The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ by the unrehearsed quality, as well as the ubiquity, of the British conception of Arab political agitation from this point forward.

      Consider, as a specimen of this conception, the words of the British director of education in Palestine, Humphrey Bowman. In a private letter dated 17 May, Bowman wrote vexedly of Arab violence, sabotage, and shop closures. Imagining the words of a more responsible Arab leadership, he ventriloquized: “They ought now to say to us: ‘We have shown you we are honest and determined by keeping the strike going for four weeks. We have now done enough. Send your Royal Commission, and we will gladly abide by its results.’”¹⁶ Bowman’s faith in British commissions and distrust of the Arab “nation’s demands” hinted at a broader British logic, as did his comments a few days later, on 24 May. These began with a list meant to illustrate that “crime has been serious throughout the country.” It included “not so many murders, but shootings at buses and even at troops; bombs; telephone lines cut; railway sleepers moved; demonstrations daily.”¹⁷ His next entry, on 31 May, deemed the killing of Constable Bird “cold blooded murder.”¹⁸

      That Bowman brought military-style attacks on government security forces and infrastructure, not to mention political demonstrations, under the same “crime” umbrella as murder was not anomalous. Wauchope himself, in a 2 June memorandum to the colonial secretary, coupled the forces of British coercion with ordinary citizens, noting that “murders of innocent people and of police are almost of daily occurrence.”¹⁹ Nor was Bowman’s seemingly cynical view of Palestinian nationalism an aberration. The major British papers took a similar line. The Times of London reported that the Arabs, far from having clear-sightedly identified the futility of nonviolent protest against the British, were mired in a fog of invidious rumor, which found them resorting to “rowdy . . . demonstration[s]” and general “unruliness.”²⁰ They were also demanding a “national government,” a term The Times, like Bowman, disparaged via quotation.²¹ Nevertheless, the paper did acknowledge that another British commission of inquiry was probably pointless, as the fundamental problem in Palestine was the impossibility of establishing a Jewish “home” without infringing Arab rights.²² These rights, however, clearly did not rise to a national status, as evidenced by The Times’ recommendation the next day that the British might simply have to “crush” the Arab “unrest and disorder.”²³

      When the punitive village searches began in late May, The Times promptly presented them as an unfortunate necessity.²⁴ On 30 May, a telling descriptor debuted in its coverage: “A military patrol on the railway to the north of Lydda had a lively affray last night with brigands, who opened fire on it from both sides.”²⁵ The Times, then, had also begun referring without qualification to coordinated assaults on government forces as the actions of ordinary criminals. On 3 June it deemed the sabotage of British infrastructure in Gaza the work of “gangs.”²⁶ On 8 June, it wrote that Arab “bandits” had engaged the Cameron Highlanders in a four-hour battle!²⁷

      While the right-leaning Spectator also pointed out the vanity of another British commission and even acknowledged “the many injuries and illegalities done to the Arabs,” it too implicitly downgraded the Arab standing in Palestine to something less than fully national, writing on 29 May:

      Whatever view be held on the broad question of the respective rights of Jews and Arabs in Palestine, there must be unanimity on one point, that the Mandatory Power will be abdicating its function if it fails to suppress with all the force at its command the Arab mobs who are resorting to destructive violence in Jerusalem and Jaffa and other centres.²⁸

      As with the government intelligence reports, the paper readily conflated this “mob” violence with the broader political instability, emphasizing, “The disturbance in Palestine is mainly of the nature of mob-violence.”²⁹ The government’s breaking of the strike by force was therefore “necessary and proper.”³⁰

      A number of the Spectator’s readers took issue with these prescriptions. Among them was E. A. Ghoury of the Palestine Arab Party (whose president, Jamal Husayni, sat on the AHC). In a 12 June letter to the editor, Ghoury proposed that the behavior of British forces in Palestine—which included “beatings, destruction of property, insulting of women, invading homes,” and so on—might usefully be juxtaposed with the attention the British press paid to “the cases of ‘Arab snipers, marauders, rebels, bands,’ and similar names given to the young Arabs who are trying to defend their rights and liberate their country.”³¹ He likewise told a British audience at Chatham House that the revolt was “not the act of terrorists or marauders or snipers,” but was, rather, “a revolution” seeking “justice.”³²

      But Ghoury’s minority report could hardly be heard above the din of mutually reinforcing British coverage. The Daily Herald featured headlines such as “Arab Murder Campaign” (14 May) and “Gangsters in the Holy City” (19 May). Presaging Dill’s later assessment, the Daily Telegraph editorialized in its 18 May edition, “What began as mere common crime . . . has [evolved] into a political exhibition of rueful hatred.”³³

      MODERATE ELEMENTS

      Although his was an audible voice in the chorus of criminalization, Wauchope was alert to the difficulties this chorus might create for law enforcement. Thus, while describing attacks on British forces as “murder,” his 2 June memo to the colonial secretary also cautioned against adopting measures designed to “intimidate [the] Arab population sufficiently to bring lawless acts to an end.” The high commissioner thus elided, as would GOC Dill, the fact that His Majesty’s forces had already begun terrorizing Arab villagers. He nevertheless presciently advised that harsh tactics risked “alienat[ing] all moderate elements in this country, perhaps permanently.”³⁴

      According to Air Vice Marshal Peirse, a few days before Wauchope’s memo, on 30 May, the inspector general of police—along with Peirse himself, the other architect of the village search policy—relayed instructions to him from unspecified superiors to “modify the intensity” of the searches. Thus, he recorded despairingly, did “the only measure available for coercing the rebels [slip] away from us.”³⁵ The record suggests, however, that this measure’s indispensability in reality proved too precious to relinquish, official sanctioning aside.

      The flow of reports of British brutality did not fall off in early June, after the supposed termination of severe measures. On 18 June, the AHC sent a telegram to the high commissioner, voicing more of the familiar complaints: “. . . Army men beat unarmed Arab villagers [and] destroy[ed] furniture [and] food supplies.”³⁶ Two days later, Wauchope assured Yitzhak Ben Zvi, the chair of the Jewish National Council (Va’ad Leumi), that “where responsibility [for Arab attacks] can be fixed on any village severe measures are being taken.”³⁷ Reports of such measures appeared contemporaneously in the Arab press, and included charges of theft, the destruction of food, and “ill treatment” of villagers.³⁸ On 23 June, the deputy inspector general of police wrote in a CID report that “summary action against certain villages” had “aroused considerable resentment and criticism.” This took on added significance in light of his subsequent observation that “it would not appear that up to the present more than a small proportion of the villagers have taken arms against the forces of Government.”³⁹ Peirse characterized the 24 June search of villages in the vicinity of the routinely sabotaged Jerusalem-Lydda railway line as having had “a good effect”—the familiar euphemism for terrorizing villagers into obedience.⁴⁰ By then, the government had conducted eighty-one village searches, nearly half of which had failed, not surprisingly, to recover any weapons.⁴¹ In July, the high commissioner informed the colonial secretary that there were “accusations of undue military severity throughout the country.”⁴² He felt obliged to begin his 7 July address to the Palestinian public with a reference to the “misconception . . . that Government uses force wantonly and ruthlessly.”⁴³ The next СКАЧАТЬ