A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine: Imperialism, Property and Insurgency by Zeina B. Ghandour
| Published date | 01 November 2010 |
| Author | Brenna Bhandar |
| Date | 01 November 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2010.00832_1.x |
Zeina B. Ghandour, A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine:
Imperialism, Property and Insurgency
,London: Routledge, 2010, 202 pp, hb
d70.00.
This book is a pleasure to read. Threading together an analysis of a rich and
varied range of texts, from narratives of Palestinian refugees, laws, ordinances
and policies relating to land and governance, to the personal diaries of colonial
agents, Ghandour disrupts conventional historical discourses of Mandate
Palestine. Ghandour’s style of writing is perceptive, engaging and re£ects a depth
of sense that is not often encountered in academic prose.The sense that I speakof
encapsulates an acute empathy for the subjects of her analysis, an incisive
political analysis, and an intellectual project that is realised through a strategy of
unsettling.
In this review, I will discuss three aspects of the book that I found particularly
innovative and which contribute meaningfully to existing literatures on post-
colonial theory and legal analyses of the colonial settlement of Palestine.The ¢rst
regards the writing of history. The author’s aim is to challenge the very rules of
history as a genre and speci¢cally to disrupt the linear teleological narratives that
characterisedominant discourses of the Mandate in Palestine.At the outset of the
book she poses the question:‘[w]hat would happen to the discipline of history if
historical studies were received as though they were works of art: as the emotive,
evocative, subjective creations of their author?’ (83).
She unsettles the authorial power of dominant historical discourses on Man-
date Palestine in a variety of ways. Most pointedly, she does so by relaying the
voices of Palestinian refugees, speaking about a range of experiences but most
particularly the Rebellions of 1935-1939. Along with challenging ‘accepted lin-
guistic and cultural constructs’she also hopes that the narratives of Palestinian
refugees might‘make the reader feel slightly sick and uncomfortable when faced
with them’ (5).
Uncovering narratives of the subaltern is not a new strategy in post-colonial
theory, invested as it is in challenging dominant, imperialdiscourses of colonisa-
tion. However, rather than utilise the transcripts of her interviews to provide
evidence of a counter-narrative of settlement or to provide proof that imperial
discourses are rife with orientalist ideologies and mistaken assumptions, Ghan-
dour quite simply lets the voices speak for themselves. In Chapter Three, the
narratives of people involved in the Rebellion conclude the chapter without
immediate commentaryor analysis by Ghandour, and the e¡ect is very powerful:
the very terms and vocabulary of imperial discourses on the Rebellion are irre-
vocably altered by the refugees themselves, as Palestinian memories and under-
standings of what happened create an entirely di¡erent framework for
understanding the Rebellion. In this way, Ghandour suggests that whether or
not the Rebellion successfully achieved de-colonisation is really not the point.
In shifting our gaze, she challenges an imperial logic that sees power relations as
a zero-sum game.Violence, in the context of the Mandate, becomes inevitable
rather than necessary, but necessary as a‘reclamation ofthe self’ (10). The value of
the rebellion is assessed by Ghandour in very di¡erent terms as the value it had
for the colonial subject who was ¢ghting, perhaps, to exit ‘the distress of [an]
Reviews
107 9
r2010The Author.The Modern Law Review r2010The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2010) 73(6) 1076^1092
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