Palestine up in Arms: Contentious Politics and the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939

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Summary (no more than 500 words) From Zimbabwe to Algeria, the 20th century witnessed an outpouring of revolutionary movements across the Third World attempting to assert their national claims to statehood in the face of crumbling European empires. Yet, what separates nationalist movements that succeed from those that fail? How important are localised dynamics between claimants in the study of contentious episodes like revolutions? Using the case study of the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in the British Mandate of Palestine, I attempt to examine the failure of revolutionary movements in yielding significant political advances for their respective anticolonial nationalist causes. Building upon studies of contentious politics that highlight the dynamic and relational nature of episodes of contention, such as revolution, I seek to analyse the processual and situational mechanisms at play in failed "revolutionary situations", such as the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt. I attempt to consider the relationship between the various claimants - elites, rural peasantry, urban workers, as well as the British and Zionists - as dialogic and ever-evolving. By doing so, I seek to examine how repression and conciliation pattern mobilisation and relationships between claimants during contentious episodes, ultimately asserting that overwhelming repression on its own is unable to account for the failure of revolutionary nationalist movements. Instead, for repression to neuter such movements, it must act at the relational level and disturb existing or developing cracks between claimants, for example by stoking intra-elite conflict or turning elites into oppositional targets for other social groups. The Palestine-Israel conflict remains an ever-present political fixture on both the regional and global stages. The protests and violence of May 2021 across Israel and the Occupied Territories, termed the Unity Intifada, have arguably shifted the political status quo within the nexus of the Palestine-Israel conflict. When combined with the recent election of the most right-wing government in Israeli history, comprising members of the radical Kahanist movement, the stage appears set for a Third Intifada. My intended project provides a valuable quantitative historical analysis of the first major incidence of nationalist Palestinian collective action. In so doing, this project contributes to the nascent, but growing, field of historical political economy, which seeks to explore theoretical conjectures in a historically situated manner. By analysing this historically and symbolically significant case of Palestinian collective action, my proposal expands our understanding of the effects of variable levels of repression upon mobilisation and relationships between contentious actors.