“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” the American novelist William Faulkner famously wrote.1 Oren Kessler, in his superb book, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt andd the Roots of the Middle East Conflict, illustrates Faulkner’s timeless observation. “Palestinians, despairing over their thwarted national hopes, wage acts of protest, boycott, sabotage, and violence,” Kessler writes.
The 1936 to 1939 Arab Rebellion, also known as al-Thawra al-Arabiya al-Kubra, the Great Arab Revolt, to Palestine’s Arabs, is mostly forgotten. There are precious few treatments that have been published in English specifically devoted to this seminal event. Until Y. Porath’s The Palestinian Arab National Movement 1929–1939: From Riots to Rebellion appeared in 1977 as part of a magisterial two-volume treatment of Palestinian Arab nationalism during the time of Britain’s rule over Palestine,2 only John Marlowe’s journalistic account of the uprising, published three decades earlier, Rebellion In Palestine,...
