5

1936–1939

‘An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country. There is no common ground between them. Their national aspirations are incompatible.’

Peel Commission report, 1937

REBELLION

On the evening of 15 April 1936, three armed Arabs rolled barrels onto the road near Nur Shams in the hills between Nablus and Tulkarem. They forced passing vehicles to stop and demanded money to buy weapons and ammunition. In one truck, loaded with crates of chickens, they found two Jews, Zvi Dannenberg and Yisrael Hazan. A third Jew was travelling in another vehicle. The gunmen shot them in cold blood. Hazan, a recent immigrant from Greece, died on the spot and the two others were wounded, Dannenberg dying later of his injuries. The unnamed perpetrators, who were described by the British and Jews as highwaymen or bandits, were followers of al-Qassam. The next day two members of a dissident Zionist group killed two Arab labourers, Hassan Abu Ras and Salim al-Masri, in a roadside shack near Petah Tikvah. ‘If they imagined that that would put an end to the bloodshed,’ commented the official Haganah account of the incident, ‘they were soon to be disappointed.’ It was the start of the pattern of attack, reprisal and counter-reprisal that was to set the country ablaze. Three years later the conflict over Palestine had passed the point of no return.1

Hazan’s funeral in Tel Aviv on 17 April triggered assaults by Jews on passing Arabs. By nightfall on the 19th, rioting had spread to Jaffa and nine Jews had been killed with sixty injured. Curfews were imposed by police and troops. Strikes spread across Arab areas, led by local national committees, clubs and unions. Under popular pressure, the Husseini and Nashashibi families buried their rivalry and set up a new Arab Higher Committee (AHC) under the grand mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini. It called for a general strike, civil disobedience and non-payment of taxes. Thus began what Palestinians still call their ‘great rebellion’ – ‘al-thawra al-kubra’. Zionists referred at the time to rioting, or simply to ‘events’ (‘meoraot’ in Hebrew), which falls dismissively short of the heroic image conjured up by the Arabic terminology.2 Semantic differences masked recognition by both sides, however, that what was happening was a significant new chapter in the Arab–Jewish struggle.

Palestine was ripe for one of its periodic outbreaks of trouble. Security had been a preoccupation for the British and Zionists since the killing of al-Qassam the previous November, while new discussions about a legislative council had gone nowhere slowly. Arabs felt a growing sense of grievance – and menace. The previous year had seen the largest single influx of Jewish immigrants since the Mandate began: 65,000 Jews had arrived, most fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. In addition, an economic downturn had hit the vitally important citrus sector hard.³ In the wider world, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia had been welcomed by Arab nationalists as a blow to British prestige. The Palestinians again demanded a halt to Jewish immigration and land sales, and the creation of a national – i.e. Arab – government. The British responded by announcing a one-off increase in immigration quotas.

Attacks included crop-burning, wire-cutting, sniping and grenades thrown at Jewish vehicles on main roads. Plantations of trees were cut down. Armed bands began to form. ‘We made the Jews afraid’, boasted Omar Shehadi, a teenage fighter from Safad. ‘They couldn’t work their land, or even switch their lights on at night or go about at night.’⁴ Bombs exploded in Haifa and Jaffa and the railway line to Egypt was sabotaged near Gaza. It was a challenge, though hardly a formidable military threat. In the early days British soldiers described rebels carrying ‘ancient muskets using rusty nails as ammo’ or throwing ‘home-made grenades which were beer cans stuffed with stones … with an explosive in it and a bit of fuse which made more noise than cause any damage’.5 Worse was to come. By June the high commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, was describing a ‘state of incipient revolution’. Another British official noted: ‘Nothing happens during the day, which makes the nights and the shooting seem nightmarish and unreal.’⁶ Arab militancy – and unity – seemed to be paying dividends. Filastin invoked the memory of al-Qassam, printing a cartoon showing a worried Chaim Weizmann looking on as the dead sheikh watched the mufti and Ragheb al-Nashashibi overcoming their differences and shaking hands.⁷ Ben-Gurion admitted frankly that the ‘economic blessings’ of Zionism had had no effect on Arab leaders. ‘Even if they admit it – and not all of them do – that our immigration brings a material blessing to the land, they say – and from the Arab viewpoint rightly so: “None of your honey and none of your sting.” ’⁸ Every day Hebrew newspapers printed black-edged death notices. In August 1936 a renowned Arab guerrilla leader, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, a Lebanese veteran of the nationalist struggle against the French, arrived in the country at the head of a five-hundred-strong band of Syrians, Iraqis and Palestinians, and tried to consolidate the rebel forces into a well-co-ordinated army. It was a ‘moment of hope’ that gave the revolt an air of respectability.⁹ Wauchope was as gloomy as Ronald Storrs had been after the disturbances of 1920. ‘I was up early this morning’, he wrote to a colleague, ‘and could have wept as I saw the walls of Jerusalem turn golden under the cloudless sky and thought of – what you and I think of every sorrowful day.’¹⁰

DEFINING REVOLT

Ben-Gurion at least grasped that this escalating violence was ominous. In private, he took issue with colleagues who questioned whether these ‘events’ constituted an uprising, as now seemed clear to him. ‘Perhaps in some book there is a scientific definition of a revolt’, he commented,

but what can we do when the rebels themselves do not act according to the laws of science and revolt according to their own understanding, their ideas and their ability? The Arabs are fighting with a strike, with terror, sabotage, murder and the destruction of property … against the government – including Jewish immigration, which depends as they see it on the government. What else do they have to do for their behaviour to be recognised as a rebellion and an uprising?11

Public discourse was again very different. Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and Moshe Shertok, head of the Jewish Agency’s political department, urged British officials to crack down decisively on what they dismissed as mere ‘rioting’. It was a familiar argument: discontent was not deep-seated and Arab peasants had been ‘terrorized’ by malcontents into making trouble. Jewish leaders played up the half-hearted aspects of the strike and the heterogeneous composition of what they called the ‘gangs’. A book by a leading British Zionist, written in consultation with Ben-Gurion, described the Arab movement as ‘led neither by a dispossessed Palestinian fellah nor by a disappointed Palestinian effendi, but by Fawzi Kawakji [sic], an ex-Turkish officer of Syrio-Turkish extraction and of Syrian citizenship. He has collected around him Druses, Syrians, Iraqis and brigands who … flock to any place where there is chance for excitement and perhaps booty.’¹²

Deeds proved more decisive than propaganda. The Arab strike, many Jews realized, provided a golden opportunity to bolster their economic independence – getting rid of Arab workers in the Nesher quarries near Haifa and replacing Arab stevedores in the port. Shertok noted the gratifying reaction in the old settlements of Zichron Yaakov and nearby Athlit – which had stubbornly held out against the Histadrut’s campaign for Hebrew labour – when Jewish workers replaced the striking Arabs. ‘One farmer worked out that Jewish grapes cost him only 3mils more per ton than Arab grapes, and as well as that he spares his health as he doesn’t need to stand in the sun all day shouting “Yallah!” [Get on with it!] at the Arab women.’¹³ Arab employees in government service were replaced by Jews. But the most eye-catching gain was the opening of a port in Tel Aviv in response to the strike in Jaffa. Attacks on the police in the alleys of Jaffa’s old city, overlooking the port, were punished by the destruction of more than two hundred buildings, ostensibly to improve health and sanitation but in fact to improve access for the British military. Up to 6,000 Arabs were left homeless.14 No longer would ‘this rancid town’, as an exultant Ben-Gurion called the old city, be the first sight for Jewish immigrants as they reached the shores of the homeland. ‘If Jaffa went to hell, I would not count myself among the mourners’, he noted.¹⁵ The mufti’s actions, it was said, had achieved what Zionist principles could not.

Critics of the Palestine government accused it of using kid gloves and making it hard for troops and police to suppress the unrest. ‘On one occasion, a group of Arab women were seen seated on a rug near a village, apparently refreshing themselves during a pause in their agricultural labours’, one recorded.

Someone had the bright idea of looking under the rug. The ladies at first failed to understand, and then combined protest with loud lamentation when they saw that bluff was useless. Under the rug the earth had been newly dug. The earth was dug up again, and in a narrow trench was found a little arsenal of arms and ammunition.¹⁶

In mid-May, a month into the strike and disturbances, the British announced a familiar response to the Palestine conundrum: a royal commission, ‘the highest form of enquiry known in the British empire, composed of people of such eminence and authority that its recommendations must necessarily carry the greatest weight’,¹⁷ would be despatched to investigate.

IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT, INCOMPATIBLE ASPIRATIONS

The strike ended in October 1936 when British diplomatic efforts orchestrated an appeal by the rulers of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan and Yemen, an early example of pan-Arab involvement in the Palestine question. Economic pressures from Arab citrus growers and boat owners – the civil war in Spain had eliminated competition from that country and fruit prices were soaring – helped persuade the Arab Higher Committee to seek a face-saving way out.¹⁸ The commission, headed by Lord Peel, a former secretary of state for India, arrived in mid-November. Sitting in the elegant dining room of the Palace Hotel in Jerusalem, Peel and his five colleagues heard more than a hundred witnesses, chief among them the mufti and Weizmann. The Zionist effort – aided by bugging the commissioners’ private meetings – was co-ordinated and strategic. Weizmann eloquently described the broad outlines of Jewish history, the scourge of anti-Semitism, the plight of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, as well as his own efforts to reach agreement with the Arabs: the 1919 agreement with Emir Faisal got a long mention (it had been published in June for propaganda purposes).19 The Arab side had declared a boycott of the hearings after the government announced a new, though limited, labour immigration quota the day the commission left for Palestine. Eventually, though, it did hear testimony from the mufti, who described the ‘Jews’ ultimate aim’ as being to reconstruct the Temple of Solomon on the site of the Haram al-Sharif. Jewish immigration must come to a complete halt, he insisted; the question of whether the newcomers would be allowed to stay in an independent Arab Palestine would, he said, have to be left for the future.

The Peel Report, published in July 1937, remains a perceptive study of the troubled history of Palestine since 1917, and it captured well how Arab–Jewish relations had changed since then:

Arab antagonism to the National Home was never ignored by thoughtful Zionists; but, whereas they used to regard it as no more than an obstacle, however serious, to be somehow overcome, they now see it, we believe, though they do not always say so, as the danger that it is or might become. Nobody in Palestine can fail to realise how much more bitter, how much more widely spread among the people, Arab hatred of the National Home is now than it was five or ten years ago.²⁰

Its conclusion was stark:

An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country. There is no common ground between them. Their national aspirations are incompatible. The Arabs desire to revive the traditions of the Arab golden age. The Jews desire to show what they can achieve when restored to the land in which the Jewish nation was born. Neither of the two national ideals permits of combination in the service of a single State.

The terms of the Mandate were unworkable and could only be enforced by repressing the Arabs. Both Arabs and Jews demanded independence. Establishing an Arab state would violate the rights of the Jewish minority, but creating a Jewish state in the whole of Palestine would both violate Arab rights and generate wider Arab and Muslim opposition. The only workable solution was the creation of two sovereign states. ‘Partition’, the commission argued, ‘seems to offer at least a chance of ultimate peace. We can see none in any other plan.’ The proposed Jewish state would cover about 25 per cent of Palestine, north from Tel Aviv along the coast including – overwhelmingly Arab – Galilee. The Arab state could encompass the mountains and the Negev desert, as well as Jaffa, and be linked to Transjordan. Britain would continue to control Jerusalem, Bethlehem and a corridor leading to the Mediterranean.

The Peel proposal provoked furious debate in the Yishuv and the Zionist movement, not least because it did not include historically important areas: neither Jerusalem nor Hebron, nor any part of the province of Judaea. Opponents bemoaned the idea that any part of Eretz-Yisrael should be surrendered. Jabotinsky called the plan absurd and insisted there was no chance the Jews would fall into the trap. Weizmann, however, had signalled flexibility to the commission, making

a sharp distinction between the present realities and the messianic hope … a hope embedded in Jewish traditions and sanctified by the martyrdom of thousands of years, a hope which their nation cannot forget without ceasing to be a nation … God has promised Eretz Yisrael to the Jews. This was their Charter. But they were men of their own time, with limited horizons, heavily laden with responsibility toward the generations to come.21

He and Ben-Gurion accepted partition in principle, but argued for more generous territorial terms. Ben-Gurion called it ‘not an end, but a beginning’ of the redemption of the ‘whole of the country’.²²

The Arab Higher Committee dismissed any idea of carving up the land, but dissenting representatives of Ragheb al-Nashashibi’s recently founded National Defence Party resigned. Nashashibi supporters were then attacked and some murdered by supporters of the mufti. Friday prayers in mosques were used to preach against the evils of partition. The AHC repeated its demands for an end to Jewish immigration and land purchases and the replacement of the Mandate by a treaty between Britain and a sovereign and independent Arab state of Palestine. Pan-Arab support for the Palestinian position was expressed at a conference in Bludan, Syria, in September 1937. Still, the solution sketched out by Peel remained – on paper if not in reality – the most likely way to resolve the conflict.

Behind the scenes unofficial attempts were made to establish contact (if not common ground) between the sides: Judah Magnes of the Hebrew University, one of the founders of Brit Shalom, was involved in one initiative in the summer of 1936, but the Jewish Agency was deeply suspicious and the identity of the Arab interlocutors uncertain. In 1937 another proposal – involving a ceiling of 50 per cent for the Jewish population of an independent Palestinian state – was no more successful. Its basis was that every citizen was to have ‘equal and complete political and civil rights’. The formulation was scorned by the Jewish Agency. ‘This sounds eminently liberal, but what does it mean in the reality of political life?’ one official asked. ‘That every Beduin and illiterate is to count at the polling-booth with the most advanced European Jews. The crudely majoritarian design of the agreement is very skilfully covered under that sweeping liberal phraseology.’23 The suspicion was that the initiative was intended to torpedo implementation of the Peel partition proposal by suggesting, falsely, that Arab–Jewish agreement was in fact possible. Magnes, the former high commissioner Sir Herbert (now Lord) Samuel and the Jewish authors of other ‘unauthorized’ peace initiatives were condemned by the Zionist leadership and vilified as traitors and assimilationists across the Hebrew press.

REPRESSION AND RESTRAINT

Uneasy calm returned in the summer of 1937, though unrest resumed in late September when Arab gunmen killed a British district commissioner, Lewis Andrews, with his police bodyguard, outside the Anglican Church in Nazareth. Like the incident that sparked the first wave of violence in April 1936 it was blamed on al-Qassam supporters. Andrews was the highest-ranking British official to be killed so far. This time the government response was tougher. The Arab Higher Committee and national committees were proscribed and dozens arrested. Haj Amin al-Husseini was removed from the presidency of the Supreme Muslim Council and, after first taking refuge on the Haram al-Sharif, where he was besieged by the British, he slipped away, dressed as a Bedouin, to exile in Lebanon, where he remained under surveillance by the French authorities. Other Arab leaders, including Hussein Khalidi, the mayor of Jerusalem, were deported to the Seychelles on a Royal Navy destroyer.24

In October disorder erupted all over the country. It was far more extensive than in 1936. Now Arabs attacked buses, railways, the strategically important Iraqi oil pipeline that extended across the north of the country to Haifa, and army posts. Armed groups formed into larger regional units which competed for support from Damascus, where the AHC had established the Central Committee for Jihad under Izzat Darwaza, which collected money and sent supplies and weapons to the Palestine rebels. The French authorities, having granted the Syrians greater autonomy the previous year, declined British requests to interfere.²⁵

Repression became the norm and there were many incidents of brutality by British police and troops. ‘The military courts started off well’, one policeman recorded in December 1937,

but as we expected are being too lenient and want too much evidence to convict on, so any Johnny Arab who is caught by us now in suspicious circumstances is shot out of hand. There is an average of a bomb a day thrown in Haifa now but few of them do much damage. One was thrown in a Jewish bus last night and the culprit caught. We took him to his house but there was no evidence so we let him try to escape in the garden, fortunately I will not have to attend the inquest.

The same policeman described how ‘running over an Arab is the same as a dog in England except we do not report it’.²⁶ In November the British hanged the elderly Sheikh Farhan al-Saadi, leader of the remnants of the Qassamiyoun, and added outrage to injury by carrying out the execution during the Ramadan fast – an event immortalized by Abdel Karim al-Karmi in a poem which cursed ‘the Arab kings’ for ignoring the blood of the martyr.²⁷ Sir Charles Tegart, a colonial police expert with years of service in India, was charged with reviewing security in Palestine. His recommendations, which were quickly adopted, included constructing a chain of concrete blockhouse-type forts across the country – along the frontiers and elsewhere – as well as the introduction of Doberman dogs from South Africa for use in searches, and the opening of an Arab interrogation centre in Jerusalem. Waterboarding and other forms of torture were common.28 Nonetheless, violence resumed with greater intensity in the summer of 1938. Rebels were soon in control of mountainous areas, running their own improvised courts, collecting taxes and patrolling openly in the streets of Nablus, the centre of the struggle. Police stations were attacked.

In late August, the peak of the revolt, the British military commander, General Robert Haining, reported that ‘the situation was such that civil administration and control of the country was, to all practical purposes, non-existent’.²⁹ The number of rebels was estimated at 9, 000–10,000, with perhaps 3,000 full-time fighters. British forces consisted of two army divisions numbering some 25,000 servicemen. The British punished Arab villages for aiding the rebels by imposing collective fines and blowing up houses that were said to have sheltered guerrillas. If fines were not paid then livestock was confiscated. Orange groves and vineyards were uprooted. Arabs were made to act as human shields by sitting on inspection trolleys, which drove on the rails ahead of trains, or they were forced to ride on lorries with army convoys to prevent mine attacks. On the lorries, some soldiers would brake hard at the end of a journey and then casually drive over the Arab – ‘the poor wog’ – who had tumbled from the bonnet, killing or maiming him.³⁰ ‘If there was any land mines it was them [the Arab prisoners] that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it,’ said another soldier. During searches, soldiers would surround a village (usually before dawn) and hold the men in wire cages while others searched and often destroyed everything; they burned stocks of grain and poured olive oil over food and household effects. The men were screened by hooded Arab informers, who would nod when a suspect was found, or by British officials checking their papers. Massacres took place at al-Bassa, near the Lebanese frontier, and at Halhul near Hebron, but these only came to light many years later.³¹ In October 1938, the army lost control of the Old City of Jerusalem for five days. By November Haining had to report: ‘The rebel gangs have now acquired, by terrorist methods, such a hold over the mass of the population that it is not untrue to say that every Arab in the country is a potential enemy of the government.’32 The atmosphere was charged and dangerous and the stories and symbols of the period left a lasting imprint.

Initially, wearing an Ottoman tarbush – dark-red and tasselled – was a sign of support for the rebellion. ‘It was to differentiate Arabs’, recalled a Palestinian from Tiberias. ‘If you went bareheaded you would be like the Jews. It was a question of identity. If someone wanted to shoot a Jew, he would not shoot at you if you were wearing a tarbush. But it also meant exposure, because the Jews would know whom to shoot at.’³³ Later, rebel bands, known as mujahideen or thuwwar (holy warriors/revolutionaries), ordered people to abandon both the tarbush and European headgear in favour of the peasant’s traditional keffiyeh or hatta and aqal cord to allow them to blend in with locals and frustrate the efforts of British forces to track them down. ‘The transformation was like magic’, recalled Khalil Totah, headmaster of the Quaker school in Ramallah. Even judges complied. Intimidation took place on a large scale.³⁴ ‘They put a tarbush on a donkey and said: “only the donkey wears a tarbush, buy a hatta” ’, a rebel fighter from Acre remembered later.³⁵

Until the winter of 1937 few instances were recorded of Jews attacking Arabs. One notable exception was the killing near Petah Tikvah in April 1936 – the work of dissidents who had broken away from the Haganah. The view of the Yishuv institutions was that a policy of self-restraint (havlagah), ‘following the highest traditions of Zionism’, as Weizmann put it, would help persuade the British to crack down hard on the Palestinian disorder as well as allow the Jews to occupy the high moral ground and gain political advantage. The lack of significant Jewish military capacity or experience was another weighty factor. Weizmann complained to Wauchope that a government account of the disturbances contained ‘not a single reference to, still less a word of praise for, the restraint which the Jews have shown during the long months of violence directed against them by the Arabs’.³⁶ The havlagah policy was largely but not universally observed. In November 1937 the murder of five Jewish workers near Jerusalem triggered a wave of reprisals. A Zionist official was horrified to come across Jewish children dancing round the corpse of an Arab in the Jewish Rehavia area. Anti-Arab attacks started to be carried out by the Irgun Tzvai Leumi (National Military Organization), the militant group inspired by Jabotinsky and shunned by the mainstream of the Yishuv. In April 1938 a member of the Revisionist youth movement Beitar named Shlomo Ben-Yosef fired at an Arab bus in Galilee in retaliation for the killing of five Jews. When Ben-Yosef was hanged in Acre gaol by the British, the Irgun kidnapped and hanged an Arab in Haifa and, using Mizrahi Jews disguised as Arabs, began placing bombs in markets and public places: at least thirty-five Arabs were killed in one devastating attack in July. It was a reflection both of changing times and self-delusion that the Zionist press appeared unable to believe that Jews were responsible for such an atrocity, suggesting it must be the work of agents provocateurs intending to inflame Arab–Jewish relations. The Jewish-run Palestine Post commented:

The ‘revolt’ is on the verge of collapse, and nothing short of a ‘war’ involving the whole population could give it fresh impetus. What surer way of spreading the seed of inter-racial war than to make each Arab believe that each Jew is his enemy, and what surer means can there be of creating that belief than by manufacturing the type of crime which, in its sacrifices and resultant panic, makes the credulous Arab point to the Jews as its author.37

But the internal Jewish debate about havlagah was largely about maintaining the crucial Zionist link to Britain; only a small minority – largely Brit Shalom supporters – were thinking in terms of future relations with the Arabs of Palestine.³⁸ The mood was harsh. ‘As a native of the country who knew the Arabs I knew very well that havlagah would be interpreted as weakness and would encourage an increase of Arab attacks upon Jews’, argued Elie Eliachar, a prominent Jerusalem Sephardi figure.³⁹

RE-PEEL

In the heat of events, in a Europe more preoccupied by Germany and the Sudentenland crisis than faraway Palestine, Britain’s calculations were changing. In April 1938 another Commission of Inquiry, headed by Sir John Woodhead, arrived in Jerusalem to examine the unrest and to review prospects for implementing partition. Zionists sardonically called it the ‘Re-Peel’ commission. Like the previous body, its deliberations were secretly recorded by the Jewish Agency.40 Over the summer its direction became clearer. In November the Woodhead Commission concluded that Lord Peel’s proposal was not feasible. It produced three alternative partition schemes with different boundaries and administrative arrangements – none of them acceptable to the Zionists or to the Arabs – and recommended that the future of Palestine be reviewed at a conference in London. The AHC had opposed any co-operation with the commission. Hassan Sidqi al-Dajani, an Arab member of the Jerusalem municipal council who planned to testify before it, was assassinated and was assumed to have been another victim of the mufti’s men. Dajani had been warned not to co-operate. ‘Those who go to the partition commission should take their shrouds with them’, he was told.⁴¹ Now Fakhri al-Nashashibi (a cousin of Ragheb), who was backed secretly by the Jewish Agency,⁴² came out openly against the mufti and demanded that the cleric’s opponents be allotted half the seats in the Palestinian delegation to the London talks.⁴³ Fakhri was then sentenced to death – luckily for him in his absence – by a ‘revolutionary court’.

In late 1938 support for the mujahideen began to fall off and reports multiplied of villagers being coerced to support them. There was also a marked increase in the killings of suspected collaborators, informers and policemen, as well as much settling of personal scores: Fawzi, a Tiberias taxi driver, disappeared suddenly, his body was found in an irrigation canal in a Jewish area with a skewer through his head. He was condemned as ‘an informer for the Zionists’.⁴⁴ Precise numbers are hard to come by and are bedevilled by problems of sources. But one authoritative estimate suggests 1,000 Arabs were killed by rebels between 1936 and 1939.⁴⁵ In 1938, the bloodiest single year, the toll was 69 Britons, 292 Jews and 486 Arab civilians or policemen. Over 1,000 rebel fighters were killed in action.⁴⁶ Arab ‘peace bands’ (Fasail al-Salam) began to fight rebel forces. Fakhri al-Nashashibi was the leading figure behind this short-lived counter-insurgency campaign. An important role was played by Fakhri Abdel-Hadi, a former rebel commander from Arrabeh who was on the payroll of the British consul in Damascus and seemed to some British officials to be playing a double game in pursuit of personal gain, waging feuds involving murder, abduction and robbery.47

But British military power – not least the deployment of RAF aircraft against lightly armed fighters on the ground – was the overwhelming reason for the defeat of the rebellion.⁴⁸ Major-General Bernard Montgomery, for a few months commander of the 8th Division in northern Palestine, was described as ‘blood mad’ in his attitude towards the rebels.⁴⁹ Anti-rebel peasant formations sprang up in the Nablus area and among the Druze of Mount Carmel around Haifa. Nashashibi organized peace bands in the Hebron hills, gathering 3,000 villagers for a public rally in Yatta in December 1938 which was addressed by the British army commander in Jerusalem, Major-General Richard O’Connor. Working with the Jewish Agency, Pinchas Rutenberg – the influential Jewish industrialist who ran the Palestine Electric Corporation – paid for a consignment of weapons that were delivered to Nashashibi by the Haganah. Nashashibi also mounted a propaganda campaign that was paid for by the Jewish Agency. Its message – timed for the run-up to the St James Conference in February 1939 – was that most Arabs did not support the rebellion. ‘Fakhri’, a Jewish acquaintance reported, wished ‘to prove to the public that there is a strong opposition to the Mufti … and that the majority of the Arabs of Palestine really want peace, and, if they fear the Jews, they fear the Mufti more.’ The Jewish Agency arranged a meeting between a British intelligence officer and Arabs from Abu Ghosh, a village on the main road west of Jerusalem that had long enjoyed collaborative relations with its Jewish neighbours. The villagers duly condemned the rebellion and urged the British to strengthen the moderates. ‘Such demonstrations of divergences of opinion between the Mufti’s clique and other Arabs are all to the good’, a Zionist official noted.⁵⁰

GAINS ON THE GROUND

In these turbulent times, the Zionists made more important gains. From March 1938, as the British moved to abandon partition and, as seemed likely, to impose new restrictions on the growth of the Jewish national home, there was a scramble to create new ‘facts on the ground’. Hanita, on a ridge overlooking the Lebanese border, was the most famous of the ‘stockade and watchtower’ (Homa ve’Migdal) type of settlement. The point was to build on land that had been purchased but not yet settled. If a roofed structure could be erected by nightfall, it would be considered legally permanent. Hanita also lay on an infiltration route used by Arab rebels moving in and out of Palestine, so the site served a dual purpose. Moshe Dayan, a young Haganah man from Nahalal in the Jezreel valley, described hundreds of pioneers setting out before dawn and scrambling up a rocky hillside with loads of equipment. ‘On the hilltop site we began erecting a wooden watchtower and the standard perimeter fence, a double wall of wood filled with earth and boulders’, he wrote later:

We hoped to do all this during the day so that the tented compound within would be defended by nightfall when we expected the first attack. But night came and we had not completed the fortifications. There had been too much to do and we were also hampered by a strong wind. We could not even put up the tents. At midnight we were attacked.

Arthur Koestler wrote a vivid fictionalized account of the back-breaking work in his celebrated novel, Thieves in the Night. Hanita was portrayed as embodying the Zionist nexus between territory, defence and identity. ‘The Arabs learned once again, after the lessons of Tel Hai, Hulda and Tirat Zvi’, other Jewish settlements that had been attacked and successfully defended, ‘that a place where the foot of a Jewish settler has trod, where the blood of a Hebrew defender has been spilled, will not be abandoned by its builders and defenders’, as the history of the Haganah put it.51 These outposts were endowed with an aura of progressive pioneering; in 1937 a model of a stockade and watchtower settlement was chosen for the Palestine Pavilion at the World Exposition in Paris. In all, fifty-seven were established by 1939.⁵²

Valuable military experience was acquired by the Zionists during the Arab rebellion. Three thousand Jews had been recruited into the supernumerary police by October 1936. By summer 1939 22,000 Jews were serving in it and the settlement police, the majority effectively working for the Haganah.53 Haganah men like Dayan and Yigal Allon joined a new British unit called the Special Night Squads (SNS), set up after the Iraqi oil pipeline had been sabotaged. It was commanded by an eccentric officer named Orde Wingate, who was described by Weizmann as ‘strange and brilliant’.⁵⁴ Operating under cover of darkness in Galilee, the SNS took the war to the Arab rebels in a brutal counter-insurgency campaign. Wingate was known as haYedid (the Friend) by the Jews. Little was said in public at the time about the harsh methods he employed, which were described as ‘extreme and cruel’ by one official and which included abuse, whippings, torture and executions. On 2 October 1938, nineteen Jews, including eleven children, were killed in Tiberias by the mujahideen in a well-planned attack that was compared to the Hebron massacre of 1929.⁵⁵ In its wake Wingate and his men rounded up ten Arabs from the nearby village of Hattin and summarily shot them.⁵⁶ Under Wingate’s influence Allon and Dayan helped develop a bolder Jewish military doctrine that was referred to in Hebrew as ‘going beyond the fence’, i.e. moving from static defence to offensive operations against the enemy. In all, 520 Jews had been killed since 1936.⁵⁷

MUNICH IN ST JAMES

In February 1939 the St James Conference in London was dubbed a new ‘Munich’ by the Zionists, who feared a change in policy even before it began. Weizmann reminded his British and Jewish audiences that Zionist efforts to come to an understanding with the Arabs were as old as the Balfour Declaration. The 1919 agreement with Emir Faisal was again given prominent mention. No direct contact took place between the two sides, though, and back in Palestine violence continued. In March the British tracked down and killed Abdul-Rahim Hajj Mohammed, one of the legendary leaders of the rebellion.⁵⁸ Like al-Qassam before him, Hajj Mohammed entered the pantheon of Palestinian heroes whose names and reputations were to be invoked in years to come. A famous saying attributed to him went: ‘The shoe of the most insignificant mujahid is nobler than all the members of society who have indulged in pleasure while their brethren suffered in the mountains.’59 Arif Abdel-Razzaq, another senior commander (who was renowned for his smart, British-style uniforms) surrendered to the French authorities on the Syrian border. The Jenin commander, Youssef Abu Durra, was detained on the border with Transjordan. Memories of the rebellion lived on in Palestinian popular consciousness.⁶⁰

In May the British issued a new White Paper. It abandoned the idea of partition and sharply restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine to 75,000 over the next five years, with subsequent figures to depend on Arab consent, and placed severe restrictions on the rights of Jews to buy land. It also provided for the establishment within ten years of an independent Palestinian state and the immediate appointment, once peace was restored, of Palestinians to head certain ministries. It left no room for doubt about the magnitude of the policy shift that was taking place: ‘His Majesty’s Government believe that the framers of the Mandate in which the Balfour Declaration was embodied could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish State against the will of the Arab population of the country’, the paper stated.

His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given to the Arab people in the past, that the Arab population of Palestine should be made the subjects of a Jewish State against their will.

The White Paper’s rejection by the Zionists was as unequivocal as it was predictable. It should have been a moment of rare satisfaction for the Palestinians. But the negative Arab response to such a stunning reversal by the British made little sense. According to some accounts, a majority of members of the AHC approved it but the mufti stood firm in rejecting it – on the grounds that having fled to Lebanon he was now unable to return home because of British opposition. Objections were heard too from rebel commanders who opposed any compromise.⁶¹ ‘I thought it impossible that the British government would go any further to accommodate the Arabs’, wrote Awni Abdel-Hadi, the Istiqlal leader. ‘In politics, the task is to distinguish what is possible from what is not; the policy that consists of taking what one can, even while demanding more, is preferable to sterile obstinacy.’62 Later Palestinian scholars judged the mufti harshly. ‘Zionist opposition may have doomed the White Paper from the very start’, Yezid Sayigh has written, ‘but the Palestinians had, through their own reactions, lost the opportunity to enter the mandatory administration at higher levels and prepare for their own postcolonial state. The price they paid was increased social dislocation and political disorientation.’⁶³ Rejecting the proposals was ‘short-sighted and irresponsible’, argued the mufti’s biographer.⁶⁴

Palestine’s physical reality was changing too. The Jewish population had nearly doubled in the preceding six years, from 234,000 in 1933 to 445,000 by 1939, rising from 21 per cent of the total to 30 per cent. And by the outbreak of the Second World War Arabs and Jews lived even more separately than they had before, continuing a trend that had begun in 1921 and accelerated after 1929. In 1936 and 1938 Jews again left Arab-majority neighbourhoods, abandoning Haifa’s crowded lower town for the Hadar haCarmel district, and so mixed communities were emptied of their Jewish inhabitants and social relations were severed. Jewish areas looked after their own interests with the support of the Yishuv’s central institutions.⁶⁵ ‘We live in a mixed city. This is not the same as life in a neighbourhood’, maintained David HaCohen, the Haifa labour leader.

The home is indeed in the neighbourhood, but the business is located in the Arab street. People spend 10 hours a day there, the port is there, the market is there, that is where those children live who are liable to get illnesses and from whom my children in the Jewish neighbourhood will contract the illnesses.⁶⁶

Tensions were especially evident in areas like Manshiyeh on the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. In 1936, a British visitor observed ‘a contrast that shouts’ between the neighbouring towns.⁶⁷ Jews in Jaffa demanded that their neighbourhoods be annexed to Tel Aviv. ‘At the present moment’, the Peel Report noted, ‘the two races are holding rigidly apart.’⁶⁸ Chaim Sturman, a veteran of HaShomer, the settlement guards, founder of Ein Harod and a renowned ‘Arabist’, worried that he would soon forget how to speak Arabic. (Sturman was killed by a mine in September 1938.) Earlier that year Moshe Shertok had lamented the poor standard of Arabic teaching in Jewish schools; the reason was that more than ever the Yishuv consisted of contiguous Jewish-only areas. ‘The number of Jews who need Arabic on a daily basis is becoming smaller and smaller’, he noted.69

In November 1939 Jewish residents of Tel Aviv’s Brenner neighbourhood, adjacent to Jaffa, complained that Arabs were coming back: ‘the same Arabs who only yesterday aimed the barrels of rifles and pistols at us are now sauntering through the city. Who knows what our neighbours are plotting? Will we leave the city wide open [to attack]? Will we forget the recent past?’⁷⁰ The establishment of Tel Aviv port – its traffic increasing steadily at its neighbour’s expense⁷¹ – had been a direct response to the Arab strike and unrest in Jaffa. So was the creation of the new Carmel market in the Yemenite quarter of the Jewish city. Spatially, socially and psychologically, Arabs and Jews were ever more distant.

The Zionist Congress which met in Geneva in mid-August 1939 took place in an atmosphere of ‘unreality and irrelevance’.⁷² It was expected to be the most significant congress since the founding one had been held in Basel in 1897. Resistance to the policy of the White Paper, it declared, ‘is not directed against the interests of the Arab people’. Delegates reaffirmed

the resolve of the Jewish people to establish relations of mutual good will and cooperate with the Arabs of Palestine and of the neighbouring countries. Despite four years of bloodshed and destruction, the Congress expresses its opinion that on the basis of mutual recognition of the respective rights of both races, a way can be found to harmonise Jewish and Arab aspirations.

A few days after the congress ended Hitler invaded Poland. Palestine’s two peoples were braced for the next stage of the struggle that neither side doubted lay ahead.