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University of California Press

The Crime of Nationalism

Britain, Palestine, and Nation-Building on the Fringe of Empire
by Matthew Kraig Kelly (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Oct 2017
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780520291492
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 10 b/w photos, 1 map
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About the Book

The Palestinian national movement gestated in the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was born during the Great Revolt of 1936–39, a period of Arab rebellion 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.

About the Author

Matthew Kraig Kelly is a historian of the modern Middle East. He has served as a visiting professor at Occidental College and the University of California, Los Angeles, and his work has been published in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Middle East Critique, and other academic journals.


Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
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

Reviews

"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, the
archival 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
"A major contribution that deals with a key moment in Palestinian history. Kelly shows convincingly that Palestinians launched and persisted in their armed struggle largely in response to the violent methods that Great Britain routinely employed during its colonial occupation. He demonstrates as well how the British government and media and their Zionist allies consistently refused to recognize the revolt’s political character, and instead insisted on labeling it as a criminal enterprise rather than as a nationalist mobilization."—Ted Swedenburg, author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past

"This is a compelling book that narrates how the British engaged with the Palestinian revolt. Kelly demonstrates the blindness of the British Mandate Government (and the Colonial Office) to what was going on in Palestinian society, and proves that this blindness played a causal role in how the revolt unfolded. He also succeeds in exposing the convergence between British and Zionist views throughout most of the revolt. The Crime of Nationalism is a major contribution."—Laila Parsons, author of The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence, 1914–1948

"The Crime of Nationalism is a powerful addition to the literature on Palestine, Zionism, and the pre-1948 conflict between the two nationalist movements, particularly on the 1936–39 revolt."—Mark LeVine, author of Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880–1948