The 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.
Matthew Kraig Kelly is Dean's Lecturer in Social Research at the University of California, Los Angeles.
AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPAT ONE APRIL-OCTOBER 19361 • British Causal Primacy and the Origins of the Palestinian Great Revolt2 • “A Wave of Crime”: The Criminalization of Palestinian Nationalism, April–June 19363 • “The Policy Is the Criminal”: War on the Discursive Frontier, July–August 19364 • The British Awakening to the Military Nature of the Rebellion, August–October 1936PART TWO 1937–395 • The Peel Commission Reconsidered6 • Towards a Rebel Parastate: The Arab Rejection of Partition and the Effort to Institutionalize the Revolt, 1937–387 • New Policy, New Crime: The Abortion of the Balfour Declaration8 • The End of the Revolt, 1939ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex
"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."
