mandatory era. There are focused monographs on Ottoman Jerusalem and a very few others on post-1918 Jerusalem, but there are hardly any continuous urban histories of the city. 3
    Ilan Pappe, London, 2009

Family Trees

    The Tahiri Branch

Bibliography
    PRIMARY SOURCES
    Ben-Gurion Archives, Sdeh Boker.
    Centre for Arab Research, the Orient House Archives, Jerusalem.
    City of Jerusalem Archives.
    Public Record Office: CO 733, FO 78, FO 1521 and FO 371.
    OFFICIAL REPORTS
    The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry.
    The French Report.
    The Shaw Commission.
    St Antony’s College Middle East Centre’s Private Papers Collection (The Emery and Adamson Papers).
    The Central Zionist Archives, S/25, W/125, Z4 and the Mufti Files.
    The Hagana Archives, Tel-Aviv.
    The Israel State Archives, The archive of Palestine government secretariat,
    Archives of the Arab Higher Committee Executive.
    The Shari‘a court Records, Jerusalem.
    COLLECTIONS
    A. Arslan, The Memoirs of Prince Adel Arslan , Beirut 1983 (Arabic).
    R. Asad, The Egyptian Royal Archives , Cairo 1946.
    K. G. Al-Asali, Historical Documents form Jerusalem , Amman 1989, (Arabic).
    A. Cohen, A. Simon-Picali and O. Salameh (eds), Jews in the Muslim Court , Jerusalem 1996 (Hebrew).
    M. Al-Kayali, The Documents of the Arab Palestinian Resistance, 1918-1939 , Beirut 1988 (Arabic).
    K. Salibi and