Driving down Route One from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, you pass through a gauntlet of pine-clad gorges, empty but for a few gutted armored cars left by the roadside as memorials to those fallen in the country’s War of Independence. Where the coastal plain finally banks into view, there rises on either side of the road a last outcrop of wooded foothills, known as the Latrun salient. Though nothing indicates that these hills might be different from those that lurched past minutes earlier, this terrain is still demarcated on some maps as No-Man’s Land, testimony to a time when another country once began here, when one could have hazarded houses amid these slopes, heard laughter trickle down through the midday haze. Today Latrun’s new-growth forest echoes only with the banter of Israeli weekend barbecues and the faint rumble of traffic. Yet as you gather speed down the highway, already sighting the first skyscrapers of Tel Aviv on the horizon, you can make out on the other side of the road a looming relic of the old frontier.

On the last hill before the plains stands a fortress, lean, pockmarked by bullet holes, and surrounded by the looted detritus of war—decommissioned tanks, armored personnel carriers, old howitzers. The collection belongs to the Armored Corps Museum that is today housed here. Fronted by a rest stop and gas station which stocks hot dogs and camping gear for people primarily pressing on to elsewhere, the site is for parts of the year a relatively overlooked way station on the national tourist trail. On the day of my first visit, only a dozen people were wandering around the ramparts, some clambering over the tanks, posing for photographs on their turrets, others already making their way out. Yet for those who might linger here, there are sweeping views of vacated agro-industrial pastorals emptying into Israel’s heartland, and a guidelet’s invitation to reimagine the wars, ancient and modern, that have been fought over the land.

On an exterior wall flanking the entrance to the Latrun fortress is an informational glass plaque, which relates that the structure was built “as a lesson of the 1936–1939 riots” but is otherwise curiously silent about those events, what happened then, or why. Indeed, the “riots” of 1936–1939 rarely figure in the shorthand summations of the history that has shaped this land. Israelis know those years merely as a paroxysm of inchoate violence, far removed in time and overtaken by later wars and rebellions, among which they will foremost remember their own. In such ways, for some people, this would forever be the uprising that wasn’t.

Long after the spring of 1936, when news of a general strike and unrest in Palestine began to creep into the London headlines, government correspondences would speak interminably of events forever on the brink—of growing disturbances, ambushes on colonial troops, a complete absence of rule of law—yet hesitate to put a name to what was happening. General Bernard Montgomery, who was sent to suppress the “riots” before he won fame as Rommel’s nemesis in the North African desert campaigns of the Second World War, famously dismissed the main protagonists as “bandits.” Throughout, the government blamed the unrest on excitable elements within the native population, at odds with its best own interests. At home as well as abroad, newspapers absorbed interchangeable tales of rampant criminality, religious fanaticism, and still more nefarious influences. “Italian Propaganda Campaign Renewed—Thought to Blame for Most Trouble,” declared a New York Times headline in 1937, divining a new fascism at work in the East. But while the Axis powers were happy to publicize Britain’s troubles in the region, the Times, not for the last time, had it wrong.

In 1917, the British government had published a document known as the Balfour Declaration, which promised the distant land of Palestine as a national home for the Zionist movement. Its adherents, a mélange of European utopians, ideologues, and refugees from the pale of settlement, had been arriving over the preceding decades—at first establishing plantation-model estates with land acquired from semi-feudal landholders, later buying smaller parcels of land, or appropriating communal village and urban lands with governmental connivance, and, with growing frequency, evicting those peasants who worked it. By the end of the 1930s, an estimated 120,000 Palestinians had been made landless. Around them, clusters of new hard-angle houses were springing up, and for a growing number of Arabs, even cursorily familiar with the news from French Algeria, the British East Africa Protectorate, or Rhodesia, there was no mistaking the writing on those walls.

For years there had been demonstrations and violence, commissions of inquiry, premonitions of revolt. Once it finally erupted, it grew into the most concerted challenge to imperial authority since the Boer War. Following the expiration of a nationwide strike, bands of rebels began sealing off their warren-like casbahs, overrunning police stations, and harassing the country’s European colonies. In one year alone, the authorities logged a thousand attacks on police and military positions and six hundred on Jewish settlements. Over the coming years, government forces briefly deserted the major towns of Jaffa, Hebron, Jericho, Beersheba, and even the Old City of Jerusalem. As the term “revolt” began creeping into press coverage, the government acknowledged that it had lost control of much of the country.

As related by historian Tom Segev in his book One Palestine: Complete, the 25,000 soldiers who began arriving in Palestine in 1937 were the largest expeditionary force dispatched by Her Majesty’s government since the First World War, when it first seized this corner of the Levant. It took three years to quash the riots. Periodically, some news of the means by which this was accomplished would make it into the British press, even spark occasional questioning by a concerned Labour MP. As later evidence would show, more than four thousand Palestinians were killed—many times the number lost by the British government and the Jewish settler community. Yet it was stories of rebel outrages, such as the killing of nineteen settlers near Tiberias, among them eleven children, that dominated the headlines that year. Among the things glossed over by this coverage was the violence being done not only to the native inhabitants of Palestine, but also to the physical space of the country. For while the government had little trouble standing its ground in its distant battle with terrorists and brigands, those who bore the brunt of this resolve now found that same terrain warping around them, then settling into new, confounding patterns.

One autumn over seventy years later, as I was driving along a fenced settler highway in the West Bank, this impression of a world torn and rearranged, again came back to me. When the seasons shift in the country, warm, sea-soaked air rolls up from the coast after sunset and swathes the highlands in dense, billowing fog. It was a night like that, wrapped in a white void, when my car suddenly coughed and then chugged to a halt on the embankment, hopelessly stranded. I sat there until morning, watching mist swirling beyond the roadside wire, occasionally nodding off. Sometimes a rent would open in the void, and, in one such moment, two opposing landscapes flickered into view. The highway, I now realized, skirted the edge of a deep gorge. Through my windshield, I could make out severed trails on its terraced slope—a world of lost passages that seemed set apart from the highway not only by the wire fence but by time itself. In that moment, a dark structure emerged in my rearview, looming over the highway, wrapped in a halo of white searchlight. A row of concrete slabs. A single watchtower. It was a prison camp. Then the mist closed in again.

Much of my reconstruction of the years of the Revolt was done not in the Middle East but in the basement archive of an Oxford college during an otherwise sunny English summer. Its office was a small room with two desks, one for researchers, the other occupied by a young, helpful librarian, who would periodically disappear into the adjoining stacks to retrieve cartons of sundry Imperial documents, news clippings, photographs. As the sound of outside traffic murmured in the room’s high-set casement, I searched for what these documents could say about those years, but also what their statistics could only darkly hint at—the violence being done to Palestine’s native inhabitants and to the physical space of their country.

The story begins in 1873, when Joseph Glidden, an American farmer, took out the first US patent for a novel form of cattle control. Originally manufactured by the Barb Wire Company of DeKalb, Illinois, his invention proved an affordable means of both carving space and fixing bodies in place—and, as such, became a stupendous export success. Over the first two decades of the twentieth century, British infantry would subdue South Africa’s Boer frontier by blanketing the High Veldt in coiled barbed wire, known as concertina, infamously culminating in 1920 in the concentration camps that Britain eventually erected there—the first of the modern era. Around this time Italian armored cars were also chasing Omar al-Mukhtar’s mounted rebels through the Libyan hinterlands, leaving behind camp after camp of corralled, starved Bedouin. These scenes were reprised during Britain’s suppression of the 1920 Iraqi revolt, a campaign that made such extensive use of Glidden’s invention that British veterans of the campaign would for years thereafter recall rural Mesopotamia as a landscape swathed in barbed wire.

In 1936 this experience was brought to bear on Palestine. Soon after the outbreak of armed resistance, the government moved to quarantine urban centers of revolt and establish some modicum of control over the country’s inaccessible highlands. Britain’s men on the ground perennially complained that many of the villages from which insurgents were drawn, and in which they often took shelter, were places that even after nearly two decades of British rule had yet to set sight on an English soldier. Affording them this privilege would require that landscapes be pried apart and then stitched together within a new arrangement. In order to dislodge rebels from the narrow alleyways of the Arab coastal city of Jaffa and open the city to imperial troops, some eight hundred houses in the heart of the city were Haussmannized as part of an “urban regeneration campaign.” More than two thousand people were left homeless, in what was to prove a harbinger of a punitive house-demolition policy subsequently rolled out across the countryside, and which would sometimes entail the outright demolition of those communities deemed insufficiently cooperative with the government.^*

Rolling out the concertina was an indispensable part of this pedagogy of violence, as exemplified by population screening operations that became a staple of the government’s rural repression campaign. Roaming platoons of soldiers and police began cordoning off villages, rounding up their inhabitants—sometimes by the thousands—in barbed-wire “cages” erected on the villages’ outskirts, before finally transferring suspected insurgents into a sprawling archipelago of long-term internment camps.

That new native demographic known as “likely suspects,” as well as the purgatories into which it was herded, were products of emergency legislation printed into force by the Mandate administration. The 1937 Palestine Martial Law, derived from legalisms initially pressed into service during the 1921 Irish War of Independence, gave the local British High Commissioner effective power “to take any action he wished,” in order to reinstitute control. Despite its title, however, the legislation limned a precarious line between colonial self-image and reality, constituting not an outright declaration of martial law—and with it the admission that government had broken down—but rather the normalization of an indefinite state of exception. The modern security state had arrived in Palestine.

In the space that it made, a new tracery of power now became discernible. Its wharf was in part bureaucratic—composed of new personal IDs, travel permits, and village registers with which the government sought to fix the local population—and in part physical, strung together from sudden roadblocks, checkpoints, and islands of barbed wire that rapidly metastasized along new roads now built to channel armored cars and soldiers into the country’s rural interior.

As I scrolled through the photographs, internal intelligence memoranda, and news clippings that fill the Oxford archive, these interlocking grids of control flickered in and out of view—sometimes incomplete, often only partially effective, yet indelibly premonitory. At the center of that vision stood the colonial detainment camps, whose total population by the peak of the rebellion had swelled to some ten thousand, as related by Segev in his book. At various times, each would turn into a small concertina township. Many became so overcrowded that older detainees had to be rotated out to make space for new ones. By that very sprawling fact, however, the form of the camp also grew increasingly diffuse, at once merging with the barbed cordon perimeters that were springing up around surrounding towns and villages, and pushing toward a larger possibility.

Near the end of my time in my Oxford basement, I came upon a government handbook published after the suppression of the Revolt, entitled Combined Military and Police Action. In it was a set of instructional drawings, depicting a village encircled by a sweep-and-arrest operation. Setting the image of the camp against these sketches briefly induced a feeling of vertigo, as the contours of the former began to blur into the latter; the camp becoming ever more a village, the village ever more a camp. The effect was only belatedly punctuated by the observation that in both of these schemata, in all their elaborate superimposition of structure, the natives themselves were curiously difficult to make out. As if they had become invisible.