Reporting the Insurgency: An Arabic Reportage on the 1936 Revolt in Palestine

Scholars have highlighted the relative dearth of literary journalism in the contemporary Arab Middle East. In the twentieth-century interwar period, though, a few works of narrative journalism were published in Palestine, when the British controlled the country under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate. This study explores “Rihla bayna al-jibal fi ma‘aqil al-tha’irin” (Journey across the mountains in the strongholds of the rebels)—an Arabic text that covers the Palestinian revolt of 1936. Initially serialized in a Jaffa newspaper toward the end of the insurgency and then collected in book form, the text was presented as a translation of the articles of a Western foreign correspondent. A close reading will reveal that it is rather the work of an Arab journalist, written for Palestinian readers, and that it meets the defining criteria of literary journalism, despite its concessions to fiction. Factors that would explain the scarcity of Arabic literary journalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will be used as terms of reference to investigate the circumstances of publication, the design, and the models of this Palestinian reportage. It will be argued that: the political sensitivity of the topic attracted readers and did not discourage advertisers from supporting the daily in which the reportage appeared; British press censorship contributed to shaping its design; and the format of literary reporting, borrowed from the U.S. and European press, was employed to convey an anticolonial message.