The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

unless [Jewish] immigration is suspended.”⁶² The RAF—which held supreme command over the armed forces in the mandate until September 1936—issued an intelligence summary for April 1936, which likewise concluded that the strike, having begun in Jaffa and spread to other towns, initially “lacked any central control.”⁶³ The Arab “leaders” were following the strikers.

      This was not news to the Arabs themselves, whose understanding of the circumstances of mid-1936—their nature and history—differed markedly from that of the Jews and the British. Three developments were especially salient for Palestinian Arabs in 1935–36. The first was a new, unprecedentedly large influx of European Jews—62,000 in 1935—who were fleeing the Nazi menace in Central Europe.⁶⁴ The Arab leadership in Palestine, operating with effectively universal popular sympathy, had for nearly two decades advanced three demands to the British: halt Jewish immigration, terminate Jewish land purchases, and establish a democratic government reflecting the country’s Arab majority. As of 1935, the British had acceded to none of these demands, and the largest annual wave of Jewish immigration in Palestinian history was a painful reminder of that fact. This circumstance was aggravated by a simultaneous slump in Arab wages and surge in Arab unemployment.⁶⁵

      The second development pertained to the second of the perennial Arab demands, Jewish land purchases. As with Jewish immigration, the figures for Jewish acquisition of land in Palestine peaked in the period preceding the strike and accompanying violence of 1936. By 1930, Jews held over one million dunums (four million acres) of land in the country. At 62,000 dunums, Jewish purchases in 1934 were greater than the previous three years combined, and they leapt to 73,000 in 1935.⁶⁶ Notes Ann Mosely Lesch, “In 1935, [the] high commissioner asserted that the fear that the Jewish community is ‘eating up the land’ is felt ‘in every town and village in Palestine.’”⁶⁷

      The third significant development for Palestinian Arabs in 1935–36 was the nascent flowering of a public sphere, due primarily to the bootstrapping organizational efforts of the Istiqlal (Independence) Party, beginning in 1932.⁶⁸ As Weldon Matthews has shown, the Istiqlal played on and exacerbated the credibility problem of the traditional Arab leadership, whose fruitless protests and diplomatic missions the broader Arab population disdained. From late 1933 to the autumn of 1935, however, the Istiqlal and other youth-oriented Arab political parties were largely dormant. It was Jaffa port workers’ interception of a Tel Aviv-bound shipment of weapons concealed in barrels of cement that reinvigorated grassroots Arab political networks in October 1935.⁶⁹ By then, Arab youths, intellectuals, and workers had become seasoned political activists, garnering press coverage for the national cause and staging popular demonstrations that brought pressure to bear upon the traditional Arab leadership.⁷⁰ The same elements compelled elite Palestinian families to set aside their differences and, in the days after 19 April, to form the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), with the mufti of Jerusalem (al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni) as president.⁷¹

      The Husaynis had for generations occupied the upper echelon of Jerusalem politics, and the British (like the Ottomans before them) often depended on the family in their dealings with the local Arab community.⁷² In 1912, the young Amin al-Husayni enrolled in the famous al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he first became involved in the anti-Zionist politics that would become his legacy.⁷³ His relationship with the British in subsequent decades teetered between harmony and hostility, but not to the point of disinheriting him of the mediating role London had long devolved upon his family. And thus on 21 April, the president of the newly constituted Arab Higher Committee assured the high commissioner that he would “do his best to prevent [the] continuance of disorder.”⁷⁴ Wauchope would regard the mufti and the AHC as a “moderate influence on more extreme leaders” for some time yet. The AHC, in the high commissioner’s view, was “not directly concerned with [the] organisation of strikes,” which had been thrust upon it by the Arab masses.⁷⁵

      BREAD, DIGNITY, AND GANGSTERS

      While the AHC awkwardly attempted to choreograph the actions of a popular movement it had neither initiated nor inspired, the Committee was in ideological accord with this movement on two points. The first was that the Arabs of Palestine were due the same legal recognition as the Arabs of Iraq, Egypt, and every other Arab territory: they were entitled to national independence. A number of AHC representatives stated this to the high commissioner and the chief secretary during a meeting at the government house in Jerusalem on the evening of 5 May. The mufti, for example, explained, “The Palestinians are not inferior in any way to the Iraqi or the Egyptian people, and while these two countries either have had or are about to have their rights recognized, the Jews are opposed to the slightest measure of reform that may be proposed in Palestine.”⁷⁶

      The AHC’s secretary and Istiqlal representative, ʿAwni Bey ʿAbd al-Hadi, then spoke. The ʿAbd al-Hadis were prominent landowners in Jenin and Nablus, and ʿAwni Bey—who had studied law in France, helped to found the Istiqlal party, and been appointed the AHC’s liaison to the locally organized national committees—was a prominent figure in his own right.⁷⁷ Like the mufti, ʿAwni Bey situated the local conflict in the larger Arab struggle for independence:

      While our neighbours in Syria and Egypt are fighting for their independence, the Arabs of Palestine are struggling for their bread. The dignity of the Arabs in this country and their freedom are exposed to danger, and we consider that it is the sacred duty of every one of us to defend his endangered bread and dignity.⁷⁸

      A few weeks later, on 30 May, the high commissioner and the chief secretary met with the mayors of major Palestinian towns and cities, who hammered away at the same theme. Allowing Jewish immigration to proceed apace, the mayors declared, posed a “danger to [Palestinian Arabs’] future existence” and constituted a “betrayal of . . . Arab rights.”⁷⁹ Halting immigration would terminate the disorders. Absent that, “neither the [AHC] nor any other leader could . . . oppose the people without losing honour and credit.”⁸⁰ A few days earlier, the high commissioner had opened a letter of protest from the First Arab Rural Congress. It also emphasized the “great danger to our national and racial existence” created by ongoing Jewish immigration, which it declared “completely illegal,” as were the British “attempts to suppress the lawful voice of the nation . . . by force.”⁸¹ Whereas everyone from Jewish merchants to the leaders of the Jewish Agency had stressed the pseudo-national and illegal nature of the strike, the many Arabs from whom Wauchope heard were adamant regarding their national standing and legal entitlement to resist British implementation of the Balfour Declaration.

      When not parrying protests from Arabs and Jews, British officials mulled over the deteriorating security situation in the country. In the second half of May, His Majesty’s troops encountered determined armed resistance in Gaza and Beersheba in the south and in Nablus and Tulkarm in the north.⁸² Across the land, the silence of the Palestinian night was steadily succumbing to the hiss and crackle of gunfire and firecrackers.⁸³ While some authors have deduced from this circumstance that British security forces were under perpetual siege in May 1936, that appears to be an exaggeration.⁸⁴ As late as 23 June, the deputy inspector general of police would report that relatively few villagers had attacked British forces.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, the RAF intelligence summary for May 1936 did find that the AHC’s attempt to maintain a peaceful strike was faltering, and that “more extremist elements were taking the law into their own hands.” These “extremists,” it is worth noting, aimed their attacks “chiefly against [the] police and military.”⁸⁶

      At the same time, government crime statistics showed an astonishing increase in murders and attempted murders in April and May 1936, as compared with the same two-month period in the previous year. Murders numbered nineteen in April/May 1935, a figure which nearly tripled to fifty-three in April/May 1936. Attempted murders more than quadrupled, from twenty to eighty-seven. Crimes also shot up from earlier in the year. In March, there had been eleven murders and twenty attempted murders.⁸⁷ The data depicted a crime wave, a fact that colored the intelligence summary’s portrayal of the “extremists,” which it neglected to disaggregate from the common criminals committing murders. Thus, despite its observation that the bulk of the Arab violent attacks in May targeted military