1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine
A popular uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the British administration, known as the Great Revolt, and later the Great Palestinian Revolt or the Palestinian Revolution, lasted from 1936 until 1939. The movement sought independence from British colonial rule and the end of British support for Zionism, including Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews.
The uprising occurred during a peak in the influx of European Jewish immigrants, and with the growing plight of the rural fellahin rendered landless, who as they moved to metropolitan centres to escape their abject poverty found themselves socially marginalized. Since the Battle of Tel Hai in 1920, Jews and Arabs had been involved in a cycle of attacks and counter-attacks, and the immediate spark for the uprising was the murder of two Jews by a Qassamite band, and the retaliatory killing by Jewish gunmen of two Arab labourers, incidents which triggered a flare-up of violence across Palestine. A month into the disturbances, Amin al-Husseini, president of the Arab Higher Committee and Mufti of Jerusalem, declared 16 May 1936 as "Palestine Day" and called for a general strike. David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Yishuv, described Arab causes as fear of growing Jewish economic power, opposition to mass Jewish immigration and fear of the British identification with Zionism.
The general strike lasted from April to October 1936. The revolt is often analysed in terms of two distinct phases. The first phase began as spontaneous popular resistance, which was seized on by the urban bourgeois Arab Higher Committee, giving the movement an organized shape that was focused mainly on strikes and other forms of political protest, in order to secure a political result. By October 1936, this phase had been defeated by the British civil administration using a combination of political concessions, international diplomacy and the threat of martial law. The second phase, which began late in 1937, was a peasant-led resistance movement provoked by British repression in 1936 in which increasingly British forces were targeted as the army itself increasingly targeted the villages it thought supportive of the revolt. During this phase, the rebellion was brutally suppressed by the British Army and the Palestine Police Force using repressive measures that were intended to intimidate the whole population and undermine popular support for the revolt. A more dominant role on the Arab side was taken by the Nashashibi clan, whose NDP party quickly withdrew from the rebel Arab Higher Committee, led by the radical faction of Amin al-Husseini, and instead sided with the British – dispatching "Fasail al-Salam" in coordination with the British Army against nationalist and Jihadist Arab "Fasail" units.
According to official British figures covering the whole revolt, the army and police killed more than 2,000 Arabs in combat, 108 were hanged, and 961 died because of what they described as "gang and terrorist activities". In an analysis of the British statistics, Walid Khalidi estimates 19,792 casualties for the Arabs, with 5,032 dead: 3,832 killed by the British and 1,200 dead due to intracommunal terrorism, and 14,760 wounded. By one estimate, ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between 20 and 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. Estimates of the number of Palestinian Jews killed are up to several hundred.
The Arab revolt in Mandatory Palestine was unsuccessful, and its consequences affected the outcome of the 1948 Palestine war. It caused the British Mandate to give crucial support to pre-state Zionist militias like the Haganah, whereas on the Palestinian Arab side, the revolt forced the main Palestinian Arab leader of the period, al-Husseini, into exile.
Economic background
World War I left Palestine, especially the countryside, deeply impoverished. The Ottoman and then the Mandate authorities levied high taxes on farming and agricultural produce and during the 1920s and 1930s this together with a fall in prices, cheap imports, natural disasters and paltry harvests all contributed to the increasing indebtedness of the fellahin. The rents paid by tenant fellah increased sharply, owing to increased population density, and growing transfer of land from Arabs to the Jewish settlement agencies, such as the Jewish National Fund, increased the number of fellahin evicted while also removing the land as a future source of livelihood. By 1931 the 106,400 dunums of low-lying Category A farming land in Arab possession supported a farming population of 590,000 whereas the 102,000 dunums of such land in Jewish possession supported a farming population of only 50,000. The late 1920s witnessed poor harvests, and the consequent immiseration grew even harsher with the onset of the Great Depression and the collapse of commodity prices. The Shaw Commission in 1930 had identified the existence of a class of 'embittered landless people' as a contributory factor to the preceding 1929 disturbances, and the problem of these 'landless' Arabs grew particularly grave after 1931, causing High Commissioner Wauchope to warn that this 'social peril ... would serve as a focus of discontent and might even result in serious disorders.'Economic factors played a major role in the outbreak of the Arab revolt. Palestine's fellahin, the country's peasant farmers, made up over two-thirds of the indigenous Arab population and from the 1920s onwards they were pushed off the land in increasingly large numbers into urban environments where they often encountered only poverty and social marginalisation. Many were crowded into shanty towns in Jaffa and Haifa where some found succour and encouragement in the teachings of the charismatic preacher Izz ad-Din al-Qassam who worked among the poor in Haifa. The revolt was thus a popular uprising that produced its own leaders and developed into a national revolt.
Although the Mandatory government introduced measures to limit the transfer of land from Arabs to Jews, these were easily circumvented by willing buyers and sellers. The failure of the authorities to invest in economic growth and healthcare for the general Palestinian public and the Zionist policy of ensuring that their investments were directed only to facilitate expansion exclusively of the Yishuv further compounded matters. The government did, however, set the minimum wage for Arab workers below that for Jewish workers, which meant that those making capital investments in the Yishuv's economic infrastructure, such as Haifa's electricity plant, the Shemen oil and soap factory, the Grands Moulins flour mills and the Nesher cement factory, could take advantage of cheap Arab labour pouring in from the countryside. After 1935 the slump in the construction boom and further concentration by the Yishuv on an exclusivist Hebrew labour programme removed most of the sources of employment for rural migrants. By 1935 only 12,000 Arabs worked in the Jewish sector, half of these in agriculture, whereas 32,000 worked for the Mandate authorities and 211,000 were either self-employed or worked for Arab employers.
The ongoing disruption of agrarian life in Palestine, which had been continuing since Ottoman times, thus created a large population of landless peasant farmers who subsequently became mobile wage workers who were increasingly marginalised and impoverished; these became willing participants in nationalist rebellion. At the same time, Jewish immigration peaked in 1935, just months before Palestinian Arabs began their full-scale, nationwide revolt. Over the four years between 1933 and 1936 more than 164,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine, and between 1931 and 1936 the Jewish population more than doubled from 175,000 to 370,000 people, increasing the Jewish population share from 17% to 27%, and bringing about a significant deterioration in relations between Palestinian Arabs and Jews. In 1936 alone, some 60,000 Jews immigrated that year – the Jewish population having grown under British auspices from 57,000 to 320,000 in 1935
Political and socio-cultural background
The advent of Zionism and British colonial administration crystallised Palestinian nationalism and the desire to defend indigenous traditions and institutions. Palestinian society was largely clan-based, with an urban land-holding elite lacking a centralised leadership. Traditional feasts such as Nebi Musa began to acquire a political and nationalist dimension and new national memorial days were introduced or gained new significance; among them Balfour Day, the anniversary of the Battle of Hattin, and beginning in 1930, 16 May was celebrated as Palestine Day. The expansion of education, the development of civil society and of transportation, communications, and especially of broadcasting and other media, all facilitated notable changes. The Yishuv itself, at the same time, was steadily building the structures for its own state-building with public organisations like the Jewish Agency and the covert creation and consolidation of a paramilitary arm with the Haganah and Irgun.In 1930 Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam organised and established the Black Hand, a small anti-Zionist and anti-British militia. He recruited and arranged military training for impoverished but pious peasants but also for ex-criminals he had persuaded to take Islam seriously and they engaged in a campaign of vandalizing tree plantations and British-constructed rail lines, destroying phone lines and disrupting transportation. Three minor mujāhīdūn and jihadist groups had also been formed that advocated armed struggle: the Green Hand active in the area of Acre-Safed-Nazareth from 1929 until 1930 when they were dispersed; the Organization for Holy Struggle led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and operative in the areas of Jerusalem from 1931 to 1934; and the Rebel Youth active in the Tulkarm and Qalqilyah area from 1935 composed mainly of local boy scouts.
File:Al-Husayni1929.jpg|thumb|upright|Amin al-Husayni, Mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Arab Higher Committee
The pressures of the 1930s wrought several changes, giving rise to new political organizations and a broader activism that spurred a far wider cross-section of the population in rural areas, strongly nationalist, to join actively in the Palestinian cause. Among new political parties formed in this period were the Independence Party which called for an Indian Congress Party-style boycott of the British, the pro-Nashashibi National Defence Party, the pro-Husayni Palestinian Arab Party, the pro-Khalidi Arab-Palestinian Reform Party, and the National Bloc, based mainly around Nablus.
Youth organisations emerged like Young Men's Muslim Association and the Youth Congress Party, the former anti-Zionist, the latter pan-Arab. The Palestinian Boy Scout Movement, founded early in 1936, became active in the general strike. Women's organisations, which had been active in social matters, became politically involved from the end of the 1920s, with an Arab Women's Congress held in Jerusalem in 1929 attracting 200 participants, and an Arab Women's Association being established at the same time, both organised by feminist Tarab Abdul Hadi. Myriads of rural women would play an important role in response to faz'a alarm calls for inter-village help by rallying in defence of the rebellion.