Description
Book SynopsisThe Palestinian national movement gestated in the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was born in the Great Revolt of 1936-39, a period of sustained Arab protest against British policy in the Palestine mandate. In The Crime of Nationalism, Matthew Kraig Kelly makes the unique case that the key to understanding the Great Revolt lies in what he calls the crimino-national domain-the overlap between the criminological and the nationalist dimensions of British imperial discourse, and the primary terrain upon which the war of 1936-39 was fought. Kelly's analysis amounts to a new history of one of the major anticolonial insurgencies of the interwar period and a critical moment in the lead-up to Israel's founding. The Crime of Nationalism offers crucial lessons for the scholarly understanding of nationalism and insurgency more broadly.
Trade Review"Kelly is to be congratulated for a scholarly study that is sure to provoke further debate about the Arab revolt of the 1930s, a pivotal insurgency that demands more scrutiny and about which too little has been written." * Middle East Journal *
"Kelly’s analysis of the ‘Great Revolt’ of 1936–39, an Arab rebellion against British colonial policy in the Palestine mandate, emphasises the importance of what he characterises as the ‘overlap between the criminological and nationalist dimensions of British imperial discourse’, or the ways in which acts of violence on both sides were represented and interpreted." * Survival: Global Politics and Strategy *
"Kelly's book is a must-read because the crimino-national logic he describes is still in force. It has lost some of its idioms but the lethal potency of its discursive coordinates remain operative. While Kelly’s interpretive analytical prism shows that the reality was otherwise, thearchival documents written mostly by colonial administrators and Zionist campaigners bear the imprint of a demonizing narrative that continues to reproduce itself in multiple ways and still haunts the Palestinian national movement. * Journal of Palestine Studies *
"Histories of imperialism and nationalism ... will all benefit greatly from this work." * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
PAT ONE APRIL-OCTOBER 1936
1 • British Causal Primacy and the Origins of the Palestinian Great Revolt
2 • “A Wave of Crime”: The Criminalization of Palestinian Nationalism, April–June 1936
3 • “The Policy Is the Criminal”: War on the Discursive Frontier, July–August 1936
4 • The British Awakening to the Military Nature of the Rebellion, August–October 1936
PART TWO 1937–39
5 • The Peel Commission Reconsidered
6 • Towards a Rebel Parastate: The Arab Rejection of Partition and the Effort to Institutionalize the Revolt, 1937–38
7 • New Policy, New Crime: The Abortion of the Balfour Declaration
8 • The End of the Revolt, 1939
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
