by John Ellis
With her imperialistic hubris bolstering her confidence in her eventual success, England embraced her role as protectorate over Palestine. As it would turn out, England was in way over her head, culminating in England dumping the problem of Palestine in the United Nation’s lap in 1947, a little over a quarter of a century after officially receiving her Mandate. Ignorance of the region – religions, cultures, and histories – provided the blueprint for the British Mandate’s ultimate failure. None of this is to say, though, that sane, insightful voices within the Empire weren’t pointing England’s government to the real, foundational problems. But competent report after competent report couldn’t tilt the balance away from the old-guard imperialists who convinced themselves that England’s cultural “superiority” would win out. Even though sane voices had been sounding insightful clarion calls to recognize the dire reality of the situation from the very beginning, the Mandate was doomed to failure.
The memoir of Lt.-Col. Walter Francis Stirling, who served as governor of the Jaffa District in Palestine, provides an early poignant look into the clash of cultures in Palestine that devolved into violence as the Zionists increased Jewish immigration under the British Mandate. While there were larger political concerns at play, including the right to the land and the resources, Stirling’s words reveal two societies in drastic opposition to each other. I quote his paragraph in full:
“It was fascinating to watch the first beginnings of the colonisation [sic] schemes of the Jews, who got down to work with a courage and determination which were beyond all praise. The first batches of immigrants were mostly from Poland and Galicia, lamentable specimens of the human race; yet these very same people, in the next generation, have produced fine examples of young men and women. But the impact on the Arab mind of Russian and Polish customs was disastrous. The Jews, who had little or no inhibitions, thought nothing of the practice of mixed bathing in the nude. The Arabs, with their strict rules of sexual conduct, regarded behavior such as this as the very negation of elementary decency. How was it possible, they would ask, for the British, a Christian race, to inflict such people as the Jews on the country?”[1]
As David Hirst noted, “It was a fundamental clash of culture, yet the Arabs would have absorbed it but for the one totally inadmissible premise that underlay the whole Zionist enterprise. The Jews were not only introducing an alien culture, they planned to make it the only one in the country.”[2] One of the things that is often missed, especially in current conversations, is how vastly different most of the Zionist immigrants were from the Jews who already lived in Palestine. The newcomers were largely non-practicing Jews from Eastern Europe who were socialists, and many of them Marxists. Prior to their arrival, the locals – Arabs, Christians, and Jews – had existed peacefully for generations. The Zionists dropped an incompatible culture into the region’s finely balanced equation.
One of the absurdities of the Paris Peace Conference was the imperialist nations’ inability to recognize how cultural and national differences between people groups would create problems. The creation of the modern nation of Iraq is an example. Inexplicably mashing together Sunni and Shia Muslims along with Kurds made for an untenable populace within the new country’s borders drawn by naïve yet arrogant Europeans. At the Cairo Conference of 1921, the British then decided to crown a Sunni Muslim, Faisal Hussein, as king over the Shia majority country of Iraq. At the same time, Abdullah Hussein, his brother, was appointed king over Transjordan. Britain believed their foreign interests would be best served by “a stable Hashemite monarchy in Transjordan united by blood to Britain’s other Middle East ally, Iraq.”[3] What would best serve the people in the various regions was not considered.
During the Paris Peace Conference, the Big Three of Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau had no understanding of the cultural and religious intricacies of the Middle East, and neither did most of their trusted advisors. Their hubris and bigoted beliefs about the locals led them to believe that their force of wills and “superiority” were all that was needed for the Mandate system to work. The will and desire of the various people groups were of little to no concern. However, the British found out quickly how unstable the situation in Palestine became when Zionism was thrown into the mix.
Between 1920 and the end of the British Mandate in 1948, Palestine was rocked by riots and revolts. Many innocent people, Jews, Arabs, and Brits alike, lost their lives over the quarter of a century England oversaw the region.
Moving into this next part of the story of Palestine and Israel, I want to be careful. I condemn all violence and bloodshed. But as I wrote in the introduction to this series – “Justice Is Rarely a Two-Way Street” – this is a complex narrative that is rarely told honestly or in full, and I want to give a voice to those who haven’t been allowed to speak. I also want to present the events truthfully. This is harder than simply laying out facts because the question of “whose facts?” must be decided on. I have pro-Zionist and pro-Palestinian sources that often tell vastly different stories. While I will be referencing and quoting from those sources in this and the remaining chapters, I will be letting the English do most of the heavy narrative lifting. This isn’t to say that the many English commissions, reports, and white papers from the time period are infallible and lacking in bias, but after combing through sources and records, those reports and white papers offer the clearest picture of what took place during the British Mandate. And often, the men behind the reports reached conclusions that were highly critical of England.
I originally relegated this next paragraph to a footnote, but I’m not sure how many people read my footnotes, and it’s important. So, I have (and have read, which should go without saying) Menachim Begin’s memoir The Revolt: Story of the Irgun. Begin is best know in history as the Israeli Prime Minister that signed the Camp David Accords in 1978. He also served as the leader of Irgun, sometimes referred to as Etzel, during the British Mandate and through the Nakba. In his memoir, he justifies his “hate” of the British (his word, not mine) because they “barred the way of our people to physical salvation … [and] frustrated their efforts for national independence.” If he were alive, he would derisively dismiss me for primarily relying on the British, considering my primary sources as too prejudiced against the Zionist cause to be trustworthy or of any value. But, as you’ll see in chapter 5 “The Jewish Revolt,” Begin, who also eventually served as Israel’s Prime Minister, was a terrorist. In fact, I’m not sure he would mind that description since, like all terrorists, he believed that his objective was holy enough to justify any means, including acts of terrorism. I bring this up for the issue of full disclosure, and that disclosure being that you can easily find sources that flatly contradict the narrative I’m putting forward in this series.[4] I’m also confident enough in the totality of my sources and understanding of the overall narrative to accept the challenges of competing narratives.
For that narrative, in this chapter I’m going to briefly touch on four events and the subsequent British commissions and reports/white papers: the Nabi Musa riot of 1920, the Mopsi Demonstrations/May Day Riots of 1921, the Palestine Disturbances of 1929, and the Arab Revolt of the mid-1930s. Chapter 5 will be devoted entirely to the Jewish Revolt of 1947 that led to England finally throwing her hands up in the air and dumping the problem of Palestine in the U.N.’s lap. But first up, the Nabi Musa riot of 1920.
The basic fact(s) of the riot are laid out by the pro-Zionist historian David Fromkin. “The violence predicted for Jerusalem broke out on 4 April 1920. During the Moslem springtime festival of the Prophet Moses, al-Nabi Musi, fiery orators roused Arab mobs to what became three days of rioting against Jews.”[5] David Ben-Gurion’s biographer Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, adds, “In the end, five Jews were killed and two-hundred and sixteen wounded, eighteen of them seriously. Four Arabs had been killed, among them a small girl, and twenty-three Arabs wounded, one of them seriously. Seven British soldiers were also injured, all of them apparently having been beaten by rioting Arabs.”[6]
One of the organizers of the demonstrations that devolved into the Nebi Musa riots was a young man named Al-Haji Amin al-Husayni (referred to as Amin or the Mufti moving forward). Born in 1895,[7] Amin entered life as a son in one of the most prominent Arab-Muslim families in Palestine. Part of the landed aristocracy of the region, the al-Husayni family had long dominated political power in Palestine, serving the Ottoman Empire. As a teenager, Amin was sent to Cairo to study under Rashid Rida, a prominent pan-Arabist and fierce opponent of Zionism. Except, even though his teacher was a progressive reformer, Amin failed to acknowledge and act upon “the technological, political, and economic gap that existed between the native Palestinians and the Zionist settlers.”[8] While a committed pan-Arabist, who joined the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Amin’s aristocratic upbringing prevented him from acknowledging the oppression of the Palestinian peasants under his family’s rule. The gaps between the Palestinian peasants and the Zionists were owed, in large part, to the systemic oppressions at the hands of the landed Arab aristocracy, including his family. His refusal to atone for his family’s sins by elevating the peasants helped continue and further the imbalances between the indigenous population of Palestine and the Zionist migrants. His aristocratic classism didn’t prevent him from using the Palestinian peasants for his own political ends, though.
On March 8, 1920, Amin helped organize and lead demonstrations throughout Palestine in support of the short-lived reign of Faisal Hussein, who had just been appointed king over the newly organized constitutional monarchy of Syria, which was an act of rebellion against the French Mandate of Syria.[9] Amin and his followers marched through the streets calling Palestinian Muslims and Christians to acknowledge Faisal as their King. Even though the demonstrations were peaceful and orderly, Britain wasn’t impressed, to put it lightly, with Amin advocating for Palestine to be removed from under England’s rule and joined with a larger Arab nation that was throwing the European nations’ plans for the region into turmoil. Adding to the initial peaceful demonstrations, a letter, signed by Amin, was sent to the British authorities in Palestine calling for Palestine to be joined with Syria. The letter also made clear the group’s opposition to Zionism. In response, England banned political demonstrations across Palestine. A month later, Amin circumvented the English ban “by turning a religious celebration in April into a vehicle for political protest.”[10]
A key fact that helps explain the tinder box in which the demonstrations took place is that Easter, Passover, and Nabi Musa all took place at the same time in 1920. As the Nabi Musa procession made its way down Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street, Amin “held up a portrait of [Feisal] and shouted: ‘This is your King!’”[11] According to Fromkin, Amin’s words “roused Arab mobs to what became three days of rioting against Jews.”[12] Demonstrating a level of objectivity, Amin’s biographer Mattar explains, “Some sources claim that Jews provoked the outbreak, but there is no doubt the violence was a result of Arab hostility.”[13] The raw fact is that Palestinians initiated the violence, but the raw facts don’t tell the whole story.
Shortly after the violence, Major-General Sir Philip C. Palin was appointed head of the commission tasked with uncovering the causes of the riots. In the “Introductory Note,” the Commission acknowledges right out of the gate that their “mission was subsequently enlarged by the addition of the words (received by cable dated 22nd April 1920 from General Headquarters) ‘and as to the extent and causes of racial feelings that at present exist in Palestine.’”[14] England realized that the Nabi Musa riot was symptomatic of deeper issues and asked Sir Palin to uncover those issues, which he and his colleagues strived to do. Interestingly and tellingly, the Palin Commission Report wasn’t published in England owing to the pressure to squash it exerted by powerful Zionist allies in the British government, because what it revealed didn’t serve the Zionist objectives.
An important point made by the Palin Commission, and one that’s relevant to the common modern misconception that the Palestinians are somehow usurpers on Jewish land, is that the peasants of Palestine cannot be properly called Arabs. Instead, according to the report, “the vast majority of the population [of Palestine], both Moslem and Christian being of mixed blood and largely consisting of indigenous races which have occupied the country time immemorial.” With the concluding sentence of the paragraph, the report offers the important conclusion, “These people constitute a true peasantry rooted to the soil, a fact which it is important to bear in mind in estimating the reality of the opposition to the proposed immigration of the Jews of the Diaspora.”[15] Sir Palin exposed the reality that Palestine was already populated by an indigenous people who had existed there before the Jewish Diaspora. Well, he would’ve exposed that reality if his report had been allowed to see the light of day.
The report goes through the oppression the Palestinian peasants suffered for generations under various Arab and Turkish rulers. The report does point out that “Whatever may be alleged against Turkish rule, one fact stands out quite clearly from the evidence. Up to a very recent date the three sects, Moslem, Christians and Jews lived together in complete amity.”[16] Ultimately, the Palin Commission’s job was to discover what was the change that resulted in the severance of that “amity.” The report wastes little time in pinpointing the problem. “The Balfour Declaration was published on the 2nd November 1917 and … the document is undoubtedly the starting point of the whole trouble.”[17]
Prior to that revelation, the report called forward the belief of the Palestinians that the British government supported their desire for self-determination. This made the subsequent betrayal of the Balfour Declaration even worse. After the indigenous population realized the practical effects of the Declaration, “It is impossible to minimise [sic] the bitterness of the awakening. They considered that they were handed over to an oppression which they hated more than the Turk’s and were aghast at the thought of this domination.”[18] Practically from the get-go, the Palestinians saw through the Balfour Declaration and recognized the true objectives of the Eastern European socialist Zionists. It was more than just a clash of cultures; it was an existential battle by those who had lived, worked, and loved the land for thousands of years versus strangers who held to what they deemed as immoral ideas and actions. The Palin Report goes on to point out that the Palestinians’ feelings are deeper than mere “wounded pride of race and disappointment in political aspirations.”[19] Continuing, the report explains that “the Orthodox Jew born in the country has never inspired the Arab or Christian with any particular feelings of distrust … But they already notice that the latest immigrants from Eastern Europe are men of a very type imbued with all shades of the political opinions which have plunged Russian into a welter of anarchy, terrorism and misery during the past few years.”[20]
The Palin Commission also uncovered the ends to which the Zionists worked to create conditions that forced Palestinians to sell their land to them. It points out the complex organization that leaves the Palestinians “in great straits” and believing they “ultimately have to sell their lands to the Zionists at any price.”[21] This is summed up in the Zionist mantra that “We want the Jewish State and we won’t wait.”[22] As Zionist settlements encroached on their ancestral lands, the Palestinians grew more and more nervous, to the point of feeling like resorting to violence was their only defense.
The report, while long, is damning; reading it reveals why the Zionist allies in England wanted the Palin Commission’s Report buried. The conclusion sums up, “That the causes of the alienation and exasperation of the feelings of the population of Palestine are: a. Disappointment at the non-fulfillment of promises made to them by British propaganda. b. Inability to reconcile the Allies’ declared policy of self-determination with the Balfour Declaration … c. Misapprehension of the true meaning of the Balfour Declaration and forgetfulness of the guarantees determined therein, due to the loose rhetoric of politicians and the exaggerated statements and writings of interested persons, chiefly Zionists. d. Fear of Jewish competition and domination, justified by the experience and the apparent control exercised by Zionists over the Administration.”[23]
The Report also points the finger at the British administration over Palestine for failing to heed the warnings of potential violence and for failing to provide the infrastructure necessary to ward off that violence. But it leaves the bulk of its damnation for the Zionists, putting in print that, “the Zionist Commission and the official Zionists by their impatience, indiscretion and attempts to force the hands of the Administration, are largely responsible for the present crisis.”[24]
Major-General Sir Philip C. Palin pulled the veil back on what was behind the growing unrest in Palestine. Unfortunately, the Nabi Musa riot turned out to be a precursor to a more violent spasm: the Mopsi demonstrations in 1921. But first, there are two important footnotes to the Nabi Musa riots that need to be touched on.
Firstly, it needs to be reiterated that the Palin Commission did not spare the Moslem Arab landed aristocracy in the report’s condemnation. Amin was raised in a family that had an entrenched societal hierarchy in place. His prejudices against peasants helped determine the eventual Zionist victory. Even their supposed advocates ultimately worked against the Palestinian peasants.
Secondly, the Jewish retaliation to the initial looting during Nabi Musa was led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant black sheep of the Zionist movement. Unfortunately, I will be unable to cover Jabotinsky as much as I’d like throughout the remainder of this series. No doubt, his name will pop up again, but it’s important to note that a counter to the World Zionist Organization was operating in Palestine. In 1919, Jabotinsky became convinced that the British authorities would not only welcome but encourage a pogrom in Palestine. By the end of the year, Jabotinsky was calling for the creation of a Jewish self-defense organization in preparation for those (assumed) eventual pogroms. Shortly before the Nabi Musa riots, the Haganah had been organized (the paramilitary organization that eventually became the official IDF). Jabotinsky’s biographer and disciple Joseph Schechtman claims that Weizmann and the WZO knew about and tacitly approved of Jabotinsky’s efforts. Other sources claim otherwise. Regardless, by April 1920, the Haganah had been organized, armed, and was conducting military exercises. Violence begets violence, and men like Amin and Jabotinsky bent events towards their will, and in the process took advantage of oppressed and trusting people. As the Palin Commission pointed out, Arabs, Jews, and Christians had existed peacefully in Palestine for generations. Nationalism spurred by the self-interest of elites played a large role in the undermining of that peace.
For their roles in the riots, Jabotinsky was arrested, and a warrant was issued for Amin, who escaped to Damascus. Jabotinsky was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but only served one and was then exiled from Palestine. Both men, though, made their way back to Palestine. And the story of Amin’s promotion to Mufti of Jerusalem sits at the center of the events in Palestine over the next twenty-five years.
[1] Walter Francis Stirling, “Palestine: 1920-1923” From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948 ed. Walid Khalidi (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2005), 229.
[2] David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (New York: Nation Books, 2003), 171.
[3] Larry Collins and Dominque LaPierre, O Jerusalem! (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1972), 198.
[4] The reason why contradictory sources are can be so easily found is because the narrative of the region is largely written and controlled by Christian Zionists in this country. Foucault’s “power is knowledge” comes to mind.
[5] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (New York: A Holt Paperback, 1989), 447.
[6] Tom Segev, A State At Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 163.
[7] There’s some uncertainty about the year of Amin’s birth. The two main biographers land on different dates – 1895 and 1897. I’m using 1895 because I only have one of the biographies and that’s the date it uses.
[8] Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 9.
[9] Even though the Arab kingdom of Syria was backed by England as a ploy to undercut French influence in the region, France quickly put an end to the new Kingdom of Syria that covered much of what the pan-Arabists had been promised them by England via McMahon.
[10] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 16.
[11] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 17.
[12] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 447.
[13] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 17.
[14] “The Palin Commission Report,” accessed 3/13/2024, Middle East Yabber (anu.edu.au).
[15] Ibid
[16] Ibid
[17] Ibid
[18] Ibid
[19] Ibid
[20] Ibid
[21] Ibid
[22] Ibid
[23] Ibid
[24] Ibid
Practically Known Theology 