Smart people know not all Jews are Zionists. Smart people who do their homework know not all Zionists are Jews – The dangerous idiocy of Piers Morgan
In February this year, an Israeli investigative webzine, The Hottest Place in Hell, reported an IDF war crime – one of way too many to count – the previous May:
A senior officer in the Nahal Brigade tied an explosive fuse to the neck of an elderly Gazan who was forced to clear houses in the Zeitoun neighborhood. He served as a human shield for hours, until the soldiers ordered him and his wife to leave the neighborhood. Minutes later, they were both shot dead.
They said they had nowhere to run and couldn’t evacuate to Khan Younis. The man walked with a cane, and simply wouldn’t be able to walk all the way there.
The commanding officer tied explosive to the man’s neck and:
… explained that if he did something wrong or not as we wanted, the person behind him would pull the rope, and his head would be severed from his body. He walked around with us like that for eight hours, though he was an 80-year-old man and could not escape us.
In this way he was deployed as a human probe, sent into building after IDF destroyed building to trigger any booby trap left by the resistance. After their ordeal, the two were ordered to leave but the unit commander neglected to inform neighbouring units, one of which, acting on kill-all-that-moves orders, gunned them down 200 metres from where they’d moments earlier been ‘freed’.
How could “the world’s most moral army” do such a thing? Well it had an excellent teacher. The Nakba befalling the Palestinian people in 1948 is well known. (Granted, not well enough. For a one-stop shop, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine remains the go-to text.) Less well understood is why Christian Zionists (frequently antisemitic, like Churchill and Balfour) with hands on the levers of state power collaborated with largely secular Jewish Zionism to establish a racist colonial settler state in so oil rich and geo-strategically critical a region. See my 2019 review of Stephen Gowans’ Israel: a Beachhead in the Middle East.
Least known of all though is how so many of the tools in the settler state’s arsenal of terror – human shields to collective punishment … ‘racialised time’ to road networks forbidden to Palestinians … destruction of mosques and churches to commandeering schools and hospitals … humiliation to torture and murder … – is lifted from the British Mandate playbook a full decade before the State of Israel came into being, and catastrophe befell a people which for millennia had tilled the land and tended the olive groves of Palestine in peaceful coexistence with their Jewish neighbours.
Here to rectify things is Charles W. Anderson of the Institute for Palestine Studies, in a 2019 piece for Jewish Quarterly. I stumbled on it via a Vanessa Beeley post this morning, on Iran’s relations with the West since 1979. Enthrallment was instant. Though it’s some 6,400 words, there’s plenty of weekend left …
The Suppression of the Great Revolt and the Destruction of Everyday Life in Palestine
Over the past quarter century, the deconstruction and obstruction of everyday life in the occupied Palestinian territories has become all too familiar. Since the Oslo era (1993–2000), the checkpoint has, in many ways, come to symbolize Israel’s willful obstruction of Palestinians’ most elementary of freedoms: the ability to move from place to place. Going to school, tending to agricultural areas, conducting business in an adjacent town, or visiting relatives and friends – the simplest activities of modern life and society – all become subject to the time distorting effects of unpredictable lines and the routine harassment and humiliation of security checks at the network of checkpoints that grew in the 1990s. In turn, Palestinian space has been fragmented and parcelized in dizzying fashion, with islands of supposed Palestinian control (“Area A” of the West Bank) decomposed into some 227 “enclaves” by the end of the Oslo years, 88 percent of which were less than two square kilometers in size, and all surrounded or divided from each other by Israeli jurisdictions and checkpoints. Drawing on Heidegger’s observation that the ability to self-consciously control the use of time is one of humanity’s defining characteristics, Amal Jamal suggests that the removal or muting of that capacity in the occupied Palestinian territories – what Jamal describes as subjection to “racialized time” – has been deliberately used to diminish Palestinian life and, in effect, call Palestinians’ humanity into question. Similarly, Sari Hanafi has argued that Israel is committing “spacio-cide,” annihilating Palestinian space through colonization, demolition and degradation of urban centers, constriction of zones of habitation, and territorial disaggregation and fragmentation. Within this harrowing ensemble, Palestinians live under endless and constantly changing restrictive conditions that enforce precarity and damage the social and economic bases of their collective life, while at the same time they periodically suffer from additional collective punishments, such as curfews and home demolitions, attacks by settlers, and military raids, searches, and campaigns.
The present fractured state of occupied Palestine bears more than a passing resemblance to the now distant era of the 1930s. Many of the military tactics Israel uses to control the Palestinians, and especially its fascination with collective punishment, date back to the British Mandate, and specifically to the suppression of the Palestinian insurgency from 1936–39, known as the Great Revolt. Aside from tactical repertoires for managing and repressing the Palestinians, important elements of the systems of military law which Israel has employed to rule over the Palestinian minority in the Jewish state (1948–66) and the population of the West Bank and Gaza (1967–present) also stem from the British counterinsurgency state built in the 1930s. In what follows I propose to tease out another dimension of the manifold legacy of the 1930s: that of the regularized destruction of the daily life of the colonized.
Everyday life, and its social and economic foundations, became a battleground during the Great Revolt. Recent scholarship in English has disclosed much about the collective punishments, dirty war tactics, and ambient brutality that characterized the counterinsurgency against the Great Revolt. This paper supplements our understanding of the counterinsurgency by highlighting its targeting of the everyday existence of the Palestinian population. The colonial state intruded upon all manner of daily activities, degrading Palestinians’ living conditions and turning the mundane into a site of contest and a pressure point through which to exercise power. The colonial regime converted schools and hotels into military bases, seized crops and livestock, and invaded, assaulted, and demolished homes, villages, and urban quarters. Quotidian and ritual activities like attending prayers or going to school were made contingent on docile behavior or random circumstance; even funerals were prohibited as potential “disturbances.” Villages were temporarily incarcerated and the movement of goods and persons was restricted and rendered dependent on compliance with state surveillance. The rebels were determined to build an alternative sovereignty and public realm that would incorporate the Palestinian population. To destroy that project and cow the population into submission, colonial authorities employed an array of collective punishments that targeted the body politic. The result was a sustained attack on the daily life of the colonized that operated through four registers: economic sanctions, the control of space, the loss of bodily autonomy, and movement controls. No less than its other legacies, this article contends that the 1930s counterinsurgency established a critical precedent for Israel’s subsequent approach to the Palestinians, one premised on the systematic disruption and degradation of everyday life as a means of curbing resistance and controlling the population.
Collective Punishment
When the Palestinian rebellion sprang to life in April 1936, the Mandatory power faced the greatest crisis since its founding – one from which it never fully recovered, and which largely set in motion the end of British rule over Palestine a dozen years later. The uprising was the conscious fruit of the revolutionary preacher ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam and his followers, and of the anticolonial currents among youth, peasants, and wider society that were galvanized into action following al-Qassam’s failed bid to make revolution in 1935. Its strength flowed from its broad popular appeal and its creative organizational and institutional impulses, which provided a durable and formidable framework.
The government’s first line of defense in 1936 was the 1931 Palestine (Defense) Order in Council, an omnibus legislation that granted broadly dictatorial powers to the Palestine administration and empowered the high commissioner to make regulations by fiat in the name of “securing the public safety and the defense of Palestine.” The Order in Council not only allowed the government to bypass the regular court system (through military courts and other measures), but also authorized state seizure or destruction of immovable properties and confiscation of goods such as fuel, food, grain, or other items, without recompense or challenge. The Order in Council was invoked even before the uprising had become an Arab general strike and over the ensuing years the corpus of “emergency” and “defense” law grew rapidly, affording new levers to exert pressure on the everyday lives of Palestine’s Arab communities.
The Jerusalem government hoped to bring the revolt to a close through a diplomatic feint (a royal commission of inquiry) or by arresting key organizers – both of which were attempted in May 1936. Instead, the civil uprising grew into an insurgency that featured dozens of attacks per day by July, the majority directed at state forces. Armed rebel formations operated in both urban centers and the countryside, receiving support from the population and (surreptitiously) from the strike’s leadership organs. Faced with insurrection, the military was eager to press a counterinsurgent campaign and, throughout 1936, repeatedly sought sanction for iron fist tactics. It deemed rural society especially deserving of assault, and began to formulate an argument conflating the rural population tout court with insurgency. Yet despite its zeal, the military faced serious challenges, not least the absence of actionable intelligence on the rebels and their whereabouts. The rebels, meanwhile, knew the country and its rural milieux, and were experts at concealing themselves, going to ground in the presence of the army and the police. The military’s answer to these conundrums was a search regime that targeted Palestinian communities indiscriminately.
The official rationale for searches was to locate insurgents, arms, and contraband. However, in its brutish fashion, the military was poorly equipped (and less interested) to determine liability for acts of rebellion, such as sniping on Jewish colonies, British patrols, or road and rail traffic, and content instead to dole out punishment to communities on the grounds of their proximity to such incidents. Searches often resembled punitive raids: houses and businesses were smashed up, goods and foodstuffs ruined, livestock killed, and villagers humiliated, beaten, and killed on occasion. The military’s commanding officer later explained that the destructiveness of searches was compensation for the instructions to keep collective fines modest. Moreover, as the military was incapable of landing a crushing blow on the insurgency, colonial forces aimed instead to cut it off from its bases of rural support by intimidating and brutalizing villagers in areas of rebel strength.
From the beginning, the search regime was lethal. On 25 May 1936 at Kafr Kanna in the Galilee, British forces shot and killed an Arab woman. Other villagers were slain during searches in the subdistricts of Nablus, Ramallah, Ramla, Safad, Tulkarm, and no doubt elsewhere. In the Ramallah subdistrict, troops conducting sweeps in early July repeatedly fired on villagers, killing six and injuring four. When they were not lethal, searches remained destructive and terrifying. At al-Tira in the Ramla subdistrict, the police and military spoilt food, wrecked doors to homes, shops, and storehouses, and beat or assaulted some seventy residents. At Kuwaykat in the Galilee, search forces gathered the village’s men and youth, took them outside the village, forced them to run and jump on command, then beat and kicked them after making them sleep outdoors. By the end of June 1936, the regime’s first official month in action, 148 villages had been searched, and by late July the number had risen to 215 operations. Complaints surfaced across the country. Despite turning up little in the way of arms or men, the Royal Air Force (RAF) deemed subsequent searches “very successful,” and such operations continued throughout and after the strike.
Far from being passive, as the literature that repeats common arguments found in military sources has represented, the Palestine administration regularly evolved new tactics aimed at quelling the rebellion. These tactics nibbled away at the time and financial health of the colonized or interfered with their rhythms of life. Curfews were one such device. Initially imposed in Jaffa, the uprising’s first urban flashpoint, curfews became regularized at night and common by day in Arab towns and villages. At their extreme they confined affected populations to their homes for twenty-two hours a day. The administration quickly updated the Collective Punishments Ordinance, allowing it to saddle villages accused of offenses such as property damage or stoning cars with “punitive police posts” whose costs were born by the village. By mid-June 1936 almost thirty such posts existed; the government sometimes threatened their imposition to try to induce village mukhtars to collaborate.
A mainstay of the government’s approach was to use financial sanctions to dissuade support for the strike and punish its participants. Since the strike was not technically illegal, the administration opted to criminalize the financial support of those who, as the high commissioner put it, endeavored to “coerce the Government of Palestine,” and to seize their assets or place them under attachment. The grounds for imposing collective fines multiplied, and, by design, no proof tying a given locality to specific unlawful activity was necessary. Villages resisting police and military searches were assessed fines, as were, more arbitrarily, those merely proximate to roadside attacks or ambushes. ‘Isa al-Sifri, a Jaffa youth activist, counted 250 fines levied in 1936. Attempting to correct for previous practice, when fines imposed after the 1929 uprising went uncollected because they were too steep, High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope instructed that fines be modest in size and collected immediately. Fines were often taken in kind, which in villages meant the seizure of valuable livestock, damaging the long-term earning capacity and savings of affected families. Nablus, which was hit with one of the largest fines (five thousand Palestine pounds), resisted payment but had part of its fine taken in goods and sundries, even including pillows, soap, and sugar. By the strike’s end 21,272 Palestine pounds in charges had been assigned, yet less than half of this sum was collected by early 1937, which may have owed in part to resistance but also indicated many communities’ economic fragility, which only sharpened under the stringent conditions of the strike.
The violence, destruction, and financial losses caused by searches and collective fines led to widespread Palestinian fear and sometimes unexpected responses. At times, rural populations – including those of Qabatiya in Jenin subdistrict and the ‘Arab al-Bawatin Bedouin encamped east of Bisan – fled ahead of searches and other operations. The Arab Higher Committee, the official coordinating body for the strike, considered incidents like these a response to the search regime and its “intimidation of women and children.” Collective fines, and fears for the honor and safety of women and children, were also a cause for temporary evacuations.
Controlling Space
In June 1936, the government unveiled a new set of repressive powers …