Читать книгу The Crime of Nationalism - Matthew Kraig Kelly - Страница 8

Introduction

ON 21 JUNE 1936, Muhammad Hajj Husayn Qaʿdan and Ahmad Muhammad Sulayman were traveling from their village of Dayr al-Ghusun southeast along the hilly terrain to Balʿa, near Tulkarm. The path of their journey ran through an area that the British, who then governed Palestine, regarded as a “trouble spot.” The British dubbed the territory between Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm the “triangle of terror” in reference to its residents’ habit of firing on police and soldiers. But the triangle was just one of several problem areas for the British. Across Palestine, His Majesty’s security forces had been encountering armed resistance for the better part of June 1936, and the Arab population at large had, since April, been observing a strike against British policy in the country. While the two villagers likely sympathized with the strike and perhaps with the armed attacks, on 21 June, they went simply in search of water for their cattle. Nevertheless, when a British pilot monitoring the area caught sight of the men on the hills, he fired on them, prompting them to take shelter in a nearby cave. The pilot then radioed the pair’s location to British soldiers in the vicinity, a number of whom shortly arrived on the scene. One of them, a Sergeant Sills, approached the mouth of the cave and fired into it without warning. The villagers—who, in keeping with custom, bore their own arms—fired back, fatally wounding Sills in the head and chest.¹

The case of Muhammad Hajj Husayn Qaʿdan and Ahmad Muhammad Sulayman ultimately reached the supreme court of Palestine on appeal, after a lower court sentenced both men to death. The high court denied none of the details noted above, but nevertheless rejected the right of the two villagers to defend themselves. On the contrary, the court 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.”² The court seemed to suggest that the British, by virtue of their constituting the state in Palestine, behaved legally by definition, and that those resisting them were therefore criminals by definition. Palestinian rebels did not reject this logic, but rather adapted it. Indeed, they took up arms in its name.

Not initially, though. The British had occupied Palestine since the end of the First World War, and their presence there had been met with a decade and a half campaign of Arab protest. British policy in Palestine centered on open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases, with the stated goal of establishing a “Jewish National Home.” Arab protest against this policy was mostly peaceful, though occasionally violent. In either case, it was ineffectual. And that failure fed the popular frustration that would boil over into open rebellion in mid-1936. The Palestinian Great Revolt lasted from 1936 to 1939. It is the temporal focus of this book.

As the cave anecdote suggests, the book has a thematic focus as well. It seeks to understand how violence is coded and construed, both by historical actors and by the historians thinking about those actors. When is violence visible, and when is it invisible? When does it emerge as the primary explanation for a given historical episode, and when does it appear incidental to that episode? As the book demonstrates, the answers to these questions lie in the interplay of the mutually constitutive discursive formations of “nation” and “crime.” I use the term “crimino-national” to refer to this area of analytic focus.

In the age of nationalism, the nation names the criminal. In so doing, the nation claims for itself the prerogatives of violence, from incarceration to killing, while at the same time disinheriting the criminal of these prerogatives. Looked at from the other end, violent crime claims for itself rights normally associated with the nation-state: to control the bodies of others, up to and including the point of death. It is therefore imperative that the nation-state police the boundary between itself and the criminal, such that any criminal effort to dissolve that boundary is resoundingly repudiated. It is for this reason that coercion lies at the heart of so many definitions of the modern state, such as Ernest Gellner’s, which characterizes the state as “that institution or set of institutions specifically concerned with the enforcement of order.”³ Before enforcing order, the state must name order, and conversely disorder. The state, acting in the name of the nation, cannot countenance any criminal enterprise claiming to represent not disorder, but an alternative order. And this is exactly what modern revolutionary movements, acting in the name of their own nations, have done. The Palestinian rebels are a case in point.

Although less so than other interwar insurgencies, the revolt of 1936–39 is well studied. It has given birth to a literature that offers a range of theoretical perspectives on both its origin and its outcome. One useful way of construing this theoretical spectrum is by reference to the archival materials on which studies of the revolt have drawn: the reports, correspondence, and memoirs of British officials in London and Jerusalem; those of the Jewish Agency and the Haganah; and the memoirs and diaries of Palestinian nationalists, to name the most salient sources. Some studies have taken on board one or another of the theoretical perspectives implicit in these materials, and have produced what we might think of as chronicles of the rebellion. Such chronicles—many of them eminently readable—rehearse a series of facts, highlighting watersheds such as the revolt’s outbreak in April 1936, its cessation in October of that year, its recommencement in September 1937, and its collapse in 1939.

Chronicles more sensitive to the Jewish experience of the revolt emphasize, additionally, the role of Arab-on-Arab violence and intimidation in maintaining the strike and the rebellion, and may highlight Arab atrocities against Jews, such as the murderous assaults on Safed in August 1936 and Tiberias in October 1938. They also tend to reproduce the perspective of Zionist intelligence on the rebel movement and its personalities, and that of the Jewish Agency on British officials in Palestine.⁴ Chronicles more concerned with representing the Arab experience of the revolt may call attention to episodes such as the collisions between British soldiers and Arab rebels at the pivotal Battles of Balʿa (near Tulkarm) and Beit Imrin (near Nablus) in September 1936, or at the Battle of al-Yamun (near Jenin) in November 1937. They are also apt to offer more sympathetic and subtle portraits of the rebel commanders and sub-commanders, and of the subversive institutions, such as the rebel courts, that proliferated across Palestine during the revolt’s second phase.⁵ Whatever the perspectives of these different studies, all of them absorb not only facts but also narratives from the sources upon which they draw. These narratives preordain certain events, persons, and developments as critical for understanding the rebellion, and in that way predetermine the basic character of the studies that assimilate them.

Then there are those histories of the Great Revolt that hew more conscientiously to a given theoretical perspective. These typically engage more critically and even skeptically with the archival materials relating to the rebellion. Over time, the general trajectory of these works has been away from top-down analyses of the rebellion and toward bottom-up analyses. Where the first emphasize elite political institutions and personalities as the driving forces of the rebellion, the second offer something closer to “peoples’ histories” or “histories from below,” which seek to reinstate the agency of peasants, proletarians, and other “subalterns” as decisive actors in the revolt’s unfolding.⁶

The present book offers a crimino-national analysis of the rebellion, focusing on the under-explored area of overlap between the criminological and the nationalist dimensions of British imperial discourse in Palestine. British and Zionist discussions of the revolt both consistently represented it as a criminal affair only masquerading as a national uprising. This is the primary framing of the rebellion that one encounters in the British and Zionist archives. And it is therefore the framing that most chronicles of the rebellion reproduce, either wholly or in substantial part. But, as we will see, even the more theoretically sophisticated histories of 1936–39 have tended, often unwittingly, to reproduce the British and Zionist crimino-national framing of the revolt. Although the archives themselves contain ample evidence of the speciousness of this framing, the British and Zionist sources contain an abiding crimino-national narrative that mutes and marginalizes this evidence. Researchers who are less than vigilant in deconstructing this narrative therefore often reproduce, rather than remedy, these archival lacunae.

Consider the following example. The Great Revolt began as a largely peaceful general strike. With time, however, it grew violent. According to the standard narrative, the British initially followed a “policy of no repression,” in Yehoshua Porath’s phrase, and only belatedly resorted to violence in response to the increasingly violent tactics of the rebels. Yet, as part one of this book demonstrates, the “no repression” thesis is false. British repression in Palestine was rampant in 1936, and it got underway much earlier than most studies suggest.

Why have so many histories of the revolt gotten this point wrong? Because they have absorbed the depiction of 1936 that is latent in the British and Zionist archival materials. These materials include a vast number of situation reports and day-to-day telegraphic exchanges among and between officials in Jerusalem and London, and a handful of more detailed reports that are some of the earliest histories of the revolt. They contain multiple references to British violence, but the references are dispersed across a mass of material relating to other topics, and thus no narrative of British brutality emerges from them.

Many chronicles of 1936, for example, cite the summary report of R. E. C. Peirse, the British military commander in Palestine, but neglect to note the report’s most damning disclosures.⁷ These concerned the “village searches” that British security forces began conducting throughout the country in May 1936. The objects of these searches were supposed to have been weapons and wanted men, but Peirse acknowledged that the searches’ real purpose was “punitive.” He explained that on the pretext of “search,” British police and soldiers were “actually” employing “Turkish methods” against the villagers. The point of these methods was to offer the villagers a taste of British terror, lest they became enamored of, or intimidated by, the armed bands then forming in the hills.⁸ Peirse further divulged that the “Turkish methods” were sufficiently pervasive to cause “a grave crisis” within the Palestine police, whose Arab section nearly defected en masse in protest against the “searches.”

All of this occurred in May and early June 1936. British repression only escalated with the spread of the rebellion thereafter. The April–October 1936 phase of the revolt was thus hardly a period of “no repression.” The problem for researchers has been that Peirse did not do them the favor of underscoring the consequence of such disclosures. On the contrary, he made them only in passing, as though they were incidental to his larger narrative: the “no repression” narrative. Similarly, significant revelations crop up elsewhere in the archival record, and in the same perfunctory fashion. For example, in discussing the “considerable [Arab] resentment and criticism” of British repression in the villages, the deputy inspector general of police noted in a report of 23 June 1936 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.”⁹

To summarize, then, we have the military commander in Palestine acknowledging that in May 1936, British brutality against Palestinian villagers was pervasive to the point of causing a near-mutiny among Arab policemen. Additionally, we have the deputy inspector general of police conceding that, as of a month later, few of these villagers had attacked British security forces. When knit together, these and related facts suggest a narrative that runs counter to that found in the British and Zionist archives and parallel to that found in the Arabic sources. According to this narrative, British repression in 1936 preceded and provoked widespread militant activity among the Palestinian population, not the other way around. British violence, that is, was a basic cause of the revolt, not a reluctant reaction to it.

By contrast, the logic of British imperial discourse in Palestine dictated that the rebellion be framed as an unprovoked outbreak of crime, to which London was merely responding. Palestinian militants, activists, and spokespersons adapted, rather than rejected, this “crime wave” framing of the insurgency. In particular, they accepted its two core premises: first, that violence was justified when directed against criminals; and second, that peoples or nations were singularly competent to name the criminal. For the Palestinians, it followed not that the British nation was suppressing a crime wave in Palestine, but rather that the Palestinian nation was entitled to violently expel the British, whom they had rightly designated as criminals. Regardless of its application, in agreeing to this discursive framework, the Palestinians and the British reflected the prevalent understanding of nationalism as coded in international law and otherwise attested to in the international community of the interwar years. They thus committed themselves to demonstrating their own national and the other’s criminal credentials.

This crimino-national discourse matters historically. Our appreciation of it enables us to approach the interwar archives with a deconstructive agenda that brings new facts to light. In the case of 1936–39, there are two groups of such facts. The first pertains to the archival, and by extension historiographical, absence of the British from key causal junctures of the rebellion, such as the watersheds noted above: the rebellion’s outbreak, its temporary cessation, its recommencement, and its collapse. The village searches relate to the first of these. When we peer into the archive, we do not see the searches; we see the British seeing the searches. From their vantage point, the searches maintained law and order. Deconstructing that vantage point, we learn that the searches contributed to the breakdown of law and order. We learn, in other words, that the British were present at—that is, causally implicated in—the revolt’s inception. The archival presentation of the village searches is but one instance of the “absence” phenomenon. Part one of the book examines other instances. The second group of facts that a crimino-national approach brings to light concerns the positive quality of the rebellion. Much of the scholarship on the rebellion presents it negatively, as an anti-British and anti-Zionist enterprise. No doubt it was these things, but it was also a constructive enterprise centered on state-building. By placing the criminological consideration of the Palestinian national movement at the center of our concerns, we become alert to the empirical indices of this fact, as part two of the book demonstrates.

Put briefly, the British and Zionist criminological framing of Palestinian nationalism succeeded in portraying a national rebellion as a crime wave only by cropping the British out of the picture. This is not to suggest that the archive contains no mention of British actions in 1936–39. It is rather to observe that the archive presents British behavior as reactive and causally secondary, while it presents Palestinian behavior as formative and causally primary. In this sense, at every critical moment of the archival presentation of the rebellion, the British go missing from their own story. This book returns them to their rightful place.

A word is in order with regard to the book’s arrangement. The reader of chapter one can be forgiven if she puts the book down thinking that its argument goes as follows. The British were afflicted in Palestine by a kind of tunnel vision, which prevented them from apprehending their own causal implication in the disturbances they were attempting to manage. Their tendency to portray the rebellion as a criminal affair was a function of this tunnel vision. To have apprehended their own role in bringing about the revolt would have been to understand the revolt’s nationalist character, something beyond the capacity of the imperial mind.

This understanding is a simplification, as the reader careful enough to carry it forward into subsequent chapters will learn. Chapters two and beyond present a range of Arab, British, and Jewish voices, and those voices suggest a diversity of views on the rebellion. For example, some British officials failed even to consider the possibility that His Majesty was suppressing not a crime wave but a national revolt in Palestine. By contrast, others were alert not only to the possibility but to the reality of this scenario. Many fell somewhere in between. This range of perspectives was evident not only in the voices of British civilian officials but also in those of British policemen, soldiers, journalists, politicians and dissidents. The same diversity characterized Zionist opinion. But if the British and the Zionists did sometimes apprehend their own causal implication in the rebellion, why should we preoccupy ourselves with a crimino-national discourse that seemingly excludes this possibility?

The answer is that the discourse elaborated in chapter one was a form of political logic, not a deterministic psychology. The people perpetuating this discourse did so with varying degrees of awareness. Some knew that they were framing the rebellion in a manner that served British imperialism and Zionism more than it did the facts. Others were true believers. Most were a mix of the two. But nearly all participated in the criminalization of Palestinian nationalism. This book is a history of that criminalization.

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