British brutality alienated not only Arab policemen and villagers, but also the Arab population at large, which increased public sympathy for attacks on British police and soldiers. As Michael J. Cohen relates, in June 1936, when Emir ʿAbdullah of Transjordan requested that his Palestinian interlocutors refrain from further violence, they “replied that the terrorism was itself in reply to the brutality of the Mandatory.”137 An organization of Arab priests argued similarly to the high commissioner, claiming that the government had “provoked the Arabs to resist it openly through the various ruthless and severe measures which it adopted.”138 Muhammad ʿIzzat Darwaza, ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi’s successor as the AHC secretary, wrote that the search regime, coupled with the “violence and cruelty” with which the British repressed political demonstrations, only “added fuel to the [nationalist] fire.”139 The archdeacon said the same in a letter to MP Stanley Baldwin: “I am afraid . . . the rough-handling methods which prevailed for a time at the end of May among the British Police . . . were the direct cause of a good deal of the violence and shooting which has [now] to be suppressed.”140
The gist of these testimonies is corroborated by Sir Hugh Foot, who served in Palestine as a junior assistant secretary in the Colonial Service during the revolt years, and later became the British governor of Cyprus. In 1959, Foot would recall:
. . . [I]n Palestine and again in Cyprus there was often a tendency to attempt to make up for lack of intelligence by using the sledge hammer—mass arrests, mass detentions, big cordons and searches and collective punishments. Such operations can do more harm than good and usually play into the hands of the terrorists by alienating general opinion from the forces of authority.141
No reader of Dill’s report would appreciate the role the British themselves played in stoking the rebellion. In scrutinizing Dill’s three findings, one notices, in each case, the same element missing from the causal equation: the mandatory. The strike develops unaided into open rebellion; Arab policemen defect without apparent reason; and the British refrain from offensive operations in the mandate. The first two propositions gloss over, and the third simply denies, the causal role of the mandatory in the rebellion’s unfolding.142
This blinkered imperial vision was pervasive among British officials. Among its more pristine manifestations was Wauchope’s passing acknowledgement in a December 1936 memorandum that the government’s casualty reports had hitherto failed to “differentiate between civilians killed and wounded by the Forces of the Crown and those who are the victims of riots or other forms of violence.”143 While the British had kept careful tabs on the number of Jews and Britons killed by Arabs, it apparently never occurred to them to count the number of Arab noncombatants killed or otherwise harmed by British forces. As for Arab militants, the notion that their deaths at the hands of the government could be anything less than justified was still further beyond the pale. One government official, having acknowledged the accuracy of an estimate of “1,000 . . . Arabs killed during the [1936] disturbances,” remarked in October 1937: “As the Jews point out these cannot fairly be described as ‘murders’ comparable with the figure of eighty Jews, since with few exceptions they represent casualties incurred while resisting Government forces.”144
A November 1936 report of the supreme court of Palestine featured similar reasoning. The document concerned an appeal on behalf of two Arabs convicted of shooting a British soldier outside Balʿa, near Tulkarm. A lower court had sentenced both men to death. The high court did not deny that the defendants had been attempting to acquire water for their cattle when a British plane began firing on them, causing them to take shelter in a cave. Nor did it deny that a British soldier had then approached the cave and “fired two shots into the hole in order to investigate[!].” What the court did deny was the right of the men to defend themselves against unjustified and potentially lethal British force. On the contrary, the report 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.”145
CONCLUSION
In viewing the “disorder” and “lawlessness” that plagued their Palestine mandate, the British gazed from the lofty perch of “law and order.” This position required, as a matter of discursive coherence, that they be in no way constitutive of the “chaos” they sought to name as such and then sort out. The British could see the map of Palestinian politics, but they could not see themselves drawing it.146 If an outbreak of Arab “criminality” was at the root of the instability that increasingly afflicted Palestine, the British could not be both implicated in it and at the same time positioned to identify and address it as such.
Yet, as the sources cited in this chapter suggest, a close reading of the government’s own reports unearths evidence of the ubiquity of British violence in Palestine in 1936. Nevertheless, the British understanding of events in this period was generally consistent with the accounts of the military commander, the high commissioner, and the supreme court justices of the mandate, all of which presented the Arab rebellion as causally extrinsic to the behavior of the mandatory. As the next chapter will elaborate, the same was true of the majority of British soldiers, policemen, and opinion-makers, as well as the Zionists demanding greater British repression of the Arabs.
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