“The revolt continues to cast its shadow over eight decades of the Arab-Israeli confrontation.”

By Oren Kessler

A CERTAIN grim but familiar pattern typifies reports from the Holy Land.

Palestinians, despairing over their thwarted national hopes, wage acts of protest, boycott, sabotage, and violence. All around them Jewish settlements inexorably expand. Islamic hardliners sabotage peace talks, executing suspected collaborators and moderates. Occupation forces launch an aggressive crackdown, demolishing homes, erecting a separation wall, and drawing censure for rights abuses. The world power with the greatest clout over the warring sides pushes a partition plan, even while seeming to doubt its viability. Jewish factions are split: One is ready to give up part of the Land of Israel for peace; another demands the entire ancient patrimony, by force of arms if needed. Further bloodletting appears inevitable.

These could be this morning’s news alerts. Or headlines from the Second Intifada of the early 2000s, the earlier First Intifada, or any number of clashes over the three-quarters of a century since the Jewish state’s creation in 1948.

Instead it is an earlier story — of Palestine’s first Arab rebellion, a seminal, three-year uprising a decade before Israel’s birth that cast the mold for the Jewish-Arab encounter ever since.

About 500 Jews were killed and some 1,000 wounded. British troops and police suffered around 250 fatalities in their ranks. But the price exacted upon the Arabs themselves was heavier still, and not just in terms of body count.

The Great Revolt of 1936 to 1939 was the crucible in which Palestinian identity coalesced. It united rival families, urban and rural, rich and poor in a single struggle against a common foe: the Jewish national enterprise — Zionism — and its midwife the British Empire. A six-month general strike, one of the longest anywhere in modern history, roused Arabs and Muslims worldwide to the Palestine cause.

Yet the revolt would ultimately turn on itself. A convulsion of infighting and score-settling shred the Arab social fabric, sidelined pragmatists for extremists, and propelled tens of thousands of refugees out of the country. British forces did the rest, seizing arms, occupying cities, and waging a counterinsurgency that left thousands of dead. When the dust cleared, at least 5,000 — perhaps more than 8,000 — Arabs were dead, of whom at least 1,500 likely fell at Arab hands. More than 20,000 were seriously wounded. Arab Palestine’s fighting capacity was debilitated, its economy gutted, its leaders – above all, Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini – banished.

The revolt to end Zionism had instead crushed the Arabs themselves, leaving them crippled in facing the Jews’ own drive for statehood a decade on. It was the closest the Palestinians would ever come to victory; they have never quite recovered.

To the Jews the insurgency would leave a very different inheritance. It was then Zionist leaders began to abandon illusions over Arab acquiescence, to confront the unnerving prospect that fulfilling their dreams of sovereignty might mean forever clinging to the sword. The revolt saw thousands of Jews trained and armed by Great Britain, the world’s supreme military power, turning their amateur guard units into the seed of a formidable Jewish army, complete with special forces and an officer corps.

But it was also during the revolt that some Jews — facing Fascism in Europe and carnage in Palestine — decided that mere passive defense was national suicide, and when Jewish terrorism first appeared on the landscape.  

The story of 1936-1939 is therefore a story of two national movements, and of the first major explosion between them. The rebellion was Arab, but the Zionist counter-rebellion — the Jews’ military, economic, and psychological transformation — is a vital, overlooked element in the chronicle of how Palestine became Israel.

For it was then — not in 1948 — that Palestine’s Jews consolidated the demographic, geographic, and political basis of their state-to-be. And it was then that portentous words like “partition” and “Jewish state” first appeared on the international diplomatic agenda.

The Jews, despite the undeniable price in blood, had skillfully turned the rebellion to their advantage. Over three years they had not abandoned a single settlement — on the contrary, they had raised some 60 new ones at key strategic points. The Arab economic boycott had directly served the goal of David Ben-Gurion – already the leader of Palestine’s Jews, who within a decade would declare Israeli statehood – of creating a separate, self-sufficient Jewish economy. A Zionist metal and arms industry had emerged, producing mines and grenades and soon progressing to mortars and bombs. 

The Haganah – the illegal but tolerated Zionist paramilitary – had been massively expanded and professionalized by the world’s preeminent army. Orde Wingate, the mythical founder of the Special Night Squads, did not live to see his dream of a Jewish military — his brief life ended in a wartime plane crash in the Burmese jungle. But in men like Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon he had created the leadership cadre of the Israel Defense Forces.

For the Jews the greatest shift was psychological: They had withstood a powerful, sustained assault and lived to tell about it. The belief that material gains would bring Arab consent now looked naive and, worse, dangerous. Instead, by the end of the revolt and the start of the world war, much of Palestine’s Jewish mainstream had accepted the fact that the country’s fate would ultimately be determined, and maintained, by force.

Yet ultimately the uprising also persuaded Britain that its two-decade Zionist experiment had proven too costly — in blood, treasure, and the goodwill of broad swathes of its empire. As war with Hitler loomed, the Chamberlain government determined in its 1939 White Paper that it was high time that Palestine’s doors — virtually the only ones still open to Jews — be shuttered. Few decisions in the 20th Century would carry repercussions as profound.

The reader might imagine that events of such magnitude would already have been amply investigated. This is, after all, the most written-about of the world’s ongoing disputes, having earned itself the all-encompassing designation as The Middle East Conflict. And yet that same reader, keen to learn more, encounters scarcity: a handful of academic studies, or perhaps a few pages or a chapter in wider histories of this land.

Remarkably, no single general-interest account has yet been written of this formative but forgotten insurgency. It was in view of that deficit that I began a project spanning research on three continents, in three languages, and over five years, resulting in my book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict.

And yet I was not interested in composing a mere snapshot or time capsule – the revolt continues to cast its shadow over eight decades of the Arab-Israeli confrontation. Hamas’s armed wing, and its homemade rockets, carry the name of the original anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Islamist fighter-martyr whose martyrdom at British hands helped spark the revolt: Izz al-Din al-Qassam. Palestinian folk songs and dance still celebrate the insurgents of old: “Raj’at al-Baroudeh”—“The Gun Has Returned”—remains particularly popular. A main street in a Palestinian area of the Jordanian capital was recently named after Abdel-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad, the revolt’s chief commander, and the leading technical university in the West Bank organized a major commemoration on the anniversary of his death.

The last 15 years have seen four major rounds of fighting between Hamas and Israel, with airstrikes wreaking havoc on the Gaza Strip and rocket salvos sowing dread and destruction as far as Tel Aviv and even Haifa. In the most recent of these, in May 2021, hostilities extended to a new, 21st-Century battleground: social media.       

Amid the mutual recriminations, timelines in both camps were atwitter with parallels from the past. “The riots of the Arab enemy take us back many years to the Great Arab Revolt,” tweeted Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right Israeli lawmaker then in the opposition. “Back then a hostile British government protected rioters; today a worthless, weak Jewish government, a corrupted legal system and law enforcement neutered by dangerous post-national and post-modern notions.” In December Smotrich’s party was granted a senior slot in the Defense Ministry, with wide-ranging powers over settlement construction in the West Bank.

When Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel united in a day-long strike, their supporters reached for their own analogs from days gone by.

“Tomorrow a general strike is declared across historic Palestine,” a prominent pro-Palestinian activist tweeted. “This is a historic moment. Last time this happened was on May 16, 1936. Exactly 85 years ago. . . . A legacy of resistance.”

Today, when Israeli troops detain suspects without charge, raise checkpoints, and raze homes they rely on tactics and laws inherited from their British forerunners. And when Washington pushes a two-state solution it is invoking the 1937 Peel proposal, the progenitor of all later partition plans from the UN’s a decade later, through the Clinton Parameters for peace, the Trump “deal of the century,” and Biden administration policy – as Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated in his visit to the region earlier this month.

The past is never dead, a novelist once wrote, and it’s not even past. For Israelis and Palestinians, the revolt rages on.

Oren Kessler is a Tel Aviv-based journalist, political analyst, and author. This essay was adapted from his first book, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, February 15, 2023).