The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

press, they began appearing regularly in both Arab and Jewish newspapers during the revolt. Their caricatures often implied the criminality of the other by way of subtle visual cues that played on well-known physiognomical and phrenological codes.⁶⁹ One cartoon from the 19 June edition of Filastin depicted a British authority accepting a Jewish bribe while simultaneously exhorting the government to employ “all types of force” against the “Arab robbers and scoundrels.” The official’s deep-set eyes and compressed brow connoted his delinquency according to physiognomical conventions.⁷⁰ A second cartoon was more blunt. It depicted John Bull standing before a judge and flanked by two wives, one Arab and one Jewish. The judge advises him, “If you are sincerely looking for peace you must divorce your second wife [the Jewess], because your marriage to her is illegal.”⁷¹

      The Arabs were turning the charge of criminality back upon their accusers, and were thereby engaging the crimino-national critique: the nation reserved to itself the right to name the criminal, whether the criminal fell within or outside its ambit. To the extent that a “period of crime and disorder” was acknowledged by Arab nationalist groups (as it was by the Arab Women of Jaffa), it was a matter for the people to sort out—a process that began with diagnosing the external cause of the internal disorder, which was the long-standing, ongoing British and Zionist colonial penetration of Palestine.⁷²

      While the Arabs remonstrated against British policy and the means employed to enforce it, the mainstream British press continued to regard the revolt as a largely criminal affair, although this line of argument showed signs of faltering. The term “Arab revolt” appeared for the first time in The Times’ coverage on 20 June, but it made no difference with regard to the paper’s crime thesis; the same article marveled at Lord Winterton’s minority opinion in a House of Commons debate that “the Arab revolt . . . was a national movement, not mere banditry,” a view which led him to propose “the startling theory that nationalists were entitled to use all means, short of violence, to hold up the Government.”⁷³

      The Spectator’s coverage was more discriminating, partly because more of the column space it devoted to Palestine consisted of letters to the editor. Even its professionally authored “think pieces,” however, gave evidence of a working hypothesis approach to understanding the revolt. A paragon of this genre was the 17 July article by William Blumberg, titled “The Arab and Zionist Policy.” Blumberg contended that it was “no use trying to make capital out of Arab lawlessness as the Zionists do.” “Revolutions,” he continued, “have their own logic.” He thus pointed out what The Times had ignored: once the language of revolt and revolution was in play, talk of criminality became much more complicated. But the “proof of good will” that Blumberg suggested the Arabs rightly required was not that of the British but rather that of the Zionists. After all, setting aside the fact that the Arabs had done so for two decades, the British could not “concede demands raised at the point of the revolver.”⁷⁴ Rather, Blumberg pressed the burden of surrendering to violence onto the Jews. The British position with regard to force was, once again, essentially invisible in its moral dimension. The very idea of the illegitimacy of British force was excluded in advance, even by someone capable of articulating the Arab case quite well in other regards, and who in fact sympathized with it. The dearth of analyses of the British presence in Palestine—and by extension of the legitimacy of the British use of force to maintain “law and order” there—was another instance of the discursive theme noted in the previous two chapters: namely, the absence of the British from their own calculations regarding the course of events in the mandate.