J Migdal (ed) Palestinian Society and Politics. Princeton University Press. 1980. 
(Third World Quarterly, January, 1983, Vol. 5, No.1)

One of the contributors to this volume writes that ... Palestinian Arabs catapulted into public view as a result of the 1967 war and the ascendency of the PLO.' Another result has been that Israelis, the protagonists of the Palestinians, have taken on the added task of self-appointed experts on all facets of Palestinian life and society and that Israeli social scientists have transformed the West Bank into a laboratory for testing all kinds of theories without, at any time, examining or touching upon central political issues such as Zionism, Israeli policies, the displacement of the Palestinians by a settler colonial society, and the specific nature of the Palestinian experience.
The book is divided into two parts: the first by Migdal deals with Palestine prior to 1948, and the West Bank till the early 1970s, examining the effect of successive regime policies on the social cohesion and the fragmentation of Palestinian society. The second part is by various authors, whose main qualification seems to be their knowledge of Hebrew, and accessibility to Israeli archives, in addition to a near-total ignorance of Arabic sources. The historical studies are scholarly and competent, Israeli researchers being at their best when dealing with 'safe' subjects, such as 'British administrative policy in rural Palestine.' The contemporary studies are less scholary and some do not belong in the academic field at all. For instance, those constituting fragments of larger studies of the West Bank commissioned by the Israeli authorities in the aftermath of the 1967 war to facilitate the task of the military government in the occupied areas. It is unfortunate that 'intelligence oriented reports' of this kind should find their way to a scholarly volume. They are opaque and of a transitory nature. They ar interesting only as the subject of a study of disinformation, and as practical guides for the control and fragmentation of a national community. In part one, Migdal puts forwards the thesis that capitalism led to the break-up of Palestinian society, while deliberate regime policies led to its fragmentation, and he then proceeds to review investment, alliance, and security policies, under the Ottoman, British, Jordanian, and Israeli regimes.
Under the dttomans, the peasants lost possession of their lands and capitalism made its small beginnings, while the authorities relied on the urban notables for their rule. The effect of the British Mandate was to intensify and institutionalise many of the patterns begun in the Ottoman period, particularly the growth of capitalism, while Jordanian rule aimed specifically at weakening any centralising tendencies in Palestinian society, and 'to insure fragmentation as a means of denying the Palestinians a potential West Bank basis for challenging the regime'. Under Israeli military occupation, the policies adopted have not been different. Investment policies accentuated political fragmentation, and security policies 'even more explicitly ... aimed at preventing new forms of political and social cohesion', obstructing any move towards the establishment of a greater than local-based leadership.
Migdal, although hasty and in most parts much too brief, puts forward a well-argued and convincing thesis. His approach however itself constitutes a limitation. For in his view,'the conditions faced by Palestinians have often resembled those confronted by other peoples in the Third World.' In one stroke, he choses to ignore the specificity of Zionism, as a form of settler colonialism which ejected and displaced the native inhabitants, in addition to economically exploiting the remaining minority. A second weakness is his disregard for the majority of the Palestinians (more than a million in Jordan, half a million in Israel, three hundred thousand in Syria and Lebanon respectively, Gaza, the Gulf states) an examination of which would enhance his thesis, though the establishment of the PLO, and the recognition it has achieved both nationally and internationally, might indicate that the Palestinians have been able to overcome their fragmentation despite the obstacles placed in their paths by the host countries. In addition, the period since the early 1970s which Migdal's work does not cover, indicates that Israeli policies in the West Bank have not succeeded, that a wide-based leadership has been established and that the policy of fragmentation has not achieved its purpose. The result has been the intensification of what he terms 'security' policies, in plainer words, repression.
In part two, eight authors examine various aspects of Palestinian society, both rural and urban. The contributions are extremely uneven; some are scholarly, while others adopt a traditional orientalist's approach, relying on highly suspect sources and betraying an amazing degree of ignorance of basic facts.
Four articles by Taqqu, Stein, Miller and Baer deal with historical topics. Taqqu examines the transition from peasantry to wage labour which took place in the last decade of the Mandate. This leads to an increasing differentiation of the Arab labour force, and the formation of an incipient Palestinian Arab working class. Its appearance on the political stage however was late, and it was unable to influence the course of political events.
Stein gives a scholarly account of British attempts to deal with the issue of land transfers from Arab to Jews which remained a burning subject throughout the years of the Mandate. He shows that despite British legislation, over 80 per cent of the population dependent on agricultural income was not entitled to legal protection, and concludes that British attempts to tackle the issue were half-hearted, as real protection would have conflicted with the terms of the Mandate. The transformation of Palestine into a Jewish National Home was based on land acquisition, and British attempts to limit the latter were not in any way a retreat from the Mandate, but related to fears of creating a stratum of landless peasants thus endangering security. Miller examines British administrative policy and the attempts to establish a legal representative structure in the villages, whose role was confined to collecting funds and maintaining public order. He also explains the origins of the collective punishments and fines regulations (still in practice by Israel on the occupied West Bank and Gaza), which made the community responsible for any act committed by one of its members against the state.
Baer provides a legalistic account of the office of Mukhtar since Ottoman times, and points out that this role has been gradually diminishing with the advent of centralised authority, being now relegated to the status of a regular government official of the lowest grade.
Mishal's study focuses on the period of Jordanian rule and the mechanism of control employed by Abdullah, namely, the manipulation of elections, public appointments, and recruitment into the army. Mishal's account, though sound, is brief and despite its title does not extend beyond the early 1950s.
The unspoken preoccupation of Shamir's article is the search for ways of integrating the inhabitants of the refugee camps. It focuses on the attitudes of the inhabitants of one refugee camp in the West Bank, in the aftermath of the Arab defeat of 1967. The author concludes that the inhabitants' awareness of their identity as Palestinians remains acute and that the whole problem lies in the camp structure itself (not the ongoing political conflict, displacement, or Israeli policies) and that 'only dismantling the framework may remove this barrier to more effective integration.' He chooses to ignore the fact that in places where the Palestinians have been integrated and prospered, this has not conflicted with their perception of their identity or prevented them from extending their support to the PLO as the embodiment of the Palestinian national movement. Heller's article deals with political and social change in the West Bank since 1967 and gives full marks to the positive role of the Israeli occupation. Thus 'the Israeli occupation represents a massive intrusion of western modernity ...' while 'argicultural development in the West Bank has been little short of revolutionary.' All the author's information is based on interviews with, and publications of, the officers of the Israeli military administration. Even the wholesale transformation of a major part of the Arab labour force into a commuter army, their villages transformed into dormitories, and completly dependent on the vagaries of the stricken Israeli economy, is hailed as a major innovation of social engineering enabling the Palestinians to 'escape the stress usually associated with occupational change in agrarian society.
The weakness and shallowness of this study is only equalled by Divine's account of 'the continuing supremacy of critical cleavages' in Palestinian society arguing that the Palestinian political leadership is stagnant and reactionary. Thus, the leadership of the PLO and even active cadres both political and military all belong to one 'clan', religious differences preside over political aims, and 'in the contemporary idiom, the welfare of the nation proceeds from the excellence of certain families, and this excellence stems from the legitimacy of their religious ties.' While this might have been partly correct forty years ago, and could contribute to our understanding of societies such as Saudi Arabia and various Gulf states today, it is simply not correct as far as the Palestinian national movement is concerned, and the facts that Divine marshals to substantiate her claim are blatantly wrong. This is the least scholarly part of the book, and its inclusion in a scholarly work reflects poor editorial judgement.