The Crime of Nationalism. Matthew Kraig Kelly

British (and Zionist) discussions of the revolt.⁸⁸

      Arab leaders were meanwhile keen to distinguish themselves from those involved in violent actions. Both the AHC and the national committees advocated openly for a nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience.⁸⁹ They did so, moreover, with the backing of the Arab press. The pan-Arab al-Difaʿ—along with Filastin, one of the two highest circulation Arabic dailies in the country—editorialized in late April, “We want the Arab Higher Committee to act as Gandhi acted in India when he called for civil disobedience.”⁹⁰ Filastin used the government’s favored epithet (“disturbers of the peace”) to designate those Arabs who were resorting to violence.⁹¹ Al-Liwaʾ called in its 15 May edition for the Arabs to adopt only peaceful methods of protest.⁹²

      “TURKISH METHODS” AND THE VILLAGE SEARCHES

      OF MAY 1936 AND AFTER

      Violence, however, was much more than an Arab problem, as Arab journalists and political leaders were quick to note. In fact, the problem of British violence was the second topic of agreement between the AHC and the Arab public. Thus, in the course of the mayors’ 30 May conversation with the high commissioner and the chief secretary, Nablus mayor Sulayman Bey Tuqan complained of British police and soldiers’ maltreatment of Arabs. He was particularly concerned about the so-called “village searches” that security forces were then conducting throughout the country.⁹³ British spokesmen announced that the purpose of these searches was to discover weapons and to apprehend wanted men. An abundance of Arab testimony, however, indicated that the searches were actually punitive expeditions, designed to frighten the population and thereby to re-establish “law and order”—just as the cabinet had directed Wauchope to do.

      These “searches,” moreover, were not limited to rural areas.⁹⁴ On 1 June, the high commissioner received a delegation of ʿulamaʾ, who drew his attention to an incident in the Bab Hutta quarter of Jerusalem, which the clerics had taken some trouble to investigate. They reported that soldiers and police, ostensibly searching for weapons in the area, had instead stormed through houses, destroying food and furniture and mortifying men in front of their wives. The ʿulamaʾ had heard numerous tales of violent British exploits in Arab villages. Following their investigation at Bab Hutta, they now believed them. The men suggested to the high commissioner that these actions, coupled with the long-standing British policy of refusing to respond meaningfully to nonviolent Arab protest, were generating the present instability. “[I]f shooting and bombing is being done now,” one of them explained, “it is not with the object of committing murder or because the Arabs like disorders, but simply with the object of letting their voice reach England.”⁹⁵

      FIGURE 2. Residents of Bab Hutta, in Jerusalem, survey the wreckage of a British “village search,” summer 1936. (Library of Congress)

      These were not the first reports of police brutality that Wauchope had heard. Arab leaders had informed him as early as 21 April that officers had shot a sixteen-year-old youth in the back, and that “the attitude of the Police had given the impression to the Arabs that their real enemies were the British.”⁹⁶ The Anglican archdeacon in Jerusalem related the same to the chief secretary. Anglican missionaries operated in villages throughout Palestine, and regularly reported back to the archdeacon and archbishop in Jerusalem regarding developments in the Arab community. On 2 June, the day after Wauchope’s meeting with the ʿulamaʾ, the archdeacon wrote the chief secretary with concern: “It is believed amongst some at any rate of the British Police that they have been definitely ordered to ‘Duff them [the Arabs] up’. (The phrase itself is significant to anyone who remembers, as I do, the days before the present Inspector-General).”⁹⁷

      The archdeacon referred to the notorious Douglas Duff, whose harsh tactics as a police inspector in 1920s Palestine had rendered his surname a byword for police brutality. Indeed, Duff’s fondness for such torture techniques as waterboarding and “suspension” ultimately landed him in trouble with the high commissioner, who fired him in 1931 for the “ill treatment” of a prisoner.⁹⁸ The infamous former inspector had actually visited Jerusalem only a few weeks earlier, on 12–14 May, during his first trip to Palestine since departing the country in 1932.⁹⁹ Remarkably, Duff himself was taken aback by the violence to which the British openly subjected Arab civilians. After witnessing soldiers and police searching a caravan of Arabs wending its way out of the city’s German Colony, he lamented: “If the sort of thing I saw . . . is usual in these days, then it is no wonder that we are laying up a great debt of active hatred against ourselves.” As Duff described the episode: “The searching was none too gently executed, for I saw one Arab being savagely kicked by a brawny man in khaki, whilst an old man with a grey beard received a nasty cut from a leather hand-whip.”¹⁰⁰ Evidence from Arabic sources suggests that the brutality Duff witnessed was, indeed, “usual” in those days. Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a schoolteacher and member of a militant underground organization in May 1936, wrote that British security forces in the Old City of Jerusalem were demeaning Palestinians by forcing them to stop and salute the same police patrols that regularly beat them up “for no reason.”¹⁰¹ Al-Difaʿ likewise reported that British police were “searching passersby for no reason” and “harassing them . . . when [they] show any form of resistance upon receiving rude, provocative insults.”¹⁰² Such smug behavior, writes Mustafa Kabha, “filled [Palestinians] with indignation and hatred for the English.”¹⁰³

      The archdeacon received similar reports from around the country. He informed the chief secretary: “From every side complaints are reaching me daily of the unnecessary and quite indiscriminate roughness which is being displayed by the British Police in their handling of the native, and particularly the Arab, population.”¹⁰⁴ In a subsequent letter, he disclosed that he possessed reliable reports that the repression was still worse in Palestine’s northern districts.¹⁰⁵ The ubiquity of this unruly behavior led the archdeacon to surmise that the police had adopted a new “method” for dealing with Arabs. He dated its inception to one week before the death of Constable Robert Bird on 28 May at the hands of Arab rebels in the Old City of Jerusalem—an important detail, as Bird’s killing served as “the usual defence” of police brutality.¹⁰⁶ Not incidentally, Bird’s assailants appear to have targeted him in retaliation for the earlier British killing of an Arab man.¹⁰⁷ Similarly, a fortnight later, on 12 June, rebels attacked and wounded the British assistant police superintendent, Alan Sigrist, a man whose savagery towards Jerusalem’s Arabs was legendary.¹⁰⁸

      The archdeacon’s estimate of the introduction of tough new measures against the Arab community was on the mark. Duff had seen evidence of such tactics in mid-May. And by 24–25 May, police and troops were raiding villages near Nazareth and Gaza, on the assumption that they quartered men who had mounted attacks on government forces over the previous two days. These raids, a War Office report disclosed, “took the form of searches for arms and wanted men by troops and police and, being fairly severe in nature, had also a punitive effect which began to produce most satisfactory results in the more truculent villages.”¹⁰⁹ The statement that the searches “had also a punitive effect” was disingenuous. In reality, punishing villagers was the searches’ primary purpose, while weapons and wanted men were secondary concerns. As Air Vice-Marshal R. E. C. Peirse—the military commander in Palestine and the co-architect of the village search policy—divulged in a top-secret report: “Ostensibly these searches were undertaken to find arms and wanted persons; actually the measures adopted by the police on the lines of similar Turkish methods, were punitive.”¹¹⁰ In early June, the new colonial secretary, William Ormsby-Gore, spoke with Kenneth Williams, the editor of the publication Great Britain and the East and the author of a book about Ibn Saʿud.¹¹¹ Williams had received information from two sources of whose “bona fides” and “reliability and good judgment” he was certain, and who reported that “British troops in Palestine had been committing ‘excesses’ against the Arabs.” He stated further that his informants “were under the impression that the conduct of the troops had the approval of the High Commissioner.”¹¹²

      While