The Revolt and the Iron Fist

It started with shops closing.

On 19 April 1936 the trouble broke out in Jaffa, and within a week Palestinians had done something they had never managed before. They united. Rival families, rival towns, Muslims and Christians, city merchants and village farmers, all of them agreed on one thing at the same time and stopped the country.

The general strike began. Shops shut. Ports stopped loading. Taxis stopped driving. Workers walked off jobs. Local committees sprang up in every town to keep it going.

It lasted six months. It is still one of the longest general strikes in the history of the world.

The demands were three, and they were not complicated. Stop Jewish immigration. Stop the sale of Arab land. Give Palestine a government elected by the people who live in it.

In other words: treat us like a country.

What the children were being taught

Here is a small object that settles a large argument.

Open a Palestinian primary school textbook from the 1930s, the kind that sat on a desk in front of a seven-year-old in Nablus or Gaza, and you find a lesson on the borders of the country. Palestine, the children learned, has Lebanon and Syria to the north, Transjordan to the east, Egypt to the south, and the sea to the west.

That is a homeland, defined, printed, and taught to small children, more than a decade before 1948.

People still argue that Palestinian national identity was invented afterwards, as a reaction, or as a piece of propaganda. The children copying out that lesson were not reacting to anything. They were learning where they lived, the way you did.

The grown-ups could see what was coming, too. A cartoon ran in the Palestinian press during these years showing the leaders of the Zionist movement building their new state, brick by brick. The foundation they were laying it on was a pile of human skulls.

That was printed as satire, in a newspaper, for ordinary readers. It was about ten years early.

What Britain did about it

Britain’s answer arrived fast and it was not a negotiation.

Soldiers poured in. Curfews went up. And then came the punishment that Palestinians remember best, because you could see it from the road.

House demolitions.

If a village was thought to be helping the rebels, British forces would dynamite houses in it. In Jaffa in June 1936 they blew up a wide strip through the middle of the old city, hundreds of homes, and officially called it town planning and slum clearance. Everybody knew what it was. Families came back to rubble and were handed nothing.

They also used collective punishment, which is the idea that if you cannot find the guilty person you punish everyone near him. Whole villages were fined. Men were rounded up and made to stand in cages in the sun. Villagers were forced to sit on the front of army vehicles as human shields so the rebels wouldn’t fire.

By the end of the first phase, more than 190 Palestinians were dead and over 800 wounded. Across 1936 and 1937 together, British forces killed over a thousand Palestinians. British records for those same two years count 37 of their own military and police dead, and 69 Jews.

They went after the newspapers too. And after the women.

Sadhij Nassar was the wife of Najib Nassar, the Haifa pharmacist who had been warning about all of this since 1908. She was a great deal more than an editor’s wife. Born in Haifa to a Baha’i family, speaking four languages, she ran the women’s section of Al-Carmel from 1926, co-founded the Arab Women’s Union in Haifa in 1930, and travelled to international women’s conferences in Cairo to argue the Palestinian case in rooms full of Europeans.

She took part in the 1936 strike. So the British arrested her, accused her of supplying weapons to the rebels, and then never put her in front of a court at all. Under the emergency regulations they did not have to. From March 1939 she was held in a prison in Bethlehem for eleven months, untried, with no sentence to count down and no date to look forward to.

She went straight back to the paper when they let her out, and she edited Al-Carmel herself until the British closed it down in 1944.

In September 1936 Britain declared martial law. The Arab Higher Committee, the closest thing Palestinians had to a national leadership, headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was ordered to end the strike. Arab kings from neighbouring countries leaned on the Palestinians too, promising that Britain would be fair if they just stopped.

In October, the strike ended.

Britain was not fair.

The word “transfer”

What Britain sent instead was a commission.

Lord Peel and his team arrived, took evidence, and in July 1937 published a report that changed everything. The Peel Commission concluded that Arabs and Jews could not live under one government, and recommended cutting Palestine in two.

Here is the shape of it. A Jewish state taking Galilee, the Jezreel Valley and the coastal strip from Mount Carmel down past Tel Aviv. An Arab state made of everything else, folded into Transjordan. And a slice kept permanently under British rule, a corridor running from Jerusalem west to the sea at Jaffa.

So how big was the Jewish state? You will see two different answers to that, and both are honest, so it is worth learning why.

Measured against all of Mandatory Palestine, it came to about 20 percent. But more than half of Palestine is the Negev, a desert where almost nobody lived, and Peel did not really hand the Negev to anyone. Take the empty desert out of the sum and the Jewish state is closer to a third of the land people actually farmed and lived on.

Twenty percent or a third, depending on what you count. What nobody disputes is which part it was. The Jewish state got the coastline, the ports, the water and the best soil in the country, and it was to go to a community that was then a bit over a quarter of the population.

Then it added a recommendation in careful official English, and this is the sentence that matters.

It proposed a transfer of population. Arabs living in the area that would become the Jewish state would be moved out, and the report put a figure on it. Around 225,000 Arabs would have to go. Around 1,250 Jews would move the other way.

And if the Arabs would not go willingly, the report said, the transfer might have to be compulsory. It pointed at the forced exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923 as the model worth copying, which was a chilling thing to recommend to anybody who knew how that had actually gone.

That is a British government document, in 1937, in print, proposing to remove a quarter of a million people from their homes because their presence was inconvenient.

Palestinians rejected the plan completely. The Zionist congress argued about it, and Ben-Gurion, in private letters, was clear about how he saw it: take the state now, even small, and the borders can be dealt with later.

The word “transfer” was now on the table. It never left it.

Round two, and this one was war

In autumn 1937 the revolt came back, and it came back armed.

A British district commissioner in Galilee was shot dead. Britain outlawed the Arab Higher Committee, arrested its members, and deported five of them to the Seychelles, including the mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein al-Khalidi.

Al-Khalidi kept a diary on that island, and he had nothing to do but think. He came back to the same conclusion over and over, worked out from four thousand kilometres away: that Britain and the Zionist leadership were working towards the same end, that Palestinian politicians were being managed rather than consulted, and that the country was going to be lost while its leaders were still being reasonable about it.

He was writing that in 1938. Nobody who could have acted on it was reading it. Hajj Amin al-Husseini escaped to Lebanon in disguise.

So Palestinians entered the most serious fight of their lives with their entire political leadership in prison, in exile, or on the run. That was not an accident. It was the point.

What followed was a real rural war. Peasant fighters, mostly farmers with old rifles, took control of large parts of the countryside. For a period in 1938 the rebels effectively ran the hill country, and in October 1938 they held the Old City of Jerusalem for several days. British administration in some districts simply stopped functioning.

The commanders became famous, and most of them are buried young.

Abd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad was the overall commander, a farmer’s son from Dhinnaba near Tulkarm, respected even by his enemies for refusing to attack civilians. He wrote a warning that the weakness and squabbling of the politicians would destroy the revolution from the inside. He was killed days later, in March 1939, surrounded by British troops near Sanur.

There is a photograph of his four sons, taken afterwards. Four boys, in a row, all of them small. That is the other half of what these three years cost, and it is the half that does not show up in the casualty tables. Every one of those commanders was somebody’s father, and the families they left behind were farming families with no pension, no compensation and no state to appeal to.

Farhan al-Sa’di was the old man of the movement, one of al-Qassam’s original followers from the Jenin hills. He was around eighty years old when the British caught him with a rifle. Britain had just brought in emergency regulations making possession of a weapon a hanging offence, and a military court dealt with him in a matter of days.

They hanged him on 22 November 1937. It was the middle of Ramadan. He was fasting, and he asked to be allowed to break his fast before they did it.

They hanged him anyway.

An eighty-year-old man, executed while fasting, in Ramadan, by a foreign government, for owning a gun in his own country. Whatever Britain thought it was buying with that rope, what it actually bought was a thousand new recruits.

Abd al-Fattah Mustafa took over the Jenin sector after him.

Hassan Salama commanded the coastal plain, the Jaffa, Lydda and Ramla sector. He survived this war. Keep his name too. He is still fighting over the same ground in 1948.

Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini commanded the Jerusalem area, and he survived this war. Keep his name. He comes back in chapter six, and his death is one of the hinges of 1948.

The third gun

There was somebody else shooting, and it was not the British.

Through July 1938 the Irgun ran a bombing campaign against Arab civilians. Not army posts, not police stations. Markets and bus stops. They bombed the Arab market in Haifa on 6 July, came back and bombed Haifa again on 25 July, and set off bombs in Jerusalem in the same weeks. Around 68 Palestinian civilians were killed in that single month. Shoppers, porters, market traders, children sent out for vegetables.

This was the first sustained campaign of bombing civilian crowds in the country’s history, and it did what such campaigns generally do. It did not end the revolt. It taught everybody what the next thirty years were going to look like.

The iron fist closes

Britain brought in around 25,000 to 30,000 troops, plus the RAF, and set out to break the revolt permanently.

They built a barbed wire and minefield barrier along the northern border. They set up military courts where possessing a weapon meant death. One hundred and twelve Palestinians were executed by hanging after summary trials in those courts. Around 9,000 were held without trial in detention camps at places like Sarafand and Nur Shams. Men swept up in village raids were penned in open-air wire cages in the sun, sometimes for days, waiting to find out what was going to be done with them. They demolished around 2,000 homes over the three years.

There was a specific technique for a village suspected of hiding rebels. Troops would surround it at dawn, drive everyone into the open, hold the men for hours or days, ransack every house, seize the food stores, kill the livestock, pour the olive oil out onto the ground and mix the flour with sand so it could not be eaten.

They also began using Palestinian prisoners to walk ahead of convoys over roads that might be mined.

And they got help from an unusual place.

The other way to break a revolt

Soldiers were not the only tool Britain had, and they were not the cleverest one.

Britain also set out to break the revolt from the inside, and it went to work on the oldest weakness there is. Palestinians were not one solid thing. There were rival families, town against countryside, the Husseinis against the Nashashibis, feuds running back generations.

So Britain paid for the split.

The British consul in Damascus, Gilbert MacKereth, went looking for rebel commanders who had fled into Syria, and offered them a deal. Amnesty, weapons and wages. The wages were the sharp end of it. A man fighting in the revolt might get four Palestinian pounds a month. Britain offered six.

Out of that came the peace bands, in Arabic fasa’il al-salam. Armed Palestinian units, paid by the British, hunting other Palestinians. Fakhri Nashashibi, from the family that had spent twenty years losing to the Husseinis, became their public face in the south. In the north the British turned a rebel commander named Fakhri Abd al-Hadi, who came across with his fighters.

British officers wrote privately that they had no illusions about Nashashibi and did not believe he was in it for anything but himself. They used him anyway.

Then there were the informers, and there was a particular routine that people who lived through it never got over.

Soldiers would drive into a village and line the men up in the open. In the back of one of the trucks, behind a screen, sat a hooded man from that same village. And he would point.

Think about what that does to a place. Not the arrests. The afternoon afterwards, when everybody walks home and every man in the village starts working out which of his neighbours was sitting in the truck.

It did precisely what it was built to do. By late 1938 Palestinians were killing Palestinians. Rebel courts passed death sentences on collaborators and carried them out. Peace bands used their British rifles to settle village quarrels that had nothing to do with the British at all. Nashashibi relatives were assassinated, and Fakhri Nashashibi himself was shot dead in Baghdad in 1941.

Historians who have been through the files mostly agree the peace bands did not defeat the revolt. The army did that. What the peace bands did was turn up near the end and make the defeat poisonous, so that Palestinians came out of it not only crushed but unable to trust each other.

That was the more expensive loss, and it lasted a great deal longer.

Two rules, one country

Set two British policies side by side. Same years. Same country.

Rule one. A Palestinian found with a rifle, or with ammunition, or in some cases with a single bullet in his pocket, could be tried by a military court and hanged. A hundred and twelve men were. Villages were searched for weapons over and over, the searches came with beatings, and food stores were wrecked to pressure people into handing guns in.

Rule two. From May 1936 onwards, Britain armed Jewish settlers. Officially, on the books, with paperwork. It created auxiliary and supernumerary police units and the settlement police, the Notrim, and issued them rifles, uniforms, armoured cars, training and wages, on the stated grounds that settlements needed to defend themselves.

By the end of the revolt there were somewhere around 20,000 armed Jewish policemen, supernumeraries and settlement guards in Palestine, carrying British weapons entirely legally.

Twenty thousand men armed by the government. And an eighty-year-old hanged in Ramadan for owning a gun.

The Notrim did not vanish when the revolt ended. It was a legal, trained, British-equipped pool of manpower, and a great deal of it walked into the Haganah with everything Britain had paid to teach it.

The captain who taught the lesson

Orde Wingate was a British army officer, eccentric, brilliant, and a passionate Zionist. He believed the Jewish state was a religious duty, and he decided to help it happen.

Wingate created the Special Night Squads. He got permission in March 1938 and had them running by that June, and they were exactly what the name says. Three squads of British soldiers, pulled from the Royal Ulster Rifles, the Royal West Kents and the Manchesters, working alongside Haganah men signed on as extra police. It started with about 25 Haganah members and grew to around 75.

Read that sentence again, because the whole chapter turns on it. British soldiers and Zionist militia, in the same units, under the same officer, briefed together in the same room before going out at night against Palestinian villages.

His method was to stop sitting in forts waiting to be attacked, and go out first instead. Hard, fast, in the dark.

And what he taught them was not soldiering.

Wingate trained his men to kill without hesitating. To make prisoners talk by shooting one in every ten of them. To force sand down villagers’ throats until they were sick. To walk into a village, demand its weapons, and promise to destroy the place if the weapons did not appear.

He despised the Arab population and said so to anyone who would listen, and nobody who served with him was in any doubt about it.

A British military historian who studied these squads called what they did “state terrorism”. Field Marshal Montgomery, who was not a soft man, later told Moshe Dayan he thought Wingate had been mentally unbalanced.

Which brings us to who was standing next to him, learning. Wingate picked two young Haganah men out personally. Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon. Dayan said afterwards that Wingate had taught them everything they knew.

Ilan Pappé puts it more bluntly than that. What Wingate handed the Haganah, he argues, was a finished working method: how to surround a Palestinian village, take it, empty it, and knock it down.

In ten years those two students would be commanding an army. They used exactly these tactics, on exactly these villages, at a scale Wingate did not live to see.

Britain trained one side of a future war and disarmed the other. Then Britain left.

The bishop on the Haifa road

One more name, because he does not fit the picture most people carry of this fight.

Gregorios Hajjar was the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Akka and Galilee, a Melkite bishop with his seat in Haifa. Palestinians called him the bishop of the Arabs, and they meant it literally, because Muslims came to him as well as Christians. He spoke against the Mandate and against Zionist expansion from the pulpit, publicly, by name, for years, in a period when Britain was hanging men for far less.

You could not intern a bishop. It would have caused a scandal in every Catholic capital in Europe.

In 1940 his car came off the road on the way to Haifa and he was killed.

The police called it an accident. Very few Palestinians believed it, and the doubts went into the local police file too. Nothing was ever proved, and nothing is being proved here either.

What is worth noticing is simpler than a conspiracy. The revolt was never a Muslim uprising. Christians led it, funded it, wrote it, preached it and were buried out of it, and one of its loudest voices wore a Melkite archbishop’s cross. The idea that any of this was a religious war came later, and it came from people who found it useful.

The bill

By 1939 the revolt was finished.

Count the cost, and count it carefully, because this is the reason 1948 went the way it did.

Around 5,000 Palestinians were killed. Around 15,000 were wounded. Around 5,600 were imprisoned. Somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of all adult Palestinian men were killed, wounded, jailed or exiled. On the other side, roughly 400 Jews were killed. British losses came to 262 dead counting soldiers and police together, of whom about a hundred were soldiers.

Five thousand, against four hundred, against two hundred and sixty-two. That is not a war between two armies. That is what a modern army does to farmers.

The political leadership was scattered across three continents. The fighters were dead or in camps. The weapons were confiscated. The villages were broke.

Meanwhile the Haganah had spent those same three years growing, arming, training with British officers, and learning the ground.

The paper that came too late

In May 1939, with a European war weeks away, Britain suddenly panicked about Arab opinion and issued the White Paper.

It said Jewish immigration would be capped at 75,000 over five years and then need Arab agreement. Land sales to Jews would be restricted. And within ten years, Palestine would become an independent state governed by Arabs and Jews together.

It was, on paper, almost everything the Palestinians had demanded in 1936.

The Palestinian leadership rejected it, partly because the leaders who could have negotiated it were in exile and out of touch, partly because they no longer believed a word Britain said. That refusal is still argued about today, and honest Palestinian historians call it one of the worst mistakes of the whole story.

The Zionist leadership was enraged by it, and Ben-Gurion summed up his response with a line that turned out to be exactly what happened: fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper.

Then Hitler invaded Poland, and the world stopped paying attention to Palestine for six years.

When it looked back, everything had changed.