not criminals, and therefore did not deserve it; and the British meting it out were thereby advertising their own criminality. The Arab Women of Jaffa informed the high commissioner on 8 July that the British use of excessive force in the area was “common knowledge.” Anticipating the charge of Arab criminality, their letter went on to assert:
Your Excellency will realize that the Arab people are compelled in the present circumstances to defend themselves and their country by purely national motives without the least intention to commit crime, as Your Excellency may assume, and the only means for quickly ending this period of crime and disorder will be by the removal of the causes which have created them.57
ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi echoed this theme, addressing the high commissioner from the detention camp at Sarafand:
I, personally, do not know any one person of those who fire from the mountain-tops or who blow [up] bridges or cut telephone wires but it appears to me that there is not one person amongst them who is actuated by any personal interest in all the acts which he does, exposing himself to many dangers.58
He also reminded the high commissioner, “. . . [T]he fact which cannot be doubted is that your troops have dealt with the Arabs ruthlessly and destroyed many Arab villages without any justification.”59
The AHC wrote Wauchope on 15 July, “It is a matter of regret to the Committee that bitter complaints are still being addressed to it with regard to the ruthless and severe manner in which the troops are dealing with the situation under the pretext of ‘search.’”60 Wauchope received another such report three days later, this one from the Arab Orthodox Priests Congress for Palestine and Transjordan:
The banishment of leaders, the confinement of people in prisons, the blowing up of houses with dynamite, the imposition of heavy fines on towns and villages, the looting of property, cereals and livestock, and other similar vigorous measures which are still being taken by troops and Police in all parts of the country are not only detestable measures which are prohibited by religion and inhuman and not befitting the civil forces of a great Christian and civilized power but are also unlikely to culminate in suppressing the rebellion and restoring order.61
While officials tended to dismiss such reports, it was not for lack of internal corroboration. A government welfare inspector reported to the chief secretary on 13 July that British troops had, a week earlier, killed an unarmed former policeman and father of five in the village of ʿAbud, about ten miles northwest of Ramallah. ʿAbud, wrote the inspector, had “always been peaceful and [had] not even been searched by troops.” His sour commentary on the incident suggested that such episodes were not rare:
Instead of pacifying the country by these tactics, bitterness and resentment is rapidly increasing in the villages and elsewhere. Whereas at the beginning of the trouble the fellahin were our best friends, we are steadily turning them into our worst enemies by these methods of ruthlessly killing innocent people and destroying their possessions and their stores of food.62
An internal Colonial Office memo dated 9 July noted “many instances of rash and dangerous shooting by Supernumerary Police,” a particularly troubling development given the number of Jews among their ranks.63 Testimony to continued British malfeasance turned up in private correspondence as well. Policeman Percy Cleaver wrote his aunt and uncle from Haifa on 6 July, “I’ve been on one or two of these [night] raids and it’s quite good fun, especially turning the contents of the houses into the street.”64
In addition to repudiating the charge of criminality emanating from British and Jewish quarters, articulate Arab opinion in the latter half of 1936 also reversed it, and not only with respect to Britons. Arab newspapers portrayed Tel Aviv as a “city of thievery, swarming with forgers and thieves,” and made frequent reference to Jewish criminal conspiracies, often involving entanglements with world communism.65 In reply to a Jewish newspaper’s report that children throughout Palestine were suffering from nightmares of “an Arab criminal standing in front of their houses, trying to get in,” a writer for al-Difaʿ observed: “This portrayal of the ‘Arab criminal’ is not surprising because every word in this newspaper, and in fact every word on the street and in official statements has painted this picture.” The headline of the article read, in part: “The Arabs are not the criminals, you criminal!”66 Arab newspapers also sought to transfer the criminal label to the British. Al-Jamiʿa al-Islamiyya argued, “. . . [T]he cases of the strike are not of the nature to which the criminal law is applicable, because criminal laws have been enacted . . . where the offence is committed on account of criminal habits.”67 The reality, declared Filastin, was that “the [British] policy alone is the criminal.”68
While prior to April 1936 political cartoons featured sparingly in the Arab Palestinian press, they began appearing regularly in both Arab and Jewish newspapers during the revolt. Their caricatures often implied the criminality of the other by way of subtle visual cues that played on well-known physiognomical and phrenological codes.69 One cartoon from the 19 June edition of Filastin depicted a British authority accepting a Jewish bribe while simultaneously exhorting the government to employ “all types of force” against the “Arab robbers and scoundrels.” The official’s deep-set eyes and compressed brow connoted his delinquency according to physiognomical conventions.70 A second cartoon was more blunt. It depicted John Bull standing before a judge and flanked by two wives, one Arab and one Jewish. The judge advises him, “If you are sincerely looking for peace you must divorce your second wife [the Jewess], because your marriage to her is illegal.”71
The Arabs were turning the charge of criminality back upon their accusers, and were thereby engaging the crimino-national critique: the nation reserved to itself the right to name the criminal, whether the criminal fell within or outside its ambit. To the extent that a “period of crime and disorder” was acknowledged by Arab nationalist groups (as it was by the Arab Women of Jaffa), it was a matter for the people to sort out—a process that began with diagnosing the external cause of the internal disorder, which was the long-standing, ongoing British and Zionist colonial penetration of Palestine.72
While the Arabs remonstrated against British policy and the means employed to enforce it, the mainstream British press continued to regard the revolt as a largely criminal affair, although this line of argument showed signs of faltering. The term “Arab revolt” appeared for the first time in The Times’ coverage on 20 June, but it made no difference with regard to the paper’s crime thesis; the same article marveled at Lord Winterton’s minority opinion in a House of Commons debate that “the Arab revolt . . . was a national movement, not mere banditry,” a view which led him to propose “the startling theory that nationalists were entitled to use all means, short of violence, to hold up the Government.”73
The Spectator’s coverage was more discriminating, partly because more of the column space it devoted to Palestine consisted of letters to the editor. Even its professionally authored “think pieces,” however, gave evidence of a working hypothesis approach to understanding the revolt. A paragon of this genre was the 17 July article by William Blumberg, titled “The Arab and Zionist Policy.” Blumberg contended that it was “no use trying to make capital out of Arab lawlessness as the Zionists do.” “Revolutions,” he continued, “have their own logic.” He thus pointed out what The Times had ignored: once the language of revolt and revolution was in play, talk of criminality became much more complicated. But the “proof of good will” that Blumberg suggested the Arabs rightly required was not that of the British but rather that of the Zionists. After all, setting aside the fact that the Arabs had done so for two decades, the British could not “concede demands raised at the point of the revolver.”74 Rather, Blumberg pressed the burden of surrendering to violence onto the Jews. The British position with regard to force was, once again, essentially invisible in its moral dimension. The very idea of the illegitimacy of British
