The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ order to avoid further alienating the population.”⁴⁴ If the authorities were still contemplating this course of action in early July, they had yet to undertake it, Peirse’s assurances notwithstanding. It is therefore little surprise that on the same day as Zaslany’s report, the AHC resolved to “complain to the League of Nations regarding terrorism and the killing of innocents by the British military” and “to prepare a report on the violent actions that occurred during searches.”⁴⁵ Nor is it surprising that in August, the writer of a Colonial Office memorandum referred to “the numerous complaints we [have] received about outrages by the troops.”⁴⁶ As the War Office itself ultimately acknowledged—almost in the same breath as it decried the Arabs’ “successful protests against ‘excesses’ by troops”—in the absence of an official policy of repression in the revolt’s first phase, “many repressive measures . . . crept in through force of circumstances . . . and mostly they were more severe in nature than would have been necessary . . . had a strong front been presented from the start.”⁴⁷

      Such measures, coupled with the government’s perpetual indifference to Arab demands, squandered whatever remained of its credibility among the Arab population, and placed “moderate elements” such as Arab government employees in an impossible position. On 30 June, Mustafa Bey al-Khalidi, a puisne judge at the supreme court in Jerusalem, along with 136 other Arab civil servants, signed a statement to the high commissioner and other top officials. Its essence was that the Arab officials could no longer usefully serve as a link between the British government and the Arab population, who with good reason disbelieved all of the officials’ assurances as to London’s good faith vis-à-vis commissions of inquiry and other such palliatives. British force would do nothing to change this situation, the statement insisted. In a poignant and representative passage, the officials asserted:

      It will be argued, we know . . . that Government cannot yield to violence without losing prestige. We would strongly have supported that argument had it not been for our belief that Government is itself in part to blame for the state of mind which has brought about the violence. We yield to no one in upholding order and authority as the foundation of all good government. But authority implies justice all round, and when justice is denied . . . then authority becomes undermined; and it shows a mistaken notion of prestige to suppose that it can be restored by the use of force.⁴⁸

      The statement prompted a delayed response from the president of the Committee of the Jewish Community of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, but one worth noting in the present context. It arrived on the high commissioner’s desk with the endorsements of an array of Jewish groups, along with a request that it be forwarded to the colonial secretary and to the League of Nations Mandates Commission.⁴⁹ The letter claimed that the 137 Arab signatories of the statement had “wholly or partly . . . identif[ied] themselves with the movement of civil disobedience and open revolt, with all its implications of cold-blooded murder, vandalism and the like.” The government, it argued, should have fired them. To do otherwise was to yet again countenance “brigands, marauders and ‘rebels.’” Incredibly, the Arab signatories had “even presume[d] . . . to protest against the Government’s policy of ‘repressions.’” In a word, the Arab statement was “patently illegal” and the Colonial Office erred in deigning to acknowledge it.⁵⁰

      THE AMBIVALENT ZIONIST DEPICTION OF THE

      PALESTINIAN LEADERSHIP

      The Jewish press beat the same belligerent drum. One newspaper, in a May special edition, proclaimed that the government had “surrendered the country to murderers.”⁵¹ On 19 June, the new colonial secretary, William Ormsby-Gore, relayed to Weizmann the high commissioner’s opinion that Jewish newspapers’ unrelenting calls for “ruthless repressive measures against the Arabs” had considerably “exacerbate[d] Arab feeling.”⁵² Indeed, two days prior, Filastin ran an article stating, “The Mandate authorities would clearly not have used these violent means were it not for the provocations of the Jews and the Jewish press.”⁵³

      As Ian Black documents, a great deal of the Arab-related content of the Zionist press in Palestine originated from the political department of the Jewish Agency.⁵⁴ This was true in particular of the Palestine Post.⁵⁵ The Post claimed from the first that the strike was the work of thugs. Its 27 April edition, for example, contained headlines such as “Strike forced on Arabs” and “Business as usual in spite of hooligans.” In a 29 April article titled “Deal with the instigator,” the paper declared that “the inspiration for the strike is undisguised intimidation,” and prayed that the British would not “lose themselves in admiration of what can easily be mistaken for a perfect organization, with its roots in some deep-seated grievance.” On 20 May, the Post opined that arrest figures (800 Arabs, fifty Jews) during the recent “wave of crime” furnished “a simple index to the part of the population which supplies the aggressor and the criminal.”⁵⁶ When the AHC publicly pled for nonviolent resistance to the British, the Post editorialized that the committee was either dissembling, or had “never exercised any real influence over [its] people” in the first place.⁵⁷

      This analysis contained a tension that was also present in the Jewish Agency arguments to Wauchope. These were resolute regarding the criminal nature of Arab political agitation in Palestine. When elaborating this claim, Zionists’ rhetorical weapon of first choice was to lay responsibility for all violence in the country at the doorstep of the national leadership, whose national credentials they simultaneously belittled. The evidence for this inference was lacking, however, as disclosed in Jewish Agency members’ private remarks (such as Ben Gurion’s and Shertok’s above) and in the Post’s desultory acknowledgement that the Arab leadership had, perhaps, sincerely advocated peaceful methods. But if they had, insisted the paper, that only exposed their “leadership” for the sham it was. Thus, to put it colloquially, the Arab leaders got it coming and going. They were either fomenting all violence or powerless to control it. Either way, what kind of leaders were these?

      Of course, this choice was false. For the Arab leaders were neither responsible for all violence in the country nor empowered to prevent it. And the charge regarding their impuissance was, in any case, an afterthought in Zionist discussions. The primary indictment remained that the AHC had coerced Arab participation in the strike through thuggery and was likewise behind the attacks on British police and soldiers. As with the Times’ coverage of encounters between Arab and British forces, the Post cast the Arab militants as mere outlaws, turning out headlines such as “Running fights with Arab bandits” and “Soldiers fight bandits.”⁵⁸ Bandits and hooligans, not “some deep-seated grievance,” were the real drivers of the strike. The Post’s 4 June edition heralded the government’s “long-delayed recognition” of the strike’s “essential illegality.”⁵⁹

      BRITISH INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENTS

      OF THE REBELS

      While the Jewish Agency and the Jewish press relentlessly reiterated the top-down (that is, AHC-directed) crime theme, British intelligence attempted to come to grips with some of the subtleties on the ground. Two were particularly significant. First, as noted above, Arabs mostly struck at British forces and infrastructure in May, although they also attacked Jews (sometimes fatally) and their property. The increase in “crime” therefore had a peculiarly military quality. Second, crime did not, in fact, increase dramatically from May to June. The number of murders was equal from one month to the next (twenty-one in each case), and attempted murders were comparable (moving from fifty-four to sixty). Cases of manslaughter, theft, and “other offences against the person” actually declined in June, while assaults and woundings increased from thirteen to seventeen and highway robberies from four to five.⁶⁰

      The RAF weekly intelligence summary of 17 June continued to refer to armed Arab groups engaged in sabotage and attacks on British forces as “gangs” and “marauders,” but it also took notice of their organizational sophistication. Recounting СКАЧАТЬ