The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

He goes on to tell of a twelve-year-old newspaper boy in Jenin, who adopted the moniker “Abu Jilda” and “led an ‘army’ of children, with the purpose of mocking and harassing the police and the government generally.”²⁶ This “army,” composed of youths aged seven to twelve, donned “tin hats” modeled on those the British police wore, and slung bandoliers around their shoulders, against which they rested sticks in lieu of rifles. They even carried drums. Courtney remembers the boys parading “through the dusty Jenin streets” and brazenly violating the curfew by running noisily from house to house after hours. In response, the police would cobble together slingshots and smack the children with stones (“usually in the rear”!), a tactic which succeeded in converting them into “law-abiding and law-respecting citizens.”²⁷ Similar demonstrations occurred elsewhere in Palestine. In June 1936, a celebration erupted in the streets of Jerusalem. Its occasion was a rumor that the city’s notorious assistant superintendent of police, Alan Sigrist, had been assassinated. Here, too, scores of children fashioned tin hats out of “trays and platters” and held aloft wooden swords as they chanted anti-colonial slogans.²⁸

      In willfully defying the outsider’s law while reappropriating his symbols of national sovereignty, “Abu Jilda’s” troupe reproduced, theatrically, tactics that Abu Jilda’s troop had pioneered in its real-world skirmishes with British police. As another former Palestine policeman, Colin Imray, recollects in his memoir, Abu Jilda became a top law enforcement priority after his group of outlaws executed a four-man police patrol and made off with their horses, rifles, and bandoliers.²⁹ On a separate occasion, one of Abu Jilda’s men apprehended a “senior legal officer” at gunpoint and demanded his pants.³⁰ When the police finally caught up with the infamous bandit and his longtime partner in crime, Salih al-ʿArmit, the two men emerged from their hideout “festooned with full police bandoliers and carrying police rifles.”³¹ An unwary observer might have mistaken them for policemen.

      By the time of the revolt, bandits such as Abu Jilda seem not only to have straddled a line between criminal and adventurer but also to have sat astride the border of the criminal and the national—the very space the British inhabited in the Arab Palestinian political imagination. Indeed, both Abu Jilda and his attorney appear to have been keenly aware of this fact. The latter insisted at Abu Jilda’s 1934 trial that his client’s deadly assault on a policeman was “based on nationalist principles” as opposed to criminal proclivities.³² This defense took for granted that the same actions, when coded as national rather than as criminal, took on an inverted moral significance. If the British could play this game, why not the Arabs? As for the bandit-hero himself, one of his fellow prisoners, Najati Sidqi, recalled in his memoir that Abu Jilda wore

      a military uniform decorated on the epaulettes with two swords and three stars in an attempt to distance himself and his group from the charge of being bandits. He also carried a long polished sword with a gilded handle and called himself chief of staff, while designating his colleague al-ʿArmit . . . as deputy with full authority.³³

      During the revolt, Arab insurgents employed the same strategy. Among the photographs that Palestine policeman (and great-nephew of Lord Allenby) P. J. De Burgh Wilmot kept in his scrapbook from the revolt years are a number featuring dead rebels in military attire. One such snapshot displays a mortally wounded Arab in button-down khaki trousers, khaki jacket, and high boots.³⁴ The private papers of the assistant superintendent of police in Jenin, G. J. Morton, include a revolt-era photograph of three rebels in the same outfits, with the caption: “Typical Arab gangleaders in the Jenin area.”³⁵ As Morton’s caption indicates, the wearing of such uniforms was common among insurgents. A CID report of 18 August 1936 noted, “. . . [A]ircraft report seeing men in some uniform decamping into the hills.”³⁶ (The same report noted, not incidentally, that Palestinian “flag days have been held in Jaffa and other parts of the country.”) One British soldier recalled of Fawzi al-Qawuqji, whom the British would come to regard as the commander-in-chief of the rebels, “I remember seeing him through the field-glasses, standing on a small hill at the Battle of Bala, in Turkish uniform, wearing his medals and carrying a sword.”³⁷ Porath likewise notes rebel commanders’ predilection for “uniforms and symbols of rank.”³⁸

      It is worth pausing for a moment to consider Porath’s explanation for the rebel uniform phenomenon, which is partially correct. He claims that rebel maltreatment of villagers in 1939 was “[t]o some extent . . . motivated by personal desire for status and wealth,” and continues, “Otherwise, one can hardly understand the deep concern of the bands’ commanders, who were leading an underground organisation, for uniforms and symbols of rank.” Undoubtedly the uniforms served as a symbolic denial of rebel criminality, but not merely on account of some rebels’ bad behavior. For the British equation of the rebels with “bandits,” “marauders,” and “criminals” persisted independent of the rebels’ treatment of the villagers. And while the rebel armies were “underground” in the sense that they waged asymmetric war against a traditional police force and military, their uniforms signified—to the Arabs of Palestine, to the British, and to an international audience—that they were a national military, regardless of what the British might claim.

      Arab rebels thus not only transgressed the law but also commandeered its legitimizing tokens in the form of military and police regalia, as well as flags, stamps, courts, and other such emblems of national sovereignty (as we will explore further in subsequent chapters). In so doing, they did not so much break the law as they did turn it back upon its ostensible guardians. The British responded with mockery and re-imposed upon the rebels labels such as “murderer” and “criminal.” Thus, one of Wilmot’s photographs of a uniformed Arab rebel is accompanied by a caption disparaging the idea that the man was a soldier of any kind. Wilmot refers elsewhere to a pair of slain Arabs in the same uniform as “murderers.”³⁹

      The British eagerness to so name the insurgents had an anxious quality, the impetus of which is well articulated by the legal scholar Nasser Hussain: “As Walter Benjamin once noted, the law’s fear of [generalized] violence is different from its fear of crime. Crime is a transgression against the law that may be checked by it. A more general unrest threatens not so much to upset the law as to set up an alternative logic and authority to it.”⁴⁰

      While Arab bandits, rebels, and their young acolytes adopted police and military garb, British police and troops, as we have seen, frequently resorted to bandit tactics, and thereby embodied the conflation of the national and the criminal in the Palestinian political imagination. The bulk of the British officers imported from the disbanded Palestine gendarmerie into the Palestine police in 1926 were former Black and Tans from Ireland, whose reputation for “a certain ruthlessness,” observed a 1939 War Office report, they “maintained” during the revolt.⁴¹ The idea of employing Black and Tans in Palestine originated in the early 1920s, with then-Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill. Writes James Barker:

      What Churchill envisaged for Palestine was a tough corps of fighters as a tactical reserve for the existing police force. As it happened, there were men available who matched this description: the thousands of ex-servicemen known as ‘the Black and Tans’ that Churchill himself had recruited as Secretary of State for War in February 1920 to reinforce the Royal Irish Constabulary. With both sides in Ireland seeking a negotiated settlement, these men, notorious for their brutality and indiscipline, would soon be out of a job. Churchill, unconcerned by their bad reputation, started planning their transfer en bloc to Palestine.⁴²

      Ex-Black and Tans became more, not less, prominent and influential in the Palestine police as time passed, holding five of eight district commander posts by 1943.⁴³ The group’s notoriety was such that British officials began, in the course of the revolt, to use its appellation as a byword for illegal behavior among police.⁴⁴

      Criminal elements, then, existed on either side of the Arab-British divide, although neither party could be correctly described as simply criminal, and the bulk of those fighting—whether Arab or British—did not have criminal backgrounds. The Arab revolt could only be regarded as a criminal enterprise within a discursive framework that submitted the legitimacy of British force in Palestine as a given. British violence in Palestine