The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

of that criminalization.

      MAP 1

PART ONE

       April–October 1936

ONE

       British Causal Primacy and the Origins of the Palestinian Great Revolt

      19 APRIL 1936 WAS A SUNDAY, the first day of the Jewish week. Jewish and Arab merchants in Palestine began raising the metal shutters on their shops early that morning, as was their habit. Although tension between the two communities had been escalating over the preceding days, weeks, and months, it did little to slow the routine of their commercial interactions in the Old City of Jerusalem, where Jewish and Arab quarters were nestled together and the locals knew each other by name. Pinhas Zuckerman was therefore likely familiar with the Arab who remarked to another customer in his shop that morning, “It has begun. You [Jews] already killed two Arabs.”¹ The man referred to a double-homicide of two days prior in Petah Tikvah. At the same moment, a curiously similar story was spreading out west, in Jaffa, according to which Jews in neighboring Tel Aviv had murdered two Arabs. Unlike the Petah Tikvah story, however, this one was false.

      Because the ordinary person was in no position to verify such gossip, the emotional climate into which it drifted often determined whether it withered on the vine or “blossomed” into violence. Politically hot periods virtually yearned for the spark of an ominous rumor. Seven years earlier, for example, when a sensational report of rioting in Jerusalem reached Jaffa, Arab mobs there raped, tortured and hacked to death members of the Jewish community.² The atmosphere was similarly tense in the days before 19 April 1936. On 18 April, an Arab political activist noted in his diary that “various rumors” about Jewish violence were “spreading like wildfire,” producing “outrage” among Palestine’s Arabs.³ At such times, gruesome episodes like those of 1929 lingered in local Jewish memory. Beneath the shaloms and salams Jews daily exchanged with their Arab neighbors, there stirred the unsettling awareness that such greetings of “peace” were prayers, not promises.

      Arabs, meanwhile, harbored their own anxieties. A few days before the portentous tidings overheard in Zuckerman’s store, some Arab highwaymen preying on passengers between Nablus and Tulkarm gunned down three Jews.⁴ Jews retaliated the next day against Arabs in Tel Aviv and were presumed (correctly) by British authorities to be responsible for the Petah Tikvah homicides twenty-four hours later.⁵ On the latter day, 17 April, some of the mourners departing the funeral of a victim of the Arab highwaymen proceeded from Tel Aviv towards Jaffa “with unlawful intent,” according to the written testimony of the city’s assistant superintendent of police.⁶ When the mourners reached Jaffa, British police turned them away with baton charges. Back in Tel Aviv, a throng of Jews outside the Cinema Ophir battered an Arab gharry-driver named ʿAbd al-Rashid Hasan, and several others trashed the shop of Ibrahim ʿAli Hatrieh.⁷ A cascade of violence ensued. According to a British report, on that single day, “Cases of assault [against Arabs] took place in Herzl Street, ha-Yarkon Street, Allenby Road near the General Post Office, outside the Cinema Moghraby and at the seashore bus terminus.”⁸

      Despite these attacks, police station diaries recorded no Arab reprisals against Jews in Jaffa on either the 17th or the following day.⁹ But by Sunday, 19 April, Arabs in Jaffa were prepared to believe the worst upon hearing the rumor begun early that morning regarding their two countrymen.¹⁰ And having gathered for a 9 A.M. parade only to have the municipal authorities deny their permit request, they were already out in force (and frustrated) when the story of the murders started spreading. Shortly after 10 A.M., Arabs throughout the city began harassing Jews, who fled in panic to the bus station opposite the district police headquarters, whence they escaped on buses to Tel Aviv. A Jewish factory owner in the city shuttered his building as Arabs gathered outside. Several Jews emerged from the crowd, pleading with him for protection. One woman uttered fearfully, “I am a widow!”¹¹ In the teeming town square, a party of Arabs circulating among the mob set upon a Jew with knives, leaving his gored corpse within a hundred yards of the police station. Two and a half miles across town, a second group of Arabs bludgeoned a Jew to death in the vicinity of the Hasan Bey mosque.¹² Jewish counterattacks in Tel Aviv soon followed, and as vehicles carrying wounded Arabs pulled into the Manshiya quarter of Jaffa, Arab protestors hurled stones at the police, who in turn charged at them with batons.¹³ By the following day, fourteen Jews and two Arabs lay lifeless in their families’ arms.¹⁴ Although no one knew it, the Palestinian Great Revolt had begun.

      FIGURE 1. A Jewish family departing a “danger zone” in the Jaffa-Tel Aviv area, summer 1936. (Library of Congress)

      BACKGROUND OF THE REBELLION

      Certain questions press upon us in considering these and subsequent events. The most obvious concerns the larger context in which they transpired. In that regard, two developments in particular—both of which transformed Jewish and Arab politics in 1930s Palestine—require our attention. The first development pertained to the Zionist labor movement, which by the early 1930s constituted the institutional heart of the Jewish community in Palestine (henceforth: the Yishuv) in the form of the Jewish Agency and its filiations.¹⁵ This movement’s strategy of forging an Arab-Jewish workers’ alliance so as to divide Arab proletarians against their effendi betters fizzled out in the 1930s. The sobering fact, Zionist leaders realized, was that class loyalty was no match for national loyalty among the Arabs.¹⁶ As if relations between the two communities were not sufficiently strained, Arab and Jewish laborers would now compete rather than cooperate.

      The second development concerned the efficacy of Arab nonviolent protest against the ongoing British implementation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Many in the mandate believed that the “national home” His Majesty had famously pledged to prop up in Palestine was a nation-state in all but name. And while Jews anticipated it with joy, Arabs did so with dread. By the 1930s, more than a decade of peaceful Arab attempts to bring down Balfour had achieved nothing. The delegations to Britain, the protests in Palestine, the conferences across the region—all diplomatic routes reached a dead end in London.¹⁷ When not ignoring Arab spokespersons, British officials would indulge them in dialogue, promise to consider their concerns carefully, and then carry on as before. On occasions when Arab protest veered into violence, the British would dispatch commissions of inquiry to Palestine. None of the commissions’ recommendations included reneging on the Balfour Declaration, however, and any that implied Balfour’s repudiation London effectively disregarded.¹⁸ Noncooperation and nonviolent demonstrations proved equally unavailing, a circumstance so acidic to Arab political organizing that between 1923—when the British mandate for Palestine became official—and 1928, it ground to a virtual halt.¹⁹ Nonviolence was futile, and by the 1930s, everyone knew it.

      Of course, violence, too, had proven useless. Neither the Nebi Musa disturbances of April 1920 nor the Jaffa upheavals of May 1921 nor the Wailing Wall riots of August 1929 had produced any change in British policy in Palestine. But these local failings were belied by developments in the broader region, where Arab “lawlessness” in Egypt and Iraq (and in the French mandate for Syria) had extracted concessions from the governments of those territories.²⁰ The British, it seemed obvious, only understood force. The Arab consensus on this point, coupled with the mainstream Zionist abandonment of a Jewish-Arab labor alliance, rendered incidents such as those in Jaffa and Tel Aviv in April 1936 all but inevitable. It also ensured that these incidents would be construed quite differently by Jews, Arabs, and Britons.

      And thus arises a second question regarding the debacle of April 1936 and after: whose fault was it? The answer to that question was everywhere the same: the criminals’. The