This paper examines memoirs from British officials and local Arab educators, colonial records, and secondary material on late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine and places them in dialogue with each other by engaging theories of translating modernity and examining continuities from the late Ottoman period into British colonial educational policies. I will analyze, first, the driving educational philosophies of British officials and Arab educators during the British Mandate (1922-1948) and, second, how the project of controlling education was entertained with the looming political question of the future of Palestine. Competing educational projects were a prominent aspect of broader debates over the future of former Ottoman colonies following World War One. The 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations, the legal document granting the British Empire tutelage of Palestine, asserted Ottoman failure to achieve modern standards of civilization. This framework also justified the British political presence by presenting the former Ottoman territories, such as Palestine, as inherently lagging in their progress towards civilization and called for British promotion of social and cultural development. Changes in education intended to fundamentally alter Palestinian society became central in terms of internal governance as well as a means to justify Britain’s presence to the international community. The literature from this period has overwhelmingly presented Arab resistance to British colonial rule as a nationalist movement dominated by the drive for Arab unity in the face of European imperialism and Zionist migration. Yet several factors in this period suggest that other forms of resistance to empire operated outside the nationalist narrative. For example, the spread of literacy and education among subaltern populations and the residual effects of Ottoman unity among elites present a diverse set of experiences of Mandatory Palestine, as well as different aims and outcomes for education. A frequent criticism of examining education reforms as a transformative process in the modern Middle East asserts that most education projects primarily, if not exclusively, targeted elites. Yet government officials and education reformers justified the use of precious funding and other resources for pedagogical projects on account of a shared belief that education would develop the general population—especially groups like women or rural populations— that they perceived as non-modern or regressive. This paper explores the ways in which such elite officials imagined their education projects as impacting the self-image and development of subaltern communities, as well as how individuals in these communities conceptualized the role of education in their lives.

The paper examines the grant and implementation of the concession to electrify the Sub-district of Jaffa in the 1920s. It argues that the coupling of technology and politics produced new mechanisms of power, which were crucial in determining the history of mandate-era Palestine and beyond. As the first commercial concession granted by the British Mandatory Government as well as the first attempt at electrification in Palestine, the Jaffa Concession was hugely important. There were profits to be made from electrification, at least according to some observers. But its signal importance stemmed from the fact, widely acknowledged at the time, that electrical power was easily convertible into – indeed, was inseparable from – political power. The history of electricity in Palestine has so far gone virtually unexamined. Contemporary scholarship seems largely to have forgotten that electrification was “the main economic pivot of the Zionist programme” in the interwar period, as one lone historian put it over fifteen years ago. By contrast, the importance of electrical power was not lost on the protagonists of 1920s Palestine. Electrification provided one of the earliest sites of contestation over Britain’s policy of promoting a Jewish National Home. The Zionists deliberately used their bid for electrification rights as a means of bolstering support for the overall scheme of the National Home. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Arabs, no less aware of the multiple forms of power bound up with electricity, campaigned against the Zionist initiative on those same terms. Using records culled from the Palestine Government, the press, and the Israel Electric Company Archives the present paper seeks to map the way material properties of specific technologies intervene in human history by shaping the physical world in specific ways, with the goal of showing that like electricity, political power is channeled through material structures, whose properties determine their flow.

This paper examines the British approach to institutional Islam in Palestine during the first decade of the Mandate. By looking at the establishment of Islamic institutions, such as the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC), the paper considers both the process used by the Christian power to transfer oversight of Islamic affairs to the local Muslim community and the logic that guided that transfer. Based upon British and Israeli archival materials, memoirs from colonial officials and leading Arab observers, British and Zionist intelligence reports, newspaper reports, and select records from the SMC, this article uses the SMC as a lens for understanding how British policy attempted to order and control Palestinian Islam. My work challenges conventional historical accounts that present the British decision to create Muslim-run institutions as either an abdication of Britain’s duty as a colonial power or as an act of appeasement towards the Muslim Arab population. I argue that the SMC was neither a product of colonial neglect or weakness, but was instead created through a conscious policy of dividing the Palestinian population along religious rather than ethnic or nationalist lines. This policy led to a reconfiguration of Ottoman ideas of communal representation that extended the millet concept to include the Muslim community and established the need for an autonomous Muslim institution run entirely by the local community, an unprecedented need that was soon fulfilled by the establishment of the SMC. The paper also discusses the novelty of the Islamic institutions created by the British in Palestine and considers whether the SMC represented a Palestinian Islam or even a Palestinian nationalist Islam. Also discussed are the ways in which the communitarian paradigm adopted in Palestine worked with or against alternative subaltern understandings of identity and organization.

Following World War I, photography and photojournalism were growing in British Mandate Palestine as were tensions between the immigrating and resident Jewish populations and the resident Arab populations. As increasingly violent riots began to break out, the nature of photographed representation in Palestine morphed to reflect the surrounding violence. This paper discusses the changes in the public presentation of Palestinian photographs to enhance the depiction of these violent encounters and their historical and political significance from the end of World War I through the Arab Riots of 1936. This historical time span provides sufficient examples of violent confrontations between the two groups vying for legitimacy while still entrenched in a colonial setting. After the end of World War I in 1918, the Palestinian population, the Jewish population, and the British military became increasingly engaged in altercations leading up to the Arab Riots of 1936. Cameras captured the portrayed reality before and after the rioting in Jerusalem and Jaffa, among other locales. With the escalation of these rifts, the photographs depicted more violence than ever before. These new interpretations of the violent events, however, reflect the contextual surroundings. This paper addresses the identities of the photographers behind the camera from the Palestinian and Arab communities and the distribution channels through which the photographs were reproduced. Furthermore, I analyze the depicted events and the relevance of the vantage point in contributing to the efficacy of reporting the event. The photographs transform from ones presenting merely scenes of mass public gathering to those showing individual acts and results of violence, such as those running from danger and corpses. In order to ascertain the progression of violent depiction, I use Arabic newspapers, such as Falastin, in addition to photograph collections and chronicled histories. Articles from the Arabic press provide the historical and sociocultural context for which the photographs were taken. The eighteen years I discuss are situated within an intermediate period of increasing confrontations between two defining moments of the conflict: the Balfour Declaration, which encourages a Jewish homeland, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which establishes Israel as a state. In analyzing the snapshots, this paper shows the normalizing ability of pictorial violence within the milieu of British Mandate Palestine. This paper highlights the role of popularized imagery of violence in anti-colonial movements as a new tool for political expression.