The Crime of Nationalism: Britain, Palestine, and Nation-Building on the Fringe of Empire by Matthew Kraig Kelly (review)

Matthew Kraig Kelly’s study of the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine against British rule and Jewish settlement of the country reimagines nationalism, violence, and colonial power. Kelly does this by presenting two central theses: brutal British repression of a national strike and nonviolent protest sparked the Palestinian violence of the revolt, not the other way around; and the British and Zionists coded the revolt and the Palestinians as criminal, thereby legitimizing state violence and delegitimizing the Palestinian national cause. Thus, a national revolt became a “crime wave” by cropping out the harsh British counterinsurgency that caused Palestinian violence in the first place, what Kelly calls the “criminological framing of Palestinian nationalism” (p. 6). As Kelly puts it, British repression “preceded and provoked widespread militant activity among the Palestinian population, not the other way around. British violence, that is, was a basic cause of the revolt, not a reluctant reaction to it” (p. 5). Counterinsurgency is a misnomer; the British were the insurgency. Everyone or no one was a criminal in a radical rereading of the relationship of violence to politics: “The revolt forced the question of who had the right to use force. To answer this question was to divide politics into order and chaos, and in more earthly terms, the licit and the illicit. This was the crimino-national game played by all” (p. 14).

Kelly presents destructive, violent army village “searches” as a vivid example among many in the pantheon of brutal government pacification measures that were as criminal as that which they were trying to suppress. The methodology of presenting Palestinian national protest as criminality is interesting and, of course, highly significant, for it sets up Palestinian “identity” as shaky, inchoate, and somehow primitive, something that from the start of the British Mandate was so unreal that poorly led Palestinians preferred selfish banditry to joining together to get rid of the British and block Jewish immigration. By presenting Palestinian national insurgency as crime, Zionists at the time of the revolt and after (and the British at the time) diminished the Palestinian counter-claim to the country. Palestine was not so much a land without a people for a people without a land, as a land with a people with no formed national identity and who were inclined to banditry for a law-abiding people with formed national structures but without a land. Kelly’s point is that Palestinian “crime” was an expression of national identity, willfully misbranded by the British and their allies in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine.

Kelly strongly puts his case in his examination and, in doing so, upsets traditional defining notions of the state as having the monopoly on violence. Kelly is having none of this, observing critically how, “Nations were not criminal; nations named the criminal” (p. 178). Such a conception of state versus non-state violence requires a nuanced reading of the Arab revolt as reactive to British violence and, where violent, politically purposeful, as Kelly does in this book. Palestinians did not see themselves as criminals; rather, they were entitled to use violence to expel the British. This makes for a (re)reading of British and Jewish source material. This line of argument draws together the text, with Kelly emphasizing how the Jews saw Palestinian opposition as lacking popular support and enduring only due to thuggery; the British, who initially regarded armed Arab attacks as illegal, by 1938 subscribed to the broader Jewish view. London had to dismiss any notions among colonial officials that the strike after April 1936 had any popular basis but was instead venal and corrupt. Kelly’s crimino-national approach brings to the fore the positive, collective aspects of the revolt, reshaping supposed criminal behavior as a national endeavor.

Readers may well quibble with a book that reimagines the state in this way — after all, state control of...