On This Day

1 October

BRITISH REPRESSION IN MANDATE PALESTINE
On this day in 1937, the British authorities banned all Arab nationalist political organisations and arrested members of the Arab Higher Committee, the central political representation of Palestinians. This followed the shooting of the British District Commissioner for the Galilee by rebels a few days earlier. Four AHC members were deported to the Seychelles and two avoided arrest and left Palestine for Syria. The period following saw increased resistance from Palestinians and intensified repression.

 

القمع البريطاني للفلسطينيين تحت الانتداب

1 أكتوبر

في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1937، منعت السلطات البريطانية جميع المنظمات السياسية العربية واعتقلت أعضاء اللجنة العربية العليا، الممثل السياسي المركزي للفلسطينيين. جاء ذلك في أعقاب إطلاق النار من قبل المتمردين على مفوض المقاطعة البريطانية في الجليل قبل أيام قليلة. تم نفي أربعة أعضاء من اللجنة العربية العليا إلى سيشيل وتجنب اثنين من الاعتقال بمغادرة فلسطين إلى سوريا. شهدت الفترة التالية تكثيف القمع وازدياد مقاومة الفلسطينيين.

Britain erected and for thirty years maintained the scaffolding that the Zionists happily tore down when their House of Israel was ready. Despite the objections of some British military commanders and civil servants in Palestine, His Majesty’s Government protected Jewish immigration, encouraged Jewish settlement, subsidised Jewish defence and protected the Yishuv, as Palestine’s minority Jewish community called itself, from the native population. Without Great Britain, there would not have been an Israel for the Yishuv, or a catastrophe – Nakba in Arabic – for Palestine’s Arab majority.

The Zionists established self-governing – and separate – institutions to prepare the Yishuv for independence. However, when Churchill proposed representative government for all the people of Palestine, Weizmann opposed him because Jews were a minority. Similarly, the Zionists rejected ‘free immigration’ into Palestine out of fear that Arabs would move there. When they demanded special treatment for themselves vis-à-vis non-Zionist Jews and Arabs, Britain gave it. Churchill told Weizmann that he knew the Zionists were smuggling arms into Palestine but would not interfere to uphold the law...

‘On at least three occasions in thirty years,’ Arthur Koestler wrote in Promise and Fulfilment (1949), ‘the Arabs had been promised the setting up of a legislative body, the cessation of Jewish immigration and a check on Jewish economic expansion.’ And on each of these occasions, the Mandate authorities broke their promise. The Mandate was marked by outbreaks of violence, Government White Papers and the Arab population’s loss of ground to Jewish immigrants. The Arab General Strike of 1936 led to an all-out rebellion against British rule. The British took three years to suppress it, during which, according to British records, the Administration killed 3,073 Arabs (112 of whom were executed).

Amid the tension, Arabs carried out a savage massacre in Hebron. Sixty-seven Jews were killed, including women and children. Ben Gurion called it a pogrom, but according to Segev this is a misuse of the term. Pogroms, as in Russia and the Ukraine, were officially sponsored. The motivation was anti-semitism; the Arabs, on the other hand, were reacting to fear of Zionist domination. ‘Most of Hebron’s Jews were saved because Arabs hid them in their houses,’ Segev writes, adding that Zionist archives list 435 Jews who escaped death in this way, a higher number than in European pogroms.

"We learned from the British what democracy means", wrote Israeli President Shimon Peres in 2011, "and how it behaves in a time of danger, war and terror. We thank Britain for introducing freedom and respect of human rights both in normal and demanding circumstances. It was a great lesson and a necessary one for a country such as Israel...We have shown that with a small piece of land, little water and no oil, it is possible to create a thriving economy and a sustainable democracy...That is why we hope our neighbours will choose to join the family of democratic nations."

"None of the foreign leaders at Peres’s funeral raised the fact that millions of Palestinians live as occupied subjects, second-class citizens, and exiled refugees as a result of the policies he contributed to. None of them asked how he, like other Israeli leaders, could subscribe to liberal values while subjugating another society...and promote equality while preserving ethnic privilege. Perhaps the answer can be found in Peres’s own words: ‘We learned from the British.’

17-minute British promotional film for recruitment to the British police in Palestine.

Much of the film emphasises contrasts between contemporary Palestine and its rural farming activities and ancient districts. City of Haifa Two Palestinian men wearing keffiyehs standing out in the countryside. Boats in a small harbour. Rural shots. Modern cars driving through the countryside. A mosque. Men doing basket weaving. A modern city street. Ploughing in a field. Harvesting crops using a horse to pull the machinery. Silting grain. Men in bathing suits socialising. City transport. Lake Tiberias A beach with bathers, beautiful women in swimsuits, hair uncovered. Kibbutz life. Tel Aviv Old town scenes with elderly people and ancient buildings. GVs of a city. Temples. Another shot of the town with modern buildings and transport. Narrow alleys full of people. A man dispences cups of tea from a vessel over his shoulder and cups around his waist. Nuns in habits walk by. Women with covered and uncovered heads. Beginning of the police training part of the film - British men in cars. They undertake training on location. Reconnaisance, engineering, driving army trucks, outdoor classroom training with a blackboard. A demonstration of a neatly packed uniform. A trainee in his sleeping quarters. Family life in the barracks. Boxing entertainments. Football and other sports such as long jump. Relaxing outdoors around small tables and tea. Mounted horse training. The men leave the barracks on horseback to train out on location in the country. A scientist looks through a microscope in a laboratory. Policemen in a radio room calling out to others on location, they are wearing keffiyehs under the hot sun. Army trucks driving over sand dunes. A van of camels walking across a desert. Dog training - searching 'suspects' for substances. Training at sea. A ship R306 goes by with its British crew patroling the coastline. A smaller vessel goes by with a British flag flying from its stern. They stop a local fishing party and inspect their goods. A police graduation parade in the city. Officials stand on a podium and award the graduates medals. Qualified police for town and sea are seen going off to do their duty. The end title calls out for Palestine Police recruits aged between 18 and 25 years of age.