From 1936 to 1939, the British Empire faced one of its greatest challenges of the interwar period in the form of a concerted, widespread uprising in Palestine that for a time displaced British authority in much of that territory. In The Crime of Nationalism, Matthew Kraig Kelly seeks “to understand how violence”—specifically the violence of the 1936–39 revolt in Palestine—“is coded and construed, by historical actors and by the historians thinking about those actors” (p. 2). Kelly has scoured the major archives from Mandate Palestine in the United Kingdom and Israel to deconstruct the official British narrative, embraced by some subsequent scholars, that Palestinian violence disturbed, and British violence reestablished, law and order. Reproducing a litany of British condemnations of Arab rebels as nothing more than bandits and gangsters, Kelly argues instead that the revolt pitted Arabs against Britons in a struggle over institutions of state power. While the British cast themselves as impartial arbiters of Arab–Jewish conflict, Kelly shows them to be primary contributors to instability and violence. Kelly thus flips the official British narrative on its head: British violence produced disorder, while the rebel campaigns were nation-building in progress.

Most accounts of the 1936–39 revolt divide it into two general phases: an initial phase, from April to October 1936, characterized by a Palestinian general strike and rural insurrection and a British civilian police response, followed by a lull during which the Peel Commission visited Palestine and other Arab leaders intervened; and a second phase, beginning with the assassination of a high-ranking British official in September 1937, of militarized insurgency and counterinsurgency. The Crime of Nationalism argues this timeline renders invisible British violence against Arabs during the first phase and “obscures a basic component of the causal machinery that determined the revolt's initial, and by extension ultimate, trajectory: namely, the mandatory itself” (p. 29). Palestinian rebel violence did not spur Britain's police and military actions to suppress the revolt; instead, British violence against non-violent Palestinian protest inspired widespread retaliatory violence.

That the revolt originated in British violence challenges British and Israeli establishment historians, including Tom Bowden, Michael J. Cohen, and Yehoshua Porath, whose work adopts significant parts of the official narrative, and also Jacob Norris, who has written on British violence during the revolt's second phase. Kelly also takes on Palestinian historian Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout, who identifies attacks on British officials by followers of ʿIzz al-Din al-Qassam—a Haifa-based Muslim preacher who organized clandestine militant cells before he was killed by police in 1935—as igniting both phases of the revolt. Kelly counters that the revolt's “chain of events was contingent, and well outside the control of the handful of Qassamites apparently responsible” (p. 109). He proposes that the British response (searches of homes and individuals, raids on villages, destruction of property, harassment, beatings, and extrajudicial killings) was far more consequential.

This emphasis on British violence gives necessary context to the revolt's unfolding, but overlooks the major achievement of al-Hout and others of her generation: writing Palestinians into their own history as active participants. Centering the official British narrative, even to debunk it, comes at the expense of a detailed engagement with substantive aspects of the revolt, including the dynamics of Palestinian mobilization, the articulation of variants and registers of nationalism, and their impact on struggles for decolonization in Palestine-Israel and beyond. Only in Chapter 6 (of eight), which focuses on rebel attempts to establish an infrastructure of governance, is the reader introduced to local leaders of the revolt like ʿAbd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad, ʿArif ʿAbd al-Raziq, and others. (Despite references to “Qassamites,” Qassam himself appears only in an endnote.) And beyond the alienation produced by British violence, Kelly offers little to explain why Palestinians participated in the revolt. Rebel institutions offer some answers to these questions, but Kelly's description of these entities accentuates their symbolic rather than functional significance. Arab rebels, he writes, “commandeered [the law's] legitimizing tokens in the form of military and police regalia, as well as flags, stamps, courts, and other such emblems of national sovereignty” (p. 53). Kelly paints the Arab rebels as a kind of mirror image of British authorities, distinguishable “neither [by] their discipline nor their tactics,” but by “their objectives. The British sought to defy the demands of the Arab Palestinian public, the rebels to meet them” (pp. 136–37). At times, however, this parallelism verges on reducing rebel efforts to mere mimicry: “The rebels took their crimino-national cues from the British,” Kelly asserts. “Like the British, they wore uniforms, formed military chains of command, and convened their own courts of justice” (p. 179).

The “crimino-national,” a neologism of Kelly's coinage, is the framework of The Crime of Nationalism. It explores “the interplay of the mutually constitutive discursive formations of ‘nation’ and ‘crime’” (p. 2), pitting the nation-state against the violent criminal in a contest to assert prerogatives of violence and control of others’ bodies. States certainly use law (as both a discourse and a tool) to legitimize their own violence and to delegitimize challengers, and Kelly makes clear that “crime” is not an objective phenomenon but a construct. But national and legal boundaries do not always overlap (or produce one another) so neatly. Kelly writes that “it is the nation, and specifically the nation-state, that names the criminal. The British had such a state, the Palestinians did not, and do not” (p. 183). Britain was, however, an imperial state whose rule in Palestine was authorized by the League of Nations and whose mandate committed it to support the settler-colonial Zionist project. Reducing the 1936–39 revolt to a struggle between two nations, one (British) with a state and one (Palestinian) seeking to establish one, obscures the full scope of Britain's strategic calculations in Palestine and pushes the question of Zionism to the margins.

Most significantly, it fails to consider the revolt's role in producing new forms of Palestinian national (or, for that matter, British imperial) identification. Kelly at times acknowledges the imperial context within which the 1936–39 revolt took place, arguing for example that Britain's criminalization of the revolt reflected a reconfiguration of imperial rule's justifications to conform to post–World War I norms, divesting them of “the racism that had historically animated them” so as to “maintain the pretense of a liberal agenda in the Middle East” (pp. 74–75). Elsewhere, however, Kelly asserts the British project in the Middle East “was explicitly pro-nationalist” (p. 35). This tension between maintaining imperial influence and shepherding the Middle Eastern mandates toward independence requires further unpacking.

Ultimately, The Crime of Nationalism has much to say about “crime,” but leaves “nationalism”—whether as a Palestinian phenomenon or an emerging global order—largely unexamined. While documenting British violence and hypocrisy in Palestine is not without value, it does not account for other local, national, and regional factors that shaped the contours and substance of the 1936–39 revolt. Though Kelly presents arguments and material relevant to comparative studies of struggles for independence, particularly in the British Empire, his “crimino-national” framework too often conflates sovereignty with the nation-state. The result is an account of the 1936–39 revolt that is less than fully satisfying, either as Palestinian or British imperial history.