‘Palestine 1936,’ a new history of the Great Revolt in the British Mandate of Palestine, argues that the seeds for the Mideast conflict were cultivated, if not sown, nearly a century ago
Imagine two buses that have a history of crashing into each other. The drivers and passengers change, as does the policeman directing traffic. Sometimes – for lack of said policeman, and with no traffic light in sight – the bus drivers direct themselves. Sometimes the buses have more than one driver; sometimes no one is truly at the wheel.
Imagine that countless articles, books and doctoral theses have been written about these buses. Some have focused on the drivers, some on the passengers, some on the policemen, traffic lights or lack thereof.
Imagine that the first head-on collision, while referenced in some of these studies, had generally been overlooked despite the fact that in numerous ways it laid the foundations for many, if not all, future collisions – an archetype of conflict.
In the days surrounding the release date of Oren Kessler’s “Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict,” nearly a dozen Israelis were murdered at the hands of Palestinian terrorists, whose homes would soon be slated for demolition by Israeli forces.
Those events unfolded in early 2023. However, as Kessler convincingly argues in his well-researched new book, the seeds for the incidents were quite clearly cultivated, if not sown, in British Mandatory Palestine nearly a century ago.
The Great Revolt, the first sustained Palestinian-Arab nationalist uprising, was launched in the spring of 1936 in protest of British rule and Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine. The revolt would last more than three years – a turbulent period marked by massive Arab strikes as well as bloody cycles of violence, resulting in thousands of deaths. Years before the establishment of the State of Israel, its shadow would be cast far into the future.
The name behind the rocket
Kessler, who has written extensively on Middle Eastern affairs as a journalist and political analyst, opted to focus his book largely on specific characters: famous, infamous and all-but-anonymous. This emphasis helps make the book eminently readable, while also enabling the reader to better understand broader societal, ideological and geopolitical trends and factors, some of which certainly continue today.
One brief yet important example is the case of Iz al-Din al-Qassam, strangely and ironically remembered by one student cited by Kessler as a man who “laughed like a child, and spoke with the simplicity of a child.”
Anyone who follows the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has heard of the Qassam rocket, as well as Hamas’ military wing, the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, yet may be less familiar with the namesake of these two symbols of Palestinian terror.
Born in Syria in 1882, Al-Qassam was a fiery zealot who preached against British rule and Jewish immigration. After word of Jewish arms shipments spread rapidly through the local Arab community in late 1935, Al-Qassam and “two dozen companions sold their belongings (including their wives’ jewelry) to buy arms.” After murdering Jewish police constable Moshe Rosenfeld while letting two of his Arab colleagues go free, Al-Qassam and his crew immediately became the most wanted men in Mandatory Palestine.
Following a four-hour battle in a forest outside Jenin – still a common scene for West Bank anti-terror operations – Al-Qassam was killed, immediately becoming a key symbol for Palestinian nationalism.
After the murder of innocent Jews by followers of Al-Qassam in early 1936, violence flared across the country, with a general Arab strike ensuing for much of that year.
Underpinning the broader significance of Al-Qassam’s fight and death, Kessler notes that the leader of the Jewish community, David Ben-Gurion, instantly grasped the event’s significance. “This is the first time the Arabs have seen that a man could be found ready to give his life for an idea,” Ben-Gurion said, presciently predicting that there would be “dozens, hundreds, if not thousands like him.”
Kessler deftly illustrates other central figures of the period, sometimes even touching on fateful, almost forgotten encounters between them. These include a 1934 meeting between Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett (né Shertok, who was then head of the Jewish Agency’s political department and would one day become Israel’s prime minister), and noted Palestinian nationalist Musa Alami, who was described by Ben-Gurion as an “extraordinarily intelligent” man “who had a reputation as a nationalist and a man not to be bought by money or by office, but who was not a Jew-hater either.”
The meeting was a real eye-opener for Ben-Gurion, who “for the first time … heard an articulate expression of the litany of Arab grievances, from someone he deemed, ‘sincere, straightforward and sensible,’ and a genuine ‘Arab patriot.’”
Consistent with his overall well-balanced narrative and ability to parse out meaningful quotations and source texts from all sides, Kessler also explains how this encounter changed Alami. According to his biographer, until that time the Palestinian nationalist had been “incredibly naive” about the Zionists’ intentions, regarding them “rather as a Kenya farmer regards elephants: dangerous creatures always liable to destroy his property and quite capable of being lethal, which he expects the government to keep under control but against which he feels no personal enmity.”
While the meeting and many other scenes described by Kessler are tame and civil, his account is certainly not without graphic details. Scenes of carnage at an oft-targeted, “ill-omened vegetable market in Haifa” following yet another bombing, for example, are described in gory detail as a “shambles of dismembered corpses of human beings, donkeys and horses,” based on a foreign diplomat’s account quoted by Kessler.
The author could have excised these sections, left more to the imagination and made his work more suited for bedtime reading. However, doing so would certainly have done a disservice both to the reader and to the individual victims who are all-too-often overlooked, their pain forgotten and their names thrown into the simmering, violent cauldron of Middle Eastern history. In some cases, parallels to imagery from the first and second intifadas are striking.
Failed British policies
Yet besides Jews and Arabs, the British were also very much central to the conflict during this period – a fact that can be easily forgotten with so much of the conflict’s history having taken place after their proverbial exit from the regional stage.
Kessler brings the British to the fore, delving into how official policy during the period was sometimes unduly influenced by the personal biases and opinions of its officials, how waffling decisions from London served to entrench the conflict and – perhaps most strikingly – how the developing geopolitical situation in Europe ultimately informed British decisions vis-à-vis Palestine.
By bringing many of the central British figures to life through quotations and masterful illustrations of their personal histories, character, triumphs and challenges, Kessler paints a picture of a very real, very personal and very fallible empire on the wane. It was one that had many goals and interests to pursue, most of which ended in some sort of failure – at least as far as keeping Mandatory Palestine peaceful was concerned.
Though British forces cracked down on local troublemakers, introducing means and tactics that are still used to this day by the Israeli authorities, such as home demolitions, ultimately their policies overwhelmingly failed.
Yet the big losers of the Great Revolt were the Palestinian Arabs themselves, as Kessler emphasizes numerous times throughout his work. The revolt led and declared by Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini brought about many more Arab deaths than Jewish or British – many of them the direct result of Arab-on-Arab violence. Estimates place the number of Arab deaths at some 5,000, while hundreds of Jews and British citizens lost their lives over the course of the revolt.
The Arab economy was also damaged far worse than the Jewish one. In fact, to the Zionists’ delight, the revolt actually led to increased Jewish economic independence, including the building of the port of Tel Aviv; increased construction of Jewish settlements; and a very significant jump in arms and training to Jewish fighters. The latter was due to British reluctance, on the eve of a world war, to commit more of their own forces to the Palestinian arena.
Like any good historian, Kessler doesn’t glaze over numerous less-than-convenient truths from the period. He highlights and details the grand mufti’s rabid antisemitism and would-be Nazi collusion; Winston Churchill’s Islamophobic sentiments; and the fact that both Zionists and Arab-Palestinian nationalists courted fascist Italy and benefited from its largesse in the 1930s.
He does, however, leave out a few aspects regarding the Great Revolt that would have helped the reader better understand it. He could, for instance, have touched more on British military actions to quell the revolt or daily life during this tumultuous time. Yet in a book of this length and style, certainly not every event and angle can be fully addressed.
Indeed, while at times the book may read like a frenetic, random collection of acts of violence, ideologies and personae, with little connecting neighboring sections or paragraphs besides simple chronology – in some ways that is perhaps the truest reflection a book can provide of this ever-messy, century-long conflict.
Subtly and not-so-subtly, Kessler also makes clear the parallels to subsequent chapters in the conflict. The internal communal debates on how best to achieve national interests. Heated conversations around the roles and goals of violence and vengeance. The extent to which fear sowed within Arab-Palestinian society can silence voices of moderation and encourage violence among the masses, even as some of those sowing that fear live abroad in luxury, far removed from the battles others fight on their behalf. The important role international powers can play in solving conflict – as well as exacerbating it – and how both sides always seem to view those powers as inherently prejudiced.
The brilliance of “Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict” lies in the fact that Kessler took a truly archetypical yet understudied event in the history of the world’s most intractable conflict and, following extremely intensive research, made that event – in the historical context in which it happened, as well as the decades-long conflict which has ensued – supremely approachable.
Oren Kessler’s “Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict” is out now, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.