Shmuel Katz

which had in fact never existed and which could not be conjured up. Whenever, therefore, a reaction was to be provoked in the more militant, or more unruly, section of the Arab population, it was the vaguer generality of Islam or of pan-Arabism that was invoked.

Thus, the disturbances in 1929 were organized on a religious pretext-the alleged designs of the Zionists on the Moslem Holy Places and an Arab assertion of Moselm ownership of the Western Wall (of the Jewish Temple), which abuts the Temple Mount where the Moslems built their mosques. These disturbances, marked by the resolute permissivenes of the British authority, were characterized by outbursts of sheer slaughter. The massacre of the scholarly Jewish community of Hebron remained unrepeated elsewhere because of the defense provided by the newly effective Jewish Haganah organization.

The “Arab Revolt” of 1936-1939, developed by British and Arab cooperation into an expression of pan-Arab policy, was far more ambitious. It was intended-and indeed came to be-the herald of Britain’s final abrogation of her pact with the Jewish people. for between 1929 and 1936, a drastic and dire change had occurred in the world.

The Nazis had come to power in Germany. The campaign of the German state against the Jewish people in Germany and throughout the world, the wave of anti-Semitism engulfing the Jews of Eastern Europe and poisoning the wells of the West, had created an unprecedented pressure on the gates of their national home. During the three years after 1933, when the official anti-Jewish terror in Germany began, some 150,000 Jews had entered Palestine by taking advantage of remaining loopholes in the immigration regulations. The plight of the Jews remaining in Germany and of the persecuted, increasingly desperate, five million Jews in eastern Europe was arousing considerable international attention. Opening the gates of Palestine, though the obvious solution, would have meant the defeat of the Arabists’ purpose. A few more years of large-scale Jewish immigration would have placed the Jews in a majority. If the Jews could proclaim a state, the Arab population-for the most part probably prepared to resigh itself to a Jewish regime if it did not interfere with its way of life-might well make peace with it, and the British presence would come to an end. The pressuere of Jewish need and world sympthy could be countered only by a more powerful, irresistible force which would prove that it was impossible to achieve the Mandate’s original purpose, that Arab resistance was too strong, too determined. The Arab “Revolt” was the result.

It was not a revolt at all but a campaign of violence directed against the Jews. Haj Amin’s resources, after fifteen years of organization, were adequate to give it a countrywide-though still primitive and improvisational-character. In 1920, the pogroms had been inspired and connived at by the military administration in an effort to nip its home goverment’s zionist policy in the bud. In 1936, the Arab campaign of violence was a move calculated to further the British home govermnemt’s intention of finally burying Zionism. The policy laid down in 1939 in the White Paper was the preordained purpose for which the 1936 outbreak was needed.

The permissive attitude of the Palestine government to the campaign of violence was evident from the outset. The outbreak was signaled months in advance. Inciting speeches by Arab political and religious notables and inflammatory articles in the Arab newspapers were the order of the day. It was common talk among both Jews and Arabs that the Arab villages (as in 1920) were “infested with agitators” who were inciting the population to violence against the Jews and that once again the people were being assured that a’dowlah ma’ana. This process was not disturbed by a single overt act, no by any public statement, nor any warning of preventive or punitive action by the government.

When, in the face of this astonishing forbearance, warnings were addressed to the High Commissioner and to the colonial Office in London of the signs of the imminence of Arab violence, the reply was that the situation was under control. Similar reassuring statements were made after the first day’s toll of seventeen Jews killed by Arab mobs in the public streets of Jaffa under the nose of the British authority (Katz,pp. 4-5).

Had the campaing been in fact a spontaneous Arab outbreak, and had the government been determined to maintain law and order, the outbreak would have lasted no more than a few days and would have made little impact. A completely typical illustration of the administration’s solution to the problem of pretending to be putting down the “rebellion” is provided by the description by a British soldier on the spot, given in the London journal New Statesman and Nation, September 20, 1936:

At night, when we are guarding the line against the Arabs who come to blow it up, we often see them at work but are forbidden to fire at them. We may only fire into the air, and they, upon hearing the report, make their escape. But do you think we can give chase. Why, we must go on ourhands and knees and find every spent cartridge-case which must be handed in or woe betide us.

In a similar spirit, the generel strike proclaimed by the Arab Higher Committee (the self-appointed leader-ship of the Arab community, headed by Haj Amin el Husseini) and imposed on the Arab masses as the central weapon and symbol of the campaign was not resisted by the administration. It refuses to declare the strike illegel, in flagrant contrast to its swift crushing of an earlier strike in nonviolent protest-by the Jews against Jabotinsky’s arrest after the pogrom of 1920.

When, subsequently, the “rebels,” mistaking British premissiveness for Arab strength, went beyond attacks on Jewish villages and on Jewish life and property and attacked British personnel, effective measures were taken, and the “rebels” were firmly suppressed.

The revolt, widely publicized, served its purpose. The British govermnemt proclaimed in its famous White Paper of 1939 its abandonment of the Zionist policy. After the introduciton of 75,000 more Jews into Palestine during the ensuing five years, the gates would be closed. The way would thus be open for that ultimate semi-dependent Arab state that would complete the British pan-Arab dream in the Middle East.

This document was rejected as inconsistent with the Mandate by the supervising body of the League of Nations, the Permanent Mandates Commission. But the League of Nations was dying, and Britain treated it with appropriate contempt. Four months later, the Second World War broke out, and the British government executed the White Paper policy as if Palestine had been a British possession and the White Paper an act of Parliament. Unnumbered Jews thus were trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe when, but for the rigid and unrelenting application of the provisions of the White Paper, they could have escaped to Palestine even during the war.

It may be that this grim consequence of British policy is the reason why the British government later willfully destroyed so many of the documents that could have provided direct evidence of the Palestine government’s behavior. After thirty years, the British state archives were, in accordance with custom, opened to the research of writers and historians. The entire correspondence between the Palestine administration and its chiefs at the Colonial Office in London relating to the records of the meetings of the Executive Council (in effect the Cabinet) of the Palestine govermnent had been “destroyed under statute.” Another obviously important file so destroyed was that relating to the Haganah organization, which, if it had not been hamstrung by the government, was itself capable of putting a swift end to the Arab attacks. Yet another file destroyed was on “Propaganda Among the Arabs”-the incitement against the Jews-which the Palestine government had often been charged with inspiring, sponsoring, or at least facilitating.