The Arabs: A History

In the aftermath of the Qassam revolt, the heads of the Palestinian political parties attempted to reassert their leadership over the nationalist movement. In April 1936 the leading parties united in a new organization called the Arab Higher Committee. They called for a general strike by all Arab workers and government employees, as well as a complete boycott on all economic exchanges with the Yishuv. The general strike was accompanied by violent attacks on British forces and Jewish settlers. The nationalist leaders’ strategy backfired badly. The Palestinian Arab economy suffered far worse than the Yishuv as a result of the boycott. Britain flooded the country with 20,000 new troops to put down the rebellion. Britain also called on its allies in neighboring Arab states to persuade the Palestinian leadership to call off the general strike. On October 9, 1936, the kings of Saudi Arabia and Iraq joined the rulers of Transjordan and Yemen in a joint declaration calling on “our sons the Arabs of Palestine” to “resolve for peace in order to save further shedding of blood. In doing this,” the monarchs claimed implausibly, “we rely on the good intentions of your friend Great Britain, who has declared that she will do justice.”43 When the Arab Higher Committee responded to the kings’ declaration and called for an end to the strike, the Palestinians felt betrayed by their own leaders and their Arab brethren alike. Their views were captured by the Palestinian nationalist poet Abu Salman, whose acerbic verses accused both the Palestinian leaders and British-backed Arab monarchs of selling out the Arab movement:You who cherish the homeland

Revolt against the outright oppression

Liberate the homeland from the kings

Liberate it from the puppets

I thought we had kings who could lead the men behind them 44

Abu Salman spoke for the disenchanted Palestinian masses when he asserted that the liberation of Palestine would come from its people, not its leaders. In the aftermath of the general strike the British responded once again with a commission of enquiry. The report of the Peel Commission, published July 7, 1937, sent shock waves through Palestine. For the first time, the British acknowledged that the troubles in Palestine were the product of rival and incompatible national movements. “An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country,” the report acknowledged. “About 1,000,000 Arabs are in strife, open or latent, with some 400,000 Jews. There is no common ground between them.” The solution proposed by the Peel Commission was partition. The Jews were to gain statehood in 20 percent of the territory of Palestine, including most of the coastline and some of the country’s most fertile agricultural land, in the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee. The Arabs were allotted the poorest lands of Palestine, including the Negev Desert and the Arava Valley, as well as the hill country of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The population of Palestine did not correspond to the geography of partition. This was particularly problematic as major Arab towns and cities were included in the proposed Jewish state. To iron out such anomalies, the Peel Commission held out the possibility of “population transfers” to remove Arabs from territories allocated to the Jewish state—something that in the later twentieth century would come to be called ethnic cleansing. Britain’s recommendation of forced transfer won the chairman of the Jewish Agency, David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), over to the partition plan. “This will give us something we never had, even when we were under our own authority” in antiquity, he enthused—namely, a “really Jewish” state with a homogenously Jewish population.45 To compound Arab grievances, the partition plan did not envisage an independent Palestinian state but called for the Arab territories to be appended to Transjordan, under Amir Abdullah’s rule. The people of Palestine had grown deeply distrustful of Abdullah, seeing him as a British agent who was covetous of their lands. For the Palestinians, the Peel Commission’s recommendations represented the worst possible outcome for their national struggle. Far from securing their rights to self-rule, their population was to be dispersed and ruled by hostile foreigners—the Zionists and Amir Abdullah. The Jewish Agency accepted the terms, Amir Abdullah agreed with the Peel Commission, and the Palestinians went to war against both the British and the Yishuv. The second phase of the Palestinian Arab Revolt lasted two years, from the autumn of 1937 through 1939. On September 26, 1937, Palestinian extremists murdered the district commissioner in Galilee, L. Y. Andrews. The British arrested 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders, deported many to the Seychelles, and declared the Arab Higher Committee illegal. Without central leadership, the revolt degenerated into an uncoordinated insurgency that ravaged the Palestinian countryside. The insurgents attacked British police and army patrols and Jewish settlements, assassinated British and Jewish officials, and killed Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the occupation authorities. They sabotaged railways, communications, and the oil pipelines that crossed through Palestine. Villagers found themselves caught between the insurgents, who demanded their support, and the British, who punished all those suspected of aiding the insurgents. The effects on the Palestinians were devastating. Every Arab attack against the British and the Yishuv brought massive reprisals. The British, determined to suppress the revolt militarily, dispatched 25,000 soldiers and policemen to Palestine?the largest deployment of British forces abroad since the end of the First World War. They established military courts, operating under ?emergency regulations? that gave the mandate the legal trappings of a military dictatorship. The British destroyed the houses of all persons involved in attacks, as well as all persons known or suspected of having aided insurgents, under the legal authority of the emergency regulations. An estimated 2,000 houses were destroyed between 1936 and 1940. Combatants and i