The Defence of Palestine: insurrection and public security, 1936–1939

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

• Within three years of the British capture of Baghdad in 1917 Mesopotamia erupted in full scale revolt

• The British army was severely stretched and cost £40 million

• The rebellion shifted British policy of the region away from the Indian model led by Sir Arnold Wilson of imposing standards of administration and towards the Arab façade of his rival Sir Percy Cox

• Wilson blamed it on the Hashemites

• Whereas the conventional explanation was that British tax-collecting methods were more efficient than the Ottoman predecessors

• Palestine mandate was transferred from the control of the Foreign office to the middle east department of the colonial office

• Security was transferred from the war office to the air ministry

• The primitive aspects of the Palestinian unrest in 1936 placed it in a limbo were it could not be 'scientifically' classified as a rebellion

• To most the British handling of the rebelling was a textbook example of vacillation

• The 1937 commission argued that martial law ought to have been imposed earlier

• The League of Nations censured Britain for failing to apply martial law earlier

• The Root of Britain's hesitancy lay in difficulty in interpreting Arab actions and in the ambiguity of objectives implicit in the mandate itself

• By 1936 the British had become accustomed to thinking that the Arabs of Palestine were incapable of organising a unified national movement

• Ben Gurion saw ''new power and remarkable discipline'' in the Arab movement as early as the demonstrations of October 1931

• Ben Gurion argued that the death of al-Qassam was a watershed in the development of Arab consciousness: his self-sacrifice set new standards

• The British police dismissed him as a charlatan working by ''bringing together the more religiously minded of the villagers and preaching to the doctrines of Islam… to stimulate a spirit of religious fanaticism''

• Explained his policy by selecting his audience amongst the poor, the ignorant and the more violently disposed of the pious

• No doubt that in official eyes that they were rebels rather than mere bandits

• Mohammed el Bernawi came to me at Hamman el Ein and said, ''If terrorism does not continue, this Government will think that the Arab Higher Committee was responsible for the disturbances and will not bring the Committee back. If the disturbances continue, the Government may bring them back as being not respone…''

• Palestine General Staff's lucid report on the I936 events, Military Lessons of the Rebellion in Palestine. Noting one possible policy for coping with the disturbances, that of making 'some temporary concessions to the Arabs which would enable the leaders to call off the campaign of violence and conduct negotiations in a more tranquil atmosphere

• The salient point about the legal powers taken to meet the challenge of the Arab rebellion is that martial law was never openly imposed, in the strict sen

• Palestine had for a moment a baffled military governor with no special powers.3 The British convention of civil supremacy was maintained.

• The Military view was that in an 'ordinary' colonial territory, martial law would have been in effect by the summer of I936. Only the political peculiarities of Palestine obstructed the transition, with dangerous long- term results. Martial law was publicly threatened, but not imposed. The rebellion was stalled but never crushed

• The forces available to counter the Arab insurgency were a product both of general British attitudes to law and order, and of the particular political landscape of Palestine. Throughout the Mandate period there were repeated efforts to construct a mixed Arab-Jewish police force with a leavening of British officers and other ranks to provide some assurance of control and to foster the preferred ethos of British policy

• It was evident that the small police force, some 900 British, i 500 Arab, and 400 (rising to 500) Jews, was incapable of dealing with the insurgency, even when reinforced by roughly 4,000 supernumerary police (75 per cent Jew

• e army deplored the results of allowing a reversal of police and military roles

• Overall, the effect of the substantial forces deployed in Palestine by September I936 was problematic; most observers thought that the sheer quantity of troops, however employed, had a noticeable impact.

• minated. The military commander in north Palestine told the chief of police in January I938 that his soldiers still resented the way 'the Police, while laying back in the collar themselves, try to steal the milita

• Unusually in such circumstances, the suggestion of military control came from London rather than from the frustrated local commander, and the reasoning rested primarily on public opinion. And oddly, while complying with the proposal, the local chiefs held - at least as the High Commissioner reported it - that 'we do not think it will have any material effect on public opinion'

• MacMichael now insisted on the 'essential unity' of the Arab movement; though 'not fully co-ordinated', its organization was being constantly improved. The movement was 'definitely a national one

• In one sense this was 'real' martial law: recourse to the military as 'the only remaining Force in the Community',2 invoked by pressure of circumstances rather than by executive decision. But to the military authorities, a declaration of martial law was not so much a constitutional issue as a practical instrument: soldiers believed in the moral impact of public determination to use force

• The Arab police were written off so completely by the military authorities, and even, to an alarming extent, by the police authorities too, that there was never any question of using them as the heart of an integrated intelligence ser

• This was the crucial point. The plain fact was that the British police were almost entirely ignorant of Arabic, and the army had only a hand- ful of reasonably fluent speaker

• No substitute for an indigenous police force was found

• the nearest the authorities came to mobilizing the Jews (apart from the bucolic home-guard activities of the Jewish Settlement and Supernumary Police) was through the - distinctly subterranean - Special Night Squads.