behavior among the Arabs. He reported to Thomas that he had “initiated proceedings under the Criminal Law (Seditious Offences) Ordinance” against the issuing of a manifesto by the Arab Transport Strike Committee, which called upon Arab government employees to stay home from work.56 In short order, he would begin arresting and incarcerating large numbers of Arab journalists, most of whom advocated for civil disobedience, not violence.57 In the meantime, Wauchope urged members of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) (about which more below) not to support the strike, and suggested, in all sincerity, that they send another delegation to London.58
In a second respect, however, the British evaluation of the events of April 1936 and after diverged from that of the Jewish Agency. While the Jewish Agency and many Jewish witnesses on the ground regarded the strike as a vacuous, pseudo-national gesture on the part of the Arab leadership, to which the Arab population at large was averse, Wauchope stressed in a 4 May memorandum, “The hands of the leaders are being forced by extremists and by the fact that the whole of the Arab population is behind the general strike.”59 The “extremists” he had in mind were the transport strikers, whose manifesto called explicitly for “a peaceful general strike.”60 Thomas communicated Wauchope’s interpretation of events to the cabinet on 13 May, along with the high commissioner’s reassertion (in response to earlier cabinet objections) of the need for the British government to appoint a commission to investigate the disturbances. Such a gesture, he insisted, “might enable the Arab leaders to call off the strike and the present unrest.” The cabinet conceded Wauchope’s point, but insisted that he make the appointment of a commission conditional on the restoration of “law and order,” and that he announce this publicly.61
The high commissioner and his superiors were now agreed that the Arab leadership needed an excuse to call off the strike. They thus regarded it as a popular phenomenon—not, as the Jewish Agency maintained, as a ruse foisted upon the Arabs by their unscrupulous representatives. As Wauchope explained to Thomas on 16 May, “A demand was pressed upon [the Arab leaders] from all Arab quarters in Palestine that the strike should continue.” The leadership was, he emphasized, “powerless to stop the strike unless [Jewish] immigration is suspended.”62 The RAF—which held supreme command over the armed forces in the mandate until September 1936—issued an intelligence summary for April 1936, which likewise concluded that the strike, having begun in Jaffa and spread to other towns, initially “lacked any central control.”63 The Arab “leaders” were following the strikers.
This was not news to the Arabs themselves, whose understanding of the circumstances of mid-1936—their nature and history—differed markedly from that of the Jews and the British. Three developments were especially salient for Palestinian Arabs in 1935–36. The first was a new, unprecedentedly large influx of European Jews—62,000 in 1935—who were fleeing the Nazi menace in Central Europe.64 The Arab leadership in Palestine, operating with effectively universal popular sympathy, had for nearly two decades advanced three demands to the British: halt Jewish immigration, terminate Jewish land purchases, and establish a democratic government reflecting the country’s Arab majority. As of 1935, the British had acceded to none of these demands, and the largest annual wave of Jewish immigration in Palestinian history was a painful reminder of that fact. This circumstance was aggravated by a simultaneous slump in Arab wages and surge in Arab unemployment.65
The second development pertained to the second of the perennial Arab demands, Jewish land purchases. As with Jewish immigration, the figures for Jewish acquisition of land in Palestine peaked in the period preceding the strike and accompanying violence of 1936. By 1930, Jews held over one million dunums (four million acres) of land in the country. At 62,000 dunums, Jewish purchases in 1934 were greater than the previous three years combined, and they leapt to 73,000 in 1935.66 Notes Ann Mosely Lesch, “In 1935, [the] high commissioner asserted that the fear that the Jewish community is ‘eating up the land’ is felt ‘in every town and village in Palestine.’”67
The third significant development for Palestinian Arabs in 1935–36 was the nascent flowering of a public sphere, due primarily to the bootstrapping organizational efforts of the Istiqlal (Independence) Party, beginning in 1932.68 As Weldon Matthews has shown, the Istiqlal played on and exacerbated the credibility problem of the traditional Arab leadership, whose fruitless protests and diplomatic missions the broader Arab population disdained. From late 1933 to the autumn of 1935, however, the Istiqlal and other youth-oriented Arab political parties were largely dormant. It was Jaffa port workers’ interception of a Tel Aviv-bound shipment of weapons concealed in barrels of cement that reinvigorated grassroots Arab political networks in October 1935.69 By then, Arab youths, intellectuals, and workers had become seasoned political activists, garnering press coverage for the national cause and staging popular demonstrations that brought pressure to bear upon the traditional Arab leadership.70 The same elements compelled elite Palestinian families to set aside their differences and, in the days after 19 April, to form the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), with the mufti of Jerusalem (al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni) as president.71
The Husaynis had for generations occupied the upper echelon of Jerusalem politics, and the British (like the Ottomans before them) often depended on the family in their dealings with the local Arab community.72 In 1912, the young Amin al-Husayni enrolled in the famous al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he first became involved in the anti-Zionist politics that would become his legacy.73 His relationship with the British in subsequent decades teetered between harmony and hostility, but not to the point of disinheriting him of the mediating role London had long devolved upon his family. And thus on 21 April, the president of the newly constituted Arab Higher Committee assured the high commissioner that he would “do his best to prevent [the] continuance of disorder.”74 Wauchope would regard the mufti and the AHC as a “moderate influence on more extreme leaders” for some time yet. The AHC, in the high commissioner’s view, was “not directly concerned with [the] organisation of strikes,” which had been thrust upon it by the Arab masses.75
BREAD, DIGNITY, AND GANGSTERS
While the AHC awkwardly attempted to choreograph the actions of a popular movement it had neither initiated nor inspired, the Committee was in ideological accord with this movement on two points. The first was that the Arabs of Palestine were due the same legal recognition as the Arabs of Iraq, Egypt, and every other Arab territory: they were entitled to national independence. A number of AHC representatives stated this to the high commissioner and the chief secretary during a meeting at the government house in Jerusalem on the evening of 5 May. The mufti, for example, explained, “The Palestinians are not inferior in any way to the Iraqi or the Egyptian people, and while these two countries either have had or are about to have their rights recognized, the Jews are opposed to the slightest measure of reform that may be proposed in Palestine.”76
The AHC’s secretary and Istiqlal representative, ʿAwni Bey ʿAbd al-Hadi, then spoke. The ʿAbd al-Hadis were prominent landowners in Jenin and Nablus, and ʿAwni Bey—who had studied law in France, helped to found the Istiqlal party, and been appointed the AHC’s liaison to the locally organized national committees—was a prominent figure in his own right.77 Like the mufti, ʿAwni Bey situated the local conflict in the larger Arab struggle for independence:
While our neighbours in Syria and Egypt are fighting for their independence, the Arabs of Palestine are struggling for their bread. The dignity of the Arabs in this country and their freedom are exposed to danger, and we consider that it is the sacred duty of every one of us to defend his endangered bread and dignity.78
A few weeks later, on 30 May, the high commissioner and the chief secretary met with the mayors of major Palestinian towns and cities, who hammered away at the same theme. Allowing Jewish immigration to proceed apace, the mayors declared, posed a “danger to [Palestinian Arabs’] future existence” and constituted a “betrayal of . . . Arab rights.”79 Halting immigration would terminate the disorders.
