Re-Remembering the Mandate: Historiographical Debates and Revisionist History in the Study of British Palestine

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, historians have been engaged in a critical reappraisal of the history of Israel and Palestine. Spurred on by the work of Israeli ‘New Historians’ and Palestinian revisionists, the field has seen a sustained challenge to the crude narratives of conventional nationalist historiography. This article investigates the impact of this reappraisal on the study of British rule in Palestine (1917–1948), arguing that while the work of the new historians has been useful in opening up debate about the nature of Zionist development, Israeli revisionist history has done a poor job of considering how Jews and Arabs lived and worked together under British rule. To get away from the distorted idea that Jews and Arabs developed in communities that were closed-off from each other, we need to adopt an approach that treats them as participants in the same narrative, a perspective adopted by historians who use a ‘relational history’ approach to understanding the Mandate. The paper concludes that the most promising development in the field has been the integration of new voices and primary sources into scholarship, but cautions that, in our quest to understand the lives of the colonized, we may be missing opportunities to reconsider the nature of British colonial rule.