3

1917–1929

‘Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel”.’

Vladimir Jabotinsky

‘THE USUAL PALESTINIAN TYPE’

British rule quickly revealed both the scale of Zionist ambition and the depth of Arab hostility, though the latter was muted until military operations against Turkish forces ended with the capture of Damascus in October 1918. In April Chaim Weizmann led a Zionist commission ‘to investigate present conditions of the Jewish colonies’ on an official trip to the country, where it demanded the use of Hebrew as an official language and the flying of the blue and white Star of David flag. When the commission visited Hebron, an accompanying Jewish journalist reflected the Zionists’ hopes for the future – despite the obvious obstacles ahead. ‘Some day it will be a fine city’, he reported.

But at present it is otherwise. The Arabs – there are said to be about 20,000 of them – are of the usual Palestinian type, and though many of them are quite rich, they are content to spend their days in dirty narrow streets and to go about clothed like beggars. The number of Jews is now about 850.1

In this confident mood – redolent of encounters elsewhere between European colonialists and natives – the Zionists marked the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration with a parade in Jerusalem. That was met by Arab protests near the Jaffa Gate, demanding the withdrawal of the declaration2 – henceforth repeated on 2 November every year – and by the creation of a new Muslim–Christian Association (MCA),³ the first Palestinian nationalist organization, with branches across the country. ‘Palestine is Arab’, declared the MCA:

Its language is Arabic. We want to see this formally recognized. It was Great Britain that rescued us from Turkish tyranny and we do not believe that it will deliver us into the claws of the Jews. We ask for fairness and justice. We ask that it protect our rights and not decide the future of Palestine without asking our opinion.⁴

It was a blunt message that heralded conflict in an atmosphere that was changing ominously. Musa al-Alami, a young Arab lawyer, noted how his old Sephardi Jewish friends in Jerusalem had severed contacts with Arabs at the behest of the ‘tough and aggressive Ashkenazim’.⁵

High-level diplomacy was one response to Arab enmity. In June 1918 Weizmann travelled south to Aqaba in Transjordan to meet Emir Faisal, the third son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca and commander of the Arab forces that had swept up from the Hijaz, with British support, to fight the Turks. The Zionist leader believed he had created ‘the basis of a long-term friendship’ with the handsome and intelligent Hashemite prince; his admiration for ‘the greatest of all the Arabs’, which never dimmed,⁶ contrasted sharply with his contempt for the truculent Palestinian variety. ‘It is in our interest,’ Weizmann explained to colleagues, ‘to localize the Arab question, to take it from Jerusalem to Damascus. To take Palestine out of Pan-Arabia and to get them to concentrate on Bagdad, Mecca and Damascus.’⁷ Faisal believed that Jewish money and influence in America would help the cause of Arab nationalism and secure him the throne of Syria in the face of strong French opposition – an approach that has been dubbed an ‘exchange of services’.⁸ The two men met again in London before signing their agreement in January 1919, ahead of the Paris peace conference. On paper it was a remarkable achievement. Article 4 stipulated:

All necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale, and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil. In taking such measures the Arab peasant and tenant farmers shall be protected in their rights and shall be assisted in forwarding their economic development.

It stipulated too that ‘the Mohammedan holy places were to be under Mohammedan control’. Faisal, however, added an important caveat in Arabic to the English text: the agreement would be null and void unless the Arabs were granted full independence. When they were not, Weizmann continued to believe the deal was valid. In reality, with the French and British in firm control across the region, the agreement was a dead letter within a few months.

It was not the last time that Zionists would seek to resolve the conflict over Palestine by subsuming the issue in a wider Arab context. Years later, Weizmann harked back to the 1919 agreement as a tragically lost opportunity for mutually beneficial co-operation. It became an enduring staple of Zionist propaganda – or self-delusion – that ‘Faisal’s dream was allowed to perish’.9 That ignored the fact that neither the Hashemite prince nor any other Arab leader could, at least openly, oppose Palestinian interests. Nor was it the last time that there was a jarring disconnect between the grand ambitions of diplomacy and the reality of the confrontation taking shape on the ground. Weeks after the Paris peace conference rejected Faisal’s demands for Syria, Zionist officials met to discuss relations with ‘our neighbours’. Ben-Gurion, by now the leader of the Ahdut haAvoda (Labour Unity) movement, was the most eloquent and clear-sighted of the pessimists: ‘Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews,’ he said.

But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution! There is a gulf and nothing can fill this gulf. It is not possible to resolve the conflict between Jewish and Arab interests [only] by sophistry. I do not know what Arab will agree that Palestine should belong to the Jews – even if the Jews learn Arabic. And we must recognise this situation. If we do not acknowledge this and try to come up with ‘remedies’ then we risk demoralisation … We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.10

GRIEVANCES, PROPAGANDA AND INSECURITY

It had long been impossible to entertain the illusion that Palestine was an empty land. ‘The land-owning and commercial classes among the Palestinian Arabs are genuinely afraid that the Zionist plan involves their land being expropriated and ousted from taking any part in the industrial and commercial development of the country’, the Zionist Review commented in early 1920.

They are opposed, and justifiably opposed, to an exclusive Jewish domination either in the political or in the economic sphere, and they are bound to oppose Zionism so long as they think that such domination is among the aims of Zionism. But it would be a great mistake for Zionists to conclude that this opposition is irremovable, and to base their policy on that hypothesis.¹¹

That was an optimistic conclusion, and arguably a false one. It was already clear that the Arabs rejected the Balfour Declaration along with Jewish immigration and land sales, even if that genuinely meant greater prosperity for all. That latter Zionist promise was unconvincing however, and not least because of the land question: in Ottoman times, tenants had not been evicted when land ownership changed, but simply answered to a new landlord. Now they were evicted, and that ‘incomprehensible innovation’ naturally fuelled fears about the future.¹² At best, the Zionists continued to argue, relations with the Arabs would improve as the Jewish presence became stronger and generated economic growth. If relations did not improve, then so be it.

Ronald Storrs, the British military governor of Jerusalem and author of the most elegant memoir penned about the early years of British colonial rule, described an atmosphere that was ‘always critical, frequently hostile, sometimes bitterly vindictive and even menacing’13 as Arab resentment spread. Storrs noted how ‘two hours of Arab grievances drive me into the synagogue, while after an intense course of Zionist propaganda I am prepared to embrace Islam’.¹⁴ In March 1920, Jewish feelings of insecurity were fuelled by attacks on the settlements of Metullah and Tel Hai in northern Palestine, the result of tensions in French-controlled Lebanon and Syria. The hero’s death of Joseph Trumpeldor, a Russian-born HaShomer member who had lost an arm fighting for the Tsar in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, became the object of a cult of patriotic sacrifice: a Zionist version of ‘dulce et decorum est’. Beyond Trumpeldor’s martyrdom, Tel Hai came to symbolize the link between land, labour, sweat and blood, encapsulated in the slogan: ‘a place once settled is not to be abandoned’.¹⁵

Incidents of Jews being attacked by Arabs became more frequent.¹⁶ Zionists complained that the British were not prepared to act, but Storrs assured Jewish representatives that security would be adequate during the Muslim Nebi Musa pilgrimage in the Judaean desert near Jericho, in April. In the event three days of violence in Jerusalem left 5 Jews dead and 200 injured; 4 Arabs were killed with 25 injured. Jewish anger focused on the British administration for not acting firmly. An official British report, unpublished at the time, focused on Arab fears of Jewish immigration and settlement, though the military’s response was criticized too. ‘All the carefully built relations of mutual understanding between British, Arabs and Jews seemed to flare away in an agony of fear and hatred’, Storrs lamented, with the familiar exasperation of the ‘man on the spot’ found wanting by distant peers in the imperial capital.

Our dispositions might perhaps have been better … but I have often wondered whether those who criticised us … could have had the faintest conception of the steep, narrow and winding alleys within the Old City of Jerusalem, the series of steps up or down which no horse or car can ever pass, the deadly dark corners beyond which a whole family can be murdered out of sight or sound of a police post not a hundred yards away. What did they know of the nerves of Jerusalem, where in times of anxiety the sudden clatter on the stones of an empty petrol tin will produce a panic?¹⁷

The Palin Report described a ‘condition of affairs when the native population, disappointed of their hopes, panic-stricken as to their future, exasperated beyond endurance by the aggressive attitude of the Zionists, and despairing of redress at the hands of an Administration which seems to them powerless before the Zionist organisation, lies a ready prey for any form of agitation’.18 The militant right-wing Russian Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had served in the British army during the war and who tried to lead Jewish defence efforts in Jerusalem, was sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude. But after protests in the House of Commons his sentence was reduced to a year and his legacy of activism lived on.

A MANDATE FOR CHANGE

Among the Arab community the idea of a distinct Palestinian national identity had continued to spread since the end of the war, encouraged in part by the gradually dawning realization of Zionist ambitions and the creation of a separate British administration for the country.¹⁹ In February 1919 the first congress of Muslim–Christian Associations declared unity with Syria, though support faded when Faisal’s rule collapsed and he was expelled by the French the following summer. Questions also started to be asked in Arab circles as to exactly what Faisal had agreed with Weizmann.

In May 1920 the San Remo conference granted Britain the Mandate for Palestine under the Covenant of the League of Nations. Syria, including Lebanon, and Mesopotamia (Iraq) were to be provisionally recognized as independent but meanwhile were to be assisted and advised by France and Britain respectively. The intention was to govern these former Ottoman territories ‘until such time as they are able to stand alone’. Arab leaders were to argue from then on that the British were obliged on that basis to facilitate the creation of an independent Arab state in Palestine – though that was clearly not compatible with the commitment to establish a Jewish national home. Transjordan was briefly a no-man’s-land until being attached to the British Palestine Mandate, but was exempted from Balfour’s pledge under the rule of Faisal’s brother, the Emir Abdullah bin Hussein. The Arabian peninsula remained a battleground between Sharif Hussein and the Al Saud.

Britain’s first high commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, a leading Liberal Jewish politician, arrived by cruiser in Jaffa in grand viceregal style in tropical whites, plumes and cocked hat. ‘The military authorities were nervous, and had made the most formidable preparations against any possible eventuality’, Samuel recalled. ‘But nothing happened at all, and the leading men of all the communities joined in a courteous welcome.’20 The terms of the Mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration almost verbatim. Article 6, crucially, pledged to promote Jewish immigration and land settlement; English, Arabic and Hebrew were declared official languages. A ‘Jewish agency’ was to be recognized to advise the administration, but there was no parallel Arab agency. The word ‘Arab’ did not in fact appear in the text, while the word ‘Palestinian’ was used only with reference to the acquisition of citizenship by Jews. Arab hostility was guaranteed from the start. The feeling was reciprocated: Weizmann’s colleague, the Russian-born Menachem Ussishkin, refused to shake hands with the mufti of Jerusalem, Kamal al-Husseini, at a reception Storrs organized for the high commissioner.²¹

In December 1920 the MCA’s third Palestinian Congress in Haifa dropped its demand for union with Syria – and rejected the Balfour Declaration. It also elected an Arab Executive (AE) committee led by Musa Kazem al-Husseini of the eminent Jerusalem family. Palestinians began to focus more on the fate of Palestine. Arabic educational works on geography and history that were published in the 1920s reflected this clearly. And so, increasingly, did political behaviour: ‘After the recent events in Damascus we must change our plans entirely,’ Musa Kazem told supporters. ‘Southern Syria is no more. We must defend Palestine.’²²

If official British policy was clear, there were grave doubts about it in private. ‘It is indeed difficult to see how we can keep our promises to the Jews by making the country a “national home” without inflicting injury on 9/10ths of the population’, one official confided to his diary. ‘But we have now got the onus of it on our shoulders, and have incurred odium from the Moslems & Christians, who are not appeased by vague promises that their interests will not be affected.’²³ In August 1921, reviewing his first year in the post, the high commissioner referred pointedly to those Zionists ‘who sometimes forget or ignore the present inhabitants of Palestine’, and who suddenly ‘learn with surprise and often with incredulity, that there are half-a-million people in Palestine, many of whom hold, and hold strongly, very different views’.24

Weizmann’s diplomacy had not succeeded in defusing Arab opposition. Other less subtle methods were tried as well. In May he met a Nablus notable, Haydar Bey Touqan, a former mayor and Ottoman MP, and promised him £2,000 to conduct pro-Zionist propaganda. Touqan managed to produce petitions from ten villages in support of British rule and Jewish immigration and condemning the Jerusalem riots. In all some eighty such petitions appeared.²⁵ Another tack was to exploit existing divisions and encourage new ones. Chaim Kalvarisky, one of the most colourful figures in the world of Jewish-Arab relations, was tasked by the Zionist executive to promote the formation of Muslim National Associations to counter the nationalist Muslim–Christian Associations. The Polish-born, French-educated Kalvarisky, an agronomist by training, was considered the Yishuv’s leading ‘expert’ on Arabs (many others would follow). He had served as a land agent in Galilee for many years, dispossessing Arab peasants, while professing sensitivity to Arab feelings.²⁶ Arab ‘farmers parties’ were established in Nazareth and Jenin under his aegis to ‘maintain and deepen the divide’²⁷ between the villages and the urban elite – a tactic that was to resurface decades later. Newspapers were persuaded to adopt a pro-Zionist – or at least a neutral – policy. Bribes were paid to secure the postponement of a nationalist congress until after a sensitive holiday period when trouble seemed likely.²⁸ Kalvarisky’s boldest initiative was to ‘buy’ Musa Kazem, president of the Arab Executive.²⁹ Other plans to buy Arab support, or inaction, failed to materialize because of shortages of cash. And nor, felt some Zionist critics, were these efforts effective: ‘The signature of the professional petition-monger or the temporary benevolence of a venal editor have no appreciable effect on the situation’, commented one official, ‘and in general little can be done by the mere distribution of casual bribes, except, perhaps, on a vastly larger scale than it is possible to contemplate.’³⁰

Kalvarisky’s activities were by their nature discreet, but he hardly operated under deep cover. Arab interlocutors regarded him with open contempt: Awni Abdel-Hadi of Nablus, a prominent nationalist lawyer, told Kalvarisky frankly that he preferred dealing with Zionists who did not claim to be seeking rapprochement:

You always speak of a Jewish-Arab agreement or good relations between Jews and Arabs. I tell you frankly that I would rather deal with Jabotinsky or Ussishkin than you. I know that they are our declared enemies who want to crush us, take our lands and force us to leave the country – and that we have to fight them. You, Kalvarisky, seem to be our friend but in the end I can see no difference between your goal and Jabotinsky’s. You also support the Balfour Declaration, the national home, unrestricted immigration and the continuous purchase of Arab lands – which for me is a matter of life and death.31

Abdel-Hadi would repeat his view of the inevitability of conflict in later meetings with Zionist representatives.³²

MAY DAY

Neither bribes nor diplomacy prevented the next wave of violence to hit Palestine. In May 1921 rioting erupted in Jaffa. It was triggered by a May Day clash between rival Communist and socialist Jewish groups in the Manshiyeh quarter, bordering Tel Aviv. The main target was the hostel for new Jewish immigrants, where ‘pioneer couples who walked arm in arm through the streets were for the Jaffa Arabs the most tangible demonstration of the moral and social ruin which Palestine faced from Jewish immigration’.³³ Ten thousand Jews had entered the country via Jaffa port since the previous September alone – largely East European Zionists and socialists who been born among the pogroms of Tsarist Russia and had spent their youth in the turmoil of war and revolution. Arab press reports complained of the spread of ‘Bolshevik’ ideas – a common theme; social mores – the provocatively immodest appearance of Jewish women – were a particular preoccupation. Mixed bathing was another.

Trouble spread across the country. Attacks on the Jewish colonies of Petah Tikvah and Hadera (founded by Hovevei Tzion in 1891) were repulsed only by the deployment of British cavalry and aircraft. Martial law was declared. Over six days of violence forty-one Jews and forty-four Arabs were killed.34 Of the Jewish victims, the best known was the writer Yosef Haim Brenner, who had become profoundly pessimistic about relations with the Arabs. To Jewish fury, Sir Herbert Samuel also announced a temporary halt to Jewish immigration. Fines and other collective punishments were imposed on Arab communities. ‘It was my first encounter with the experience of terror, death, the Arab as an enemy’, one Jewish youngster recalled later.³⁵ The bloodshed was the most alarming sign yet that Arab–Zionist tensions were likely to be a serious problem for the British authorities. The Haycraft Commission, which investigated the events, dismissed the view of Yishuv spokesmen that the trouble was the work of ‘demagogues, agitators and effendis’ – anything but the expression of growing Arab political opposition. ‘Feeling against the Jews was too genuine, too widespread and too intense to be accounted for in above superficial manner’, it reported.³⁶ Samuel, echoing the commission’s findings, told Weizmann: ‘I have come to the conclusion that the importance of the Arab factor had been underestimated by the Zionist movement; unless there is very careful steering it is upon the Arab rock that the Zionist ship may be wrecked.’³⁷ The report implied, Weizmann complained, ‘that the Zionist desire to dominate in Palestine might provide further ground for Arab resentment’.³⁸ At the high commissioner’s urging Weizmann met a Palestinian Arab delegation, led by Musa Kazem al-Husseini (the intended recipient of sweeteners from Kalvarisky) in London that November to discuss future constitutional arrangements, but there was little common ground. The suspicious atmosphere was not conducive to progress. Weizmann asked a student from Haifa, David HaCohen, to book a room in the Arab delegation’s hotel under an assumed name and obtain copies of their documents.³⁹ ‘Dr Weizmann, while his speech was conciliatory, adopted an unfortunate manner in delivering it’, reported a British official. ‘His attitude was of the nature of a conqueror handing to beaten foes the terms of peace. Also I think he despises the members of the delegation as not worthy protagonists – that it is a little derogatory [sic] to him to expect him to meet them on the same ground.’40 In private, Weizmann was even harsher, telling a colleague that the Arab delegation was ‘fifth-rate’.⁴¹

Like the more limited trouble in Jerusalem the previous year, the unrest was a powerful fillip to plans for Jewish self-defence: another answer to worries about how to ‘deal with’ Arab opposition to Zionism, or ‘the Arab question’ as it was now routinely called by the Jews. In December 1920 the newly established Histadrut (General Federation of Hebrew Labour in Palestine) had resolved to set up a volunteer defence organization called the Haganah (Defence).⁴² HaShomer, the Jewish settlement guards group that had been established in 1909, was abolished. Under its founder Eliahu Golomb, the Haganah held a first ‘officers training course’ in August 1921. Armssmuggling increased, with two hundred pistols brought into the country. Intelligence-gathering, focused inevitably on Arabs, became better organized. Jabotinsky, now out of prison, campaigned in vain for the revival of the Jewish battalions of the Great War and their incorporation into the British garrison in Palestine. Not long afterwards he was to call for an ‘iron wall’ to protect the fledgling Jewish enterprise. That much-quoted phrase has stuck as a succinct description of how, for all its talk of co-existence, the Zionist movement really dealt with Arab opposition, despite significant differences of emphasis between rival political movements. ‘Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized’, Jabotinsky wrote. ‘That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel”.’⁴³ Discreet Haganah preparations helped avert more unrest in Jerusalem on 2 November, Balfour Day, by now a regular fixture in the secular calendar of the accelerating conflict.

The Haycraft Commission noted another important change: shifting perceptions by Arabs of their Jewish neighbours. ‘During the riots all discrimination on the part of the Arabs between different categories of Jews was obliterated’, the report commented. ‘Old-established colonists and newly arrived immigrants, Chalukah [Haluka] Jews [living on charity handouts from abroad] and Bolshevik Jews, Algerian Jews and Russian Jews, became merged in a single identity, and former friendships gave way before the enmity now felt towards all.’44 The British, increasingly, rejected the standard Zionist narrative about the fundamentally good relations between the two communities: ‘It is all very well to say that there has been peace for a generation between Arabs and Jews. It was the sort of peace that exists between two bodies of men who have little or nothing to do with each other.’⁴⁵

BLURRING DIFFERENCES

On the surface, relative calm reigned for the next few years. In 1922 the British Mandate was confirmed by the League of Nations and the country’s boundaries, based on the three Ottoman provinces of southern Syria, were fixed. Transjordan became a separate entity where Balfour’s promise did not apply, to the fury of Zionists who claimed it as part of their biblical patrimony and objected to what they denounced as ‘partition’ – a theme which would reappear in years to come. The territory across the river was ruled by Emir Abdullah, the younger son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, under British tutelage.

By this time the Zionist enterprise had already been under way for four decades, though it had not yet brought about a significant demographic transformation: Palestine’s 757,000 inhabitants consisted of an overwhelming majority of Arabs, with a Jewish minority of 83,000 or 11 per cent of the population. But immigration continued apace. The third aliya, dated from 1919 to 1923, brought in 35,000 largely Russian and Polish and mostly socialist Jewish newcomers. These halutzim (pioneers) played an important role in establishing kibbutzim and other collective Zionist organizations such as Gdud haAvoda (the labour battalion). Its members built roads, drained swamps and undertook other public construction projects, and did much to mould the ethos of an autonomous society built by Hebrew labour – the word Hebrew (Ivrit) deliberately replacing the word Jewish. ‘We came to this land to build it and to be rebuilt in it’, went a popular song of the time, reflecting the notion that a ‘new Jew’ – tough, dedicated, muscular and Hebrew-speaking, who rejected the values of the Diaspora – was being created in the ancient homeland.

Arabs were not part of that exclusive nationalist vision. Employing Arabs was frowned upon in particular: in the early 1920s a Jewish farmer from Rishon LeZion complained to a British official that he had been ordered by the Jewish Agency to dismiss the local Arabs he had grown up with and employed as herdsmen and ploughmen, and instead engage new Jewish immigrants at higher pay.

If he dismissed the Arabs in the summary manner suggested, such bad feeling would be created that, being a vindictive people, they might well burn his crops … The Jews who had been proposed to him as labourers knew nothing about farming and … local conditions. The Arabs would work to all hours of the night if it were a question of getting a crop in before the rain; the Jews would down tools precisely at six o’clock, no matter what the weather.46

The next wave of mass Jewish immigration during the Mandate – the fourth aliya – is dated from 1924 to 1929. The majority of these newcomers were from Poland, hit by a severe economic crisis and a wave of anti-Semitic persecution. (They were known as the ‘Grabski aliya’, named after the Polish prime minister whose financial reforms had badly affected the country’s Jews.) This influx was very different sociologically from the ideologically motivated pioneers of the past, those Weizmann admiringly called ‘the men of Degania and Nahalal’. It included substantial lower- and middle-class elements who brought their savings – $2,500 was the minimum required for a new ‘capitalist’ immigration certificate – to invest in workshops, businesses and services. Weizmann was not best pleased. ‘Some of them were little disposed to pull their weight in a new country’, he wrote later. ‘A few, in their struggle for existence, showed anti-social tendencies; they seemed never to have been Zionists and saw no difference between Palestine as a country of immigration and, for instance, the United States.’ Too many of the newcomers smacked of the ‘life of the ghetto’.⁴⁷ Large numbers settled in Tel Aviv, which was now billed as the ‘white city’ on the Mediterranean sands. As early as 1918, a new Hebrew geography book described it as ‘a European oasis within an Asian desert’ and praised its straight, paved streets planted with gardens and flowers, everything ‘new and shining’.⁴⁸ An influx of capital and residents, some of them turning their backs on Jaffa after the 1921 unrest, triggered a construction boom.⁴⁹ Cultural life flourished with a theatre and orchestra, though less attractive aspects included prostitution. In the words of a 1924 police report: ‘Suddenly we began to see … cars of wealthy Arabs and Christians from Jaffa arriv[ing] in Tel Aviv in the middle of the evenings and parked alongside the houses [of] … new female immigrants, [and] the wild debauchery continued until the wee hours of the night.’50

New newspapers and publishing houses gave a boost to the spreading Hebrew language. Tel Aviv’s population grew from just 2,000 in 1920 to 34,000 by 1925, the year the Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes drew up a master plan for the city. Jaffa was still bigger, but was gradually cut off from the Arab villages in its hinterland by the creation of a contiguous zone of Jewish settlement.⁵¹ ‘We saw the Arabs as our neighbours and cousins’, a Tel Aviv native recalled.

We knew the baker and the greengrocer, the people selling strawberries, prickly pears and bouza [ice-cream in Arabic]. When someone in Tel Aviv said: ‘I’m going into town’, they meant to Jaffa. That’s where you went to have fun, shop, work, and above all to go [to] the port, the centre of social life. Still there was a sense of anxiety and insecurity about wandering around in Jaffa. The [Arab] shabab – young guys, louts and thugs used to swear at Jews and provoke them. British officials and police often encouraged them.⁵²

By the spring of 1925 Palestine’s total Jewish population was 108,000.⁵³ This was a landmark year: the first time the number of Jews who came to Palestine exceeded the number who entered the US, after the imposition of immigrant quotas there.⁵⁴ To a visiting British journalist in 1927, Tel Aviv was

a perfect freak in Palestine … rather like Alexandria but without any flavour of the East. The streets were crowded. Wide hipped German & Polish & Russian girls wheeling prams – an endless file – & men looking as though they were using Sunbronze on their fat aquiline features. Not a word of English & my questions for direction not understood.⁵⁵

Modernity and prosperity went hand in hand. British policy under the Mandate gave open preference to Jewish development, providing ‘a propitious environment for the growth of a larger and more homogeneous Zionist enclave, which in turn led to the bifurcation of Palestine’s economy’.⁵⁶ In 1922 an electricity concession was granted to the Russian-Jewish industrialist Pinchas Rutenberg, who built a grid which supplied power to Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Jewish settlements and British military facilities, and later constructed a power station at Naharayim on the Jordan. Winston Churchill, the colonial secretary, told MPs that the bidding process had not been unfair since ‘the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps towards the irrigation and electrification of Palestine’. The Palestine Potash works at Sedom on the Dead Sea was another enterprise that depended on Jewish investment and technological prowess.57

Politically, the question of ‘relations’ with the Arabs seemed less urgent to the Zionists in the mid-1920s, but it had not, of course, gone away. Kalvarisky’s attempts to ‘buy’ Palestinian moderates yielded few positive results, and his profligate methods were discredited until he was ordered ‘on no account to have any control over the expenditure of Zionist funds’. Arab work by Jewish institutions was scaled back. The ‘Arab question’ – never a high priority for the Jewish mainstream – faded from view. Jabotinsky was a lonely and candid voice protesting against what he saw as the illusion of Arab acquiescence in Zionism, denouncing ‘Kalvarisky’s bribes and Weizmann’s peace-lies’.⁵⁸ In 1925 he went on to found the New Zionist Organization, better known as the ‘Revisionist movement’ because it wanted to ‘revise’ the terms of the Mandate to include Transjordan within its scope. ‘There are two banks to the Jordan’ went its famous slogan. ‘One is ours, and so is the other.’

On the Arab side, a more pro-British mood was encouraged for a while by concessions over land and the creation of a powerful Supreme Muslim Council headed by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who had been given the brand new title of Grand Mufti.⁵⁹ In 1923, however, British proposals for a legislative council met with the firm rejection of the fifth Palestine Arab Congress, which opposed anything that was based on the hated Balfour Declaration. The Yishuv was unhappy with the idea of any representative institutions, given the still small number of Jews. The Zionists agreed reluctantly to take part in council elections, but an Arab boycott and subsequent low turnout meant that the results were declared null and void. High Commissioner Samuel’s efforts foundered on the irreconcilable clash between Britain’s support for a Jewish national home and the refusal of the Zionists to accept minority status. It was another example of the way that Arab actions and divisions often ended up inadvertently helping the Zionist cause.

‘NO COMMON LANGUAGE’

If the economic prosperity of the mid-1920s boosted the self-confidence of the Yishuv, there was still little sign that benefits were trickling down to the Arab population, as Zionist propaganda always claimed was happening. Land purchases expanded, notably in the Marj Ibn Amr (Jezreel or Esdraelon) valley where sales by the absentee Sursuq family of Beirut attracted notoriety but also distracted attention, misleadingly, from numerous smaller sales by Palestinian Arabs.60 More Jewish settlements were established on the coastal plain. Land sales peaked in 1925. In late 1924, the annual conference of Ahdut haAvoda, held at Ein Harod – one of the first kibbutzim – provided an opportunity to debate the question of Zionist ‘relations’ with the Arabs. Its conclusion was that the answer lay in the joint organization of Jewish and Arab workers, and that there was no Arab ‘national movement worthy of the name and that, at the current stage of development of the national home, a political agreement with the Arabs of Palestine was neither practical nor desirable’.⁶¹ Looking back at the debates over the proposed legislative council, the Ahdut haAvoda leader Ben-Gurion spoke out forcefully against representative government: ‘We must not be afraid to proclaim openly that between us, the Jewish workers, and the leaders of today’s Arab movement, the effendis, there is no common language’, he argued. Ben-Gurion did not deny the right of the Arab community to self-rule – but he would not, and clearly could not, concede their right to rule the country. Zionism was an authentic and progressive national movement, in his view, and Arab nationalism, the plaything of self-interested, reactionary leaders who wanted only to keep the ignorant masses under their control, was not.⁶²

Even then, however, some leading Zionists were aware of a nagging sense of false security. ‘What continually worries me is the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Palestine’, fretted Arthur Ruppin, the lawyer who had opened the Palestine Office in Jaffa back in 1908. ‘Superficially it has improved inasmuch as there is no danger of pogroms, but the two peoples have become much more estranged in their thinking. Neither has any understanding of the other.’ Arab views reflected this pessimism in a bleak mirror image: ‘It is a gross error to believe that Arab and Jew may come to an understanding if only each of them exchanges his coat of extremism for another of moderation’, the Palestinian Arab Congress reported to the League of Nations in 1924. ‘When the principles underlying two movements do clash, it is futile to expect their meeting halfway.’63

In 1925 Ruppin helped found a new organization – Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace). It was designed to foster Arab–Jewish understanding and promote the idea of a ‘bi-national’ state. Dominated by Central European, largely German-born Jewish intellectuals and pacifists – ‘all these Arthurs, Hugos and Hans’, in the dismissive words of one critic⁶⁴ – Brit Shalom met considerable hostility from the Zionist establishment, which saw it at best as idealistic and naïve, and at worst dangerously out of touch with the harsh realities of life in Palestine. Other well-known members included Martin Buber, the charismatic philosopher, the historian Gershom Scholem, and a number of Jewish professors of oriental studies at the newly founded Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Arab hostility was unmistakable when Lord Balfour, accompanied by Weizmann and Field Marshal Allenby, attended the inauguration of the new institution on Mount Scopus, on 1 April that year, and a general strike was declared. Hundreds of telegrams of protest arrived at Government House but he drew no conclusions from driving through nearly empty streets.⁶⁵ By contrast, he was warmly welcomed by Jews in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and especially in Balfouriya, a settlement founded near Afula by American Zionists in honour of this ‘new Cyrus’ (the Persian king who had liberated the Jews from their Babylonian exile). Later the same day, in Nazareth, Balfour and his entourage were pelted with stones and had to be rescued by British soldiers.⁶⁶ Balfour also faced mass demonstrations on an ill-advised visit to Damascus, where French troops guarding him killed three protestors. Co-existence remained a noble aspiration: Brit Shalom promoted private discussions, published a magazine and launched a programme of Arabic evening classes for Jews as part of an effort to encourage friendly relations between the two peoples. Kalvarisky and a handful of Sephardi notables also joined. Brit Shalom’s appearance was seen by many Arabs as a welcome sign of weakness in the mainstream Zionist movement.67 Politically, however, it got nowhere.

Arab rivalries helped the Zionists. Ragheb al-Nashashibi, the scion of another powerful Jerusalem family – Ronald Storrs called him ‘unquestionably the ablest Arab in Palestine’ – led opposition to the grand mufti. Nashashibi’s Palestinian Arab National Party favoured co-operation with the British administration and was denounced as treacherous by the Arab Executive. The Zionists did whatever they could to encourage this mutual vilification, providing financial support even as their own resources dwindled.⁶⁸ Many prominent Arab families, including nationalist activists, continued to sell land to Jews – an embarrassing issue that has been little addressed in Palestinian historical literature.⁶⁹ Beyond their local impact, land transfers affected the wider Arab economy. After the Marj Ibn Amr valley was sold, modern production methods and stockbreeding replaced traditional cereal cultivation and herding; nearby Nazareth and Jenin, market towns for the grain trade, suffered, while Haifa, which was better placed to service farm machinery and sell cash crops, benefitted.⁷⁰

In 1926 there was little organized Arab political activity at all, with even the now-traditional strikes on Balfour Day temporarily forgotten. Against the background of a deepening local economic crisis, marked by unemployment, labour protests and even net Jewish emigration in 1927, Zionism seemed less threatening than before. The Husseinis and Nashashibis set aside their differences to seek a measure of self-government. The seventh (and last) Palestinian Arab Congress in 1928 did not even demand the abrogation of the Mandate or express opposition to Zionism.⁷¹ Its sessions, Kalvarisky reported, had been ‘practical and moderate’, though he did observe the loss of influence of the aristocratic feudal families and the rising strength of the ‘extremist and chauvinist’ intelligentsia, with whom it was far harder for the Jews to come to terms.⁷² Arab interest in cooperating with the government attracted support because of the progress achieved by neighbouring countries under Mandatory regimes (Iraq, Syria and Lebanon) towards establishing self-governing and representative institutions – institutions which were so conspicuously absent in Palestine.

GOING TO THE WALL

If economic depression bred political quiescence, the rumbling of a new crisis ensured that the confrontation between Arabs and Jews was soon back on everyone’s minds – and with an especially volatile element. It began with a dispute over arrangements at the western (‘wailing’) wall of the Herodian temple compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, which Jews believed was the site of the Temple of Solomon. It is also the western wall of the Haram al-Sharif (‘Noble Sanctuary’ or Temple Mount), known to Muslims as al-Buraq – named for the horse the Prophet Muhammad had tethered there before completing his ‘night journey’ to heaven. Muslims had long feared that the Haram, site of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque (Islam’s third holiest site after Mecca and Medina), might be threatened. Jews had prayed at the wall’s massive stones for centuries. In Ottoman times they were not permitted to place benches, screens or Torah scrolls on the site, or do anything that might be interpreted as a claim to possession. In reality, these restrictions were not always observed, custom and practice proving laxer than the letter of the law. Little changed under the British, who had pledged to respect the status quo. In 1922, the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC) opposed any attempt to enhance Jewish access and Haj Amin, the grand mufti, raised large sums of money from Muslims to renovate the Haram. Now propaganda about an alleged Zionist threat began to circulate in the Muslim world. (It may have been based on a photomontage or drawing of the Haram in Zionist propaganda leaflets and postcards that were intended to attract Jewish funding.) Occasional inflammatory speeches fuelled suspicions. Modern research has unearthed sketchy evidence of a plot by a Jewish extremist to blow up the mosque – and his execution by the Haganah defence organization.73 But there was no official Zionist plan to take over the Muslim holy places. Even Weizmann’s agreement with Emir Faisal had stipulated that they would remain under Muslim control. In such a tense atmosphere, however, rumour, propaganda and exaggeration mattered more than facts.

This highly charged dispute escalated on Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement) 1928, when Jews brought a screen to the wall to separate male and female worshippers. It was removed by police. When the British reaffirmed the status quo, the SMC began a campaign to impose restrictions. ‘The Muslims of Palestine are determined to sacrifice body and soul in order to safeguard their religious rights’, warned a newspaper loyal to the mufti. ‘It is enough that their national rights have been stolen from them.’74 Zionist pressure brought Arab counter-pressure. Months of rising tensions, a provocative flag-waving demonstration by the Jabotinsky-inspired Beitar Revisionist movement and mutual denunciations came to a head in the summer heat of 1929.⁷⁵ Tit-for-tat attacks in Jerusalem, and more protests, were the prelude to the worst violence since 1917. On 16 August a Kurdish Jewish teenager was stabbed to death by Arabs on the border between two neighbourhoods. Contemporary accounts differ as to whether Avraham Mizrahi had kicked a football into an Arab garden or stolen a courgette. In normal times a trivial local dispute of this kind could have been easily settled. But these were far from normal times.⁷⁶

The violence began on the Haram al-Sharif after Friday prayers on 23 August. Several Jews were killed in Jerusalem, where there were complaints that the British police failed to use force or even to fire warning shots to deter the attackers. Haganah men rebuffed assaults from Lifta and Deir Yassin, on the western edge of the city, on the nearby newly built Jewish suburb of Beit Hakerem with its modest stone houses and red-tiled roofs. Lifta was singled out by police and the Zionists as ‘as bad a village as there was round Jerusalem’.⁷⁷ Arabs from Qaluniya attacked the neighbouring Jewish village of Motza. The dead knew their killers intimately – a reminder that Palestine’s neighbours and enemies were all too often interchangeable. Of the entire Maklef family, the only survivor was nine-year-old Mordechai, who survived by jumping out of a window. (In 1948 he would take part in the battle for Haifa, and in 1952 he became the second chief-of-staff of the Israeli Defence Forces.)

MASSACRE IN HEBRON

The biggest Arab attack, in response to the news from Jerusalem, took place in Hebron, home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Ibrahimi mosque, a revered religious site for Muslims and Jews. The sixty-four victims from the city’s Orthodox Jewish community included a dozen women and three young children who were killed in horrific circumstances. Raymond Cafferata, a British police superintendent, described what he witnessed:

On hearing screams in a room, I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child’s head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut, but on seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed; he was practically on the muzzle of my rifle. I shot him low in the groin. Behind him was a Jewish woman smothered in blood with a man I recognised as a[n Arab] police constable named Issa Sheriff from Jaffa. He was standing over the woman with a dagger in his hand. He saw me and bolted into a room close by and tried to shut me out – shouting in Arabic, ‘Your Honour, I am a policeman.’ … I got into the room and shot him.78

In Safed, the holy city in upper Galilee, twenty-six died. Jews had lived peacefully there, as they had in Hebron, for centuries, long before the advent of Zionism, though tensions had risen in the preceding years as they had across the country. Still, the leaders of the Hebron Jewish community had rejected an offer to have Haganah men sent from Jerusalem to protect them. In all 133 Jews and 116 Arabs were killed, most of the Arabs by British police; 339 Jews and 232 Arabs were injured. Ben-Gurion called the Hebron massacre a pogrom, comparing it to the notorious Kishinev killings in 1903, immortalized in a famous Hebrew poem by Chaim Nahman Bialik, entitled ‘The City of Slaughter’. Eastern European anti-Semitism and Arab violence in Palestine – portrayed by Arabs as legitimate resistance to Zionist expansion – were thus fused into an indissoluble whole. Hebrew newspapers filled page after page with stomach-churning descriptions of the atrocities and pictures of the innocent victims. The lesson drawn by many was that Jews must fight back when attacked. Haim Bograshov, principal of the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv, an elite school where Zionist values were proudly inculcated, articulated the point:

Over the course of an entire generation we educated our children and pupils that they should not hold out their necks to the slaughter, that they should not die like the dead of Safed, perish like the butchered of Hebron. It is over. The time of riots has passed for us and will not return, for we shall not let ourselves be killed without resisting.79

Unlike the Russian pogroms, though, the slaughter in Hebron was not organized by the authorities. Hundreds of Jews were sheltered and saved by their Arab neighbours. Yet it remained a shocking – and enduring – example of the human cost of Arab hostility, which showed no sign of abating. In October Arabs declared a general strike in protest at ‘blindly pro-Zionist’ British policies. In Nablus, singled out by the authorities for punishment, eighty pupils from the government school were flogged on their bare buttocks. That was ordered by a British official who was known for his contempt for Arabs, believing only one in thirty ‘so endowed by nature as to merit the expenditure of public money on his secondary education’.⁸⁰ The British Commission of Inquiry under Sir Walter Shaw, however, decided that the violence was not intended to be a revolt against British authority.

The Arabs called the attacks the ‘al-Buraq rebellion’ – a reference to the Prophet’s winged horse. Jews would remember the events as the ‘1929 disturbances’. In June 1930 three Arabs, convicted of murder in Hebron and Safed, were hanged in Acre prison, a crowd of hundreds waiting silently outside as the executions were carried out on what became known as ‘Red Tuesday’ after the poem by Ibrahim Touqan. Vigils were held in Haifa and Nablus. ‘May the blood of these Palestinian martyrs water the roots of the tree of Arab independence’, ran an Arabic eulogy.⁸¹ The song ‘From Acre Gaol’ (‘Min Sijn Akka’), by the popular poet Nuh Ibrahim, remains a staple of Palestinian collective memory. By contrast, the Jewish policeman who killed an entire Arab family in Jaffa had his death sentence commuted.⁸²

In time, the 1929 violence would come to be seen as an important milestone. Pan-Muslim sentiment had been aroused over the fate of the Haram al-Sharif and was to remain a significant factor in mobilizing public opinion and governments far beyond Palestine. In Palestine itself, the Arabs sensed that the old distinction between Jews and Zionists was no longer valid. In Hebron in particular, the establishment of a new yeshiva (religious school) in 1924 had brought in American and European Jewish students; they were not Zionist settlers but were still likely perceived as such by the local Arabs.83 Sephardi Jews from the old Yishuv closed ranks with Ashkenazi newcomers and began to do what they had refrained from doing previously – joining the Haganah and adopting an openly Zionist ethos.⁸⁴ The Arab–Jewish confrontation, in short, was becoming a more explicitly national one.

Moreover, awareness of the significance of that change sharpened: Jewish voices from left and right compared the situation to sitting on a volcano.⁸⁵ Christopher Sykes, an astute British chronicler of the Mandate years, identified 1929 as ‘a cross-roads moment when mistakes could not easily be undone’.⁸⁶ In one of several similar cases, Arabs from Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem attacked the Nahalat Shiva Jewish neighbourhood in the city centre, built on land their own forebears had sold years before. Was that a reflection of a dawning understanding that it had been a terrible mistake to allow the Zionists to gain the firm foothold they now had?⁸⁷ Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the great Hebrew writer, lived through the trauma in Talpiot, a new Jewish suburb of Jerusalem, which came under attack, and described afterwards how his feelings towards Arabs had changed. ‘Now my attitude is this. I do not hate them and I do not love them; I do not wish to see their faces. In my humble opinion, what we now need is to build a big ghetto of half a million Jews in Palestine. Otherwise we are lost.’⁸⁸ Yehoshua Palmon, a Jewish native of Jaffa who was to become an influential Arab ‘expert’, saw 1929 as a turning point in the conflict. The violence ‘taught me that we had only two alternatives before us: surrender or the sword’, he reflected later. ‘I chose the sword.’⁸⁹

AROUSING APPREHENSION

In what was becoming a familiar pattern under British Mandatory rule, the events of 1929 were followed by another investigation and new policy recommendations. In March 1930 the Shaw Commission concluded that ‘the claims and demands which from the Zionist side have been advanced in regard to the future of Jewish immigration into Palestine have been such as to arouse among Arabs the apprehension that they will in time be deprived of their livelihood and pass under the political domination of the Jews’.90 Ominously for the Jews, the commission pointed to the ‘landless and discontented class’ being formed by Zionist expansion as the main source of trouble, and urged that ‘directions more explicit’ should follow. Another investigation, conducted by Sir John Hope Simpson, then looked at the economic capacity of Palestine, and concluded that there was insufficient land to meet the needs of Jewish immigrants. Rural Arab areas were already experiencing an economic crisis aggravated by a poor harvest that forced peasants to sell their land and migrate to the cities and the shanty towns spreading around them. He warned:

The principle of the persistent and deliberate boycott of Arab labour in the [Jewish] colonies is not only contrary to the Mandate, but it is in addition a constant and increasing source of danger to the country. The Arab population already regards the transfer of lands to Zionist hands with dismay and alarm. These cannot be dismissed as baseless in the light of the Zionist policy.

Zionist opinion found this accurate assessment ‘patronising and hostile’.⁹¹

The White Paper that followed, issued under the name of the colonial secretary Lord Passfield (Sidney Webb), appeared in October 1930. It implied that future Jewish immigration to Palestine might have to be restricted. The Zionists, unhappy with what felt like their diminishing influence in London, were horrified. Chaim Weizmann resigned as president of the Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency, its British-recognized executive arm. Passfield was attacked by pro-Zionist Labour MPs as well as by the Conservative opposition, and the White Paper was revoked after intensive lobbying that played on the weaknesses of Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government.⁹² In February 1931 MacDonald read out to MPs a letter he had sent to Weizmann – the Arabs called it the ‘Black Letter’ – repudiating Passfield’s policy. ‘It was under MacDonald’s letter to me’, Weizmann wrote, ‘that the change came about in the government’s attitude, and in the attitude of the Palestine administration, which enabled us to make the magnificent gains of the ensuing years.’93 In the wake of the alarming events of 1929 the Zionist movement obtained a ringing reaffirmation of Britain’s commitment to the national home. But there was no reappraisal of Jewish relations with the Arabs of Palestine.

Occasionally, more critical voices were heard. Hans Kohn was a supporter of Brit Shalom who unusually – though appropriately for a future leading scholar of nationalism – described the Zionist–Arab confrontation against the wider background of resistance to colonialism elsewhere: ‘I cannot concur with [official Zionist policy] when the Arab national movement is being portrayed as the wanton agitation of a few big landowners’, he wrote.

I know … that frequently the most reactionary imperialist press in England and France portrays the national movements in India, Egypt, and China in a similar fashion – in short, wherever the national movements of oppressed peoples threaten the interest of the colonial power. I know how false and hypocritical this portrayal is. We pretend to be innocent victims … Of course the Arabs attacked us in August. Since they have no armies they could not obey the rules of war. They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt. But we are obliged to look into the deeper cause of this revolt. We have been in Palestine for twelve years … without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people. We have been relying exclusively upon Great Britain’s military might. We have set ourselves goals which by their very nature had to lead to conflict with Arabs … We ought to have recognised that these … would be … the just cause, of a national uprising against us … we pretended that the Arabs did not exist.⁹⁴

Judah Magnes, the American reform rabbi and pacifist who became the first chancellor of the Hebrew University, had drawn similar conclusions in a controversial address around the same time, during which he was heckled by students. ‘If we cannot find ways of peace and understanding, if the only way of establishing the Jewish National Home is upon the bayonets of some empire, our whole enterprise is not worth while; and it is better that the eternal people that has outlived many a mighty empire should possess its soul in patience, and plan and wait.’95 Still, these were the arguments of a tiny Jewish minority with very little ability to influence the hardening mood in the wake of the bloodshed. In 1931 Arthur Ruppin left Brit Shalom, and the organization ceased to exist two years later due to the desertion of many members and a chronic lack of funds.

Ben-Gurion, by now a powerful figure in the Labour movement, had spoken frankly about the irreconcilable aspirations of Zionists and Arabs for years, and he concluded in November 1929 that the existence of an Arab national movement was now beyond doubt. ‘The Arab in Eretz Yisrael should not and cannot be a Zionist,’ he told colleagues. ‘He cannot want the Jews to become a majority. That is the source of the true confrontation between us and the Arabs. We and they both want to be the majority.’⁹⁶ Those comments were made in private. At the same time in public, however, he maintained the official line that the disturbances were the work of ‘a crowd, incited and inflamed by the fire of religion and fanaticism’.⁹⁷ In October he had already emphasized the need to focus on mass immigration and to increase the physical security of the Yishuv, and sketched out a plan called Bitzaron (Fortification). Gaps between existing settlements would be closed – ‘joining the dots’, he called it – and, in future, settlements were to be planned to ensure territorial contiguity. Jerusalem, not hitherto a priority, was to receive special attention.

On the ground, another important effect of the 1929 violence was to increase the physical separation between the country’s two communities. Jews left Hebron completely, though three dozen Sephardi families returned in 1931. The few Jews in Gaza and other overwhelmingly Arab areas of Palestine also left. Under the pressure of a short-lived Arab boycott movement, Jewish merchants left the Old City of Jerusalem as well as Arab parts of Haifa and Jaffa and moved to predominantly Jewish neighbourhoods, or to Tel Aviv. Acre’s small community of Salonika Jewish fishermen decamped to Haifa. Arabs also left Jewish-dominated areas. ‘Arab drivers are afraid to go into Jewish quarters and Jews into Arab ones’, recorded the wife of a British official in Jerusalem. ‘And then one takes a car with Hebrew numbers, thinking one has a Jewish driver, and finds oneself with an Arab who has put up Hebrew numbers to get custom. All the drivers take two hats, to wear a tarbush or an ordinary hat according to the district.’98 Demarcation became sharper. ‘In every respect the schism between the two people was now open and undisguised’, a British report noted.⁹⁹ The trend towards economic segregation was boosted too. The aftermath of the disturbances gave a boost to the campaign for Hebrew labour, especially in the countryside. The old idea of a joint Arab–Jewish workers’ organization, never very successful, suffered a near-fatal blow. In the vineyard at Motza, outside Jerusalem, where the Histadrut had previously campaigned in vain for Hebrew labour only, most Arab workers were dismissed.¹⁰⁰ The battle lines were getting clearer.