the Arab rebellion as causally extrinsic to the behavior of the mandatory. As the next chapter will elaborate, the same was true of the majority of British soldiers, policemen, and opinion-makers, as well as the Zionists demanding greater British repression of the Arabs.
TWO
“A Wave of Crime”
THE CRIMINALIZATION OF PALESTINIAN
NATIONALISM, APRIL–JUNE 1936
THE BRITISH RECASTING OF PALESTINIAN nationalists as criminals was not sudden. The pinch of the twin pincers of Arab and Jewish opinion, however, made it inevitable. Regarding Arab opinion, the League of Nations mandate instrument was holy writ for the Arab Palestinian political class. It stated that the inhabitants of the Middle East stood already on the threshold of national autonomy, and required only a last interval of British and French assistance in order to cross it. The British project in the region, in other words, was explicitly pro-nationalist. London was therefore poorly positioned to recognize its internal security woes in Palestine for what they were: an Arab movement for national independence from London. This dilemma rendered the Zionist tactic of portraying that movement as something else altogether—as a crime wave—increasingly attractive to the British.
Crime, as chapter one detailed, was a key point of convergence between British and Jewish portrayals of the revolt. This convergence was not total, however. There were, in fact, two crimino-national claims about Arab protest in 1936, which one might call strong and weak, respectively. The strong claim was that both the strike and the rebellion lacked popular Arab support, and endured only because thugs working for the Arab national leadership had cowed the docile masses into backing them. The weak claim denied that the strike was coerced, but affirmed that both it and the armed Arab attacks on British forces and Jewish civilians were, indeed, illegal. Zionist leaders promoted the strong claim from the first. Their British counterparts affirmed only the weak claim initially. With each passing month, however, London drifted toward the Zionist position. This chapter charts that drift.
THE “CRIMINALS” BEHIND THE “CRIMINALS”
On 24 April 1936, the Jewish Agency dispatched a telegram to “the Jewish people” at large, expressing resolve in the face of Arab attacks and observing, “This is not [the] first time that our peaceful creative effort [is] being interfered with by [the] assaults of instigated rioters.”1 This statement encapsulated the Zionist case against the Arabs from 1936 forward, which was threefold: the rioters were pawns of their devious leaders, not free agents acting on the basis of their perceived interests and rights; the Jews were creators and the Arabs destroyers; and the Zionist enterprise in Palestine was an entirely peaceful one. These three themes converged in the criminalization of Palestinian nationalism.
Zionist leaders relentlessly promoted the “devious leaders” claim.2 Weizmann argued to Wauchope on 3 May that the “overwhelming majority of ordinary Arab citizens” were secretly opposed to the strike.3 Shertok and David Ben Gurion wrote the high commissioner on 17 May complaining of the government’s refusal to dissolve the “rebellious body styling itself the ‘Supreme Arab Committee’ [the AHC],” a policy which they claimed gave “further encouragement . . . to the acts of lawlessness carried out by its agents throughout the country.”4 Ben Gurion was the chair of the executives of both the Jewish Agency and the WZO, and a towering figure in the Zionist milieu. He had founded the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labor) in 1920, and later led Mapai (the Israel Workers Party), which several Zionist workers’ organizations founded in 1930. The “acts of lawlessness” to which he and Shertok referred included the previous night’s murder of three Jews in Jerusalem, although the two offered no evidence of the AHC’s connection to this crime. In a letter to Wauchope on 14 May, Shertok and Ben Gurion likewise bundled together nonviolent protest and violent crime, and saddled the AHC with liability for both:
. . . open incitement to continue the strike, the call to civil disobedience, criminal acts including the murder of innocent people have not diminished . . . We cannot regard the guilt as attaching only to the miserable individuals committing crimes. The responsibility for this criminal activity rests upon the instigators and leaders who are kindling a fire of racial hatred and strife in the country.5
The pair stated unequivocally in their 17 May letter: “. . . [P]ersonal responsibility [must] be placed on [the AHC’s] members as individuals for all terrorist acts which may be committed in the country.”6 Weizmann was meanwhile telling the high commissioner that “quiet” would never be restored in Palestine so long as the AHC continued to function. When Wauchope responded that he “needed rather more evidence . . . before proceeding to take strong measures against them,” Weizmann offered none, but proposed that “the disbanding of the Committee would make a strong impression on the country.”7 In a letter to Wauchope on 6 June, Shertok declared again that the AHC was “the mainspring of the whole campaign of strike, sedition, disobedience and terror.”8
FIGURE 3. The normally bustling jewelers’ market in the Old City of Jerusalem, hauntingly empty as a result of the 1936 strike. (Library of Congress)
While insisting that the British recognize the AHC’s unmitigated responsibility for the full spectrum of disorders then wracking the country, the Jewish Agency leadership was privately more ambivalent on this point. Shertok himself stated in a meeting of the executive in late May: “We have no evidence that the Committee of Ten (the AHC) are organizing the acts of violence and terror in the country, but it is clearly encouraging and provoking these actions.”9 Nevertheless, Agency members were united in their conviction that if the Arab leadership were personally responsible for all violence in Palestine, then organized Arab politics just was a criminal enterprise. Thus, regardless of the extent to which they believed that this conditional matched the state of affairs, Zionist spokesmen insisted the government adopt it as its framework for managing the disorders.
The Agency therefore demanded not only that Wauchope take sterner measures in combating violent crime but also that he “stamp out any attempt at civil disobedience.”10 The Agency’s political secretary, Arthur Lourie, cabled Jerusalem from London on 7 June, suggesting that the Agency tap sympathetic members of Parliament to press the government publicly to outlaw the strike, the AHC, and the regional national committees—that is, Palestinian politics.11
Ben Gurion’s 10 June reply to Lourie was revealing. He noted the efficacy of the government’s deportations of leaders such as ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi, whom he deemed the “moving spirit and principal organizer” of the Arab political community.12 Ben Gurion had actually met with ʿAbd al-Hadi earlier, in July 1934, on the understanding that he was a “patriotic, truthful, and incorruptible” Arab leader.13 He claimed at the time that he and ʿAbd al-Hadi had “parted in great friendship.”14 If he regarded him as a criminal by June 1936, he did not mention it to Lourie. Ben Gurion also disclosed that, in his view: “Even if the strike ends the acts of terrorism won’t. That is not now (at any rate) in the hands of the leaders.”15 His insistence, then, that the Arab leaders were responsible for the criminal and other violence was tactical.
THE BRITISH DRIFT BEGINS
While the Jewish Agency relentlessly pushed the government to outlaw the strike and to unleash the full force of its counterinsurgent machinery against the rebels, British opinion was already moving in the same direction. The shift began at about the time of the government’s escalation of repressive measures in the second half of May and early June. This is not to suggest that
