Explain the outbreak of, and the British response to, the Arab revolt of 1936 and 1939.

   By the mid 1930’s, the Jewish population in Palestine had grown to approximately 400’000 and Jewish economic and political structures in Palestine were well ensconced. The Jewish National Fund bought up land, as well as set up industrial projects, on which non-Jews could not work. The extent of the Jewish presence and the rapidly deteriorating fate of European Jewry meant that the British would have an extremely difficult time extricating themselves from the Balfour Declaration, which stipulated that the British government favoured the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The existing Palestinian leadership, dominated by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, was unwilling to grant members of the Jewish community citizenship or to guarantee their safety if an Arab state was to emerge. The British mandate made it clear that they were responsible for the well being and safety of every religious group within that mandate and had to make sure that when they leave Palestine, a solution would have been found or imposed that allowed everyone to live in peace. With rapid Jewish immigration ‘the greatest Arab grievance was, as usual, immigration’ and the Zionists determined to make sure that the British carry out their promise of the establishment of a Jewish state, the Palestinians were worried that their British rulers would be replaced by Jews, ‘their (Palestinian) concern was that independence might indeed be granted in a few years, only not to them, to the newcomers from Europe who would outnumber them’.

   A General Strike was called for in April 1936 in protest at growing Jewish economic strength; Palestinian tradesmen and workers went on strike across Palestine. But violence began soon, on the 13th of April 1936, when two Jewish settlers were killed by Arabs on the Tulkarm Road. This led to almost instant reprisals from Jews when two Arabs were killed the day after. There was an escalation of violence across Palestine, But especially in the town of Jaffa where riots broke out. Jaffa was a hotbed of Palestinian discontentment, it had been local leaders in Jaffa who had originally called for a General Strike across Palestine, having taken their inspiration from a similar strike by Syrians against the French. There was widespread tension across Palestine and there was a hostile feeling between the Palestinians and Jews. Palestinian guerrilla bands sprang up across Palestine, acting largely independently and composed overwhelmingly of peasants, who were resentful of increasing Jewish ownership of land. These bands were sporadically attacking Jewish settlements and British government sites in the countryside. On the 25th of April 1936, the six main Palestinian political parties formed the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) to give the so far disorganised rebellion some leadership. The purpose of the AHC was to fight Zionism nationally and to oppose the British. The AHC was not in command of the rebels, but had influence and was in contact with all rebel leaders and help set up a structure so every area had its own commander in charge of all military operations within that specified area. The AHC called for the General Strike to continue and a boycott of Jewish businesses to start. The main demands of the AHC reflected the biggest grievances of the general Palestinian population had, an immediate end to Jewish immigration, an end to any more transfer of land to Jews and a new General Representative Government. The strike quickly turned into a campaign of terror against Jews and their property. Armed groups of Palestinians attacked Jewish villages as well carrying out operations against the British army and police. By August 1936, responding more to attacks on British assets then to Jewish losses, the British authorities launched a harsh military crackdown on the Palestinian rebels. The British wanted the AHC to help end the revolt and decided to bring in her regional allies to help mediate an end to the revolt. A public appeal was made by Emir Abdullah of Transjordan and the King’s of Iraq and Saudi Arabia for a cessation of violence. They also were in direct contact with the AHC leaders and the revolt ended in October 1936, ‘the AHC had called for an end to the violence and it had ended immediately. They were capable of restarting it just as quickly’. Following the cessation of the strike and violence, the British government set up a Royal Commission to find out how best to solve the problems of Palestine. The Royal (Peel) Commission was set up to examine the conflict between Arab and Jew’s and to find a long-term solution that was needed for Palestine. The Jewish homeland that was desired by the Zionists and promised by the British government could have developed into an independent state or part of a federal state or within a binational territorial state. The Peel Commission published its findings in July 1937 and it described the Arab and Jewish positions as irreconcilable and that the existing mandate in its current form was unworkable. It attributed the underlying cause of the revolt to Arab desire for independence as well as hatred and fear of a possible establishment of a Jewish state. The Peel Commission recommended freezing Jewish immigration at 12’000 a year for five years and the partitioning of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Palestinians were dismayed at the prospect of loosing potentially half their land and the revolt resumed in September 1937.

   The 20th Zionist Congress, which met in 1937, rejected the proposed boundaries for partition in the Peel Commissions report, but agreed in principle to idea of partition. Palestinians nationalists rejected any notion of partition full stop. The British government approved the Peel Commissions findings and sent a technical team to Palestine to make detailed plans for partition. However, this technical team, the Woodhead Commission, reversed the Peel Commissions findings. The Woodhead team published its own report in November 1937, in which it found that partition was impractical, this in turn was accepted by the British government. The mandate that the British government had over Palestine gave the British the responsibility of ensuring that every religious group in Palestine must be protected and be allowed to work, live and practise their religion peacefully. The British government was now in a very complicated situation as they had already made it clear that they favoured the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But how was this to be established with all the Palestinian hostility? Should it be an independent homeland within Palestine, or part of a federal state or within a binational territorial state? Arabs still heavily outnumbered Jews at this point, but could the British hand over control of Palestine to Arabs given their absolute denial of any national rights whatsoever to Jews, a clear conflict with the mandate that the British had.

   An escalation of violence occurred when the acting District Commissioner of Nazareth, Lewis Andrews, was assassinated by Palestinian rebels in September 1937. The colonial authorities responded by outlawing the AHC on the 1st of October 1937 and by imposing martial law across Palestine, which allowed military courts to pass the death sentence. The rebels were becoming much more effective and daring as more and more volunteers joined the revolt and because arms were being smuggled across the porous borders from Syria. The money used to buy these arms came from money extorted from wealthy Arabs by the rebels. Rebel tactics included attacking telephone and telegraph communications, blowing up railway lines and bridges, as well as attacking police and army installations. Palestinian guerrilla’s had managed to take control of much of inland Palestine (inc. Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, parts of Jerusalem Old City and even parts of Jaffa) for eighteen months (peaking Aug-Sept 1938), ‘For more than eighteen months the country’s interior was controlled by the rebels’.During this period, Jews were relatively untouched, as it was the British who were the main targets for the Arab rebels, except for the massacre in Tiberias where a large number of the towns Jews were killed in September 1938.

   The British authorities routinely used collective punishment against the Palestinians. From the outset of the revolt, collective punishment united the civil and military authorities in improvised actions against rebellious villages; one fined the villages in accordance with the Collective Punishment Ordinance, while the other demolished their houses under the Emergency Regulations. ‘After much hesitation, the government handed extraordinary powers to the military, enabling it to crush the Revolt well before the outbreak of World War Two’. Collective Punishment existed in most British colonies, but in most places it needed the approval of the Colonial Secretary; however, the autocratic powers enjoyed by the Palestine High Commissioner made this unnecessary. The Chief Justice of Palestine, Sir Harry Trusted, was uneasy about the use of collective punishment. He argued that it was ‘contrary to the ordinary principles of British administration of justice and should be pursued with extreme care’. The Attorney-General, William Fitzgerald, was far less ambivalent, he maintained that ‘collective punishments and ordinances in most of the British colonies have achieved that desideratum of British law and administration, peace and ordered government, with the least possible amount of repressive measures’.

   From June 1937, the British military stepped up its effort to defeat the rebels by the increased use of the RAF, detachments of troops were now supported from the air ‘villages where rebels were sheltering were repeatedly bombed’. But the air offensive did not succeed in destroying the rebels completely, the government in London decided for a change of Generals in command with Lt-Gen Haining taking over form General Dill. The appointment of a new General heralded a change of tactics. Haining ordered the prolonged occupation of rebel villages in order to deny bases to the rebels, to support Palestinian still loyal to the British and the reintroduction of civil control. By May 1938, seventy massive concrete forts were constructed at all the main crossroads and vantage points in Palestine. An electrified fence was put up along the vulnerable northern frontier to check the constant passage of rebels. Collective punishment was still used, but it was decided to balance this with rewards for villages that offered co-operation.

   The High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir Harold MacMichael wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in early September 1938 ‘the position is deteriorating rapidly and has reached a stage at which the rebel leaders are more feared and respected than we are. The movement is definitely a national one’. He went on to say that the revolt was ‘an attempt to achieve the complete reversal of government policy regarding partition and Jewish immigration’.

   British troops were extremely harsh in their treatment towards the Arabs which resulted in protests from Anglican clergy, who acted throughout the revolt as a self-appointed civil rights organisation. The Archdeacon of St.George’s wrote to the Chief Secretary saying ‘from every side complaints are reaching me daily of the unnecessary and quite indiscriminate roughness displayed by the British police in their handling of the native, and particularly the Arab population’ and of ‘wanton and unnecessary violence when searching houses and the roughing up of suspects’. Whole villages were razed to the ground when the murder of a police officer or soldier occurred. The District Commissioner of Hebron, unlike most government officials, he remained in the town, submitted a report to the government in August 1938 detailing acts of vandalism, arson, looting and murder by the police forces sent in to reimpose order. He wrote of ‘acts of wanton and reckless barbarity perpetrated by English members of the military and police force against the local people, including a boy of fifteen who was beaten and then shot’. In the village of Kfar Yasif, in early 1939, a British army truck drove over a land mine which exploded, killing one soldier and wounding others. According to Eric Bishop, an Anglican minister, the surviving soldiers went on the rampage, torching seventy houses. Nine Arabs were killed as the soldiers sprayed the road with machine-gun fire.

 

   In October 1938 the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Edmund Ironside, dispatched another whole division to Palestine, which turned the scales against the rebels. British military power was so overwhelming, the revolt began to crumble. The death penalty was not only applied to murder now, but also for carrying arms. The critical turning point of the revolt was August to October 1938, it was at this point that Lt-Gen Haining was able to report back to London that the whole country was in the hands of the army and the ‘co-operation’ of many of the rebel leaders had been obtained while the others had fled the country. In the end, the British military proved too strong for the Palestinian guerrilla’s who were outgunned and could not cope with Britains more high tech weapons. But the British were astonished by the tenacity of the revolt and were forced to use a sizeable number of troops and resources into defeating the revolt. The Zionists were able to see the revolt first hand and embarked on a militarism of their own, with fifteen thousand Jews under arms by 1939. It helped create an increasingly militant Jewish political culture and in the 1940’s Ben-Guiron and other Zionist leaders made a decision to prepare for a military fight against the Palestinians rather than the British. This decision proved to be instrumental in the eventual defeat of the Palestinians. When the Jews began their own revolt against the British after the end of the Second World War ‘the Palestinians proved too exhausted by the effort of rebellion between 1936 and 1939 to be in any condition to match it’.

   The Arab revolt was the first time that the Arabs of Palestine truly united together for a single cause; it was the first Palestinian national movement. It united virtually all Palestinians from both village and town, mobilising thousands of Palestinians form all sectors of society and all over Palestine. The revolt helped produce a revolutionary spirit amongst the workers and peasants.

Bibliography

L James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (Abacus publishing, 2001)

N Shepherd, British rule in Palestine (Cambridge University press, 1999)

N Bethell, The Palestine Triangle (Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1979)

B Kimmerling, Palestinians: The making of a People (Harvard University Press, 1994)

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