One of the most influential families in Jerusalem was the Husayni family. They competed for power with the Nashashibi family. Playing on these divisions in particular, the British appointed Raghib bey al-Nashashibi mayor of Jerusalem in 1920 (replacing an al-Husayni) and then the following year selected Hajj Amin al-Husayni as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The authority of the position of Mufti of Jerusalem was greatly expanded in 1922 when Hajj Amin was elected to head a newly created institution called the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC). The SMC was responsible for managing a broad range of Palestinian affairs, from the judicial to the educational. Not surprisingly, the resources of the SMC and its vast patronage network became the focus of bitter rivalry, not only pitting one notable family against another, but intensifying rivalries within families as well. In his attempt to shore up his position against rivals, Hajj Amin eagerly used Islam to promote his leadership of the burgeoning Palestinian nationalist movement.
Though demonized by his Jewish and British enemies, Hajj Amin al-Husayni in fact cooperated well enough with the mandate administration. Only gradually did he use his religious authority to achieve a position of significant political influence contrary to British interests. It was a potent mix. The key event in this transformation was the so-called ‘Western Wall riots’ in 1929. The Western Wall was the only revealed section of what remained from the massive retaining wall built by Herod. This wall allowed Herod to enlarge the platform on which the Second Temple stood before being destroyed in 70 BC. Given this association, the wall became Judaism’s most important place of pilgrimage and prayer. The wall also was part of a Muslim religious trust (waqf): Muslim attachment to the wall and to the al-Haram al-Sharif (or ‘Noble Sanctuary’, as the Temple Mount is known in Arabic) is due to their association with the story of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven. The wall is known to Muslims as al-Buraq, because Muhammad tethered his horse there, and the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, built in the 7th century, are two of Islam’s most revered buildings.
In 1928, attempts by some Jews to extend their access to the wall by bringing screens and benches were fiercely challenged by Hajj Amin, no doubt as part of a larger political campaign to enhance his national status. Claims and counterclaims became increasingly heated over the following year and, when a Revisionist Party youth movement organized a demonstration demanding Jewish control over the whole complex, tensions spiralled out of control. Rioting broke out in Jerusalem in August 1929, the British struggled to restore order, and the violence spread to Hebron, Jaffa, and Safad, cities with significant Jewish populations. The massacre of Jews in Hebron was especially horrifying, and those who survived fled Hebron in the wake of the riots. Overall, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs lost their lives. Palestinians worried that the Jews were violating the sanctity of Islam and dispossessing them of their patrimony. Jews compared Hebron to the pogroms of Eastern Europe.
Prelude to revolt
The tensions over access to the Western Wall galvanized the communal hostilities generated during the first decade of the mandate. In effect, they ended any real chance of Arab–Jewish peace in Palestine. Britain struggled to deal with the fallout. The Shaw commission, sent out to report on the 1929 disturbances, criticized Hajj Amin al-Husayni’s lack of restraint but acquitted him of incitement. More significantly, the commission warned against continued Jewish immigration and land purchase, arguing that the further dispossession of Arab farmers could only lead to more disturbances. In October 1930 the British issued the Passfield White Paper, stressing the need to deal more forthrightly with Arab concerns. It called for restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchase and drew attention to the conspicuous absence of a representative legislative council. Zionist leaders were furious. In London, they voiced strong criticism of the White Paper and succeeded the following year in persuading the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to write a personal letter to Weizmann in which key elements of the 1930 White Paper were revoked.
Palestinian Arabs, in turn, were outraged by such external lobbying, in which political factors in London seemed paramount. The 1930s would be a period when Palestine’s Arab neighbours—first Iraq, then Egypt and Syria—negotiated various forms of self-government and formal independence, just as was called for by the mandate system. The Palestinians, by contrast, were no closer to self-rule. As the possibilities of constitutional change grew dimmer, the Arab notables, some of whom had a stake in continued British patronage, began to lose the confidence of their own constituencies. Increasingly Palestinian Arabs began to assert themselves as a national community. As resentment of the mandate rose, nationalist sentiment became more radicalized and more interlaced with religion. One prominent example of the sort of clandestine violence that emerged in this period is the secret armed band that formed under the leadership of a Syrian immigrant religious preacher named Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam. Though his movement was short-lived, his attacks on Jewish settlements in the northern valleys attracted support among both the poor rural population and the marginalized urban inhabitants living in the shanty towns of Haifa, where al-Qassam was based.
In the spring and summer of 1936, after almost twenty years of British dominance, Palestine spontaneously erupted into mass demonstrations. The notables were caught off guard. They desperately tried to take the reins of popular reactions that risked spiralling out of their control. Leaders of rival factions belatedly came together in April to form a coalition, known as the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), and tried to coordinate a national strike. Unprecedented as a national effort, the strike forced both the Yishuv and the British to respond in significant ways. While the strike aimed to harm the Yishuv, it was the Arab economy that suffered worse by, in effect, accelerating the process of segregation. The Yishuv took advantage of the unstable situation by becoming more self-reliant and, for example, building a new port for Tel Aviv, the new Jewish city bordering Jaffa. Britain responded to the Arab demonstrations with carrot and stick, first sending 20,000 new troops to put down the rebellion and then pledging to establish (yet again) an official commission of enquiry, this one chaired by Lord Peel.
The general strike, which lasted six months, was called off by the AHC in October, ostensibly due to the mediation of neighbouring Arab states and their call for the Palestinians to trust in the commission (though it also allowed the large landowning elite to export their citrus harvest). As a precursor to future dynamics, some Arab leaders, such as the kings of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, sought to bolster their own legitimacy by involving themselves in the affairs of ‘our sons the Arabs of Palestine’. Others, though, such as Abdullah of Transjordan, had ambitions of their own in Palestine itself. Palestine was opening something of a new chapter with the intervention of Arab neighbours. An even greater watershed in the unfolding of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict would come with the publication in 1937 of the Peel Commission’s report. Calling for Palestine to be partitioned into separate Arab and Jewish states, the report gave rise to greater and more sustained violence.
Conclusion
In taking on the dual obligation of the mandate, Britain assumed the problematic balancing act was one it could uphold. This gross misjudgement would come back to haunt the British government. As the British imperial historian Elizabeth Monroe concluded, ‘Measured by British interests alone, it is one of the greatest mistakes of our imperial history.’ That the vague terms of the Balfour Declaration would, in the end, prove problematic had been foreseen by Lord Curzon back in 1917 when outlining his opposition to the whole idea: ‘we ought at least to consider,’ he had stressed, ‘whether we are encouraging a practicable idea, or preparing the way for disappointment and failure’.
If British attempts to settle a European population among indigenous inhabitants with whom there could be no accommodation constituted one of the most problematic challenges for the Empire, the alliance born of the Balfour Declaration also proved fraught for Zionism. Zionism’s close relationship with the European power ruling Palestine could not but,
in the minds of the Palestinian Arabs, indelibly frame it as a settler colonial movement. For some Jewish leaders, who saw their own national liberation movement as a return to the land of their ancestors (or at least to the nearest plains and valleys), this was obviously contrary to the identity they might otherwise have wished to create in Palestine. For other leaders, however, the alliance with the British Empire was in fact key to their portrayal of the Zionist project as part of a European civilizing mission. Weizmann, for example, preferred that Jews not be referred to as a ‘native population’; Herzl described the Jewish homeland as a European rampart against barbarism; Zionists commonly referred to their settlements as colonies. It is true that Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill declared in 1922 that the Jews were in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance, but Palestinian Arabs did not see the promise of a national home as Britain’s to make.
Chapter 3
Palestine partitioned 1937–47
Despite the essential support offered by the British administration, when the Yishuv proclaimed statehood in 1948, Britain was widely portrayed as the enemy from whom independence was wrested in a war of liberation. To properly understand the radical transformations that would ultimately occur in Palestine, one needs to focus particularly close attention on the ten-year period following the 1937 Peel partition plan and the outbreak of a peasant-led Arab rebellion that would be brutally repressed by British force. If it was the First World War that broke the Ottoman Empire, the Second World War hastened the demise of the British Empire that had taken its place. The Second World War produced a ‘perfect storm’ of regional and international pressures whose mutually reinforcing effects served to accelerate the end of colonial rule in Palestine (thus helping to explain why this is the one chapter to treat a span of only ten rather than twenty years).
Between 1937 and 1947, Britain effectively lost control of an increasingly chaotic situation in Palestine. The Arab revolt was put down in 1939, but at great cost. British suppression inflicted tremendous damage on Palestinian political and social structures, and forced Britain to back away from the 1937 Peel partition scheme. The stick was accompanied by some carrot. With the revolt defeated, Britain attempted to conciliate Arab opposition, going so far as to reverse the commitment made to the Jews in the Balfour Declaration. In 1939 Britain issued a new White Paper calling for an independent Palestinian state under majority Arab rule. But the war against Nazi Germany, during which Palestine became an important military base, forced Britain again to change its policies. In the wake of the Second World War, and faced with tremendous international (especially US) pressure to allow Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to enter Palestine forthwith, Britain stepped back from the 1939 White Paper’s plan for an independent Palestine. In 1947 discussion returned to the question of partition, this time under the rubric of the United Nations (UN). Less than ten years earlier, Britain had agonized over the prospect of partitioning Palestine and concluded that it was the last thing they would do. And so it was.
1937 Peel Commission Report and the 1939 White Paper
As was discussed in the last chapter, conflicts over a legislative assembly, immigration, and land purchase all contributed to the growth of Arab resistance to Zionism during the interwar period. In 1936, after twenty years of colonial dominance, an Arab general strike was organized to oppose British policies. These protests were accompanied in the countryside by sporadic attacks on Jewish and British positions. Sometimes referred to as the first phase of the Arab revolt, the six-month strike was brought to an end in October 1936 when the Palestinian leadership, made up of members of notable families who had finally come together as a national body known as the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), accepted Britain’s plan to appoint a new commission. Chaired by Lord William Robert Peel, former Secretary of State for India, this commission joined the ever-growing list of official investigations into causes of unrest in Palestine. Its report published in the following year would make it the most famous.
Officially entitled the Palestine Royal Commission, the Peel Commission was dispatched to determine whether ‘either the Arabs or the Jews have any legitimate grievances’ and, if so, ‘to make recommendations for their removal and for the prevention of their recurrence’. Though tasked with finding a way to fit two national movements into a single territory, the commission instead concluded that they were irreconcilable, a Gordian knot that could only be cut by the sword.
THE PALESTINE ROYAL (PEEL) COMMISSION REPORT, July 1937
[T]he Mandate cannot be fully and honourably implemented unless by some means or other the national antagonism between Arab and Jew can be composed. But it is the Mandate that created that antagonism and keeps it alive; and, as long as the Mandate exists, we cannot honestly hold out the expectation that either Arabs or Jews will be able to set aside their national hopes or fears and sink their differences in the common service of Palestine. That being so, real ‘self-governing institutions’ cannot be developed, nor can the Mandate ever terminate, without violating its obligations, general or specific. For at any given time there must be either an Arab or a Jewish majority in Palestine, and the government of an independent Palestine, freed from the Mandate, would have to be either an Arab or a Jewish government. In the latter event—assuming, we repeat, that the miracle of reconciliation has not happened and that politics are still conducted on lines of race—the general obligation implicit in all Mandates that the people entrusted to Mandatory administration are to be enabled in course of time to ‘stand by themselves’ would not have been fulfilled. In the other event, the obligation in Article 2 ‘for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home’ would not have been discharged.
…
Manifestly the problem cannot be solved by giving either the Arabs or the Jews all they want. The answer to the question ‘Which of them in the end will govern Palestine?’ must surely be ‘Neither’. We do not think that any fair-minded statesman would suppose, now that the hope of harmony between the races has proved untenable, that Britain ought either to hand over to Arab rule 400,000 Jews, whose entry into Palestine has been for the most part facilitated by the British Government and approved by the League of Nations; or that, if the Jews should become a majority, a million or so of Arabs should be handed over to their rule. But, while neither race can justly rule all Palestine, we see no reason why, if it were practicable, each race should not rule part of it.
The commission’s report was published in July 1937, accompanied by a map proposing new boundaries for a reconstructed Palestine (see Illustration 6). In its view, partition was best brought about by the emergence of a Jewish state in the agriculturally rich coastal plain in the west and the hills in the north. Peel’s partition map was thus influenced by modern Zionist settlement patterns, not ancient Biblical identifications. It is also important to note that the proposed Jewish state would be home to a very large Arab minority, almost half the proposed state’s population (by contrast, in the area allotted to the Arab state there were only some 1,200 Jews). The Peel Commission believed that for the partition to be ‘clean and final’, the question of the large Arab minority must be ‘boldly faced and firmly dealt with’. So, as a necessary corollary to partition, Peel called for an ‘exchange of population’: that is, the transfer of over 200,000 Arabs in order to make room for a Jewish state. Some areas (including Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and a corridor to the Mediterranean) would remain under British control. As for the remaining area of Palestine, about 80 per cent, the Peel plan recommended that it be united with the neighbouring Emirate of Transjordan. Its Hashemite ruler, Abdullah, welcomed the idea.
6. The 1937 Peel Commission partition plan
The Zionist response to the Peel recommendations was somewhat equivocal. At the twentieth Zionist Congress, held at Zurich in August 1937, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion together promoted partition against those who refused to give up the Zionist claim
to more territory (including, in the case of the Revisionists, Transjordan). By accepting Peel’s idea of partition, the pragmatic Zionist leadership was not necessarily registering its agreement to Peel’s detailed allotment of territory. When questioned about the wisdom of dividing the south from the proposed state, Weizmann responded: ‘It will not run away.’ In the end, the delegates sought endorsement for the principle of a Jewish state, voting strategically in favour of partition but rejecting the plan.
While some British officials came around to seeing Peel’s partition plan as the most hopeful solution to an intractable problem, others were wary of imposing such hardship on the indigenous Arab population. It was widely understood that the idea of transferring thousands of Arab families from the lands of their ancestors, as recommended by Peel, could only happen through the use of force. The British government decided to appoint a ‘technical’ commission to sort out the logistics of implementing the partition plan, and it ended up repudiating the proposal. Forced transfer of the Arab population was considered a non-starter. Yet without such recourse the prospect of a Jewish state including such a large Arab minority presented a future source of insoluble problems. Thus, insuperable as the difficulties of continuing the mandate seemed to the Peel Commission, the British government, upon further examination and reflection, deemed partition even less workable.
As for the Arab response to the Peel partition proposals, it was marked by the eruption of one of the most significant anti-colonial revolts ever confronted by the British Empire. Although the goals of the 1937–9 revolt remained the same as in 1936, the nature of Arab protest changed. Britain declared the AHC illegal in October 1937 and issued warrants for the arrest and deportation of leading notables. Lacking a central system of command, the revolt was fought by thousands of peasants, mostly in the hill areas of Palestine’s central and northern regions. Operations were frequently undertaken at night, while farming continued, as best it could, during the day. By the summer of 1938, rebel attacks on British positions (such as police stations and railways) had completely disrupted the government’s capacity to provide services. Increasingly the peasants’ anger was also directed towards their own notable class. Where possible, rebel leaders demanded financial ‘donations’ from the wealthy landowners and cancelled the payment of rents and debts. It was during this period that the keffiyeh—the popular head cloth, tied with a black headband, worn by peasants—became the patriotic symbol of Palestinian identity. Though in a state of near civil war, Palestinian national identity had never before been so forcefully expressed.
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