Rashid Khalidi has written poignantly that under the British Mandate the Palestinian national movement was crippled by its lack of purchase on state institutions. Without denying his claim, this paper nonetheless challenges this view by looking at the rebel courts established during Palestine's Great Revolt (1936-39). In older scholarship the revolutionary courts were largely seen as showpieces where vengeance was meted out to suspected collaborators or familial opponents of rebel band leaders. In recent years some accounts have credited the courts with greater scope, and offered some detail on their operation and the regard given them by the population. This paper proposes to further augment understanding of the rebel courts, and with them the Great Revolt more broadly, by approaching the courts as an aspect of a larger process of state formation from below, while supplementing existing accounts of their operations. Using Arabic memoirs and newspapers and Zionist and British intelligence as sources, its aim is to illuminate the efforts during the revolt of popular and peasant-based forces to reconstitute and reshape their communities and society. The revolutionary courts were part of a larger counter-state apparatus that rebel bands constructed in the villages and countryside of Palestine. The insurgents, composed largely of rurally-based, peasant bands, not only attacked British and Zionist interests, but they built their own proto-state apparatus, including intelligence organs and local administration as well as the courts, while levying taxes and applying conscription. At its apex in 1938 the revolt briefly threatened British Mandatory rule. The Palestinian insurgents' appeal and the successes they achieved during 1938 were not solely the fruits of growing military prowess. The erection of rebel institutions represented and effected the spread of an insurgent sovereignty predicated on invalidating, voiding, and replacing the sovereign powers and capabilities of the colonial state. The drive towards creating an indigenous popular sovereignty built on growing patterns of assertiveness and activism by non-elites. Throughout much of the revolt 'youth' and peasants prevailed in various fashions upon their social superiors, ultimately bringing about the fleeting rise of what Ted Swedenburg has termed 'the peasant agenda': a loose program of radical social reform targeting debt, money-lending, and even rent. In examining the rebel courts, this paper intends to investigate the inter-relations between anti-colonial insurrection, state formation from below, the rise of popular power in the nationalist movement, and agendas of social reform and communal reconstitution.