The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

Dayr al-Ghusun southeast along the hilly terrain to Balʿa, near Tulkarm. The path of their journey ran through an area that the British, who then governed Palestine, regarded as a “trouble spot.” The British dubbed the territory between Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm the “triangle of terror” in reference to its residents’ habit of firing on police and soldiers. But the triangle was just one of several problem areas for the British. Across Palestine, His Majesty’s security forces had been encountering armed resistance for the better part of June 1936, and the Arab population at large had, since April, been observing a strike against British policy in the country. While the two villagers likely sympathized with the strike and perhaps with the armed attacks, on 21 June, they went simply in search of water for their cattle. Nevertheless, when a British pilot monitoring the area caught sight of the men on the hills, he fired on them, prompting them to take shelter in a nearby cave. The pilot then radioed the pair’s location to British soldiers in the vicinity, a number of whom shortly arrived on the scene. One of them, a Sergeant Sills, approached the mouth of the cave and fired into it without warning. The villagers—who, in keeping with custom, bore their own arms—fired back, fatally wounding Sills in the head and chest.¹

      The case of Muhammad Hajj Husayn Qaʿdan and Ahmad Muhammad Sulayman ultimately reached the supreme court of Palestine on appeal, after a lower court sentenced both men to death. The high court denied none of the details noted above, but nevertheless rejected the right of the two villagers to defend themselves. On the contrary, the court asserted: “Yet another point was raised [by the appellants’ lawyer], namely that it was the natural reaction for the appellants to shoot back when fired upon. This astounding theory, which allows men to retaliate when either police or military are doing their duty, is unknown to me.”² The court seemed to suggest that the British, by virtue of their constituting the state in Palestine, behaved legally by definition, and that those resisting them were therefore criminals by definition. Palestinian rebels did not reject this logic, but rather adapted it. Indeed, they took up arms in its name.

      Not initially, though. The British had occupied Palestine since the end of the First World War, and their presence there had been met with a decade and a half campaign of Arab protest. British policy in Palestine centered on open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases, with the stated goal of establishing a “Jewish National Home.” Arab protest against this policy was mostly peaceful, though occasionally violent. In either case, it was ineffectual. And that failure fed the popular frustration that would boil over into open rebellion in mid-1936. The Palestinian Great Revolt lasted from 1936 to 1939. It is the temporal focus of this book.

      As the cave anecdote suggests, the book has a thematic focus as well. It seeks to understand how violence is coded and construed, both by historical actors and by the historians thinking about those actors. When is violence visible, and when is it invisible? When does it emerge as the primary explanation for a given historical episode, and when does it appear incidental to that episode? As the book demonstrates, the answers to these questions lie in the interplay of the mutually constitutive discursive formations of “nation” and “crime.” I use the term “crimino-national” to refer to this area of analytic focus.

      In the age of nationalism, the nation names the criminal. In so doing, the nation claims for itself the prerogatives of violence, from incarceration to killing, while at the same time disinheriting the criminal of these prerogatives. Looked at from the other end, violent crime claims for itself rights normally associated with the nation-state: to control the bodies of others, up to and including the point of death. It is therefore imperative that the nation-state police the boundary between itself and the criminal, such that any criminal effort to dissolve that boundary is resoundingly repudiated. It is for this reason that coercion lies at the heart of so many definitions of the modern state, such as Ernest Gellner’s, which characterizes the state as “that institution or set of institutions specifically concerned with the enforcement of order.”³ Before enforcing order, the state must name order, and conversely disorder. The state, acting in the name of the nation, cannot countenance any criminal enterprise claiming to represent not disorder, but an alternative order. And this is exactly what modern revolutionary movements, acting in the name of their own nations, have done. The Palestinian rebels are a case in point.

      Although less so than other interwar insurgencies, the revolt of 1936–39 is well studied. It has given birth to a literature that offers a range of theoretical perspectives on both its origin and its outcome. One useful way of construing this theoretical spectrum is by reference to the archival materials on which studies of the revolt have drawn: the reports, correspondence, and memoirs of British officials in London and Jerusalem; those of the Jewish Agency and the Haganah; and the memoirs and diaries of Palestinian nationalists, to name the most salient sources. Some studies have taken on board one or another of the theoretical perspectives implicit in these materials, and have produced what we might think of as chronicles of the rebellion. Such chronicles—many of them eminently readable—rehearse a series of facts, highlighting watersheds such as the revolt’s outbreak in April 1936, its cessation in October of that year, its recommencement in September 1937, and its collapse in 1939.

      Chronicles more sensitive to the Jewish experience of the revolt emphasize, additionally, the role of Arab-on-Arab violence and intimidation in maintaining the strike and the rebellion, and may highlight Arab atrocities against Jews, such as the murderous assaults on Safed in August 1936 and Tiberias in October 1938. They also tend to reproduce the perspective of Zionist intelligence on the rebel movement and its personalities, and that of the Jewish Agency on British officials in Palestine.⁴ Chronicles more concerned with representing the Arab experience of the revolt may call attention to episodes such as the collisions between British soldiers and Arab rebels at the pivotal Battles of Balʿa (near Tulkarm) and Beit Imrin (near Nablus) in September 1936, or at the Battle of al-Yamun (near Jenin) in November 1937. They are also apt to offer more sympathetic and subtle portraits of the rebel commanders and sub-commanders, and of the subversive institutions, such as the rebel courts, that proliferated across Palestine during the revolt’s second phase.⁵ Whatever the perspectives of these different studies, all of them absorb not only facts but also narratives from the sources upon which they draw. These narratives preordain certain events, persons, and developments as critical for understanding the rebellion, and in that way predetermine the basic character of the studies that assimilate them.

      Then there are those histories of the Great Revolt that hew more conscientiously to a given theoretical perspective. These typically engage more critically and even skeptically with the archival materials relating to the rebellion. Over time, the general trajectory of these works has been away from top-down analyses of the rebellion and toward bottom-up analyses. Where the first emphasize elite political institutions and personalities as the driving forces of the rebellion, the second offer something closer to “peoples’ histories” or “histories from below,” which seek to reinstate the agency of peasants, proletarians, and other “subalterns” as decisive actors in the revolt’s unfolding.⁶

      The present book offers a crimino-national analysis of the rebellion, focusing on the under-explored area of overlap between the criminological and the nationalist dimensions of British imperial discourse in Palestine. British and Zionist discussions of the revolt both consistently represented it as a criminal affair only masquerading as a national uprising. This is the primary framing of the rebellion that one encounters in the British and Zionist archives. And it is therefore the framing that most chronicles of the rebellion reproduce, either wholly or in substantial part. But, as we will see, even the more theoretically sophisticated histories of 1936–39 have tended, often unwittingly, to reproduce the British and Zionist crimino-national framing of the revolt. Although the archives themselves contain ample evidence of the speciousness of this framing, the British and Zionist sources contain an abiding crimino-national narrative that mutes and marginalizes this evidence. Researchers who are less than vigilant in deconstructing this narrative therefore often reproduce, rather than remedy, these archival lacunae.

      Consider the following example. The Great Revolt began as a largely peaceful general strike. With time, however, it grew violent. According to the standard narrative, the British initially followed a “policy of no repression,” in Yehoshua Porath’s phrase, and only belatedly resorted to violence in response to the increasingly