Twenty Years of Warnings Nobody Wanted

Here is something that gets left out of most tellings, and it shouldn’t be.

Somebody did ask the Palestinians. Once. Properly.

In 1919 the world’s winners gathered in Paris to redraw the map after the Great War. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, had been going around saying that people should get to choose who governs them. He called it self-determination, and he seemed to mean it.

So he sent a commission to the Middle East to find out what the people actually wanted. Two Americans, Henry King and Charles Crane, travelled through Syria and Palestine for six weeks in the summer of 1919. They met delegations. They read petitions. They talked to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Then they wrote it all down.

The report that got filed in a drawer

The King-Crane Commission report said, in plain language, what it had found.

Nearly nine tenths of the population of Palestine was non-Jewish, and that population was emphatically against the Zionist programme. Not mildly. Not partly. The feeling was strong and it was not going to fade.

The commissioners also asked British officers a very practical question. If you go ahead with this anyway, what would it take? The officers estimated that you would need an army of at least fifty thousand soldiers to force it through.

So King and Crane recommended cutting Jewish immigration back sharply and giving up the plan for a Jewish state.

The report went to Paris. It was quietly shelved. It wasn’t even published for three years.

Fifty thousand soldiers. Remember that number. The British ended up sending far more than that, and they still couldn’t hold it.

In that same conference there was a meeting between Prince Faisal, leading the Arab delegation, and Chaim Weizmann, leading the Zionist one. T. E. Lawrence, the Englishman the films call Lawrence of Arabia, translated between them. They signed a friendly agreement about Arabs and Jews working together.

Faisal added a handwritten condition in Arabic at the bottom: this only counts if the Arabs get the independence they were promised.

They didn’t. So it didn’t.

Britain moves in

In 1920 Britain appointed its first High Commissioner for Palestine. The man they chose was Herbert Samuel.

Yes. That Herbert Samuel. The one who had written the secret 1915 memo saying Britain should take Palestine and grow a Jewish majority in it. Britain put the author of the plan in charge of carrying it out, and then acted surprised when Palestinians didn’t trust the referee.

In 1922 the League of Nations made it official. Britain was formally given the Mandate for Palestine, and written into that document, near the top, was Britain’s duty to create the conditions for a Jewish national home.

Not a promise made in a private letter any more. International law.

Samuel got to work. Hebrew became an official language alongside Arabic and English. Jewish immigration was opened up. The Jewish Agency was recognised as the official body speaking for Jews in Palestine, which effectively gave the Zionist movement a government-in-waiting, with its own budget, schools, hospitals and land office.

Palestinians were offered a council with almost no power, in which they would be permanently outvoted. They refused it. Then they were blamed for refusing it.

Watching the numbers climb

By 1925 the change was impossible to miss. That year alone about 33,000 Jewish immigrants arrived, roughly three times the year before. Thirteen new settlements went up. Tel Aviv got its own town council. The Histadrut, the Jewish labour federation run by David Ben-Gurion, was building an entire parallel economy with its own rules, and one of those rules was Hebrew labour: Jewish employers should hire Jewish workers.

That policy had a logic behind it. It was meant to build a self-sufficient Jewish working class instead of a settler class living off cheap local labour. But look at what it does on the ground. Land the Arabs can’t buy back. Jobs the Arabs can’t take. Two economies in one country, and a wall between them going up brick by brick.

In 1925 the Hebrew University opened in Jerusalem. Balfour himself came out for the ceremony. Samuel was there. Allenby was there.

Palestinians shut their shops, went on general strike, and hung black flags out of their windows.

Nobody in the ceremony changed their plans.

Al-Buraq, 1929

Then came the summer of 1929, and the flashpoint was the holiest few metres of ground on earth.

In Jerusalem there is a wall. Jews call it the Western Wall, the last remnant of the Second Temple, and it is the most sacred place they can pray. Muslims call it al-Buraq Wall, after the night journey of the Prophet Muhammad, and directly above it stands the Al-Aqsa compound with the Dome of the Rock.

The same stones. Two faiths. One narrow alley.

Through 1928 and 1929 the tension over prayer rights at the wall built and built. In August 1929 a Zionist demonstration marched to the wall with flags and chanting. Rumours flew. Then it exploded.

For about a week Palestine came apart. In Hebron, Arab mobs attacked the ancient Jewish community and killed 67 people, including women and children. It was a massacre, and it should be named as one. Other Hebron families hid their Jewish neighbours in their own houses and saved dozens of lives, and that should be named too. In Safed, 18 more Jews were killed. British police and troops firing on Arab crowds killed well over a hundred Palestinians.

By the end, around 133 Jews and at least 116 Arabs were dead.

Three men at Acre

Britain wanted an example made.

Hundreds of Palestinians were arrested. Twenty-six were sentenced to death, and in the end three of those sentences were carried out. Three young men.

Fuad Hijazi, from Safed. Ata al-Zir and Muhammad Jamjoum, both from Hebron.

They were held in Acre prison. On 17 June 1930 they were taken out to be hanged, one after another.

The story that came out of that prison, and that Palestinians have told ever since, is that each of the three tried to go first. Not to get it over with. So that the other two would not have to watch a friend die before their turn.

A poet wrote a song about it, and Palestinians have been singing it for nearly a hundred years. It’s called Min Sijn Akka, “From Acre Prison.” Ask a Palestinian grandmother. She will know the tune.

Their graves are still in Acre.

The report Britain wrote, and then tore up

After the blood of 1929, Britain did what Britain always did. It sent a commission.

The Shaw Commission came out at the end of 1929 to work out why the country had exploded. Its report said the thing Palestinians had been shouting for ten years: the violence came from Arab fear of losing the country, driven by Jewish immigration and land purchase, and Britain had never given Palestinians any real political voice at all.

So Britain sent another one. Sir John Hope Simpson arrived in 1930 to look specifically at land, and he came back with numbers. There was not enough farmable land to go round. Land bought by the Jewish National Fund was closed to Arabs permanently, and the Hebrew labour rule closed the jobs on it too, so every sale produced not just a landless family but an unemployable one. He reckoned close to 30 percent of Palestinian farming families were already landless.

In October 1930 the Colonial Secretary, Lord Passfield, published a White Paper built on those two reports. It recommended limiting Jewish immigration, restricting land sales, and taking the Arab majority’s interests seriously for the first time since Balfour.

For about four months, Britain had a Palestine policy that actually matched its own evidence.

Then the lobbying started in London. Weizmann resigned his position in protest, the press went to work, and the pressure on the government inside Parliament and inside the Labour Party was enormous.

In February 1931 the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, wrote a letter to Weizmann that read the Passfield White Paper into the ground. It did not cancel it. It simply clarified every clause until there was nothing left standing. Immigration would continue. Land sales would continue. Hebrew labour was fine.

Jews called it the MacDonald Letter. Palestinians called it the Black Letter, and it taught them something they never unlearned. Britain would investigate honestly, publish honestly, and then fold the moment honesty cost it anything.

The gate opens wider

In Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power.

What followed for Jews in Europe was the worst crime of the twentieth century, and it is not this book’s subject, but it is the engine of everything in this chapter, so let’s be exact about it. Jews were stripped of citizenship, robbed, beaten, driven out, and eventually murdered in their millions in an industrial system built for that purpose. Six million people.

They tried to escape. Country after country in the West quietly shut the door. Ships full of refugees were turned back from ports and sent to their deaths.

So they went where the door was open. And the door that was open was Palestine.

Look at the immigration figures. In 1931, about 4,000 arrived. In 1932, about 9,500. In 1933, around 30,000. In 1934, about 42,000. In 1935, 62,000.

In fifteen years the Jewish population of Palestine went from roughly a tenth to nearly a third.

And the idea of simply moving the Palestinians somewhere else was already being raised in rooms with British officials sitting in them.

The documentary records a meeting between David Ben-Gurion and Sir Arthur Wauchope, the British High Commissioner, in which Ben-Gurion suggested that Palestinians pushed off their land by Jewish settlement building should be resettled across the river in Transjordan. Wauchope’s reported answer was that it sounded like a good idea.

That exchange comes from the film, and this series has not been able to check it against the original papers, so hold it loosely.

What needs no holding loosely is everything around it. Within two years Ben-Gurion was arguing for transfer openly at the Zionist Congress, and the Jewish Agency had set up committees whose actual job was to work out how Arabs might be moved out of the country.

The word was not a secret, and it was not an accusation invented afterwards. It was an agenda item.

There was also a machine helping to move them, and it is one of the strangest arrangements of the whole century.

In August 1933 the Zionist Federation of Germany and the Jewish Agency signed a deal with the economics ministry of Nazi Germany. It was called the Haavara Agreement, from the Hebrew word for transfer. Under it a German Jew emigrating to Palestine could pay money into a special account in Germany. That money was spent on German export goods, the goods were shipped to Palestine and sold there, and the emigrant collected his money at the other end.

Germany got rid of Jews and got export sales at the same time. Jews got out with some of their property instead of none of it. Around 60,000 German Jews reached Palestine this way, bringing something like eight million pounds of capital with them.

It was fought over bitterly inside the Jewish world, because it broke the international boycott of Nazi Germany, and a Zionist official involved in negotiating it was shot dead on a Tel Aviv beach in 1933.

Judge that deal however you judge it. What it did in Palestine is not in dispute. It turned a stream of frightened refugees into an organised transfer of people and money, and it landed at the exact moment Palestinians were least able to absorb it.

Now hold both true things at once again, because this is the hardest paragraph in the series.

Those refugees were running for their lives, and they had nowhere else on earth to go, and turning them away would have meant sending human beings back to gas chambers. That is real.

And the Palestinian farmer watching ships arrive in Jaffa harbour, who had no vote, no army, no newspaper the British would listen to, and who could see with his own eyes that he was becoming a minority in his own country, was not a villain for being frightened. That is also real.

Two peoples with a genuine case, and a third country, Britain, which had promised both of them different things and had no intention of keeping either promise honestly. That is the trap. Nobody in Palestine built it.

The barrels on the dock at Jaffa

On 16 October 1935, Arab dockers at Jaffa port were unloading a Belgian cargo ship called the Leopold II.

They were shifting drums of cement. One of the drums slipped and broke open on the dock.

Guns came out of it.

The British searched the rest of the consignment. Out of 537 drums, 359 were packed with weapons. Twenty-five Lewis machine guns. Eight hundred rifles. Four hundred thousand rounds of ammunition. The paperwork named a merchant in Tel Aviv.

Nobody was arrested. The authorities said they could not establish who the shipment was really for, and the case quietly died.

Try to feel what that did to people.

Palestinians had spent fifteen years being told they were imagining things. That immigration was a humanitarian matter. That land sales were ordinary business between willing parties. That there was no plan and no army and nothing to be frightened of.

Then a barrel fell over on a dock in front of a crowd of Arab workers, and eight hundred rifles rolled out onto the stones. And the same government that had spent fifteen years searching Palestinian villages for weapons, and that would soon be hanging men for owning one, looked at four hundred thousand rounds of ammunition and arrested precisely nobody.

Protests went up across Palestine, then in Amman, Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. A strike began on 26 October and turned violent in Jaffa.

The argument about whether an army was being built ended that week. Everyone had watched the answer roll across a dock.

The pictures that went missing

One more thing about this whole period, and it is about why you have probably never seen it.

There was a Palestinian film archive. Reels shot by Palestinians through the 1930s and 1940s of ordinary life: streets, weddings, markets, schools, harvests, football. In the wars that followed, that archive was lost. Some of it was seized, some scattered, and a great deal of it simply disappeared and has never been found.

Now think what that leaves for a film maker sixty years later who wants to show you what Nablus looked like on a Tuesday afternoon.

The team behind the documentary this series is built on spent months going through vaults in other people’s countries, hunting for footage of Palestine that Palestinians had not been allowed to keep. Some of what they found was sitting in the British Library in London.

So the moving pictures of Palestinian life before 1948 that anyone has seen were largely preserved by the empire that helped end it, and they had to be dug out by Palestinians who travelled to London to look at their own grandparents.

That is not a footnote about film. It is the same story as the villages, happening to a different kind of evidence.

The preacher who picked up a rifle

By the mid 1930s, Palestinian patience was gone, and the old leadership of wealthy families and polite petitions had nothing left to offer.

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam was not Palestinian, and his story explains a great deal.

He was born in Jableh on the Syrian coast and studied at al-Azhar in Cairo, and he came home a trained scholar. When Italy invaded Libya in 1911 he raised money and volunteers for the resistance there. When France seized Syria after the First World War, he went up into the mountains of Jabal Sahyun and fought a guerrilla campaign against French troops from 1919 to 1921. The French sentenced him to death while he was still in the hills.

So he came into Haifa in the early 1920s as a wanted man who had already fought two European empires and lost to both of them.

In Haifa he became the imam of the Istiqlal Mosque, which means Independence. He also took a job as a marriage registrar, which sounds dull and was not, because it meant he travelled through the villages of the north constantly and knew everybody in them. He taught in the mosque, married poor couples for nothing, and ran night classes teaching farmers and dock workers to read.

And he went to the right people. Not the big families. Not the town politicians with their petitions.

He went to the shanty towns on the edge of Haifa, the shacks of tin and packing crates full of peasants who had been pushed off land in Marj Ibn Amir and across the north and had come to the port looking for a day’s work. Men who had already lost their fields. Men with nothing left to be careful with.

He organised them into small secret armed cells and told them the country would only be saved by fighting for it.

In November 1935 British forces cornered him and a handful of followers in the hills near Ya’bad, outside Jenin. He was told to surrender.

He refused, and he told his men to die as martyrs.

They killed him there. And his funeral in Haifa turned into the largest gathering Palestine had seen, thousands of people packed into the streets, and a lot of them walked out of that funeral having decided something.

The poets were saying it too. Abdul Rahim Mahmoud, standing before a visiting Saudi prince in Jerusalem, wrote a line that went around the country like a slap: have you come to visit Al-Aqsa, or to say goodbye to it before it is lost?

He asked that in 1935.

Ibrahim Tuqan, the other great Palestinian poet of those years, pointed his in a different direction. He aimed at the leadership, and it was savage. In 1935 he wrote a piece addressed to the patriotic notables who kept announcing how heavy the burden of the cause was, and the sting of it was simple enough to repeat in one sentence. Only a scrap of the country is left, so would you kindly step aside before the rest of it blows away.

A poet, in print, telling his own country’s leaders to resign.

Five months later

On 19 April 1936, in Jaffa, it began.

The strike started, and then it spread, and within days it was every city and nearly every village in Palestine.

And this time the Palestinians said plainly, on the record and in English so that foreigners would hear it, what the whole thing was about. A spokesman for the leadership put the case out, and it was not a list of complaints about wages or taxes. It was an argument about a country.

Their quarrel, he said, was with British policy in Palestine, and with where that policy was obviously heading, which was the replacement of the Arabs by the Jews in their own land. Britain had imposed the Balfour Declaration on them without ever asking, a document detested by every Arab in the region. And in promising a national home to the Jews, Britain had deliberately left out any protection at all for the political rights of everybody else who lived there.

That last point is the sharpest thing in the statement, and it happens to be exactly right.

Go back and read those sixty-seven words from 1917 one more time. Civil and religious rights, for the existing non-Jewish communities. Not political rights. Not national rights. Not the right to a country of your own.

Palestinians had spotted the hole in that sentence in 1917. Here they were nineteen years later, on strike, still pointing at it.

The three young men at Acre had been hanged for a riot. What was starting now was not a riot.