Читать книгу The Crime of Nationalism - Matthew Kraig Kelly - Страница 10

ONE

British Causal Primacy and the Origins of the Palestinian Great Revolt

19 APRIL 1936 WAS A SUNDAY, the first day of the Jewish week. Jewish and Arab merchants in Palestine began raising the metal shutters on their shops early that morning, as was their habit. Although tension between the two communities had been escalating over the preceding days, weeks, and months, it did little to slow the routine of their commercial interactions in the Old City of Jerusalem, where Jewish and Arab quarters were nestled together and the locals knew each other by name. Pinhas Zuckerman was therefore likely familiar with the Arab who remarked to another customer in his shop that morning, “It has begun. You [Jews] already killed two Arabs.”¹ The man referred to a double-homicide of two days prior in Petah Tikvah. At the same moment, a curiously similar story was spreading out west, in Jaffa, according to which Jews in neighboring Tel Aviv had murdered two Arabs. Unlike the Petah Tikvah story, however, this one was false.

Because the ordinary person was in no position to verify such gossip, the emotional climate into which it drifted often determined whether it withered on the vine or “blossomed” into violence. Politically hot periods virtually yearned for the spark of an ominous rumor. Seven years earlier, for example, when a sensational report of rioting in Jerusalem reached Jaffa, Arab mobs there raped, tortured and hacked to death members of the Jewish community.² The atmosphere was similarly tense in the days before 19 April 1936. On 18 April, an Arab political activist noted in his diary that “various rumors” about Jewish violence were “spreading like wildfire,” producing “outrage” among Palestine’s Arabs.³ At such times, gruesome episodes like those of 1929 lingered in local Jewish memory. Beneath the shaloms and salams Jews daily exchanged with their Arab neighbors, there stirred the unsettling awareness that such greetings of “peace” were prayers, not promises.

Arabs, meanwhile, harbored their own anxieties. A few days before the portentous tidings overheard in Zuckerman’s store, some Arab highwaymen preying on passengers between Nablus and Tulkarm gunned down three Jews.⁴ Jews retaliated the next day against Arabs in Tel Aviv and were presumed (correctly) by British authorities to be responsible for the Petah Tikvah homicides twenty-four hours later.⁵ On the latter day, 17 April, some of the mourners departing the funeral of a victim of the Arab highwaymen proceeded from Tel Aviv towards Jaffa “with unlawful intent,” according to the written testimony of the city’s assistant superintendent of police.⁶ When the mourners reached Jaffa, British police turned them away with baton charges. Back in Tel Aviv, a throng of Jews outside the Cinema Ophir battered an Arab gharry-driver named ʿAbd al-Rashid Hasan, and several others trashed the shop of Ibrahim ʿAli Hatrieh.⁷ A cascade of violence ensued. According to a British report, on that single day, “Cases of assault [against Arabs] took place in Herzl Street, ha-Yarkon Street, Allenby Road near the General Post Office, outside the Cinema Moghraby and at the seashore bus terminus.”⁸

Despite these attacks, police station diaries recorded no Arab reprisals against Jews in Jaffa on either the 17th or the following day.⁹ But by Sunday, 19 April, Arabs in Jaffa were prepared to believe the worst upon hearing the rumor begun early that morning regarding their two countrymen.¹⁰ And having gathered for a 9 A.M. parade only to have the municipal authorities deny their permit request, they were already out in force (and frustrated) when the story of the murders started spreading. Shortly after 10 A.M., Arabs throughout the city began harassing Jews, who fled in panic to the bus station opposite the district police headquarters, whence they escaped on buses to Tel Aviv. A Jewish factory owner in the city shuttered his building as Arabs gathered outside. Several Jews emerged from the crowd, pleading with him for protection. One woman uttered fearfully, “I am a widow!”¹¹ In the teeming town square, a party of Arabs circulating among the mob set upon a Jew with knives, leaving his gored corpse within a hundred yards of the police station. Two and a half miles across town, a second group of Arabs bludgeoned a Jew to death in the vicinity of the Hasan Bey mosque.¹² Jewish counterattacks in Tel Aviv soon followed, and as vehicles carrying wounded Arabs pulled into the Manshiya quarter of Jaffa, Arab protestors hurled stones at the police, who in turn charged at them with batons.¹³ By the following day, fourteen Jews and two Arabs lay lifeless in their families’ arms.¹⁴ Although no one knew it, the Palestinian Great Revolt had begun.

FIGURE 1. A Jewish family departing a “danger zone” in the Jaffa-Tel Aviv area, summer 1936. (Library of Congress)

BACKGROUND OF THE REBELLION

Certain questions press upon us in considering these and subsequent events. The most obvious concerns the larger context in which they transpired. In that regard, two developments in particular—both of which transformed Jewish and Arab politics in 1930s Palestine—require our attention. The first development pertained to the Zionist labor movement, which by the early 1930s constituted the institutional heart of the Jewish community in Palestine (henceforth: the Yishuv) in the form of the Jewish Agency and its filiations.¹⁵ This movement’s strategy of forging an Arab-Jewish workers’ alliance so as to divide Arab proletarians against their effendi betters fizzled out in the 1930s. The sobering fact, Zionist leaders realized, was that class loyalty was no match for national loyalty among the Arabs.¹⁶ As if relations between the two communities were not sufficiently strained, Arab and Jewish laborers would now compete rather than cooperate.

The second development concerned the efficacy of Arab nonviolent protest against the ongoing British implementation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Many in the mandate believed that the “national home” His Majesty had famously pledged to prop up in Palestine was a nation-state in all but name. And while Jews anticipated it with joy, Arabs did so with dread. By the 1930s, more than a decade of peaceful Arab attempts to bring down Balfour had achieved nothing. The delegations to Britain, the protests in Palestine, the conferences across the region—all diplomatic routes reached a dead end in London.¹⁷ When not ignoring Arab spokespersons, British officials would indulge them in dialogue, promise to consider their concerns carefully, and then carry on as before. On occasions when Arab protest veered into violence, the British would dispatch commissions of inquiry to Palestine. None of the commissions’ recommendations included reneging on the Balfour Declaration, however, and any that implied Balfour’s repudiation London effectively disregarded.¹⁸ Noncooperation and nonviolent demonstrations proved equally unavailing, a circumstance so acidic to Arab political organizing that between 1923—when the British mandate for Palestine became official—and 1928, it ground to a virtual halt.¹⁹ Nonviolence was futile, and by the 1930s, everyone knew it.

Of course, violence, too, had proven useless. Neither the Nebi Musa disturbances of April 1920 nor the Jaffa upheavals of May 1921 nor the Wailing Wall riots of August 1929 had produced any change in British policy in Palestine. But these local failings were belied by developments in the broader region, where Arab “lawlessness” in Egypt and Iraq (and in the French mandate for Syria) had extracted concessions from the governments of those territories.²⁰ The British, it seemed obvious, only understood force. The Arab consensus on this point, coupled with the mainstream Zionist abandonment of a Jewish-Arab labor alliance, rendered incidents such as those in Jaffa and Tel Aviv in April 1936 all but inevitable. It also ensured that these incidents would be construed quite differently by Jews, Arabs, and Britons.

And thus arises a second question regarding the debacle of April 1936 and after: whose fault was it? The answer to that question was everywhere the same: the criminals’. The Jews and the British bestowed that appellation upon the Arabs, who repaid both in the same coin. The accusation shaped out two entities: the lawless and, negatively, the lawful. To name the criminal was to name the chaotic, the unruly, the uncivilized, and thereby tacitly to designate not merely a political order, but order itself: the political transmogrified into the metaphysical. The revolt forced the question of who had the right to use force. To answer this question was to divide politics into order and chaos, and in more earthly terms, the licit and the illicit. This was the crimino-national game played by all.

Two circumstances occasioned it. First, by the 1930s, British intelligence regarding Arab political activities had become anemic. The 1929 Wailing Wall riots exposed the incompetence of the two British intelligence agencies responsible for Palestine: the “I” section of the Royal Air Force (RAF) Headquarters and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Palestine police. In the riots’ aftermath, the inspector-general of police in Ceylon, Herbert Dowbiggin, arrived in Palestine to review police procedures and recommend changes in the police force.²¹ His report of April 1930 spotlighted the inability of the CID to acquire reliable information on the activities of Arab “agitators.”²² Dowbiggin’s reforms, however, proved no remedy.²³ Half a decade later, the former commissioner of police in Calcutta, Sir Charles Tegart, and the former head of the security service in India, Sir David Petrie, wrote in another report that the Palestine CID had once again “failed in its primary function, the collection of intelligence regarding, and the investigation of, terrorist crime.”²⁴ As important, by the time of the revolt, the mandatory lacked a functional counterespionage apparatus. In consequence, Arab rebels thoroughly penetrated British intelligence (see chapter four).²⁵

This breakdown of British intelligence in Palestine brought about a second circumstance. Without reliable information on Arab political life, the British could do little to manage Arab political expression but smother it beneath a blanket of draconian laws. Thus did a creeping criminalization of Palestinian nationalism set in. Crime would feature in the revolt as surely as it had in prior outbreaks of violence in Palestine. By the 1930s, however, the British application of the criminal label to Arab protest was becoming conspicuously expansive. This was most apparent when Arab protests threatened the stability of the political order in the mandate. The criminal law ordinance that the British put in place after the 1929 Wailing Wall riots, for example, not only criminalized disparagement of the British flag but also broadened state powers of collective punishment. The government proclaimed these measures in the name of “public order,” where the public in question did not recognize the legitimacy of the mandate.²⁶ Likewise, the December 1933 Prevention of Crime ordinance—enacted after rioting late that year—permitted district commissioners in Palestine to take preemptive legal action against suspected troublemakers based solely on the “known characters” of the individuals in question. The accused were allowed no legal appeal to this charge.²⁷ While this increase in repression ostensibly served as a stopgap for the lack of actionable intelligence that might have enabled the British to preempt violent episodes, it actually exacerbated the original problem by further alienating the Arab population from the mandatory.

The British had sought to mitigate such alienation early on by modernizing the Palestinian landscape, a project that was intended to benefit both Arabs and Jews. London gridded the country in railroads, highways and telephone lines, for example, and invested heavily in Arab schools and hospitals.²⁸ Arab access to the highest echelons of power in Jerusalem and London was, moreover, unprecedented in the history of British imperial governance.²⁹ But it did not compare to that of the Yishuv. As Gideon Biger observes, British and Jewish development of Palestine amounted to a “joint structure,” whereby the British would “lay the infrastructure” and the Jews “depend on it for the success of their settlement endeavours.”³⁰

Palestinian Arabs were acutely aware of this “joint structure,” and of the insidious imperialist ideology that it manifested. As Fredrik Meiton and Jacob Norris have recently detailed, the self-consciously “constructive imperialism” London brought to bear in its Palestine mandate centered, in Meiton’s words, on “the material foundation of modern society: waterways, roads, bridges, ports and airports, railway lines and electric grids.”³¹ And, as Norris notes, the primary architects of the Balfour Declaration “all subscribed to [the] vision of European Jews acting as the drivers of colonial development in Palestine.”³² It was just this ideological project that enabled the British to sustain the conceit that a Jewish state in Palestine would uplift the country’s Arab inhabitants even as it buried their national aspirations.³³

The British believed that the key to Arab Palestinian quiescence was economic growth, and that the key to economic growth was the Yishuv. Mandate officials thus blithely excluded Palestine’s Arabs from basic decisions regarding the country’s future, even as they conferred with the Zionists about the same matters. As Naomi Shepherd observes of Arthur Wauchope, the British high commissioner in Palestine in 1936: “No High Commissioner became so intimately involved with the Zionist leadership, repeatedly taking them into his confidence in a way he never did the Arab leaders.”³⁴ More broadly, the mandate authorities did not recognize Arab political organizations, and more often than not simply ignored them.³⁵ This created a distance between British and Arab political institutions much greater than that between British and Jewish political institutions, and made the preservation of “law and order” in the mandate—that is, the maintenance of the politically asymmetrical state of affairs—increasingly dependent on force.

Up through the period of the revolt, for example, the British neglected to forge connections between rural political structures and the mandatory state, leaving village elders and headmen bereft of any legal standing. There were no legal specifications for the status of mukhtar (village headman), for instance, a situation that placed many villages at the mercy of one powerful family, and without democratic representation. British “point-men” at the village level were therefore often out of sync with their supposed constituencies.³⁶ This limited the extent to which the mandatory could reach down to the level of the individual in these areas, both in terms of observing his political behaviors and of shaping his political sensibilities; that is, in Foucauldian language, the extent to which the government could individuate the rural population.³⁷ As a result, when the British authorities in Palestine faced rural rebellion and resistance, their menu of strategic options was limited to one: brute force, typically in the form of collective punishment. Such tactics only served to further alienate the peasantry, many of whom, by the time of the revolt, had not actually seen a Briton in decades.³⁸

This dilemma was by no means restricted to the countryside. In 1925, for example, High Commissioner Herbert Plumer sought to extend a redraft of the prior year’s Collective Responsibility Ordinance to urban areas. And as the colonial secretary confessed, applying this ordinance to towns “could not fail to lend colour to any criticism that the reason why we have to resort to such special legislation is that our policy is so much detested that the Arabs cannot otherwise be made to acquiesce in our rule.”³⁹

The British criminalization of Palestinian nationalism was an ontological claim regarding order and chaos. But the British failure to individuate the Arab population of Palestine—to incorporate them into a disciplinary apparatus that would naturalize the “criminality” of violent political protest against the government and its policies—left unveiled the discursive machinery underlying this claim.⁴⁰ The Arabs knew that they were being cast as criminals, and were therefore positioned to identify such casting as a form of power, which might be turned back upon the British and the Zionists.

JEWISH, BRITISH, AND ARAB PERSPECTIVES ON THE

STRIKE AND REVOLT OF APRIL AND MAY 1936

Jewish, British, and Arab perspectives on the strike and emergent violence of the weeks and months after 19 April came quickly to revolve around the question of crime: that is, who the real lawbreakers were in Palestine, and what entitlements accrued to their victims, especially with regard to violence.

Evidence of the Jewish perspective on the violence of April and May 1936 comes from the files of the Jewish Agency.⁴¹ Its legal committee transcribed the statements of Jewish witnesses to the events of those distressing days, which culminated in the commencement of an Arab general strike on 22 April. A Jerusalem shop owner named Naftali Barukh interpreted the strike as a hollow attempt to establish the Arabs’ credentials as a nation or “people.” He regarded this faux collective as something much closer to a rabble, as evidenced by local Arabs’ harassment of a merchant from Hebron—an incident, he noted deploringly, that prompted no police response.⁴² Yisrael Ligal, the mukhtar of the Old City, claimed that even in the days after the strike’s declaration, Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem continued to have cordial relations. Both groups attributed much of the trouble to British mischief, as opposed to one another. But as the Arab press published and Arab leaders repeated allegations against the Jews, the calm began to crack, especially among the youth. Lamented Ligal: “Every day I see young punks interfering with vendors at Jaffa Gate.”⁴³ These “punks,” according to one H. Eden, were part of a “terrorist” vanguard, to whom the bulk of the Arab population of Jerusalem was quietly opposed. He specified that “in normal times,” this youth element “sits at the cards and acts as intermediaries between the various criminals.”⁴⁴

Such street-level testimonies dovetailed with the claims of the Jewish Agency leadership. The Agency’s highest body was its executive, which consisted of the heads of its various departments. The most important of these was the political department, whose director was the Agency’s primary institutional link to the mandatory government.⁴⁵ In 1936, this was Moshe Shertok. Shertok’s family had immigrated to Palestine in 1906, when he was a boy. He went on to study law in Istanbul and to serve as a translator in the Ottoman army during the First World War. His involvement with the Zionist movement dated to his student days at the London School of Economics in 1922–24, and led to his appointment at the Jewish Agency in 1933.

On that fateful Sunday, 19 April 1936, Shertok met with John Hathorn Hall, the British chief secretary—along with the treasurer and the attorney general, one of the three permanent officers on the high commissioner’s own executive council—at approximately 1 P.M. Shertok had learned of the killings in Jaffa two hours earlier. He remarked in a memorandum concerning the meeting, “My main purpose . . . was to make sure that the tenor and contents of the first Official Communique on the disturbances should not be given the usual wrong twist.”⁴⁶ The secretary disappointed him, refusing to back away from his description of the events in Jaffa as “clashes” rather than what Shertok insisted they were: “an attack by Arabs on Jews.”⁴⁷ This led to a discussion of the attempt by Jewish mourners on 17 April to enter Jaffa, a “story” that Shertok “refused to believe.”⁴⁸ He likewise downplayed the attacks on “some Arab gharry drivers” in Tel Aviv by attributing them to “foolish youths.” Hall was unmoved. Dissatisfied, Shertok departed in hopes of a more fruitful dialogue with the chief secretary’s superior, the top civilian official in Palestine, High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope.

Wauchope had been appointed British High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan in 1931, at the age of 57. An enthusiastic civilian administrator, he had spent most of his adult life in the military, where he had proven himself a physically courageous man. His experience in the Middle East dated back to the First World War, when he commanded a British brigade in Iraq and was wounded in battle. While Shertok sought an audience with Wauchope, it was Chaim Weizmann, a British Jew and the president of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), who secured one two days later, on 21 April.

Weizmann was a tireless advocate for Zionism, and had been involved in a number of the movement’s watershed victories, including the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the awarding of the mandate for Palestine to the British at San Remo in 1920. At the same time, Weizmann’s credentials as a British patriot were unimpeachable. He had resided in England since 1904, when his work in chemistry earned him an appointment at the University of Manchester. It was in his capacity as a scientist that Weizmann would place the British government in his debt, and thereby elevate his standing as a Zionist representative to London. In the course of the First World War, Weizmann developed a method for extracting acetone from maize. The breakthrough allowed British arms manufacturers to replenish their stocks of acetone at a moment when they had fallen critically short of the essential solvent.

In their meeting on 21 April, Weizmann learned from Wauchope that the Arab leaders, “one after another,” had expressed both regret and surprise concerning the violence in Jaffa on 19 April.⁴⁹ The high commissioner likewise suggested in a letter to Shertok a few days later that the Arab leadership were not behind the disorders.⁵⁰ The Jewish Agency’s own intelligence confirmed as much.⁵¹ For his part, Shertok hardly regarded the Arab leaders as worthy of the name. He claimed that they had “seized the revolutionary chance for staging a big national show in the form of a general strike.” He alleged further that their supposed followers were overwhelmingly opposed to the strike, and participated only under duress.⁵² From these premises, it was a short step to the conclusion that the strike was a criminal affair. Shertok reported to members of the Jewish Agency in London, “We pressed [Wauchope] to declare the strike illegal in the sense that incitement to the strike and open organisation of it should become punishable.”⁵³ Weizmann argued similarly to Wauchope’s overseer and liaison to the cabinet, Colonial Secretary J. H. Thomas, during a confab at Claridge’s Hotel in London on 18 May. He explained to Thomas that the high commissioner’s belief that the work stoppage reflected Arab mass sentiment was mistaken, and that “if one was prepared to spend the necessary money, there would be no difficulty in calling off the strike.” That is, there existed no deeply rooted national movement of protest among Palestine’s Arabs, and lining the right pockets would reveal as much.⁵⁴

In one respect, the British evaluation of the circumstances of April–May 1936 came quickly to converge with that of the Jewish Agency. While Wauchope’s assessment of the state of affairs was more nuanced than the Agency’s, he ultimately required little persuading with regard to Shertok’s insistence that the strike be criminalized. The high commissioner wrote to Thomas on 18 April, suggesting that the present unrest was due in large part to Arab discernment of the fact that violent protest in Cairo and Damascus had led to negotiations with the British in Egypt and the French in Syria. He noted, moreover, that the British had promised the Arabs a legislative council in 1930, but were, as of 1936, still refusing them one.⁵⁵ But by 5 May, Wauchope’s tone had changed. He was emphatic that the strike was indeed illegal and of a piece with other “criminal” behavior among the Arabs. He reported to Thomas that he had “initiated proceedings under the Criminal Law (Seditious Offences) Ordinance” against the issuing of a manifesto by the Arab Transport Strike Committee, which called upon Arab government employees to stay home from work.⁵⁶ In short order, he would begin arresting and incarcerating large numbers of Arab journalists, most of whom advocated for civil disobedience, not violence.⁵⁷ In the meantime, Wauchope urged members of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) (about which more below) not to support the strike, and suggested, in all sincerity, that they send another delegation to London.⁵⁸

In a second respect, however, the British evaluation of the events of April 1936 and after diverged from that of the Jewish Agency. While the Jewish Agency and many Jewish witnesses on the ground regarded the strike as a vacuous, pseudo-national gesture on the part of the Arab leadership, to which the Arab population at large was averse, Wauchope stressed in a 4 May memorandum, “The hands of the leaders are being forced by extremists and by the fact that the whole of the Arab population is behind the general strike.”⁵⁹ The “extremists” he had in mind were the transport strikers, whose manifesto called explicitly for “a peaceful general strike.”⁶⁰ Thomas communicated Wauchope’s interpretation of events to the cabinet on 13 May, along with the high commissioner’s reassertion (in response to earlier cabinet objections) of the need for the British government to appoint a commission to investigate the disturbances. Such a gesture, he insisted, “might enable the Arab leaders to call off the strike and the present unrest.” The cabinet conceded Wauchope’s point, but insisted that he make the appointment of a commission conditional on the restoration of “law and order,” and that he announce this publicly.⁶¹

The high commissioner and his superiors were now agreed that the Arab leadership needed an excuse to call off the strike. They thus regarded it as a popular phenomenon—not, as the Jewish Agency maintained, as a ruse foisted upon the Arabs by their unscrupulous representatives. As Wauchope explained to Thomas on 16 May, “A demand was pressed upon [the Arab leaders] from all Arab quarters in Palestine that the strike should continue.” The leadership was, he emphasized, “powerless to stop the strike unless [Jewish] immigration is suspended.”⁶² The RAF—which held supreme command over the armed forces in the mandate until September 1936—issued an intelligence summary for April 1936, which likewise concluded that the strike, having begun in Jaffa and spread to other towns, initially “lacked any central control.”⁶³ The Arab “leaders” were following the strikers.

This was not news to the Arabs themselves, whose understanding of the circumstances of mid-1936—their nature and history—differed markedly from that of the Jews and the British. Three developments were especially salient for Palestinian Arabs in 1935–36. The first was a new, unprecedentedly large influx of European Jews—62,000 in 1935—who were fleeing the Nazi menace in Central Europe.⁶⁴ The Arab leadership in Palestine, operating with effectively universal popular sympathy, had for nearly two decades advanced three demands to the British: halt Jewish immigration, terminate Jewish land purchases, and establish a democratic government reflecting the country’s Arab majority. As of 1935, the British had acceded to none of these demands, and the largest annual wave of Jewish immigration in Palestinian history was a painful reminder of that fact. This circumstance was aggravated by a simultaneous slump in Arab wages and surge in Arab unemployment.⁶⁵

The second development pertained to the second of the perennial Arab demands, Jewish land purchases. As with Jewish immigration, the figures for Jewish acquisition of land in Palestine peaked in the period preceding the strike and accompanying violence of 1936. By 1930, Jews held over one million dunums (four million acres) of land in the country. At 62,000 dunums, Jewish purchases in 1934 were greater than the previous three years combined, and they leapt to 73,000 in 1935.⁶⁶ Notes Ann Mosely Lesch, “In 1935, [the] high commissioner asserted that the fear that the Jewish community is ‘eating up the land’ is felt ‘in every town and village in Palestine.’”⁶⁷

The third significant development for Palestinian Arabs in 1935–36 was the nascent flowering of a public sphere, due primarily to the bootstrapping organizational efforts of the Istiqlal (Independence) Party, beginning in 1932.⁶⁸ As Weldon Matthews has shown, the Istiqlal played on and exacerbated the credibility problem of the traditional Arab leadership, whose fruitless protests and diplomatic missions the broader Arab population disdained. From late 1933 to the autumn of 1935, however, the Istiqlal and other youth-oriented Arab political parties were largely dormant. It was Jaffa port workers’ interception of a Tel Aviv-bound shipment of weapons concealed in barrels of cement that reinvigorated grassroots Arab political networks in October 1935.⁶⁹ By then, Arab youths, intellectuals, and workers had become seasoned political activists, garnering press coverage for the national cause and staging popular demonstrations that brought pressure to bear upon the traditional Arab leadership.⁷⁰ The same elements compelled elite Palestinian families to set aside their differences and, in the days after 19 April, to form the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), with the mufti of Jerusalem (al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni) as president.⁷¹

The Husaynis had for generations occupied the upper echelon of Jerusalem politics, and the British (like the Ottomans before them) often depended on the family in their dealings with the local Arab community.⁷² In 1912, the young Amin al-Husayni enrolled in the famous al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he first became involved in the anti-Zionist politics that would become his legacy.⁷³ His relationship with the British in subsequent decades teetered between harmony and hostility, but not to the point of disinheriting him of the mediating role London had long devolved upon his family. And thus on 21 April, the president of the newly constituted Arab Higher Committee assured the high commissioner that he would “do his best to prevent [the] continuance of disorder.”⁷⁴ Wauchope would regard the mufti and the AHC as a “moderate influence on more extreme leaders” for some time yet. The AHC, in the high commissioner’s view, was “not directly concerned with [the] organisation of strikes,” which had been thrust upon it by the Arab masses.⁷⁵

BREAD, DIGNITY, AND GANGSTERS

While the AHC awkwardly attempted to choreograph the actions of a popular movement it had neither initiated nor inspired, the Committee was in ideological accord with this movement on two points. The first was that the Arabs of Palestine were due the same legal recognition as the Arabs of Iraq, Egypt, and every other Arab territory: they were entitled to national independence. A number of AHC representatives stated this to the high commissioner and the chief secretary during a meeting at the government house in Jerusalem on the evening of 5 May. The mufti, for example, explained, “The Palestinians are not inferior in any way to the Iraqi or the Egyptian people, and while these two countries either have had or are about to have their rights recognized, the Jews are opposed to the slightest measure of reform that may be proposed in Palestine.”⁷⁶

The AHC’s secretary and Istiqlal representative, ʿAwni Bey ʿAbd al-Hadi, then spoke. The ʿAbd al-Hadis were prominent landowners in Jenin and Nablus, and ʿAwni Bey—who had studied law in France, helped to found the Istiqlal party, and been appointed the AHC’s liaison to the locally organized national committees—was a prominent figure in his own right.⁷⁷ Like the mufti, ʿAwni Bey situated the local conflict in the larger Arab struggle for independence:

While our neighbours in Syria and Egypt are fighting for their independence, the Arabs of Palestine are struggling for their bread. The dignity of the Arabs in this country and their freedom are exposed to danger, and we consider that it is the sacred duty of every one of us to defend his endangered bread and dignity.⁷⁸

A few weeks later, on 30 May, the high commissioner and the chief secretary met with the mayors of major Palestinian towns and cities, who hammered away at the same theme. Allowing Jewish immigration to proceed apace, the mayors declared, posed a “danger to [Palestinian Arabs’] future existence” and constituted a “betrayal of . . . Arab rights.”⁷⁹ Halting immigration would terminate the disorders. Absent that, “neither the [AHC] nor any other leader could . . . oppose the people without losing honour and credit.”⁸⁰ A few days earlier, the high commissioner had opened a letter of protest from the First Arab Rural Congress. It also emphasized the “great danger to our national and racial existence” created by ongoing Jewish immigration, which it declared “completely illegal,” as were the British “attempts to suppress the lawful voice of the nation . . . by force.”⁸¹ Whereas everyone from Jewish merchants to the leaders of the Jewish Agency had stressed the pseudo-national and illegal nature of the strike, the many Arabs from whom Wauchope heard were adamant regarding their national standing and legal entitlement to resist British implementation of the Balfour Declaration.

When not parrying protests from Arabs and Jews, British officials mulled over the deteriorating security situation in the country. In the second half of May, His Majesty’s troops encountered determined armed resistance in Gaza and Beersheba in the south and in Nablus and Tulkarm in the north.⁸² Across the land, the silence of the Palestinian night was steadily succumbing to the hiss and crackle of gunfire and firecrackers.⁸³ While some authors have deduced from this circumstance that British security forces were under perpetual siege in May 1936, that appears to be an exaggeration.⁸⁴ As late as 23 June, the deputy inspector general of police would report that relatively few villagers had attacked British forces.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, the RAF intelligence summary for May 1936 did find that the AHC’s attempt to maintain a peaceful strike was faltering, and that “more extremist elements were taking the law into their own hands.” These “extremists,” it is worth noting, aimed their attacks “chiefly against [the] police and military.”⁸⁶

At the same time, government crime statistics showed an astonishing increase in murders and attempted murders in April and May 1936, as compared with the same two-month period in the previous year. Murders numbered nineteen in April/May 1935, a figure which nearly tripled to fifty-three in April/May 1936. Attempted murders more than quadrupled, from twenty to eighty-seven. Crimes also shot up from earlier in the year. In March, there had been eleven murders and twenty attempted murders.⁸⁷ The data depicted a crime wave, a fact that colored the intelligence summary’s portrayal of the “extremists,” which it neglected to disaggregate from the common criminals committing murders. Thus, despite its observation that the bulk of the Arab violent attacks in May targeted military and police personnel—not exactly the magnets of the criminal class—the RAF report referred to the perpetrators of these actions as “gangs,” a term that would become ubiquitous in British (and Zionist) discussions of the revolt.⁸⁸

Arab leaders were meanwhile keen to distinguish themselves from those involved in violent actions. Both the AHC and the national committees advocated openly for a nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience.⁸⁹ They did so, moreover, with the backing of the Arab press. The pan-Arab al-Difaʿ—along with Filastin, one of the two highest circulation Arabic dailies in the country—editorialized in late April, “We want the Arab Higher Committee to act as Gandhi acted in India when he called for civil disobedience.”⁹⁰ Filastin used the government’s favored epithet (“disturbers of the peace”) to designate those Arabs who were resorting to violence.⁹¹ Al-Liwaʾ called in its 15 May edition for the Arabs to adopt only peaceful methods of protest.⁹²

“TURKISH METHODS” AND THE VILLAGE SEARCHES

OF MAY 1936 AND AFTER

Violence, however, was much more than an Arab problem, as Arab journalists and political leaders were quick to note. In fact, the problem of British violence was the second topic of agreement between the AHC and the Arab public. Thus, in the course of the mayors’ 30 May conversation with the high commissioner and the chief secretary, Nablus mayor Sulayman Bey Tuqan complained of British police and soldiers’ maltreatment of Arabs. He was particularly concerned about the so-called “village searches” that security forces were then conducting throughout the country.⁹³ British spokesmen announced that the purpose of these searches was to discover weapons and to apprehend wanted men. An abundance of Arab testimony, however, indicated that the searches were actually punitive expeditions, designed to frighten the population and thereby to re-establish “law and order”—just as the cabinet had directed Wauchope to do.

These “searches,” moreover, were not limited to rural areas.⁹⁴ On 1 June, the high commissioner received a delegation of ʿulamaʾ, who drew his attention to an incident in the Bab Hutta quarter of Jerusalem, which the clerics had taken some trouble to investigate. They reported that soldiers and police, ostensibly searching for weapons in the area, had instead stormed through houses, destroying food and furniture and mortifying men in front of their wives. The ʿulamaʾ had heard numerous tales of violent British exploits in Arab villages. Following their investigation at Bab Hutta, they now believed them. The men suggested to the high commissioner that these actions, coupled with the long-standing British policy of refusing to respond meaningfully to nonviolent Arab protest, were generating the present instability. “[I]f shooting and bombing is being done now,” one of them explained, “it is not with the object of committing murder or because the Arabs like disorders, but simply with the object of letting their voice reach England.”⁹⁵

FIGURE 2. Residents of Bab Hutta, in Jerusalem, survey the wreckage of a British “village search,” summer 1936. (Library of Congress)

These were not the first reports of police brutality that Wauchope had heard. Arab leaders had informed him as early as 21 April that officers had shot a sixteen-year-old youth in the back, and that “the attitude of the Police had given the impression to the Arabs that their real enemies were the British.”⁹⁶ The Anglican archdeacon in Jerusalem related the same to the chief secretary. Anglican missionaries operated in villages throughout Palestine, and regularly reported back to the archdeacon and archbishop in Jerusalem regarding developments in the Arab community. On 2 June, the day after Wauchope’s meeting with the ʿulamaʾ, the archdeacon wrote the chief secretary with concern: “It is believed amongst some at any rate of the British Police that they have been definitely ordered to ‘Duff them [the Arabs] up’. (The phrase itself is significant to anyone who remembers, as I do, the days before the present Inspector-General).”⁹⁷

The archdeacon referred to the notorious Douglas Duff, whose harsh tactics as a police inspector in 1920s Palestine had rendered his surname a byword for police brutality. Indeed, Duff’s fondness for such torture techniques as waterboarding and “suspension” ultimately landed him in trouble with the high commissioner, who fired him in 1931 for the “ill treatment” of a prisoner.⁹⁸ The infamous former inspector had actually visited Jerusalem only a few weeks earlier, on 12–14 May, during his first trip to Palestine since departing the country in 1932.⁹⁹ Remarkably, Duff himself was taken aback by the violence to which the British openly subjected Arab civilians. After witnessing soldiers and police searching a caravan of Arabs wending its way out of the city’s German Colony, he lamented: “If the sort of thing I saw . . . is usual in these days, then it is no wonder that we are laying up a great debt of active hatred against ourselves.” As Duff described the episode: “The searching was none too gently executed, for I saw one Arab being savagely kicked by a brawny man in khaki, whilst an old man with a grey beard received a nasty cut from a leather hand-whip.”¹⁰⁰ Evidence from Arabic sources suggests that the brutality Duff witnessed was, indeed, “usual” in those days. Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a schoolteacher and member of a militant underground organization in May 1936, wrote that British security forces in the Old City of Jerusalem were demeaning Palestinians by forcing them to stop and salute the same police patrols that regularly beat them up “for no reason.”¹⁰¹ Al-Difaʿ likewise reported that British police were “searching passersby for no reason” and “harassing them . . . when [they] show any form of resistance upon receiving rude, provocative insults.”¹⁰² Such smug behavior, writes Mustafa Kabha, “filled [Palestinians] with indignation and hatred for the English.”¹⁰³

The archdeacon received similar reports from around the country. He informed the chief secretary: “From every side complaints are reaching me daily of the unnecessary and quite indiscriminate roughness which is being displayed by the British Police in their handling of the native, and particularly the Arab, population.”¹⁰⁴ In a subsequent letter, he disclosed that he possessed reliable reports that the repression was still worse in Palestine’s northern districts.¹⁰⁵ The ubiquity of this unruly behavior led the archdeacon to surmise that the police had adopted a new “method” for dealing with Arabs. He dated its inception to one week before the death of Constable Robert Bird on 28 May at the hands of Arab rebels in the Old City of Jerusalem—an important detail, as Bird’s killing served as “the usual defence” of police brutality.¹⁰⁶ Not incidentally, Bird’s assailants appear to have targeted him in retaliation for the earlier British killing of an Arab man.¹⁰⁷ Similarly, a fortnight later, on 12 June, rebels attacked and wounded the British assistant police superintendent, Alan Sigrist, a man whose savagery towards Jerusalem’s Arabs was legendary.¹⁰⁸

The archdeacon’s estimate of the introduction of tough new measures against the Arab community was on the mark. Duff had seen evidence of such tactics in mid-May. And by 24–25 May, police and troops were raiding villages near Nazareth and Gaza, on the assumption that they quartered men who had mounted attacks on government forces over the previous two days. These raids, a War Office report disclosed, “took the form of searches for arms and wanted men by troops and police and, being fairly severe in nature, had also a punitive effect which began to produce most satisfactory results in the more truculent villages.”¹⁰⁹ The statement that the searches “had also a punitive effect” was disingenuous. In reality, punishing villagers was the searches’ primary purpose, while weapons and wanted men were secondary concerns. As Air Vice-Marshal R. E. C. Peirse—the military commander in Palestine and the co-architect of the village search policy—divulged in a top-secret report: “Ostensibly these searches were undertaken to find arms and wanted persons; actually the measures adopted by the police on the lines of similar Turkish methods, were punitive.”¹¹⁰ In early June, the new colonial secretary, William Ormsby-Gore, spoke with Kenneth Williams, the editor of the publication Great Britain and the East and the author of a book about Ibn Saʿud.¹¹¹ Williams had received information from two sources of whose “bona fides” and “reliability and good judgment” he was certain, and who reported that “British troops in Palestine had been committing ‘excesses’ against the Arabs.” He stated further that his informants “were under the impression that the conduct of the troops had the approval of the High Commissioner.”¹¹²

While the colonial secretary assured Williams that Wauchope would not have authorized such tactics, the testimony of Duff and the archdeacon, the report of the War Office, and Peirse’s disclosures all point to the widespread British adoption of “Turkish methods” in this early period. Wauchope’s supposed ignorance of the fact warrants closer scrutiny. Echoing Ormsby-Gore, Charles Smith writes that Wauchope was “enraged” on learning of the “Turkish methods” being employed in the villages, and that he ordered Peirse and the inspector general of police, Roy Spicer, to “moderate the searches.”¹¹³ This occurred on 30 May, according to Peirse’s own account.¹¹⁴ It is curious, however, that Wauchope’s private secretary, Thomas Hodgkin, wrote in a personal letter dated 28 May that he had taken the decision to resign his post the previous Sunday (24 May) to protest the “new repressive measures on the part of the Government.”¹¹⁵ The high commissioner’s private secretary, then, knew of the punitive searches on the day they supposedly began, and attributed them, without qualification, to “the Government” led by his boss. This renders implausible, though not impossible, the idea that Wauchope only learned of the harsh treatment later and was then scandalized.

Regardless, the brutality of the village searches was sufficiently rampant as of early June that it had engendered, according to Peirse, “a grave crisis with the [Arab] section” of the Palestine police, who considered the severe measures “repugnant.”¹¹⁶ In one instance, soldiers “searching” Qaqun, near Tulkarm, handled the village so harshly that its residents called the police in desperation. The Arab officers who responded were appalled by the scene they came upon, to the point that they began fighting with the soldiers, one of whom shot and killed a policeman.¹¹⁷ The dead man’s fellow officers resigned in protest.¹¹⁸ And within days, Arab policemen from several towns and villages convened a meeting in Jerusalem, which produced a series of demands to the general police authority. Among them: “Fair investigations into the crimes that British policemen have committed in light of recent events.”¹¹⁹

It is worth noting that while Peirse and the archdeacon’s chronologies indicated that the punitive searches began in the second half of May, a Jewish Agency summary of events from 7 May reported that “punitive posts”—“a most effective measure of teaching turbulent villages wisdom”—had already been installed in nine villages.¹²⁰ This was two weeks prior to the appearance of the first Arab “gangs.”¹²¹

BRITISH VIOLENCE AND THE SCHOLARSHIP ON 1936

As the previous section demonstrates, the British began violently repressing the Arab population of Palestine within a month of the strike’s declaration. Yet, when government officials later surveyed the revolt’s first phase, they failed to factor this critical detail into their accounts. With a handful of exceptions—most notably, Matthew Hughes’s pioneering work on British violence in 1936–39—much of the English- and Hebrew-language literature on the revolt has repeated their error.¹²² Even Hughes writes that “the widespread use of punitive actions” in Palestine was “central to British military repression after 1936.”¹²³ The scholarship more generally has taken for granted the truth of British officials’ assertions that the few punitive measures police and soldiers did adopt in late May 1936 were discontinued in early June. But accepting this claim requires that one discard an abundance of testimony—both Arab and British—to the contrary. It also obscures a basic component of the causal machinery that determined the revolt’s initial, and by extension ultimate, trajectory: namely, the mandatory itself.

Thus, Jacob Norris, who in a separate and very instructive capacity corrects the traditional understanding of the revolt, nevertheless writes that prior to October 1936, the British “[sought] to contain the rebel bands using orthodox civilian policing” (although the reality, as Georgina Sinclair notes, is that the British never successfully civilianized the Palestine police, which “remained essentially a paramilitary force”).¹²⁴ In the same vein, Yehoyada Haim claims that Wauchope’s policy of “protecting lives and property without the use of repressive measures” was “applied by the British during most of the Revolt’s first phase.”¹²⁵ Yoav Gelber writes that the British were “hesitant in the first phase” of the rebellion and that Wauchope “opposed a strong hand” approach to the disturbances.¹²⁶ Michael J. Cohen comes close to recognizing the inaccuracy of such statements. He cites the Peirse report in support of his assertion that the village searches in the revolt’s first phase were “ineffective in the discovery of arms and were unpopular with the troops, against whom all kinds of charges were levelled.” But Cohen then neglects to place these facts in the context of Peirse’s admission that the real purpose of the searches was punitive—a truth which casts both the paucity of arms and the profusion of charges in a much different light. Cohen likewise takes it for granted that subsequent charges against British troops stemming from the village searches were mere “rumour and propaganda.”¹²⁷ Yehoshua Porath, too, claims that “Government reaction to the strike and the revolt remained almost to the end rather reserved, in the hope that violence would die out and the strike would disintegrate before severe measures became necessary.”¹²⁸ While acknowledging the existence of some “punitive measures” up to July, Porath goes so far as to state that a British “policy of no repression” existed in this period.¹²⁹ Likewise, Tom Bowden, citing a War Office file, suggests that the British abided by an internal security protocol in Palestine in 1936 that did not involve “strict repressive measure[s].”¹³⁰

The government reports contained in the file Bowden references paint a similar picture. They consist, among other things, of a synopsis of Lieutenant General John Dill’s “summary of events” for April-October 1936. Dill inherited command of the British forces in Palestine from Peirse in September 1936—thus marking the transfer of military authority in the mandate from the RAF to the army—and assumed the role of general officer commanding (GOC). His account of the time prior to his own arrival on the scene warrants some examination, given Bowden and others’ effective reiteration of it.

According to the synopsis of Dill’s report, several important points had been established as of October 1936: the strike had “developed into a form of open rebellion”; the loyalty of the Arab section of the Palestine police had become dubious; and the government had refrained from employing British troops in any offensive capacity.¹³¹ The third point was a slightly inaccurate paraphrase of what Dill had written in the full report, but the error was inevitable. In the report itself, Dill emphasized that well into May 1936, British forces “had been dissipated on protective duties and little or no force was used for punitive work.” Confusingly, he then stated that in June, when groups of armed Arabs began appearing, there occurred a “relaxation” in the use of “punitive measures” during the village searches, and that “combined with this relaxation . . . came definite signs of defection among the Palestine Police.” A few sentences later, and more confusingly still, Dill claimed that on 3 June, “the Palestine Government decided ‘to continue our present policy . . . of endeavouring to protect life and property without adopting severe repressive measures.’”¹³² One might have thought that rebel sniping had led British forces to attack Arab villagers, which in turn had caused Arab police to mutiny. But on Dill’s bewildering telling, armed Arab groups emerged, at which point the British for some reason “relaxed” the briefly operative (and hitherto denied) punitive measures and Arab policemen inexplicably began defecting. This causal picture was pure confusion, making the synopsis of it simplistic of necessity.

Each of Dill’s three propositions, in any case, was specious. Concerning the first, while the strike had “developed into a form of open rebellion,” this language obscured two crucial facts. First, in the strike’s early days, armed revolt and refusal to work were largely unlinked. As noted, the AHC itself, as well as the national committees and the Arab press, advocated openly for a nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience.¹³³ The convergence of the strike and the revolt was therefore not a foregone conclusion as of May 1936. Second, Dill’s language framed the armed rebellion as having evolved congenitally from the strike; it thus cropped out causal variables extrinsic to the Arab community, such as British violence.¹³⁴ This framing depended on Dill’s second and third propositions: the questionable loyalty of Arab policemen and the supposedly purely defensive operations of British troops. Taking these in reverse order, British forces undertook offensive and intentionally “punitive” operations in Arab villages beginning in May. And these, as Peirse acknowledged, produced a “grave crisis” in loyalty among Arab police officers, who objected to the use of such measures against their countrymen.¹³⁵ As ʿAbd al-Wahhab Kayyali observes, the same measures were “instrumental in bringing about a greater degree of cohesion and identification between the villagers and the rebels.”¹³⁶

British brutality alienated not only Arab policemen and villagers, but also the Arab population at large, which increased public sympathy for attacks on British police and soldiers. As Michael J. Cohen relates, in June 1936, when Emir ʿAbdullah of Transjordan requested that his Palestinian interlocutors refrain from further violence, they “replied that the terrorism was itself in reply to the brutality of the Mandatory.”¹³⁷ An organization of Arab priests argued similarly to the high commissioner, claiming that the government had “provoked the Arabs to resist it openly through the various ruthless and severe measures which it adopted.”¹³⁸ Muhammad ʿIzzat Darwaza, ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi’s successor as the AHC secretary, wrote that the search regime, coupled with the “violence and cruelty” with which the British repressed political demonstrations, only “added fuel to the [nationalist] fire.”¹³⁹ The archdeacon said the same in a letter to MP Stanley Baldwin: “I am afraid . . . the rough-handling methods which prevailed for a time at the end of May among the British Police . . . were the direct cause of a good deal of the violence and shooting which has [now] to be suppressed.”¹⁴⁰

The gist of these testimonies is corroborated by Sir Hugh Foot, who served in Palestine as a junior assistant secretary in the Colonial Service during the revolt years, and later became the British governor of Cyprus. In 1959, Foot would recall:

. . . [I]n Palestine and again in Cyprus there was often a tendency to attempt to make up for lack of intelligence by using the sledge hammer—mass arrests, mass detentions, big cordons and searches and collective punishments. Such operations can do more harm than good and usually play into the hands of the terrorists by alienating general opinion from the forces of authority.¹⁴¹

No reader of Dill’s report would appreciate the role the British themselves played in stoking the rebellion. In scrutinizing Dill’s three findings, one notices, in each case, the same element missing from the causal equation: the mandatory. The strike develops unaided into open rebellion; Arab policemen defect without apparent reason; and the British refrain from offensive operations in the mandate. The first two propositions gloss over, and the third simply denies, the causal role of the mandatory in the rebellion’s unfolding.¹⁴²

This blinkered imperial vision was pervasive among British officials. Among its more pristine manifestations was Wauchope’s passing acknowledgement in a December 1936 memorandum that the government’s casualty reports had hitherto failed to “differentiate between civilians killed and wounded by the Forces of the Crown and those who are the victims of riots or other forms of violence.”¹⁴³ While the British had kept careful tabs on the number of Jews and Britons killed by Arabs, it apparently never occurred to them to count the number of Arab noncombatants killed or otherwise harmed by British forces. As for Arab militants, the notion that their deaths at the hands of the government could be anything less than justified was still further beyond the pale. One government official, having acknowledged the accuracy of an estimate of “1,000 . . . Arabs killed during the [1936] disturbances,” remarked in October 1937: “As the Jews point out these cannot fairly be described as ‘murders’ comparable with the figure of eighty Jews, since with few exceptions they represent casualties incurred while resisting Government forces.”¹⁴⁴

A November 1936 report of the supreme court of Palestine featured similar reasoning. The document concerned an appeal on behalf of two Arabs convicted of shooting a British soldier outside Balʿa, near Tulkarm. A lower court had sentenced both men to death. The high court did not deny that the defendants had been attempting to acquire water for their cattle when a British plane began firing on them, causing them to take shelter in a cave. Nor did it deny that a British soldier had then approached the cave and “fired two shots into the hole in order to investigate[!].” What the court did deny was the right of the men to defend themselves against unjustified and potentially lethal British force. On the contrary, the report asserted: “Yet another point was raised [by the appellants’ lawyer], namely that it was the natural reaction for the appellants to shoot back when fired upon. This astounding theory, which allows men to retaliate when either police or military are doing their duty, is unknown to me.”¹⁴⁵

CONCLUSION

In viewing the “disorder” and “lawlessness” that plagued their Palestine mandate, the British gazed from the lofty perch of “law and order.” This position required, as a matter of discursive coherence, that they be in no way constitutive of the “chaos” they sought to name as such and then sort out. The British could see the map of Palestinian politics, but they could not see themselves drawing it.¹⁴⁶ If an outbreak of Arab “criminality” was at the root of the instability that increasingly afflicted Palestine, the British could not be both implicated in it and at the same time positioned to identify and address it as such.

Yet, as the sources cited in this chapter suggest, a close reading of the government’s own reports unearths evidence of the ubiquity of British violence in Palestine in 1936. Nevertheless, the British understanding of events in this period was generally consistent with the accounts of the military commander, the high commissioner, and the supreme court justices of the mandate, all of which presented the Arab rebellion as causally extrinsic to the behavior of the mandatory. As the next chapter will elaborate, the same was true of the majority of British soldiers, policemen, and opinion-makers, as well as the Zionists demanding greater British repression of the Arabs.