WAR ON THE DISCURSIVE FRONTIER: THE
STRUGGLE TO CRIMINALIZE THE OTHER
In June 1936, Paula Ben Gurion opened a letter from London. In it, her husband David boasted that those making the Arab case in the city had singularly failed to expand “the ranks of our enemies” among the British political class. By contrast, Zionist influence was such that in the parliamentary debate of 20 June, “The speeches by Lloyd George, Leopold Amery, Tom Williams, Creech Jones, Herbert Morrison, James de Rothschild and Victor Cazalet were wholly or partly prepared by us.” He regarded the debate as “almost entirely the fruit of our work.”45 But in early July, Lourie relayed to Shertok that members of the House of Commons, while “agreed that terrorism must be stopped,” were nevertheless pondering the utility of reducing Jewish immigration into Palestine. And the Agency received a report the next day stating that Wauchope was all that stood between the British military and a death blow to the insurgents, no doubt exacerbating Shertok and others’ sense of urgency regarding the British—and above all Wauchope’s—perception of the rebels.46
Fear of British capitulation to Arab demands roused the Jewish Agency and its allies to apply greater diplomatic and popular pressure on the government to treat the revolt as a criminal affair: that is, to crush it. But doing so proved increasingly difficult for the British. By July, the rebels were launching twenty to thirty attacks on British troops and communications (“and occasionally . . . Jewish settlements”) daily.47 The CID periodical appreciation summary for 12 July logged “persistent reports” of “large armed bands in the hills between Nablus and Ramallah.” Although the department regarded these as mere phantoms, it acknowledged the existence of such robust formations in the villages. The rebels’ “courage,” noted the summary, was not in question. It added poignantly, “[A] number are said to have gone to the hills taking their winding sheets [burial shrouds] with them.”48
British forces countered insurgents via “pressure” on areas in and around Nablus and Ramallah, which generated still more insurgents.49 The same undoubtedly resulted from the “bitterness . . . felt by the Rural and Urban population [over] the action taken by Government in sending large bodies of troops to villages, etc., and alleged shooting of unarmed peasantry,” as the CID reported.50
On learning of some rebels’ coercion of villages that failed to contribute “men or money” to the revolt, the CID averred that “the bandit (’Mujaheddin’) spirit” was “still very much alive.”51 But the coercive tactics of the rebels were not, at this point, of primary concern to most Arabs, who were preoccupied instead with the behavior of British forces.52 This included the comparable practice of levying collective fines on villages deemed insufficiently supportive of the government. A telegram from the village of Jabaʿ read aloud at a meeting of the AHC on 19 July described “soldiers bursting into the village and collecting fines.”53 Cities, too, were subject to fines. In June alone, the British fined Nablus, Acre, Safed, and Lydda.54 Rebel manifestos referred to these actions as “infringements” (al-taʿaddi) and included them alongside robberies and murders in their list of indictments of the mandatory government.55
Apart from complaints regarding these often devastating financial impositions, Arab reports of British brutality continued unabated.56 They frequently entailed a dual claim: the Arabs suffering such treatment were not criminals, and therefore did not deserve it; and the British meting it out were thereby advertising their own criminality. The Arab Women of Jaffa informed the high commissioner on 8 July that the British use of excessive force in the area was “common knowledge.” Anticipating the charge of Arab criminality, their letter went on to assert:
Your Excellency will realize that the Arab people are compelled in the present circumstances to defend themselves and their country by purely national motives without the least intention to commit crime, as Your Excellency may assume, and the only means for quickly ending this period of crime and disorder will be by the removal of the causes which have created them.57
ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi echoed this theme, addressing the high commissioner from the detention camp at Sarafand:
I, personally, do not know any one person of those who fire from the mountain-tops or who blow [up] bridges or cut telephone wires but it appears to me that there is not one person amongst them who is actuated by any personal interest in all the acts which he does, exposing himself to many dangers.58
He also reminded the high commissioner, “. . . [T]he fact which cannot be doubted is that your troops have dealt with the Arabs ruthlessly and destroyed many Arab villages without any justification.”59
The AHC wrote Wauchope on 15 July, “It is a matter of regret to the Committee that bitter complaints are still being addressed to it with regard to the ruthless and severe manner in which the troops are dealing with the situation under the pretext of ‘search.’”60 Wauchope received another such report three days later, this one from the Arab Orthodox Priests Congress for Palestine and Transjordan:
The banishment of leaders, the confinement of people in prisons, the blowing up of houses with dynamite, the imposition of heavy fines on towns and villages, the looting of property, cereals and livestock, and other similar vigorous measures which are still being taken by troops and Police in all parts of the country are not only detestable measures which are prohibited by religion and inhuman and not befitting the civil forces of a great Christian and civilized power but are also unlikely to culminate in suppressing the rebellion and restoring order.61
While officials tended to dismiss such reports, it was not for lack of internal corroboration. A government welfare inspector reported to the chief secretary on 13 July that British troops had, a week earlier, killed an unarmed former policeman and father of five in the village of ʿAbud, about ten miles northwest of Ramallah. ʿAbud, wrote the inspector, had “always been peaceful and [had] not even been searched by troops.” His sour commentary on the incident suggested that such episodes were not rare:
Instead of pacifying the country by these tactics, bitterness and resentment is rapidly increasing in the villages and elsewhere. Whereas at the beginning of the trouble the fellahin were our best friends, we are steadily turning them into our worst enemies by these methods of ruthlessly killing innocent people and destroying their possessions and their stores of food.62
An internal Colonial Office memo dated 9 July noted “many instances of rash and dangerous shooting by Supernumerary Police,” a particularly troubling development given the number of Jews among their ranks.63 Testimony to continued British malfeasance turned up in private correspondence as well. Policeman Percy Cleaver wrote his aunt and uncle from Haifa on 6 July, “I’ve been on one or two of these [night] raids and it’s quite good fun, especially turning the contents of the houses into the street.”64
In addition to repudiating the charge of criminality emanating from British and Jewish quarters, articulate Arab opinion in the latter half of 1936 also reversed it, and not only with respect to Britons. Arab newspapers portrayed Tel Aviv as a “city of thievery, swarming with forgers and thieves,” and made frequent reference to Jewish criminal conspiracies, often involving entanglements with world communism.65 In reply to a Jewish newspaper’s report that children throughout Palestine were suffering from nightmares of “an Arab criminal standing in front of their houses, trying to get in,” a writer for al-Difaʿ observed: “This portrayal of the ‘Arab criminal’ is not surprising because every word in this newspaper, and in fact every word on the street and in official statements has painted this picture.” The headline of the article read, in part: “The Arabs are not the criminals, you criminal!”66 Arab newspapers also sought to transfer the criminal label to the British. Al-Jamiʿa al-Islamiyya argued, “. . . [T]he cases of the strike are not of the nature to which the criminal law is applicable,