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

Who decides when political opposition becomes a crime in a colonial context? How are such determinations made and implemented? These questions lie at the heart of Kelly's engaging study about the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine from 1936 to 1939, in which thousands of Palestinians undertook various forms of protest against the British Mandate government and the Zionist settlement that it enabled. Kelly notes that many of the English-language studies "have tended, often unwittingly, to reproduce the British and Zionist crimino-national framing of the revolt" (4). He deconstructs this framing to show how British violence played a causative role both in the outbreak of the revolt from April to October 1936 and in its recommencement in July 1937.

The book's eight main chapters take readers through the chronology of the revolt, analyzing British, Zionist, and Palestinian Arab perspectives along the way. Through a careful analysis of open statements and private correspondence, Kelly demonstrates that even as British and Zionist leaders were publicly declaring that the rebels were nothing more than "criminal gangs" and "terrorists," privately they recognized the nationalist impetus and popular support behind the uprising. Moreover, Kelly shows through a detailed chronology of events how specific acts of British brutality and policies of "vicarious punishment" were preconditions for the rise of Palestinian Arab violence (93).

The majority of Kelly's findings are based on an extensive array of documents from the British and Israeli archives. But unlike other scholars who have made use of these collections, Kelly casts a critical eye on Zionist and British rhetorical devices that work to obscure both the nationalist dimensions of the revolt and the criminal dimensions of Zionist and British actions. He also shows how incidents of Palestinian criminality, particularly attacks against noncombatants, reified British and Zionist views. Kelly's careful attention to the discursive aspects of these narratives implicitly draws from methodologies in rhetorical studies, allowing him to provide a fresh reading on a relatively well-studied historical episode.

In his attempt to consult Palestinian sources, especially published memoirs by participants in the revolt, Kelly confronts one of the biggest challenges that historians of Palestine face—namely, the lack of Palestinian archival material from this period. Most of the private book collections and journals written by Palestinian Arabs during the Mandate period were either confiscated by Israel in 1948 or lost during the Palestinian Arab exodus of that year. As a result, historians of the revolt can obtain source material that adequately represents the Palestinian perspective only with great difficulty.

Nonetheless, certain Palestinian sources could have enhanced Kelly's study. A number of Arabic newspapers published in Palestine during this period could have provided additional details about both British violence and other Palestinian Arab nationalist activities. Admittedly, relying on the Arabic press from this time period is risky because the British authorities frequently shut down Palestinian newspapers during the revolt, citing security concerns. Even when papers could print, they were subject to heavy British censorship.

A more glaring omission relates to Arabic poetry, which was an especially popular way for Palestinian Arab narratives and framings of the revolt to be articulated and circulated. Two of the most famous poets from this period—Abu Salma and 'Abd al-Rahim Mamhud—not only participated in the revolt but also composed verses about it that were published in the local press (when possible) and circulated orally among Palestinian Arabs. Given Kelly's careful attention to British and Zionist rhetorical framing, using insights from rhetorical methodologies to examine Palestinian poetry from this period would have greatly enriched the project.

Overall, Kelly's study makes an important contribution to our understanding of how imperial discourses shape contemporaneous understandings of historical events as well as historians' renderings of these events. More broadly, his book sheds important light on how nation-states define violence as...