The Crime of Nationalism: Britain, Palestine, and Nation-Building on the Fringe of Empire by Matthew Kraig Kelly

Author:Matthew Kraig Kelly [Kelly, Matthew Kraig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Middle East, Israel & Palestine, Arabian Peninsula, Political Science, World, Middle Eastern
ISBN: 9780520965256
Google: oa41DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B075LWWCRB
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2017-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

WIGS, WARDERS, AND WITNESSES: REBEL

INSTITUTION-BUILDING AND THE BRITISH

AND ZIONIST RESPONSE

In May 1938, the high commissioner sent word to the colonial secretary that in the area of the country north of Tel Aviv’s latitude, “outrages against life and property” had become the norm. The Galilee district, MacMichael elaborated, was under the control of “gangs,” who had succeeded in convincing the villagers that they, and not the government, were to be feared and obeyed. The rebels’ executions of uncooperative mukhtars were particularly persuasive in this connection.22

Such coercive tactics evinced a lack of political unity within the Arab community, a problem the exiled Arab leadership did little to ameliorate. Village leaders complained to Amin al-Husayni, then in Lebanon, about rebel atrocities. In consequence, the exiled AHC issued pamphlets denouncing the bands’ maltreatment of their fellow Arabs.23 Likewise, the Headquarters of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, the closest thing to a unified rebel command as of August 1938, sent out orders to band leaders forbidding them to execute traitors without prior authorization.24 The most prominent commander associated with the Headquarters was a Tulkarm-based grain merchant named ʿAbd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad, or Abu Kamal. Abu Kamal had fought in the Turkish army in the First World War, and then alongside Fawzi al-Qawuqji in 1936.25 He now issued a series of instructions to local rebel leaders, including: “[You] do not have the authority to sentence a man to death, whatever the incriminating evidence.”26 Neither the Headquarters of the Arab Revolt in Palestine nor any other coordinating body, however, succeeded in exerting control over the various rebel formations.27 Not that such control would have eliminated the violence. The AHC itself ordered the rebels to kill any Arab in contact with the Woodhead Commission.28 Neither was local sanction for such deeds difficult to obtain. A blacklist of informers was posted in Haifa mosques, for instance, which included a religious authorization for the informers’ assassination.29

British officials were largely of the opinion that the mufti was orchestrating all of this villainy from his new residence in Junieh, outside Beirut. But they had yet to obtain solid evidence for this supposition. Many of their Arab informants were of questionable reliability.30 And in private, officials ruefully acknowledged the paucity of “positive evidence of the mufti’s complicity in the plots of the Arab conspirators” and confessed they were “quite unable to produce any proof of his criminal activities.”31 They were nevertheless convinced on the basis of circumstantial evidence that Amin al-Husayni sat at the center of the “criminal” network responsible for Palestine’s “inundation by propaganda, accompanied by money and arms, from over the [Syrian] border.”32

The British consul in Damascus characterized the claim that the bulk of captured arms in Palestine came from Syria as “mere supposition, not to say invention.”33 He was more concerned about anti-British propaganda, particularly in the local Syrian press, whose “sympathetic tone towards banditry in Palestine” he was at pains to modulate.34 MacMichael produced several examples of this troubling tendency from Syrian newspapers, which included: mention of “rebel courts”

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