A politics of care: Local nurses in Mandate Palestine

Abstract

This article examines the work experiences of Palestinian Arab nurses to illuminate the operation of the colonial public health regime in Mandate Palestine. Analyzing nurses' work in the clinics of town and village communities and their relationships with the colonial government's Department of Health, it argues that these nurses were social and political interlocutors in the system of public health, which depended upon their intimate relationships with local communities. By pulling these women out of the archives, this article complicates received wisdom among scholars about development, expertise, and the chronology of welfare. Telling the stories of these women also provides a ground-level view of the operation of daily governance in Mandate Palestine and the lived social, political, and economic realities of an often-overlooked cadre of Palestinian workers from that period.