Britain's Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–1939 (Cambridge Military Histories)

The great Palestinian rebellion of 1936-1939 is an episode of history which has been largely forgotten and which has, until quite recently, been grossly neglected by western historians. The insurgency was a visceral response to the British state’s determination that Palestine should be converted into a white European Jewish settler state, on behalf of the supposed strategic interests of the British Empire. At the time of the Balfour declaration in 1917, 93 per cent of the population of Palestine were Arabs, whose problematic presence was dismissed as “existing non-Jewish communities”. The British support for this settler state was accomplished after 1917 by colonial state violence, institutionalised anti-Arab discrimination, and the encouragement of waves of Jewish immigration. This process continued for almost twenty years before there was an explosion of protest across Palestinian society. The great revolt took two forms - the longest general strike in history (175 days) and guerrilla action by armed rebel groups. It lasted almost four years before being decisively crushed by the British occupying forces.Although there are insightful chapters about the rebellion in John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried (2006) and David Cronin’s Balfour’s Shadow (2017) there is still, remarkably, no basic detailed narrative history of the rebellion, following its chronology from beginning to end. There are various reasons for this deficiency. Among them is that any understanding of this episode requires a historian to be competent in three languages - English, Arabic and Hebrew - which few western historians are. Another reason is that the relevant archives, such as they are, are widely scattered geographically. A third reason is that the defeated Palestinians left relatively few written records of the revolt as it unfolded, and any longer term attempt to chart it was hampered by the annihilation of Palestinian society in the Nabka of 1948. Those who benefited most from smashing the Palestinian desire for self-rule had little reason to dwell on this ugly and violent episode in British colonial history.Matthew Hughes’s book is greatly to be welcomed as a major scholarly contribution to this subject. He examines the conflict from the perspective of the victors, scrutinising the methods used by the British to crush Palestinian resistance - what in the 1930s was euphemistically called “pacification”. He uncovers a great deal of hidden history, never previously published. This book also offers the most reliable statistics yet available on the numbers of those killed and injured on both sides of the conflict, and they are somewhat greater on the Palestinian side than in previous accounts.His primary focus is on the activities of the British army. This is an important book because Hughes has consulted a massive range of archival sources, to produce a scrupulously scholarly book on this topic which is likely to remain the definitive one about the British army in Palestine 1936-39. This is not a polemical book. Hughes is not concerned with wider issues of foreign policy or ideology, or the continuing conflict between the Israeli state and the Palestinians. He restricts the focus of this study to the four years of the rebellion. The result is an honest, balanced and dispassionate study of the conflict which is crammed with fascinating detail as well as providing a persuasive explanation for the defeat of the insurgency. It presents a devastating account of the racism, violence and cynicism of British colonial rule, and implicitly it indicates truths about the British state and foreign policy which remain muffled and marginalised just as much today as in the 1930s.This book does not study the course of the revolt chronologically but rather examines various aspects of colonial policy used to smash the rebellious indigenous population. The first of these is the use of law to legitimise repression in all its aspects. Basically, all forms of dissent were made unlawful, even in their smallest and most peaceful expression such as singing, shouting or meeting in a café. When the colonial criminal law proved an obstruction to repression it was replaced by emergency regulations and military courts. State terrorism became legal; peaceful dissent became criminal. The law was backed up by military force, which ranged from trashing Palestinian homes, confiscating livestock and crops, fines, arbitrary detention and an army policy based on the core principle of collective punishment, to more extreme measures involving casual executions, burying wounded men alive, and sporadic massacres. But Hughes is keen to differentiate the British army from the actions of other armies such as French and American ones, which have a much bloodier record where war crimes against civilians are concerned.His central argument is that the British directed most violence against property, not people. Homes and sometimes entire villages were levelled. Jaffa was subjected to destruction on a scale which left its mark on the city to the present day. Although military excesses were covered-up by those at the top, these were in the main deviations from policy not central to it. Torture centres were staffed by the colonial police, not the army. The population was ground down by repression which was hydra-headed and ranged from British soldiers defecating in jars of olives in Palestinian homes to the use of concentration camps.Hughes situates the rebellion in the context of other twentieth century insurgencies, asking why the Palestinian one failed while others succeeded. He concludes that the Palestinians cause was a fragmented one, lacking a dynamic political leadership or a unified command structure in the field. Palestinian society lacked both unity and effective leadership and there was little in the way of wider Arab solidarity. There were outstanding individuals, particularly al-Qassam and al-Qawuqji, but the first was killed (possibly murdered by the British) shortly before the revolt began, and the second left Palestine after his efforts were undermined by the local political leadership. Hughes presents a sorry picture of Palestinian disunity and mediocre political leadership.Another reason why the Palestinian uprising has been ignored for so long is that the British Left at the time showed a remarkable lack of interest in it, even though its course almost exactly paralleled that of the Spanish civil war. Even someone like George Orwell, who as former colonial policeman knew exactly what Empire meant for native populations, was totally indifferent to this spectacular example of British imperial violence and repression. As for the Labour Party, which had supported the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine from the start, Herbert Morrison described the uprising as “fascist” and asserted that a minority of Arabs working for Hitler and Mussolini were behind the troubles. The Manchester Guardian blamed it all on official enemies, claiming that German agents were in Palestine “to stir up the population against British rule”. This newspaper enthusiastically supported the military crackdown, calling the Palestinians “terrorists” and asserting that repression was justified as an expression of “our self-respect as governors and trustees”. The Manchester Guardian also mocked the “wild propaganda” of those who (quite accurately) claimed that the core Zionist aim was to take over Palestine and expel its Arab population. The trades union-owned Daily Herald blamed the insurgency on “secret agents, chiefly Italian”. The BBC, not wishing to upset the government, chose self-censorship over truth-telling. Only the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker reported on the crimes of the British forces, describing RAF bombing raids and the troops killing, arresting and evicting villagers. It defined the rising as an anti-imperialist struggle.Matthew Hughes is not concerned with media issues outside Palestine, where his focus is on censorship and the closing down of Arab newspapers as another aspect of the British state’s determination to isolate, demoralise and grind down the insurgent population. The evidence contained in his book nevertheless casts a bitterly ironic light on the false claims of Labour Party politicians, the Manchester Guardian, and government spokesmen at the time. This was indeed an anti-colonial struggle, provoked by the injustices of the British government’s determination to extinguish Palestinian nationalism in order to create an artificial white European settler state. When the Palestinians rose up against the many flagrant injustices imposed upon them by a colonial administration which was contemptuous of democracy they faced not only the force of empire but also the indifference or hostility of all but a small fraction of the British Left.This book is a prodigious work of scholarship, which is likely to be cited by all future writers on Palestinian history. What is striking about it is the immense detail it supplies about the persecution of the Palestinians over a four-year period and how the violence of colonial rule was hidden from the British public. The government ensured that what was happening in Palestine was kept from public scrutiny, aided by a compliant media and the indifference of the British Left. This book should be read by anyone interested in the history of Palestine in the years leading up to the creation of a Jewish state or who is interested in wider issues such as the history of the British army, the dark, violent underside of the British Empire, or in the role played by law and legality in state repression.

A very interesting book, looking at how Britain suppressed the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 in Palestine. The methods were not pretty but they worked. The author’s work can be summarised in three quotes from the book:“The pacification of Palestine was a history of violence.”“violence without good political leadership is destined to fail”“The Palestinians preferred nothing to something that was not everything.”The last sentence has remained valid ever since.