The End of the Revolt, 1939

This chapter discusses the collapse of the Palestinian Great Revolt in 1939. It focuses on the civil war that wracked the Arab community of Palestine in 1938–39, including the Husayni-Nashashibi and other rivalries, the anti-rebel "peace bands," and the British implication in both. It also details the intensive British military effort to crush the rebel court system and to expel or exterminate the various rebel leaders. The chapter goes on to analyze the St. James Conference and the British effort to give a democratic cast to what was, in fact, a planned reversal on the Balfour Declaration. Finally, the chapter explores the consequences of that reversal for Arabs, Britons, and Jews in Palestine.

British Causal Primacy and the Origins of the Palestinian Great Revolt

This chapter discusses the political and economic background of the strike and revolt of April 1936 and the months following. It addresses both the contemporaneous Arab, British, and Jewish understandings of that background and the subsequent scholarly evaluation of those understandings. It argues that much of the literature on the rebellion has repeated an analytic error that is endemic to the British and Zionist archives: namely, the failure to reckon with the causal primacy of British violence in bringing about the rebellion. This oversight has entailed the marginalization of the Arab Palestinian voices that have sought to draw attention to the role of British violence in bringing about and sustaining the rebellion. A crimino-national reading of the British and Zionist archival materials relating to 1936–39 unearths evidence that bolsters the traditional Arab view of the revolt's underlying causes.

The British Awakening to the Military Nature of the Rebellion, August–October 1936

This chapter discusses the divergence, in the latter weeks of the rebellion, between the British public and private portrayals of the revolt. British public statements finally fully converged with the Zionist portrayal of the rebellion (the strong crimino-national claim). Yet, under the influence of military intelligence, British private assessments of the rebel movement proved subtler. They suggested that rather than being mere bandits, the rebels were something closer to "soldier-bandits," a sort of hybrid criminal-nationalist. The chapter discusses the discursive logic of this divergence, arguing that London's pro-nationalist pretensions in its Middle Eastern mandates hamstrung its capacity to characterize the rebellion as a large-scale outbreak of crime and forced it to pin the criminal charge upon a cabal of pseudo-national criminals (the Arab Higher Committee). The chapter goes on to detail a crisis within the British government over whether to declare martial law in Palestine and the logic of the eventual British decision against declaring martial law.

“The Policy Is the Criminal”

This chapter charts the struggle between the Arabs, on the one hand, and the British and the Jews, on the other, to characterize one another as criminals and themselves as nationalists. It explores in more detail the Zionist claim that the rebellion was the work of a criminal cabal working at the behest of the Arab Higher Committee, including that claim's recurrence in the scholarship on the revolt. This exploration reveals that the "strong crimino-national claim" of the Zionists was without merit and appeared plausible only to the extent that British violence in Palestine was regarded as a priori legitimate (as it was by most Britons and Jews). The chapter goes on to detail the Arab response to the British and Zionist attempts to portray the revolt as a "crime wave," which was to reverse the charge. It then discusses Arab attacks on Jewish noncombatants and how Zionist leaders mobilized these atrocities to bolster the "crime wave" framing of the rebellion.

Introduction

This chapter sketches the historiography of the Palestinian Great Revolt of 1936–39 and introduces a new, crimino-national perspective on the rebellion. This perspective explores the substantial but hitherto neglected area of overlap between the national and the criminological dimensions of British imperial discourse in Palestine. The chapter argues that a crimino-national perspective fundamentally changes both our empirical and our theoretical understanding of the rebellion by drawing new facts to light and by illuminating the state-building dimensions of the insurgent movement. Where earlier histories have suggested that British violence in Palestine was causally reactive, a crimino-national reading suggests that it was, in fact, causally primary. As important, where earlier histories presented the Palestinian rebel movement as seeking the destruction of Zionism and the expulsion of the British, a crimino-national reading suggests that the rebel movement was also a constructive enterprise centered on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

New Policy, New Crime

This chapter details London's two-pronged strategy for undoing the immense rebel gains of 1938. The first prong was to significantly tighten British control over the Arab population of Palestine through a restrictive regime of travel permits and identification cards and also through violent repression in the villages and major cities. The second prong was to abort the Balfour Declaration and wind down Jewish immigration into Palestine, so as to drain away support for the rebel movement by at least partially meeting popular Palestinian demands. In addition to the military effort this strategy entailed, it also involved a significant propaganda effort aimed mainly at the British public. This effort sought to rationalize the dramatic British reversal involved in negotiating with Arab Palestinian leaders that London had hitherto deemed criminals.

Towards a Rebel Parastate

This chapter discusses the rebel effort to construct a Palestinian state, a project that reached its height in 1938. It details the extent to which competing rebel commanders were able to set aside their differences and come together for the greater national good. In addition, the chapter discusses the proliferation of a rebel court system, which was integrated under a high court and operated throughout Palestine. These courts conducted their business in the stead of the mandatory courts, which the Arab Palestinian population had abandoned en masse. The chapter further discusses the tendency of scholars to gloss over this rebel state-building effort and also to underplay the British role in crushing the nascent Palestinian state.

Conclusion

The chapter summarizes the findings of the book, suggesting that it has bolstered three main contentions. First, the British were causally implicated in the Palestinian Great Revolt at a fundamental level and in a manner that prior histories of the rebellion have failed to appreciate. Second, the British were afflicted in Palestine as much by their blinkered imperial vision as they were by rebelling Arabs. And third, rather than deconstructing the British and Zionist crimino-national discourse vis-à-vis the Palestinians, the literature on the revolt has tended to reproduce that discourse. The chapter then proceeds to argue that in addition to revising the scholarly understanding of the Great Revolt, the crimino-national model has both synchronic and diachronic implications, the former relating to other interwar rebellions and the latter to the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The crimino-national model may likewise shed light on our understanding of such contemporary terrorist movements as al-Qaida.

The Peel Commission Reconsidered

This chapter argues for a revised understanding of the circumstances occasioning the rebellion's recommencement in October 1937, one taking into account the policy of “vicarious punishment” that the British initiated in the aftermath of the publication of the report of the Palestine Royal Commission. The chapter also argues for a revised understanding of the most prominent British critic of partition, the Foreign Office’s George Rendel. Rendel’s posthumous reputation has suffered dearly at the hands of Elie Kedourie, who characterized his anti-partitionist stance, as well as his critique of the British criminalization of the revolt, as the peculiar preoccupations of a delusional mind. The chapter argues, on the contrary, that Rendel was among the least deluded of British high officials in 1937–38. While his estimation of regional Arab loyalty to Palestine proved erroneous, his judgment regarding the folly of British repression in Palestine proved sound. The primary consequence of increased British repression in 1937–38 was the strengthening of popular Arab support for the revolt.

“A Wave of Crime”

This chapter begins by observing a difference between the British and Zionist crimino-national framings of the rebellion. The British initially portrayed both the Arab work stoppage and violence as criminal behavior, but they acknowledged that the strike was widely popular among Arab Palestinians. The Zionists went further, insisting that the strike and the revolt were both the work of a criminal Arab leadership, which had coerced the docile Arab masses into supporting them. The chapter goes on to chart the steady British drift toward the Zionist position and to detail the political circumstances that occasioned this drift. Chief among these circumstances was a dilemma. The British had predicated their post-WWI occupation of the Middle East on London's support of the national aspirations of the region's inhabitants. They were therefore poorly positioned to recognize His Majesty's role in stifling those aspirations.