in their handling of the native, and particularly the Arab, population.”104 In a subsequent letter, he disclosed that he possessed reliable reports that the repression was still worse in Palestine’s northern districts.105 The ubiquity of this unruly behavior led the archdeacon to surmise that the police had adopted a new “method” for dealing with Arabs. He dated its inception to one week before the death of Constable Robert Bird on 28 May at the hands of Arab rebels in the Old City of Jerusalem—an important detail, as Bird’s killing served as “the usual defence” of police brutality.106 Not incidentally, Bird’s assailants appear to have targeted him in retaliation for the earlier British killing of an Arab man.107 Similarly, a fortnight later, on 12 June, rebels attacked and wounded the British assistant police superintendent, Alan Sigrist, a man whose savagery towards Jerusalem’s Arabs was legendary.108
The archdeacon’s estimate of the introduction of tough new measures against the Arab community was on the mark. Duff had seen evidence of such tactics in mid-May. And by 24–25 May, police and troops were raiding villages near Nazareth and Gaza, on the assumption that they quartered men who had mounted attacks on government forces over the previous two days. These raids, a War Office report disclosed, “took the form of searches for arms and wanted men by troops and police and, being fairly severe in nature, had also a punitive effect which began to produce most satisfactory results in the more truculent villages.”109 The statement that the searches “had also a punitive effect” was disingenuous. In reality, punishing villagers was the searches’ primary purpose, while weapons and wanted men were secondary concerns. As Air Vice-Marshal R. E. C. Peirse—the military commander in Palestine and the co-architect of the village search policy—divulged in a top-secret report: “Ostensibly these searches were undertaken to find arms and wanted persons; actually the measures adopted by the police on the lines of similar Turkish methods, were punitive.”110 In early June, the new colonial secretary, William Ormsby-Gore, spoke with Kenneth Williams, the editor of the publication Great Britain and the East and the author of a book about Ibn Saʿud.111 Williams had received information from two sources of whose “bona fides” and “reliability and good judgment” he was certain, and who reported that “British troops in Palestine had been committing ‘excesses’ against the Arabs.” He stated further that his informants “were under the impression that the conduct of the troops had the approval of the High Commissioner.”112
While the colonial secretary assured Williams that Wauchope would not have authorized such tactics, the testimony of Duff and the archdeacon, the report of the War Office, and Peirse’s disclosures all point to the widespread British adoption of “Turkish methods” in this early period. Wauchope’s supposed ignorance of the fact warrants closer scrutiny. Echoing Ormsby-Gore, Charles Smith writes that Wauchope was “enraged” on learning of the “Turkish methods” being employed in the villages, and that he ordered Peirse and the inspector general of police, Roy Spicer, to “moderate the searches.”113 This occurred on 30 May, according to Peirse’s own account.114 It is curious, however, that Wauchope’s private secretary, Thomas Hodgkin, wrote in a personal letter dated 28 May that he had taken the decision to resign his post the previous Sunday (24 May) to protest the “new repressive measures on the part of the Government.”115 The high commissioner’s private secretary, then, knew of the punitive searches on the day they supposedly began, and attributed them, without qualification, to “the Government” led by his boss. This renders implausible, though not impossible, the idea that Wauchope only learned of the harsh treatment later and was then scandalized.
Regardless, the brutality of the village searches was sufficiently rampant as of early June that it had engendered, according to Peirse, “a grave crisis with the [Arab] section” of the Palestine police, who considered the severe measures “repugnant.”116 In one instance, soldiers “searching” Qaqun, near Tulkarm, handled the village so harshly that its residents called the police in desperation. The Arab officers who responded were appalled by the scene they came upon, to the point that they began fighting with the soldiers, one of whom shot and killed a policeman.117 The dead man’s fellow officers resigned in protest.118 And within days, Arab policemen from several towns and villages convened a meeting in Jerusalem, which produced a series of demands to the general police authority. Among them: “Fair investigations into the crimes that British policemen have committed in light of recent events.”119
It is worth noting that while Peirse and the archdeacon’s chronologies indicated that the punitive searches began in the second half of May, a Jewish Agency summary of events from 7 May reported that “punitive posts”—“a most effective measure of teaching turbulent villages wisdom”—had already been installed in nine villages.120 This was two weeks prior to the appearance of the first Arab “gangs.”121
BRITISH VIOLENCE AND THE SCHOLARSHIP ON 1936
As the previous section demonstrates, the British began violently repressing the Arab population of Palestine within a month of the strike’s declaration. Yet, when government officials later surveyed the revolt’s first phase, they failed to factor this critical detail into their accounts. With a handful of exceptions—most notably, Matthew Hughes’s pioneering work on British violence in 1936–39—much of the English- and Hebrew-language literature on the revolt has repeated their error.122 Even Hughes writes that “the widespread use of punitive actions” in Palestine was “central to British military repression after 1936.”123 The scholarship more generally has taken for granted the truth of British officials’ assertions that the few punitive measures police and soldiers did adopt in late May 1936 were discontinued in early June. But accepting this claim requires that one discard an abundance of testimony—both Arab and British—to the contrary. It also obscures a basic component of the causal machinery that determined the revolt’s initial, and by extension ultimate, trajectory: namely, the mandatory itself.
Thus, Jacob Norris, who in a separate and very instructive capacity corrects the traditional understanding of the revolt, nevertheless writes that prior to October 1936, the British “[sought] to contain the rebel bands using orthodox civilian policing” (although the reality, as Georgina Sinclair notes, is that the British never successfully civilianized the Palestine police, which “remained essentially a paramilitary force”).124 In the same vein, Yehoyada Haim claims that Wauchope’s policy of “protecting lives and property without the use of repressive measures” was “applied by the British during most of the Revolt’s first phase.”125 Yoav Gelber writes that the British were “hesitant in the first phase” of the rebellion and that Wauchope “opposed a strong hand” approach to the disturbances.126 Michael J. Cohen comes close to recognizing the inaccuracy of such statements. He cites the Peirse report in support of his assertion that the village searches in the revolt’s first phase were “ineffective in the discovery of arms and were unpopular with the troops, against whom all kinds of charges were levelled.” But Cohen then neglects to place these facts in the context of Peirse’s admission that the real purpose of the searches was punitive—a truth which casts both the paucity of arms and the profusion of charges in a much different light. Cohen likewise takes it for granted that subsequent charges against British troops stemming from the village searches were mere “rumour and propaganda.”127 Yehoshua Porath, too, claims that “Government reaction to the strike and the revolt remained almost to the end rather reserved, in the hope that violence would die out and the strike would disintegrate before severe measures became necessary.”128 While acknowledging the existence of some “punitive measures” up to July, Porath goes so far as to state that a British “policy of no repression” existed in this period.129 Likewise, Tom Bowden, citing a War Office file, suggests that the British abided by an internal security protocol in Palestine in 1936 that did not involve “strict repressive measure[s].”130
The government reports contained in the file Bowden references paint a similar picture. They consist, among other things, of a synopsis of Lieutenant General John
