The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

The accusation shaped out two entities: the lawless and, negatively, the lawful. To name the criminal was to name the chaotic, the unruly, the uncivilized, and thereby tacitly to designate not merely a political order, but order itself: the political transmogrified into the metaphysical. The revolt forced the question of who had the right to use force. To answer this question was to divide politics into order and chaos, and in more earthly terms, the licit and the illicit. This was the crimino-national game played by all.

      Two circumstances occasioned it. First, by the 1930s, British intelligence regarding Arab political activities had become anemic. The 1929 Wailing Wall riots exposed the incompetence of the two British intelligence agencies responsible for Palestine: the “I” section of the Royal Air Force (RAF) Headquarters and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Palestine police. In the riots’ aftermath, the inspector-general of police in Ceylon, Herbert Dowbiggin, arrived in Palestine to review police procedures and recommend changes in the police force.²¹ His report of April 1930 spotlighted the inability of the CID to acquire reliable information on the activities of Arab “agitators.”²² Dowbiggin’s reforms, however, proved no remedy.²³ Half a decade later, the former commissioner of police in Calcutta, Sir Charles Tegart, and the former head of the security service in India, Sir David Petrie, wrote in another report that the Palestine CID had once again “failed in its primary function, the collection of intelligence regarding, and the investigation of, terrorist crime.”²⁴ As important, by the time of the revolt, the mandatory lacked a functional counterespionage apparatus. In consequence, Arab rebels thoroughly penetrated British intelligence (see chapter four).²⁵

      This breakdown of British intelligence in Palestine brought about a second circumstance. Without reliable information on Arab political life, the British could do little to manage Arab political expression but smother it beneath a blanket of draconian laws. Thus did a creeping criminalization of Palestinian nationalism set in. Crime would feature in the revolt as surely as it had in prior outbreaks of violence in Palestine. By the 1930s, however, the British application of the criminal label to Arab protest was becoming conspicuously expansive. This was most apparent when Arab protests threatened the stability of the political order in the mandate. The criminal law ordinance that the British put in place after the 1929 Wailing Wall riots, for example, not only criminalized disparagement of the British flag but also broadened state powers of collective punishment. The government proclaimed these measures in the name of “public order,” where the public in question did not recognize the legitimacy of the mandate.²⁶ Likewise, the December 1933 Prevention of Crime ordinance—enacted after rioting late that year—permitted district commissioners in Palestine to take preemptive legal action against suspected troublemakers based solely on the “known characters” of the individuals in question. The accused were allowed no legal appeal to this charge.²⁷ While this increase in repression ostensibly served as a stopgap for the lack of actionable intelligence that might have enabled the British to preempt violent episodes, it actually exacerbated the original problem by further alienating the Arab population from the mandatory.

      The British had sought to mitigate such alienation early on by modernizing the Palestinian landscape, a project that was intended to benefit both Arabs and Jews. London gridded the country in railroads, highways and telephone lines, for example, and invested heavily in Arab schools and hospitals.²⁸ Arab access to the highest echelons of power in Jerusalem and London was, moreover, unprecedented in the history of British imperial governance.²⁹ But it did not compare to that of the Yishuv. As Gideon Biger observes, British and Jewish development of Palestine amounted to a “joint structure,” whereby the British would “lay the infrastructure” and the Jews “depend on it for the success of their settlement endeavours.”³⁰

      Palestinian Arabs were acutely aware of this “joint structure,” and of the insidious imperialist ideology that it manifested. As Fredrik Meiton and Jacob Norris have recently detailed, the self-consciously “constructive imperialism” London brought to bear in its Palestine mandate centered, in Meiton’s words, on “the material foundation of modern society: waterways, roads, bridges, ports and airports, railway lines and electric grids.”³¹ And, as Norris notes, the primary architects of the Balfour Declaration “all subscribed to [the] vision of European Jews acting as the drivers of colonial development in Palestine.”³² It was just this ideological project that enabled the British to sustain the conceit that a Jewish state in Palestine would uplift the country’s Arab inhabitants even as it buried their national aspirations.³³

      The British believed that the key to Arab Palestinian quiescence was economic growth, and that the key to economic growth was the Yishuv. Mandate officials thus blithely excluded Palestine’s Arabs from basic decisions regarding the country’s future, even as they conferred with the Zionists about the same matters. As Naomi Shepherd observes of Arthur Wauchope, the British high commissioner in Palestine in 1936: “No High Commissioner became so intimately involved with the Zionist leadership, repeatedly taking them into his confidence in a way he never did the Arab leaders.”³⁴ More broadly, the mandate authorities did not recognize Arab political organizations, and more often than not simply ignored them.³⁵ This created a distance between British and Arab political institutions much greater than that between British and Jewish political institutions, and made the preservation of “law and order” in the mandate—that is, the maintenance of the politically asymmetrical state of affairs—increasingly dependent on force.

      Up through the period of the revolt, for example, the British neglected to forge connections between rural political structures and the mandatory state, leaving village elders and headmen bereft of any legal standing. There were no legal specifications for the status of mukhtar (village headman), for instance, a situation that placed many villages at the mercy of one powerful family, and without democratic representation. British “point-men” at the village level were therefore often out of sync with their supposed constituencies.³⁶ This limited the extent to which the mandatory could reach down to the level of the individual in these areas, both in terms of observing his political behaviors and of shaping his political sensibilities; that is, in Foucauldian language, the extent to which the government could individuate the rural population.³⁷ As a result, when the British authorities in Palestine faced rural rebellion and resistance, their menu of strategic options was limited to one: brute force, typically in the form of collective punishment. Such tactics only served to further alienate the peasantry, many of whom, by the time of the revolt, had not actually seen a Briton in decades.³⁸

      This dilemma was by no means restricted to the countryside. In 1925, for example, High Commissioner Herbert Plumer sought to extend a redraft of the prior year’s Collective Responsibility Ordinance to urban areas. And as the colonial secretary confessed, applying this ordinance to towns “could not fail to lend colour to any criticism that the reason why we have to resort to such special legislation is that our policy is so much detested that the Arabs cannot otherwise be made to acquiesce in our rule.”³⁹

      The British criminalization of Palestinian nationalism was an ontological claim regarding order and chaos. But the British failure to individuate the Arab population of Palestine—to incorporate them into a disciplinary apparatus that would naturalize the “criminality” of violent political protest against the government and its policies—left unveiled the discursive machinery underlying this claim.⁴⁰ The Arabs knew that they were being cast as criminals, and were therefore positioned to identify such casting as a form of power, which might be turned back upon the British and the Zionists.

      JEWISH, BRITISH, AND ARAB PERSPECTIVES ON THE

      STRIKE AND REVOLT OF APRIL AND MAY 1936

      Jewish, British, and Arab perspectives on the strike and emergent violence of the weeks and months after 19 April came quickly to revolve around the question of crime: that is, who the real lawbreakers were in Palestine, and what entitlements accrued to their victims, especially with regard to violence.

      Evidence of the Jewish perspective on the violence of April and May 1936 comes from the files of the Jewish Agency.⁴¹ Its legal committee transcribed the statements of Jewish witnesses to the events of those distressing days, which culminated in the commencement of an Arab