Why have so many histories of the revolt gotten this point wrong? Because they have absorbed the depiction of 1936 that is latent in the British and Zionist archival materials. These materials include a vast number of situation reports and day-to-day telegraphic exchanges among and between officials in Jerusalem and London, and a handful of more detailed reports that are some of the earliest histories of the revolt. They contain multiple references to British violence, but the references are dispersed across a mass of material relating to other topics, and thus no narrative of British brutality emerges from them.
Many chronicles of 1936, for example, cite the summary report of R. E. C. Peirse, the British military commander in Palestine, but neglect to note the report’s most damning disclosures.7 These concerned the “village searches” that British security forces began conducting throughout the country in May 1936. The objects of these searches were supposed to have been weapons and wanted men, but Peirse acknowledged that the searches’ real purpose was “punitive.” He explained that on the pretext of “search,” British police and soldiers were “actually” employing “Turkish methods” against the villagers. The point of these methods was to offer the villagers a taste of British terror, lest they became enamored of, or intimidated by, the armed bands then forming in the hills.8 Peirse further divulged that the “Turkish methods” were sufficiently pervasive to cause “a grave crisis” within the Palestine police, whose Arab section nearly defected en masse in protest against the “searches.”
All of this occurred in May and early June 1936. British repression only escalated with the spread of the rebellion thereafter. The April–October 1936 phase of the revolt was thus hardly a period of “no repression.” The problem for researchers has been that Peirse did not do them the favor of underscoring the consequence of such disclosures. On the contrary, he made them only in passing, as though they were incidental to his larger narrative: the “no repression” narrative. Similarly, significant revelations crop up elsewhere in the archival record, and in the same perfunctory fashion. For example, in discussing the “considerable [Arab] resentment and criticism” of British repression in the villages, the deputy inspector general of police noted in a report of 23 June 1936 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.”9
To summarize, then, we have the military commander in Palestine acknowledging that in May 1936, British brutality against Palestinian villagers was pervasive to the point of causing a near-mutiny among Arab policemen. Additionally, we have the deputy inspector general of police conceding that, as of a month later, few of these villagers had attacked British security forces. When knit together, these and related facts suggest a narrative that runs counter to that found in the British and Zionist archives and parallel to that found in the Arabic sources. According to this narrative, British repression in 1936 preceded and provoked widespread militant activity among the Palestinian population, not the other way around. British violence, that is, was a basic cause of the revolt, not a reluctant reaction to it.
By contrast, the logic of British imperial discourse in Palestine dictated that the rebellion be framed as an unprovoked outbreak of crime, to which London was merely responding. Palestinian militants, activists, and spokespersons adapted, rather than rejected, this “crime wave” framing of the insurgency. In particular, they accepted its two core premises: first, that violence was justified when directed against criminals; and second, that peoples or nations were singularly competent to name the criminal. For the Palestinians, it followed not that the British nation was suppressing a crime wave in Palestine, but rather that the Palestinian nation was entitled to violently expel the British, whom they had rightly designated as criminals. Regardless of its application, in agreeing to this discursive framework, the Palestinians and the British reflected the prevalent understanding of nationalism as coded in international law and otherwise attested to in the international community of the interwar years. They thus committed themselves to demonstrating their own national and the other’s criminal credentials.
This crimino-national discourse matters historically. Our appreciation of it enables us to approach the interwar archives with a deconstructive agenda that brings new facts to light. In the case of 1936–39, there are two groups of such facts. The first pertains to the archival, and by extension historiographical, absence of the British from key causal junctures of the rebellion, such as the watersheds noted above: the rebellion’s outbreak, its temporary cessation, its recommencement, and its collapse. The village searches relate to the first of these. When we peer into the archive, we do not see the searches; we see the British seeing the searches. From their vantage point, the searches maintained law and order. Deconstructing that vantage point, we learn that the searches contributed to the breakdown of law and order. We learn, in other words, that the British were present at—that is, causally implicated in—the revolt’s inception. The archival presentation of the village searches is but one instance of the “absence” phenomenon. Part one of the book examines other instances. The second group of facts that a crimino-national approach brings to light concerns the positive quality of the rebellion. Much of the scholarship on the rebellion presents it negatively, as an anti-British and anti-Zionist enterprise. No doubt it was these things, but it was also a constructive enterprise centered on state-building. By placing the criminological consideration of the Palestinian national movement at the center of our concerns, we become alert to the empirical indices of this fact, as part two of the book demonstrates.
Put briefly, the British and Zionist criminological framing of Palestinian nationalism succeeded in portraying a national rebellion as a crime wave only by cropping the British out of the picture. This is not to suggest that the archive contains no mention of British actions in 1936–39. It is rather to observe that the archive presents British behavior as reactive and causally secondary, while it presents Palestinian behavior as formative and causally primary. In this sense, at every critical moment of the archival presentation of the rebellion, the British go missing from their own story. This book returns them to their rightful place.
A word is in order with regard to the book’s arrangement. The reader of chapter one can be forgiven if she puts the book down thinking that its argument goes as follows. The British were afflicted in Palestine by a kind of tunnel vision, which prevented them from apprehending their own causal implication in the disturbances they were attempting to manage. Their tendency to portray the rebellion as a criminal affair was a function of this tunnel vision. To have apprehended their own role in bringing about the revolt would have been to understand the revolt’s nationalist character, something beyond the capacity of the imperial mind.
This understanding is a simplification, as the reader careful enough to carry it forward into subsequent chapters will learn. Chapters two and beyond present a range of Arab, British, and Jewish voices, and those voices suggest a diversity of views on the rebellion. For example, some British officials failed even to consider the possibility that His Majesty was suppressing not a crime wave but a national revolt in Palestine. By contrast, others were alert not only to the possibility but to the reality of this scenario. Many fell somewhere in between. This range of perspectives was evident not only in the voices of British civilian officials but also in those of British policemen, soldiers, journalists, politicians and dissidents. The same diversity characterized Zionist opinion. But if the British and the Zionists did sometimes apprehend their own causal implication in the rebellion, why should we preoccupy ourselves with a crimino-national discourse that seemingly excludes this possibility?
The answer is that the discourse elaborated in chapter one was a form of political logic, not a deterministic psychology. The people perpetuating this discourse did so with varying degrees of awareness. Some knew that they were framing the rebellion in a manner that served British imperialism and Zionism more than it did the facts. Others were true believers. Most were a mix of the two. But nearly all participated