As with the government intelligence reports, the paper readily conflated this “mob” violence with the broader political instability, emphasizing, “The disturbance in Palestine is mainly of the nature of mob-violence.”29 The government’s breaking of the strike by force was therefore “necessary and proper.”30
A number of the Spectator’s readers took issue with these prescriptions. Among them was E. A. Ghoury of the Palestine Arab Party (whose president, Jamal Husayni, sat on the AHC). In a 12 June letter to the editor, Ghoury proposed that the behavior of British forces in Palestine—which included “beatings, destruction of property, insulting of women, invading homes,” and so on—might usefully be juxtaposed with the attention the British press paid to “the cases of ‘Arab snipers, marauders, rebels, bands,’ and similar names given to the young Arabs who are trying to defend their rights and liberate their country.”31 He likewise told a British audience at Chatham House that the revolt was “not the act of terrorists or marauders or snipers,” but was, rather, “a revolution” seeking “justice.”32
But Ghoury’s minority report could hardly be heard above the din of mutually reinforcing British coverage. The Daily Herald featured headlines such as “Arab Murder Campaign” (14 May) and “Gangsters in the Holy City” (19 May). Presaging Dill’s later assessment, the Daily Telegraph editorialized in its 18 May edition, “What began as mere common crime . . . has [evolved] into a political exhibition of rueful hatred.”33
MODERATE ELEMENTS
Although his was an audible voice in the chorus of criminalization, Wauchope was alert to the difficulties this chorus might create for law enforcement. Thus, while describing attacks on British forces as “murder,” his 2 June memo to the colonial secretary also cautioned against adopting measures designed to “intimidate [the] Arab population sufficiently to bring lawless acts to an end.” The high commissioner thus elided, as would GOC Dill, the fact that His Majesty’s forces had already begun terrorizing Arab villagers. He nevertheless presciently advised that harsh tactics risked “alienat[ing] all moderate elements in this country, perhaps permanently.”34
According to Air Vice Marshal Peirse, a few days before Wauchope’s memo, on 30 May, the inspector general of police—along with Peirse himself, the other architect of the village search policy—relayed instructions to him from unspecified superiors to “modify the intensity” of the searches. Thus, he recorded despairingly, did “the only measure available for coercing the rebels [slip] away from us.”35 The record suggests, however, that this measure’s indispensability in reality proved too precious to relinquish, official sanctioning aside.
The flow of reports of British brutality did not fall off in early June, after the supposed termination of severe measures. On 18 June, the AHC sent a telegram to the high commissioner, voicing more of the familiar complaints: “. . . Army men beat unarmed Arab villagers [and] destroy[ed] furniture [and] food supplies.”36 Two days later, Wauchope assured Yitzhak Ben Zvi, the chair of the Jewish National Council (Va’ad Leumi), that “where responsibility [for Arab attacks] can be fixed on any village severe measures are being taken.”37 Reports of such measures appeared contemporaneously in the Arab press, and included charges of theft, the destruction of food, and “ill treatment” of villagers.38 On 23 June, the deputy inspector general of police wrote in a CID report that “summary action against certain villages” had “aroused considerable resentment and criticism.” This took on added significance in light of his subsequent observation 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.”39 Peirse characterized the 24 June search of villages in the vicinity of the routinely sabotaged Jerusalem-Lydda railway line as having had “a good effect”—the familiar euphemism for terrorizing villagers into obedience.40 By then, the government had conducted eighty-one village searches, nearly half of which had failed, not surprisingly, to recover any weapons.41 In July, the high commissioner informed the colonial secretary that there were “accusations of undue military severity throughout the country.”42 He felt obliged to begin his 7 July address to the Palestinian public with a reference to the “misconception . . . that Government uses force wantonly and ruthlessly.”43 The next day, Reuven Zaslany, the Jewish Agency’s liaison to the British army, reported to Haganah intelligence that “the government intended to reduce the weapons searches in Arab villages, in order to avoid further alienating the population.”44 If the authorities were still contemplating this course of action in early July, they had yet to undertake it, Peirse’s assurances notwithstanding. It is therefore little surprise that on the same day as Zaslany’s report, the AHC resolved to “complain to the League of Nations regarding terrorism and the killing of innocents by the British military” and “to prepare a report on the violent actions that occurred during searches.”45 Nor is it surprising that in August, the writer of a Colonial Office memorandum referred to “the numerous complaints we [have] received about outrages by the troops.”46 As the War Office itself ultimately acknowledged—almost in the same breath as it decried the Arabs’ “successful protests against ‘excesses’ by troops”—in the absence of an official policy of repression in the revolt’s first phase, “many repressive measures . . . crept in through force of circumstances . . . and mostly they were more severe in nature than would have been necessary . . . had a strong front been presented from the start.”47
Such measures, coupled with the government’s perpetual indifference to Arab demands, squandered whatever remained of its credibility among the Arab population, and placed “moderate elements” such as Arab government employees in an impossible position. On 30 June, Mustafa Bey al-Khalidi, a puisne judge at the supreme court in Jerusalem, along with 136 other Arab civil servants, signed a statement to the high commissioner and other top officials. Its essence was that the Arab officials could no longer usefully serve as a link between the British government and the Arab population, who with good reason disbelieved all of the officials’ assurances as to London’s good faith vis-à-vis commissions of inquiry and other such palliatives. British force would do nothing to change this situation, the statement insisted. In a poignant and representative passage, the officials asserted:
It will be argued, we know . . . that Government cannot yield to violence without losing prestige. We would strongly have supported that argument had it not been for our belief that Government is itself in part to blame for the state of mind which has brought about the violence. We yield to no one in upholding order and authority as the foundation of all good government. But authority implies justice all round, and when justice is denied . . . then authority becomes undermined; and it shows a mistaken notion of prestige to suppose that it can be restored by the use of force.48
The statement prompted a delayed response from the president of the Committee of the Jewish Community of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, but one worth noting in the present context. It arrived on the high commissioner’s desk with the endorsements of an array of Jewish groups, along with a request that it be forwarded to the colonial secretary and to the League of Nations Mandates Commission.49 The letter claimed that the 137 Arab signatories of the statement had “wholly or partly . . . identif[ied] themselves with the movement of civil disobedience and open revolt, with all its implications of cold-blooded murder, vandalism and the like.” The government, it argued, should have fired them. To do otherwise was to yet again countenance “brigands, marauders and ‘rebels.’” Incredibly, the Arab signatories had “even presume[d] . . . to protest against the Government’s policy of ‘repressions.’” In a word, the Arab statement was “patently illegal” and the Colonial Office erred in deigning to acknowledge it.50
THE AMBIVALENT ZIONIST DEPICTION OF THE
PALESTINIAN LEADERSHIP
The