This article seeks to explore past and present trends in the study of the Palestinian countryside, as reflected in Israeli and Arab-Palestinian scholarship about the Plain of Sharon—a key section of Palestine’s coastal plain. The article presents a detailed exposition of the different schools of thought, and by establishing the drawbacks of each school, it argues the need for an integrative approach to the subject and sources at hand. Scholars must therefore consider all the relevant primary sources and secondary literature. Furthermore, they should discuss their object of inquiry from both the perspective of the village and that of the region as a whole.Before 1948, Palestinians lived in a predominantly rural society. Therefore, a systematic treatment of the Palestinian countryside is vital for conducting any thorough discussion of the country’s history. Indeed, the social, economic, and demographic history of the Palestinian countryside during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods has received a significant scientific attention. Historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, demographers and material-culture researchers all long participated in a lively scholarly discourse in English, Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and more, mainly European languages. This attention reflects not only an interest in the ongoing Palestinian-Zionist conflict, but—more importantly—the accelerated pace of digitization of archival materials. The digital revolution, with the internet and social networks, removed previous political, geographical and financial barriers to scholarly exchange, and provided direct access to primary sources in various languages and from a wide variety of archival collections in Israel/Palestine and abroad.Jewish ethnographic accounts of the Palestinian countryside were inspired by everyday contacts with Palestinian society during the British Mandate period and influenced by available Western studies. Later, Zionist intelligence officers, like Ezra Danin, Tuvia Ashkenazi, and Ya‘akov Shimoni, documented land ownership patterns, structures of power and high politics for the purposes of the Jewish Yishuv. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, Israeli geographers like David Amiran, Yehuda Karmon and Gidon Golani of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working in the service of the Israeli state planning apparatuses, presented a spatial perspective of the ‘Arab Village’. They utilized geographical tools and also based their work on field work and official statistics. Early Israeli scholarship about the ‘Arab village’ (Heb. Ha-kfar ha-‘Aravi) reflected Jewish perceptions of the Arab-Palestinian ‘Other’. More specifically, it embodied the ways in which Israeli scholars, most of whom of European origin, conceived the ‘Arab Village’ in light of general Orientalist perceptions of the East, and specific Zionist national preoccupations. Their studies of the ‘Arab village’ were motivated by the need to understand, to contain and to control Israel’s Arab citizenry. With few exceptions, early Jewish scholars like Karmon and Amiran regarded the ‘Arab village’ as an Oriental, traditional, backward, unorganized settlement form, constrained by the limitations of the environment. Jewish settlements, on the other hand, were hailed as a Western, modern, advanced, planned and prosperous settlement form, which overcame nature for the benefit of humanity.This dichotomy of settlement forms manifested Jewish ethnocentric, temporal and spatial conceptions about the Land of Israel (Heb. Eretz Israel), encoded in Zionist doctrine and praxis. Zionist scholars, officials and educators, formulated, in scholarly terms, a ‘Theory of Settlement Decline.’ For them, the perceived miserable condition of the ‘Arab Village’ proved the decline of the Land of Israel after the exile of the Jewish People. The previous condition of the country could only be reversed, they argued, by the return of the chosen people to their ancestral home.This narrative served to marginalize and de-legitimize traditional Arab forms of settlement, as well as ownership, possession and use of land. More severely, it served Israeli functionaries as justification for the appropriation of vast swaths of privately-owned Arab-Palestinian land for exclusive Jewish use. The importance that Israel’s state apparatus and the security establishment attached to this legitimizing work is evident in the material support they extended to researchers who carried out these studies on their behalf. This trend has diminished since the 1970s, especially because of the more scientifically rigorous and less ideologicallyminded scholarship of a new generation of geographers, led by David Grossman of Bar Ilan University, and fellow colleagues from Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa.Arab-Palestinian scholarship, for its part, embodies a national discourse whose aim is to secure, perpetuate and confirm the Palestinian Right of Return, and to highlight the Arab-Palestinian character of the land against Israeli attempts to ‘Judiaize’ it. Arab-Palestinian scholarship focuses mainly on the socio-cultural aspects of individual villages, and pays little attention to the geographical, or wider regional, dimensions. In the hundreds of ‘village books’ written since the 1940s, the claim of Palestinian historical continuity and autochthonous existence since Canaanite times stands in sharp contrast to the more recent reported origin of village families from other parts of the Levant.Since the 1980s, Sharif Kana‘ana’s team scholars from Bir Zeit University, followed by their colleagues from Al-Najah University in Nablus, made an indispensable contribution to the understanding of the history of the Palestinian countryside. They were the first to make extensive use of previously untapped local and Ottoman sources, including the oral accounts of village residents. Later, Arab Palestinian residents of Israel, educated in Israeli universities, made steps towards bridging the gap between Palestinian and Israeli scholarship. They utilized their linguistical proficiencies and access to archives on both sides to present a more rigorous account on the history of the Palestinian countryside than ever before. The main gap between Israeli and Arab-Palestinian scholarship is thus an ideological one, a state worsened by the often selective and non-exhaustive use of different corpora of sources. Researchers are now able to re-evaluate existing scholarship in light of the new data as well as insights gleaned from archaeology, ethnography, the history of the Ottoman Empire, the history of nomadic societies, oral history, cartography and digital mapping (GIS studies), as discussed in the article.