Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” the American novelist William Faulkner famously wrote.1 Oren Kessler, in his superb book, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt andd the Roots of the Middle East Conflict, illustrates Faulkner’s timeless observation. “Palestinians, despairing over their thwarted national hopes, wage acts of protest, boycott, sabotage, and violence,” Kessler writes.The 1936 to 1939 Arab Rebellion, also known as al-Thawra al-Arabiya al-Kubra, the Great Arab Revolt, to Palestine’s Arabs, is mostly forgotten. There are precious few treatments that have been published in English specifically devoted to this seminal event. Until Y. Porath’s The Palestinian Arab National Movement 1929–1939: From Riots to Rebellion appeared in 1977 as part of a magisterial two-volume treatment of Palestinian Arab nationalism during the time of Britain’s rule over Palestine,2 only John Marlowe’s journalistic account of the uprising, published three decades earlier, Rebellion In Palestine,3 was available. Ann Mosley Lesch’s excellent Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939: The Frustration of a Nationalist Movement followed in 1979.4 More recently, there was Tom Segev’s meandering 1999 book, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate5 and Ted Swedenburg’s Memories Of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past.6 But only Marlowe and Swedenburg focused exclusively on the Arab Rebellion. Palestine 1936 is thus a welcome addition to the literature. And, more importantly, provides the “context” that the protestors of the ongoing Gaza War argue is needed to understand the historical roots of this intractable conflict.“It began with Izz al-Din al-Qassam,” David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv’s (as the Jewish community in pre-state Israel was called) preeminent political leader and first prime minister of Israel observed after the rebellion had been raging for some sixth months (74). Al-Qassam is perhaps best known to Palestinians and Israelis today as the name of a rocket long used by Hamas to target Israel and also of that movement’s military wing. Neither is a coincidence. As Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela note in their important book, The Palestinian Hamas, the group has long “traced its roots . . . from Sheikh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam.”7Given his inchoate and poorly led uprising, al-Qassam hardly merits such veneration. But then as now he captured the zeitgeist of the time. A clergyman turned guerrilla, al-Qassam fought against France’s occupation of his native Syria following World War I. He escaped to Palestine in 1921 after being sentenced to death in absentia by a French court. Al-Qassam quickly immersed himself in radical, Palestinian nationalism and using his mosque in Haifa as a platform acquired a reputation as a popular, fiery orator. He also became renowned for his social welfare efforts and good deeds (a practice adopted by Hamas in Gaza since its founding in 1987): ministering to the poor, infirm, and downtrodden; establishing night schools for illiterate adults; and steering wayward youth toward productive lives of piety and discipline. His appointment as the Islamic marriage registrar for the Galilee provided al-Qassam with the perfect cover to solicit donations to support his planned uprising, recruit fighters, cache arms, and create a resistance network throughout the region.8But Al-Qassam was a fanatic. Like his heirs in Hamas, he regarded politics and religion as inseparable. And, like a future champion of Salafi-Jihadism and fellow Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam, al-Qassam embraced the defense of Muslim lands against Western encroachment as a divinely ordained obligation incumbent upon all true believers. He and his men dressed in traditional Muslim attire, grew their beards long as the Quran commands and every fighter was required to swear bayat (the personal oath of allegiance) to al-Qassam. A fatwa obtained from Damascus’s chief cleric sanctified the uprising that al-Qassam launched in November 1935.His revolt lasted just two weeks. After murdering a Jewish policeman, the Palestine Police Force launched a manhunt for al-Qassam. He was discovered hiding in a cave with a small band of followers. A four-hour gun-battle ensued. Al-Qassam and all his men were killed. An estimated four thousand people attended al-Qassam’s funeral, where he was mourned as a martyr.9 Ben-Gurion immediately grasped the significance of al-Qassam’s failed rebellion and heroic death. “This is the first time the Arabs have seen that a man could be found ready to give his life for an idea,” he commented. Hereafter, there would more, the Jewish leader worried: “dozens, hundreds, if not thousands like him” (46).Ben-Gurion’s prediction materialized sooner than he had perhaps thought possible. On April 15, 1936, a band of Qassamiyyun, as his acolytes were known, their identities masked by keffiyehs, set up a roadblock on an isolated stretch of the Nablus-Tulkarem road. From Arab travelers, they extracted money with which to purchase arms to avenge their sheikh’s death. A darker fate, however, awaited the three Jewish travelers whom the Qassamiyyun encountered. One was shot dead and the other two were seriously wounded. The next night some Jews took revenge: murdering an Arab fruit picker—and so it continued as rumor fed outrage and inter-communal acts of violence succeeded one another with growing intensity. Within weeks, the Great Arab Revolt had engulfed all of Palestine.Unlike previous outbursts of violence there, such as the 1920, 1921, and 1929 riots, the succession of incidents that gathered momentum throughout the spring of 1936 were of both a different character and magnitude. This was a revolt as much against British rule of Palestine as it was against the Zionist enterprise transforming the mandate. As is well known, at the height of World War I, Britain had issued the Balfour Declaration. That statement of policy was a note sent by the foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, a prominent British Zionist. It committed Britain to “facilitate” the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people.”10 The League of Nations further enshrined this commitment into the mandate to govern Palestine it awarded to Britain in 1922. The mandate’s language explicitly enjoined Britain in article 2 to place Palestine “under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” In addition, article 6 stipulated that Britain “shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage . . . close settlement of Jews on the land.”11Palestine’s Arabs never accepted the Balfour Declaration—or indeed any Jewish claims to the Holy Land—and had long vigorously protested the terms of the League of Nations mandate. Nonetheless, before 1936, Jews not Britain were the target of Arab violence. And, the violence had been mostly geographically isolated and more easily contained. Now, rioting and unrest convulsed Palestine’s cities. The countryside was also aflame with rebels attacking rail lines and roads and communications infrastructure; the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline that cut across Palestine from Kirkuk, Iraq to the port of Haifa; outlying police and military posts; and rural Jewish communities. Palestine’s Arab leaders also declared a general strike. Shops closed, workers refused to report to their places of employment, Jewish businesses were boycotted, and Palestine’s commerce came to a standstill. As Kessler notes, “today’s boycott-Israel campaign is the direct descendant of the 1936 strike” (6). He also explains how the black-and-white checkered keffiyehs adorning persons protesting the Gaza War and Israel’s existence today date back to the Arab Rebellion. “The ubiquitous keffiyeh symbolized the new reality,” Kessler explains.Finally, there was an ugly intra-communal dimension to the rebellion as old scores were settled and longstanding vendettas avenged against their fellow Arabs. Accordingly, within a matter of weeks, the roadside murders carried out by the Qassamiyyun had prompted a series of urban disorders that escalated into a general strike, an outright revolt, and a country-wide guerrilla, cum civil, war.Stunned by the ferocity of the uprising, the British declared a state of emergency—delegating extraordinary powers to the army and police in hopes of restoring order. As Kessler also points out, some of the tactics that the Israel Defense Forces use today to counter Palestinian terrorism derive from British counterterrorism measures used throughout the Arab Rebellion, including “collective fines for whole villages and cities, the forcible reopening of shops closed in the strike, and the demolition of suspected insurgents’ homes” (63). Meanwhile, as the government’s security forces—in some cases allied with the Haganah, the Yishuv’s self-defense militia—struggled to contain the rising tide of violence submerging Palestine, London embarked on a fresh attempt to divine some political resolution to Jewish and Arab claims to Palestine. The rebellion had been raging for six months when a Royal Commission chaired by Lord Peel arrived in Palestine to investigate the causes of the violence and offer recommendations that might bring lasting peace to this contested land.On July 7, 1937, the commission issued its report. Running to some 400 pages, Peel and his fellow commissioners concluded that the mandate was unworkable. Partition into separate Arab and Jewish countries, what is today called the “two-state solution,” the commission concluded was the only option that “seems to offer at least a chance of ultimate peace. We can see none in any other plan” (97). Palestine’s Arabs categorically rejected the plan—not least, as Kessler notes, because “although the Jews owned just 7 percent of Palestine’s land, the plan gave them fully 20 percent of the country” (97). Instead, the Arabs repeated their long-standing demands for the immediate cessation of all Jewish immigration and land purchase, Britain’s abrogation of the Balfour Declaration, the termination of the League of Nations mandate, and the granting of full independence for Palestine as an Arab state. The Yishuv was also dissatisfied with the commission’s recommendations. The proposed Jewish state was even smaller than the diminutive one that the Yishuv had anticipated. But, with Jewish persecution in Germany and elsewhere in Europe intensifying, Ben-Gurion and his colleagues, despite their misgivings, felt they had no choice but to accept what was on offer. Fears of the resumption of the revolt, which had been temporarily suspended while the commission conducted its inquires, coupled with a deepening sense of dread that Britain would completely abandon its commitment to Zionism, also emerged as salient considerations. In September 1937, the revolt resumed. And, once again the Qassamiyyun were responsible for an act of violence that would have far-reaching repercussions.Lewis Andrews had arrived in Palestine as a young soldier twenty-years earlier—and never left. Rather than return to his native Australia at war’s end, he joined the provisional military government administering Palestine and then stayed on when the Colonial Office took over and civilian rule was restored. In July 1937, Andrews was appointed acting district commissioner for the Galilee—the senior most British official responsible for that region. Fluent in both Arabic and Hebrew and with a deep knowledge of Palestine that the Peel Commission had relied upon, he arguably was the model British colonial civil servant. But he was hated by Arabs and vilified as a “Zionist partisan” (109). Andrews was also reportedly especially disliked for his meticulous documenting of the clandestine sale of land by Arabs to Jews—a list of names that reportedly also included many leading Palestinian Arab nationalists.12 The uneasy quiet that had settled over Palestine as the Peel Commission completed its inquires and drafted its reports was shattered when Lewis was gunned down by three Qassamiyyun while attending church services in Nazareth (118).With Lewis’s assassination, the government moved quickly to completely suppress the revolt. Arrest warrants were issued for the entire Arab leadership, who were also stripped of their government-appointed offices. Although the community’s titular leader, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the self-styled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and his brother and trusted confidant, Jamal, escaped; five other Arab notables were swept up in the police dragnet. They were transported directly to a waiting British warship in Haifa that quickly raised anchor and set sail for the Seychelles islands and the detainees’ enforced exile. An additional two full divisions of British troops—some 30,000 men—were dispatched from Britain to Palestine. Within weeks they found themselves enmeshed in an especially brutal counterterrorism campaign. As Kessler recounts, “house demolitions became commonplace; sometimes dozens of homes were razed in a village on a single day” and when “rail lines were sabotaged, men would be seized from nearby villages . . . and seated in a wheeled platform in front of the engine car. . . . Using Arabs as ‘minesweepers’ was common enough to prompt daylong strikes in Haifa and Acre” (156–57).But for Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government in London, these events were an unfortunate distraction from far more dire developments unfolding in Europe. As Nazi Germany rearmed and Adolf Hitler’s demands became more expansive, Chamberlain desperately maneuvered to avoid another catastrophic European war. In the event that these efforts failed, British strategists and statesmen had begun to focus their attention on preparations for another Anglo-German conflict. Should hostilities indeed erupt, Britain would have to rely on the Suez Canal to transfer reinforcements from India for either home defense or for the expeditionary force that would inevitably be deployed to the European continent. But if Italy entered the war on Germany’s side and blocked British access to the canal from either the Mediterranean or its colonies along the Red Sea, these forces would have to travel overland across the Middle East and through Palestine. Continued fighting there would impede their movement. Palestine’s pacification now became of paramount importance to Britain. And, although its security forces were in the process of militarily defeating the rebellion, the uprising’s underlying political causes remained.This realization triggered a fundamental reassessment of Britain’s policy for Palestine. The Jews, it was reasoned, had no choice in the circumstances but to support Britain in a war against Germany. Given the preceding two years of bloodshed and destruction in Palestine, Arab support could not be counted on. Accordingly, a new approach that would placate the Arabs and assure Britain’s strategic interests in the region was essential. Partition was no longer tenable—and the Jews were expendable. “Balfour declaration has been adequately implemented,” Britain’s ambassador to Egypt assured the colonial secretary, Malcolm MacDonald. “We promised a national home not a national refuge for the Jews” (189). And, as MacDonald himself argued, “The Jews would be on our side in any case in the struggle against Hitler” (218). When Weizmann pressed the government not to abandon the Jews at their hour of greatest need, Chamberlain prevaricated. As Kessler recounts, “They spoke for nearly an hour. The prime minister assured him that London remained committed to partition.” Weizmann, the minutes of the meeting record, seemed “unduly distressed.” Chamberlain tried to assuage the Zionist leader’s deepening concerns telling him “‘not [to] worry too much’” (134–35). Chamberlain’s infamy as the architect of appeasement is thus perhaps only exceeded by the cynical lie he imparted to Weizmann on what would prove to be the eve of the Holocaust.A year later, the new policy was duly announced. The 1939 government White Paper decreed that Palestine would be granted its independence ten years hence. Jewish immigration was to be strictly regulated at a maximum rate of 10,000 persons per annum over the next five years and thereafter made completely dependent on Arab consent. This stipulation was qualified somewhat by Britain’s willingness, conditions permitting, to allow an additional 25,000 Jewish refugees to emigrate to Palestine. the of Jews that would be to Palestine was set at a maximum of would also be on Jewish land purchase in Palestine, although these were not with the of the British had no that the White Paper would be to either Palestine’s Arabs or Although the new policy Arab over Jewish claims to the Holy and the of Palestine at two to it Zionist interests and the Yishuv a in the far as the Arabs were any of the Jewish claims to the Holy in any was the Arab demands for a to all Jewish immigration to Palestine, a on Jewish land and the immediate termination of the mandate and its with an Arab state had not been by the White their was by this in that Palestine’s Arabs had been shattered by three years of resistance and least more than Kessler whom at least at Arab More than were seriously homes had been thousand Arabs had than of whom had settled in “The Arab was . . . of Arabs government to and over their . . . of all that once through the port of was now to the port at the British from the Balfour Kessler the Arab uprising’s But the political, and economic of Arab Palestine was The Jews, he came out Israel’s future army emerged from the a single Jewish rural community had been or And, although the Jews of Palestine had an in Jews had been and a thousand also an important to never their or defense to but 1936 was by the as one of the ten best of and was named as the of the for Jewish are well Kessler has a and account of a event in the of the conflict.