PALESTINE 1936, the Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict
- Jonathan Coulter
- Nov 13
- 8 min read
Updated: Nov 18
By Oren Kessler, 2023
317pp Rowman & Littlefield
Seeing a film dramatization of the Palestinian revolt from 1936 to 1939 prompted me to search for reading material on the same matter. It did not take me long to find this book, the name of which chimed with the title of the film which was simply Palestine 36.
The author, Oren Kessler, is an American journalist who lives in Tel Aviv. When I read his bio, I winced at the fact that he was a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and formerly worked at the American pro-Israeli think-tank-cum-lobby-group, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Notwithstanding, I was impressed by his scholarship. He seemed thorough and sought to give voice to the people involved in all sides of the conflict, Palestinian, Jewish and British, rather than use it as a platform to advance an agenda.
He completed the book in 2023, clearly before being able to digest the implications of what has happened since October of that year. However, by exploring events of the 30s, he provides invaluable context to help us understand the present.
The conflict was a direct result of decisions taken by the British during World War 1, notably its double-dealing, i.e. offering the Ottoman lands in Arabia, including Palestine, to the Arabs, in contradiction with deals it made with the Zionists and the French. It did this under the pressure of war and in line with imperialistic thinking that sought to extend British control in strategically important areas, i.e. close to the Suez Canal and the Middle Eastern oilfields. The first British governor of Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs, explained the logic behind the Balfour Declaration as creating:
A little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.
British leaders like Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and William Ormsby-Gore went beyond the words of the Balfour Declaration and actively promoted the Zionist settler-colonial cause. This meant facilitating Jewish immigration from Europe, such that between 1922 and 1940 the Jewish population in Palestine grew more than fivefold to over 467,000, around one third of the total. At the same time, Britain’s mandatory authority allowed the Jews to develop their own governance structures while holding back the Palestinians’ march towards self-government. As also pointed out by Peter Shambrook (p159-161), special ordinances were approved that allowed new Jewish landlords to evict customary Palestinian tenants who had clear rights under Ottoman law.
Prior to World War 1, Jews had lived at peace alongside Muslims and Christians, but the massive change in the status quo resulting from the Mandate, under which the League of Nations authorised Britain to govern Palestine, inevitably triggered reactions on the part of the Palestinian population, some of it violent. To cap it all, 1930s Palestine faced a growing influx of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany.
All this created adverse reactions among the Palestine elite, the urban working class and, above all, rural peasantry (fellaheen) who saw themselves losing land and livelihood in the face of this massive influx of Europeans who were establishing a network of Jews-only agricultural communities around the country. The revolt started with isolated acts of violence against Jews and soon progressed to a general strike under the leadership of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC).
The continued violence led the Mandatory authorities to institute the Peel Commission that in July 1937 proposed partitioning the country, the first incarnation of the two-state solution. An exchange of population was envisaged involving the transfer of up to 225,000 Arabs out of the Jewish state, and 1,250 Jews in the other direction (see Wikipedia).
The AHC rejected partition and demanded a complete halt to Jewish immigration, a prohibition on land sales to Zionists, and the establishment of representative government to reflect the country’s Arab majority. The war went on, with Britain exiling the Palestinian leadership, bringing in military enforcements, arming Zionist settlers to support its effort and taking punitive measures against native communities.
However, by 1939, Britain was preparing for war against Nazi Germany and was mostly concerned about keeping Arab opinion onside. In May, Parliament approved a White Paper conceding to most Arab demands, limiting Jewish immigration to 75,000 per over five years, with an Arab veto thereafter. Due in part to this, but more to exhaustion, the Arab insurgency ended.
In fact, as Kessler points out, the Great Revolt exacted the heaviest price from its instigators. Somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 Palestinians died, compared to about 500 Jews and 250 British. As many as 2,000 homes were demolished. Meanwhile about 40,000 Palestinians, disproportionately representing the political, commercial, and landed elite, departed Palestine for neighbouring lands, and the local Arab economy collapsed. There was much dissension among the Palestinians of whom according to Kessler (p211), at least 1,500 likely fell at Arab hands.
At the same time the Jewish community (Yishuv) maintained a unified leadership, notwithstanding the independent activity of the Irgun, and used the revolt to develop its own armed forces, the Haganah, into a fully-fledged defence force. Consequently, incensed that Britain’s White Paper that reneged on its former support for massive Jewish immigration, the Yishuv was well prepared to launch its own violent insurgency, against the British, during the following decade.
Contrasting figures on the Palestinian side
What Kessler does best is bring to life the key players on Palestinian, Jewish and British sides.
The leading Palestinian player was Amin al-Husseini, who in 1921 became Chief Mufti at the instigation of Herbert Samuel, Secretary of the Mandatory Authority. This was a lifetime position that made him de facto leader of Palestine's Muslims. He then became President of the Supreme Muslim Council, an organisation that Samuel founded to oversee sharia courts, mosques and religious schools, and oversee shrines, and this greatly increased his authority.
Amin was opposed to Zionism since 1920, but there was a period in the early 30s when he thought he might achieve agreement with the Zionist leader David Ben Gurion, who would later become head the Jewish Agency and the first Prime Minister of Israel. However, when Ben Gurion said he foresaw the rise of a Jewish polity that would absorb as many as eight million immigrants, the prospects were dashed.
In April 1936, Amin went on to chair the AHC, and there was an increase in attacks on the Mandatory authorities, Jews and presumed collaborators. In October 1937, he fled to Lebanon to evade arrest, but nevertheless, remained the dominant figure on the Arab side. During World War 2 he established himself in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany for whom he collaborated as a propagandist.
A firm opponent of Zionism from 1920, Amin comes over as an inflexible and unsympathetic leader whom Kessler contrasts with two much more approachable figures among the leading Palestinians, the author and intellectual George Antonius (author of the Arab Awakening) and the Cambridge-educated lawyer Musa Alami. Kessler (p20) describes Amin as a lackluster scholar with middling theological credentials, who but for Samuel’s intervention, would likely have been lost.
Key elements in the counterinsurgency
Orde Wingate would contribute more than any figure outside the Yishuv to the creation of Jewish military power. Coming from a military family of strict non-conformist (i.e. Plymouth Brethren) belief, he was of a fanatical bent that foreshadowed militant Christian Zionism. Kessler (p169) describes his world as utterly shaped by the Bible, whose battles and miracles were for him not distant legends but recent events.
Wingate arrived in Palestine as an intelligence officer but managed to persuade the army to allow him to establish the partly Jewish-staffed Special Night Squadrons (SNS) to defend Britain’s oil pipeline from Iraq which was constantly being sabotaged. He was highly successful in this and contributed greatly to the development of the Haganah. He was also a proponent of collective punishment and was sometimes cruel.
Ulster-born Sir Charles Tegart was a counter-insurgency specialist who had honed his skills in the Bengal police where, in ten years, he had risen to the rank of Commissioner. He was an expert on Irish and Bengali militancy, had survived multiple assassination attempts and earned himself a knighthood.
He arrived in Palestine in early 1938 and produced a plan that would include converting the police into a paramilitary counter-insurgency force, establishing dozens of permanent, reinforced concrete police forts at key points around the country - known as Tegart Forts - and a fortified fence along its norther frontier – to be built by Jewish labour. Tegart was also behind the establishment of Arab Investigation Centres where suspected Arab insurgents were interrogated and sometimes tortured.
Kessler recounts how British forces meted out brutal collective punishment to the people of Al-Bassa, near the Lebanese border, as a reprisal for the killing of British soldiers nearby, how village residents were routinely placed in open-air cages under the hot sun (sometimes denying them water, causing eight deaths on one occasion), using Palestinians as human-shields to prevent attacks on trains, and engaging in house demolitions. Some of this can be seen in Israel’s present brutality.
In another review, Peter Eisenstadt critiques Kessler for somewhat underplaying the extent and viciousness of the British military actions against the Palestinians, with many villages reduced to rubble due to bombardment from the air.
Future Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who commanded the most brutal phase of the British campaign, has what amounts to a passing mention. Arthur “Bomber” Harris is unmentioned.
For those wanting a grittier account of the Great Revolt, Eisenstadt recommends Caroline Elkins’ Legacy of Violence, particularly Chapter 5 which shows both of these figures greenlighting whatever force was needed to cope with the insurrection. Elkins’ book is about repressive approaches used during the length and breadth of the British Empire; she brings home the ruthless approach adopted in Palestine, and the role of the RAF, responsible for nearly half the official enemy kills during the Revolt (see p227).
Kessler is correct when he cites the historian Matthew Hughes (p157), who described the Law as one of lawlessness, whereby:
after 1936 the British established a systematic, systemic, officially sanctioned policy of destruction, punishment, reprisal and brutality that fractured and impoverished the Palestinian population (sic).
Indeed, British law and Palestine-specific emergency regulations gave commanders and troops wide discretion to do as they saw fit, much as happened in other colonial counterinsurgency campaigns.
Conclusion
Looking at this from today’s perspective, the Palestinians might have been better off accepting the Peel Commission’s partition, as it would have left them with much more of Palestine than they have now. However, the voracious appetite and influence of the Zionists suggest they would not have stopped there but pursued their long-term ambition to get the whole of Palestine with as few natives as possible. Indeed, Ben-Gurion described the Peel Commission’s proposal as an unrivalled lever for the gradual conquest of all of the Land of Israel.
The driving force behind the conflict was a Zionist settler-colonial project supported by the UK. At a time when many Britons complain of being swamped by immigrants, it is worth reflecting on the fact that Britain was seeking to settle (in terms of today’s UK) the equivalent of over 20 million immigrants of a single ethnicity. Only an entitled colonial regime could conceive of such a scheme that was bound to bring forth massive resistance.
Indeed, the only way to understand this conflict is through the colonial mindset that dominated British foreign policy until the mid-20th century, and which was evident in tactics wielded against protests in India and the Irish rebellion after World War 1. This thinking coincided with the interests of a very determined and united group of European Jews who also had colonial pretensions. As these gained power within the state of Israel, they adopted much of Britain’s erstwhile brutal approach towards the Palestinians, including house demolitions, aerial bombardment, collective punishment, the use of human shields and torture.
Comments