Urban Arab Palestine, No-Go Areas, and the Conflicted Course of British Counter-Insurgency During the Great Rebellion, 1936–1939
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Chapter 6 “Government Forces Dare Not Penetrate”: Urban Arab Palestine, No-Go Areas, and the Conflicted Course of British Counter-Insurgency during the Great Rebellion, 1936–1939 Simon Davis The Great Palestine Arab rebellion against British rule, sometimes termed the first authentic intifada,1 lasted from April 1936 until summer 1939. The British Mandate’s facilitation of Zionist expansion in Palestine had since the 1920s recurrently aroused violent Arab protest, mainly at urban points of interface with Jewish communities. Initially, the great rebellion seemed just such an- other occurrence, beginning with inter-communal riots in Manshiyeh, the mixed Arab-Jewish workers’ suburb separating the Jewish city of Tel Aviv from its mainly Arab neighbor Jaffa. But despite the reinforcement of exhausted Palestine Police with 300 Cameron Highlanders, a quarter of the infantry in Palestine, the disorders metamorphosed into lasting, territory-wide Arab civil disobedience. Coordinated by National Committees in each principal town, elite leaders hurriedly formed the Jerusalem-based Arab Higher Committee, hoping to preserve leadership over qualitatively new levels of nationally con- scious activism. Proliferating rural sniping and sabotage, mainly on Jewish settlements, most engaged the British military, predisposed to familiar small- war, anti-banditry traditions, largely derived from experience in India. But urban political violence, mainly in the form of reciprocally escalating Arab and Jewish bombings, shootings and stabbings, was left to the increasingly over- whelmed police. Consequent loss of control over Arab towns forced the British High Commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, to invoke emergency regulations in June 1936. But subsequent military repression, frequently contemptuous of civil political context, merely aggravated Arab resistance, which was trans- formed, British observers noted, from past patterns of spasmodic anti-Zionist violence into a comprehensive uprising against British Mandatory rule itself. 1 Charles Townshend, “First Intifada: Rebellion in Palestine, 1936–39,” History Today, 37:7 (1989). Accessed January 31, 2019. http://www.historytoday.com/charles-townshed/first- intifada-rebellion-palestine-1936-39. © Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2020 | doi:10.30965/9783657702787_007 106 Simon Davis Crushing Arab Palestine therefore became an essential cynosure, in Cabinet and military opinion in London, of British worldwide imperial credibility.2 Historians are presently re-examining subsequent brutal campaigning as a prehistory of Britain’s post-1945 counter-insurgent “dirty wars,” and for Arab Palestine as so destructive and shocking as to render it incapable of self-de- fense against Zionist expropriation a decade later.3 But recent studies follow the British army into its comfort-zone of rural pacification, where regular troops were blooded, under career officers jockeying for position prior to the anticipated European war.4 These forces were doctrinally averse to grueling and tedious urban warfare, as well as effective intelligence and security duties, particularly in labrynthine, sullen, culturally alien Arab old cities. Rather, these were contained as no-go areas, leaving their civil societal and economic provi- sions to atrophy. Ironically, when under such conditions urban rebel surges followed, military reactions were of an indiscriminate severity which objecti- fied the urban centers concerned as enemy nodes to be reduced, rather than structural hubs of a polity to be recovered. British military license over, rather than aid to, the Mandatory civil power progressively obliterated the British Colonial Office policy, exercised stealth- ily by Wauchope since late 1931, of encouraging Arab Palestinian develop- ment to cultivate political trust. Wauchope’s endeavor had been to reconcile Palestine’s Arab and Jewish communities on terms of material and political convergence, proceeding to consensual post-colonial self-government in ways that continued to support British Middle Eastern interests. Towards the Arab side, this was initially manifested in paternalistic concern for distressed Arab peasants, mediated politically with notable elite interlocutors. Only shortly before the rebellion did Wauchope finally attend to urban governance and material reforms. But once disorder erupted, British military destructiveness 2 British National Archives (hereafter TNA) Colonial Office (hereafter CO): CO733/310/1 Palestine Disturbances, 1936 April-May. 3 Georgina Sinclair, “‘Get Into a Crack Force and Earn Twenty Pounds a Month All Found’: The Influence of the Palestine Police on Colonial Policing 1922–1948,” European Review of History 13:1 (2006), 49-65. Andrew Mumford, The Counter-Insurgent Myth: The British Experience of Irregular Warfare (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 3-6. Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, “Further Thoughts on the Imperial Endgame and Britain’s Dirty Wars,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40:3 (2012), 506, 509. David Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel,” Settler Colonial Studies 2:1 (2012), 59-80. 4 Among his fine contributions, Matthew Hughes, “The Practice and Theory of British Counter- Insurgency: The Histories of the Atrocities at the Palestinian Villages of al-Bassa and Halhul, 1938–1939,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 20: 3-4 (2009), 528-550, is a key micro-history. Also, Norris, Jacob, “Repression and Rebellion: Britain’s Response to the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936–39,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36:1 (2008), 25-45..