ABSTRACT
Great Revolt shook the mandate territory of Palestine. The struggle pitted a poorly armed peasant movement against the might of the world’s pre-eminent colonial power, Great Britain. Despite the militancy and duration of the revolt, scholarly work on this period tends to emphasize the shortcomings of the insurgent movement and, in particular, to discount the role of the peasantry. Dominant accounts generally define the fellahin as “traditional, backward, and conservative,” as “activated by tribal and religious
Ted Swedenburg was one of the first historians in the West who dissociated himself from the common discourse of modernization which had been applied to studies on Palestine’s history. His work combined two of the main features of recent orientations in the conflict’s historiography. On the one hand, he brings to the fore marginalized groups, in this case the rebelling peasants of Palestine in the 1930s; on the other, he chose to analyse their history as part of an anti-colonialist movement. By adopting this approach, his work forms a major component in the new historiography which focuses on history from below, and adopts a colonialist perspective towards Zionism, as did the critical Israeli sociologists on the other.
