Book Review
“Yusif Sayigh: Arab
Economist, Palestinian Patriot; a Fractured Life Story”
Edited by Rosemary Sayigh (2015)
Yusif Sayigh (1916 – 2014) is widely known as an expert on Arab
economic development, as former Director of the Economic Research
Institute and Chairman of the Economics Department at the American
University of Beirut (AUB), and for his work with the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO) on strategic planning of resistance
and economic development, including creation of PEDRA (Palestine
Economic Development and Reconstruction Agency, later PECDAR).
Compiled and edited by Rosemary Sayigh, anthropologist and Yusif’s
partner in life for more than five decades, with the compassion for
people and the ordinary that is characteristic of her oral history
work,[1] the memoirs of YusifSayigh
are, however, more than just another biography of a public
figure.
The trajectory of childhood and youth that emerges from the
memoirs, for example, is a strong reminder of the freedom of
movement and mobility that was quite common even for a village boy
in historic Palestine which, despite all arbitrary Western colonial
redesign, was still part of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria). From
Kharbata (Syria) where the Sayigh family had set up home and the
father, a pastor, ran his parish, we follow Yusif back to his
village of birth, al-Bassa (Palestine), to boarding school in Sidon
(Lebanon), to Beirut, where Yusif attends university and the entire
family obtains Lebanese citizenship simply because a family visit
coincides with a call for registration, and on to Tiberias
(Palestine), Tikrit (Iraq) and Jerusalem (Palestine) for work that
is to help finance his brothers’ education, political activism, and
professional engagement in Arab economic resistance against the
Zionist colonization of Palestine.
Yusif’s stories of boyhood and family life also show vividly that
early 20th century Palestinian society was not homogenously
stagnant, conservative and caught up in poverty and religious
traditions. There is Yusif’s mother protecting her children
from the father’s rigid Protestant discipline, and there is the
story of her courageous decision to pack up the family in the
absence of her husband, and flee the barren Syrian Kharbata during
the 1923 Druze uprising against French colonialism, in order to
return to al-Bassa, escape poverty and secure modern education for
her children. Through Yousif’s fond and detailed memories,
al-Bassa, the village on Palestine’s fertile northern Mediterranean
coast and its community of Muslims and Christians, is revived as a
place of liberal social traditions, fruit and tobacco plantations
and first adventures in sexuality and romance.
Stories recounted about university studies at the AUB (1934 – 38)
convey the intensity of intellectual debate between “Arab
nationalist” and “(Greater) Syrian nationalists” about the
preferred post-colonial order for the Arab world. We find Yusif
engaged in discussion with admired leaders of both of these
competing streams of political thought, becoming politicized, and
eventually joining the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP),
because of the party’s secular vision and praxis of resistance
against colonial rule. Through chapters 5 to 8, we follow Yusif’s
involvement with the SSNPand its leader AntunSaadeh, which
eventually ends in frustration with secret political parties and
their un-transparent mode of action that would keep him from
joining another political party for the remainder of his life.
The Nakba has the Sayigh family seek refuge in Beirut. Yusif
himself is captured together with other young men in Jerusalem in
May 1948 by a Zionist militia. The chapter entitled “Prisoner of
War”, is a rare and vivid testimony of hunger and summary
executions in Israeli make-shift detention camps, of Yusif’s pleas
for protected prisoner of war status for Palestinian civilians like
himself and his companions, and of relief at the appearance of the
International Red Cross.[2] Striking in hindsight
is the manner in which Yusif recounts his deportation from
Jerusalem in the spring of 1949: it is a story of release from
Israeli detention and of reunion with friends, comrades, colleagues
and family, first in eastern Jerusalem, then in Amman and Beirut.
Is it because this deportation, which would turn into permanent
exile, is too painful to be remembered? Or is it at that time
simply not a memorable incident for the prisoner who, released into
the Bilad al-Sham of his youth, would immediately resume political
and academic engagement for a better post-colonial Arab world that
included Palestine?
As pointed out by the editor, there are also many questions younger
generations would want to pose to Dr. Yusif about his work with the
PLO, beginning with the first session of the Palestinian National
Council (PNC) in the early 1960s and lasting until shortly after
the singing of the Oslo accords in the mid-1990s. The stories
recounted in chapter 12 show the Palestinian scholar working
relentlessly – and ultimately failing - to insert strategic
planning and transparency into what he calls an “unorganized
Palestinian resistance movement”, or, later, to overcome narrow
partisan interests for the benefit of a scientific economic
development plan for the Palestinian state. The principle that
politics is to create the conditions for Arab, including
Palestinian, post-colonial economic development, and that economic
development involves social justice, had been constants in
YusifSayigh’s work as an economist since his first notable book,
Bread with Dignity (1961). An overview of the academic achievements
and legacy of this pioneer scholar and teacher of economics in the
Arab world is provided by the editor in the final chapter of the
book.
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Yusif Sayigh: Arab Economist,
Palestinian Patriot: A Fractured Life Story, published by AUC
press. Click here to order directly from the publisher,
or here to order from Amazon UK, or here to
order from Amazon US.
New edition, Too Many Enemies, published by
Al-Mashriq. Click here to order
[1] Rosemary Sayigh, From Peasants to Revolutionaries (1979), and, Too Many Enemies(1994), representing milestones in oral history work about the experience of Palestinian refugees exiled in Lebanon.
[2] For a recent study featuring Yusif Sayigh’s and similar first-hand accounts and reflecting critically on the role of the ICRC, see: Salman Abu Sitta and Terry Rempel, “The ICRC and the Detention of Palestinian Civilians in Israel’s 1948 POW/Labor Camps during the 1948 War”, Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLIII, No. 4 (Summer 2014).