The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle - Rashid Khalidi

4. The Revolt, 1948, and Afterward

pp 108-110

In the end, the might of Britain, the lack of significant external support for the revolt, the absence of a unified Palestinian military or political structure combined with the reemergence of Palestinian disunity, and the failure of the revolt to enunciate an achievable political goal, led to its suppression. The cost to Palestinian society was great. Hundreds of homes were blown up (perhaps as many as two thousand),* crops were destroyed, and over one hundred rebels were summarily executed simply for the possession of firearms, or even ammunition.' Curfews, administrative detention, internal exile, and other punishments were liberally applied, and particularly cruel means were employed by the British, such as tying villagers to the front of locomotive engines to prevent rebels from blowing up trains. An entire quarter of the Old City of Jaffa was dynamited (under the rubric of "urban renewal") after the British failed to bring it under control. Total Arab casualties during the revolt were approximately 5,000 killed and 10,000 wounded, while those detained to- taled 5,679 in 1939.4 The number of those exiled or forced to flee is unknown, but is probably in the thousands. In an Arab population of about 1 million, these were considerable figures: they meant that over 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.5 Although some of the casualties were simply bystanders, these figures give some indication of the extent of popular participation in the revolt, and of its all-encompassing national nature.

The repression of the revolt had an impact not only on the populace, but also on the Palestinians' ability to fight thereafter, and on the already fractured capabilities of their national leadership. A high proportion of the Arab casualties included the most experienced military cadres and enterprising fighters.° By the end of the revolt, most of the top Arab political leaders and thousands of other cadres, militants, and fighters were imprisoned, interned by the British in the Seychelles, in exile, or dead. The British also confiscated large quantities of arms and ammunition rom the Arabs during the revolt, and continued to do so during later years.' By the end of the revolt, existing political divisions within the Palestinian polity had become envenomed, leading to profound rifts between the majority supporting the revolt and a minority that had become alienated from the leadership: the consequence was assassinations, infighting, and further weakening of the Palestinian position. The impact of the revolt on the Palestinian economy was also severe, although some of that damage was self-inflicted, as a boycott of British and Jewish goods and of the mandatory government during the strike and the revolt simply opened up opportunities for the already larger Jewish-controlled sector of the economy of Palestine to expand further.

The revolt profoundly affected others besides the Arabs of Palestine. For the Yishuv, it meant a sudden interruption in the growing wave of immigration to Palestine. This came at a time when it appeared that had there been a continuation of the trend in the annual level of immigration (which had topped sixty-one thousand in 1935), a Jewish majority in Palestine was within reach. Moreover, as Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany escalated, while most countries of the world callously refused to open their doors (at a time when European Jews able to find refuge could still escape), the prospect of the closing of the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration was particularly chilling. Even as Zionism won new adherents the world over as Nazi Germany slid toward new depths of depravity in its treatment of Jews, the Zionist movement faced a grave crisis in Palestine. Meanwhile, the Yishuv joined in the fight against the Palestinian revolt, extending its support to British repressive efforts. More Jewish policemen were recruited, trained, and armed, and existing Zionist military formations were expanded and strengthened, receiving British training and eventually acquiring valuable combat experience against the Palestinian rebels.

The British welcomed this support, even as they began to question their own long-standing commitment to Zionism. As the general strike and later the armed revolt ground on, the need to bring their vital Palestinian possession back under control had obliged the British to deploy over twenty thousand troops and considerable contingents of the Royal Air Force to Palestine by September 1936, and even more in the fall of 1938. This was a military burden that the empire could ill afford, with conflict looming in Europe: indeed, the revolt spread and took over several major cities in the summer and fall of 1938 because British forces had to be held in reserve during the Czechoslovak crisis over the Sudetenland between Britain, France, and Germany. It could only be crushed when the Munich accord freed up large numbers of British troops for service in Palestine. The need to spend large sums of money and deploy so many troops for such a long period to suppress the revolt in Palestine was clearly causing serious headaches for the British government and for imperial military planners. British leaders thus watched with dismay as a commitment to support the Zionist project that had initially been perceived as promising various advantages while involving limited liabilities gradually became an onerous burden. By the end of the 1930s Palestine had become an embarrassment to the British in a number of respects.

Notes

3. The seventy-five-year-old Shaykh Farhan al-Sa'di was hanged by the British on charges that a bullet was found in his possession. He was in fact one of the first and most important leaders of the revolt, and had been a lieutenant of Shaykh 'Iz al-Din al-Qassam in November 1935, escaping the British police ambush in which al-Qassam had been killed: Zu'aytir, Yawmiyyat.

4 . W. Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, Appendix 4, 846-49.

5. This calculation is based on the figures in McCarthy, The Population of Pales- tine, Table A4-—5, 104, which indicates that less than 40 percent of the male Muslim population (and a slightly larger proportion of the male Christian population) was between the ages of twenty and sixty in 1940.

6. See photos of fifteen leading commanders of the 1936-39 revolt, ten of whom were killed in combat, in Zu'aytir, Yawmiyyat, pp. following 660.

7.This is clear from the figures in W. Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, Appendix 3, 845, which indicate that the British confiscated over 13,200 firearms from Arabs from 1936 until 1945. During the same period, confisca- tions from Jews totaled 521, at a time when the British were encouraging Jew- ish military formations to participate in the repression of the revolt alongside British forces, and giving them arms and training.