“During my last visit to my homeland, I sensed a new spirit, a spirit of progress and awakening that made me proud of my country. The conference I am currently attending sets a fine example for this awakening.”Footnote ¹ This testimony was given by a Palestinian who visited his homeland after three decades abroad. The conference mentioned was the first Congress of Arab Doctors in Palestine, convened in Haifa in June 1933. Twenty-seven doctors attended from across Palestine, and a similar number of doctors could not attend but sent letters of empowerment to the delegates. It would have been impossible to imagine an event such as this three decades earlier, the anonymous attendee noted in retrospect. The professional, personal, and communal challenges and demands facing these doctors would also have been inconceivable at the turn of the century. This book is about them.

Palestinian Doctors tells the story of the country’s community of Arab doctors from its inception in the late nineteenth century until the catastrophe of 1948. It tells Palestine’s story through the endeavors and challenges of doctors, writing them into local and regional history. The study of their origins and careers extends beyond the country’s well-documented urban history and assembles cities, towns, and villages into one conceptual mosaic. The book examines the processes that enabled the emergence of this professional group and its positioning within the local community and the colonial hierarchy. It delves into doctors’ relationships with British administration and their Jewish counterparts, their intellectual production, their attempts to unionize, and finally, their role in the 1948 war and the Nakba’s immediate effect on their lives.

Doctors are a particularly compelling subject of historical research because, by the beginning of the twentieth century, they came to be regarded as the epitome of modern knowledge and virtue, called upon to heal both the individual and the social body. The rise of this professional community, the book argues, was determined by the Palestinian elite’s effort to maintain its status amid a rapidly changing geopolitical, economic, and cultural reality, mediated by relations with fellow Arab medical students and doctors from across the region, a confining yet enabling colonial administration, and settler-colonial Zionist medical doctors and establishments. Palestinian Doctors traces the agency, potential, and limitations of this community.

Our analysis incorporates regional, national, and local scales. The regional scale is crucial for understanding the profession’s formation and the connections forged with peers in neighboring countries. Before Israeli statehood, Palestine had no medical school of its own, requiring medical students to constantly migrate across countries and continents. For many of the book’s protagonists, medical training meant a meaningful encounter with a foreign urban culture and the acquisition, alongside new knowledge, of new tastes, beliefs, and dispositions. Most doctors studied in Beirut, where they encountered a vibrant cosmopolitan student community that connected them to regional professional networks that would become part of their professional, intellectual, social, and national outlook.

The national scale enables us to look at this medical community’s shared experiences within the particularities of Palestine. These included the colonial legal and political framework of the British Mandate and employment by the Department of Health (DoH). It also enables us to examine doctors’ personal and collective interactions with those who gradually became their professional rivals, members of the Jewish medical community, which posed both a political and a professional challenge. On the national scale, the book also examines their countrywide unionization and the Palestinian Arab Medical Association’s attempt to deal with the medical challenges of the 1948 catastrophe.

Finally, the local scale enables a nuanced understanding of how different socioeconomic and political developments in specific localities created different engagements with modern medicine. Some communities produced more physicians than did others, some became medical centers, while others did not, and local specificities help understand why. In some localities, a landowning household would send offspring to study medicine. Elsewhere, families of ulama sought to maintain their social status by converting cultural capital from religious education into formal university education. Other factors included the availability of missionary schools, which prepared some children better than others for Beirut’s medical schools, or the choice of Mandate authorities to place a District Health Office in one town rather than another, creating employment opportunities and increasing both the supply of and demand for medical personnel.

Historicizing Professions in Colonial and Non-Colonial Contexts

Palestinian doctors were “modern doctors” in terms of their clinical training, acquaintance with the medical scientific canon, and proficiency in methods of treatment. It was their positioning in space, Palestine, and time, the Mandate period, and the attributes of their emergence as a community that made them a unique case study, one that urges us toward a reconceptualization of the professions in the colonized world.

Scholars have formulated a conceptual framework for the study of professions as an interaction between the university, state, professionals, and users. These four categories of actors and their interactions, they argue, can help us understand the resources and histories of professional communities. Universities train professionals and provide them with the cultural and practical capital on which their status and practice depend.Footnote ² Education forms personal bonds and networks of people who perform interaction rituals and arrive at shared conceptions of identity and purpose.Footnote ³ States provide training, licensing, and employment and are involved in regulating the profession. Professionals unionize, self-regulate, and enhance their collective interests in relation to the other three actors. They are responsible for the profession’s cohesion and continuity by creating formal and informal socialization mechanisms that enable the dissemination of knowledge. Finally, users’ (or patients’) material resources and demand for services are crucial to the profession’s development. Medical insurance and state-sponsored health services expand demand and, with it, the users’ community.Footnote ⁴

Historians of the medical profession have noted the connection between university training and the rising power of the urban middle class, which demanded more medical services and higher standards of training. By the late nineteenth century, entry to the medical profession depended on extensive science-oriented secondary education and the ability to bear the financial burden of long years of study – thus limiting entry to the profession to the European and American upper middle classes.Footnote ⁵

Historians of the professions in colonial societies challenge the validity of this theorization for its oversight of gender, race, ethnicity, and power relations outside the professional field. In her work on the Taiwanese medical profession under Japanese rule, sociologist Ming-Cheng M. Lo demonstrated how doctors’ pursuit of market interests was qualified by ethnic solidarity with their consumers and how their organizational autonomy served alternately to protect their professional market and assist in the anti-colonial struggle. She therefore suggested studying the emergence of professions under colonial rule by examining, first, their internal organization, knowledge base, cultural system, and group interests; second, ethnic networks within the colonized society, its cultural traditions, and structural inequalities between colonizer and colonized; and finally, the context of the colonial state and colonized civil society.Footnote ⁶

Professionals’ education in colonial contexts was designed to create a cadre of intermediaries between the colonial power and the indigenous population. University graduates were integrated into the lower ranks of the colonial administration. Universities were rare, and those that did exist attracted students from neighboring colonies and facilitated the formation of group identities and networks that crossed colonial frontiers and a trans-imperial circulation of ideas, models, and experiences. The establishment of universities in the colonies was sometimes explicitly designed to prevent local students from traveling abroad and integrating into anti-colonial networks. Within the colonial apparatus, university education of colonized professionals created new racial distinctions between them and colonial colleagues, creating novel limitations on their professional mobility and salary.Footnote ⁷

Professionals in colonial contexts were embedded in national, racial, or ethnic power relations that affected patients’ trust in biomedicine and limited promotion tracks of colonized professionals within the government. Like many other university graduates, doctors often played key roles in both the anti-colonial movement and the colonial administration. In late nineteenth-century West Africa, for example, African doctors had difficulties finding employment outside the government because few African patients trusted Western biomedicine. Employment at the colonial medical service, however, came at the expense of sacrificing their professional autonomy and serving as the arm of the state among the colonized. In the early twentieth century, by contrast, private practitioners benefited from the emergence of an African elite willing to consult Western medicine.Footnote ⁸ In Taiwan, medicine was one of the only venues for upward mobility. However, since it entailed a long course of study, sometimes abroad, most doctors hailed from those elites and relied not only on their education but also on their family background for social prestige. Thus, in practice, the emergence of the new educated elites caused little disruption for the old.Footnote ⁹

Our analysis examines the postcolonial critique within the Palestinian context. The Palestinian medical profession predated the direct colonial encounter and relied on foreign medical training outside Palestine, mainly in Beirut and Istanbul. From 1918 to 1948, Palestine was a colonial entity under British control: Palestinian doctors served as the backbone of the DoH but, as in other colonies, were denied decision-making positions. As for medical education, training outside Palestine, particularly in Beirut, integrated our protagonists into regional and transnational networks – which also posed a threat to the colonial state.

In addition to the colonizer-colonized dyad, the settler-colonial setting further problematizes the elements discussed in the fourfold model. The emergence and expansion of the Palestinian professional community paralleled a rapid expansion and institutionalization of a Zionist one, creating a bifurcated professional community. Palestinian doctors found themselves caught in an uneven competition with European immigrant doctors. The relationship between doctors and patients was consequently largely determined within the triangle of colonial, settler-colonial, and ethnic power relations. Elucidating these entanglements within Palestinian professional history enables a revision of our understanding of professions under colonialism.

Historicizing Medicine in the Middle East

The historiography of the medical profession in the Middle East is far from comprehensive. Several works have been dedicated to the Egyptian medical profession, which owes its emergence to Mehmet ʿAli Pasha’s initiative to establish the Qasr al-ʿAini Medical School in 1827 to serve the needs of his new army. A second medical school was established in Istanbul the same year. During the same period, Egypt’s viceroy and the Ottoman sultan dispatched students and interns to French, German, Italian, and British medical schools.Footnote ¹⁰

Historians of the Egyptian medical profession have concentrated on Qasr al-ʿAini and the Egyptian Medical Association, founded in 1919. Egyptian doctors’ intellectual production has also been given scholarly attention. From the 1920s onward, Egyptian doctors saw themselves as part of an intelligentsia committed to reforming the Egyptian nation, yielding a corpus of publications aimed at that cause.Footnote ¹¹ Palestinian doctors were involved in this social-intellectual discourse, consuming its textual productions and taking part in the Egyptian medical scene through participation in its conferences.

As for the Iraqi medical community, prior to the establishment of a local medical school in 1927, it had to rely on training abroad – particularly in Beirut, Istanbul, and Paris. Iraq’s 1932 independence and the graduation of the first cohorts of Baghdad’s Royal Medical College linked the Iraqi history of medicine to the state’s policies on the one hand and to the college, its student body, and its administration on the other.Footnote ¹²

The history of the Syrian medical profession concentrates on the Ottoman Imperial Medical School (later named the Arab Medical School) in Damascus and the relationship between its student body and staff, Syrian society, and Ottoman (and later French) authorities. The school’s Ottoman Turkish curriculum was Arabized under Faysal’s short rule and remained Arabic under the French. Fearful of French retribution, the school shunned nationalist activity throughout the 1920s.Footnote ¹³

The history of the Palestinian medical profession is different. Lacking both a medical school and a state apparatus, its history cannot be that of an institution or a state-building process. Rather, it is a history of individual, familial, and collective efforts to obtain medical education, private practice, and employment in the DoH, the establishment of municipal and later national medical societies, and laying the foundations for a medical infrastructure. The British commitment to a Jewish national home in the Mandate for Palestine made nation-building efforts overwhelmingly difficult for Palestine’s Arabs, as the foundation of an independent Arab state was at the bottom of the British priorities. When comparing the community explored here with the Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi ones, the absence of a medical school and a state-building project are central to our analysis.

Against this backdrop, the history of medical education in nearby Beirut is central to both existing historiography and our own analysis. Doctors from the entire region studied in Beirut’s two faculties of medicine: the Syrian Protestant College (est. 1866, the medical school – 1867, renamed the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1920) and St. Joseph University (est. 1876, the faculty of medicine – 1883). In these schools, students gained not only medical training but also personal and professional connections and career opportunities throughout the region and beyond. Beirut’s proximity encouraged hundreds of young Palestinian men and a few dozen women to complete their medical, pharmaceutical, dental, or nursing training there.Footnote ¹⁴ A group that received similar sociohistorical analysis is that of Armenian medical students, also heavily represented in Beirut, many of whom would proceed to practice in Mandate Palestine.Footnote ¹⁵

As for European faculties, we only have limited research on the history of Arab, Turkish, or Persian students, except for Paris.Footnote ¹⁶ Students were dispatched to Europe by their respective governments, and some went there at their own expense. Geneva, for example, became a hub for Ottoman dissidents.Footnote ¹⁷ In European medical schools, Middle Eastern students also met Asian and African students who arrived due to similar local limitations. Inter- and intra-imperial connections between Turkish-, Arab-, or Persian-speaking students and students from the colonized world are yet to be explored.

Besides educational venues, Palestinian doctors shared with other doctors in the region discursive tropes and real-life concerns. Arab, Turkish, and Armenian doctors often advised mothers on how to keep their homes clean and their children’s nutrition hygienic and policymakers on how to contain or prevent the spread of epidemics and how to reform the countryside.Footnote ¹⁸ Facing the double challenge of British and Zionist presence, Palestinian doctors were no exception.

This study contributes to the understanding of the medical profession in the Middle East while adding its own specificities. Concentrating on medical education, historians have largely neglected to study doctors’ professional communities. Focusing on luminaries, most historical work on the medical profession in the region ignores the hundreds or thousands of doctors who are not. Telling the profession’s history through the less famous ones, this book attempts to shed light on their personal and communal stories.

Social Histories of Palestine

Our work builds on and contributes to the flourishing field of Palestine’s social history in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. In particular, it builds on existing scholarship on Palestine’s urban Arab elites, bourgeoning middle classes, and histories of the professions. The Nakba created an archival rupture followed by a long process of silencing and erasure. Devoid of a state and with its institutions of memory and documentation under constant threat, Palestinian historiography, particularly for Palestinian historians, remains a methodological act of resistance. Personal archives, family photos, oral histories, autobiographies, and the published press complement the official filing of the Palestinian past at the British National Archives or Israeli State Archive, enabling scholars to reconstruct particular Palestinian stories.

Histories of Palestinian villages, towns, and cities, those destroyed in the Nakba and those that remained, illustrate the historical transformations of the country from the turn of the twentieth century until 1948. Urban histories of Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa have surveyed the emergence of modern urban classes.Footnote ¹⁹ These are often interlaced with the rise of notable families, whose members moved across the region for educational, professional, and business reasons. Many Palestinian professionals personified this mobility and these opportunities. Since they did not concentrate in one city, not even Palestine’s largest cities, the current research offers a bird’s-eye view of their formation as a professional class.

Histories of Palestinian towns highlight the social transformations occurring beyond the urban centers.Footnote ²⁰ Jacob Norris’ work on Bethlehem’s Dabdoub household during the late Ottoman and Mandate periods illustrates how overseas travel, commerce, and connections transformed the town and its people and enabled the rise of Palestinian nouveaux riches with worldwide connections. The Dabdoubs made a fortune from crafting and exporting local Christian devotional objects,Footnote ²¹ enabling cousins Antoine and Michel to become doctors in the late 1940s. Antoine’s brothers continued to work in the local family business with their father while he studied at the AUB. He returned to his hometown during the 1948 war and opened a clinic for the Deheisheh Camp refugees, later playing a central role in establishing Bethlehem’s Caritas Baby Hospital.Footnote ²² Dr. Dabdoub’s story is one example linking local Palestinian social developments to the history of the medical profession.

Palestinian society was predominantly rural, and documentation of most villages was scarce or nonexistent. Yet since the 1980s, historians have created a rich corpus of village histories.Footnote ²³ Since the early 2000s, hundreds of interviews were conducted by projects such as PalestineRemembered.com and Zochrot and uploaded to open-access websites. These interviews were of tremendous value for this book, providing firsthand acquaintance with village realities and otherwise undocumented evidence about healthcare and doctors.

These testimonies complement existing studies on rural Palestine, which underline the entangled relationship between the upper classes and the countryside.Footnote ²⁴ More recently, Basma Fahoum’s study of peasants in the Palestinian tobacco industry illuminates their resourcefulness and agency amid stronger capitalist and colonialist forces.Footnote ²⁵ Our focus on doctors adds another layer to our understanding of the distance between the city and the village, as doctors’ national and professional calling was determined by their movement into or relationship with the rural periphery. Analyzing the community through this prism enables the incorporation of the local, urban, or rural with broader spatial perspectives.

The history of labor in Mandate Palestine was also given ample scholarly attention. Existing scholarship examines the unskilled labor market, mainly through the tensions and cooperation between Arab and Jewish workers.Footnote ²⁶ The two communities were segregated politically, culturally, and economically but worked in shared spaces. The colonial infrastructure created encounters and challenges for both communities, which gradually grew apart as the conflict intensified. Still, as railroad workers or employees of the colonial bureaucracy, Arabs and Jews continued working together until the British departure. These shared spaces were pivotal in the evolution of each community’s definition of national self, constantly forcing reevaluation while encountering the national other.Footnote ²⁷ Employed by the DoH in its hospitals, clinics, and administration, Arab and Jewish doctors were part of this encounter. This direct interaction, alongside less direct interfaces as operators of neighboring clinics and members of a shared medical market, was formative in the evolution of the Palestinian medical community.

Local histories of professions during the Mandate are also gaining momentum. Nimrod Ben Zeev delved into Palestine/Israel’s social and cultural history of construction, highlighting its ethnic and racial attributes.Footnote ²⁸ Hilary Falb Kalisman’s study of teachers sheds light on the development of a community through a process of professionalization with the establishment of colonial or semi-colonial state education systems. As employees of the colonial government, teachers were at once in the service of the colonial apparatus and shared an emancipatory vocabulary. Like doctors, they were relatively mobile within and across state borders, shared a new professional language, and considered themselves pillars of the new society.Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, Naama Ben-Zeev and Gal Amir’s work on Palestinian lawyers underlined the role of this professional community in advocating Palestinian civil and judicial rights. Like Palestinian doctors, they numbered a few hundred, and many were prominent actors in the public sphere. Like doctors, they were centered in cities and evolved as a professional community under British rule. Like doctors, they were outnumbered by the Jewish professional community, and like healthcare, law was a central site of conflict between the two communities.Footnote ³⁰

Few works have been dedicated to Palestinian professional associations in the Mandate period. Sherene Seikaly’s work on chambers of commerce examined men of capital’s conferences and their professional and political lobbying, which included restricting Jewish immigration to ward off commercial competition.Footnote ³¹ Assaf Likhovski studied the legal thought and public advocacy of Palestinian lawyers, paying particular attention to their ongoing dialogues with their counterparts in other Arab countries and showing how they lobbied for more substantial representation for Arab lawyers and judges in the colonial legal system.Footnote ³² Our discussion of doctors’ unionization will thus contribute to this scholarship on Palestinian professionals and professional associations.

Narratives of Modern Medicine in Palestine

Existing historiographies of medicine in Palestine underline the centrality of foreign missions and Jewish communities in the introduction of medical services while marginalizing the role of the Ottoman state, municipalities, and local actors. Studies have demonstrated the segregated nature of healthcare during the Mandate, mainly the Jewish community’s relatively well-established healthcare system and its dedication to the national project, as opposed to the limited services offered to the Arab population by the colonial system and private practitioners.Footnote ³³ Overshadowed by a larger Jewish-Zionist one since late Ottoman times, the Palestinian Arab medical community was overwhelmed by the mass migration of more than 2,000 German and Central European Jewish doctors after the Nazi rise to power in 1933, which made the Jewish medical community roughly ten times larger.Footnote ³⁴ Histories of the Jewish medical profession and biographic studies of individual doctors abound.Footnote ³⁵ Jewish doctors treated Arab patients and sometimes collaborated with Arab doctors. Our contribution to the history of Jewish doctors lies in our insistence on tracing their interactions with their Palestinian colleagues, which historians of the Jewish community in Palestine tend to ignore. A notable exception is Nisim Levi, whose comprehensive lexicon of local pre-1948 physicians includes roughly 4,000 short biographies of 400 Arab and Armenian physicians.Footnote ³⁶ It was this list that started our journey.

European and American missionary doctors are also central to existing historiography. They established the first hospitals in Palestine.Footnote ³⁷ This history is often narrated in conjunction with or as a prelude to the development of Jewish health services. Jewish doctors, mostly European immigrants backed by Jewish philanthropists and philanthropic organizations, managed to establish competing medical institutions and, from the second decade of the twentieth century, a medical infrastructure: a national sick fund, hospitals, and dispensaries.Footnote ³⁸ English- and Hebrew-language histories of medicine describe the country’s medical landscape in terms of a rivalry between Jewish communities and missionary initiatives in the late Ottoman period and a booming Zionist medical infrastructure in the Mandate period.

The Arabic-language historiography of medicine is mainly biographical, and leading physicians feature in general biographical dictionaries.Footnote ³⁹ Muhammad ʿAql’s three-volume study on Palestinian doctors surveys the historical development of medical professions in Palestine and includes an impressive lexicon of doctors, dentists, and pharmacists. ʿAql’s use of Arabic, Hebrew, and English sources makes his work the most comprehensive one about the medical community.Footnote ⁴⁰ Muhammad Qaraqra’s monograph concentrates on the DoH and is less concerned with the physicians themselves.Footnote ⁴¹

Given the relatively small number and weaker organizations of Arab medical professionals, their historical significance is arguably marginal. As we demonstrate in this book, the history of medicine in late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine is incomplete without them. They were a crucial part of Palestine’s emerging Arab professional class and the changing urban landscape. They were the backbone of the DoH and thus constituted, like teachers and other government employees, a crucial interface between the British authorities and Palestine’s Arab society. The book also explores their interactions with Jewish doctors – sometimes collaborative, sometimes conflictual. The collapse of medical services to the Arab population in 1948 remains an unexplored aspect of this crucial historical moment, a lacuna we address in Chapter 7.

Methodology and Sources

The book’s analytical framework combines qualitative and quantitative sources and methodologies. In the absence of official Palestinian archives for this period, it relies on Arabic, English, Hebrew, and French sources from Israeli, British, and French archives, as well as the Hebrew and Arabic press, publications of the DoH and the Palestine Arab Medical Association, biographies and autobiographies, and works on specific localities.

For mapping the profession’s sociology, we created a database (mideastemed.org) compiled using biographical dictionaries, phonebooks, official indexes, newspaper advertisements, and more. It includes some 400 men and three women who worked as doctors in Palestinian cities and towns during the period under study. The database includes other medical professionals – dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and midwives – as well as thousands of medical professionals who worked in the Middle East, particularly the Levant and Egypt. Historians of medicine and the medical profession often turn to biographies of notable individuals because information on others is meager. Analyzed collectively, however, the research outcomes enable tracing the production of medical professionals as an intersection between global, regional, and local processes – for example, as part of global educational mobilities, regional networks of Arab doctors, and a town’s relationship with its hinterland. Overall, the combination of sources and methods allows for both micro-level analysis of specific individuals or localities and macro-level analysis of the medical community. This database enables independent browsing and data analysis and encourages further research of this history. We find this possibility respectful of our academic community and the historical subjects.

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1 examines the development of the medical profession in late Ottoman Palestine, with a particular focus on Jerusalem. It argues that it was the encounter between the local elite and the myriad forms of imperial and missionary medical interventions that introduced modern medicine into Ottoman Palestine. The missionary involvement accounts for the presence of foreign doctors and the establishment of hospitals and clinics – providing care for the poor and employment to the first cohorts of Palestinian doctors.

Chapter 2 traces the sociological background of Palestinian doctors – their families, birthplaces, and education. It argues, first, that the Palestinian medical community was a regional phenomenon, as it attracted doctors from Anatolia and all parts of Greater Syria and relied mostly on Beirut’s faculties of medicine and the networks students had forged there. Second, the chapter argues that this professional class was not uniformly of urban elite origin but was rather diverse in terms of origins and denomination. We show how the composition of the professional community changed over time in relation to these terms.

Chapter 3 positions the professional community’s agency and challenges within the colonial context. The DoH employed eighty-three doctors throughout the Mandate years, making it one of the main employers and providers of medical services to Palestine’s Arabs, particularly the lower classes. This chapter explores the ambivalent relationship between the colonial department and the medical community, arguing that while it provided employment to dozens of physicians and some rudimentary medical services, it offered limited promotion opportunities to its Arab employees. This policy led to the fragmentation of the professional community and reliance on private practice, compromising the development of a national Arab medical apparatus.

Chapter 4 delineates doctors’ professional mobility. Different factors determined the size, nature, and reach of local professional communities. These included the size of the locality, its changing economic role within local and regional markets, and the presence of missionary, governmental, and Jewish institutions. Three categories are examined: the countryside, where very few doctors worked; small towns such as Acre and Nazareth, which housed small groups of doctors alongside a few pharmacists, dentists, and midwives; and Palestine’s major cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem – which served as medical hubs for a few dozen doctors, who worked as private practitioners as well as in governmental and missionary hospitals and clinics.

Chapter 5 provides a labor-oriented analysis of the medical market as a microcosm of the Palestinian-Zionist settler relationship, whose specificities were connected to the intimate nature of medical treatment and the large disparity between the Jewish and Arab medical communities. With superior organization and funding, Jewish doctors constituted both a political and a professional challenge. The 1933 Nazi takeover brought about a massive migration of German Jewish doctors to Palestine. The occupational threat posed by the immigrant doctors intensified the politicization of the professional relationship between Jewish and Arab doctors. Palestinian doctors were not only affected by the conflict but became active in the national movement.

Chapter 6 takes us to the 1940s, which witnessed the maturation of the professional and political processes explored throughout the book. It examines doctors’ role as public intellectuals criticizing the colonial government’s meager investment in public health, proclaiming themselves as the nation’s educators in matters of health and hygiene, and protesting the licensing of immigrant Jewish doctors. It then looks at doctors’ unionization, their relationship with medical associations in neighboring countries, their central role in regional medical congresses, and the formation of city-based associations culminating in the establishment of the Palestinian Arab Medical Association in 1944. The 1940s were a decade of vibrant Palestinian public activism, in which doctors played a leading role, seeking to reform their society and using their personal skills and collective power to take part in a nation-building process.

Finally, Chapter 7 addresses the 1948 catastrophe through the medical prism. Within the space of several months, the British authorities withdrew their funding of public health, the fighting increased the demand for medical services, and many of Palestine’s Arab doctors were displaced. This chapter follows the paths of those who remained, their efforts to save lives under wartime conditions, and the postwar fate of the medical community. It argues that the slow and belated unionization of the Palestinian medical profession and subsequent withdrawal of the meager British medical services resulted in limited Palestinian ability to cope with the huge numbers of wartime casualties, which was metonymic of the overall collapse of Palestinian civil society.