The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

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       “The Policy Is the Criminal”

      WAR ON THE DISCURSIVE FRONTIER,

      JULY–AUGUST 1936

      THE TREND LINES OF THE REVOLT and the strike evident in June deepened in July. Increasingly robust and well-organized Arab military formations took the field, and the strike endured in defiance of its regularly forecast demise.¹ The government responded to these developments with air power, propaganda, and military reinforcements. In the course of the month, British planes assaulted the rebels assiduously, firing 8,000 rounds and dropping 205 bombs. Mandate authorities also circulated over 350,000 pro-government leaflets to nearly a thousand villages.² Mustafa Kabha relates that such leaflets tended to feature a mix of “veiled threats and promises.” One read:

      In times of distress and drought . . . the government exempted you from paying taxes and lent you a helping hand in the form of subsidies. But now the government is spending its money arresting lawbreakers and maintaining order . . . Who loses as a result of violations of the law? The losers are you and your village.³

      In addition to the bullets, bombs, and handbills, two more British battalions arrived in Palestine, raising the total to eight. They fortified road and rail, and set up permanent pickets at trouble spots such as the road between Jerusalem and Nablus and areas in the “triangle of terror” (Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm).⁴

      While the Jewish Agency and the Jewish press continued to regard the rebels as criminal gangs (kenufyot) and the strike as a contrived display of Arab “unity,” it would be a mistake to suggest that the reverse was unqualifiedly true in either case. The rebels did sometimes harass, assault, and even assassinate those they considered an impediment to the movement for national independence, and thereby alienated many of their fellow Arabs. And while the strike and the rebellion enjoyed broad popular support, there were Arabs who subverted both. The wealthy mukhtar of the village of Bidya, about twenty miles southwest of Nablus, refused to participate in the revolt on grounds that its proponents were lower-class delinquents.⁵ The mukhtar of Silwan, near Jerusalem, defiantly offered his protection to the Yemenite Jews entering and leaving his village. The Arabs of Lifta, on Jersualem’s northern outskirts, were likewise inclined to keep the intercommunal peace, and resented the push towards confrontation with the Jews.⁶ Arab attitudes regarding what constituted national obligations thus varied. (Indeed, Arab ideas about what constituted Arab national identity in Palestine varied.)⁷ Many Arabs were ambivalent about the strike, which placed their national and familial obligations at odds. The strike committees were alert to these difficulties and pooled resources to aid those most impinged upon by the work stoppage. Where beneficent tactics did not achieve their end, the committees resorted to intimidation.⁸

      The Jewish Agency seized on such cases as evidence of the coercive and fundamentally criminal substructure of the strike. But the reality, as the British appreciated, was that while part of the strike’s success turned on enforcement mechanisms designed to prevent those less willing or able to participate from undermining Arab solidarity, the political objectives of the Arab population at large were clear long before the disturbances began in April 1936—and they included halts to Jewish immigration and land purchases, both of which spoke to the fundamental Arab hostility to further Jewish economic encroachment in Palestine. Wauchope, for example, wrote Ormsby-Gore in mid-June: “Intimidation is responsible only in small measure for continuance of strike which has [the] full sympathy of all Arabs.”⁹

      While the British and the Zionists repeatedly admonished the Arabs that they would not meet their objectives through violent protest, such scoldings were disingenuous.¹⁰ It was, after all, trivially true that the Arabs could not extract British concessions by violent means, for they could not extract them by any means at all, as the history of the mandate plainly disclosed. The general Arab response to this circumstance was well articulated three years earlier, during the October 1933 riots in Jaffa, when Musa Alami, then a mandate official, commented: “The prevailing feeling is that if all that can be expected from the present policy is a slow death, it is better to be killed in an attempt to free ourselves of our enemies than to suffer a long and protracted demise.”¹¹ ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi, writing to Wauchope from the detention camp at Sarafand (in Lebanon) in August 1936, gave voice to a kindred sentiment: “The Arabs are aware that [the] Government is able to continue to pursue its present policy for another long period without showing any weakness. But they assert, on the other hand, that they have nothing to lose.”¹²

      All of this established the context of the escalating struggle between Zionists, Arab Palestinians, and Britons for discursive ascendancy vis-à-vis the rebellion, which the present chapter will chart. It will focus in particular on the boldest crimino-national claim of the Zionists: namely, that the revolt was literally the product of a criminal syndicate working in secret collusion with the Arab Higher Committee. In addition, it will detail how Britons and Arabs responded to this contention, and how Arab actions bolstered it.

      CRIMINAL NETWORKS AND THE ORIGINS

      OF THE REVOLT

      The most ambitious Zionist argument for the criminality of the strike and the revolt held that the apparently spontaneous disturbances of April 1936 were actually the premeditated outcome of known criminal elements working at the behest of the Arab leadership. In July, for example, a declaration “from СКАЧАТЬ