Rosemary Sayigh (ed.), Becoming Pro-Palestinian: Testimonies from the Global Solidarity Movement (Bloomsbury Publishing / I.B. Tauris, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Rosemary Sayigh (RS): A specific event inspired the conception of this book: a demonstration of approximately 180,000 people in London in support of Palestinians in May 2021, concurrent with the latest Israeli attack on Gaza. Though Israeli attacks on Gaza were continual, no such large demonstrations had occurred before. I was curious about the motivations leading to such participation, and though I could not reach the actual demonstrators I decided to invite some 40+ individuals of varying occupations to write a brief “self story” explaining why and how they had become “pro-Palestinian.”
Most of the contributors were people known to me through a long life of research and writing about Palestinian refugees. This meant an easy transition from earlier work and producing this book.
One source of inspiration was oral history theory which offers the “focused life story” as potential format. Another was Yasir Suleiman’s edited work Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which admirably demonstrates the historical value of personal reminiscences.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
RS: The main issue explored by the “self stories” collected for this book is the experiences and motivations that have inspired a varied group of people to support the Palestinian cause, and how they do so.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
RS: All my earlier published work has arisen out of oral history research carried out among Palestinian refugees living in camps in Lebanon.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
RS: My hope for the book is that, through exposure to personal connections, readers will become interested in the history of the Palestinian people and go on to read more from the rich factual and fictional/aesthetic material available, thereby increasing the size of an audience for the more serious material on Palestine which is growing exponentially every year.
J: To what extent did marriage to a Palestinian influence the course of your work?
RS: It is certainly true that Yusif’s story of being a prisoner of war during 1948-9 deepened my interest in his personal story, as did his descriptions of his mother’s village of Al-Bassa where he spent much of his childhood. These stories certainly deepened and “humanized” my interest in Palestine. But my primary interest was always political, i.e. the colonial transfer of the land of Palestine from its indigenous inhabitants to immigrants chosen for their likely value to the British empire.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
RS: I still have one possible publishing project in a series of life stories recorded with women from Shatila camp in Beirut as part of a PhD dissertation. But having reached the age of ninety-seven, I doubt if I have the capacity for further publishing.
Excerpt from the book (from the Foreword, p. xi)
When Israel attacked Gaza in May 2021, world public opinion reacted with pro-Palestinian demonstrations on a scale not witnessed before. Starting on May 9, protests erupted in Amman, Istanbul, Cape Town, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Paris, Chicago, Milwaukee, Madrid, Brussels, Nairobi, Tokyo, Berlin, and in various cities in India, the UK, USA, Canada, and Kyrgistan. On May 22 an estimated 180,000 people demonstrated for Palestine in Hyde Park, London, probably the largest demonstration for Palestine in British history.