Indeed, having concluded that no change in British policy would be achieved through the traditional leadership’s strategy of strikes and demonstrations, much less by negotiation and entreaty, a more radical younger generation of Arab nationalists now pressed for outright confrontation. They found common cause with both an increasingly militarized Muslim clergy and the more extreme elements of an emerging pan-Arab movement that sought to link Palestine’s fate with like-minded independence movements in Egypt and Trans-Jordan. The collective zeitgeist was perhaps best summed up by Rashid al-Haj Ibrahim, one of Haifa’s most prominent bankers, a pan-Arabist, and leader of the newly founded al-Istiqlal (Independence) Party. Addressing a clandestine meeting of fellow militants early in 1933, Ibrahim forcefully presented the case for armed revolt. “The Jews are advancing on all fronts,” he declared. “They keep buying land, they bring in immigrants both legally and illegally, and they have even invaded Trans-Jordan. If we cannot demonstrate to them convincingly enough that all their efforts are in vain and that we are capable of destroying them at one stroke, then we shall have to lose our holy land or resign ourselves to being wretched second-rate citizens in a Jewish state.” When asked exactly how he proposed to achieve this, Ibrahim unhesitatingly replied, “By doing what we did in 1929, but using more efficient methods. We have learned from our mistakes and they will not recur.” A geriatric local imam and itinerant marriage registrar named Sheikh ‘Izz al-Din Abd al-Qadir al-Qassam would become the unlikely leader of the organized revolt that Ibrahim had promised.15
On paper at least, there was little in al-Qassam’s background that would suggest his lasting historical importance as the legendary Palestinian martyr-hero he remains today. He was born sometime during the 1870s or early 1880s to an impoverished family who lived in a small Syrian village. His father was a teacher in the local kuttab (an Islamic elementary school often attached to a mosque) that the younger al-Qassam attended before entering Cairo’s al-Azhar University. It was in Egypt that his political consciousness appears to have awakened. Al-Qassam became involved with the nationalist movement protesting British rule, but upon graduation he moved to Turkey to work as a religious teacher. Al-Qassam, however, soon returned to Syria. In 1911, Italy invaded Libya, and he again became immersed in radical politics. Declaring resistance to the invasion a jihad, al-Qassam raised funds to support the struggle and recruited 250 volunteers to go fight in Libya. At the start of World War I, al-Qassam had joined the Ottoman army and after receiving the standard infantry training served as chaplain to a unit quartered near Damascus. He subsequently fought as a guerrilla in the ill-fated 1919–20 uprising against France’s occupation of Syria. Sentenced to death in absentia by a French military court, al-Qassam fled to Haifa via Beirut in 1921 and shortly afterward was appointed imam of the newly opened, Supreme Muslim Council–funded al-Istiqlal Mosque.16
He quickly achieved renown as a popular and galvanizing cleric. A fiery and impressive orator with the credentials of a learned teacher and theologian and the street cred of a warrior blooded in battle against the Western invader, al-Qassam swiftly gained status and stature within the community. His tireless ministering to the poor and the unfortunate further solidified al-Qassam’s reputation. He established a night school for illiterate working-class adults and devoted himself to guiding at-risk youths to lives of piety and devotion. These good deeds, however, were increasingly overshadowed by his growing involvement in radical, nationalist Palestinian politics. Together with Ibrahim, al-Qassam in 1928 founded the Haifa chapter of the militant Young Muslim Men’s Association and six years later succeeded his close friend as its president. Al-Qassam’s appointment as marriage registrar for the Galilee enabled him to cement his network of contacts and expand his circle of admirers beyond the city to the rural heartland. His official duties also provided al-Qassam with the perfect cover to recruit new fighters to the struggle, establish clandestine guerrilla cells, cache arms and supplies, oversee military training, and generally lay the foundation for the violent uprising he planned to lead when the time was right.17
Al-Qassam also appears to have been a Salafist embracing a literal and austere form of Islam that inextricably linked politics to religion and regarded rebellion and the defense of Muslim lands against Western encroachment as a personal obligation. Al-Qassam and his followers dressed in traditional Muslim attire and grew their beards long according to Qur’anic injunction. His men proudly claimed for themselves the respected title of “sheikh” and also swore bayat (a personal oath of allegiance) to al-Qassam, who ensured that the rebellion he was planning would be considered theologically legitimate by obtaining from the mufti of Damascus a fatwa sanctioning attacks on both Britons and Jews.18
For al-Qassam, the struggle against Palestine’s British rulers and Jewish interlopers alike was divinely decreed. Clandestine meetings therefore began with religious instruction before moving on to practicalities, including training in firearms and bomb making. Al-Qassam was scathing in his dismissal of the mainstream Muslim establishment’s passivity and cowardice. “You are a people of rabbits,” he inveighed from his pulpit, “who are afraid of death and scaffolds and engaged in prattle. You must know that nothing will save us but our arms.” He routinely criticized the Arab Executive for its bluster and the mufti of Jerusalem and Supreme Muslim Council for spending money on restoring mosques rather than purchasing weapons.19
By the early 1930s, al-Qassam’s subversive activities had crystallized in the form of a secret association calling itself the Black Hand. Numbering in the several hundreds, its purpose was to kill as many Jews as possible and spread terror among the Jewish populace across northern Palestine. What remains unclear is whether this group or a dissident splinter was responsible for the spate of Jewish settlers murdered between April 1931 and December 1932. Regardless, by 1935 al-Qassam had made sufficient preparations for the sustained rebellion he had long believed was necessary to rouse the masses and challenge what he regarded as the insufficiently militant Arab leadership. Only in this manner, he believed, would the collapse of British rule and attendant demise of Zionist dreams for Palestine be achieved. On November 6, 1935, al-Qassam left Haifa to implement his battle plan. The timing appears to have been influenced by the accidental discovery only a few weeks earlier of a large amount of arms and ammunition concealed in a consignment of cement on the Jaffa docks. The intended recipient had a Jewish surname and an address in Tel Aviv; Arab press reports claimed this was incontrovertible evidence that the Jews were arming themselves to seize control of the country. Al-Qassam had thus decided the time had come to start the rebellion.20
He took to the hills with a small band of followers. There are conflicting accounts whether the gang prematurely tipped its hand by shooting a Jewish police sergeant or crossed paths with a police patrol hunting for fruit thieves. Regardless, in the gun battle that followed, a Jewish police officer was killed, and a manhunt was launched. Al-Qassam and his followers hid in caves for nearly two weeks. As the chill and damp of winter set in, it cannot have been a comfortable existence. Moreover, depending on which year he was in fact born, al-Qassam was in either his late fifties or his early sixties, hardly an age suited to an existence of living life in the rough, on the run. On November 20 or 21, acting on information supplied by an informer, the police surrounded a cave near the Arab village of Ya’bad in which the rebel band was hiding. In the four-hour gun battle that ensued, al-Qassam and two of his band were killed and five others captured. Two were able to escape.21
Almost immediately, this otherwise inconsequential clash became the stuff of legend. Stories circulated about the gang’s piety: how they were all found with Qur’ans in their pockets; how they faithfully prayed five times a day despite being relentlessly hunted; how they passed their time in hiding deep in Qur’anic study; and how a talisman had been found in the folds of al-Qassam’s turban that read,
O God save me from the terrible armoury of the infidel
O God let your r
eligion win and go victorious
O God protect me in my coming adventure.22
Four thousand people attended al-Qassam’s funeral, where he was hailed as a martyr. Classes in Arab schools throughout Palestine were suspended in his honor. David Ben-Gurion, the newly elected chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive Committee, observed these developments with grave unease. Al-Qassam’s last stand at Ya’bad, he argued, was the Arab version of Tel Hai, with al-Qassam cast in Trumpeldor’s heroic role. “This is the first time the Arabs have seen that a man could be found ready to give his life for an idea, and this will undoubtedly be a very important educational factor for the Arab masses, and at all events for their youth,” Ben-Gurion predicted. “There is no doubt that this episode will now bring about further attempts at terrorism.”23
Ben-Gurion’s assessment was soon validated. Although al-Qassam had been neither elected nor appointed to any position of national leadership or authority, his example at once roused to consciousness and militarized what had hitherto been at best an ill-formed and spasmodic protest movement. The appeal of al-Qassam’s uncompromising hostility toward Britain’s continued governance of Palestine and support for Zionism blazed across the class and social distinctions that had long divided Palestinian Arab society. In effect, al-Qassam endowed the movement with a new ideological and nationalist focus solidified by the powerful force of militant Islam. He transformed what had hitherto been a mostly spontaneous, inchoate, poorly organized, and uncoordinated struggle into a clearly articulated—albeit nascent—revolution. As the Palestinian-American historian Philip Mattar notes, al-Qassam “achieved more in death than he did during fifteen years of preaching.” Indeed, it was al-Qassam’s loyal followers—the so-called Qassamiyyun—who, within months of his death, set alight the most serious and protracted challenge to British rule over Palestine and the greatest threat yet posed to the Yishuv: the 1936–39 Arab Rebellion.24
On April 15, 1936, a Qassamiyyun gang blockaded a stretch of road between Nablus and Tulkarm. After robbing the occupants of ten automobiles, they stopped a bus and held up its Arab and Jewish passengers, assuring the former that their money would be well spent in helping to fund the brigands’ rebellious activities. Almost as an afterthought, they ordered three Jews off the bus and shot them. One was killed outright and the other two wounded, one mortally.25
The following evening, members of the Haganah-Bet murdered two Arab workers near Petah Tiqva in reprisal. The country’s already highly charged atmosphere had been further electrified earlier in the day when trouble erupted at the funeral of one of the Jewish victims. Mourners had clashed with police and roughed up several Arab passersby. Rumors, however, quickly spread that the Arabs had in fact been killed and not just beaten. For two tense days there was no further trouble. But then, on April 19, Jaffa exploded in violence. Arab gangs assaulted Jews both there and in neighboring Tel Aviv. The police, apparently taken by surprise, were initially overwhelmed. They were forced to fire into the crowd to disperse it, but it was not until an RAF armored car squadron arrived from Ramle late in the afternoon that order was finally restored. Nine Jews lay dead, and ten more were wounded. After more than a year of increasing Arab agitation and mounting tension, the Palestine government moved swiftly to contain any further violence, imposing a curfew on Jaffa and Tel Aviv and invoking the Palestine (Defence) Order in Council, essentially proclaiming a state of emergency throughout the country. The next day, however, Arabs killed five more Jews, and two Arabs were shot dead by police. Meanwhile, Arabs in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nablus, Haifa, and Tulkarm independently decided to go on strike, thus paralyzing commerce in those cities. Pressure was now building across Palestine for the Arab leadership to declare a general, nationwide strike.26
On April 25, delegates from all the major Arab parties and factions gathered in Jerusalem. They agreed to establish the representative Higher Arab Committee, comprising eight leaders, along with subsidiary local committees, that now superseded the Arab Executive by assuming responsibility for directing the protests. Haj Amin al-Husseini was elected its chairman, and a statement was issued vowing to continue and expand the de facto local strikes into a countrywide work stoppage until the “British Government makes a fundamental change in its present policy in Palestine in a manner which will be manifested by the stoppage of Jewish immigration.” The committee also called for the prohibition of Jewish land purchase and the creation of a truly representative national government. “The present position is very critical,” Haj Amin told Wauchope. “The Arabs were of the strong belief that the continuation of the present policy will lead them to immediate annihilation. They find themselves compelled, moved by their struggle for existence, to defend their country and national rights.”27
The Arab Rebellion had now officially begun. Arab workers throughout the country went on strike, all Arab businesses closed, Arab public and private transport stopped, and classes in Arab schools were suspended. Idle strikers and students alike milled about the streets, staged protest marches, and brazenly intimidated shopkeepers who defied the committee’s ban on commerce.28
From the start, the Higher Arab Committee walked a thin line between encouraging civil disobedience and abetting violence. The mufti embodied this duality. For at least the previous two years he had played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the plans for the uprising. Although Haj Amin had repeatedly spurned al-Qassam’s demands to launch a countrywide revolt, he had not been idle. Eschewing immediate action, he had instead devoted his efforts to careful preparations, instructing his young followers to begin stockpiling arms and commence clandestine weapons training. The mufti had also formally assumed command the previous summer of the subversive al-Jihad al-Muqaddas (Holy War Organization) that his nephew had previously founded.29
Wauchope nonetheless persisted in his belief that Haj Amin was a moderate who had a calming effect over his more radical followers. Even as the mufti and the Higher Arab Committee imposed a reign of terror over Palestine during May and June 1936, the high commissioner stubbornly clung to this position. It was yet another indication of the continued incompetence of police intelligence despite the lesson of the 1929 riots and the Dowbiggin reforms. Keith-Roach, for example, recounts how in May, Wauchope naively gave permission to Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Higher Arab Committee to tour the country with the expectation that they would allay antigovernment sentiment and not further stoke it. The mufti in fact agitated for an intensification of the campaign of civil disobedience. “Incendiarism, attacks on railways and roads, bomb throwing at police and shooting became rife” as a result of the tour, a British army intelligence assessment concluded.30
Indeed, the two weeks that followed the mufti’s rabble-rousing excursion were among the most violent and destructive that Palestine had yet known. The locus of the unrest now also shifted from Palestine’s urban centers to its rural heartland. Rebel gangs burned down Jewish-owned wheat fields and uprooted more than fifteen thousand trees from Jewish-owned orchards and citrus groves. They destroyed government telephone and telegraph poles and repeatedly sabotaged the Kirkuk–Haifa oil pipeline. Jews traveling by bus or car were routinely shot at, and outlying Jewish settlements were attacked, as were isolated police barracks and military posts. In the cities, meanwhile, the violence also persisted. There were forty-one bombings in Jaffa alone and another thirty-five in Haifa. Jews were shot at while leaving a Jerusalem cinema and going to classes at Hebrew University. Thousands of Jaffa’s Jewish residents were forced to abandon their burned-out homes and move elsewhere.31
In just weeks the rebellion had transformed itself from an urban riot and general strike to a countrywide, rural guerrilla war. Yet when Wauchope finally allowed the police to arrest sixty-one leading Arab nationalists on sedition-related charges, he specifically excluded the mufti and other committee members from the dragnet. The police and the army chafed at the administration’s dilatory response to the disorders and the restrictions imposed on them. The high commissioner, howe
ver, brushed aside their complaints, explaining to the colonial secretary, William Ormsby-Gore, “It is understandable that soldiers and many others want to apply more drastic methods. Extreme methods might be best to meet our present difficulties but the bitterness so engendered would have deplorable results in the future.”32
Wauchope’s unyielding faith in conciliation over suppression in fact arguably had precisely the opposite effect: provoking more violence fueled by the rebels’ perception of governmental weakness rather than sagacity. The high commissioner failed to grasp that the mantle of leadership of the Arab community had passed from the traditional ruling elite of long-established elders to a new generation of impatient, radicalized youths. It was the shabaab (young guys) who had effectively seized control of the nationalist movement and were driving the rebellion forward. Regardless of whether this was a product of Wauchope’s innate recalcitrance or the inadequacy of the police intelligence he was provided, it was a major miscalculation that would have dire repercussions. “Critical days were allowed to pass without energetic action on the part of the Administration, and the initiative gradually passed into the hands of the strikers,” observed John Marlowe, the pseudonym of a British resident of Palestine named Jack Collard, who later wrote two of the earliest accounts of the British mandate’s violent history.33
Thus procrastination born of wishful thinking condemned Palestine to three more years of unremitting violence. What Wauchope, however, correctly understood was the depth of the Arabs’ commitment to their rebellion. “I knew it was useless to argue that Jewish immigration has hitherto been the cause of material benefit to the Arab people,” Wauchope told the colonial secretary, “for the Ulemas [Muslim scholars with authority in religious and legal matters] and the Arabs are not thinking of material profit or loss, nor of the past: they are all dominated by the fear of what may happen in the future if immigration be not stopped and their minds are not open to argument.”34
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