This paper utilizes French and British intelligence reports, as well as Arabic memoirs and journals, to shed light on transnational humanitarian relief efforts for the exiled rebels of the Syrian Revolt of 1925. Banished to the deserts of Transjordan all throughout the 1930s, "The Children of the Desert" was the name given to this charitable campaign. Organized in Syria and Iraq, the campaign nevertheless received donations from Syrian émigrés in Europe, the United States, Central and South America, as well as Africa. French and British mandate authorities monitored the activities of these "former insurgents," attempting to keep track of the money, supplies, and people reaching them. In a way, their movements and the attention they garnered represented forms of subversion, even as the rebellion had been quelled. Transnational aid, I argue, acted as a force in itself, which needed to be monitored and countered. Furthermore, in considering the makeup of this relief effort, this paper also remarks upon the dissolution of the Syro-Palestinian Congress--the main organization that assisted the rebels from abroad in Cairo, Jerusalem and Geneva from 1925-1927. Along the lines suggested by Philip Khoury, this paper argues that the efforts of the campaign reveal a dissonance between an old guard of Syrian leadership as exemplified by the Syro-Palestinian Committee, and the new populism of those behind the “Children of the Desert” campaign.

The paper centers on the Palestinian Arab town of Nablus, and the fraught debates over electrification that took place there in the years preceding the Great Arab Revolt, 1936-9. The Zionist-run and operated Palestine Electric Corporation held a monopolistic concession for the electrification of Palestine. As a result, the Palestinian community came to view electrification as the handmaiden of Zionist conquest. “If Rutenberg electricity lights the city of Nablus and Tulkarem,” one Nabulsi writer warned in 1932, referring to the general manager of the PEC, “one can say that Rutenberg and his works have conquered the land.” That electricity was only available through a Zionist company presented the Palestinian community with a dilemma. Besides the imperative to reject Zionism and British colonial rule, many Palestinians also aspired to “be modern," which to most included access to electrical power and light. As this paper will show, using previously unused sources from the Israel Electric Corp. Archives and elsewhere, the struggle over electrification in Nablus – within the town and between the town and the PEC – both reflected and remade the political fault lines of the Palestinian community in ways that would bear heavily on the Arab Revolt of the late ‘30s and beyond.

This paper argues that teachers employed by the governments of Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan both subverted and bolstered their governments throughout the rebellions of the interwar period. After the First World War, the League of Nations touted government schooling as both a key means by which Mandate inhabitants were to become modern, and a marker of whether or not they had done so. Parents hoped government schooling would help their children achieve government employment, which promised a steady paycheck and social mobility. However, British colonial officials feared that an excess of education might produce rebellious, and anti-British, nationalists; British policies thus limited government schooling during the Mandate period. The subsequent dearth of educated personnel had two paradoxical effects during the violent rebellions that took place across the region during the 1930s. Firstly, educators could criticize the policies of the states that employed them, in print and in demonstrations, without fear of permanent dismissal, as they could not be easily replaced. Secondly, educators were also dependent on their governments for their livelihoods; they thus preferred to work within the government rather than to join the segments of the population working towards their governments’ violent overthrow. Histories, newspaper articles, memoirs and popular accounts have lionized these teachers as nationalist heroes. Educators appear as the mouthpieces of violent, peasant or popular revolutionary uprisings rather than part of the often-maligned elite negotiations. Schools themselves are repeatedly described as “hotbeds of nationalism.” In these narratives, educators preach to legions of angry young men and women, inspiring them with “the spirit of nationalism” and “resistance to imperialism”, thereby inciting and participating in anti-colonial rebellions. Yet, simplistic contrasts between elite and peasant elide the complex experience of the growing number of individuals who fell between these categories, their role as government-subsidized nationalists, and the nature of the nationalisms they espoused. Moreover, these teachers, and those they educated more generally, seldom participated in the armed uprisings that swept the region. Drawing upon hundreds of personnel files, memoirs, textbooks, alumni records, official statistics and publications from archives in the United States, United Kingdom, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, this paper develops narratives of anti-imperial rebellions beyond the simple binary of nationalist resistance vs. collaboration. It shows how an influential interest group managed to protest against their governments, while remaining within government service.

The introduction of the portable Kodak camera revolutionized the way Arab publics viewed themselves. It was likely for this reason that British colonial authorities maintained strict regulation against the purchasing and operating of the photogravure machine necessary for local publishers to reprint the images. Those who owned the capacity were limited by strict censorship code prohibiting, among other things, representation of public demonstrations. Drawing on research conducted, in part, for a recent book--The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz (1952-1967)--this paper looks at the evolution of a powerful political voice from the 1930s, through the lens of his photography. Trained as a lawyer in Istanbul, Kamil al-Jadriji would return to Iraq in the early 1920s, becoming, in 1933, editor of the country’s main oppositional newspaper, al-Ahali. In 1947, he helped found the Iraqi National Democratic Party, which spearheaded a major push for independence in 1952, half a decade before the military Coup of Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim. Although his photography (assembled by the Royal Photographic Society of Bath) never appeared in al-Ahali, the aesthetic and subject matter of his images delineated a yet more compelling and urgent dimension to the already prescient language of his political doctrine. As I discuss here, al-Jadriji’s Kodak images remain among the oldest available by a local photographer in the Middle East. They exist today as an invaluable index of the struggle for collective identity in Iraq and of a social revolution deferred.

This paper concerns the Palestinian Great Revolt of 1936–39, and draws on British and Zionist archival materials. It observes that the central organizing principle of the rebellion was the British criminological framing of the rebels. Arab militants, activists, and spokespersons adopted, rather than rejected, two central premises of the British representation of the insurgency: namely, that violence was justified when directed against criminals, and that a community's organizing itself into a national state rendered it competent to designate individuals as criminals. In agreeing to these discursive terms, the Arabs and the British reflected the prevalent understanding of nationalism as coded in international law and otherwise attested to in the international community of the interwar years. They thus committed themselves to demonstrating to the international community––theatrically, rhetorically, and propagandistically––their own national and the other's criminal credentials. The argument of this paper is that scholars' appreciation of this fact will enable them to approach the colonial archive from this period with a deconstructive agenda that, in the case of the revolt, has brought important new information to light.