Anatomy of the 1936––39 Revolt: Images of the Body in Political Cartoons of Mandatory Palestine
This article analyzes body images in political cartoons during the 1936––1939 Arab Revolt. By deciphering the visual messages in the political cartoons of two newspapers——the Arabic Filastin and the Hebrew Davar ——the article examines how body representations portray stereotypes of rivals and reveal assumptions about and relations between conflicting parties. Visual imagery maintained its impact by illustrating nationalist attitudes, critiques, and goals. In addition to being referents to a period not well documented in images, cartoons are also potent historical sources for reconstructing a sociopolitical history of Palestine.
A dictated policy: cartoons and the 1936 strike in Palestine
Current scholarship emphasises the dominant role played by the Arab press in the general strike in Palestine in 1936. In spite of this, cartoons, a crucial feature of Filastin – the most widely circulated Arabic-language daily in the Mandate – have received little scholarly attention. The current paper seeks to correct this through examining editorial cartoons to demonstrate how they reflect Filastin’s role in engendering sympathy toward and participation in the general strike among a broader audience than could be reach by the textual content of the paper. Cartoons contributed to the transformation of what it meant to be Palestinian in the context of the broader national struggle against Great Britain and Zionism by examining discourses of ‘peoplehood’ – i.e. intersecting and overlapping categories of identity – interrogating subjects such as gender, nation and class to mobilise disparate elements of Palestinian society against colonial intrusion.
The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith: Another View of the Land Question in Palestine
Zionist historiography of the Mandatory period accords a considerable place to the problem of land purchase and colonization. In the early 1930s, the Zionists feared that Britain would put restrictions on land purchase and that great difficulties would ensue from ordinances designed to protect the tenantcultivators in the event of eviction. The historian's eye has also been caught by the ambivalent position of the Arab national leadership which, while publicly demanding an end to Zionist expansion, privately continued to sell land to the Jews. But the literature hardly deals with the tenants themselves—the human center of the land debates and the subjects of considerable social interest in themselves.