'He Who Has a Hen Can Get an Egg on Loan'

Credit for Arab Peasants in Mandate Palestine, 1922-1947

الملخص

Following the Arab Disturbances of 1929 the Mandatory Government reached the conclusion that in addition to the national conflict between Arabs and Jews, the violence also occurred because of economic difficulties that the Arab peasants and migrants from the rural areas into the urban ones faced. The government therefore decided to undertake measures to improve the economic situation of the peasants, especially the poorer ones, in order to reduce the tension. As one of the main strategies for doing so, the government decided to change the credit system from the informal system of money-lending in the black market, what it considered too expensive, to the seemingly cheaper formal system of credit furnished by banks. Yet, the majority of the Arab rural economy remained dependent throughout the Mandate period on the informal form of credit. Banks tended to furnish loans to a small fraction of the peasant society, usually richer peasants, for which they had better information regarding their activities and assets. An investigation of the informal system suggests that even there credit was provided mainly and more easily to the richer group, and not to labourers or tenants. It is to such situation that the following Arab proverb refers: ‘[Only] he who has a hen can get an egg [on loan] (’alladhi ‘indahu dajajah yu’tihu bayda). This review article discusses the four volumes of the Subaltern Studies project and a book by Ranajit Guha, the editor of the series. O'hanlon critically examines older—colonial, national, and Marxist-economistic—historiographies against which the writers who belong to the Indian Subaltern project set their narratives. Such criticism benefits from research on other marginalized groups: women, Afro-Americans, and the British working class (the debate over the work of E.P. Thompson). The author is critical of some of the participants in the Subaltern project for not adopting these critical insights fully into their counter-writing. Utilizing Said (the politics involved in shaping the "other"), Gramsci (hegemony and its impact of personal identity) and Foucault (the impact of power relations on the social structure) the author challenges the classical humanistic and liberal notion of "self." She again confronts writers in the Subaltern project for not making a better use of this literature in their work. In taking stock with the project so far, O'hanlon also tackles the main dilemmas of the project ahead: how to create an identity and to give a "voice" to the subaltern without deteriorating into the pitfalls of essentialism, but also without recovering the subaltern in the writer's own (subjective) image.