Year of the Locust: A Soldier's Diary and the Erasure of Palestine's Ottoman Past

Voices of the Middle East and North Africa

Victors write history, as the old cliché goes. Over the past 5 centuries, European powers have fanned out across the world, conquering entire continents and writing self-serving accounts of those conquests while diminishing the merits of the conquered civilizations in order to justify their own depredations. Palestine has been no exception to that rule. Today we speak with Professor Salim Tamari, a Palestinian historian based in Ramallah, whose trailblazing work has illuminated the history of Palestine and the Levant prior to British and Zionist occupations from a perspective that is largely absent from western narratives. More specifically, we discuss his book The Year of the Locust, an eloquent chronicle of the transition period that saw the end of the Ottoman empire in the Levant and the arrival of western occupiers through the revealing lens of a rare personal diary kept by a young soldier fighting in the ranks of the Ottoman army. Guest: Salim Tamari, Salim Tamari is IPS senior fellow and the former director of the IPS-affiliated Institute of Jerusalem Studies. He is editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and Hawliyyat al Quds.