Jerusalem was surely one of the glittering prizes of the
Great War, won by the 'stout hearts and sharp swords' which Lord Birkenhead
would later commend to the under- graduates of Glasgow University. When General
Allenby captured the city in December 1917, he dispelled much of the gloom of
the war's grimmest year. The humility of his entry into the old city through
the Jaffa gate, on foot, trumped the earlier gaudy processions of European emperors
for whom the wall had been barbarously breached. Allenby was a Christian
conqueror, and thou he was to prove a sage governor in Egypt after the war, the
salient fact for Palestine of his march to Damascus was conquest. Britain
occupied Palestine by force of arms and exercised a conqueror's rights.
The chief of these was the distribution of the conquered –
or, as the leaders of the Arab national movement hoped, liberated – territory.
The discrepancy between conquest and liberation was ultimately to prove
disastrous. For the Arab fighters who advanced out of the Hejaz with T.E.
Lawrence, the goal was Syria. Palestine as a concept scarcely figured in their
mental map of the new Arab state. Though Jerusalem was one of the three most
sacred sites of lslam, negotiations between the Arabs and the British centred
on the great Syrian cities, Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus. Sherif Hussein
almost casually agreed to the exclusion of 'portions of Syria lying to the west
of' these cities from the planned kingdom.
It was Britain which, in trying to limit the French sphere
of influence in the Levant, and to protect the Suez Canal, created modern
Palestine. First, Britain detached the Holy Land from the French zone by
declaring it an area of 'international' responsibility. Next, it secured
control of the area on both banks of the Jordan as a League of Nations Mandate.
Finally it divided the Mandate into two, Palestine on the west bank and
Transjordan on the east. Simultaneously it confirmed the special status of
Palestine through the policy announced in the Balfour Declaration, of using
Britain's 'best endeavours to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people'. The motives for this fateful undertaking,
and the ambiguity of its terms, have been ceaselessly debated ever since; what
is certain is that the British government believed that it had the power as
well as the right to carry it out. It saw Palestine as a tabula rasa, ready to
be made new. In adding its equally resonant proviso, that 'nothing shall be
done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine', it plainly discounted the possibility that such
rights might come to include that of Palestinian national identity.
What baffled and finally broke the British endeavour to
implement the Mandate was precisely the emergence of Palestinian nationalism.
Why, one is driven to ask, did Britain fail to recognise what seems so obvious
with hindsight? The answer is that the emergence of national consciousness was
an erratic process. The fury of Arab hostility to Zionism, taking shape in the
alarming riots of 1920 and 1921, and spreading almost into general civil war in
1929, now look like clear enough indications. Yet at the time they were not
unmistakable. Arab resistance was sporadic, incoherent, and negative. As
Britain constructed Palestine, so it created Palestinian nationalism.
Palestinian identity was forged in fear of the Jewish domination implied by the
Mandate. The process was accelerated, ironically, by the very caution with
which the Mandatory power treated any possible infringement of Arab rights –
caution which Jews saw as anti-Zionist, if not anti-Semitic. There was indeed a
striking shift from the wild leap of the Balfour Declaration to the
circumspection with which the government trod thereafter. Here was an imperial
power which had become acutely sensitive to the religious prejudices of its
fifty million Moslem subjects. This sensitivity did not, of course, reflect
empathy with Islam: rather the reverse, fear of the latent fanaticism of Moslem
peoples and their propensity to mass violence or jihad.
By the time Sir Herbert Samuel was installed as the First
High Commissioner in 1920, the strict limits on Britain's room for political
manoeuvre were already evident. Samuel looked to be an inspired choice: the
very fact of his being Jewish must, it was thought, reassure the Zionists of
Britain's goodwill, while his unimpeachable probity as a British administrator
must reassure the Arabs that they would be treated fairly. But Samuel found
that the communities were already so polarised that his reputation was not
enough for the second task, which seemed after the 1920 riots to be the
overriding priority. Within a year of his arrival, still more serious riots
impelled him to announce restrictions on Jewish immigration, henceforth to be
governed by the 'economic absorbtive capacity' of Palestine – a fruitful seed
of future contention.
The attempt envisaged in the Mandate to create bi-ethnic
administrative and legislative institutions nonetheless failed. There was no
Arab equivalent to the Jewish Agency, the officially recognised body which
fostered the economic, educational and medical infrastructure of the Jewish
community in Palestine (Yishuv). Arab leaders refused to accept the implication
that the Arabs, as the majority, should be equated with the Jewish minority.
The Supreme Moslem Council, which was established after the 1921 riots as a
conciliatory gesture, bore no resemblance to the Arab Agency which Samuel had
hoped to institute. Arabs joined the British administration and police, but
could never reach the highest ranks. By contrast, the Jewish Agency quickly
developed into a virtual state apparatus, giving the Yishuv organisational
capacities which the Arabs were never able to match.
The precarious balancing act between promoting Jewish
aspirations and protecting Arab rights paralysed the government in face of the
worst crisis of the 1920s, the conflict over the' 'Wailing Wall' in Jerusalem
in l929. Communal violence reached catastrophic proportions. Yet even then, the
British belief in the necessity and longevity of their presence in Palestine
was scarcely if at all undermined. Like India, Palestine fascinated its
European rulers. 'There is no promotion after Jerusalem', wrote its first
British governor, Ronald Storrs, later sleepwalking as governor of Cyprus in
the 1930s. For Storrs it was an enchanted city, whose awakening into the
twentieth century he oversaw with a devotion and success unequalled until the
reign of Mayor Kollck after 1967. For the rest of the administration, the
enchantment persisted; above all in the person of Sir Arthur Wauchope, High
Commissioner from 1931 to 1938. Appointed by Ramsay MacDonald as a general 'who
does it with his head not his feet', Wauchope was an ardent believer in the
possibility of consensus in Palestine. Though earlier efforts to construct a
bi-ethnic constitution had failed, he persevered with the aim of giving the
Arabs a real measure of the self-government promised by the League of Nations.
In 1934 he set up municipal councils in the larger towns,
and in 1935 he launched his greatest project, a legislative council with an
Arab majority. The ignominious fate of this initiative was to be rejected not
only by both communities in Palestine, hut also by the House of Commons in
London. This last rejection was fatal to the scheme itself, and also to the
credibility of the Palestine government, already undermined by frequent policy
reversals over Jewish immigration. Local resistance might have been overcome by
a more resolute policy. Arabs at first refused to countenance the proposal,
because the legislative council would have no power to question the terms of
the Mandate; but their attitude softened as the extent of Zionist hostility to
it became clear. The scheme plainly offered Arab leaders a basis for creating a
national political structure, and for containing Zionism. Its collapse left
them in a state of unorganised arousal. A latent power struggle between the
representatives of the two leading Arab families, Raghib Bey Nashashibi (former
Mayor of Jerusalem) and Hajj Amin al-Husseini (Mufti of Jerusalem and president
of the Supreme Moslem Council) showed that unity was still a distant prospect.
The fact that the Mufti, who was by far the most influential Arab political
figure, derived his authority from religious sources, clearly showed that Arab
politics were not following the British pattern.
On April 15th, 1936, two Jews were murdered by Arab
'bandits' (the official term) on the road between Tulkarm and Nablus. Next day
two Arabs were killed near the Jewish town of Petah Tikvah. The funeral of the
Jews in Tel Aviv on April 17th produced, as such events often did, serious
violence, and in neighbouring Jaffa two days later dozens of Jews were attacked
in the streets. Nine were beaten, stoned or stabbed to death, and killings
continued over the following days. Police had to open fire to keep an Arab
crowd out of Tel Aviv, and armoured cars were brought in. The situation was
grim, but it did not yet seem unprecedented: indeed, it seemed all too
familiar. A new kind of Arab organisation was, however, emerging. A 'National
Committee' met in Nablus on the 20th and declared a general strike. The strike
call was repeated by national committees in other towns, and finally by a
Higher Arab Committee in Jerusalem on the 25th.
The Higher Committee spelled out the Arab demands: stoppage
of Jewish immigration, prohibition of land sales to Jews, and establishment of
representative government. The strike rapidly solidified; the port of Jaffa
ceased to function, road transport seized up (though rail workers did not
strike), and a tax boycott began. Violence became more systematic: Jewish
buildings, crops and plantations were special targets. Most ominously, in May
and June armed bands appeared in the hills of Samaria and started to carry out
bigger ambushes and attacks.
The question for the government, and also for the Yishuv,
was how to react to this Arab activity. Was it a genuine national movement, or
a series of local disturbances, fomented by agitators and criminal bandits?
Zionist leaders divided on this: David Ben-Gurion took the former view, Berl
Katznelson the latter. The British view was also confused from the start.
Sympathy with Arab fears of Zionist domination went along with paternalistic
assumptions of Arab in- capacity. Plentiful evidence of intimidation could be
found to confirm the instinctive belief that the strike was not spontaneous.
The culprits were as usual 'fanatics', 'criminals', and 'professional
agitators'. The British found it hard to accept that such undesirables might
represent popular sentiment. Moslem 'fanaticism' was an especially alien threat
which seems to have poisoned, in British eyes, the cause with which it was
inextricably linked.
The result was a complacency which is astonishing in
retrospect. Though emergency powers (the 1931 Palestine (Defence) Order in
Council) were invoked across the whole country as early as April 19th, Wauchope
consistently refused to permit military action against the armed bands. Troops
were called in as guards or to replace the British contingent of the police,
who were relieved of their ordinary duties – which often involved an irksome
subordination to Arab officers – so that they could pursue the rebels, without
noticeable effect. The bands continued to multiply throughout the summer, and
their activities increasingly resembled guerrilla warfare. The term 'rebellion'
was often used within the administration to describe what was going on, but
quite casually: more often the violence was fragmented – sniping, assault,
abduction, arson, and so on – and loosely lumped together as 'disorders' or
'disturbances'. This negative view governed the official response until
September 1936, with one spectacular exception.
In the last fortnight of June the army blasted its way into
the old city of Jaffa, the epicentre of the rebellion, with a massive series of
demolitions. Two wide roads were driven through the 'rabbit warren' of narrow
streets and blind-walled houses so typical of middle-eastern cities and so
hostile to western notions of order. There was almost no resistance: after some
sniping had been silenced by a deluge of gunfire, the population watched the
demolitions with evident incomprehension or fatalism, and Jaffa remained quiet
for several months. This crushing operation followed a long tussle between the
civil and military authorities about the need for firm measures to restore
public security. The army's view was that government must assert itself to win
public confidence. The government conceded, but contrived to wriggle out of the
military posture by disingenuously attributing the demolitions to public health
requirements. This compromise was to persist as the months of conflict dragged
into years.
Jaffa foreshadowed the rough military methods which were
finally to be used when the rebellion reached its peak in autumn 1938. Even
then, however, martial law was never formally declared, and the relationship
between the civil and military authorities was never wholly harmonious.
Aversion to military rule was, of course, part of British political culture –
albeit less evident in the colonies – but it seems to have been most pronounced
in Palestine. Wauchope's dominance as High Commissioner was heightened by the
fact that as a general he out- ranked all the military staff in Palestine, even
after the London government forced the issue in September by announcing the
imminent proclamation of martial law, and despatching Major-General John Dill
with a full division of troops to enforce it.
Compiled by Abdul Almotaleb
Abdul Almotaleb,a Palestinian by birth lives in Cairo Egypt from Cairo University is a historian,writer and blogger.
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