“I remember seeing him through the field-glasses, standing on a small hill at the Battle of Bala, in Turkish uniform, wearing his medals and carrying a sword.”37 Porath likewise notes rebel commanders’ predilection for “uniforms and symbols of rank.”38
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider Porath’s explanation for the rebel uniform phenomenon, which is partially correct. He claims that rebel maltreatment of villagers in 1939 was “[t]o some extent . . . motivated by personal desire for status and wealth,” and continues, “Otherwise, one can hardly understand the deep concern of the bands’ commanders, who were leading an underground organisation, for uniforms and symbols of rank.” Undoubtedly the uniforms served as a symbolic denial of rebel criminality, but not merely on account of some rebels’ bad behavior. For the British equation of the rebels with “bandits,” “marauders,” and “criminals” persisted independent of the rebels’ treatment of the villagers. And while the rebel armies were “underground” in the sense that they waged asymmetric war against a traditional police force and military, their uniforms signified—to the Arabs of Palestine, to the British, and to an international audience—that they were a national military, regardless of what the British might claim.
Arab rebels thus not only transgressed the law but also commandeered its legitimizing tokens in the form of military and police regalia, as well as flags, stamps, courts, and other such emblems of national sovereignty (as we will explore further in subsequent chapters). In so doing, they did not so much break the law as they did turn it back upon its ostensible guardians. The British responded with mockery and re-imposed upon the rebels labels such as “murderer” and “criminal.” Thus, one of Wilmot’s photographs of a uniformed Arab rebel is accompanied by a caption disparaging the idea that the man was a soldier of any kind. Wilmot refers elsewhere to a pair of slain Arabs in the same uniform as “murderers.”39
The British eagerness to so name the insurgents had an anxious quality, the impetus of which is well articulated by the legal scholar Nasser Hussain: “As Walter Benjamin once noted, the law’s fear of [generalized] violence is different from its fear of crime. Crime is a transgression against the law that may be checked by it. A more general unrest threatens not so much to upset the law as to set up an alternative logic and authority to it.”40
While Arab bandits, rebels, and their young acolytes adopted police and military garb, British police and troops, as we have seen, frequently resorted to bandit tactics, and thereby embodied the conflation of the national and the criminal in the Palestinian political imagination. The bulk of the British officers imported from the disbanded Palestine gendarmerie into the Palestine police in 1926 were former Black and Tans from Ireland, whose reputation for “a certain ruthlessness,” observed a 1939 War Office report, they “maintained” during the revolt.41 The idea of employing Black and Tans in Palestine originated in the early 1920s, with then-Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill. Writes James Barker:
What Churchill envisaged for Palestine was a tough corps of fighters as a tactical reserve for the existing police force. As it happened, there were men available who matched this description: the thousands of ex-servicemen known as ‘the Black and Tans’ that Churchill himself had recruited as Secretary of State for War in February 1920 to reinforce the Royal Irish Constabulary. With both sides in Ireland seeking a negotiated settlement, these men, notorious for their brutality and indiscipline, would soon be out of a job. Churchill, unconcerned by their bad reputation, started planning their transfer en bloc to Palestine.42
Ex-Black and Tans became more, not less, prominent and influential in the Palestine police as time passed, holding five of eight district commander posts by 1943.43 The group’s notoriety was such that British officials began, in the course of the revolt, to use its appellation as a byword for illegal behavior among police.44
Criminal elements, then, existed on either side of the Arab-British divide, although neither party could be correctly described as simply criminal, and the bulk of those fighting—whether Arab or British—did not have criminal backgrounds. The Arab revolt could only be regarded as a criminal enterprise within a discursive framework that submitted the legitimacy of British force in Palestine as a given. British violence in Palestine was largely absent from the surface of texts operating within this framework, as did most British and Zionist analyses of the revolt. As detailed directly, however, Arabs challenged British and Zionist discourse in this connection, forcing the issue of British force (and its Zionist impetus) to the surface of the debate over the nature of the rebellion, and thereby pressing the criminal charge back upon the mandatory and those in whose interests it acted.
WAR ON THE DISCURSIVE FRONTIER: THE
STRUGGLE TO CRIMINALIZE THE OTHER
In June 1936, Paula Ben Gurion opened a letter from London. In it, her husband David boasted that those making the Arab case in the city had singularly failed to expand “the ranks of our enemies” among the British political class. By contrast, Zionist influence was such that in the parliamentary debate of 20 June, “The speeches by Lloyd George, Leopold Amery, Tom Williams, Creech Jones, Herbert Morrison, James de Rothschild and Victor Cazalet were wholly or partly prepared by us.” He regarded the debate as “almost entirely the fruit of our work.”45 But in early July, Lourie relayed to Shertok that members of the House of Commons, while “agreed that terrorism must be stopped,” were nevertheless pondering the utility of reducing Jewish immigration into Palestine. And the Agency received a report the next day stating that Wauchope was all that stood between the British military and a death blow to the insurgents, no doubt exacerbating Shertok and others’ sense of urgency regarding the British—and above all Wauchope’s—perception of the rebels.46
Fear of British capitulation to Arab demands roused the Jewish Agency and its allies to apply greater diplomatic and popular pressure on the government to treat the revolt as a criminal affair: that is, to crush it. But doing so proved increasingly difficult for the British. By July, the rebels were launching twenty to thirty attacks on British troops and communications (“and occasionally . . . Jewish settlements”) daily.47 The CID periodical appreciation summary for 12 July logged “persistent reports” of “large armed bands in the hills between Nablus and Ramallah.” Although the department regarded these as mere phantoms, it acknowledged the existence of such robust formations in the villages. The rebels’ “courage,” noted the summary, was not in question. It added poignantly, “[A] number are said to have gone to the hills taking their winding sheets [burial shrouds] with them.”48
British forces countered insurgents via “pressure” on areas in and around Nablus and Ramallah, which generated still more insurgents.49 The same undoubtedly resulted from the “bitterness . . . felt by the Rural and Urban population [over] the action taken by Government in sending large bodies of troops to villages, etc., and alleged shooting of unarmed peasantry,” as the CID reported.50
On learning of some rebels’ coercion of villages that failed to contribute “men or money” to the revolt, the CID averred that “the bandit (’Mujaheddin’) spirit” was “still very much alive.”51 But the coercive tactics of the rebels were not, at this point, of primary concern to most Arabs, who were preoccupied instead with the behavior of British forces.52 This included the comparable practice of levying collective fines on villages deemed insufficiently supportive of the government. A telegram from the village of Jabaʿ read aloud at a meeting of the AHC on 19 July described “soldiers bursting into the village and collecting fines.”53 Cities, too, were subject to fines. In June alone, the British fined Nablus, Acre, Safed, and Lydda.54 Rebel manifestos referred to these actions as “infringements” (al-taʿaddi) and included them alongside robberies and murders in their list of indictments of the mandatory government.55
Apart from complaints regarding these often devastating financial impositions, Arab reports
