In August 1931 a number of Palestinian Arab populist groups convened a congress in the city of Nablus that subsequently called a general strike throughout the territory to oppose British policy that allowed Jewish settlements to be armed. The main nationalist body in Palestine, the Arab Executive Committee, ultimately issued the offi- cial call to strike on 23 August 1931 but the strike and demonstrations would not have attracted the attention that they did without the growthof Palestinian civil society and its general emphasis on a number of demands for political, civil and national rights of the Arab population. Populist leaders, grassroots forums and civic associations converged to play a major role in the political community of Palestine by this time. In the decade after the order-in-council, new ideas of citizenship and what it entailed as a political status emerged out of the context of both civil society and popular politics. At the centre of these new ideas, expressions and vocabularies of Palestinian Arab citizenship was the Arabic press. The growth and popularity of the press allowed it to communicate legal developments and link these developments to the changing notions and the political mobilisation of Palestinian Arab citizenship. In other words, by the early 1930s, the Arab press succeeded in disseminating a new language, vocabulary and ideology of citizenship rights and duties in the political, legal and social spheres in an increasingly easily understood fashion to a larger portion of the Arab population.

After the visit of Lord Balfour to Palestine in 1925, newspapers referred to the rights, duties and practices of Arab citizens with more frequency. However, it was the administration's plan to hold municipal elections in 1926 that galvanised the press to delving into the links between legislation and the changing nature of the political and civil rights, as opposed to the strictly legalistic aspects, of citizenship.