The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ high commissioner had opened a letter of protest from the First Arab Rural Congress. It also emphasized the “great danger to our national and racial existence” created by ongoing Jewish immigration, which it declared “completely illegal,” as were the British “attempts to suppress the lawful voice of the nation . . . by force.”⁸¹ Whereas everyone from Jewish merchants to the leaders of the Jewish Agency had stressed the pseudo-national and illegal nature of the strike, the many Arabs from whom Wauchope heard were adamant regarding their national standing and legal entitlement to resist British implementation of the Balfour Declaration.

      When not parrying protests from Arabs and Jews, British officials mulled over the deteriorating security situation in the country. In the second half of May, His Majesty’s troops encountered determined armed resistance in Gaza and Beersheba in the south and in Nablus and Tulkarm in the north.⁸² Across the land, the silence of the Palestinian night was steadily succumbing to the hiss and crackle of gunfire and firecrackers.⁸³ While some authors have deduced from this circumstance that British security forces were under perpetual siege in May 1936, that appears to be an exaggeration.⁸⁴ As late as 23 June, the deputy inspector general of police would report that relatively few villagers had attacked British forces.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, the RAF intelligence summary for May 1936 did find that the AHC’s attempt to maintain a peaceful strike was faltering, and that “more extremist elements were taking the law into their own hands.” These “extremists,” it is worth noting, aimed their attacks “chiefly against [the] police and military.”⁸⁶

      At the same time, government crime statistics showed an astonishing increase in murders and attempted murders in April and May 1936, as compared with the same two-month period in the previous year. Murders numbered nineteen in April/May 1935, a figure which nearly tripled to fifty-three in April/May 1936. Attempted murders more than quadrupled, from twenty to eighty-seven. Crimes also shot up from earlier in the year. In March, there had been eleven murders and twenty attempted murders.⁸⁷ The data depicted a crime wave, a fact that colored the intelligence summary’s portrayal of the “extremists,” which it neglected to disaggregate from the common criminals committing murders. Thus, despite its observation that the bulk of the Arab violent attacks in May targeted military and police personnel—not exactly the magnets of the criminal class—the RAF report referred to the perpetrators of these actions as “gangs,” a term that would become ubiquitous in British (and Zionist) discussions of the revolt.⁸⁸

      Arab leaders were meanwhile keen to distinguish themselves from those involved in violent actions. Both the AHC and the national committees advocated openly for a nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience.⁸⁹ They did so, moreover, with the backing of the Arab press. The pan-Arab al-Difaʿ—along with Filastin, one of the two highest circulation Arabic dailies in the country—editorialized in late April, “We want the Arab Higher Committee to act as Gandhi acted in India when he called for civil disobedience.”⁹⁰ Filastin used the government’s favored epithet (“disturbers of the peace”) to designate those Arabs who were resorting to violence.⁹¹ Al-Liwaʾ called in its 15 May edition for the Arabs to adopt only peaceful methods of protest.⁹²

      “TURKISH METHODS” AND THE VILLAGE SEARCHES

      OF MAY 1936 AND AFTER

      Violence, however, was much more than an Arab problem, as Arab journalists and political leaders were quick to note. In fact, the problem of British violence was the second topic of agreement between the AHC and the Arab public. Thus, in the course of the mayors’ 30 May conversation with the high commissioner and the chief secretary, Nablus mayor Sulayman Bey Tuqan complained of British police and soldiers’ maltreatment of Arabs. He was particularly concerned about the so-called “village searches” that security forces were then conducting throughout the country.⁹³ British spokesmen announced that the purpose of these searches was to discover weapons and to apprehend wanted men. An abundance of Arab testimony, however, indicated that the searches were actually punitive expeditions, designed to frighten the population and thereby to re-establish “law and order”—just as the cabinet had directed Wauchope to do.

      These “searches,” moreover, were not limited to rural areas.⁹⁴ On 1 June, the high commissioner received a delegation of ʿulamaʾ, who drew his attention to an incident in the Bab Hutta quarter of Jerusalem, which the clerics had taken some trouble to investigate. They reported that soldiers and police, ostensibly searching for weapons in the area, had instead stormed through houses, destroying food and furniture and mortifying men in front of their wives. The ʿulamaʾ had heard numerous tales of violent British exploits in Arab villages. Following their investigation at Bab Hutta, they now believed them. The men suggested to the high commissioner that these actions, coupled with the long-standing British policy of refusing to respond meaningfully to nonviolent Arab protest, were generating the present instability. “[I]f shooting and bombing is being done now,” one of them explained, “it is not with the object of committing murder or because the Arabs like disorders, but simply with the object of letting their voice reach England.”⁹⁵

      FIGURE 2. Residents of Bab Hutta, in Jerusalem, survey the wreckage of a British “village search,” summer 1936. (Library of Congress)

      These were not the first reports of police brutality that Wauchope had heard. Arab leaders had informed him as early as 21 April that officers had shot a sixteen-year-old youth in the back, and that “the attitude of the Police had given the impression to the Arabs that their real enemies were the British.”⁹⁶ The Anglican archdeacon in Jerusalem related the same to the chief secretary. Anglican missionaries operated in villages throughout Palestine, and regularly reported back to the archdeacon and archbishop in Jerusalem regarding developments in the Arab community. On 2 June, the day after Wauchope’s meeting with the ʿulamaʾ, the archdeacon wrote the chief secretary with concern: “It is believed amongst some at any rate of the British Police that they have been definitely ordered to ‘Duff them [the Arabs] up’. (The phrase itself is significant to anyone who remembers, as I do, the days before the present Inspector-General).”⁹⁷

      The archdeacon referred to the notorious Douglas Duff, whose harsh tactics as a police inspector in 1920s Palestine had rendered his surname a byword for police brutality. Indeed, Duff’s fondness for such torture techniques as waterboarding and “suspension” ultimately landed him in trouble with the high commissioner, who fired him in 1931 for the “ill treatment” of a prisoner.⁹⁸ The infamous former inspector had actually visited Jerusalem only a few weeks earlier, on 12–14 May, during his first trip to Palestine since departing the country in 1932.⁹⁹ Remarkably, Duff himself was taken aback by the violence to which the British openly subjected Arab civilians. After witnessing soldiers and police searching a caravan of Arabs wending its way out of the city’s German Colony, he lamented: “If the sort of thing I saw . . . is usual in these days, then it is no wonder that we are laying up a great debt of active hatred against ourselves.” As Duff described the episode: “The searching was none too gently executed, for I saw one Arab being savagely kicked by a brawny man in khaki, whilst an old man with a grey beard received a nasty cut from a leather hand-whip.”¹⁰⁰ Evidence from Arabic sources suggests that the brutality Duff witnessed was, indeed, “usual” in those days. Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a schoolteacher and member of a militant underground organization in May 1936, wrote that British security forces in the Old City of Jerusalem were demeaning Palestinians by forcing them to stop and salute the same police patrols that regularly beat them up “for no reason.”¹⁰¹ Al-Difaʿ likewise reported that British police were “searching passersby for no reason” and “harassing them . . . when [they] show any form of resistance upon receiving rude, provocative insults.”¹⁰² Such smug behavior, writes Mustafa Kabha, “filled [Palestinians] with indignation and hatred for the English.”¹⁰³

      The archdeacon received similar СКАЧАТЬ