Repression and Rebellion: Britain's Response to the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936–39

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

• Originally manifested as an urban led disobedience mapping against Zionism

• Second phase developed into a more violent and peasant led resistance that increasingly targeted the British

• The response to the second phase was far more brutal and aggressive than in the first

• Townshend plays own the scale of British repression by highlighting the conflicting imperatives of the civil and military authorities within Palestine

• Arguing British policy was highly unstable and never decisive

• The civil/military tensions were resolved in the later stages of the revolt

• British rule in Palestine had to be established before entering into any pro-Arab diplomacy

• Described by Martine Kolinsky as a 'dual policy' of 'appeasement and suppression of violence'

• Conciliatory moves were seen as required by the British but only after the revolt had been put down increasing short term repression

• Within the first phase the military was kept as a defensive force

• Arab rural areas developed rural bands that attacked Jewish settlements

• Largely directed by the urban and elitist higher Arab committee (HAC) established on 25 April 1936

• Tougher British policy operated in Palestine during the second phase when the district commissioner of the Galilee district Lewis Andrews was killed

• Marked the start of the second phase on 26 September 1937

• Following the killing, the British administration banned the HAC and the Arab National Committees

• Centralised command was destroyed

• Any effort to diffuse the crises could no longer operate within orthodox channels and the British focus switched to the more rural areas

• Collective punishment was allowed to be used to discourage rural involvement

• Britain's desire for Arab friendly relations due to the thought of war and the need to protect the Suez canal was now a priority in 1938

• The revolt was subsumed into a wider geo-political debate

• The first phase saw British soldiers sympathetic to the movement, and to Arabs in general due to shared cultural interests and friendliness as well as the fact the rebels were so poorly armed they never entered combat with the British and if they did it was very low-risk

• The shift from urban to rural changed this, and gave way to protracted peasant guerrilla warfare

• summer of 1939 General Haining was forced to admit that ‘contact with the fellah [Arab peasant] has been almost completely lost during the last three years of trouble’.

• While military reports claimed this led to a decrease in incidents in the occupied areas, they also acknowledged that the occupation of as many as twenty-five villages at any one time (with around forty troops at each post) led to further disaffection among the local population.

• The growing tide of opposition to British forces in the rural community was augmented by the erection of Tegart’s security fence along the northern Palestinian border to prevent the infiltration of rebel fighters from Syria and Lebanon

• e resulting opposition to this project culminated on 29 June 1938 with the destruction of six kilometres of the fence,

• Villagers who refused to cooperate with the military were now subject to the wholesale destruction of their property, as stipulated in regulation nine of the 1937 Defence Orders

• The hardship imposed on the rural population was augmented by the military’s policy of placing villagers in open-air pens for several hours while the living quarters were searched. In May 1939 this policy led to disaster in the village of Halhoul where 8 people died

• While there is no evidence to suggest that incidents in Palestine, such as the killings at Halhoul and Kafr Yasif, were part of an institutionalised framework, it is nonetheless clear that the troops’ growing anger and violence towards the general Arab population were given tacit encouragement by their superiors.