for the recent agitations some time ago.” The trouble began, the document continued a little further on, “with the operation of a gang of murderers.”13
It is worthwhile briefly to address this charge, which was pervasive in 1936–39 and recurs in scholarship. The declaration’s claim regarding “preparations for the recent agitations” was not without merit. According to the memoir of the Palestinian militant Subhi Yasin, the highwaymen whose 15 April murder of three Jewish motorists set off the sequence of events culminating in the slaughter of 19 April were motivated by more than loot. The men had, in fact, intended to trigger a popular rebellion against the British, and were members of a group that included two future rebel leaders, Shaykh Farhan al-Saʿdi and Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir.14 Likewise, in his diary entry for 21 October 1935, the Istiqlal activist Akram Zuʿaytir noted his plans for a large meeting on 2 November (the eighteenth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration), the aim of which would be to “usher in a revolutionary campaign in Palestine.”15
But despite the fact that some Palestinian groups were laying plans for a violent revolt well before 19 April 1936, the notion that the Arab leaders, much less a “gang of murderers,” were behind the “agitations” was mistaken. Indeed, both Subhi Yasin and Akram Zuʿaytir wrote disdainfully of the mufti and the AHC’s reluctance to support even a peaceful strike.16 And the most ambitious scholarly attempts to situate the armed bands in the milieu of the mufti and various criminal gangs have been unpersuasive.17
Even as they publicly characterized the militarization of the Palestinian national movement as the work of extremists, British officials privately acknowledged that this “extremism” in fact represented the mainstream of Arab opinion, which held that it was force alone that entrenched British policy in Palestine, and it would be force alone that dislodged it.18 As the prolific pan-Islamist writer and activist Shakib Arslan put it in a February 1935 letter to the mufti, “. . . [T]he only language [the British] can understand is resistance.”19 The idea, then, that the rebellion was a mere “extension of traditional brigandage,” the mischief of “irresponsible youths and criminals,” or an assemblage of “terrorist nuclei” to which “youths from the villages” attached themselves, does not hold up.20
As Yehoshua Porath documents, a mere seven of the known rebels had prior criminal records, although these seven were prominent figures.21 Based on interviews with former rebels conducted in the 1980s, Ted Swedenburg surmises that a greater proportion of lower-level fighters had criminal records predating the revolt than of rebel leaders, although he in no way implies that these comprised the majority of rebels. Swedenburg does note, however, that Palestinian histories conveniently ignore the criminal records of some insurgents.22
More broadly, Palestinian nationalist discourse has tended to retroject modern Palestinian conceptions of criminality onto the period of the revolt and prior. Until quite recently, this entailed the forgetting (or condemning) of erstwhile bandit-heroes such as Abu Jilda, whose violent and larcenous exploits in the 1930s were once the stuff of fearful and admiring Palestinian folklore.23 Likewise, robbers whose victims lay outside their own communities were, in earlier times, locally revered among Arabs in Palestine. They occupied a liminal frontier between crime and adventure, which depended for its existence upon intercommunal fissures born of parochial loyalties, and which Palestinian nationalist discourse has therefore foreclosed.24
But while figures such as Abu Jilda largely vanished from Palestinian memory with the sealing of this frontier, their salience at the time of the revolt turned not only on a pre- or proto-national provincialism, but also on a dialectic in the Palestinian political imagination between the criminal and the national. This dialectic emerged naturally from the growing Palestinian conviction that the national government of the mandate was predicated on the illegal negation of Arab rights, and that it was only the maquillage of British sovereignty—flags, courts, uniforms—that concealed this ugly fact.
In his memoir of his time as a policeman in Palestine during the revolt, Roger Courtney recalls, “The names and fame of bandit leaders were treasured and revered everywhere in the Arab hills.”25 He goes on to tell of a twelve-year-old newspaper boy in Jenin, who adopted the moniker “Abu Jilda” and “led an ‘army’ of children, with the purpose of mocking and harassing the police and the government generally.”26 This “army,” composed of youths aged seven to twelve, donned “tin hats” modeled on those the British police wore, and slung bandoliers around their shoulders, against which they rested sticks in lieu of rifles. They even carried drums. Courtney remembers the boys parading “through the dusty Jenin streets” and brazenly violating the curfew by running noisily from house to house after hours. In response, the police would cobble together slingshots and smack the children with stones (“usually in the rear”!), a tactic which succeeded in converting them into “law-abiding and law-respecting citizens.”27 Similar demonstrations occurred elsewhere in Palestine. In June 1936, a celebration erupted in the streets of Jerusalem. Its occasion was a rumor that the city’s notorious assistant superintendent of police, Alan Sigrist, had been assassinated. Here, too, scores of children fashioned tin hats out of “trays and platters” and held aloft wooden swords as they chanted anti-colonial slogans.28
In willfully defying the outsider’s law while reappropriating his symbols of national sovereignty, “Abu Jilda’s” troupe reproduced, theatrically, tactics that Abu Jilda’s troop had pioneered in its real-world skirmishes with British police. As another former Palestine policeman, Colin Imray, recollects in his memoir, Abu Jilda became a top law enforcement priority after his group of outlaws executed a four-man police patrol and made off with their horses, rifles, and bandoliers.29 On a separate occasion, one of Abu Jilda’s men apprehended a “senior legal officer” at gunpoint and demanded his pants.30 When the police finally caught up with the infamous bandit and his longtime partner in crime, Salih al-ʿArmit, the two men emerged from their hideout “festooned with full police bandoliers and carrying police rifles.”31 An unwary observer might have mistaken them for policemen.
By the time of the revolt, bandits such as Abu Jilda seem not only to have straddled a line between criminal and adventurer but also to have sat astride the border of the criminal and the national—the very space the British inhabited in the Arab Palestinian political imagination. Indeed, both Abu Jilda and his attorney appear to have been keenly aware of this fact. The latter insisted at Abu Jilda’s 1934 trial that his client’s deadly assault on a policeman was “based on nationalist principles” as opposed to criminal proclivities.32 This defense took for granted that the same actions, when coded as national rather than as criminal, took on an inverted moral significance. If the British could play this game, why not the Arabs? As for the bandit-hero himself, one of his fellow prisoners, Najati Sidqi, recalled in his memoir that Abu Jilda wore
a military uniform decorated on the epaulettes with two swords and three stars in an attempt to distance himself and his group from the charge of being bandits. He also carried a long polished sword with a gilded handle and called himself chief of staff, while designating his colleague al-ʿArmit . . . as deputy with full authority.33
During the revolt, Arab insurgents employed the same strategy. Among the photographs that Palestine policeman (and great-nephew of Lord Allenby) P. J. De Burgh Wilmot kept in his scrapbook from the revolt years are a number featuring dead rebels in military attire. One such snapshot displays a mortally wounded Arab in button-down khaki trousers, khaki jacket, and high boots.34 The private papers of the assistant superintendent of police in Jenin, G. J. Morton, include a revolt-era photograph of three rebels in the same outfits, with the caption: “Typical Arab gangleaders in the Jenin area.”35 As Morton’s caption indicates, the wearing of such uniforms was common among insurgents. A CID report of 18 August 1936 noted, “. . . [A]ircraft report seeing men in some uniform decamping into the hills.”36 (The same report noted, not incidentally, that Palestinian “flag days have been held
