UC Berkeley

This paper discusses the Palestinian rural notables’ class, comprised of rural sheikhs, village or clan headmen with similar life trajectories in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. The paper uses the Palestinian Hannun family of Tulkarm to demonstrate how these notables exploited changing legal, administrative and political conditions, and global economic realities, to attain socio-economic and political ascendency in the Palestinian countryside and its emergent towns. The article analyses their actions in structuralist terms of clans, households, marriage alliances and networks of patronage, and historically contextualises their rational decision-making process about selling land to Jews and cooperation with the British authorities.