Starting with the premise that sectarianism is not inherent but constructed, Laura Robson in Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine seeks to understand how an inflexible sectarianism became a major feature of twentieth-century Palestine. She argues that the British of the 1917–1948 mandate government (not dissimilar to many more recent Western pundits who expound on the Middle East) were so predisposed to believe the region's peoples were hopelessly entrenched in ancient, hostile sectarianism that they governed them as though this were the case. Robson suggests this was similar to the way the British rigidified the caste system in India; indeed, her frequent comparisons between Mandate Palestine and other British colonial governments address the common historiographical pitfall of viewing this situation as unique. Robson's focus is on how these changes affected the Christians of Palestine, who were both the smallest of these sectarian groups and the one whose existence was most confusing and discomforting to the British. During the period she discusses they suffered what Robson terms a “nearly total marginalization” as “a politics of Muslim versus Jew took hold in interwar Palestine” (1).

Robson argues that in Ottoman Palestine communal identifications were indeed important to people “but did not absolutely define their political affiliations or the nature of their representation vis-à-vis the state” (2). Further, she writes, the 1856 Ottoman firman known as the Hatt-i humayun—which established religious equality for Ottoman citizens—marked the beginning of a period when Palestinian Christians worked to bring that promise to fruition. The Hatt-i humayun was influenced by European ideals of democracy and equality, yet representatives of Europe inadvertently thwarted the flowering of those ideals as their policies increasingly marginalized Palestinian Christians.

Chapter 1 describes the careers of Palestinian Christian intellectuals deeply involved in the political milieu at the beginning of the mandate period who believed, at least for a while, that they were full participants in the quest for Arab self-determination in Palestine. They rejected the strict communal categorization relied on by the British government that separated them from the Palestinian Muslims with whom they wished to find common ground in a multi-religious Palestinian nationalist movement. The Episcopalian Palestinians, discussed in chapter 5, were a minority within a minority. They were Christians who had converted to the Protestant faith of the missionaries and faced accusations of collusion during the British mandate. Robson's chapter on this small, highly educated group explores the way Episcopalian Palestinians produced scholarship intended to connect them both to Muslims and to the British. Intellectuals like Ilyas Marmura and As‘ad Mansur presented Palestine's history as one of religious pluralism and stressed the ways Christians and Muslims shared holidays and other cultural markers, arguing that Arab Christianity had always been “at the center of an ‘authentic’ Palestinian Arab culture and history” (128). Marmura collected Palestinian Christmas carols and argued they were the most original to early Christianity, “unadulterated by the accretions of later texts and traditions” (142), thus deftly evoking Palestinian Christianity's compatibility with Protestant values.

As Jewish immigration increased, most Jewish leaders preferred categorizing inhabitants as Arabs or Jews and lobbied the British to adopt this system, which made Jews one of two groups rather than one of three. In a way this was what Palestinian Christians who sought political unity with Palestinian Muslims had wanted. But a side effect of the policy shift was that it made Palestinian Christians nearly invisible. In response, in the mid-1930s Palestinian Christians banded together, presented themselves as a coherent political bloc, and championed the old communal system of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Now, they reasoned, the old system would give Arabs more than half the political influence. In Robson's reading the Christian embrace of communal politics came too late: both British and Zionist thinking had shifted toward the ethnic Arab-vs.-Jew paradigm that swallowed up Palestinian Christians and their concerns in the Arab category.

Robson has an entirely adequate and useful bibliography but includes little engagement with other scholarship in the body of the book. And there is one niggling omission: what did Palestinian Muslims think of Palestinian Christians? How did they categorize the people around them and why? Robson's arguments that the British and Zionists marginalized Palestinian Christians make sense, but Palestinian Muslims likely also contributed to that marginalization whether purposefully or not. Discussion of the historiography of this topic would particularly have enhanced the book.

The epilogue gets to some of the present-day implications. Winston Churchill seemed puzzled by the existence of Christian Palestinians—not only were they Arabs who were not Muslims, they were Christians who rejected Zionism (70, 159)—but today many visitors to Israel can spend weeks there without ever encountering this challenge to their worldview. Even in areas that still have a strong Palestinian Christian presence, like Nazareth or Jerusalem, Palestinian Christian tour guides can only rarely hope to work with the large American evangelical tour groups that come to marvel at the Jews' return to the land of the Bible. They expect tours given by those returned Jews. As Robson notes, “many—perhaps most—of these travelers are unaware of the presence of an indigenous Palestinian Arab Christian population in the area” (163).

Many Palestinian tour guides use the strategy of labeling theirs as “alternative” tours for sympathetic leftist travelers who would rather learn about the history of the conflict than the Bible. Their use of the term “alternative” to describe themselves suggests just how relevant Robson's history of Palestinian Christians' marginalization remains. In the Palestinian tour guides' parlance, alternative means learning about the history of the region outside the Zionist or American evangelical paradigms. One can hope works like Robson's succeed in making Palestinian history not the alternative to a mainstream viewpoint but rather an integral part of it.