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Confronting an Empire, Constructing a Nation: Arab Nationalists and Popular Politics in Mandate Palestine Weldon C. Matthews London: I. B. Tauris, 2006 (342 pages, bibliography, index, appendices) $84.95 (hardcover)
In his rich, textured history of the Istiqlal Party, Weldon Matthews charts the ebullient and paradoxically fertile moment of the early 1930s in Palestinian Arab society, at once making major contributions to the understanding of British colonial policy in the territory and to the social and political history of the Palestinians. Utilizing the works of Benedict Anderson and Anthony Giddens on nationalism, and Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam, and Sidney Tarrow on social movements and "contentious politics," Matthews focuses his study on the emergence of Arab nationalism as a "movement of mass appeal" after the collapse of the Ottoman empire (3). The shortlived but highly influential Istiqlal Party, he argues, played a major role in the ascent of nationalism in Arab Palestine, alongside a set of contingent events and institutional developments, foremost of which was the consolidation of a thriving public sphere. Matthews has written the first full-length account of the Palestine Istiqlal Party. The history which he explores is not only critical to the development of Palestinian nationalism and the history of the national movement, but in departing from the fixation on elite factionalism so common in the literature, he sets a much needed example for further historical research into the period.
Mirroring the Istiqlal Party's own analysis, the primary nemesis of the rise of an Arab national identity in Palestine in this account is not so much Zionism as it is British colonialism. Avoiding the temptation to treat Palestine as sui generis, Matthews situates both British practices in the territory and the League of Nations' mandate system as a whole within a useful survey of the evolving doctrine of indirect rule in the British empire. In an incisive explication of British policy in the first two decades of mandatory rule, Matthews builds on Prasenjit Duara's proposition that British colonialism operated through a "'cultural project to maintain the colonies as non-nations,'" (33) contending that in Palestine (as elsewhere) this project was manifest through an insistence on seeing indigenous identity as principally sectarian in character. To this end, the British sought to efface the category "Arab" as...