Community social work in Palestine: from resilience to national resistance

Abstract

In the absence of a national Palestinian state and in response to the oppressive daily practices of the British Mandate government, the Israeli settlers’ colonial occupation and the Arab governments that ruled the West Bank and Gaza between 1950 and 1967, the Palestinian community has had to create and develop a set of indigenous resilience strategies. Muslih (1993) and Faraj (2017) refer to all these strategies as ‘A’mal Ejtima’y’, or ‘popular social work’, characterised by collectivism, public participation and non-hierarchical design, which has played a role in mobilising masses and facilitating youth engagement in the decolonisation process. Despite more than a century of existence of this form of social work in Palestine, it has received marginal or no attention from formal social work education and research. Recent years have witnessed some indications of the ‘resurrection’ of community social work in its very popular version.