Arabs (42 page)

The Jewish Agency accepted the terms, Amir Abdullah agreed with the Peel Commission, and the Palestinians went to war against both the British and the Yishuv.

The second phase of the Palestinian Arab Revolt lasted two years, from the autumn of 1937 through 1939. On September 26, 1937, Palestinian extremists murdered the district commissioner in Galilee, L. Y. Andrews. The British arrested 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders, deported many to the Seychelles, and declared the Arab Higher Committee illegal. Without central leadership, the revolt degenerated into an uncoordinated insurgency that ravaged the Palestinian countryside. The insurgents attacked British police and army patrols and Jewish settlements, assassinated British and Jewish officials, and killed Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the occupation authorities. They sabotaged railways, communications, and the oil pipelines that crossed through Palestine. Villagers found themselves caught between the insurgents, who demanded their support, and the British, who punished all those suspected of aiding the insurgents. The effects on the Palestinians were devastating.

Every Arab attack against the British and the Yishuv brought massive reprisals. The British, determined to suppress the revolt militarily, dispatched 25,000 soldiers
and policemen to Palestine—the largest deployment of British forces abroad since the end of the First World War. They established military courts, operating under “emergency regulations” that gave the mandate the legal trappings of a military dictatorship. The British destroyed the houses of all persons involved in attacks, as well as all persons known or suspected of having aided insurgents, under the legal authority of the emergency regulations. An estimated 2,000 houses were destroyed between 1936 and 1940. Combatants and innocent civilians alike were interned in concentration camps—by 1939, over 9,000 Palestinians were held in overcrowded facilities. Suspects were subjected to violent interrogation, ranging from humiliation to torture. Younger offenders, of between seven and sixteen years, were flogged. Over 100 Arabs were sentenced to death in 1938 and 1939, and more than thirty were actually executed. Palestinians were used as human shields to prevent insurgents from placing land mines on roads used by British forces.
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The use of overwhelming force and collective punishments by the British degenerated into abuses and atrocities that would forever stain the mandate in the memory of the Palestinians. The most heinous atrocities came in retaliation for the killing of British troops by insurgents. In one well-documented case, British soldiers took revenge for comrades killed by a land mine in September 1938 by loading more than twenty men from the village of al-Bassa into a bus and forcing them at gun point to drive over a massive land mine the British themselves had buried in the middle of the village access road. All of the occupants were killed by the explosion, their maimed bodies photographed by a British serviceman before the villagers were forced to bury their men’s remains in a mass grave.
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The Palestinian Arabs had been thoroughly defeated and by 1939 had no fight left in them. Some 5,000 men had been killed and 10,000 others wounded—in all, over 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled. However, the British could hardly claim victory. They could not sustain the cost of suppressing the revolt, and they could not impose their policies on the Palestinian Arabs. With war looming in Europe, Whitehall could no longer afford to deploy so many troops to suppress a colonial war. To restore peace to their troubled Palestine mandate, the British shelved the Peel Commission’s partition plan of 1937. Once again, a royal commission was convened to reexamine the situation in Palestine, and once again, the commission published a White Paper that sought to address Palestinian Arab grievances.

The 1939 White Paper was the best deal Britain ever offered the Palestinian Arabs. The new policy capped Jewish immigration at 15,000 each year for five years, or 75,000 total. This would raise the population of the Yishuv to 35 percent of the total population of Palestine—a minority large enough to look after itself, but not so large as to take control of the country as a whole. There would be no further Jewish immigration without the consent of the Arab majority—which all parties acknowledged
was unlikely to be forthcoming. Jewish land purchase was to be banned or severely restricted, depending on the region. Finally, Palestine would gain its independence in ten years under joint Arab and Jewish government “in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded.”
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The 1939 White Paper was unsatisfactory to both Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The Arab community rejected the terms because it allowed Jewish immigration to continue, if at a reduced rate, and because it preserved the political status quo and delayed independence by a further ten years. The Yishuv rejected the terms because it closed Palestine to Jewish immigration just as Nazi atrocities against Jews were escalating. (In November 1938, Nazi gangs had terrorized German Jewish citizens in
Kristellnacht
, or the “night of broken glass,” Europe’s worst pogrom to date.) The White Paper also ruled out the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, relegating the Yishuv to a minority status in a future Palestinian Arab state.

The leadership of the Yishuv itself was divided by the 1939 White Paper. David Ben-Gurion made clear his opposition to the White Paper from the outset. However, he identified Nazi Germany as the greater threat to the welfare of the Jewish people and famously vowed to fight on Britain’s side against Nazism as though there were no White Paper. The extremists in the Zionist movement—the Irgun and the Stern Gang—responded to the White Paper by declaring Britain the enemy. They fought against the British presence in Palestine as an illegitimate imperial state denying independence to the Jewish people, and they turned to terror tactics to achieve a Jewish state in Palestine. By the end of the Second World War, when Nazism had been eradicated, Britain would find itself combating a Jewish revolt of far greater magnitude than the Arabs had ever mounted against British rule.

At the end of the First World War, Britain’s mastery over the Middle East was unrivaled. Its troops occupied the Arab world from Egypt to Iraq, and its control over the Persian Gulf was unassailable. Although few in the Arab world had wanted the British to rule over them, most viewed their colonial overlord with respect, however grudging. The British were efficient, inscrutable, orderly, technologically advanced, and militarily strong. Britain was truly great, a colossus that towered over its colonial possessions.

Two decades of colonial rule revealed the colossus to have clay feet. Across the region the British faced a gamut of opposition, from moderate nationalist politics to radical armed insurgency. In Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt, the British were forced to negotiate and renegotiate the terms of their unwelcome presence. Each British concession to Arab opposition, every reversal of policy, revealed the fallibility of the imperial power.

It was the rising threat of fascism in Europe, however, that turned Britain’s Middle Eastern possessions into the vulnerable underbelly of the British Empire. At times, it looked as though the Arab colonies might slip from Britain’s control. British actions in Iraq and Egypt during the Second World War demonstrated the weakness of their position in a way that presaged the end of Britain’s dominion in the Middle East.

 

In Iraq, the British faced a pro-Axis coup d’état on April 1, 1941. Iraq was then ruled by an unpopular regent, Prince Abd al-Illah (r. 1939–1953), who ruled on behalf of the child King Faysal II (r. 1953–1958). When Abd al-Illah backed British calls for the resignation of the popular prime minister, Rashid Ali al-Kaylani, on grounds of his pro-Axis leanings, key Iraqi officers put their support behind the prime minister. The top military officers believed Germany and Italy would win the war and that Iraq’s interests lay in fostering good relations with the Axis. The regent, fearful of a military coup, fled Iraq for Transjordan, leaving Rashid Ali and the Iraqi military in control.

Rashid Ali’s continued exercise of political authority in the regent’s absence was deemed by Britain to constitute a coup. In spite of Rashid Ali’s every effort to demonstrate to the British that no fundamental change had occurred, the nationalist tone of his new cabinet (which included Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the grand mufti exiled for his extreme nationalist views, who was a close advisor to Rashid Ali) served only to exacerbate Britain’s fears. Invoking the terms of the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, the British requested permission to land troops in Iraq. Rashid Ali and the nationalist officers demurred, as they mistrusted British intentions. Undaunted, the British began landing troops without official sanction. The Iraqis threatened to fire on unauthorized British aircraft, which the British warned would be grounds for war. Under the circumstances, neither side could afford to back down.

Britain and Iraq went to war in May 1941. Fighting began outside the British base at Habbaniyya and lasted several days until the Iraqi forces fell back on Falluja, where they regrouped to defend Baghdad. Fresh British troops were sent from India and Transjordan. Rashid Ali turned to Germany and Italy to request assistance against the British. The Axis powers managed to send thirty aircraft and some small arms but, under the time constraints, were unable to intervene more directly. As British forces closed in on Baghdad, Rashid Ali and his political allies, including Hajj Amin al-Husayni, fled the country. They left the mayor of Baghdad to negotiate an armistice with the British, and the country as a whole in a state of chaos.

It was the Jewish community of Baghdad that fell victim to the chaos after the fall of Rashid Ali’s government in 1941. Anti-British sentiment combined with hostility to the Zionist project in Palestine and German notions of anti-Semitism to produce a pogrom unprecedented in Arab history, known in Arabic as the
Farhud
. The Jewish community of Baghdad was large and highly assimilated into all levels of society—from the elites to the bazaars to the music halls, in which many of Iraq’s most celebrated
performers were Jewish. Yet all of this was forgotten in two days of communal violence and bloodshed that claimed nearly 200 lives and left Jewish shops and houses robbed and gutted, before the British authorities decided to enter the city and restore order.

The fall of Rashid Ali’s government led to the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq. The regent, Abd al-Illah, and those Iraqi politicians most sympathetic to the British were returned to power by their former colonial master. Iraqi nationalists were outraged. They argued that Rashid Ali enjoyed widespread support among the Iraqi people. Clearly the British would only allow the Iraqis a leadership that met with London’s approval. Coming only nine years after Iraq had achieved its nominal independence, this intervention served to discredit both Great Britain and the Hashemite monarchy in the Iraqi people’s eyes.

Britain, however, was the ultimate loser in Iraq. The mandate, which had once been a success story, was now left with a shaken monarchy, a dangerous military, and a population so hostile to Britain’s role in the Middle East that they preferred to throw their lot in with Britain’s Axis enemies.

 

The Axis had its supporters in Egypt as well. Egyptian nationalists were not satisfied with the partial independence achieved in the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. Britain continued to exercise disproportionate control over Egypt’s affairs and full control over Sudan. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Egypt was flooded with British troops, and the Egyptian government seemed more subordinate to Britain since independence than it had been before. This situation was intolerable to a new generation of Egyptian nationalists whose enmity for Britain made them look with favor on Britain’s Axis enemies.

The Italians and the Germans played on nationalist sentiment to isolate the British in Egypt. The Italians launched a powerful new radio station to carry their propaganda to Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean. Radio Bari trumpeted the accomplishments of the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. The combination of extreme nationalism, strong leadership, and the military might of fascism appealed to Egyptian nationalists far more than the petty squabbles of the multiparty democracy that Britain had imposed on their country. With Germany and Italy at war with Britain, many in Egypt hoped to see the Axis powers defeat the British and force them from Egypt once and for all.

With the launch of the North African campaign in 1940, some Egyptian nationalists believed the moment of deliverance was at hand. Italian forces crossed from Libya to attack British positions in Egypt. German forces joined the Italians in North Africa with the specially trained Afrika Korps, commanded by the brilliant field marshal Erwin Rommel. By the winter of 1942, Axis forces posed a real threat to Britain’s position in Egypt. Some Egyptian political leaders, including even King Faruq himself, seemed quite receptive to the idea of Germany driving the British out of Egypt for them.