The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

as a nation or “people.” He regarded this faux collective as something much closer to a rabble, as evidenced by local Arabs’ harassment of a merchant from Hebron—an incident, he noted deploringly, that prompted no police response.⁴² Yisrael Ligal, the mukhtar of the Old City, claimed that even in the days after the strike’s declaration, Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem continued to have cordial relations. Both groups attributed much of the trouble to British mischief, as opposed to one another. But as the Arab press published and Arab leaders repeated allegations against the Jews, the calm began to crack, especially among the youth. Lamented Ligal: “Every day I see young punks interfering with vendors at Jaffa Gate.”⁴³ These “punks,” according to one H. Eden, were part of a “terrorist” vanguard, to whom the bulk of the Arab population of Jerusalem was quietly opposed. He specified that “in normal times,” this youth element “sits at the cards and acts as intermediaries between the various criminals.”⁴⁴

      Such street-level testimonies dovetailed with the claims of the Jewish Agency leadership. The Agency’s highest body was its executive, which consisted of the heads of its various departments. The most important of these was the political department, whose director was the Agency’s primary institutional link to the mandatory government.⁴⁵ In 1936, this was Moshe Shertok. Shertok’s family had immigrated to Palestine in 1906, when he was a boy. He went on to study law in Istanbul and to serve as a translator in the Ottoman army during the First World War. His involvement with the Zionist movement dated to his student days at the London School of Economics in 1922–24, and led to his appointment at the Jewish Agency in 1933.

      On that fateful Sunday, 19 April 1936, Shertok met with John Hathorn Hall, the British chief secretary—along with the treasurer and the attorney general, one of the three permanent officers on the high commissioner’s own executive council—at approximately 1 P.M. Shertok had learned of the killings in Jaffa two hours earlier. He remarked in a memorandum concerning the meeting, “My main purpose . . . was to make sure that the tenor and contents of the first Official Communique on the disturbances should not be given the usual wrong twist.”⁴⁶ The secretary disappointed him, refusing to back away from his description of the events in Jaffa as “clashes” rather than what Shertok insisted they were: “an attack by Arabs on Jews.”⁴⁷ This led to a discussion of the attempt by Jewish mourners on 17 April to enter Jaffa, a “story” that Shertok “refused to believe.”⁴⁸ He likewise downplayed the attacks on “some Arab gharry drivers” in Tel Aviv by attributing them to “foolish youths.” Hall was unmoved. Dissatisfied, Shertok departed in hopes of a more fruitful dialogue with the chief secretary’s superior, the top civilian official in Palestine, High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope.

      Wauchope had been appointed British High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan in 1931, at the age of 57. An enthusiastic civilian administrator, he had spent most of his adult life in the military, where he had proven himself a physically courageous man. His experience in the Middle East dated back to the First World War, when he commanded a British brigade in Iraq and was wounded in battle. While Shertok sought an audience with Wauchope, it was Chaim Weizmann, a British Jew and the president of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), who secured one two days later, on 21 April.

      Weizmann was a tireless advocate for Zionism, and had been involved in a number of the movement’s watershed victories, including the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the awarding of the mandate for Palestine to the British at San Remo in 1920. At the same time, Weizmann’s credentials as a British patriot were unimpeachable. He had resided in England since 1904, when his work in chemistry earned him an appointment at the University of Manchester. It was in his capacity as a scientist that Weizmann would place the British government in his debt, and thereby elevate his standing as a Zionist representative to London. In the course of the First World War, Weizmann developed a method for extracting acetone from maize. The breakthrough allowed British arms manufacturers to replenish their stocks of acetone at a moment when they had fallen critically short of the essential solvent.

      In their meeting on 21 April, Weizmann learned from Wauchope that the Arab leaders, “one after another,” had expressed both regret and surprise concerning the violence in Jaffa on 19 April.⁴⁹ The high commissioner likewise suggested in a letter to Shertok a few days later that the Arab leadership were not behind the disorders.⁵⁰ The Jewish Agency’s own intelligence confirmed as much.⁵¹ For his part, Shertok hardly regarded the Arab leaders as worthy of the name. He claimed that they had “seized the revolutionary chance for staging a big national show in the form of a general strike.” He alleged further that their supposed followers were overwhelmingly opposed to the strike, and participated only under duress.⁵² From these premises, it was a short step to the conclusion that the strike was a criminal affair. Shertok reported to members of the Jewish Agency in London, “We pressed [Wauchope] to declare the strike illegal in the sense that incitement to the strike and open organisation of it should become punishable.”⁵³ Weizmann argued similarly to Wauchope’s overseer and liaison to the cabinet, Colonial Secretary J. H. Thomas, during a confab at Claridge’s Hotel in London on 18 May. He explained to Thomas that the high commissioner’s belief that the work stoppage reflected Arab mass sentiment was mistaken, and that “if one was prepared to spend the necessary money, there would be no difficulty in calling off the strike.” That is, there existed no deeply rooted national movement of protest among Palestine’s Arabs, and lining the right pockets would reveal as much.⁵⁴

      In one respect, the British evaluation of the circumstances of April–May 1936 came quickly to converge with that of the Jewish Agency. While Wauchope’s assessment of the state of affairs was more nuanced than the Agency’s, he ultimately required little persuading with regard to Shertok’s insistence that the strike be criminalized. The high commissioner wrote to Thomas on 18 April, suggesting that the present unrest was due in large part to Arab discernment of the fact that violent protest in Cairo and Damascus had led to negotiations with the British in Egypt and the French in Syria. He noted, moreover, that the British had promised the Arabs a legislative council in 1930, but were, as of 1936, still refusing them one.⁵⁵ But by 5 May, Wauchope’s tone had changed. He was emphatic that the strike was indeed illegal and of a piece with other “criminal” behavior among the Arabs. He reported to Thomas that he had “initiated proceedings under the Criminal Law (Seditious Offences) Ordinance” against the issuing of a manifesto by the Arab Transport Strike Committee, which called upon Arab government employees to stay home from work.⁵⁶ In short order, he would begin arresting and incarcerating large numbers of Arab journalists, most of whom advocated for civil disobedience, not violence.⁵⁷ In the meantime, Wauchope urged members of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) (about which more below) not to support the strike, and suggested, in all sincerity, that they send another delegation to London.⁵⁸

      In a second respect, however, the British evaluation of the events of April 1936 and after diverged from that of the Jewish Agency. While the Jewish Agency and many Jewish witnesses on the ground regarded the strike as a vacuous, pseudo-national gesture on the part of the Arab leadership, to which the Arab population at large was averse, Wauchope stressed in a 4 May memorandum, “The hands of the leaders are being forced by extremists and by the fact that the whole of the Arab population is behind the general strike.”⁵⁹ The “extremists” he had in mind were the transport strikers, whose manifesto called explicitly for “a peaceful general strike.”⁶⁰ Thomas communicated Wauchope’s interpretation of events to the cabinet on 13 May, along with the high commissioner’s reassertion (in response to earlier cabinet objections) of the need for the British government to appoint a commission to investigate the disturbances. Such a gesture, he insisted, “might enable the Arab leaders to call off the strike and the present unrest.” The cabinet conceded Wauchope’s point, but insisted that he make the appointment of a commission conditional on the restoration of “law and order,” and that he announce this publicly.⁶¹

      The high commissioner and his superiors were now agreed that the Arab leadership needed an excuse to call off the strike. They thus regarded it as a popular phenomenon—not, as the Jewish Agency maintained, as a ruse foisted upon the Arabs by their unscrupulous representatives. As Wauchope explained to Thomas on 16 May, “A demand was pressed upon [the Arab leaders] from all Arab