1936 AND THE DEBATE OVER MILITARY CONTROL

The first phase of the Palestinian revolt in 1936 did not end in a victory for British forces.Footnote ¹² Over the course of six months the size of the garrison grew some twelve-fold, reaching the strength of two divisions (twenty-five thousand men), and the military roundly defeated rebels in a host of battles.Footnote ¹³ But the insurgency was as elusive as it was tenacious. Rebels often avoided head-on combat, melted away from engagements, and hid in plain sight amongst supportive Arab villagers. To dissuade the population from aiding or participating in the rebellion and because the colonial authorities had considerable trouble locating their quarry, they adopted a counterinsurgent strategy based on an expanding inventory of collective punishments. These tactics initially took the shape of financial penalties such as collective fines, home demolitions, and the confiscation and destruction of property, as well as curfews. Collective punishments were an accepted part of imperial doctrine and practice concerning population control, especially in the colonies.Footnote ¹⁴ Part of the empire's illiberal traditions, the recourse to collective punishments contradicted core Western juridical principles including the presumption of innocence, the notion of individual rights, and the right to a trial. In their stead, the colonial authorities in Palestine operated according to a conception of collective guilt whereby broad segments of the population–towns, villages, urban quarters, whole cities–were held responsible in the event of hostilities in their vicinity.Footnote ¹⁵ The wholesale adoption of collective sanctions constituted a critical step in an ongoing process of diminishing the political and moral, as well as legal, standing of the Palestinians in official eyes. By substituting the presumption of guilt for that of innocence, the framework of collective punishment blurred the distinction between combatants and the general population, rendering the latter an open and defenseless target in lieu of the often-elusive rebels.Footnote ¹⁶ Still, while he accepted and advocated for the use of collective punishments, High Commissioner Wauchope worried that if carried too far, the strategy threatened to permanently unwind British rule in Arab Palestine. He therefore sought to restrain the military from its most indiscriminate displays of force and, importantly, he largely acted to block the transfer of power from the civilian government to the military (via the declaration of martial law), which the Cabinet in London had authorized during the peak of the 1936 crisis.Footnote ¹⁷

The military was deeply angered and frustrated by events in Palestine and by what it viewed as undue constraints imposed on its operations. During the 1936 revolt its commanding officers, the Air Officer Commanding (AOC) R.E.C. Pierse and GOC Dill, chafed at being under the civilian authority of the High Commissioner and hungered for more latitude to conduct what they freely called “punitive” operations. As Dill put it, “The Arabs, like other oriental races, respect strength and determination and regard forbearance as weakness.”Footnote ¹⁸ Both men successively advised that martial law should be declared, with full power handed over to the military for the duration of the uprising.Footnote ¹⁹ That this course was not adopted was a sore point for the top brass, but the Colonial Secretary and the High Commissioner concurred instead on a path of using emergency laws (and an Order-in-Council) to confer extensive powers of repression and lawmaking by fiat on Wauchope and other top administrators. When martial law was first mooted in June and dismissed by London, Pierse assented to act in accordance with the doctrine of MACP, as spelled out in the military's 1934 manual, Imperial Policing.Footnote ²⁰ Yet the posture of supporting the “civil power” never satisfied the military, and its leaders waged a post hoc, and eventually a sub rosa, campaign against it.

The failure to defeat the rebels led to serious intermural recriminations. After the termination of the strike the military attributed its inconclusive ending to the squeamishness of the High Commissioner and to the mistaken mission that British forces had been given. The GOC complained in his postmortem report that the Jerusalem government had clung to “a purely defensive policy” that had seen troops “dispers[ed] on defensive duties and abstaining from repressive measures.” By forcing “extreme forbearance” on the military, and by obviating the declaration of martial law, the civilian government had squandered an opportunity to restore colonial order and missed the chance of “teaching” the Palestinians a “lesson” that would keep them “quiet for ten years.”Footnote ²¹ Wauchope responded by informing the Colonial Secretary that the military had been unable to indicate many examples where the government had improperly restrained its action. Further, he asserted that his underlying motivation had been to preserve the colonial government's post-strike authority. This last, in his view, necessitated some degree of distinction between members of the public who had committed unlawful acts and those who had not, hence his wariness regarding the military's preference for iron fist tactics.Footnote ²²

For several months Dill persisted in challenging the doctrine of MACP, which he held pertained to riots, not a full-scale popular rebellion as Palestine had witnessed. He asserted variously that the GOC, not the High Commissioner, should be able to determine when a situation falls under MACP, that the officer commanding should be able to invoke martial law, and that virtually any call-up of the military against an organized foe should trigger a delegation of martial law powers to the officer commanding.Footnote ²³ His eagerness on this score, he reiterated, was to allow the military to quickly take all necessary repressive measures to stave off a new uprising without any interference from the civilian government or concern to avoid instilling “bitterness” in the colonized. Wauchope tried to assuage Dill that in the event of renewed revolt his administration would enact a “firmer policy” based on crushing Arab resistance regardless of the cost, but the GOC refused to relent on the issue of being subordinated to the civil power (via MACP) and contended that anything less than martial law was tantamount to neutering the military.Footnote ²⁴

Given the dustup in Palestine, London weighed in with its own determination in March 1937, reaffirming both the supremacy of the High Commissioner and the doctrine of MACP. The High Commissioner, not the GOC, was empowered to decide when the military would be called into action to protect the administration and retained the ability to modify military plans if he judged they would have adverse political or religious impacts. The Cabinet endorsed Wauchope's promise to more vigorously stamp out any recrudescence of rebellion and established that the High Commissioner could choose, in lieu of declaring martial law, to delegate certain powers to the GOC, retaining power and jurisdiction himself over all other areas. Shortly after the Cabinet's pronouncements, Wauchope did propose, in view of a bubbling mini-offensive against Jewish colonies and targets in early 1937, to delegate authority over the Galilee to the military, but Dill rejected the idea, deeming the situation more appropriate for the police to handle while stubbornly insisting that any delegation of powers to the military should not be geographically limited.Footnote ²⁵ This disposition, with London in support of MACP and the High Commissioner's authority and the GOC subdued but disagreeable, held until the second phase of the revolt, when the debate over military control was reopened.

ASCENT OF THE REVOLT, 1937–1938

The second phase of the revolt, primarily triggered by the Peel Commission's recommendation in mid-1937 for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state, was greater in scope and intensity than the first phase. Over many months of fighting the British government lost control of much of the country. As the rebellion gathered momentum, colonial forces retreated to fortified military bases and to a handful of principal urban centers where rebels continued to contest and challenge their authority. The rebels established their own governing institutions, including courts and administrative capacities, to rule over the public, signaling their intention to eject and replace the British regime.Footnote ²⁶ Although British forces easily outgunned the insurgents and regularly defeated them on the battlefield, the rebellion continued to grow and expand. The colonial authorities searched in vain from autumn 1937 to autumn 1938, throughout the period of the rebellion's regeneration and ascent, for means by which to quell the budding anti-colonial revolution.

When the rebellion began again in September 1937 with the assassination of Lewis Andrews, Acting District Commissioner for the Galilee, the government quickly tried to smother it. The visible leadership bodies of the 1936 general strike, the urban-based national committees and the overarching Arab Higher Committee (AHC) that coordinated their efforts, were banned and their members targeted with preemptive arrests. Over eight hundred men were detained and held without trial under emergency law in prisons and prison camps, while hundreds if not thousands of others fled abroad to escape the same fate.Footnote ²⁷ Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore suggested that powers be immediately delegated to the new GOC, A. P. Wavell, but Acting High Commissioner William Battershill and the GOC demurred, believing that they had the situation in hand.Footnote ²⁸

In November, a military court system was erected and given jurisdiction over offenses related to state security. Carrying firearms or bombs was made a capital offense and procedure at these courts was cursory, with cross-examination of witnesses, for example, routinely disallowed.Footnote ²⁹ Police billets were established in some eighty villages proximate to rebel activities at their residents’ expense and both villages and urban centers were hit with collective fines to disincentivize and penalize cooperation with “terrorists.”Footnote ³⁰ Additionally, as they had in 1936, the police and the military conducted searches of villages and urban quarters. Although their official purpose was to arrest rebels, seize arms, and deny insurgents sanctuary among the public, in reality search operations were another form of collective punishment and typically amounted to violent rampages. Some were punctuated by killings or executions by the security forces, but as a rule they entailed the destruction of local foodstuff reserves along with all manner of personal property, from crockery to bedding and furniture to entire homes or shops.Footnote ³¹ Many in the government were convinced that the crux of the rebel organization resided in Syria and Lebanon, where nationalists associated with the ousted Mufti and head of the AHC, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, had escaped into exile and were endeavoring to command the rebellion from afar.Footnote ³² A good deal of emphasis was thus placed on the northern border, where an 80-kilometer fence (known as “Tegart's wall”) and newly built police posts were aimed at interdicting weapons smuggling activity and insurgent movement across the frontier.Footnote ³³

In the first months of the revolt's renewal, the government in Jerusalem reported to the Colonial Office that “neither life nor property is safe in certain parts of Palestine,” yet maintained that the Arab population was generally disinterested in unrest, in no small measure because it was awed by the government's “extreme” repression and the punishment of villages alleged to “shelter malefactors.”Footnote ³⁴ The impression of the rebellion's weakness was accentuated by a series of punishing routs it suffered on the battlefield between December 1937 and March 1938, each of which cost the rebels eighteen to thirty men or more.Footnote ³⁵ Nevertheless, despite their defeats in combat the rebels continued to mass in considerable numbers, with, for example, insurgent commander Shaykh ‘Atiya Ahmad ‘Awad's camp estimated in February at between 120 and three hundred men.Footnote ³⁶

Human shields were reintroduced in the second phase of the revolt during the government's effort to regain control of the strategic Latrun region connecting Jerusalem and Jaffa/Tel Aviv. By early 1938 Arab irregulars were raining down “constant attacks” on Jewish traffic in the area. At a meeting of the colonial state's presiding civilian and military officers with Charles Tegart, a counterinsurgency specialist and veteran of colonial policing in Bengal, and David Petrie, former director of intelligence in India, both of whom were brought in to ramp up the government's campaign to crush the rebellion, the use of human shields was sanctioned. Security forces in the Latrun were authorized to seize residents from villages in the vicinity of sniping activity and force them to accompany local patrols. The introduction of human shields had something of the desired effect, dampening the sniping prevalent in the region.Footnote ³⁷

In many ways the Latrun episode presaged the shape of things to come, both in that the roadways became a critical battleground in the contest for control of the country and in that the military ultimately resolved to use human shields to stem the flow of assaults on transportation convoys and arteries. As in many guerilla campaigns, the relative vulnerability and strategic importance of the transportation network was seized on by the rebels, who assailed British and Jewish traffic and sabotaged the railroads with great regularity. By disrupting and endangering transit lines, the rebels were able to attenuate the colonial state's ability to project its political authority and military power across space, not least since the counterinsurgency relied on the same roads and railways to move men and materiel. At the same time, harassing Jewish traffic played havoc with the economic health and demographic growth of the yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community), damaging the settler enterprise's international image and slowing its expansion.Footnote ³⁸

True to his pledges of a year earlier, the High Commissioner did not stand in the way of the military after the renewal of the revolt. Nevertheless, Wauchope was discredited and nicknamed “washout.”Footnote ³⁹ Where Wauchope had believed that British rule depended on preventing a “fight to the finish” and the damage that would follow, this was precisely the fight that military commanders were spoiling for.Footnote ⁴⁰ For them, Palestine recalled the rebellious frontiers of the empire, “sites of chronic battles, expeditions, and punitive military measures.”Footnote ⁴¹ MACP, which was associated, like Wauchope, with the failure to break the revolt in 1936, was ill-suited for such circumstances. Quickly, but informally, the military dispensed with the core MACP principle of subordination to civilian government and two of three subtending components of the doctrine, namely the requirement to accomplish objectives with a minimum amount of force and the need to maintain military-civilian cooperation.Footnote ⁴² The erosion of civilian control was felt immediately. Not only did commanders license dramatic displays of force, but the military also evaded civilian oversight by failing to accurately report and account for some of its most audacious violence. For example, during a search at Silwan on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem in November 1937, the official account holds that one villager was shot dead and another wounded. By contrast, an Arab account put the toll at no less than five residents killed and seventy hospitalized while houses were set ablaze, yet one serviceman's diary tells an even more sordid story in which troops beat twelve residents to death with rifle butts.Footnote ⁴³ Similarly, according to one British policeman in early 1938, soldiers near Jenin massacred as many as sixty surrendering rebels in an incident that was never officially recorded.Footnote ⁴⁴ Soldiers also sometimes killed those acquitted at the military courts or other “suspects,” using pretexts to justify the executions.Footnote ⁴⁵ Complaints of outrages by both the police and the military appeared so steadily that by 1938 the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem accused the government of fighting terrorism with terrorism.Footnote ⁴⁶ Reacting to the charges, the police sought to have the army restricted to cordons and withdrawn from searches in some locales.Footnote ⁴⁷

The military's resort to off-the-books conduct, and to atrocities, represented a clear, if sub rosa, repudiation of the civil power's authority. This tendency continued even after Wauchope was replaced in March 1938 by Harold MacMichael, a former governor of Tanganyika who enabled the progressive militarization of the Mandate. Within some two months of taking office MacMichael concluded that “every Arab must be regarded as a potential enemy in certain eventualities.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Nevertheless, his insistence on maintaining civilian control of the government was anathema to the military, which continued to blame the civil administration for the revolt's resurgence and subsequently mounted a second effort to directly take control of the Mandatory government.

By early 1938, the rebels had circumvented the countermeasures designed to deny them men and territory, but rebel bravado during this rebuilding phase had been costly.Footnote ⁴⁹ The reality that large numbers made them more conspicuous without at the same time translating into battlefield advantage precipitated a set of changes in rebel organization and tactics. Beginning in March, rebel commanders began to break their fighters into smaller formations that could be supplemented by large reserve forces during combat.Footnote ⁵⁰ The insurgents’ shift to smaller fighting units roughly coincided with an increase in rebel activity, including sabotage operations, transit assaults, and attacks on military bases, police posts, and Jewish colonies.Footnote ⁵¹

As the rebellion deepened and spread, the Mandatory slid into crisis. Before his replacement in April, GOC Wavell conceded that the counterinsurgency had come up short: “In the intervals between military operations on a large scale, which only have a temporary effect, there is little civil control of the disturbed areas, many of which are somewhat remote and inaccessible.” Tegart was more emphatic about the situation. He called the preservation of colonial law and order a “disheartening task” and concluded in early May: “It seemed quite obvious that our present methods of dealing with the situation have definitely failed. We remained continually on the defensive, reacting to attacks by the enemy and were, in consequence, steadily losing ground.”Footnote ⁵²

In May Tegart orchestrated the occupation of a dozen and a half villages that he believed were epicenters of rebel activity.Footnote ⁵³ The plan had little of its intended effect: sabotage operations and road attacks near the occupied villages immediately increased, rebels assailed or intimidated Palestinian villagers cooperating with the British, and military encampments in occupied villages were repeatedly attacked while, according to the Jewish Agency, insurgents used their powers of disguise to continue to recruit cadres from the very same occupied villages.Footnote ⁵⁴ Somewhat more successful than Tegart's village occupation scheme was the fielding of irregular British-Jewish military units known as the Special Night Squads (SNS), whose most notable veterans later went on to form the core of the Israeli army. First headed by the eccentric Christian fundamentalist Orde Charles Wingate and tasked with curbing the growing campaign of sabotage directed at the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) pipeline that transited northern Palestine, the SNS became infamous for brutal attacks on villages, often conducted at night, and for the intimidation and random execution of villagers. Although they temporarily succeeded in cutting pipeline sabotage from eighteen incidents in June to three in July (before a new rebel offensive in September and October), they did little to halt the growth of the rebellion.Footnote ⁵⁵

The High Commissioner informed London in May that the position was becoming grave. Although southern Palestine was relatively “quiet” (with the exception of Hebron), “The rest of the country to the north … especially Nablus sub district and the whole of Galilee district is subject to domination by gangs composed of local and foreign elements which constantly commit outrages against life and property.” The erection of the frontier fence and the new police posts in the upper Galilee had drained security personnel from the south, leaving it vulnerable, while British forces were overextended and being run ragged by round-the-clock operations. Three weeks later, MacMichael requested military reinforcements.Footnote ⁵⁶

The considerable growth of rebel power in the country was all the more remarkable for the minimal number of British and Jewish lives taken in the process. In the first six months of 1938 the rebels only claimed eleven British lives while injuring another thirty-four. Casualties inflicted on Jews were worse, but not vast, with thirty-eight killed and 116 injured. Compared with the sheer number of attacks they unleashed—358 episodes of firing on military and police, 131 murders or attempted murders, 223 attacks on Jewish colonies, and another 115 assaults on transportation—the human toll exacted by the rebellion from the colonial power and the yishuv was decidedly modest, if not meager.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet despite its low degree of lethality the rebel campaign had, in a stunning fashion, impaired British control over half of Palestine.

The new GOC, R. H. Haining, had two principal explanations for this turn of events. For one, he acknowledged that the single division of troops on hand was inadequate to quell the uprising. Yet privately he railed against the “second rate administration” in Jerusalem which was prone to “defeatist” ideas, singling out High Commissioner MacMichael for his “Olympian” and impersonal manner of leadership and his tendency, as with Wauchope before him, to downplay the revolt while expecting the military to rescue the administration. Haining rejected what he saw as the civil administration's shirking of its own responsibilities and favored a system of military control over the country, albeit not through martial law, but rather via the appointment of regional military governors. As in 1936, the aim of such a plan was, despite the GOC's claims to want to support the civilian administration, in fact to supersede it and terminate its ability to check or restrain the military's conduct, and it was for precisely this reason that he expected the High Commissioner would block any serious proposal to delegate powers to the GOC.Footnote ⁵⁸ Remarkably, the dispute between the civil and military branches was loud and indiscrete enough to come to the attention of the Palestinians in summer 1938, some of whom were fully aware of its extent and of the military's desire for total control.Footnote ⁵⁹

The insurgents’ fighting capacities, battlefield tactics, and internal organization all improved as their power grew. The High Commissioner highlighted this in mid-July: “It is notable that during the last three months the tactical skill of the armed bands has developed. They now operate according to plan and under leaders whose instructions they understand, trust and obey; they have, as is only natural, excellent “intelligence”; and many of the schemes owe such local success as they have achieved to a discipline and sense of guerilla tactics which are, I am informed, more marked today than they were, for instance, in the concluding stages of the disturbances of 1936.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The increasing skill and effectiveness of rebel attacks was paired with a bold series of offensives in which rebels surged into urban spaces and illustrated the weakness of colonial control over the few areas of the country where the government still had a tangible presence.

In Nablus two “well-organized and executed” operations in August spirited away P£7200 from Barclays Bank. At Hebron rebels soon carried out an even more impressive raid, torching the Barclays branch (after finding it empty), ransacking the police station and the post office, and capturing police officers (killing one), before being carried aloft by supportive crowds and then escaping unharmed.Footnote ⁶¹ The same month a lone gunman, ‘Ali Ahmad Mustafa, nicknamed “the gazelle” for his speed, slipped into the well-guarded government compound in Jenin and slew the city's notoriously harsh governor, Walter Moffat. Mustafa was killed in the incident, but the assassination “created a profound impression throughout the country” and reinforced the colonial regime's distrust of its own Arab government employees.Footnote ⁶²

In September, ‘Abd al-Halim al-Jawlani, a mastermind of the rebellion in the country's south, spearheaded the next set of raids. Leading a party estimated at five hundred strong in a disciplined operation at Beersheba where the public greeted them with rose water and ululations, his men destroyed the wireless station, raided the police station and its armory, and freed all the prisoners in the town jail. Days later at Bethlehem, a party of 150 laid waste to the town's police station, post office, and municipal offices. In successive raids on Beersheba, Bethlehem, Jericho, and Ramallah, the government's defenses collapsed with remarkable ease and the rebels carried out their missions without meeting any serious resistance. The mounting wave of attacks across the south caused the government to withdraw its police forces and abandon police stations everywhere except for at heavily reinforced locations in Hebron and Gaza city.Footnote ⁶³

The most gruesome episode of the urban offensive occurred at Tiberias in the north. In early October rebels blockaded the town, took down all its communications lines, and then raided and destroyed government centers, as they had elsewhere. The insurgent party of some three hundred, singing anthems, also assaulted the town's Jewish quarter, where they massacred residents, killing nineteen, including women and children. The day after their incursion, government forces claimed to locate the insurgents responsible for the carnage and inflicted fifty-nine casualties in three separate encounters. The SNS also exacted its own brand of justice, summarily executing ten men at the village of Hittin, west of Tiberias.Footnote ⁶⁴

The same month, in an ostentatious display of the insurgency's daring, rebels retook the Old City of Jerusalem from the British regime. During the ancient city's would-be liberation insurgents engaged the police, burned down the local police station, sniped the Jewish quarter, and waged a mini-campaign against collaborators. The temporary capture of the symbolic heart of Palestine, immediately proximate to the seat of the colonial government itself, was reversed by a week-long siege that killed some twenty Palestinians, seven of whom were said by Zionist intelligence to have starved to death during the strenuous curfew enacted by the government.Footnote ⁶⁵

At Jaffa, rebel influence was not the result of a singular movement. In August, the rebels ringed Tel Aviv while imposing a sartorial edict in Jaffa compelling the Arab public to wear the headdress of peasants (the kaffiyya), thus lending the insurgents further disguise. They attacked and intimidated the local police, raided the central station's armory, and went about erecting governing institutions, such as revolutionary courts, that exercised authority over the Arab population. Even after major counterinsurgent operations there in November, the High Commissioner referred to Jaffa as a “hotbed of terrorism.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The rebel capture of the Old City of Jerusalem in October triggered a version of military control. As the GOC predicted, during a set of important discussions in London regarding British strategy the High Commissioner opposed devolving authority to the military, denigrating martial law as the “temporary negation of all law” and emphasizing the need for more troops above all. The War Office countered by calling for an end to the civilian control of the colonial regime, branding it a hindrance to the restoration of order. Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald strove to give the military a semblance of what it desired without allowing it to compromise his plan to use negotiations and limited concessions to the Palestinians to curtail the Arab uprising (which yielded the 1939 Roundtable talks and White Paper). Though he doubted its constitutionality, he pushed through the delegation of powers, subordinating district officials to the military and giving the latter control over the Defence Regulations that formed the legal basis of the counterinsurgency, but without fully displacing the High Commissioner.Footnote ⁶⁷ When he learned of these plans, Haining protested that the situation in the country had become so dire that the civil administration was incapable of action. Disparaging the hybrid authority created by the delegation of powers, the GOC claimed that “dual control” was unacceptable and “demanded instead plenary powers for the military.” The Colonial Secretary tried to reassure Haining that the military was to be given a free hand in suppressing the rebellion while reaffirming that “it is undesirable to turn Palestine into an area of unrestricted military control.” Haining was unmoved and contended that any strategy of concessions to the Arabs would fail. The Colonial Secretary was left in the odd position of pressing forward without the full agreement of the military in Palestine, delegating powers to it while simultaneously reopening a diplomatic track with Palestinian leaders.Footnote ⁶⁸

Haining persisted in asserting the need for a military government as late as summer 1939, even after he declared the revolt all but dead. Frustrated in his drive for total control, the GOC regarded MACP as “that most difficult of situations” and condemned dual control as a “contradiction in terms.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Although MacMichael covered up military atrocities and perennially defended the conduct of the counterinsurgency, cooperation between military and civilian leaders, especially in the north, deteriorated after major military reinforcements arrived in the country in October 1938, following the Munich Pact and the appeasement of Hitler. Moreover, while military commanders continued to take wide latitude in dispensing punishment to Palestinians, whether combatants or civilians, a degree of insubordination and internal indiscipline also surfaced within the military as Haining proved in some cases incapable of fully controlling his own subordinates.Footnote ⁷⁰

WAR OF THE MINES

Much to the consternation of the military, the rebels continued to make a point of avoiding head-on encounters as the uprising hit its fullest stride. Ambushes, sniping attacks, and the skillful deployment of mines posed a daily problem for the colonial government, the military, and the yishuv by summer 1938. During the second half of the year the insurgents’ offensive operations nearly doubled in number and their lethality more than quadrupled. Attacks on motorized transit nearly doubled, and sabotage of the railroads tripled.Footnote ⁷¹ To keep from killing fellow Arabs, the rebels issued warnings not to travel in affected areas, especially at night.Footnote ⁷² It was in this fraught context that the military began the systematic use of human shields.

August marked a sharp escalation in transit attacks. Four Jews were killed and thirteen were injured in mine attacks in the citrus-growing regions of the coastal plain. Seven Jewish workers were killed and seven more injured by a mine near Tulkarm early in the month. A deadly ambush on Mt. Carmel in the Haifa region saw rebels kill at least eight Jews, some of whom were supernumerary police.Footnote ⁷³ Mid-month the police reported, “Eleven casualties are the result of landmines, the most dangerous form of attack and the greatest menace to public safety.” Eight British soldiers were killed and another twenty-four were injured in one week, making it one of the worst for the British military in Palestine, if not the worst, since World War I. A concerted effort was also made to sabotage the rail system, and six trains were derailed during the month.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Palestine government responded to the escalation of rebel assaults on transit by banning the use of all non-municipal roads throughout the country between the hours of 6:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. In September the government also forbade anyone from approaching within a mile of the rail line linking Haifa to Egypt.Footnote ⁷⁵

The rebels boasted of the effectiveness of mines and often exaggerated their deadliness. One rebel broadsheet in August carried an item claiming that thirteen British soldiers were killed by a mine on the Acre-Haifa road. According to official records, the incident, near al-Sha‘b in the Acre subdistrict, actually killed one officer, who was a lieutenant.Footnote ⁷⁶ The military declared internally that it would retaliate by “blowing up” the village, but first it beat villagers, men and women alike, at al-Sha‘b and at nearby al-Damun and al-Birwa, and seized 182 men. While marching their detainees to lock-up at al-Rama village, the arrest party was attacked by rebels who managed to free 132 prisoners.Footnote ⁷⁷ Outraged at this brazen feat, local military units quickly turned to coffeehouses and markets in Acre as well as nearby villages, and after more beatings, dragged members of the Arab public away willy-nilly for use as human shields on the roadways. As in other instances of human shielding, such hostages were forced to accompany military convoys, patrols, and escorts for civilian traffic, and were emplaced at the front of vehicles, on planks or tied to their hoods, where they were left without any physical protection and where they were almost certain to become casualties in the event of a mine or sniping attack.Footnote ⁷⁸ The next day the military returned to al-Sha‘b, but the rebels had again laid an ambush for them. A major encounter ensued that cost the British three lives while the rebels lost thirty-seven men. The government dynamited some 120 of the village's roughly three hundred homes as punishment, while perhaps an equal number were also damaged or destroyed in the process. Not content with this, the army conducted successive assaults on al-Sha‘b and surrounding villages in the aftermath, leading many villagers to decamp to Acre in search of safety.Footnote ⁷⁹

The seizure of members of the Arab public for use as human shields during the Sha‘b episode in August was coincident with the regularization of the tactic in many areas of the country. In reporting the movement of a howitzer battery from the northern border to Beisan, the navy captain in charge remarked: “The whole line was proceeded [sic] by what is now known as a ‘Minesweeping Taxi.’ These are Arab ‘bad-Hat’ taxis and driver[s], a number of them having recently been commandeered. They are kept under guard at the R.A.S.C. Depot and are used to precede all convoys. This stratagem is hoped to reduce land mine casualties.” The use of human shields was soon codified into official regulations that stipulated their use for all military convoys and for night transit. Available evidence strongly suggests that at least as far as the roadways they were first used in the north and central highlands regions, and later extended to the country's south.Footnote ⁸⁰ A colonial official posted to the Galilee later facetiously explained that “Roads[,] particularly village tracks, were always liable to be mined, but, in the paradoxical way things work in the Arab world, there was never any shortage of volunteers among the local taxi owners prepared to drive immediately ahead of a military column and thereby, in some degree, to ensure its safety.” In actuality, as one howitzer commander admitted, “The new regulations whereby each convoy is preceded by two ‘minesweepers’ is not much appreciated by the prisoners.” He describes the procedure in more unvarnished terms: “On each occasion the car is filled with them, lashed together and with little room to move. On most occasions they are put in at the point of a revolver and there they stay from about 2100 until about 0430.”Footnote ⁸¹ Hostages were at risk after completing stints as shields as well, especially those not in separate cars, who were sometimes thrown violently from their vehicles by British drivers careening about or stomping on the brakes. Palestinians ejected in this manner might be run over and either killed or left for dead.Footnote ⁸² Human shields were also deployed on the railways, where they were put in special cars or trollies that ran ahead of trains, so that if the track was mined, disabled, or otherwise attacked, they would become the first casualties. Confronting this terrible adversity, some hostages sang as loud as they could to try to alert rebel fighters to their presence and thus perhaps stay alive.Footnote ⁸³

The use of Palestinians as human shields fit the British military's increasingly racialized conception of the Palestine counterinsurgency as a “small war”—parlance for a colonial war. So-called small wars were fought against unconventional or guerilla forces rather than states and against peoples the British deemed uncivilized. They called upon their own tactical playbook of dirty warfare—one which “may shock the humanitarian,” as Callwell, the doyen of early twentieth-century British counterinsurgency theory, put it.Footnote ⁸⁴ In colonial Palestine the military manifested its claim to racial-civilizational supremacy by referring to Arabs with older epithets like “wogs” and “woggery” and calling the rebels “oozlebarts” and other corruptions of the Arabic word ‘isabat (armed bands). Fighting rebels was known as “oozling”—a term that meant hunting down a racial other.Footnote ⁸⁵ This vocabulary, which appears with particular frequency in documentary sources from 1938 onward, was freely used by commanders as well as rank-and-file, albeit mostly in private communications.Footnote ⁸⁶ As in other colonial wars, dehumanizing discourse bred a degree of sadism in some of the counterinsurgents in Palestine, thus human shielding could be understood as “a dirty trick,” as one soldier put it, “but we enjoyed it.”Footnote ⁸⁷

The conscription of Palestinians to act as human shields was a graphic and somatic display of power. It was also utterly shocking to the men so used. Being strapped to the front of a military vehicle or thrust into other transport for hours of harrowing “duty,” often in the darkness of night, turned mundane objects and spaces (roadways, railroads, and their conveyances) and everyday activities (translocal movement) into horrific scenes of mortal terror and threat. Human shielding was an object lesson in power for those impressed into the role and for the Arab population alike. Its purpose was not only “practical” (saving British and Jewish lives), but spectacular and symbolic (exhibiting the absence of value accorded to Arab lives). Its means were the very bodies of the Palestinians, requisitioned as battlefield implements against their fellow nationals, to be used and disposed of without a care for protecting the hostages’ essential right to life. As such, human shielding was part of the performative practice of “small wars,” where a major objective is “overawing” the population.Footnote ⁸⁸ Interestingly, despite its intended semiotic effect there is some indication that the rebels understood human shielding completely differently, as a sign of the British regime's “failure, disappointment [khadhlan], weakness, and cowardice,” as one missive put it.Footnote ⁸⁹

The toll taken on the population by human shielding ignited a spate of protests, particularly in the north. The residents of Acre and Haifa called a general strike in September over the tactics of the counterinsurgency, and in the former, human shielding was expressly condemned. The government responded by arresting and interning protestors.Footnote ⁹⁰ Acre's notables sent a petition to the League of Nations asserting that “The troops … seem to be unable to patrol the villages without unjustifiably arresting many villagers, and taking them with them during their patrol duty.” Their petition describes the use of human shields as a form of torture. In one incident that the military authorities later confirmed, a priest named Anton Zeitun was taken from a village in the Galilee, ostensibly without the troops, who did not speak Arabic, understanding that they had impressed a man of the cloth into being their shield.Footnote ⁹¹ Human shielding elicited criticism from some Britons living in Palestine as well. Officials of the Anglican Church in Jerusalem remonstrated against “mine-sweeping,” which Bishop George Francis Graham-Brown informed the Archbishop of Canterbury was commonplace in the north. Other British observers referred laconically to human shields on the railways as “‘suicide’ squad[s].”Footnote ⁹²

Though officials in Palestine denied it, human shields were also employed in combat. According to the Acre petitioners, this was little different from the situation with the roadways, with captives from the Arab population regularly thrust ahead of British troops during hostilities: “Whenever an engagement takes place, these villagers [the human shields] are placed in the forefront and exposed to danger.”Footnote ⁹³ The most remarkable and visible instance of such conduct came amidst the aforementioned re-conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem in October 1938. Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a Jerusalemite youth activist and rebel, describes how the cancellation of the curfew halfway through the operation was used by the troops to intersperse themselves among the throngs that emerged onto the streets in neighborhoods that had not yet been recaptured.Footnote ⁹⁴ Military reports on the city's recapture systematically expunge this detail, as do the reports of the High Commissioner, but the Haganah's official history corroborates the army's reliance on human shields.Footnote ⁹⁵

Existing records indicate that the military was hopeful that the practice would curb the rebel use of mines and Jerusalem District Commissioner Edward Keith-Roach writes in his memoirs that human shields effectively eliminated sabotage on the railways.Footnote ⁹⁶ Far from disappearing, however, mines and transit attacks proliferated after human shields had become de rigeur. There were at least thirty-one transit attacks and an unknown number of mine incidents in September and from the end of the month through October no less than forty-three assaults on transportation and thirty-five mines.Footnote ⁹⁷ Over less than a week in September “well-laid mines in different parts of the country were responsible for twelve casualties to British troops and nine to Jewish police constables.” Earlier in the month an ambush near Masmiya on the Gaza-Jaffa road killed seven Jewish supernumerary police and a mine near Beisan blew up three settlers. The worst mine incident in October injured eight or more Jews in the coastal plain.Footnote ⁹⁸ With casualties piling up, Galilee District Commissioner Alec Kirkbride judged mines the most “trying” form of rebel attack. Sabotage of the railroads also reached new heights, knocking out rail service between Palestine and Egypt for over a week. This followed the announcement by one of the top rebel commanders, Muhammad al-Salih al-Hamad (a.k.a. Abu Khalid), that the insurgents would mine and disrupt the roads and rails in a deliberate campaign to block the arrival and deployment of reinforcements, which often entered the country via Egypt.Footnote ⁹⁹

In his monthly report for September 1938 the High Commissioner highlighted the “Considerable skill and ingenuity” with which the “infernal machines” were used, noting: “Land mines are common features of the rebel warfare and a source of danger and anxiety to all who have to use the roads and tracks. Road blocks, too, often contain land mines hidden among the stones, which go off when the block is being removed.” Such roadblocks could be numerous, with seventy-eight counted one week between Hebron and Jerusalem alone.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Rebel technical proficiency with mines was seen not only in booby-trapping roadblocks, but also in developing new types of mines that might avoid killing their fellow countrymen acting as human shields. One such design used a delayed action trigger, so that the mine was not set off by the first vehicle to cross it, but would, in the event of a typical convoy, explode under a subsequent vehicle. Another employed electric triggers, allowing for controlled remote detonation.Footnote ¹⁰¹

It was only in November, with the doubling of British forces completed and an onslaught rapidly unleashed across the country, that rebel pressure on the transportation network slackened. The search regime was put into overdrive, dragnetting hundreds of communities in the final months of 1938. Moreover, it was combined with new practices of temporary mass incarceration of entire villages and urban quarters that were used to comb through their populations more systematically and thereby (finally) develop actionable intelligence on rebel formations.Footnote ¹⁰² To this retooled machinery of repression was added what the military regarded as “the outward and visible sign of Military Control,” a pass law system of movement controls imposed from November onward. All movement in motorized vehicles was barred without a permit from the military, and permits could only be acquired by those who obtained identification cards—a new technology of securitization that would be used to track the populace and close in on rebels and their associates.Footnote ¹⁰³ The rebels effected a short-lived boycott of the new movement control regime, but ultimately the pass law left the public vulnerable to “ruin and starvation” by jeopardizing its food security and threatening its already depressed businesses with commercial failure and bankruptcy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ By 1939 the colonial state's post-Munich counteroffensive had put the rebels on the defensive.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Still, the rebels’ ability to attack the transportation network and attempt to impair the state's control of territory and space remained difficult to completely stave off. Transit attacks rebounded from late December through January 1939, with no less than fifty-seven assaults against British or Jewish traffic.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The rebels displayed “remarkable pertinacity,” as Haining put it, noting in his summary report covering events from November 1938 through March 1939 that “The landmine on roads and railways still continues to be a grave menace to the lives and nerves of all ranks engaged on patrol duties.” Official escorts for all Jewish and British traffic remained necessary during the same period.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The overall pace of rebel transit attacks slowed in 1939 under the mounting pressure of the colonial counteroffensive, but their effectiveness and lethality were undiminished. In April four soldiers were killed and two seriously wounded by a mine on the railway near Lydda. In June, with all major rebel commanders killed, captured, or retired from the field, an ambush killed four British personnel and three Jewish supernumerary police.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Months later, on the eve of World War II, hundreds of Arabs joined together to sabotage miles of railway track between Gaza and Rafah, impairing service between Palestine and Egypt for half a year.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

BRITAIN'S DEFENSE OF HUMAN SHIELDS

Unlike many other tactics, such as aerial bombardment, which were approved in London beforehand, the Palestine administration studiously avoided any mention of the use of human shields in its official correspondence.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is unclear whether military commanders ever informed the Palestine administration about, let alone requested authorization for, the routine use of human shields, and, illustrating either a breach in the chain of command or the wide leeway afforded to regional commanding officers, the practice may have emerged at the brigade level first, before being approved by GOC Haining.Footnote ¹¹¹ Top local civilian officials appear to have been willing to silently go along with human shielding, and by not reporting it, likely sought to avoid both the embarrassment it entailed and having to candidly disclose the extent of the military's disregard for civilian authority. Yet the protests it set off, followed by the Palestine government's ham-handed manner of trying to dismiss them, belatedly put the matter squarely before officials in London. In an effort to rebut the Acre petition, which the Mandatory was duty-bound to submit to the League of Nations, the High Commissioner admitted in November 1938 that because of “the dastardly practice of laying mines in the public roads and tracks” the security forces “required Arab civilian traffic to precede them along certain roads.” Unwittingly stoking further concerns over the counterinsurgency's tactics, he attempted to use as an example what was in actuality a revenge attack carried out by British forces at al-Bassa in the border zone with Lebanon. After four of their colleagues were killed by a landmine near the village in August, local troops forced a bus packed with Arab men to ride over a deadly charge that they themselves had placed, deliberately killing at least ten and injuring ten others. Omitting these circumstances from mention, the High Commissioner depicted the carnage as an instance of British troops being spared from harm by a “mine sweeping” vehicle.Footnote ¹¹²

The episode at al-Bassa generated more questions than answers about human shielding. Some officials in the Colonial Office were taken aback by the brazen attitude and ungallant conduct of their colleagues in Palestine. Hinting at the deception that was being perpetrated against the home government by administrators and military commanders on the ground, the Colonial Office's senior legal officer, G. Bushe, asked why, if the story was accurate, a packed bus was thought necessary rather than one person in a vehicle. Others objected more forthrightly to what they saw as the immoral and unwarranted character of employing human shields, particularly from among the civilian population. One such voice, J. S. Bennett, pointed out that the use of human shields blatantly upended Britain's stated rationale for its counterinsurgency: while British officials held that the security forces served to protect the public from the rebels, the reliance on Palestinians as shields meant that in fact it was the Arab public that was protecting Britain's military. Senior officials brushed off such qualms and satisfied themselves with fallacious assurances from the Palestine administration that Arabs employed as human shields on the roads (al-Bassa casualties included) were not civilians but rather rebels and suspected persons (“bad hats”), even though the Palestine government had already admitted that this was not the case. Moreover, the Colonial Secretary took the step of preemptively quashing dissent on the subject of the “minesweeping taxi,” effectively instructing his department to toe the line established at Government House in Jerusalem.Footnote ¹¹³ Nevertheless, the military in Palestine was subsequently warned by the War Office that “public opinion” was souring on human shields, but the former continued to defiantly insist on their effectiveness.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The fact that the Acre petition was addressed to the League of Nations compelled the London authorities to go on the international record supporting the use of human shields. Customarily, the Mandatory power submitted memoranda alongside the petitions it transmitted to the Secretary General that dismissed the grievances of its colonial charges. Drafting the rebuttal to the Acre complainants caused some consternation at the Foreign Office, which had responsibility for the task, yet ultimately its letter to the League not only repeated the justifications offered for the practice by officials in Jerusalem but amplified them. While the government was aware that the procedure entailed the use of civilians, its official explanation contended deceitfully that only Arabs detained for rebel activities or suspected of the same were employed as shields. Further, it disclaimed all responsibility for the deaths and injuries caused by using human shields, insisting, “If untoward consequences have resulted to such offenders, the blame lies with those guilty of the practice of mine-laying and not with the troops who were patrolling the roads in the interests of public security.” Although it mounted a resolute, if whitewashed defense of the practice, the government in London sensed that the issue could bring it great disrepute. It thus attempted to minimize controversy by inaccurately claiming that its employment was extraordinary, rather than standard operating procedure, while insisting, illogically, that it was intended to prevent injury being caused to the public by rebel mines.Footnote ¹¹⁵

British trepidation in defending human shields at the League of Nations certainly owed to the practice's ill-repute as a “method[] which would not be countenanced in ordinary warfare,” yet there was little to fear.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Syrian pleas for relief from French repression during the Syrian rebellion in the 1920s were not only rebuffed by the League, but met with an evaluation clearing the French of charges of brutality.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Palestinians subjected to the racial domination-cum-tutelage of the Mandate system fared no better: British records show no substantive response by the League on the human shielding issue and its Permanent Mandates Commission session on Palestine in 1939 was entirely devoid of attention to the counterinsurgency.Footnote ¹¹⁸

HUMAN SHIELDS, THE MILITARIZATION OF THE MANDATE, AND PALESTINIAN RACIALIZATION

The racialization and dehumanization of the Palestinians during the counterinsurgency in Palestine have often been dismissed or passed over in the scholarship on the Great Revolt. Matthew Hughes has brushed aside the “Casual racism” of British forces and deemed their campaign “humane and restrained” even as he has copiously documented what he memorably refers to as its “banality of brutality.” Most recently, his extensive study of the counterinsurgency argues that it was “so effective” because of its “application of measured force” while denying that colonial violence reflected “the underlying racism of empire.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ While not an apologist for British conduct, Matthew Kelly suggests that race was a factor of declining importance throughout the interwar British Empire, including Palestine.Footnote ¹²⁰ Even works that foreground the repression and indiscriminate tactics used in suppressing the revolt avoid consideration of race and racialization.Footnote ¹²¹ Almost alone among scholars, Laleh Khalili has illustrated a countervailing approach, arguing broadly, “Racialization of the enemy is crucial to liberal counterinsurgencies, in that ultimately a racial hierarchy resolves the tensions between illiberal methods and liberal discourse.” Her work further emphasizes that racialization during the Great Revolt was instrumental in collapsing the distinction between civilians and combatants as part of a process in which civilians were not “collateral but … the central object of war making.”Footnote ¹²² The systematic use of human shields opened a new dimension in this process, converting colonized bodies from objects of punishment and surveillance into direct tools of warfare. In doing so, human shielding deepened the racialization of the Arab population. Where the Palestinians had already seen their juridical and individual rights blotted out by the expansive system of collective punishments, human shielding transposed the racial order of the Mandate directly onto Palestinian bodies, somatically manifesting the colonial state's will to protect Britons and Jewish settlers and its stark disregard for Arab life. In the broad scope of Britain's dirty war in Palestine, human shielding was just one of the many ways that the empire rendered the lives of the colonized tenuous and disposable. Yet it marked the absolute withdrawal of basic rights from the colonized.

For the military, the employment of human shields reflected its Hobbesian view of Palestinian society and, as well, the deep current of resistance that had welled up in its ranks against the Mandate's civil administration. Throughout the revolt military leaders pressed for direct control of the counterinsurgency, and effectively of the colonial state, on the grounds that civilian officials lacked the necessary spine to scourge the natives. The military's quest for state power was evident not so much in any direct interest in taking over administrative responsibilities, but instead in evading civilian oversight and in dictating the terms of military strategy and tactics, and thus in drawing the contours of the colonial state's relations with the Palestinian majority. From the military's perspective, being assigned to defensive responsibilities such as guarding state assets and personnel represented an undue “restriction” and a misuse of its capabilities.Footnote ¹²³ From the outset in 1936 it rejected the principle of restraint inherent in MACP and the necessity of discriminating between combatants and non-combatants, finding this kind of “forbearance” abhorrent. Consequently, during the second phase of the uprising, military officers took it upon themselves to sidestep the civil power, disregard MACP, and unleash indiscriminate violence as a means of intimidating the Arab public. Some justified this approach by contending that deliberately inflicting greater doses of brutality was actually more humane, and certain commanders, such as Evetts and Bernard Montgomery in the north, cultivated an iron fist approach with little checking them.Footnote ¹²⁴ As the military struggled and failed to reverse the dramatic gains made by the rebels in 1938, its tendency to blame civilian officials reemerged and its willingness to resort to ever harsher and blunter tactics grew. From this perspective, the use of Palestinians as human shields not only sent a chilling signal to the colonized. It also stood the priorities of civil government on their head: Where MACP mandated that the military defend the civil regime in order to restore and extend its rule over the colonized, the adoption of human shields eroded the state's relationship with Arab society, spreading alienation and “bitterness” while vitiating colonial claims to be defending the public in the most graphic fashion. The ease with which the military in Palestine brought the home government around to accepting and defending the use of human shields internationally, with all the potential stigma attached, is thus a remarkable indication of its ultimate ascendency within Palestine, irrespective of the formal hierarchy of state authority. It also indicates the very real threat of a rebel victory and the imperial license that was given to dispel it.

The regularization of human shielding served as proof of “the dark path of repression” foreseen and warned against by the Peel Commission.Footnote ¹²⁵ It was also elemental to an ongoing process of colonial racialization that robbed the Palestinians of their humanity, stripped them of any figment of legal rights or protections, and denuded them of the most basic security of life. Indeed, with the systematic use of human shields, the colonial regime veered towards the “negation of all law” so feared by top civilian officials and took Palestinian society with it into the ensuing abyss.