The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

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 the Jewish public in Israel to the civilized world” claimed that “the ‘leaders’ of the Arabs living in our country started making preparations for the recent agitations some time ago.” The trouble began, the document continued a little further on, “with the operation of a gang of murderers.”¹³

      It is worthwhile briefly to address this charge, which was pervasive in 1936–39 and recurs in scholarship. The declaration’s claim regarding “preparations for the recent agitations” was not without merit. According to the memoir of the Palestinian militant Subhi Yasin, the highwaymen whose 15 April murder of three Jewish motorists set off the sequence of events culminating in the slaughter of 19 April were motivated by more than loot. The men had, in fact, intended to trigger a popular rebellion against the British, and were members of a group that included two future rebel leaders, Shaykh Farhan al-Saʿdi and Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir.¹⁴ Likewise, in his diary entry for 21 October 1935, the Istiqlal activist Akram Zuʿaytir noted his plans for a large meeting on 2 November (the eighteenth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration), the aim of which would be to “usher in a revolutionary campaign in Palestine.”¹⁵

      But despite the fact that some Palestinian groups were laying plans for a violent revolt well before 19 April 1936, the notion that the Arab leaders, much less a “gang of murderers,” were behind the “agitations” was mistaken. Indeed, both Subhi Yasin and Akram Zuʿaytir wrote disdainfully of the mufti and the AHC’s reluctance to support even a peaceful strike.¹⁶ And the most ambitious scholarly attempts to situate the armed bands in the milieu of the mufti and various criminal gangs have been unpersuasive.¹⁷

      Even as they publicly characterized the militarization of the Palestinian national movement as the work of extremists, British officials privately acknowledged that this “extremism” in fact represented the mainstream of Arab opinion, which held that it was force alone that entrenched British policy in Palestine, and it would be force alone that dislodged it.¹⁸ As the prolific pan-Islamist writer and activist Shakib Arslan put it in a February 1935 letter to the mufti, “. . . [T]he only language [the British] can understand is resistance.”¹⁹ The idea, then, that the rebellion was a mere “extension of traditional brigandage,” the mischief of “irresponsible youths and criminals,” or an assemblage of “terrorist nuclei” to which “youths from the villages” attached themselves, does not hold up.²⁰

      As Yehoshua Porath documents, a mere seven of the known rebels had prior criminal records, although these seven were prominent figures.²¹ Based on interviews with former rebels conducted in the 1980s, Ted Swedenburg surmises that a greater proportion of lower-level fighters had criminal records predating the revolt than of rebel leaders, although he in no way implies that these comprised the majority of rebels. Swedenburg does note, however, that Palestinian histories conveniently ignore the criminal records of some insurgents.²²

      More broadly, Palestinian nationalist discourse has tended to retroject modern Palestinian conceptions of criminality onto the period of the revolt and prior. Until quite recently, this entailed the forgetting (or condemning) of erstwhile bandit-heroes such as Abu Jilda, whose violent and larcenous exploits in the 1930s were once the stuff of fearful and admiring Palestinian folklore.²³ Likewise, robbers whose victims lay outside their own communities were, in earlier times, locally revered among Arabs in Palestine. They occupied a liminal frontier between crime and adventure, which depended for its existence upon intercommunal fissures born of parochial loyalties, and which Palestinian nationalist discourse has therefore foreclosed.²⁴

      But while figures such as Abu Jilda largely vanished from Palestinian memory with the sealing of this frontier, their salience at the time of the revolt turned not only on a pre- or proto-national provincialism, but also on a dialectic in the Palestinian political imagination between the criminal and the national. This dialectic emerged naturally from the growing Palestinian conviction that the national government of the mandate was predicated on the illegal negation of Arab rights, and that it was only the maquillage of British sovereignty—flags, courts, uniforms—that concealed this ugly fact.

      In his memoir of his time