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TWO

“A Wave of Crime”

THE CRIMINALIZATION OF PALESTINIAN

NATIONALISM, APRIL–JUNE 1936

THE BRITISH RECASTING OF PALESTINIAN nationalists as criminals was not sudden. The pinch of the twin pincers of Arab and Jewish opinion, however, made it inevitable. Regarding Arab opinion, the League of Nations mandate instrument was holy writ for the Arab Palestinian political class. It stated that the inhabitants of the Middle East stood already on the threshold of national autonomy, and required only a last interval of British and French assistance in order to cross it. The British project in the region, in other words, was explicitly pro-nationalist. London was therefore poorly positioned to recognize its internal security woes in Palestine for what they were: an Arab movement for national independence from London. This dilemma rendered the Zionist tactic of portraying that movement as something else altogether—as a crime wave—increasingly attractive to the British.

Crime, as chapter one detailed, was a key point of convergence between British and Jewish portrayals of the revolt. This convergence was not total, however. There were, in fact, two crimino-national claims about Arab protest in 1936, which one might call strong and weak, respectively. The strong claim was that both the strike and the rebellion lacked popular Arab support, and endured only because thugs working for the Arab national leadership had cowed the docile masses into backing them. The weak claim denied that the strike was coerced, but affirmed that both it and the armed Arab attacks on British forces and Jewish civilians were, indeed, illegal. Zionist leaders promoted the strong claim from the first. Their British counterparts affirmed only the weak claim initially. With each passing month, however, London drifted toward the Zionist position. This chapter charts that drift.

THE “CRIMINALS” BEHIND THE “CRIMINALS”

On 24 April 1936, the Jewish Agency dispatched a telegram to “the Jewish people” at large, expressing resolve in the face of Arab attacks and observing, “This is not [the] first time that our peaceful creative effort [is] being interfered with by [the] assaults of instigated rioters.”¹ This statement encapsulated the Zionist case against the Arabs from 1936 forward, which was threefold: the rioters were pawns of their devious leaders, not free agents acting on the basis of their perceived interests and rights; the Jews were creators and the Arabs destroyers; and the Zionist enterprise in Palestine was an entirely peaceful one. These three themes converged in the criminalization of Palestinian nationalism.

Zionist leaders relentlessly promoted the “devious leaders” claim.² Weizmann argued to Wauchope on 3 May that the “overwhelming majority of ordinary Arab citizens” were secretly opposed to the strike.³ Shertok and David Ben Gurion wrote the high commissioner on 17 May complaining of the government’s refusal to dissolve the “rebellious body styling itself the ‘Supreme Arab Committee’ [the AHC],” a policy which they claimed gave “further encouragement . . . to the acts of lawlessness carried out by its agents throughout the country.”⁴ Ben Gurion was the chair of the executives of both the Jewish Agency and the WZO, and a towering figure in the Zionist milieu. He had founded the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labor) in 1920, and later led Mapai (the Israel Workers Party), which several Zionist workers’ organizations founded in 1930. The “acts of lawlessness” to which he and Shertok referred included the previous night’s murder of three Jews in Jerusalem, although the two offered no evidence of the AHC’s connection to this crime. In a letter to Wauchope on 14 May, Shertok and Ben Gurion likewise bundled together nonviolent protest and violent crime, and saddled the AHC with liability for both:

. . . open incitement to continue the strike, the call to civil disobedience, criminal acts including the murder of innocent people have not diminished . . . We cannot regard the guilt as attaching only to the miserable individuals committing crimes. The responsibility for this criminal activity rests upon the instigators and leaders who are kindling a fire of racial hatred and strife in the country.⁵

The pair stated unequivocally in their 17 May letter: “. . . [P]ersonal responsibility [must] be placed on [the AHC’s] members as individuals for all terrorist acts which may be committed in the country.”⁶ Weizmann was meanwhile telling the high commissioner that “quiet” would never be restored in Palestine so long as the AHC continued to function. When Wauchope responded that he “needed rather more evidence . . . before proceeding to take strong measures against them,” Weizmann offered none, but proposed that “the disbanding of the Committee would make a strong impression on the country.”⁷ In a letter to Wauchope on 6 June, Shertok declared again that the AHC was “the mainspring of the whole campaign of strike, sedition, disobedience and terror.”⁸

FIGURE 3. The normally bustling jewelers’ market in the Old City of Jerusalem, hauntingly empty as a result of the 1936 strike. (Library of Congress)

While insisting that the British recognize the AHC’s unmitigated responsibility for the full spectrum of disorders then wracking the country, the Jewish Agency leadership was privately more ambivalent on this point. Shertok himself stated in a meeting of the executive in late May: “We have no evidence that the Committee of Ten (the AHC) are organizing the acts of violence and terror in the country, but it is clearly encouraging and provoking these actions.”⁹ Nevertheless, Agency members were united in their conviction that if the Arab leadership were personally responsible for all violence in Palestine, then organized Arab politics just was a criminal enterprise. Thus, regardless of the extent to which they believed that this conditional matched the state of affairs, Zionist spokesmen insisted the government adopt it as its framework for managing the disorders.

The Agency therefore demanded not only that Wauchope take sterner measures in combating violent crime but also that he “stamp out any attempt at civil disobedience.”¹⁰ The Agency’s political secretary, Arthur Lourie, cabled Jerusalem from London on 7 June, suggesting that the Agency tap sympathetic members of Parliament to press the government publicly to outlaw the strike, the AHC, and the regional national committees—that is, Palestinian politics.¹¹

Ben Gurion’s 10 June reply to Lourie was revealing. He noted the efficacy of the government’s deportations of leaders such as ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi, whom he deemed the “moving spirit and principal organizer” of the Arab political community.¹² Ben Gurion had actually met with ʿAbd al-Hadi earlier, in July 1934, on the understanding that he was a “patriotic, truthful, and incorruptible” Arab leader.¹³ He claimed at the time that he and ʿAbd al-Hadi had “parted in great friendship.”¹⁴ If he regarded him as a criminal by June 1936, he did not mention it to Lourie. Ben Gurion also disclosed that, in his view: “Even if the strike ends the acts of terrorism won’t. That is not now (at any rate) in the hands of the leaders.”¹⁵ His insistence, then, that the Arab leaders were responsible for the criminal and other violence was tactical.

THE BRITISH DRIFT BEGINS

While the Jewish Agency relentlessly pushed the government to outlaw the strike and to unleash the full force of its counterinsurgent machinery against the rebels, British opinion was already moving in the same direction. The shift began at about the time of the government’s escalation of repressive measures in the second half of May and early June. This is not to suggest that the framing of Arab rebels as criminals was simply a witting confection designed to justify in advance British ruthlessness. Something deeper and more discursively organic than this was at work, as evidenced by the unrehearsed quality, as well as the ubiquity, of the British conception of Arab political agitation from this point forward.

Consider, as a specimen of this conception, the words of the British director of education in Palestine, Humphrey Bowman. In a private letter dated 17 May, Bowman wrote vexedly of Arab violence, sabotage, and shop closures. Imagining the words of a more responsible Arab leadership, he ventriloquized: “They ought now to say to us: ‘We have shown you we are honest and determined by keeping the strike going for four weeks. We have now done enough. Send your Royal Commission, and we will gladly abide by its results.’”¹⁶ Bowman’s faith in British commissions and distrust of the Arab “nation’s demands” hinted at a broader British logic, as did his comments a few days later, on 24 May. These began with a list meant to illustrate that “crime has been serious throughout the country.” It included “not so many murders, but shootings at buses and even at troops; bombs; telephone lines cut; railway sleepers moved; demonstrations daily.”¹⁷ His next entry, on 31 May, deemed the killing of Constable Bird “cold blooded murder.”¹⁸

That Bowman brought military-style attacks on government security forces and infrastructure, not to mention political demonstrations, under the same “crime” umbrella as murder was not anomalous. Wauchope himself, in a 2 June memorandum to the colonial secretary, coupled the forces of British coercion with ordinary citizens, noting that “murders of innocent people and of police are almost of daily occurrence.”¹⁹ Nor was Bowman’s seemingly cynical view of Palestinian nationalism an aberration. The major British papers took a similar line. The Times of London reported that the Arabs, far from having clear-sightedly identified the futility of nonviolent protest against the British, were mired in a fog of invidious rumor, which found them resorting to “rowdy . . . demonstration[s]” and general “unruliness.”²⁰ They were also demanding a “national government,” a term The Times, like Bowman, disparaged via quotation.²¹ Nevertheless, the paper did acknowledge that another British commission of inquiry was probably pointless, as the fundamental problem in Palestine was the impossibility of establishing a Jewish “home” without infringing Arab rights.²² These rights, however, clearly did not rise to a national status, as evidenced by The Times’ recommendation the next day that the British might simply have to “crush” the Arab “unrest and disorder.”²³

When the punitive village searches began in late May, The Times promptly presented them as an unfortunate necessity.²⁴ On 30 May, a telling descriptor debuted in its coverage: “A military patrol on the railway to the north of Lydda had a lively affray last night with brigands, who opened fire on it from both sides.”²⁵ The Times, then, had also begun referring without qualification to coordinated assaults on government forces as the actions of ordinary criminals. On 3 June it deemed the sabotage of British infrastructure in Gaza the work of “gangs.”²⁶ On 8 June, it wrote that Arab “bandits” had engaged the Cameron Highlanders in a four-hour battle!²⁷

While the right-leaning Spectator also pointed out the vanity of another British commission and even acknowledged “the many injuries and illegalities done to the Arabs,” it too implicitly downgraded the Arab standing in Palestine to something less than fully national, writing on 29 May:

Whatever view be held on the broad question of the respective rights of Jews and Arabs in Palestine, there must be unanimity on one point, that the Mandatory Power will be abdicating its function if it fails to suppress with all the force at its command the Arab mobs who are resorting to destructive violence in Jerusalem and Jaffa and other centres.²⁸

As with the government intelligence reports, the paper readily conflated this “mob” violence with the broader political instability, emphasizing, “The disturbance in Palestine is mainly of the nature of mob-violence.”²⁹ The government’s breaking of the strike by force was therefore “necessary and proper.”³⁰

A number of the Spectator’s readers took issue with these prescriptions. Among them was E. A. Ghoury of the Palestine Arab Party (whose president, Jamal Husayni, sat on the AHC). In a 12 June letter to the editor, Ghoury proposed that the behavior of British forces in Palestine—which included “beatings, destruction of property, insulting of women, invading homes,” and so on—might usefully be juxtaposed with the attention the British press paid to “the cases of ‘Arab snipers, marauders, rebels, bands,’ and similar names given to the young Arabs who are trying to defend their rights and liberate their country.”³¹ He likewise told a British audience at Chatham House that the revolt was “not the act of terrorists or marauders or snipers,” but was, rather, “a revolution” seeking “justice.”³²

But Ghoury’s minority report could hardly be heard above the din of mutually reinforcing British coverage. The Daily Herald featured headlines such as “Arab Murder Campaign” (14 May) and “Gangsters in the Holy City” (19 May). Presaging Dill’s later assessment, the Daily Telegraph editorialized in its 18 May edition, “What began as mere common crime . . . has [evolved] into a political exhibition of rueful hatred.”³³

MODERATE ELEMENTS

Although his was an audible voice in the chorus of criminalization, Wauchope was alert to the difficulties this chorus might create for law enforcement. Thus, while describing attacks on British forces as “murder,” his 2 June memo to the colonial secretary also cautioned against adopting measures designed to “intimidate [the] Arab population sufficiently to bring lawless acts to an end.” The high commissioner thus elided, as would GOC Dill, the fact that His Majesty’s forces had already begun terrorizing Arab villagers. He nevertheless presciently advised that harsh tactics risked “alienat[ing] all moderate elements in this country, perhaps permanently.”³⁴

According to Air Vice Marshal Peirse, a few days before Wauchope’s memo, on 30 May, the inspector general of police—along with Peirse himself, the other architect of the village search policy—relayed instructions to him from unspecified superiors to “modify the intensity” of the searches. Thus, he recorded despairingly, did “the only measure available for coercing the rebels [slip] away from us.”³⁵ The record suggests, however, that this measure’s indispensability in reality proved too precious to relinquish, official sanctioning aside.

The flow of reports of British brutality did not fall off in early June, after the supposed termination of severe measures. On 18 June, the AHC sent a telegram to the high commissioner, voicing more of the familiar complaints: “. . . Army men beat unarmed Arab villagers [and] destroy[ed] furniture [and] food supplies.”³⁶ Two days later, Wauchope assured Yitzhak Ben Zvi, the chair of the Jewish National Council (Va’ad Leumi), that “where responsibility [for Arab attacks] can be fixed on any village severe measures are being taken.”³⁷ Reports of such measures appeared contemporaneously in the Arab press, and included charges of theft, the destruction of food, and “ill treatment” of villagers.³⁸ On 23 June, the deputy inspector general of police wrote in a CID report that “summary action against certain villages” had “aroused considerable resentment and criticism.” This took on added significance in light of his subsequent observation that “it would not appear that up to the present more than a small proportion of the villagers have taken arms against the forces of Government.”³⁹ Peirse characterized the 24 June search of villages in the vicinity of the routinely sabotaged Jerusalem-Lydda railway line as having had “a good effect”—the familiar euphemism for terrorizing villagers into obedience.⁴⁰ By then, the government had conducted eighty-one village searches, nearly half of which had failed, not surprisingly, to recover any weapons.⁴¹ In July, the high commissioner informed the colonial secretary that there were “accusations of undue military severity throughout the country.”⁴² He felt obliged to begin his 7 July address to the Palestinian public with a reference to the “misconception . . . that Government uses force wantonly and ruthlessly.”⁴³ The next day, Reuven Zaslany, the Jewish Agency’s liaison to the British army, reported to Haganah intelligence that “the government intended to reduce the weapons searches in Arab villages, in order to avoid further alienating the population.”⁴⁴ If the authorities were still contemplating this course of action in early July, they had yet to undertake it, Peirse’s assurances notwithstanding. It is therefore little surprise that on the same day as Zaslany’s report, the AHC resolved to “complain to the League of Nations regarding terrorism and the killing of innocents by the British military” and “to prepare a report on the violent actions that occurred during searches.”⁴⁵ Nor is it surprising that in August, the writer of a Colonial Office memorandum referred to “the numerous complaints we [have] received about outrages by the troops.”⁴⁶ As the War Office itself ultimately acknowledged—almost in the same breath as it decried the Arabs’ “successful protests against ‘excesses’ by troops”—in the absence of an official policy of repression in the revolt’s first phase, “many repressive measures . . . crept in through force of circumstances . . . and mostly they were more severe in nature than would have been necessary . . . had a strong front been presented from the start.”⁴⁷

Such measures, coupled with the government’s perpetual indifference to Arab demands, squandered whatever remained of its credibility among the Arab population, and placed “moderate elements” such as Arab government employees in an impossible position. On 30 June, Mustafa Bey al-Khalidi, a puisne judge at the supreme court in Jerusalem, along with 136 other Arab civil servants, signed a statement to the high commissioner and other top officials. Its essence was that the Arab officials could no longer usefully serve as a link between the British government and the Arab population, who with good reason disbelieved all of the officials’ assurances as to London’s good faith vis-à-vis commissions of inquiry and other such palliatives. British force would do nothing to change this situation, the statement insisted. In a poignant and representative passage, the officials asserted:

It will be argued, we know . . . that Government cannot yield to violence without losing prestige. We would strongly have supported that argument had it not been for our belief that Government is itself in part to blame for the state of mind which has brought about the violence. We yield to no one in upholding order and authority as the foundation of all good government. But authority implies justice all round, and when justice is denied . . . then authority becomes undermined; and it shows a mistaken notion of prestige to suppose that it can be restored by the use of force.⁴⁸

The statement prompted a delayed response from the president of the Committee of the Jewish Community of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, but one worth noting in the present context. It arrived on the high commissioner’s desk with the endorsements of an array of Jewish groups, along with a request that it be forwarded to the colonial secretary and to the League of Nations Mandates Commission.⁴⁹ The letter claimed that the 137 Arab signatories of the statement had “wholly or partly . . . identif[ied] themselves with the movement of civil disobedience and open revolt, with all its implications of cold-blooded murder, vandalism and the like.” The government, it argued, should have fired them. To do otherwise was to yet again countenance “brigands, marauders and ‘rebels.’” Incredibly, the Arab signatories had “even presume[d] . . . to protest against the Government’s policy of ‘repressions.’” In a word, the Arab statement was “patently illegal” and the Colonial Office erred in deigning to acknowledge it.⁵⁰

THE AMBIVALENT ZIONIST DEPICTION OF THE

PALESTINIAN LEADERSHIP

The Jewish press beat the same belligerent drum. One newspaper, in a May special edition, proclaimed that the government had “surrendered the country to murderers.”⁵¹ On 19 June, the new colonial secretary, William Ormsby-Gore, relayed to Weizmann the high commissioner’s opinion that Jewish newspapers’ unrelenting calls for “ruthless repressive measures against the Arabs” had considerably “exacerbate[d] Arab feeling.”⁵² Indeed, two days prior, Filastin ran an article stating, “The Mandate authorities would clearly not have used these violent means were it not for the provocations of the Jews and the Jewish press.”⁵³

As Ian Black documents, a great deal of the Arab-related content of the Zionist press in Palestine originated from the political department of the Jewish Agency.⁵⁴ This was true in particular of the Palestine Post.⁵⁵ The Post claimed from the first that the strike was the work of thugs. Its 27 April edition, for example, contained headlines such as “Strike forced on Arabs” and “Business as usual in spite of hooligans.” In a 29 April article titled “Deal with the instigator,” the paper declared that “the inspiration for the strike is undisguised intimidation,” and prayed that the British would not “lose themselves in admiration of what can easily be mistaken for a perfect organization, with its roots in some deep-seated grievance.” On 20 May, the Post opined that arrest figures (800 Arabs, fifty Jews) during the recent “wave of crime” furnished “a simple index to the part of the population which supplies the aggressor and the criminal.”⁵⁶ When the AHC publicly pled for nonviolent resistance to the British, the Post editorialized that the committee was either dissembling, or had “never exercised any real influence over [its] people” in the first place.⁵⁷

This analysis contained a tension that was also present in the Jewish Agency arguments to Wauchope. These were resolute regarding the criminal nature of Arab political agitation in Palestine. When elaborating this claim, Zionists’ rhetorical weapon of first choice was to lay responsibility for all violence in the country at the doorstep of the national leadership, whose national credentials they simultaneously belittled. The evidence for this inference was lacking, however, as disclosed in Jewish Agency members’ private remarks (such as Ben Gurion’s and Shertok’s above) and in the Post’s desultory acknowledgement that the Arab leadership had, perhaps, sincerely advocated peaceful methods. But if they had, insisted the paper, that only exposed their “leadership” for the sham it was. Thus, to put it colloquially, the Arab leaders got it coming and going. They were either fomenting all violence or powerless to control it. Either way, what kind of leaders were these?

Of course, this choice was false. For the Arab leaders were neither responsible for all violence in the country nor empowered to prevent it. And the charge regarding their impuissance was, in any case, an afterthought in Zionist discussions. The primary indictment remained that the AHC had coerced Arab participation in the strike through thuggery and was likewise behind the attacks on British police and soldiers. As with the Times’ coverage of encounters between Arab and British forces, the Post cast the Arab militants as mere outlaws, turning out headlines such as “Running fights with Arab bandits” and “Soldiers fight bandits.”⁵⁸ Bandits and hooligans, not “some deep-seated grievance,” were the real drivers of the strike. The Post’s 4 June edition heralded the government’s “long-delayed recognition” of the strike’s “essential illegality.”⁵⁹

BRITISH INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENTS

OF THE REBELS

While the Jewish Agency and the Jewish press relentlessly reiterated the top-down (that is, AHC-directed) crime theme, British intelligence attempted to come to grips with some of the subtleties on the ground. Two were particularly significant. First, as noted above, Arabs mostly struck at British forces and infrastructure in May, although they also attacked Jews (sometimes fatally) and their property. The increase in “crime” therefore had a peculiarly military quality. Second, crime did not, in fact, increase dramatically from May to June. The number of murders was equal from one month to the next (twenty-one in each case), and attempted murders were comparable (moving from fifty-four to sixty). Cases of manslaughter, theft, and “other offences against the person” actually declined in June, while assaults and woundings increased from thirteen to seventeen and highway robberies from four to five.⁶⁰

The RAF weekly intelligence summary of 17 June continued to refer to armed Arab groups engaged in sabotage and attacks on British forces as “gangs” and “marauders,” but it also took notice of their organizational sophistication. Recounting an attack on a British railway patrol outside Dayr al-Shaykh, in the Jerusalem subdistrict, the report observed, “. . . the fire of the gang was organised and controlled—it was not mere indiscriminate sniping.”⁶¹ The following week’s intelligence summary likewise remarked on “the improved organisation” of the “marauders” attacking British forces. It concluded, “The two main objectives of the Arabs now appear to be intensive sabotage of railway lines and formation of armed gangs to combat the military in the open.”⁶²

Peirse’s report also commented on the more impressive rebel formations that appeared on the scene in June, particularly in what would come to be known as the “triangle of terror”—Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm. He wrote:

Armed bands which a fortnight previously consisted of fifteen to twenty men were now encountered in large parties of fifty to seventy. The bands were not out for loot. They were fighting what they believed to be a patriotic war in defence of their country against injustice and the threat of Jewish domination.⁶³

Such passing acknowledgements of the magnanimous (if misguided) motivation of what were otherwise referred to as “bandits” are rare in the record, and mark the boundary of mainstream British discourse on the revolt at the time.

CONCLUSION

By late June, then, the British and the Zionists were in firm agreement on the criminal nature of the burgeoning armed revolt—if not firm enough, from the Zionist perspective. With regard to the strike, London took a more nuanced view. On the one hand, as the high commissioner made clear verbally and via legal fiat, the strike was illegal and an open affront to the authority of the British government in Palestine. Those advocating it were therefore subject to prosecution and incarceration on grounds of sedition. On the other hand, while the British allowed that some of the strike’s success turned on the work of criminally-minded young toughs operating at the behest of local strike committees, they were nevertheless certain that it had broad popular support. So much so that the Arab leadership would have discredited itself in opposing it. But as we shall see, this more moderate—and accurate—evaluation of the strike sat uneasily with London’s pretense that it faced something other than a nationalist uprising in Palestine. And given that this pretense was indispensable to the legitimacy of the mandate, forfeiting it was impossible. Rather, the notion of a popular strike and insurgency would have to go.