Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine

During his research on land ownership in modern Palestine and Jordan, this reviewer once interviewed a former Jordanian land officer who opined that Christians had not been as vigilant about defending the Palestinian nationalist cause during the period of the British Mandate in Palestine, and it was in part this failure that led them to sell land to Jews and thus pave the way for the Palestinian Nakba, or ‘Disaster’, of 1948. On the other hand, archival documents show that Zionist officials sometimes believed that Palestine’s Christian Arabs were the most intractable foes their movement faced. Both stories reveal the varied and sometimes contradictory images people held about Christian Palestinians’ identity vis-à-vis the great issues of the day in Mandate Palestine. What were the varying responses of Palestine’s Christian Arabs to the nationalist struggle against the British and the Zionists, and how did that struggle in turn affect them as a whole and as the discreet sects into which they were divided

Ancient history · Communalism · Mandate · Mandatory Palestine · Nationalism · Officer · Palestine · Political science · Zionism · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Middle East Politics and Society · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious Studies