The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

leaders relentlessly promoted the “devious leaders” claim.² Weizmann argued to Wauchope on 3 May that the “overwhelming majority of ordinary Arab citizens” were secretly opposed to the strike.³ Shertok and David Ben Gurion wrote the high commissioner on 17 May complaining of the government’s refusal to dissolve the “rebellious body styling itself the ‘Supreme Arab Committee’ [the AHC],” a policy which they claimed gave “further encouragement . . . to the acts of lawlessness carried out by its agents throughout the country.”⁴ Ben Gurion was the chair of the executives of both the Jewish Agency and the WZO, and a towering figure in the Zionist milieu. He had founded the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labor) in 1920, and later led Mapai (the Israel Workers Party), which several Zionist workers’ organizations founded in 1930. The “acts of lawlessness” to which he and Shertok referred included the previous night’s murder of three Jews in Jerusalem, although the two offered no evidence of the AHC’s connection to this crime. In a letter to Wauchope on 14 May, Shertok and Ben Gurion likewise bundled together nonviolent protest and violent crime, and saddled the AHC with liability for both:

      . . . open incitement to continue the strike, the call to civil disobedience, criminal acts including the murder of innocent people have not diminished . . . We cannot regard the guilt as attaching only to the miserable individuals committing crimes. The responsibility for this criminal activity rests upon the instigators and leaders who are kindling a fire of racial hatred and strife in the country.⁵

      The pair stated unequivocally in their 17 May letter: “. . . [P]ersonal responsibility [must] be placed on [the AHC’s] members as individuals for all terrorist acts which may be committed in the country.”⁶ Weizmann was meanwhile telling the high commissioner that “quiet” would never be restored in Palestine so long as the AHC continued to function. When Wauchope responded that he “needed rather more evidence . . . before proceeding to take strong measures against them,” Weizmann offered none, but proposed that “the disbanding of the Committee would make a strong impression on the country.”⁷ In a letter to Wauchope on 6 June, Shertok declared again that the AHC was “the mainspring of the whole campaign of strike, sedition, disobedience and terror.”⁸

      FIGURE 3. The normally bustling jewelers’ market in the Old City of Jerusalem, hauntingly empty as a result of the 1936 strike. (Library of Congress)

      While insisting that the British recognize the AHC’s unmitigated responsibility for the full spectrum of disorders then wracking the country, the Jewish Agency leadership was privately more ambivalent on this point. Shertok himself stated in a meeting of the executive in late May: “We have no evidence that the Committee of Ten (the AHC) are organizing the acts of violence and terror in the country, but it is clearly encouraging and provoking these actions.”⁹ Nevertheless, Agency members were united in their conviction that if the Arab leadership were personally responsible for all violence in Palestine, then organized Arab politics just was a criminal enterprise. Thus, regardless of the extent to which they believed that this conditional matched the state of affairs, Zionist spokesmen insisted the government adopt it as its framework for managing the disorders.

      The Agency therefore demanded not only that Wauchope take sterner measures in combating violent crime but also that he “stamp out any attempt at civil disobedience.”¹⁰ The Agency’s political secretary, Arthur Lourie, cabled Jerusalem from London on 7 June, suggesting that the Agency tap sympathetic members of Parliament to press the government publicly to outlaw the strike, the AHC, and the regional national committees—that is, Palestinian politics.¹¹

      Ben Gurion’s 10 June reply to Lourie was revealing. He noted the efficacy of the government’s deportations of leaders such as ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi, whom he deemed the “moving spirit and principal organizer” of the Arab political community.¹² Ben Gurion had actually met with ʿAbd al-Hadi earlier, in July 1934, on the understanding that he was a “patriotic, truthful, and incorruptible” Arab leader.¹³ He claimed at the time that he and ʿAbd al-Hadi had “parted in great friendship.”¹⁴ If he regarded him as a criminal by June 1936, he did not mention it to Lourie. Ben Gurion also disclosed that, in his view: “Even if the strike ends the acts of terrorism won’t. That is not now (at any rate) in the hands of the leaders.”¹⁵ His insistence, then, that the Arab leaders were responsible for the criminal and other violence was tactical.

      THE BRITISH DRIFT BEGINS

      While the Jewish Agency relentlessly pushed the government to outlaw the strike and to unleash the full force of its counterinsurgent machinery against the rebels, British opinion was already moving in the same direction. The shift began at about the time of the government’s escalation of repressive measures in the second half of May and early June. This is not to suggest that the framing of Arab rebels as criminals was simply a witting confection designed to justify in advance British ruthlessness. Something deeper and more discursively organic than this was at work, as evidenced by the unrehearsed quality, as well as the ubiquity, of the British conception of Arab political agitation from this point forward.

      Consider, as a specimen of this conception, the words of the British director of education in Palestine, Humphrey Bowman. In a private letter dated 17 May, Bowman wrote vexedly of Arab violence, sabotage, and shop closures. Imagining the words of a more responsible Arab leadership, he ventriloquized: “They ought now to say to us: ‘We have shown you we are honest and determined by keeping the strike going for four weeks. We have now done enough. Send your Royal Commission, and we will gladly abide by its results.’”¹⁶ Bowman’s faith in British commissions and distrust of the Arab “nation’s demands” hinted at a broader British logic, as did his comments a few days later, on 24 May. These began with a list meant to illustrate that “crime has been serious throughout the country.” It included “not so many murders, but shootings at buses and even at troops; bombs; telephone lines cut; railway sleepers moved; demonstrations daily.”¹⁷ His next entry, on 31 May, deemed the killing of Constable Bird “cold blooded murder.”¹⁸

      That Bowman brought military-style attacks on government security forces and infrastructure, not to mention political demonstrations, under the same “crime” umbrella as murder was not anomalous. Wauchope himself, in a 2 June memorandum to the colonial secretary, coupled the forces of British coercion with ordinary citizens, noting that “murders of innocent people and of police are almost of daily occurrence.”¹⁹ Nor was Bowman’s seemingly cynical view of Palestinian nationalism an aberration. The major British papers took a similar line. The Times of London reported that the Arabs, far from having clear-sightedly identified the futility of nonviolent protest against the British, were mired in a fog of invidious rumor, which found them resorting to “rowdy . . . demonstration[s]” and general “unruliness.”²⁰ They were also demanding a “national government,” a term The Times, like Bowman, disparaged via quotation.²¹ Nevertheless, the paper did acknowledge that another British commission of inquiry was probably pointless, as the fundamental problem in Palestine was the impossibility of establishing a Jewish “home” without infringing Arab rights.²² These rights, however, clearly did not rise to a national status, as evidenced by The Times’ recommendation the next day that the British might simply have to “crush” the Arab “unrest and disorder.”²³

      When the punitive village searches began in late May, The Times promptly presented them as an unfortunate necessity.²⁴ On 30 May, a telling descriptor debuted in its coverage: “A military patrol on the railway to the north of Lydda had a lively affray last night with brigands, who opened fire on it from both sides.”²⁵ The Times, then, had also begun referring without qualification to coordinated assaults on government forces as the actions of ordinary criminals. On 3 June it deemed the sabotage of British infrastructure in Gaza the work of “gangs.”²⁶ On 8 June, it wrote that Arab “bandits” had engaged the Cameron Highlanders in a four-hour battle!²⁷

      While the right-leaning Spectator also pointed out the vanity of another British commission and even acknowledged