4

1929–1936

‘Zionism cannot, in the given circumstances, be turned into a reality without a transition period of the organised revolutionary rule of the Jewish minority.’

Chaim Arlosoroff

‘THE WOES INFLICTED ON PALESTINE’

On 2 November 1932 the now traditional Arab protests were held marking Balfour Day. Filastin illustrated its front page with an elaborate cartoon portraying Lord Balfour dominating a crude map of the country, holding his ‘accursed’ declaration. Emanating from it – ‘the woes inflicted on Palestine’ – are lines linked to different scenes illustrating the achievements of Zionism under the protection of the British military, represented by a haughty, pipe-smoking officer in riding boots, and by tanks, cannon and a warship off Haifa Bay.1 Elsewhere in the tableau Jewish immigrants stride energetically towards Tel Aviv, passing a glum-looking Palestinian peasant family evicted from their land, mounted on a camel plodding towards the desert. The scenery is dotted with modern Jewish factories, mechanized agriculture, bustling public works and Jewish enterprises for electricity and potash – all important economic achievements for the Yishuv. In the corner – or on the margin – stands a group of Arab men wearing European suits and tarbushes and arguing heatedly (though presumably ineffectively) about the transformation they are witnessing. Balfour, for good measure, appeared in yet another drawing on the back page of the paper.

The Filastin cartoon well captured the gloomy mood in Arab Palestine early in a decade of profound and destabilizing change, fifteen years after the declaration. Later that Wednesday 2,000 people packed the only cinema in Nablus, decked out with an Arab flag and portraits of Sharif Hussein and King Faisal, for a protest rally to mark the occasion. Other events were held in Jerusalem and Haifa.2 The aftermath of the 1929 violence and the disastrous ‘Black Letter’ saw intensifying political activity that did very little to stem Zionist progress under the Mandate, though by 1931 Jews (now numbering 175,000) still constituted less than 17 per cent of the country’s total population.³ In December that year the grand mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, convened an Islamic conference in Jerusalem to warn of the purported Jewish threat to the Muslim holy places. Arab newspapers repeatedly warned about the fate of peasants in the light of land sales, which accelerated from 1933, and named and shamed those who speculated or traded in this precious national commodity.⁴

Prolonged legal wrangling over the sale to the Jewish National Fund of a large Arab-owned tract in Wadi Hawarith, on the plain between Haifa and Tel Aviv, highlighted this increasingly sensitive issue, especially after the Shaw Commission noted the existence of a class of embittered and landless Arabs in its report on the causes of the 1929 disturbances. In 1930 the Bedouin tenants, men and women, attacked both the British policemen who were pulling down their tents and the Jewish settlers who had begun ploughing. What became known as the Wadi Hawarith affair ended in 1933 with the eviction of 1,200 Bedouin (though some were resettled elsewhere) and by the now standard practice of renaming the area in Hebrew, as Emek Hefer (mentioned in the First Book of Kings). The purchase was the third largest during the Mandate period, a significant milestone in the Zionist effort to ‘redeem’ land.⁵ However, an attempt to emulate the Jews and set up a national fund (Sunduq al-Umma) to save Arab land failed, despite a partnership with the recently established Arab Bank. It was another example of how Arab efforts were invariably unable to match the financial resources and organizational abilities of the Zionists. Traditional Arab leaders were again exposed as weak and ineffective, together with damaging though inconclusive evidence that nationalist politicians had taken bribes or been secretly involved in land sales.6 In 1934 the newspaper Alif Baa reported, highly unusually, that economic conditions were in fact better in Arab areas where land had been sold to Jews. But it later transpired that the editor had received a large payment from the Jewish Agency.⁷

Frustration with Arab shortcomings, and mounting alarm about the strength and confidence of the Zionists, led to the creation of the Istiqlal (Independence) Party. This Pan-Arab organization was founded by Awni Abdel-Hadi in 1932, part of a trend which saw Palestinian political life move away from the great aristocratic and merchant families to a younger generation of nationalist activists, often journalists and teachers who had enjoyed a European education and admired Mahatma Gandhi’s ongoing struggle against the British in India. Akram Zuwayter and Izzat Darwaza, both from Nablus, were other leading figures in this milieu. Haifa, where Jews by now made up nearly half of the population, became a stronghold for the party.⁸ The Istiqlal view compared the British Mandate to a tree: if it was felled then its Zionist ‘branch’ would fall too.⁹ The Istiqlal, commented a British report, ‘was calculated to appeal to the younger generation of Arab nationalists by its uncompromising concentration on the demand for national freedom’.¹⁰ The fight for economic sovereignty was a significant part of its platform, while the independent status enjoyed by Iraq after its 1930 treaty with Britain was a source of encouragement.¹¹ The party’s first rally in Haifa celebrated the Battle of Hattin in 1187, where the Crusader forces had been defeated by Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin in popular Western memory).¹²

Zuwayter had already resigned his post as a teacher at a government school in Acre. Mayors and other Arab officials now came under pressure to quit as well. Radicalization, or at least mobilization, was evident too in a new National Congress of Arab Youth, athletics and soccer clubs, and in an independent Arab scout movement, whose members patrolled the Mediterranean coastline to try to prevent illegal Jewish immigrants from landing – and to make the point that the Mandatory government was not enforcing its own policies. Yet legal immigration was increasing every year, and more than doubled Palestine’s Jewish population from 175,000 in 1931 to 380,000 in 1936 so that Jews then made up nearly a third of the country’s total. The scouts – their troops often named after early Muslim heroes like Khalid bin al-Walid – led nationalist parades or forced shopkeepers to shut down on strike days.13 They also organized protests when the Histadrut picketed orange groves and building sites to intimidate recalcitrant Jewish employers to stop hiring Arab workers, whose numbers increased in the prosperous late 1920s and mid-1930s.

In February 1933 a secret meeting of activists from northern Palestine heard a stark warning from Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, an Istiqlal leader and the manager of the Arab Bank in Haifa. ‘The Jews are advancing on all fronts’, read the report of the meeting by the Haganah intelligence service.

They keep buying land, they bring in immigrants both legally and illegally … If we cannot demonstrate to them convincingly enough that all their efforts are in vain and that we are capable of destroying them at one stroke, then we shall have to lose our holy land or resign ourselves to being wretched second-class citizens in a Jewish state.

Asked how the Jews could be made to see this point, Ibrahim answered: ‘By doing what we did in 1929, but using more efficient methods.’¹⁴ The British were also aware of what was stirring. In June a CID intelligence report remarked on ‘the training of the younger generation in political agitation, under cover of national culture’.¹⁵ Cumulating tensions led to a decision by the Arab Executive, under pressure to act, to declare a general strike to protest against British policy. The Haganah and the Jewish Agency were on high alert, anxious to avoid a repeat of the surprise of 1929, and kept careful tabs on Arab plans by listening to the telephone calls of key leaders.¹⁶ On 13 October 1933 a large Arab demonstration – in defiance of an official ban – was held outside government offices in Jerusalem. It was dispersed violently though there were no fatalities. In Jaffa two weeks later police opened fire after demonstrators refused to disperse; twenty-six Arabs were killed and the nearly two hundred injured included the elderly Musa Kazem al-Husseini, who was clubbed by police and died a few months later. Protests followed in Nablus, Haifa and Gaza. Ben-Gurion, for one, was impressed by the strength and cohesion of Arab opposition, which strikingly had targeted the British, not Jews. The latest unrest represented a ‘serious and worrying turning point’, he told Mapai (Workers’ Party) colleagues. The victims had been disciplined demonstrators, not rioters or murderers. He called them ‘national heroes’ who would be admired, especially by young Arabs.17

ZIONIST MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

Pessimism about the prospects for the Zionist project in the face of Arab hostility had been growing. It was expressed in a sensational way in 1932 by Chaim Arlosoroff, a scholarly young Labour leader who had become head of the Jewish Agency’s political department. In a private letter to Weizmann, Arlosoroff concluded that

Zionism cannot, in the given circumstances, be turned into a reality without a transition period of the organised revolutionary rule of the Jewish minority; that there is no way to a Jewish majority, or even to an equilibrium between the two races (or else a settlement sufficient to provide a basis for a cultural centre) to be established by systematic immigration and colonisation, without a period of a nationalist minority government which would usurp the state machinery, the administration and the military power in order to forestall the danger of our being swamped by numbers and endangered by a rising (which we could not face without having the state machinery at our disposal).

Arlosoroff’s letter has been described as ‘prophetic’ because of its frank admission that Zionist goals could not be achieved by agreement with the Arabs. It may also be seen as a statement of what was by now obvious, even if not often explicitly stated. Weizmann, in any event, did not reply.¹⁸ (When Arlosoroff was murdered on the beach in Tel Aviv in June 1933 his death was widely blamed on right-wing Revisionists, who were deeply hostile to the Labour movement – though the perpetrators were probably Arab criminals with no political motive.¹⁹)

Arlosoroff’s gloom had been prompted in part by the need to campaign against the British proposal, revived by the 1930 Passfield White Paper, for a legislative council in which Jews and Arabs would participate on the basis of their respective proportions of Palestine’s population. The problem for the Zionists was the same as it had been a decade earlier: the Arab majority that would inevitably dominate any council would clearly oppose the further development of the Jewish national home. But rather than reject the idea out of hand or acquiesce in a minority role, the Zionists instead sought a ‘parity’ formula that would recognize the financially significant role of world Jewry. Ben-Gurion linked this to another proposal: that once the Jews had become the majority in Palestine they would offer their help in creating an Arab federation. It was a throwback to the idea behind Weizmann’s much-vaunted agreement with Emir Faisal back in 1919 – a sort of political ‘grand bargain’ that would subsume Palestine in a pan-Arab context. In July 1934 Ben-Gurion and Moshe Shertok (the only senior Zionist official who spoke Arabic) met Awni Abdel-Hadi, the Istiqlal leader, and made clear that for the Jews, ‘this land was everything and there was nothing else. For the Arabs, Palestine was only a small portion of the larger and numerous Arab countries.’ He compared their situation to that of English people living in Scotland, who ‘were not a minority because they were part of the United Kingdom, where they constituted a majority’.20 A few weeks later Ben-Gurion raised the issue again, in the first of a series of meetings with Musa al-Alami, a member of a prominent landowning Jerusalem family and a government lawyer. Alami, in the words of his biographer, ‘seems to have regarded the Zionists rather as a Kenya farmer regards elephants: dangerous creatures always liable to destroy his property and quite capable of being lethal, which he expects the government to keep under control but against which he feels no personal enmity’, and was thus able to maintain relations with Jewish leaders.²¹ But when Ben-Gurion suggested that the Zionists could help the Arabs develop the country, Alami responded trenchantly that he would rather wait for a hundred years and leave the land in a state of backwardness as long as the Arabs did the job themselves.²²

Expectations were low and trust even lower. Earlier that year Leo Kohn, a senior official in the Jewish Agency political department, met George Antonius, who was then working on The Arab Awakening. Kohn’s report oozed disdain for this ‘typical Levantine’ who was anxious to present himself as ‘a cultured man of the 20th century’.²³ Outside the shadowy realm of intelligence-gathering and clandestine co-operation, encounters between Palestinian Arab and Jewish officials, let alone leaders, were extremely rare. Ben-Gurion and the mufti may have both attended a formal reception given by Sir Arthur Wauchope, the high commissioner, but that was the sum total of their interaction.24

FIGHTING BACK

Alongside the demonstrations of October 1933, other less visible activities provided similar indications of growing Arab determination to resist the British and the Zionists. Several secret military organizations were founded, including the Jihad al-Muqaddas (Holy War), led by Abdul-Qader al-Husseini, the son of Musa Kazem and the mufti’s nephew. By 1934 it had collected financial contributions and acquired some firearms. Other smaller groups appeared around the same time and followed a similar clandestine path, buying and smuggling weapons and undergoing military training.²⁵ The border between nationalist-inspired resistance and ordinary criminality was blurred, famously in the case of Abu Jilda, a publicity conscious, one-eyed bandit from a village near Nablus, known as Robin Hood or the ‘Dillinger of the desert’, who was executed in 1934 for killing a policeman. But the best-known group, sometimes known as the Black Hand, was led by Sheikh Izzedin al-Qassam, a charismatic Syrian-born preacher. Qassam’s name first surfaced in connection with an ambush in which three members of Kibbutz Yagur, near Haifa, were killed in April 1931. Intensive inquiries by the Zionists and British failed to reach a definitive conclusion at that time.²⁶ Several other incidents followed, including a grenade attack on a house in Nahalal, a model settlement in the heart of the Jezreel valley. Qassam, who had fought the French in Syria and been sentenced to death in absentia, had been a Sharia court official and marriage registrar in Haifa and in 1928 had been elected president of the city’s Young Men’s Muslim Association. In his sermons in Haifa’s Istitqlal Mosque and elsewhere, he encouraged Bedouin to resist the police and Jewish land purchases and called for armed struggle. In November 1935 he and a group of followers set out for the hills of the Jenin area. Arab sources suggest he was prompted by the accidental discovery in Jaffa of a shipment of Belgian weapons hidden in barrels of cement that were apparently intended for the Haganah – confirmation of their mounting fears of Zionist plans.

Qassam and his band killed a Jewish police sergeant near Ein Harod – and let two Arab policemen go. In the ensuing manhunt they were tracked down to a forest near Yaabed where Qassam and two associates were killed by the British, preferring death – ‘martyrdom’ – to surrender. Others fled into the hills near Nablus or were arrested later. The ‘Qassamiyoun’ were a novelty: the group’s two hundred or so members – estimates vary – were peasants or marginalized urban workers recently arrived in Haifa from the countryside, drawn by work in the port and driven by the landlessness, rising debt and social dislocation that were typical of the period. ‘I sell my land and property because the government forces me to pay taxes on it while I cannot even get the basic needs for my own and my family’s sustenance,’ one peasant complained. ‘So I am forced to go to the rich people for a short-term loan at 50 per cent interest.’27 In Haifa’s ‘Tin Town’ alone, in 1935, over 11,000 Arab workers lived in ‘hovels made out of old petrol-tins, without any water-supply or the most rudimentary sanitary arrangements’.²⁸ Qassam’s followers were also inspired by conservative Salafi Islam to fight the British and the Jews and to eschew the compromises of the traditional Palestinian leadership: Qassam had tried and failed to persuade the mufti to back a call for rebellion. His was also the first organized attempt by Palestinian Arabs to use armed struggle to promote their cause. Qassam’s funeral in Balad al-Sheikh was attended by thousands and a cult of heroism and self-sacrifice grew up around him;²⁹ his name lived on in the pantheon of Palestinian national heroes for many decades later. Even Ben-Gurion paid Qassam a perceptive – if self-referential – compliment, comparing him to Joseph Trumpeldor, the hero of Tel Hai. The term ‘Arab question’, Ben-Gurion felt, was a misnomer. ‘Its real meaning was, in his view, nothing other than the question of how to fulfill the objectives of Zionism notwithstanding the reality of an Arab presence.’³⁰

The mood in the Yishuv in the first half of the 1930s was one of pride in Jewish achievements, wariness about the strength of Arab opposition – as well as determination to carry on. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 provided a grim backdrop that was as real and menacing for Jews as it was remote for most Palestinians, and of course it boosted German-Jewish immigration. Viewed through Palestinian eyes, the persecution of European Jews was a European problem. ‘Palestine needs neither fascism nor Nazism to arouse the feelings of her sons against Zionism and its designs in the Arab world’, commented an article in Filastin in 1934.31 Everything in Jewish Palestine was ‘fair, promising and progressive’, thought Shimon Persky (later Peres), an eleven-year-old when he arrived from Poland to join his parents that same year. ‘Of course there were dangers’, the then-seasoned politician reminisced decades later.

We were aware of them too. Among Arabs whom we saw coming in from nearby Jaffa, and those from Zarnuga, close to Rehovot, were people who wanted to destroy this wonderful homeland we were building. They walked around with keffiyehs wound round their faces, accentuating their piercing, threatening eyes. Some wore red tarbushes and baggy pantaloons that could easily conceal a shabriya, a vicious curved blade made for murder. It was impossible to compromise with them, as everyone knew. There was no point in even trying. There was no choice for us Jews. We would have to keep up our guard and defend ourselves when need be, until the Arabs accepted our stake on the Land.³²