Today we have a very special episode, part of a new occasional series that will highlight some of the truly great work MERIP has done over the last 50-plus years, all of which is free to read in our archive. In the first of this series, we’re featuring the landmark essay “Abu Farid’s House” written by Beshara Doumani and published in March 1989 as part of Issue 157, “Israel Faces the Uprising.” The essay encapsulates the history of working class struggles in Palestine up to and during the First Intifada through the family of the titular Abu Farid in Salfit, a small village located between Ramallah and Nablus. 

The author, Beshara Doumani, went on to become a leading historian of Palestine in the Ottoman era. He served as the President of Bir Zeit University in the West Bank from 2021–2023 and is now the inaugural Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies at Brown University. This episode features an interview with Doumani by MERIP Executive Director James Ryan recorded on October 30th from the West Bank, where Doumani is currently on sabbatical conducting research in some of the same villages he visited when he wrote “Abu Farid’s House.” The conversation covers his experience in Salfit and its surroundings before and during the First Intifada, as well as how he understands the changes in Salfit and across the Occupied Territories, from the Oslo Accords through the present genocide in Gaza.

Further Reading: 

Beshara Doumani, “Abu Farid’s House” Middle East Report 157, March-April 1989 https://www.merip.org/1989/03/abu-farids-house/ 

“Israel Faces the Uprising” Middle East Report 157, March-April 1989 https://www.merip.org/issue-157/ 

Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (Berkeley, University of California Press 1995) https://www.ucpress.edu/books/rediscovering-palestine/paper