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THREE

“The Policy Is the Criminal”

WAR ON THE DISCURSIVE FRONTIER,

JULY–AUGUST 1936

THE TREND LINES OF THE REVOLT and the strike evident in June deepened in July. Increasingly robust and well-organized Arab military formations took the field, and the strike endured in defiance of its regularly forecast demise.¹ The government responded to these developments with air power, propaganda, and military reinforcements. In the course of the month, British planes assaulted the rebels assiduously, firing 8,000 rounds and dropping 205 bombs. Mandate authorities also circulated over 350,000 pro-government leaflets to nearly a thousand villages.² Mustafa Kabha relates that such leaflets tended to feature a mix of “veiled threats and promises.” One read:

In times of distress and drought . . . the government exempted you from paying taxes and lent you a helping hand in the form of subsidies. But now the government is spending its money arresting lawbreakers and maintaining order . . . Who loses as a result of violations of the law? The losers are you and your village.³

In addition to the bullets, bombs, and handbills, two more British battalions arrived in Palestine, raising the total to eight. They fortified road and rail, and set up permanent pickets at trouble spots such as the road between Jerusalem and Nablus and areas in the “triangle of terror” (Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm).⁴

While the Jewish Agency and the Jewish press continued to regard the rebels as criminal gangs (kenufyot) and the strike as a contrived display of Arab “unity,” it would be a mistake to suggest that the reverse was unqualifiedly true in either case. The rebels did sometimes harass, assault, and even assassinate those they considered an impediment to the movement for national independence, and thereby alienated many of their fellow Arabs. And while the strike and the rebellion enjoyed broad popular support, there were Arabs who subverted both. The wealthy mukhtar of the village of Bidya, about twenty miles southwest of Nablus, refused to participate in the revolt on grounds that its proponents were lower-class delinquents.⁵ The mukhtar of Silwan, near Jerusalem, defiantly offered his protection to the Yemenite Jews entering and leaving his village. The Arabs of Lifta, on Jersualem’s northern outskirts, were likewise inclined to keep the intercommunal peace, and resented the push towards confrontation with the Jews.⁶ Arab attitudes regarding what constituted national obligations thus varied. (Indeed, Arab ideas about what constituted Arab national identity in Palestine varied.)⁷ Many Arabs were ambivalent about the strike, which placed their national and familial obligations at odds. The strike committees were alert to these difficulties and pooled resources to aid those most impinged upon by the work stoppage. Where beneficent tactics did not achieve their end, the committees resorted to intimidation.⁸

The Jewish Agency seized on such cases as evidence of the coercive and fundamentally criminal substructure of the strike. But the reality, as the British appreciated, was that while part of the strike’s success turned on enforcement mechanisms designed to prevent those less willing or able to participate from undermining Arab solidarity, the political objectives of the Arab population at large were clear long before the disturbances began in April 1936—and they included halts to Jewish immigration and land purchases, both of which spoke to the fundamental Arab hostility to further Jewish economic encroachment in Palestine. Wauchope, for example, wrote Ormsby-Gore in mid-June: “Intimidation is responsible only in small measure for continuance of strike which has [the] full sympathy of all Arabs.”⁹

While the British and the Zionists repeatedly admonished the Arabs that they would not meet their objectives through violent protest, such scoldings were disingenuous.¹⁰ It was, after all, trivially true that the Arabs could not extract British concessions by violent means, for they could not extract them by any means at all, as the history of the mandate plainly disclosed. The general Arab response to this circumstance was well articulated three years earlier, during the October 1933 riots in Jaffa, when Musa Alami, then a mandate official, commented: “The prevailing feeling is that if all that can be expected from the present policy is a slow death, it is better to be killed in an attempt to free ourselves of our enemies than to suffer a long and protracted demise.”¹¹ ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi, writing to Wauchope from the detention camp at Sarafand (in Lebanon) in August 1936, gave voice to a kindred sentiment: “The Arabs are aware that [the] Government is able to continue to pursue its present policy for another long period without showing any weakness. But they assert, on the other hand, that they have nothing to lose.”¹²

All of this established the context of the escalating struggle between Zionists, Arab Palestinians, and Britons for discursive ascendancy vis-à-vis the rebellion, which the present chapter will chart. It will focus in particular on the boldest crimino-national claim of the Zionists: namely, that the revolt was literally the product of a criminal syndicate working in secret collusion with the Arab Higher Committee. In addition, it will detail how Britons and Arabs responded to this contention, and how Arab actions bolstered it.

CRIMINAL NETWORKS AND THE ORIGINS

OF THE REVOLT

The most ambitious Zionist argument for the criminality of the strike and the revolt held that the apparently spontaneous disturbances of April 1936 were actually the premeditated outcome of known criminal elements working at the behest of the Arab leadership. In July, for example, a declaration “from the Jewish public in Israel to the civilized world” claimed that “the ‘leaders’ of the Arabs living in our country started making preparations for the recent agitations some time ago.” The trouble began, the document continued a little further on, “with the operation of a gang of murderers.”¹³

It is worthwhile briefly to address this charge, which was pervasive in 1936–39 and recurs in scholarship. The declaration’s claim regarding “preparations for the recent agitations” was not without merit. According to the memoir of the Palestinian militant Subhi Yasin, the highwaymen whose 15 April murder of three Jewish motorists set off the sequence of events culminating in the slaughter of 19 April were motivated by more than loot. The men had, in fact, intended to trigger a popular rebellion against the British, and were members of a group that included two future rebel leaders, Shaykh Farhan al-Saʿdi and Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir.¹⁴ Likewise, in his diary entry for 21 October 1935, the Istiqlal activist Akram Zuʿaytir noted his plans for a large meeting on 2 November (the eighteenth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration), the aim of which would be to “usher in a revolutionary campaign in Palestine.”¹⁵

But despite the fact that some Palestinian groups were laying plans for a violent revolt well before 19 April 1936, the notion that the Arab leaders, much less a “gang of murderers,” were behind the “agitations” was mistaken. Indeed, both Subhi Yasin and Akram Zuʿaytir wrote disdainfully of the mufti and the AHC’s reluctance to support even a peaceful strike.¹⁶ And the most ambitious scholarly attempts to situate the armed bands in the milieu of the mufti and various criminal gangs have been unpersuasive.¹⁷

Even as they publicly characterized the militarization of the Palestinian national movement as the work of extremists, British officials privately acknowledged that this “extremism” in fact represented the mainstream of Arab opinion, which held that it was force alone that entrenched British policy in Palestine, and it would be force alone that dislodged it.¹⁸ As the prolific pan-Islamist writer and activist Shakib Arslan put it in a February 1935 letter to the mufti, “. . . [T]he only language [the British] can understand is resistance.”¹⁹ The idea, then, that the rebellion was a mere “extension of traditional brigandage,” the mischief of “irresponsible youths and criminals,” or an assemblage of “terrorist nuclei” to which “youths from the villages” attached themselves, does not hold up.²⁰

As Yehoshua Porath documents, a mere seven of the known rebels had prior criminal records, although these seven were prominent figures.²¹ Based on interviews with former rebels conducted in the 1980s, Ted Swedenburg surmises that a greater proportion of lower-level fighters had criminal records predating the revolt than of rebel leaders, although he in no way implies that these comprised the majority of rebels. Swedenburg does note, however, that Palestinian histories conveniently ignore the criminal records of some insurgents.²²

More broadly, Palestinian nationalist discourse has tended to retroject modern Palestinian conceptions of criminality onto the period of the revolt and prior. Until quite recently, this entailed the forgetting (or condemning) of erstwhile bandit-heroes such as Abu Jilda, whose violent and larcenous exploits in the 1930s were once the stuff of fearful and admiring Palestinian folklore.²³ Likewise, robbers whose victims lay outside their own communities were, in earlier times, locally revered among Arabs in Palestine. They occupied a liminal frontier between crime and adventure, which depended for its existence upon intercommunal fissures born of parochial loyalties, and which Palestinian nationalist discourse has therefore foreclosed.²⁴

But while figures such as Abu Jilda largely vanished from Palestinian memory with the sealing of this frontier, their salience at the time of the revolt turned not only on a pre- or proto-national provincialism, but also on a dialectic in the Palestinian political imagination between the criminal and the national. This dialectic emerged naturally from the growing Palestinian conviction that the national government of the mandate was predicated on the illegal negation of Arab rights, and that it was only the maquillage of British sovereignty—flags, courts, uniforms—that concealed this ugly fact.

In his memoir of his time as a policeman in Palestine during the revolt, Roger Courtney recalls, “The names and fame of bandit leaders were treasured and revered everywhere in the Arab hills.”²⁵ He goes on to tell of a twelve-year-old newspaper boy in Jenin, who adopted the moniker “Abu Jilda” and “led an ‘army’ of children, with the purpose of mocking and harassing the police and the government generally.”²⁶ This “army,” composed of youths aged seven to twelve, donned “tin hats” modeled on those the British police wore, and slung bandoliers around their shoulders, against which they rested sticks in lieu of rifles. They even carried drums. Courtney remembers the boys parading “through the dusty Jenin streets” and brazenly violating the curfew by running noisily from house to house after hours. In response, the police would cobble together slingshots and smack the children with stones (“usually in the rear”!), a tactic which succeeded in converting them into “law-abiding and law-respecting citizens.”²⁷ Similar demonstrations occurred elsewhere in Palestine. In June 1936, a celebration erupted in the streets of Jerusalem. Its occasion was a rumor that the city’s notorious assistant superintendent of police, Alan Sigrist, had been assassinated. Here, too, scores of children fashioned tin hats out of “trays and platters” and held aloft wooden swords as they chanted anti-colonial slogans.²⁸

In willfully defying the outsider’s law while reappropriating his symbols of national sovereignty, “Abu Jilda’s” troupe reproduced, theatrically, tactics that Abu Jilda’s troop had pioneered in its real-world skirmishes with British police. As another former Palestine policeman, Colin Imray, recollects in his memoir, Abu Jilda became a top law enforcement priority after his group of outlaws executed a four-man police patrol and made off with their horses, rifles, and bandoliers.²⁹ On a separate occasion, one of Abu Jilda’s men apprehended a “senior legal officer” at gunpoint and demanded his pants.³⁰ When the police finally caught up with the infamous bandit and his longtime partner in crime, Salih al-ʿArmit, the two men emerged from their hideout “festooned with full police bandoliers and carrying police rifles.”³¹ An unwary observer might have mistaken them for policemen.

By the time of the revolt, bandits such as Abu Jilda seem not only to have straddled a line between criminal and adventurer but also to have sat astride the border of the criminal and the national—the very space the British inhabited in the Arab Palestinian political imagination. Indeed, both Abu Jilda and his attorney appear to have been keenly aware of this fact. The latter insisted at Abu Jilda’s 1934 trial that his client’s deadly assault on a policeman was “based on nationalist principles” as opposed to criminal proclivities.³² This defense took for granted that the same actions, when coded as national rather than as criminal, took on an inverted moral significance. If the British could play this game, why not the Arabs? As for the bandit-hero himself, one of his fellow prisoners, Najati Sidqi, recalled in his memoir that Abu Jilda wore

a military uniform decorated on the epaulettes with two swords and three stars in an attempt to distance himself and his group from the charge of being bandits. He also carried a long polished sword with a gilded handle and called himself chief of staff, while designating his colleague al-ʿArmit . . . as deputy with full authority.³³

During the revolt, Arab insurgents employed the same strategy. Among the photographs that Palestine policeman (and great-nephew of Lord Allenby) P. J. De Burgh Wilmot kept in his scrapbook from the revolt years are a number featuring dead rebels in military attire. One such snapshot displays a mortally wounded Arab in button-down khaki trousers, khaki jacket, and high boots.³⁴ The private papers of the assistant superintendent of police in Jenin, G. J. Morton, include a revolt-era photograph of three rebels in the same outfits, with the caption: “Typical Arab gangleaders in the Jenin area.”³⁵ As Morton’s caption indicates, the wearing of such uniforms was common among insurgents. A CID report of 18 August 1936 noted, “. . . [A]ircraft report seeing men in some uniform decamping into the hills.”³⁶ (The same report noted, not incidentally, that Palestinian “flag days have been held in Jaffa and other parts of the country.”) One British soldier recalled of Fawzi al-Qawuqji, whom the British would come to regard as the commander-in-chief of the rebels, “I remember seeing him through the field-glasses, standing on a small hill at the Battle of Bala, in Turkish uniform, wearing his medals and carrying a sword.”³⁷ Porath likewise notes rebel commanders’ predilection for “uniforms and symbols of rank.”³⁸

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider Porath’s explanation for the rebel uniform phenomenon, which is partially correct. He claims that rebel maltreatment of villagers in 1939 was “[t]o some extent . . . motivated by personal desire for status and wealth,” and continues, “Otherwise, one can hardly understand the deep concern of the bands’ commanders, who were leading an underground organisation, for uniforms and symbols of rank.” Undoubtedly the uniforms served as a symbolic denial of rebel criminality, but not merely on account of some rebels’ bad behavior. For the British equation of the rebels with “bandits,” “marauders,” and “criminals” persisted independent of the rebels’ treatment of the villagers. And while the rebel armies were “underground” in the sense that they waged asymmetric war against a traditional police force and military, their uniforms signified—to the Arabs of Palestine, to the British, and to an international audience—that they were a national military, regardless of what the British might claim.

Arab rebels thus not only transgressed the law but also commandeered its legitimizing tokens in the form of military and police regalia, as well as flags, stamps, courts, and other such emblems of national sovereignty (as we will explore further in subsequent chapters). In so doing, they did not so much break the law as they did turn it back upon its ostensible guardians. The British responded with mockery and re-imposed upon the rebels labels such as “murderer” and “criminal.” Thus, one of Wilmot’s photographs of a uniformed Arab rebel is accompanied by a caption disparaging the idea that the man was a soldier of any kind. Wilmot refers elsewhere to a pair of slain Arabs in the same uniform as “murderers.”³⁹

The British eagerness to so name the insurgents had an anxious quality, the impetus of which is well articulated by the legal scholar Nasser Hussain: “As Walter Benjamin once noted, the law’s fear of [generalized] violence is different from its fear of crime. Crime is a transgression against the law that may be checked by it. A more general unrest threatens not so much to upset the law as to set up an alternative logic and authority to it.”⁴⁰

While Arab bandits, rebels, and their young acolytes adopted police and military garb, British police and troops, as we have seen, frequently resorted to bandit tactics, and thereby embodied the conflation of the national and the criminal in the Palestinian political imagination. The bulk of the British officers imported from the disbanded Palestine gendarmerie into the Palestine police in 1926 were former Black and Tans from Ireland, whose reputation for “a certain ruthlessness,” observed a 1939 War Office report, they “maintained” during the revolt.⁴¹ The idea of employing Black and Tans in Palestine originated in the early 1920s, with then-Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill. Writes James Barker:

What Churchill envisaged for Palestine was a tough corps of fighters as a tactical reserve for the existing police force. As it happened, there were men available who matched this description: the thousands of ex-servicemen known as ‘the Black and Tans’ that Churchill himself had recruited as Secretary of State for War in February 1920 to reinforce the Royal Irish Constabulary. With both sides in Ireland seeking a negotiated settlement, these men, notorious for their brutality and indiscipline, would soon be out of a job. Churchill, unconcerned by their bad reputation, started planning their transfer en bloc to Palestine.⁴²

Ex-Black and Tans became more, not less, prominent and influential in the Palestine police as time passed, holding five of eight district commander posts by 1943.⁴³ The group’s notoriety was such that British officials began, in the course of the revolt, to use its appellation as a byword for illegal behavior among police.⁴⁴

Criminal elements, then, existed on either side of the Arab-British divide, although neither party could be correctly described as simply criminal, and the bulk of those fighting—whether Arab or British—did not have criminal backgrounds. The Arab revolt could only be regarded as a criminal enterprise within a discursive framework that submitted the legitimacy of British force in Palestine as a given. British violence in Palestine was largely absent from the surface of texts operating within this framework, as did most British and Zionist analyses of the revolt. As detailed directly, however, Arabs challenged British and Zionist discourse in this connection, forcing the issue of British force (and its Zionist impetus) to the surface of the debate over the nature of the rebellion, and thereby pressing the criminal charge back upon the mandatory and those in whose interests it acted.

WAR ON THE DISCURSIVE FRONTIER: THE

STRUGGLE TO CRIMINALIZE THE OTHER

In June 1936, Paula Ben Gurion opened a letter from London. In it, her husband David boasted that those making the Arab case in the city had singularly failed to expand “the ranks of our enemies” among the British political class. By contrast, Zionist influence was such that in the parliamentary debate of 20 June, “The speeches by Lloyd George, Leopold Amery, Tom Williams, Creech Jones, Herbert Morrison, James de Rothschild and Victor Cazalet were wholly or partly prepared by us.” He regarded the debate as “almost entirely the fruit of our work.”⁴⁵ But in early July, Lourie relayed to Shertok that members of the House of Commons, while “agreed that terrorism must be stopped,” were nevertheless pondering the utility of reducing Jewish immigration into Palestine. And the Agency received a report the next day stating that Wauchope was all that stood between the British military and a death blow to the insurgents, no doubt exacerbating Shertok and others’ sense of urgency regarding the British—and above all Wauchope’s—perception of the rebels.⁴⁶

Fear of British capitulation to Arab demands roused the Jewish Agency and its allies to apply greater diplomatic and popular pressure on the government to treat the revolt as a criminal affair: that is, to crush it. But doing so proved increasingly difficult for the British. By July, the rebels were launching twenty to thirty attacks on British troops and communications (“and occasionally . . . Jewish settlements”) daily.⁴⁷ The CID periodical appreciation summary for 12 July logged “persistent reports” of “large armed bands in the hills between Nablus and Ramallah.” Although the department regarded these as mere phantoms, it acknowledged the existence of such robust formations in the villages. The rebels’ “courage,” noted the summary, was not in question. It added poignantly, “[A] number are said to have gone to the hills taking their winding sheets [burial shrouds] with them.”⁴⁸

British forces countered insurgents via “pressure” on areas in and around Nablus and Ramallah, which generated still more insurgents.⁴⁹ The same undoubtedly resulted from the “bitterness . . . felt by the Rural and Urban population [over] the action taken by Government in sending large bodies of troops to villages, etc., and alleged shooting of unarmed peasantry,” as the CID reported.⁵⁰

On learning of some rebels’ coercion of villages that failed to contribute “men or money” to the revolt, the CID averred that “the bandit (’Mujaheddin’) spirit” was “still very much alive.”⁵¹ But the coercive tactics of the rebels were not, at this point, of primary concern to most Arabs, who were preoccupied instead with the behavior of British forces.⁵² This included the comparable practice of levying collective fines on villages deemed insufficiently supportive of the government. A telegram from the village of Jabaʿ read aloud at a meeting of the AHC on 19 July described “soldiers bursting into the village and collecting fines.”⁵³ Cities, too, were subject to fines. In June alone, the British fined Nablus, Acre, Safed, and Lydda.⁵⁴ Rebel manifestos referred to these actions as “infringements” (al-taʿaddi) and included them alongside robberies and murders in their list of indictments of the mandatory government.⁵⁵

Apart from complaints regarding these often devastating financial impositions, Arab reports of British brutality continued unabated.⁵⁶ They frequently entailed a dual claim: the Arabs suffering such treatment were not criminals, and therefore did not deserve it; and the British meting it out were thereby advertising their own criminality. The Arab Women of Jaffa informed the high commissioner on 8 July that the British use of excessive force in the area was “common knowledge.” Anticipating the charge of Arab criminality, their letter went on to assert:

Your Excellency will realize that the Arab people are compelled in the present circumstances to defend themselves and their country by purely national motives without the least intention to commit crime, as Your Excellency may assume, and the only means for quickly ending this period of crime and disorder will be by the removal of the causes which have created them.⁵⁷

ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi echoed this theme, addressing the high commissioner from the detention camp at Sarafand:

I, personally, do not know any one person of those who fire from the mountain-tops or who blow [up] bridges or cut telephone wires but it appears to me that there is not one person amongst them who is actuated by any personal interest in all the acts which he does, exposing himself to many dangers.⁵⁸

He also reminded the high commissioner, “. . . [T]he fact which cannot be doubted is that your troops have dealt with the Arabs ruthlessly and destroyed many Arab villages without any justification.”⁵⁹

The AHC wrote Wauchope on 15 July, “It is a matter of regret to the Committee that bitter complaints are still being addressed to it with regard to the ruthless and severe manner in which the troops are dealing with the situation under the pretext of ‘search.’”⁶⁰ Wauchope received another such report three days later, this one from the Arab Orthodox Priests Congress for Palestine and Transjordan:

The banishment of leaders, the confinement of people in prisons, the blowing up of houses with dynamite, the imposition of heavy fines on towns and villages, the looting of property, cereals and livestock, and other similar vigorous measures which are still being taken by troops and Police in all parts of the country are not only detestable measures which are prohibited by religion and inhuman and not befitting the civil forces of a great Christian and civilized power but are also unlikely to culminate in suppressing the rebellion and restoring order.⁶¹

While officials tended to dismiss such reports, it was not for lack of internal corroboration. A government welfare inspector reported to the chief secretary on 13 July that British troops had, a week earlier, killed an unarmed former policeman and father of five in the village of ʿAbud, about ten miles northwest of Ramallah. ʿAbud, wrote the inspector, had “always been peaceful and [had] not even been searched by troops.” His sour commentary on the incident suggested that such episodes were not rare:

Instead of pacifying the country by these tactics, bitterness and resentment is rapidly increasing in the villages and elsewhere. Whereas at the beginning of the trouble the fellahin were our best friends, we are steadily turning them into our worst enemies by these methods of ruthlessly killing innocent people and destroying their possessions and their stores of food.⁶²

An internal Colonial Office memo dated 9 July noted “many instances of rash and dangerous shooting by Supernumerary Police,” a particularly troubling development given the number of Jews among their ranks.⁶³ Testimony to continued British malfeasance turned up in private correspondence as well. Policeman Percy Cleaver wrote his aunt and uncle from Haifa on 6 July, “I’ve been on one or two of these [night] raids and it’s quite good fun, especially turning the contents of the houses into the street.”⁶⁴

In addition to repudiating the charge of criminality emanating from British and Jewish quarters, articulate Arab opinion in the latter half of 1936 also reversed it, and not only with respect to Britons. Arab newspapers portrayed Tel Aviv as a “city of thievery, swarming with forgers and thieves,” and made frequent reference to Jewish criminal conspiracies, often involving entanglements with world communism.⁶⁵ In reply to a Jewish newspaper’s report that children throughout Palestine were suffering from nightmares of “an Arab criminal standing in front of their houses, trying to get in,” a writer for al-Difaʿ observed: “This portrayal of the ‘Arab criminal’ is not surprising because every word in this newspaper, and in fact every word on the street and in official statements has painted this picture.” The headline of the article read, in part: “The Arabs are not the criminals, you criminal!”⁶⁶ Arab newspapers also sought to transfer the criminal label to the British. Al-Jamiʿa al-Islamiyya argued, “. . . [T]he cases of the strike are not of the nature to which the criminal law is applicable, because criminal laws have been enacted . . . where the offence is committed on account of criminal habits.”⁶⁷ The reality, declared Filastin, was that “the [British] policy alone is the criminal.”⁶⁸

While prior to April 1936 political cartoons featured sparingly in the Arab Palestinian press, they began appearing regularly in both Arab and Jewish newspapers during the revolt. Their caricatures often implied the criminality of the other by way of subtle visual cues that played on well-known physiognomical and phrenological codes.⁶⁹ One cartoon from the 19 June edition of Filastin depicted a British authority accepting a Jewish bribe while simultaneously exhorting the government to employ “all types of force” against the “Arab robbers and scoundrels.” The official’s deep-set eyes and compressed brow connoted his delinquency according to physiognomical conventions.⁷⁰ A second cartoon was more blunt. It depicted John Bull standing before a judge and flanked by two wives, one Arab and one Jewish. The judge advises him, “If you are sincerely looking for peace you must divorce your second wife [the Jewess], because your marriage to her is illegal.”⁷¹

The Arabs were turning the charge of criminality back upon their accusers, and were thereby engaging the crimino-national critique: the nation reserved to itself the right to name the criminal, whether the criminal fell within or outside its ambit. To the extent that a “period of crime and disorder” was acknowledged by Arab nationalist groups (as it was by the Arab Women of Jaffa), it was a matter for the people to sort out—a process that began with diagnosing the external cause of the internal disorder, which was the long-standing, ongoing British and Zionist colonial penetration of Palestine.⁷²

While the Arabs remonstrated against British policy and the means employed to enforce it, the mainstream British press continued to regard the revolt as a largely criminal affair, although this line of argument showed signs of faltering. The term “Arab revolt” appeared for the first time in The Times’ coverage on 20 June, but it made no difference with regard to the paper’s crime thesis; the same article marveled at Lord Winterton’s minority opinion in a House of Commons debate that “the Arab revolt . . . was a national movement, not mere banditry,” a view which led him to propose “the startling theory that nationalists were entitled to use all means, short of violence, to hold up the Government.”⁷³

The Spectator’s coverage was more discriminating, partly because more of the column space it devoted to Palestine consisted of letters to the editor. Even its professionally authored “think pieces,” however, gave evidence of a working hypothesis approach to understanding the revolt. A paragon of this genre was the 17 July article by William Blumberg, titled “The Arab and Zionist Policy.” Blumberg contended that it was “no use trying to make capital out of Arab lawlessness as the Zionists do.” “Revolutions,” he continued, “have their own logic.” He thus pointed out what The Times had ignored: once the language of revolt and revolution was in play, talk of criminality became much more complicated. But the “proof of good will” that Blumberg suggested the Arabs rightly required was not that of the British but rather that of the Zionists. After all, setting aside the fact that the Arabs had done so for two decades, the British could not “concede demands raised at the point of the revolver.”⁷⁴ Rather, Blumberg pressed the burden of surrendering to violence onto the Jews. The British position with regard to force was, once again, essentially invisible in its moral dimension. The very idea of the illegitimacy of British force was excluded in advance, even by someone capable of articulating the Arab case quite well in other regards, and who in fact sympathized with it. The dearth of analyses of the British presence in Palestine—and by extension of the legitimacy of the British use of force to maintain “law and order” there—was another instance of the discursive theme noted in the previous two chapters: namely, the absence of the British from their own calculations regarding the course of events in the mandate.