Abigail Jacobson

This article focuses on the National Liberation League (NLL), a Palestinian Arab communist movement which operated in Palestine between the years 1943-1948. The paper examines its short-lived history in light of the relevant three contexts in which it operated: the local Palestinian national context; the regional context of communist activity in the Middle East, and the external-internationalist context of the Soviet Union. The paper further discusses the activities of the NLL during the period of the 1948 War in Palestine, as well as in the first period of military rule, imposed on the Palestinian citizens of Israel. An analysis of the NLL during the late Mandatory period and the early years of the State of Israel allows a close examination of the ways by which concepts of identity, nationalism, class and ethnicity were conceptualized, debated and contested during times of a national conflict and anti-imperial struggle, and brings to the fore tensions between ideology and practice, nationalism and internationalism. The NLL offers an important opportunity to look into the complex matrix of communist movements that combine anti-imperial struggles with struggles for national liberation in the context of a national conflict, and to examine their dilemmas and what may seem as internal contradictions.

In this fascinating and well-researched book, Jacob Norris takes the readers to a journey into the history of the colonial development of Palestine in the first part of the 20 th Century. In a very original study, he looks at the history of Palestine between the years 1905-1948 not through the more common lens of the Zionist-Arab conflict, but rather sheds light on the way the British colonial development in the region, and their various modernization projects in Palestine, shaped the local history, as well as the power dynamics between Jews and Arabs. The book follows the ways by which Palestine was imagined by the British at this period as a " land of progress " , to use Norman Bentwich's words, a land of industrial developments and opportunities, but also shows how these opportunities were not open to all segments of the population. Indeed, as Norris clearly demonstrates throughout the book, it was mainly the Zionist movement and several Jewish entrepreneurs who benefitted from this British project of modernization and progress, which stood in many ways in the center of their policies towards Palestine. The book discusses the period 1905-1948, and by this joins other studies that challenge the " rupture " caused by World War I and the transition between Ottoman and British rule in the context of Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean in general. As Norris shows, the process of modernization, both Ottoman and British-led, and the tensions between local agents and colonial agents and their involvement in these projects, have started before the beginning of the British