Other Laboratories: The Great Revolt, Civil Resistance, and the Social History of Palestine

Abstract

This essay briefly examines a pattern of little-known local and general strikes staged by the Palestinian public during 1938, amid the Palestinian uprising known as the Great Revolt. While largely overshadowed by the armed struggle then underway, these nonviolent strikes illustrate the widespread character of Indigenous resistance to British colonial rule and of support for the rebellion. Palestine has often been described as a laboratory for repression; yet when we attend to Palestinian social history, we also see that it has been a laboratory of freedom struggle, popular resilience, and recurrent waves of activism and tactical experimentation.

Keywords:

• Palestinian nationalism
• Mandate Palestine
• civil society
• social movements
• Great Revolt
• Gramsci

Notes

1 Abdul-Wahhab Kayyali, Palestine: A Modern History (London: Croom Helm, 1978); Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1929–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977); Ann M. Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939: The Frustration of a Nationalist Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hut, Al-qiyadat wa-l-mu’assasat al-siyasiyya fi Filastin, 1917–1948 (Acre: Dar al-aswar, 1981); Naomi Shepherd, Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine, 1917–1948 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000 [1999]); Matthew Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

2 Matthew Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (April 2009): p. 322, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cep002; Police, 24 January 1938, DIS 5/38, attachment, box 5, file 2, Tegart Papers, Middle East Centre Archive, St. Antony’s College, Oxford (MECA); High Commissioner (HC) to Colonial Secretary (CSS), 19 February 1938, no. 81, CO 733/366/4, British National Archive (BNA).

3 On the Jaffa massacre and the role of Officer John Faraday in it, see Murison Commission report, especially section II (B), (65) 325-5p Israel State Archive; Weldon C. Matthews, Confronting an Empire, Constructing a Nation: Arab Nationalists and Popular Politics in Mandate Palestine (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 215–19; Charles Anderson, “From Petition to Confrontation: The Palestinian National Movement and the Rise of Mass Politics, 1929–1939” (PhD diss., New York University, 2013), pp. 225–39.

4 Charles Tegart, diary, 3 January 1938 diary, box 4, file 6, Tegart Papers, MECA; Meeting on public security, 7 January 1938, box 2, file 3, Tegart Papers, MECA; ‘Izzat Darwaza, Mudhakkirat Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, vol. 3 (Beirut: Dar al-gharb al-islami, 1993), p. 192.

5 HC to CSS, 16 May 1938, CO 733/383/7, BNA; Darwaza, Mudhakkirat, pp. 351, 360–61.

6 HC to CSS, 2 May 1938, no. 201, and 9 May 1938, no. 215, CO 733/366/4, BNA. On youth leadership, see Anderson, “From Petition.”

7 Mandatory government, Report by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the Year 1938, 31 December 1938, pp. 11 and 13, made available by the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine, Document Collection, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-198684/; Darwaza, Mudhakkirat, pp. 513, 520, 540–41. For comparison with rebel-caused casualties, see HC to colonial undersecretary (Shuckburgh), 5 July 1938, CO 733/366/4, BNA, which shows 38 Jews killed and 116 injured from 1 January through 30 June.

8 Darwaza, Mudhakkirat, pp. 511, 513, 542; HC to CSS, 20 July 1938, no. 365, CO 733/366/4, BNA.

9 Darwaza, Mudhakkirat, pp. 528–29, 536, 538.

10 See Darwaza, Mudhakkirat, especially pp. 540–41.

11 Akram Zu‘aytir, Yawmiyat Akram Zu‘aytir: Al-haraka al-wataniyya al-filastiniyya, 1935–1939 (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-dirasat al-filastiniyya, 1980), pp. 415–16, 435; HC to CSS, 5 September 1938, with enclosure, Arab Women’s Association to HC, 25 July 1938, CO 733/368/9, BNA. On the use of temporary mass incarceration, see Anderson, “From Petition,” pp. 1054–68.

12 Royal Air Force (Jerusalem), 17 September 1938, August operations, Air 5/1248, BNA; Zu‘aytir, Yawmiyat, p. 431; Darwaza, Mudhakkirat, pp. 631–32, 634, 638.

13 Details of events in Hebron, 25 August 1938, S/25 – 22191, Central Zionist Archives (CZA); Forster, “Personal Impressions of 20–21 August 1938,” Jerusalem and East Mission Papers, box 61, file 3, MECA; Quote from Shepherd, Ploughing Sand, p. 213.

14 Details of events in Hebron, 25 August 1938, S/25 – 22191, CZA.

15 Charles Anderson, “When Palestinians Became Human Shields: Counterinsurgency, Racialization, and the Great Revolt (1936–39),” Comparative Studies of Society and History (forthcoming).

16 Narrative dispatch no. 11, HC to CSS, 3 December 1938, pp. 74–76, CO 935/21, BNA; Narrative dispatch no. 12, HC to CSS, 29 December 1938, pp. 82–83, CO 935/21, BNA; Report on Military Control, pp. 30–36, WO 191/89, BNA.

17 For contemporaneous claims, Anderson, “From Petition,” chapters 7–10. Hillel Cohen’s Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948, trans. Haim Watzman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) offers a recent account highlighting (and overstating) coercion within the Great Revolt.

18 Subhi Yasin, al-Thawra al-‘Arabiyya al-kubra fi Filastin, 1936–39 (Cairo: Dar al-huna li-l-tiba’a, 1959), p. 45.

19 Anderson, “From Petition,” chapters 7 and 9. On capillary power, see James McDougall, “The British and French Empires in the Arab World: Some Problems of Colonial State-Formation and Its Legacy” in Sovereignty after Empire: Comparing the Middle East and Central Asia, ed. Sally Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 44–65.

20 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 229–39.

21 Gramsci, Selections, pp. 235–39, 242–43, 257–64 (especially pp. 261, 263). Gramsci acknowledges the differing circumstances in the colonies, albeit too obliquely, on p. 243.

22 See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), especially pp. 65–71.

23 See Darryl Li, “The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement,” JPS 35, no. 2 (Winter 2006): pp. 38–55, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2006.35.2.38; John Collins, Global Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Elia Zureik, David Lyon, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, eds., Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory, and Power (London: Routledge, 2011); Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Ilana Feldman, “Gaza as an Open-Air Prison,” Middle East Report 275 (Summer 2015): pp. 12–14, https://merip.org/2015/06/gaza-as-an-open-air-prison/; Paul Gaston Aaron, “The Idolatry of Force: How Israel Embraced Targeted Killing,” JPS 46, no. 4 (Summer 2017): pp. 75–99, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2017.46.4.75.

24 Anderson, “From Petition.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charles W. Anderson

Charles W. Anderson is associate professor of history at Western Washington University and senior editor and co-managing editor of reviews at Arab Studies Journal.