Between October 1947 and June 1948, debates raged in the United Nations about how to enact Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine. From these debates among the elite members of the United Nations, the idea of an international police force emerged as an essential solution for peacefully implementing the partition. However, voices from the Arab League made it clear that the deployment of such a force would be seen as existentially violent. In this research, I ask what we can learn about the nature of both the UN and violence in historical Palestine by considering the discourses emerging from both the permanent members of the Security Council and the Arab community. I use Fanon’s concepts of zones of being and non-being and Edward Said’s concept of the permission to narrate in conversation with over 125 articles from The New York Times between 1947 and 1948. Across these articles, members of the Arab League consistently voiced opposition to the international police force. Even so, the idea of such a force persisted within the walls of the United Nations, without any substantive engagement with Arab voices. Thus, the international police force dwelled in an inescapable paradox, where the very force that the United Nations conceptualized as an essential tool for peace was, in fact, considered existentially violent by Arabs. Through the marginalization of Arab stances, we see that Arab voices dwelled in the zone of non-being, without the permission to narrate their own existence. Elite members of the United Nations, on the other hand, existed in the zone of being, where their debates and discourses shaped reality on the ground. In contrast to the institution's supposed founding ideals, I engage with marginalized voices to argue that the United Nations was never an institution that offered equal agency to all represented entities, in turn shedding light on the fraught dynamics of the United Nations’s engagement with violence in Israel/ Palestine since the institution's founding. This research reveals how marginalized local voices provide new insights into conversations surrounding the development of the United Nations and issues of global policing.

This paper examines contentious politics and urban violence in Jerusalem during the early Mandate period. By tracing the routes and locations of political demonstrations, contentious religious processions and rituals, and riots during periods of communal violence, it reveals a shift in attention from the political to the religious sphere that took place in the 1920s. The new focus on the religious centered mainly on the area of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount with the Western Wall and was promoted by both Muslim and Zionist leadership. Clubs and associations initiated conflicts in the symbolic landscape of the city through local and international newspaper campaigns, political speeches, and demonstrations. While new secular holidays in the emerging Zionist and Arab-Palestinian nationalist calendars played an important role in focusing these tensions, the politicization of sacred space and religious festivals increasingly fostered conflict and often sparked riots. Focusing on how these conflicts were linked to sacred and secular urban space (and time), I interpret the conflicts in Jerusalem in the 1920s as manifestations of competing claims to belonging and ownership. I argue that British imperial policy was a major cause of the politicization of religion and the imbuing of sacred space with nationalist aspirations. British religious imaginaries of Jerusalem and their colonial practices of rule emphasized religious identities that allowed for the mobilization of masses during religious festivals, initiating a period of protests and riots in the 1920s that ultimately led to the nationalist and anticolonial violence of the 1930s and 40s.

Capital Punishment in Palestine during the British Mandate This paper examines capital punishment in Palestine during the British Mandate (1920-1948) and focuses on the transition from the judiciary to the chief executive authority, particularly examining the diverse factors that influenced the High Commissioner's decision regarding the confirmation or commutation of death sentences. We utilize a comprehensive dataset of more than 850 capital cases constructed from archival documents and contemporary newspapers. In total, we identified 289 death sentences: 129 were commuted to imprisonment sentences, while 160 were confirmed by the High Commissioner and subsequently carried out. Our analysis uncovers significant disparities in sentencing outcomes based on motives, gender, and ethnicity, offering insights into the intricate dynamics of capital punishment during this historical period. Capital punishment, a tool of colonial power that endures to this day, failed to reduce crime and, in historical perspective, evidences the way in which structures of power and domination worked in and through Ottoman and then British forms of imperialism. The uneven rationales behind commutation point to Britain’s use of ethnicity and gender as mitigating factors in determining punishment. Social control, protection of property, and potential anti-state actions captivated the British judicial system and acted as justifications for execution. Culture, understood through an orientalist gaze, acted as a mitigating variable that further constructed Arabs as savage, tribal, beyond the assimilative project of state-building. Attorney General, Norman Bentwich’s description of Arabs as “Illiterate, primitive” and as a group whose “anger turns quickly to a savage desire to kill,” (Bentwich 1934) show the way in which British imaginings of “the Arab” influenced criminal proceedings at all stages in ways that further rendered Arabs vulnerable to violent crime and mobilized cultural explanations that hardened underlying racism. In addition to exploring the tactics of colonial power and control, our study also illustrates how to address archival silences. Our use of primary sources as a basis for constructing data sets weaponizes colonial recordkeeping as a form of critique. Future research can build on this energy by conceiving of the archive as a social construct that can be actively built by all. To this end, collective efforts can be a necessary intervention in colonial structures of knowledge. References Bentwich, Norman. 1934. “The Palestine Criminal Code.” Howard Journal 4, no. 1:61.

The main historiographical accounts of World War II in North Africa focus on conventional warfare and inter-imperial rivalry, thus overlooking a significant rise of colonial violence behind the frontline throughout the region. My paper challenges this dominant perspective through an extensive study of British, Italian, and French diplomatic, military, and colonial sources on Tunisia and Libya between 1940 and 1943. The sources are used to compare the impact of the war on colonial relations in both French and Italian colonial possessions, and to highlight trans-imperial connections between them. The findings show that both in Libya and Tunisia the war exacerbated tensions between European settlers and Arabs, leading to open rebellion and intercommunal violence, particularly in the countryside. Between 1940 and 1943 both Rome and Vichy mobilized and repressed North Africans to serve war goals, reinforce imperial loyalty and defend racial hierarchies. At the same time, both Libyans and Tunisians exploited inter-imperial conflict and the temporary weakness of European powers to act on an anti-colonial agenda that pre-existed the war. They challenged colonial powers through low-intensity guerrilla, the targeting of agricultural settlements, and everyday resistance to settlers and colonial authorities. The ensuing repressive wave from settlers and colonial authorities entailed anti-guerrilla warfare, paramilitary violence, and collective punishment. As a result, the North African imperial space underwent a radical change: pressure from both anti-colonial resistance and inter-imperial conflict forced Fascist Italy out of Libya, while in French Tunisia racial resentment and political radicalization paved the way for decolonization. The contribution of this paper is threefold: it emphasizes the long-term, regional dimension of colonial violence and decolonization in North Africa; it revaluates the agency of North Africans behind the frontline; finally, it sheds light on the nature of the New World Order from a colonial standpoint.

Much of the historiography on the French Mandate in the Levant recognizes that Lebanon and its constitution were a French project. However, there is still much to untangle in the tumultuous story that culminated in the promulgation of the constitution of 1926. A closer look at the archives, and especially at the detailed documentation for an Organic Statute preceding the 1926 constitution, indicates that the standard narrative is less than perfectly accurate. Through the archives, I explore the unfolding of the Great Syrian Revolt in parallel to the drafting of the constitution. The crucial role of that revolution is often drowned in the story of the constitution as merely one additional factor in the cacophony of negotiations between Lebanese urban notables and French High administrators. The conventional narrative explains the granting of a constitution as one of the requirements imposed on the French Mandate by the League of Nations. While the French administration had until September 1926 to issue an ‘Organic statute’ for Lebanon and Syria, the concept of a constitution was never pronounced until the outburst of the Great Syrian Revolt. As the revolution unfolded in the territories of Greater Lebanon, the French authorities feared their own demise and the unmaking of the borders they had violently imposed a few years earlier. Accordingly, I show how the French re-adapted the ‘organic statute’ already in preparation at the Quai d’Orsay into a local constitution that would be promulgated in Beirut. My research demonstrates how and why the unfolding of the Great Syrian Revolt in Lebanon was the prime motive behind the granting of a constitution. More importantly, I add a new case study to the literature on Constitutionalism as Counterinsurgency -namely the introduction of constitutions as a means of forestalling, preventing, or suppressing revolutions. In this literature, where the cases of post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq loom large, we find their precedent in Lebanon under the French mandate.