the transfer of military authority in the mandate from the RAF to the army—and assumed the role of general officer commanding (GOC). His account of the time prior to his own arrival on the scene warrants some examination, given Bowden and others’ effective reiteration of it.
According to the synopsis of Dill’s report, several important points had been established as of October 1936: the strike had “developed into a form of open rebellion”; the loyalty of the Arab section of the Palestine police had become dubious; and the government had refrained from employing British troops in any offensive capacity.131 The third point was a slightly inaccurate paraphrase of what Dill had written in the full report, but the error was inevitable. In the report itself, Dill emphasized that well into May 1936, British forces “had been dissipated on protective duties and little or no force was used for punitive work.” Confusingly, he then stated that in June, when groups of armed Arabs began appearing, there occurred a “relaxation” in the use of “punitive measures” during the village searches, and that “combined with this relaxation . . . came definite signs of defection among the Palestine Police.” A few sentences later, and more confusingly still, Dill claimed that on 3 June, “the Palestine Government decided ‘to continue our present policy . . . of endeavouring to protect life and property without adopting severe repressive measures.’”132 One might have thought that rebel sniping had led British forces to attack Arab villagers, which in turn had caused Arab police to mutiny. But on Dill’s bewildering telling, armed Arab groups emerged, at which point the British for some reason “relaxed” the briefly operative (and hitherto denied) punitive measures and Arab policemen inexplicably began defecting. This causal picture was pure confusion, making the synopsis of it simplistic of necessity.
Each of Dill’s three propositions, in any case, was specious. Concerning the first, while the strike had “developed into a form of open rebellion,” this language obscured two crucial facts. First, in the strike’s early days, armed revolt and refusal to work were largely unlinked. As noted, the AHC itself, as well as the national committees and the Arab press, advocated openly for a nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience.133 The convergence of the strike and the revolt was therefore not a foregone conclusion as of May 1936. Second, Dill’s language framed the armed rebellion as having evolved congenitally from the strike; it thus cropped out causal variables extrinsic to the Arab community, such as British violence.134 This framing depended on Dill’s second and third propositions: the questionable loyalty of Arab policemen and the supposedly purely defensive operations of British troops. Taking these in reverse order, British forces undertook offensive and intentionally “punitive” operations in Arab villages beginning in May. And these, as Peirse acknowledged, produced a “grave crisis” in loyalty among Arab police officers, who objected to the use of such measures against their countrymen.135 As ʿAbd al-Wahhab Kayyali observes, the same measures were “instrumental in bringing about a greater degree of cohesion and identification between the villagers and the rebels.”136
British brutality alienated not only Arab policemen and villagers, but also the Arab population at large, which increased public sympathy for attacks on British police and soldiers. As Michael J. Cohen relates, in June 1936, when Emir ʿAbdullah of Transjordan requested that his Palestinian interlocutors refrain from further violence, they “replied that the terrorism was itself in reply to the brutality of the Mandatory.”137 An organization of Arab priests argued similarly to the high commissioner, claiming that the government had “provoked the Arabs to resist it openly through the various ruthless and severe measures which it adopted.”138 Muhammad ʿIzzat Darwaza, ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi’s successor as the AHC secretary, wrote that the search regime, coupled with the “violence and cruelty” with which the British repressed political demonstrations, only “added fuel to the [nationalist] fire.”139 The archdeacon said the same in a letter to MP Stanley Baldwin: “I am afraid . . . the rough-handling methods which prevailed for a time at the end of May among the British Police . . . were the direct cause of a good deal of the violence and shooting which has [now] to be suppressed.”140
The gist of these testimonies is corroborated by Sir Hugh Foot, who served in Palestine as a junior assistant secretary in the Colonial Service during the revolt years, and later became the British governor of Cyprus. In 1959, Foot would recall:
. . . [I]n Palestine and again in Cyprus there was often a tendency to attempt to make up for lack of intelligence by using the sledge hammer—mass arrests, mass detentions, big cordons and searches and collective punishments. Such operations can do more harm than good and usually play into the hands of the terrorists by alienating general opinion from the forces of authority.141
No reader of Dill’s report would appreciate the role the British themselves played in stoking the rebellion. In scrutinizing Dill’s three findings, one notices, in each case, the same element missing from the causal equation: the mandatory. The strike develops unaided into open rebellion; Arab policemen defect without apparent reason; and the British refrain from offensive operations in the mandate. The first two propositions gloss over, and the third simply denies, the causal role of the mandatory in the rebellion’s unfolding.142
This blinkered imperial vision was pervasive among British officials. Among its more pristine manifestations was Wauchope’s passing acknowledgement in a December 1936 memorandum that the government’s casualty reports had hitherto failed to “differentiate between civilians killed and wounded by the Forces of the Crown and those who are the victims of riots or other forms of violence.”143 While the British had kept careful tabs on the number of Jews and Britons killed by Arabs, it apparently never occurred to them to count the number of Arab noncombatants killed or otherwise harmed by British forces. As for Arab militants, the notion that their deaths at the hands of the government could be anything less than justified was still further beyond the pale. One government official, having acknowledged the accuracy of an estimate of “1,000 . . . Arabs killed during the [1936] disturbances,” remarked in October 1937: “As the Jews point out these cannot fairly be described as ‘murders’ comparable with the figure of eighty Jews, since with few exceptions they represent casualties incurred while resisting Government forces.”144
A November 1936 report of the supreme court of Palestine featured similar reasoning. The document concerned an appeal on behalf of two Arabs convicted of shooting a British soldier outside Balʿa, near Tulkarm. A lower court had sentenced both men to death. The high court did not deny that the defendants had been attempting to acquire water for their cattle when a British plane began firing on them, causing them to take shelter in a cave. Nor did it deny that a British soldier had then approached the cave and “fired two shots into the hole in order to investigate[!].” What the court did deny was the right of the men to defend themselves against unjustified and potentially lethal British force. On the contrary, the report asserted: “Yet another point was raised [by the appellants’ lawyer], namely that it was the natural reaction for the appellants to shoot back when fired upon. This astounding theory, which allows men to retaliate when either police or military are doing their duty, is unknown to me.”145
CONCLUSION
In viewing the “disorder” and “lawlessness” that plagued their Palestine mandate, the British gazed from the lofty perch of “law and order.” This position required, as a matter of discursive coherence, that they be in no way constitutive of the “chaos” they sought to name as such and then sort out. The British could see the map of Palestinian politics, but they could not see themselves drawing it.146 If an outbreak of Arab “criminality” was at the root of the instability that increasingly afflicted Palestine, the British could not be both implicated in it and at the same time positioned to identify and address it as such.
Yet, as the sources cited in this chapter suggest, a close reading of the government’s own reports unearths evidence of the ubiquity of British violence in Palestine in 1936. Nevertheless, the British understanding of events in this period was generally consistent with the accounts
