Regardless, the brutality of the village searches was sufficiently rampant as of early June that it had engendered, according to Peirse, “a grave crisis with the [Arab] section” of the Palestine police, who considered the severe measures “repugnant.”116 In one instance, soldiers “searching” Qaqun, near Tulkarm, handled the village so harshly that its residents called the police in desperation. The Arab officers who responded were appalled by the scene they came upon, to the point that they began fighting with the soldiers, one of whom shot and killed a policeman.117 The dead man’s fellow officers resigned in protest.118 And within days, Arab policemen from several towns and villages convened a meeting in Jerusalem, which produced a series of demands to the general police authority. Among them: “Fair investigations into the crimes that British policemen have committed in light of recent events.”119
It is worth noting that while Peirse and the archdeacon’s chronologies indicated that the punitive searches began in the second half of May, a Jewish Agency summary of events from 7 May reported that “punitive posts”—“a most effective measure of teaching turbulent villages wisdom”—had already been installed in nine villages.120 This was two weeks prior to the appearance of the first Arab “gangs.”121
BRITISH VIOLENCE AND THE SCHOLARSHIP ON 1936
As the previous section demonstrates, the British began violently repressing the Arab population of Palestine within a month of the strike’s declaration. Yet, when government officials later surveyed the revolt’s first phase, they failed to factor this critical detail into their accounts. With a handful of exceptions—most notably, Matthew Hughes’s pioneering work on British violence in 1936–39—much of the English- and Hebrew-language literature on the revolt has repeated their error.122 Even Hughes writes that “the widespread use of punitive actions” in Palestine was “central to British military repression after 1936.”123 The scholarship more generally has taken for granted the truth of British officials’ assertions that the few punitive measures police and soldiers did adopt in late May 1936 were discontinued in early June. But accepting this claim requires that one discard an abundance of testimony—both Arab and British—to the contrary. It also obscures a basic component of the causal machinery that determined the revolt’s initial, and by extension ultimate, trajectory: namely, the mandatory itself.
Thus, Jacob Norris, who in a separate and very instructive capacity corrects the traditional understanding of the revolt, nevertheless writes that prior to October 1936, the British “[sought] to contain the rebel bands using orthodox civilian policing” (although the reality, as Georgina Sinclair notes, is that the British never successfully civilianized the Palestine police, which “remained essentially a paramilitary force”).124 In the same vein, Yehoyada Haim claims that Wauchope’s policy of “protecting lives and property without the use of repressive measures” was “applied by the British during most of the Revolt’s first phase.”125 Yoav Gelber writes that the British were “hesitant in the first phase” of the rebellion and that Wauchope “opposed a strong hand” approach to the disturbances.126 Michael J. Cohen comes close to recognizing the inaccuracy of such statements. He cites the Peirse report in support of his assertion that the village searches in the revolt’s first phase were “ineffective in the discovery of arms and were unpopular with the troops, against whom all kinds of charges were levelled.” But Cohen then neglects to place these facts in the context of Peirse’s admission that the real purpose of the searches was punitive—a truth which casts both the paucity of arms and the profusion of charges in a much different light. Cohen likewise takes it for granted that subsequent charges against British troops stemming from the village searches were mere “rumour and propaganda.”127 Yehoshua Porath, too, claims that “Government reaction to the strike and the revolt remained almost to the end rather reserved, in the hope that violence would die out and the strike would disintegrate before severe measures became necessary.”128 While acknowledging the existence of some “punitive measures” up to July, Porath goes so far as to state that a British “policy of no repression” existed in this period.129 Likewise, Tom Bowden, citing a War Office file, suggests that the British abided by an internal security protocol in Palestine in 1936 that did not involve “strict repressive measure[s].”130
The government reports contained in the file Bowden references paint a similar picture. They consist, among other things, of a synopsis of Lieutenant General John Dill’s “summary of events” for April-October 1936. Dill inherited command of the British forces in Palestine from Peirse in September 1936—thus marking the transfer of military authority in the mandate from the RAF to the army—and assumed the role of general officer commanding (GOC). His account of the time prior to his own arrival on the scene warrants some examination, given Bowden and others’ effective reiteration of it.
According to the synopsis of Dill’s report, several important points had been established as of October 1936: the strike had “developed into a form of open rebellion”; the loyalty of the Arab section of the Palestine police had become dubious; and the government had refrained from employing British troops in any offensive capacity.131 The third point was a slightly inaccurate paraphrase of what Dill had written in the full report, but the error was inevitable. In the report itself, Dill emphasized that well into May 1936, British forces “had been dissipated on protective duties and little or no force was used for punitive work.” Confusingly, he then stated that in June, when groups of armed Arabs began appearing, there occurred a “relaxation” in the use of “punitive measures” during the village searches, and that “combined with this relaxation . . . came definite signs of defection among the Palestine Police.” A few sentences later, and more confusingly still, Dill claimed that on 3 June, “the Palestine Government decided ‘to continue our present policy . . . of endeavouring to protect life and property without adopting severe repressive measures.’”132 One might have thought that rebel sniping had led British forces to attack Arab villagers, which in turn had caused Arab police to mutiny. But on Dill’s bewildering telling, armed Arab groups emerged, at which point the British for some reason “relaxed” the briefly operative (and hitherto denied) punitive measures and Arab policemen inexplicably began defecting. This causal picture was pure confusion, making the synopsis of it simplistic of necessity.
Each of Dill’s three propositions, in any case, was specious. Concerning the first, while the strike had “developed into a form of open rebellion,” this language obscured two crucial facts. First, in the strike’s early days, armed revolt and refusal to work were largely unlinked. As noted, the AHC itself, as well as the national committees and the Arab press, advocated openly for a nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience.133 The convergence of the strike and the revolt was therefore not a foregone conclusion as of May 1936. Second, Dill’s language framed the armed rebellion as having evolved congenitally from the strike; it thus cropped out causal variables extrinsic to the Arab community, such as British violence.134 This framing depended on Dill’s second and third propositions: the questionable loyalty of Arab policemen and the supposedly purely defensive operations of British troops. Taking these in reverse order, British forces undertook offensive and intentionally “punitive” operations in Arab villages