Weldon C. Matthews. Confronting an Empire, Constructing a Nation: Arab Nationalists and Popular Politics in Mandate Palestine. New York: I. B. Tauris. 2006. Pp. 342. £59.50

In her review of Yehoshua Porath's seminal book, The Emergence of the Arab Palestinian National Movement, 1918–1929 (1974) in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Elizabeth Monroe noted: “In general, the story he tells is not new. We all know that ‘as Zionism gathered momentum so did the opposition to it,’ that the Palestine Arabs were at the time run by notables, and that ‘the source of this aristocracy's authority was traditional and not democratic.’” Three and a half decades later the bookshelf dedicated to the history of Palestine is far heavier, and producing an original book on the Mandate period has become a much more difficult task.

Weldon C. Matthews, well aware of the impressive literature on Palestinian history, has made extensive use of it and of the Arab press and memoirs, as well as of Zionist and...