History Compass 9/3 (2011): 215–230, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00751.

Re-Remembering the Mandate: Historiographical

Debates and Revisionist History in the Study of British
Palestine
Nicholas E. Roberts*
Sewanee: The University of the South

Abstract
Over the past 20 years, historians have been engaged in a critical reappraisal of the history of Israel
and Palestine. Spurred on by the work of Israeli ‘New Historians’ and Palestinian revisionists, the
field has seen a sustained challenge to the crude narratives of conventional nationalist historiogra-
phy. This article investigates the impact of this reappraisal on the study of British rule in Palestine
(1917–1948), arguing that while the work of the new historians has been useful in opening up
debate about the nature of Zionist development, Israeli revisionist history has done a poor job of
considering how Jews and Arabs lived and worked together under British rule. To get away from
the distorted idea that Jews and Arabs developed in communities that were closed-off from each
other, we need to adopt an approach that treats them as participants in the same narrative, a
perspective adopted by historians who use a ‘relational history’ approach to understanding the
Mandate. The paper concludes that the most promising development in the field has been
the integration of new voices and primary sources into scholarship, but cautions that, in our quest
to understand the lives of the colonized, we may be missing opportunities to reconsider the nature
of British colonial rule.

Twenty years ago, historical literature on the British mandate for Palestine was considered
by many historians to be distorted by ideological bias.1 Writing in 1991, Kenneth Stein
described a field in which ‘advocacy of a political viewpoint may supersede nuances of
terminology, the causation of events, or the mechanisms of change in the conflict’s
evolution’.2 Even if scholars were not overtly polemical, they operated, according to
Zachary Lockman, within a ‘Zionist or Arab ⁄ Palestinian nationalist historical narrative’,
making them unaware of the discursive limits placed upon their categories of analysis,
let alone the conclusions they could reach.3 The field, however, was beginning to be
transformed, as Stein pointed out, by a new generation of Israeli and Palestinian scholars
that challenged nationalist orthodoxies. Stein also hoped that a more nuanced and mea-
sured approach to the history of Palestine ⁄ Israel would soon emerge ‘once the Palestinians
and other Arab states find a solution to their present difficulties with Israel’.4
The failure of the Oslo Peace Process, the devastation of the Second Intifada, and the
rise to power of hawkish political parties in Israel and Palestine have meant that those
‘present difficulties’ linger depressingly on. Nevertheless, the field of Mandate studies has
become more nuanced and varied through the critical work of revisionist Israeli, Pales-
tinian, and Western historians, though some of the old assumptions and biases remain
intact. More significant has been the shift away from the traditional narrow focus on
high politics and military affairs to analyses of the experiences of the non-elite. This has
not only helped scholars better understand life during the Mandate period, but also con-
tributed to a welcome treatment of the Arab and Jewish communities of Palestine, not as

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216 Re-Remembering the Mandate

closed-off entities, but as mutually constitutive neighbors facing the same forces of capi-
talist development, colonial rule, and nationalism. With historians continuing to accuse
each other of politicizing and falsifying the past, of undermining Zionism or Palestinian
nationalism, or of not being scholars at all, these changes have not made the field any less
contentious. But, contentious debate, even politicized debate, is not always a negative
quality in historiography, so long as it leads to a productive critical re-engagement with
the past. Such has largely been the case with the recent study of the British Mandate, as
I will argue in this article, although there remain areas in which the field could
be strengthened.
Before I continue, a word must be said about the periodization of this study. My aim
here is to outline recent trends in the historical study of the period of British rule in
Palestine (1917–1948). I do not cover, except in passing, the historical debate over the
Arab–Israeli war of 1948 or, more significantly, the vigorous and controversial debate
over the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from Israel ⁄ Palestine that occurred with the
transition from British to Israeli rule. This decision was made in part because of
considerations about the length of the article, but also because I feel that these issues
deserve separate treatment in a future review article.

The Mandate and the Arab–Israeli Conflict

British rule in Palestine lasted from 1917 until 1948, a relative blip in the history of
empire. But, the continued controversy of the Arab–Israeli conflict has ensured that the
mandate has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Palestine first emerged as a sepa-
rate country at the end of the First World War with Britain’s conquest of the Ottoman
districts of Jerusalem, Acre, and Nablus. Various plans to divide the Middle East had been
developed by Britain during the war, with Palestine ‘promised’ to a future Arab state in
the Hussein–McMahon correspondence of 1915, envisioned as an international zone in
the Sykes–Picot agreement of 1916, and pledged as the future site of a Jewish National
Home in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It was only the latter commitment to Zionism
that was realized when the terms of the Balfour Declaration were written into the
Mandate for Palestine of 1922.
This pledge to Zionism made Palestine unique among the Middle Eastern mandates,
for it precluded any real possibility of the majority Arab population being granted the
independence anticipated in the Mandatory arrangement. This did not mean that British
officials consistently favored the Zionist position in Palestine, for Britain’s primary concern
was the protection of the Suez Canal and the sea route to India, not the creation of the
Jewish National Home. Moreover, the other pledge in the Balfour Declaration that ‘noth-
ing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine’ led British officials to develop a so-called ‘dual obligation’ to
both communities. This was intended to demonstrate British fair-mindedness, but in
practice meant that colonial officials consistently switched their support from one side to
the other, engendering anger from all quarters.5
British rule was controversial throughout the mandate period, generating heated debates
in Palestine, Europe, and the USA over issues such as Britain’s control over the ‘Holy
Land’, its level of commitment to the establishment of the Jewish national home, and its
treatment of the local Arab population. Nationalist riots, revolts, and terrorist activities
were also a product of, and reaction to British rule. The violence of the Palestinian Arab
Revolt of 1936–1939 and the terrorism of Jewish paramilitary organizations in the 1940s
were particularly significant for souring the British on their colonial possession. After first

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floating the idea of the partition of the country in 1937, an insolvent post-war Britain
decided in 1947 to abandon the Mandate to the United Nations and its partition plan.
This decision would lead in short order to the establishment of the State of Israel, the
Arab–Israeli war of 1948, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs
from the country.
The events of 1948 have long structured the way in which the history of Palestine ⁄ Israel
has been written. For the mainstream Zionist narrative, which developed after 1948, the
establishment of the Israeli state was both the birth of a modern nation and the return of
an ancient people to its homeland, an updated version of Theodore Herzl’s ideas about
the Jewish state at the turn of the twentieth century.6 Here the British Mandate stood as
a final obstacle to be overcome in the long struggle for statehood. Lacking a nation state
and a national curriculum after 1948, the Palestinian nationalist narrative was more diffuse,
but the loss of Palestine was typically presented by Palestinian and other Arab scholars as
the end point of a process of Zionist colonial appropriation made possible by Western
support for Zionism and the incompetence of Arab leaders, particularly those outside of
Palestine. The mandate in this narrative was the period in which Palestinian national
aspirations were quashed by a British government committed to following through on the
Balfour Declaration, a not unreasonable reading of British policy.
Both of these nationalist narratives have tended to overemphasize the separateness of
the Arab and Jewish communities during the mandate period and exaggerate the power
of Zionism to shape history (for good or ill), a misrepresentation of the past that has also
affected scholarship that is not written from a specifically nationalist perspective.7 Con-
ventional historiography has also concentrated on moments of conflict rather than coop-
eration, on self-interested discussions of national institutions, and on analyzing Britain’s
role in terms of its arbitration of the conflict rather than its function as an imperial
power.8 All of these factors have meant that historical accounts of the mandate have
tended to have an overwhelming focus on political and military matters and a myopic
interest in the affairs of a narrow elite.

The New Historians

A group of younger Israeli historians came to challenge the conventional Zionist narrative
in the late 1980s, marking the beginning of what can now be seen in the field as a period
of critical revisionism. For these scholars, who came to be called the ‘new historians’ or
‘revisionists’ or ‘post-Zionists’, the greatest failure of the conventional Zionist narrative
was its whitewashing of Israeli history.9 Avi Shlaim, for example, argued that Zionist
history was little more than apologetics, written ‘not by professional historians but by
participants, by politicians, soldiers, official historians, and a large host of sympathetic
chroniclers, journalists, biographers, and hagiographers’.10 According to Simha Flapan,
this resulted in the promulgation of ‘certain myths that [became] accepted as historical
truth’, which was problematic not simply because they were wrong but because this self-
serving history ‘hardened into [an] impenetrable, and dangerous, ideological shield’ that
undermined the possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.11
The new historian challenge was part of a wider questioning of military politics by the
Israeli left in reaction to Israel’s controversial invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and conduct
in the Occupied Territories during the First Intifada (1987–1990). Flapan’s The Birth of
Israel: Myths and Realities (1987) set the tone by revisiting the events of 1948 in order to
show that Israel bore some culpability for the creation of the Arab–Israeli conflict
and not just its perpetuation in the 1980s. A year later, seminal works by Benny Morris,

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Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappe continued this challenge, by arguing, respectively, that Israeli
actions – and not the calls of Arab leaders – were responsible for the flight of Palestinians
in 1948; that Zionist and Jordanian leaders colluded during the war, indicating that the
Arab Goliath of Zionist historiography was little more than a myth; and that Britain,
rather than seeking to forestall the creation of Israel, was committed to stopping the
emergence of an Arab state.12
Two factors made the new historians ‘new’. First, they were born around or after
1948 and had therefore not participated as adults in the birth of the State of Israel, a status
that they felt gave them a greater impartiality.13 Second was their use of official primary
source materials, particularly newly declassified government documents, unavailable to
their predecessors. This material revealed a less varnished picture of Jewish, British,
and Arab actions and attitudes than had been presented in official histories and political
memoirs, and was used by the new historians to make the case that only their accounts
were accurate.14 Indeed, Morris went so far as to argue, implausibly, that his work was
not driven by personal politics but by what his source material revealed, a positivist argu-
ment that fit well with the scholarly norms of conventional Zionist historiography.15
The new history was warmly received by American and European scholars and
prompted a sustained review of Israeli history throughout the 1990s and 2000s.16
Revisionist accounts soon emerged for the entire history of Zionist settlement in Palestine,
from Gershon Shafir’s consideration of early Zionist immigration in Land, Labor, and the
Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: 1882–1914 (1996), to works such as Baruch
Kimmerling’s and Joel Migdal’s Palestinians: The Making of a People (1993) and Avi Shlaim’s
The Iron Wall (2000), which took the narrative up to the present day.17 The main focus,
however, of the new historians was and has remained the events surrounding 1948,
continuing a long-standing focus on the development of the State of Israel in Israeli
historiography.18
For the history of the British Mandate period, the new historian intervention was
important for bringing renewed attention to Zionist institutions and the interplay
between the British and Zionist administrations during the mandate period. Here, Tom
Segev’s One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (2001) is the best-
known account of the mandate from a revisionist perspective, becoming an international
best seller, with the works of Tamir Goren, Hillel Cohen, Ilan Pappe, Baruch Kimmer-
ling, and Joel Migdal recommended for their more focused scholarship.19

Palestinian Revisionism
The revisionist trend within Palestinian and Arab historiography has been less visible,
leading Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim to argue that Palestinians do not have the ‘victor’s
privilege’ to critically revise their nation’s history.20 This seems a plausible explanation
given the fact that the concept of Palestinian nationalism remained controversial to many
Israelis and Americans through the 1980s and into the 1990s. They are also right to argue
that access to archival material in Arabic has been an issue for scholars, with primary
sources disbursed throughout the Arab world, held in private archives, or contained in
the national archives of regimes that offer limited access to critical historians.21 There has
also undoubtedly been far less institutional support for the writing of Palestinian history
as compared to Zionist history, a product of the imbalance of power in Israel ⁄ Palestine,
as Edward Said and Joseph Massad have pointed out.22 But, it is also true that while there
may not be an equivalent movement of Palestinian ‘new historians’, Palestinian and other
Arab scholars, despite these obstacles, have been writing revisionist history for a long

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time. Indeed, in the immediate wake of 1948 writers such as Musa al-Alami and
Constantine Zurayq began to challenge the nationalist narratives of the victorious Israeli
state and the defeated Arab nations.23 The work of Edward Said on the Palestinian
question was also revisionist for its critiques of Western and Israeli attitudes toward Pales-
tinians (and the wider Middle East), as well as his criticisms of the PLO.24
In terms of recent Palestinian and Arab accounts of the Mandate, Rashid Khalidi’s
Palestinian Identity: The Construction of a Modern National Consciousness (1993), a seminal
work on the emergence of Palestinian nationalism, is the strongest in its account of
Palestinian newspapers and institutions during the Mandate period.25 His more recent
work, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (2006), investigates
Palestinian politics during the Mandate period and offers a unique comparison with Arab
politics in other mandates. Like Khalidi, Issa Khalaf has explored the failings of Palestinian
nationalists during the later years of the mandate period.26 Nur Masalha and Joseph
Massad, partly in reaction to the work of the Israeli new historians, have also written
persuasively about the origins of the idea of transfer in Zionist thought.27 Philip Mattar’s
biography of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem for much of the Mandate
period, offers a useful account that eschews the tendency of Palestinian nationalist histori-
ography to mythologize him and Zionist historiography to demonize him.28 Finally,
Salim Tamari has offered valuable analyses of Palestinian cultural figures during the late
Ottoman and mandate periods that investigate the changes brought by modernization and
colonial rule.29

New History, But Is It Original?

One aspect of the Israeli New History that was not so new, were the main arguments
made by its practitioners, a fact admitted by all sides of the debate.30 Palestinians had long
been making similar challenges to the Zionist narrative, which had been regularly ignored
by Israeli and most western historians. Members of the Israeli communist party and socia-
list left had also criticized Israeli policies in the 1950s and 1960s in much the same way as
the new historians, while in the 1960s and 1970s the work of British and Israeli scholars,
such as David Hirst, Neville Mandel, and Neil Caplan, had anticipated much of the new
revisionism.31 There were fundamental differences, however, between the Palestinian
position and that of the new historians. Nur Masalha, for example, pointed out that while
Benny Morris could be applauded for popularizing the fact that Jewish actions had forced
Palestinians to leave the country, his failure to present incidents of expulsion as part of a
larger Zionist plan, or even to see them as part of a pattern of behavior toward Palestin-
ians, forestalled a deeper discussion of the colonialism at the heart of the Zionist project.
As such, the new history continued to ignore what was a central concern of Palestinian
historiography.32
This criticism was echoed by Joel Beinin, who argued that Morris’ conclusions
represented the limits of the new history.33 Writing in the wake of Morris’ defection
from the new historian camp after the collapse of the 2000 Camp David talks, Beinin
argued that this defection should not have been shocking to scholars given that he had
never written with any sympathy for, or understanding of the Palestinian position in
regards to the refugee issue.34 Morris and other revisionist scholars may have challenged
the conventional narrative but were ultimately participants in an intra-Zionist debate, in
which Jews were the subjects of history and Palestinians its passive objects.35 This was
best shown in Morris’ exclusion of Arab testimony and his seeming reluctance to grant
that Arabs also had rights to the land, which testified to the fact, according to Beinin, that

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Morris’ work was ‘deeply embedded in categories of knowledge of the Zionist project
and not as incompatible with the methods of the old history as he would like to think’.36
In some ways, Morris is a soft target, given his public rejection of Palestinian rights in
the post-Oslo period and the fact that his work had always been closer to the mainstream
of Zionist thought than that of other new historians.37 But, it is clear that the Israeli new
history, for all its success in opening up new debates about the past, carries over many of
the weaknesses of the conventional Zionist narrative: the almost exclusive focus on Jewish
or Israeli actions, the overreliance on Hebrew sources (and almost complete lack of
sources in Arabic), the positivistic reliance on establishing facts through the use of archival
material, and the eschewing of theoretical analysis.

Palestine and Israel or Israel ⁄ Palestine?

One solution to the navel-gazing of Israeli historiography suggested by Beinin was the
‘relational approach’ originally championed by the historian Zachary Lockman. In a 1993
article, Lockman argued that the Arab and Jewish communities of the mandate should be
treated as having been ‘constituted and shaped within a complex matrix of economic,
political, social, and cultural interactions’, rather than as developing independently and
autonomously, as depicted in the ‘dual society’ model of conventional historiography.38
Lockman and Beinin’s advocacy of relational history is part of a larger debate about
how scholars should view the history of Palestine and Israel. Should that history be written
as two distinct histories of two distinct communities as traditionally been the case or
should it be conceived of as a single history of two intertwined peoples? Ilan Pappe’s
The History of Modern Palestine: One Nation, Two Peoples makes it clear that it is possible to
write a comprehensive history by focusing on the land rather than the nation(s), but his
work is rather the exception that proves the rule.39
There is not time here to discuss whether a two-state or single (bi-national) state
model for looking at the entire history of Israel ⁄ Palestine, but it seems clear that viewing
the Mandate through a two-state ⁄ dual society model distorts the history of the Mandate
period. The Jewish and Arab communities were never the monolithic, primordial, and
self-contained entities portrayed in nationalist history.40 The dual society model also
glosses over the power relations between the two communities, leading in some cases to
Orientalist assertions that Jewish success and Palestinian failure can be understood solely
in terms of the communities’ innate levels of cultural development. Relational history
would appear to be a good solution to this problem, for in adopting a comprehensive
paradigm that considers Arab and Jewish history within the same analysis, it becomes
possible to see that Arab and Jewish identities were shaped by similar forces (capitalist
development, modernization, nationalism, and colonialism) and by a conflict that both
pulled them apart and pushed them together.
Mark Levine’s Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine,
1880–1948 (2005) shows the great promise of this approach. Levine’s work discusses the
emergence of Tel Aviv as a self-consciously ‘Jewish’ answer to Jaffa, the cultural and
economic center of Arab society during the Mandate, and its eventual ‘pulverization’ of
its neighbor. The overthrowing of geography, mentioned in the title, is the replacement
of Jaffa by the current city of Tel Aviv-Yafo. Through a post-colonial investigation of
how the native city was conquered by Zionist officials, town planners, and architects, he
deconstructs the Zionist narrative that Tel Aviv represented the miraculous birth of ‘a
nation from the sands’. But, while his account offers a cogent analysis of the impact of
what he describes as ‘a mutually constitutive four-fold matrix of discourses – modernity,

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colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism’, on Jaffa and Tel Aviv, it does so by presenting
an atypically thick description of the lived experiences of the cities’ inhabitants.41 By
concentrating on ‘places of hybridity’ and moments of ‘ambivalence’, he illustrates that
separation was never easy to achieve due to the ambiguous actions and agendas of people
on the ground. The emergence of a separate Tel Aviv is also shown, paradoxically, to
have been dependent on working with rather than against the Arab population and Arab
culture.42 Most revealing are the ways in which everyday interactions of Arabs and Jews
undercut the nationalist programs of Zionists and Palestinian nationalists alike:
In fact, Jews and Palestinian Arabs were in bed together in more ways than sex, as the ability of
many of Jaffa’s most prominent Arab leaders to simultaneously lead protests against and do
business with – including selling land to – Jews and the large-scale Jewish employment of Arabs
in what was officially an ‘exclusively Jewish’ Tel Aviv, highlights the fluid lines of resistance
and cooperation that simultaneously separated and connected the two communities.43
This attention to the fluid relations between Arabs and Jews in Tel Aviv and Jaffa
prevents the account from becoming another teleological account of the rise of Zionism
and the collapse of the Palestinian nation. Instead, we see that the overthrowing of
geography in Tel Aviv, like the Zionist project it was part of, was a project that
constantly had to be rearticulated and reconfigured in reaction to events on the ground.
The strength of Levine’s study lies in his ability to show the complexities of Mandate
history by breaking down the overly neat categories of analysis of nationalist history. His
presentation of the struggles over Zionist calls to conquer land and labor, modernist
town-planning discourses, and campaigns for national unity illustrates that concepts such
as Zionism and modernization did not have fixed meanings during the Mandate period.
Rather, these were concepts that people struggled over on a daily basis as they found that
they navigated the vagaries of national conflict, colonial rule, and their changing material
conditions.
Hillel Cohen’s Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (2008)
is written from a more typical Israeli revisionist perspective, but shows a similar interest in
the relationships formed between Jews and Arabs that undermined the nationalist agenda.
He persuasively argues that ties between Arabs and Jews were much closer on the local level
than has been depicted in Palestinian nationalist and Zionist historiography, and that an
investigation of these ties indicates the diverse relationships that individuals and groups had
with Palestinian nationalism and Zionism.44
In his account, we see village leaders, Bedouin shaykhs, urban politicians, and local
farmers working with Zionists for commonsense reasons: for money, to protect their
communal interests, because their disagreement with the uncompromising stance of Arab
nationalists, or due to their ethical misgivings over the mistreatment of their Jewish
neighbors.45 While these episodes of collaboration were considered treasonous at the time
and might be seen as such by some modern observers, Cohen uses them to demonstrate
the limits of nationalist discourse to enforce discipline.
By taking us down to the level of the village shaykh or land broker, Cohen is able to
complicate the meaning of terms such as ‘Arab patriotism’ and ‘treason’ that are often
used without reflection. Equally important is the way in which he captures the dynamic
nature of collaboration, with definitions of collaboration changing in reaction to political
developments, the vagaries of Arab politics, and shifts in Zionist intelligence gathering.
In his conclusion, Cohen invokes Eugene Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen: The Moderni-
zation of Rural France, 1870–1914 to make sense of collaboration in the Palestinian context.
He rightly argues that in Palestine, as in France, nationalism was a process that had to be

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worked out on the ground, leading inevitably to resistance, ambiguities, and a ‘lack of
consensus over what territory constituted the national territory, and the preservation of
prenationalist social structures’.46 This point could be read as simply another example of the
tired Zionist argument that Palestinian nationalism was artificial, but his conclusion points
to the important fact that Palestinian nationalism was never monolithic, despite (or perhaps
because of) the attempt by Palestinian leaders (such as Hajj Amin al-Husayni) to use
disciplinary measures to enforce obedience.47 In this way, his work fits well with accounts
of Palestinian and Syrian nationalism from Ted Swedenberg and James Gelvin that point to
the fact that popular experiences and memories of the nation were different, and often at
odds with those of the elite.48

New Sources and New Voices

Although they consider Mandate history from two different perspectives, two shared
methodological choices make these studies work. One is the choice to broaden their foci
beyond matters of high politics and military affairs. The second is the choice to use
source materials in Arabic, Hebrew, and English from inside and outside the archive, such
as oral histories, interviews, court documents, and press articles (though Levine does a
better job of being inclusive in his source materials).49 To be sure, neither Levine nor
Cohen is a pioneer in this respect; rather they continue a trend in the past two decades
of eschewing the ‘Great Man’ obsession of nationalist historiography and using
neo-Marxist, feminist, postcolonialist, or postmodernist theory to challenge nationalist
orthodoxies.50
There is no space here to discuss this trend in detail, but a brief overview of recent
debates in economics, urban planning, cultural affairs, gender relations, and national
identity formation during the Mandate will help to show how scholars are engaged in
an ongoing debate over the construction and destruction of identities, institutions, and
ideologies.
Accounts of the economic situation during the Mandate have concentrated on the
establishment of a divided Jewish and Arab economy in Palestine. Building on Gershon
Shafir’s argument that Zionist economic development was a form of colonialism, scholars
such as Jacob Metzer have analyzed the steps taken by Zionist leaders to develop a
separate economy and the effect of this nationalist project on the Arab and Jewish
populations.51 Barbara Smith has persuasively demonstrated the manner in which the
British colluded in this project, through economic policies that consistently favored
Jewish business interests.52 Zachary Lockman and Deborah Bernstein have analyzed the
impact of the divided economy and the wider nationalist competition on Arab and Jewish
labor relations, while Warwick Tyler has considered the impact of the Mandate on the
rural economy of Palestine.53 These works challenge the Orientalism at the heart of the
conventional Zionist narrative by highlighting the power of Zionist and British colonial
discourses of development to shape the economic situation in Palestine.
Scholars who are interested in urban history, such as Mark Levine, Rochelle Davis and
Salim Tamari, also debate the effects of modern development and nationalist separation.54
In their accounts of Jerusalem and Haifa, they present the development of Jewish neigh-
borhoods not as an innocent process of ‘making the desert bloom’ but as an extension of
the Zionist conquest of the land mentioned in Shafir’s work. By emphasizing the colonial
nature of urban planning and its effects on the development of national identities, their
work fits well with work done by Gwendolyn Wright and Janet Abu Lughod on colonial
planning elsewhere in the Middle East, but by discussing the effects of planning on the

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Arab–Israeli conflict, they point out to the territorial specificities of development in Pales-
tine ⁄ Israel.55
Analyses of gender relations, such as Ellen Fleishman’s The Nation and its ‘New’ Women:
The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920–1948 (2003) and Ela Greenberg’s Preparing the
Mothers of Tomorrow: Education and Islam in Mandate Palestine (2009), and class relations,
such as Zachary Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies (1996), have been useful in presenting
other categories of analysis besides the nation and have helped push scholarly attention
away from the male elite.56 Interest in popular culture during the Mandate period, as
shown in the contributions of Mark Levine and Salim Tamari to Palestine, Israel, and the
Politics of Popular Culture (2005), as well as Tamari’s work at the journal Jerusalem
Quarterly, has similarly added to our understanding of how the general population experi-
enced British rule, Zionist immigration, Arab nationalism, and the forces of capitalist
modernization.57
Finally, accounts of national identity formation have challenged the idea that national
identities on both sides are primordial and coherent. Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity:
The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997) is the most well-known study of
Palestinian nationalism, but much has been added by the work of Muhammad Muslih,
Haim Gerber, Weldon Matthews, Joseph Massad, and Ted Swedenberg.58 In a similar
way, the work of Israeli revisionist scholars such a Baruch Kimmerling and Ilan Pappe
has challenged the tendency of Zionism to project itself further back in the history of
Palestine ⁄ Israel.59
Besides shifting their focus away from high politics and military affairs, many of the
scholars mentioned above have succeeded in popularizing non-archival sources for the
study of the Mandate – such as the use of newspapers, advertising, political cartoons,
memoirs, and diaries – a welcome development if we are to get beyond official history
and begin to understand how the general population experienced life in the colony.

Contextualizing the History of the British Mandate

This article has argued that over the past 20 years, our understanding of Mandate Palestine
has been broadened by a scholarly consideration of individuals, events, and discourses that
were off limits to historians working within a nationalist history. The new historian move-
ment in Israeli scholarship was something of a catalyst for this reinvestigation of history,
but more crucial for the long-term development of the field has been the shift in focus
away from the military and political elite through the integration of alternative voices and
sources in scholarly accounts of the period.
The reader will have noticed, however, that I have not discussed much literature that
deals directly with Britain’s role in this period. This is because there has been much less
scholarly attention paid to the British regime over the past couple of decades than there
was in the past.60 In some ways, this is a good thing. The concentration on the minutia of
diplomatic history in scholarship from the 1940s until the 1970s had its own navel-gazing
tendencies, and some accounts engaged in a dubious kind of apologetics for British
rule. But, the dearth of recent accounts on the British administration has meant that
British rule has not undergone the same sort of reappraisal that the history of Zionist
settlement and Palestinian nationalism has gone through. British rule in Palestine is ripe for
the kind of post-colonial and subaltern analyses that have been applied to Indian history.61
Our understanding of the British Mandate would also be strengthened by analyzing
Palestine within a comparative history of empire.62 A comparison of Jewish–Arab relations
in Palestine to Hindu–Muslim relations in British India or to Christian–Muslim relations

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224 Re-Remembering the Mandate

in British Cyprus would go along way to establishing what is really unique about this
conflict.
Finally, there are two other ways of approaching the Mandate that could be helpful in
broadening our understanding of the period. One is for scholars to devote more attention
to how the Mandate fits with the Ottoman history that preceded it. Rather than conceiv-
ing of the period of British rule as a break in history, it would be fruitful to emphasize
continuities with the Ottoman past, a periodization that makes sense given British claims
that they were following Ottoman precedent in Palestine. This would help scholars place
British and Israeli reforms within the broader context of the process of modernization
that began during the Ottoman period, as well as add depth to our understanding of
imperial rule. The second is for scholars to pay more attention to the experiences
of minority communities during the Mandate period. Accounts of the place of the
Mizrachim, Christian Arabs, and Armenian communities within the wider Jewish and
Arab communities would help scholars continue their productive attempt over the past
20 years to break down the monolithic categories of race and nationality that are central
to the nationalist paradigm.

Short Biography
Nicholas E. Roberts is an Assistant Professor of History at Sewanee: University of the
South. He holds a BA in Religion from Carleton College, an MA in Middle East Studies
from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in Middle East and Islamic Studies ⁄ History
from New York University. His research is concerned with the intersection between
Islam and politics in the history of the British Mandate for Palestine. In his dissertation
work, he investigated the manner in which British officials worked to create Islamic
institutions in their new colony and how those institutions (particularly, the Supreme
Muslim Council) came to challenge colonial rule, a study that will form the basis for his
first book. He has also published the article, ‘Palestine on Display: The Palestine Pavilion
at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924’, in The Arab Studies Journal, which looks at
Jewish and Arab involvement in Palestine’s contribution to the famous imperial exhibi-
tion. He is currently working on an article that addresses British urban planning and its
effects on Arab and Jewish settlement in Jerusalem, and another that considers the British
administration of holy places during the Mandate period.

Notes
* Correspondence: The University of the South, 735 University Avenue, Sewanee, TN 37383, USA. Email:
nickerberts@gmail.com.

1
The ideological bias of scholars was addressed in Benny Morris, ‘The New Historiography: Israel Confronts its
Past’, Tikkun: A Bimonthly Interfaith Critique of Politics, Culture and Society, 3 ⁄ 6 (1988): 19–23, 99–102; Kenneth
Stein, ‘A Historiographic Review of Literature on the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict’, The American Historical
Review, 96 ⁄ 5 (Dec. 1991); and Zachary Lockman, ‘Railway Workers and Relational History: Arabs and Jews in
British-Ruled Palestine’, Comparative Studies in Society and Social History, 35 ⁄ 3 (July, 1993).
2
Stein, ‘Historiographic Review’, 1464.
3
Lockman, ‘Railway Workers and Relational History’, 602. Similar arguments have also been made in Morris,
‘The New Historiography’ (1988); Avi Shlaim, ‘The Debate about 1948’, International Journal of Middle East Studies,
27 ⁄ 3 (August, 1995): 287–304; and Laurence Silberstein, ‘Reading Postzionism: An Introduction’, in Laurence
Silberstein (ed.) Postzionism: A Reader (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 1–28.
4
Stein, ‘Historiographic Review’, 1465.
5
It should not be forgotten, however, that the Balfour Declaration remained the bedrock of British policy
throughout the Mandatory period. This meant that while certain concessions were made to Arab opinion (as British

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 Re-Remembering the Mandate 225

officials put it), no serious initiative was ever put into place that challenged the Balfour Declaration or gave Arab
institutions the same political rights as the Jewish Agency.
6
See Herzl’s Der Judenstadt (The Jewish State) (1896) and Altneuland (The Old-New Land) (1902).
7
Martin Bunton has rightly called this, ‘a conspicuous act of retroactive determinism’. See Martin Bunton, ‘Man-
date Daze: Stories of British Rule in Palestine, 1917–1948’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 35 (2003), 485.
8
For a detailed overview of this traditional scholarship, I refer the reader to Kenneth Stein’s historiographic
review.
9
Each of these terms has its problems in describing the scholars involved in this movement. While the term ‘New
Historian’ has been taken on by the scholars themselves, many of the people involved in challenging the conven-
tional narrative are sociologists (Baruch Kimmerling and Uri Ram), political scientists (Joel Migdal and Gershon
Shafir), or geographers (Oren Yiftachel). The term revisionism is also problematic given the words association with
the Revisionist movement of Vladimir Jabotinsky. Finally, post-Zionism is a term that is controversial given the fact
that it often used by their opponents as a synonym for anti-Zionism, although some scholars, such as Uri Ram and
Ilan Pappe embrace the term.
10
Avi Shlaim, ‘The Debate about 1948’, The Israel-Palestine Question: A Reader, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge,
2005), 144–5.
11
Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 7–8.
12
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Avi
Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partitions of Palestine (Cambridge:
Columbia University Press, 1988); and Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–51 (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 1988).
13
See Morris, ‘The New Historiography’.
14
This point is made in Shlaim, ‘The Debate over 1948’, and Morris, ‘The New Historiography’.
15
See Benny Morris, ‘Response to Finkelstein and Masalha’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 21 ⁄ 1 (Autumn, 1991), 103.
16
There is not enough space here to discuss the evolution of this literature, so I refer the reader to an excellent
edited work that explores the evolution and future of the Israeli revisionism: Laurence Silberstein (ed.) Postzionism:
A Reader (New Haven: Rutgers University Press, 2008). Ilan Pappe’s recent overview of the debate in Israeli histo-
riography between post-Zionism and neo-Zionism is also recommended. See, Ilan Pappe, ‘The Vicissitudes of the
1948 Historiography of Israel’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 39 ⁄ 1 (Autumn, 2009), 6–23.
The new historian approach was far more controversial in Israel. Guardians of the conventional Israeli narrative,
such as Efraim Karsh and Shabtai Teveth, argued in the press and in their own scholarship that the new historians
were driven by their sympathy toward Palestinians to falsify Israeli history. Political figures on the Israeli right were
also critical, with Limor Livnat, the Minister of Education in Ariel Sharon’s Likud government, charging in an
attack on the new history that ‘post-Zionism is in effect what used to be called anti-Zionism’. The prestige of the
new historians has taken something of a hit with the rightwards shift in Israeli politics that has occurred since the
outbreak of the Second Intifada, which has led to the famous ‘defection’ of Benny Morris to the Zionist center,
and the rise of a new-Zionist movement in Israeli scholarship. For the reaction of traditional Zionist writers to the
new history see, Shabtai Teveth, ‘Charging Israel With Original Sin’, Commentary, 88 ⁄ 3 (September, 1989), 24–33
and Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ (London: Frank Cass, 1997). Livnat’s quote comes
from a summary of a talk she gave to the Middle East Forum on 17 August 2000, see Limor Livnat, ‘Post-Zionism
and Israeli Politics’, Middle East Forum, 17 Aug, 2000, http://www.meforum.org/185/post-zionism-and-israeli-
politics, accessed on 11 Jul, 2010. For a more recent example of her charge, see Shlomo Avineri, ‘The Lie of
Postzionism: Whoever Calls Him ⁄ Herself a Postzionist is Simply an Old Time Anti-Zionist’, Haaretz (3 July,
2007). For a discussion of the recent rise of a neo-Zionist historiography, see Pappe, ‘Vicissitudes’, 6–23.
17
See Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: 1882–1914 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996); Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (New York:
Free Press, 1993); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London, Allen Lane, 2000).
18
Stein pointed out in his 1991 article that an analysis of the literature on Arab–Israeli conflict ‘90 percent of what
was written about the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict focused on the period after 1950’. Stein, ‘Historio-
graphic Review’, 1451.
19
Segev’s work reached many of the same conclusions as Pappe’s 1988 study but in a more compelling (though
perhaps too neat) narrative. It remains the most readable overview of Mandate history, although I find myself lar-
gely agreeing with Neve Gordon’s argument that ‘Segev’s great narrative skills are also his Achilles’ heel: the fabric
of his story is too tightly woven. Where are the messy contradictions and ambiguities that characterize history?’
Neve Gordon, ‘Shadowplays’, The Nation, 6 Mar, 2008, http://www.thenation.com/print/article/shadowplays,
accessed on 9 Jun, 2010.
Other accounts of the Mandate period are more focused on smaller aspects of that history and include articles by
Hillel Cohen and Tamir Goren on Arab and Jewish relations during the Mandate period; Baruch Kimmerling and
Joel Migdal’s account of Palestinians during the Mandate as part of their longer history Palestinians: The Making of
the People; and Ilan Pappe’s accounts of the Mandate period in his The History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two
Peoples and other articles.

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226 Re-Remembering the Mandate
20
Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, ‘Introduction’, in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds.), The War for Palestine:
Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 7.
21
Rogan and Shlaim, ‘Introduction’, 6.
22
See Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1979) and Edward Said and Christopher
Hitchens (eds.), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestine Question (London: Verso, 1988); Joseph
Massad, ‘The Persistence of the Palestinian Question’, Cultural Critique, no. 59 (Winter, 2005), 1–23 and Joseph
Massad, ‘Palestinians and the Limits of Racialized Discourse’, Social Text, no. 34 (1993), 94–114.
23
See Musa al-‘Alami’s Ibrat Filastin (‘Lesson of Palestine’) (Beirut: Dar al- Kishaaf, 1949), and Constatine Zurayq,
Ma’na al-Nakbah (‘The Meaning of the Disaster’) (Beirut: Dar al-‘Ilm lil-Malayin, 1948).
24
See especially, Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1979) and Edward Said and Christo-
pher Hitchens (eds.), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestine Question (London: Verso, 1988).
25
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997) and Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2006). Some of his arguments in The Iron Cage are anticipated in ‘The Palestinians and 1948: The
Underlying Causes of Failure’, in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds.), The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History
of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12–36. Palestinian Identity won the Middle East Studies
Association book award in 1997, and is widely considered the classic text on Palestinian nationalism.
26
Khalaf offers a thorough study of Palestinian nationalist factionalism in the 1940s in Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine:
Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948 (Albany: State University of New York, 1991).
27
See Nur Masalha, ‘A Critique on Benny Morris’, in Ilan Pappe (ed.), The Israel ⁄ Palestine Question, 1st edn.
(London: Routledge, 1999), 211–20; Nur Masalha, The Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in
Zionist Political Thought 1882–1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991); and Joseph Massad,
‘The Persistence of the Palestinian Question’, Cultural Critique, no. 59 (Winter, 2005), 1–23.
28
Mattar’s work offers an account of the political life of Hajj Amin al-Husyani that was a welcome departure from
the partisan accounts of the Mufti found in nationalist historiography on both sides, see Philip Mattar, The Mufti of
Jerusalem: al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement (New York: Columbia University Press,
1988). See also Taysir Jbara.
29
See Salim Tamari, ‘Jerusalem’s Ottoman Modernity: The Times and Lives of Wasif Jawhariyyeh’, Jerusalem
Quarterly, 9 (2000); Salim Tamari, ‘Wasif Jawhariyyeh, Popular Music, and Early Modernity in Jerusalem’, in
Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenberg (eds.), Palestine Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005), 27–50; and his recently published study of Palestinian life before 1948 in Mountain Against
the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
Tamari was also instrumental in publishing the diary of Wasif Jawhariyya, which is a valuable resource for the
historian that wants to understand life and times of Jerusalem musician during the last years of the Ottoman empire
and British Mandate period: Issam Nassar and Salim Tamari (eds.), al-Quds al-intidabiya fi al-Mudhakarat al-Jaw-
ahariyya: al-kitab al-thani min mudhakarat al-musiqi Wasif Jawhariyya, 1918–1948 [Mandate Jerusalem in the Memoirs
of al-Jawahariyya: Volume 2 in the Memoirs of the Musician Wasif Jawhariyya, 1918–1948] (Jerusalem: Institute of
Palestine Studies, 2005).
30
Critics of the New Historians, such as Efraim Karsh and Shabtai Teveth, have made much of the fact that the
arguments of the New Historians are old, almost certainly in reaction to the New Historians’ claim to represent the
future of Israeli historiography. But, Avi Shlaim, for his part, admits ‘the first thing to note about the new histori-
ography is that much of it is not new’. See Shlaim, ‘Debate about 1948’, 142.
31
The position of the communist party of Israel toward Arabs is best explored in Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag
Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948–1965 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990). For information on scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, see Stein, ‘Historiographic Review’.
32
See Nur Masalha, ‘A Critique on Benny Morris’, in Ilan Pappe (ed.), The Israel ⁄ Palestine Question, 1st edn.
(London: Routledge, 1999): 211–20. Masalha’s Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Politi-
cal Thought 1882–1948 (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991) offers a more detailed presentation of
his view that Zionists deliberately pushed Palestinians out of the country. An earlier article by Walid Khalidi, ‘Plan
Dalet: Master Plan for the conquest of Palestine’ (1961), is also recommended for readers who are interested in the
issue of the intentionality in the refugee crisis. This article was republished in 1988 by the Journal of Palestine Studies
in reaction to Morris’ book. Anita Shapira’s Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force 1881–1948 (1992) offers the
best conventional Zionist account of the Zionist treatment of Arabs.
33
See Joel Beinin, ‘Forgetfulness for Memory: The Limits of the New Israeli History’, Journal of Palestine Studies,
24 ⁄ 2 (Winter, 2005), 6–23.
34
To understand Morris’ position on the Camp David talks, the reader is referred to the fascinating exchange
between Morris and Barak on one side and Hasan Agha and Robert Malley on the other in a series of articles
published in The New York Review of Books in June 2002.
In addition to analyzing Morris’ The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Beinin analyzes Morris’ other writings
on the refugee: ‘The Causes and Character of the Arab Exodus from Palestine: The Israeli Defense Forces Intelli-
gence Services Analysis of June 1948’, in Ilan Pappe (ed.) The Palestine ⁄ Israel Question, 1st edn. (London: Routledge,

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 Re-Remembering the Mandate 227

1999), 150–68; ‘Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948’ in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds.), The War for
Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 48–56; and The Birth of the
Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
35
This fits with the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling’s argument that the Zionist discourse has led Israeli
academics to work within ‘a Jewish bubble’. See Silberstein, ‘Reading Postzionism’, 11. This has led scholars such as
Kimmerling and Ilan Pappe to push for the integration of Arab perspectives into the writing of the history of Israel.
36
Beinin, ‘Forgetfulness for Memory’, 14. Derek Penslar similarly argues that, ‘the new history’s methodology is as
traditional as its conclusions are revolutionary. It operates within the confines of diplomatic and high political
history, combating older narratives of the 1948 war on their own terms’. Derek Jonathan Penslar, ‘Innovation and
Revisionism in Israeli Historiography’, History and Memory, 7 ⁄ 1 (Spring ⁄ Summer, 1995), 150.
37
It is much more difficult to extend Beinin’s criticism to a scholar such as Ilan Pappe, who writes about Israeli
actions in 1948 as ‘ethnic cleansing’, who works to include Arabs in his history of Israel ⁄ Palestine, and who self-
consciously allies himself against the Israeli mainstream. Pappe’s commitment to escaping what he has called the
Zionist metanarrative is best shown in his books The History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004) and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World Publications, 2006),
which work to bring Arab narratives about the history of Palestine to the forefront. These works have been heavily
criticized by Efraim Karsh and Benny Morris, and remain controversial in Israel.
38
See Lockman, ‘Railway Workers’, and his expanded account of labor relations in Zachary Lockman, Comrades
and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California, 1996).
39
I would contend that the continued power of nationalist historiography in the field – propped up the power of
national identity and by the intellectual and physical separation of Middle Eastern studies and Israeli ⁄ Judaic studies
in the academy – contributes to the continued inability of scholars to understand the history of Palestine ⁄ Israel from
multiple perspectives.
40
Lockman, ‘Railway Workers’, 602.
41
Mark Levine, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine 1880–1948 (Berkeley: University
of California, 2005), 2.
42
Such as in the close relationships forged between Jewish and Arab workers, a point that had been made in Lock-
man’s earlier work, and in the appropriation of Arab motifs in the ‘Oriental Eclecticism’ of early Israeli architectural
development. See Levine, Overthrowing Geography, 91–3 and 162–4.
43
Levine, Overthrowing Geography, 116.
44
Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008). Accounts of Arab and Jewish cooperation have been published by other scholars such as
Tamir Cohen and Neil Caplan but Cohen’s account remains the most influential and persuasive presentation of this
phenomenon. See, for example, Tamir Goren, ‘Hasan Bey Shukri and His Contribution to the Integration of Jews
in the Haifa Municipality at the Time of the British Mandate’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 33 ⁄ 1 (May,
2006): 19–36 and Neil Caplan, ‘Arab-Jewish Contacts in Palestine After the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary
History, 12 ⁄ 4 (October, 1977): 635–68.
45
Cohen, Army of Shadows, 67–94.
46
Cohen, Army of Shadows, 266.
47
Such a conclusion fits well with Rashid Khalidi’s argument that the formation of Palestinian identity was not
a linear process and that Palestinian identity came to coexist with other forms of identification. See R. Khalidi,
‘Competing and Overlapping Loyalties in Ottoman Jerusalem, in Palestinian Identity, 63–88. For a similar discussion
of the nationalism in the Middle East see James Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For a more general analysis of this phenomenon see Eric
Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 123.
48
See Ted Swedenberg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and James Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the
Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
49
Examples of sources beyond the archive include Levine’s use of Islamic Court documents, Ottoman archival
material, Arab and Hebrew press reports, and cultural texts, such as art, literature, and poetry. Cohen’s account is
not only more firmly grounded in the archive, particularly in documents from the Zionist intelligence service
(which he largely takes at face value), but he also adds additional information from oral histories and interviews with
Arabs (one only wishes that there had been more of these). Palestinian historiography has often relied on oral
history, which Israeli historians have traditionally regarded as illegitimate due to its partisan nature, this despite the
fact that the memoirs of Israeli politicians have been influential in Israeli historiography.
50
This trend is not synonymous with New History, for many of the New Historians eschew the use of theory.
Instead, it is part of a larger revision of the history of Palestine ⁄ Israel that is being undertaken by Palestinian, Israeli,
and Western scholars.
51
Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
52
Barbara Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy 1920–29 (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1993).

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228 Re-Remembering the Mandate
53
See Lockman, Comrades and Enemies and Deborah Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in
Mandatory Palestine, Israel Studies Series (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).
54
See Salim Tamari, ‘The Phantom City’, and Rochelle Davis, ‘The Growth of the Western Communities’, in
Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and their Fate in the War (Jerusalem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 1999),
1–9 and 32–71. For a more conventional Zionist account of urban development, the reader is referred to the work
of Ruth Kark and Yehoshua Ben Arieh.
55
Gwendolyn Wright, ‘Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial
Policy’, in Fred Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.) Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 322–45, and Janet Abu Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
56
Ellen Fleischman, The Nation and Its ‘New’ Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920–1948 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003). The work of Ela Greenberg on Muslim girls’ education in Mandatory
Palestine is also useful. See Ela Greenberg, ‘Educating Muslim Girls in Mandatory Jerusalem’, International Journal of
Middle East Studies, 36 ⁄ 1 (2004): 1–19.
57
See Salim Tamari, ‘Wasif Jawhariyyeh, Popular Music, and Early Modernity in Jerusalem’, in Rebecca L. Stein
and Ted Swedenberg (eds.), Palestine Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005), 27–50 and Mark Levine, ‘The Palestinian Press in Mandatory Jaffa: Advertising, Nationalism, and the Public
Sphere’, in Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenberg (eds.), Palestine Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005): 51–76.
58
Muhammad Muslih’s The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia Universtiy Press, 1988) offers
a detailed account of the emergence of Palestinian nationalism out of the Arab nationalism of the late-Ottoman
and wartime periods. Haim Gerber’s Remembering and Imagining Palestine: Identity and Nationalism from the Crusades to
the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) uses Anthony Smith’s ideas about ethnonationalism to argue for
a centuries-long concept of Palestinian identity. Weldon Matthews has written an excellent analysis on Arab
nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s through an analysis of the Istiqlal party, see Weldon Matthews, Confronting an
Empire, Constructing a Nation: Arab Nationalists and Popular Politics in Mandate Palestine (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006).
Joseph Massad’s ‘Palestinians and the Limits of Radicalized Discourse’, Social Text, no. 34 (1993), 94–114 considers
the discursive status of Palestinians in the West in the tradition of Edward Said’s investigations of Orientalist
discourse. Finally, Swedenberg’s Memories of Revolt (1995) offers an intriguing analysis of the interplay between
Palestinian collective memory and nationalist history in the memorialization of the Palestinian Arab Revolt of
1936–1939.
59
See Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001) and Ilan Pappe, The History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples.
60
The best scholarly accounts of the British in Palestine remain, Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The
Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917–1929 (1978) and Michael Cohen, Palestine Retreat from
Mandate: The Making of British Policy (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978). There have, however, been a couple of
interesting recent non-scholarly accounts: A. J. Sherman, Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918–1948
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997), and Naomi Shepherd, Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine 1917–1948
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).
61
One author who has recently attempted this is Zeina Ghandour, but her work unfortunately shows a rather
poor grasp of the primary and secondary literature. See Zeina B. Ghandour, A Discourse on Domination in Mandate
Palestine: Imperialism, Property and Insurgency (London: Routledge, 2010).
62
This has been attempted in a rather limited way by Rashid Khalidi who compares Palestinian nationalism under
British rule to Arab nationalism in the other British and French mandates in his book The Iron Cage. It has also
been done in a brief comparison of British policy toward Islam in Palestine to colonial policies toward Islam
in other contexts in Uri Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council: Islam Under the British Mandate for Palestine
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987).

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