Who decides when political opposition becomes a crime in a colonial context? How are such determinations made and implemented? These questions lie at the heart of Kelly’s engaging study about the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine from 1936 to 1939, in which thousands of Palestinians undertook various forms of protest against the British Mandate government and the Zionist settlement that it enabled. Kelly notes that many of the English-language studies “have tended, often unwittingly, to reproduce the British and Zionist crimino-national framing of the revolt” (4). He deconstructs this framing to show how British violence played a causative role both in the outbreak of the revolt from April to October 1936 and in its recommencement in July 1937.
The book’s eight main chapters take readers through the chronology of the revolt, analyzing British, Zionist, and Palestinian Arab perspectives along the way. Through a careful analysis of open statements and private...