Story

The Arab Revolt 1936-39

1936-1939 CE

Biblical Narrative

In the spring of the year five thousand six hundred and ninety-six, in the cities of Jaffa and Nablus, the leaders of the Palestinian Arabs gathered and declared a general strike. Close the shops. Stop the buses. Refuse to pay the British taxes. Until the gates of Jewish immigration are sealed; until the sale of Arab land to Jews is forbidden; until a national Arab government is given to the Arabs of Palestine — until then, the country shall stand still. The Arab Higher Committee was raised over the strike, and over the Committee stood the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, in his white turban beneath the gilded dome of the al-Aqsa.

And the strike held for six months, the longest political general strike in colonial history, and when at last it was lifted by the intervention of the kings of the Arab world — Ibn Saud of the Arabian Peninsula, Faisal of Iraq, Abdullah of Transjordan — it was lifted only that the British might convene a Royal Commission, and that the Commission might bring forth a recommendation. The recommendation came in the eleventh month of the year five thousand six hundred and ninety-seven: partition. Lord Peel proposed to cut the land into two — a small Jewish state in the coastal plain and the Galilee, an Arab state covering most of the rest, with a British corridor to Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

The Arabs rejected the partition altogether. The Zionist Congress in Zurich accepted the principle while haggling over the borders. And in the autumn of that year the strike that had ended became a revolt. From the hill villages of Galilee and from the Hebron mountains and from the Naplouse triangle there came down armed bands led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini and Aref Abd al-Razzak and the schoolteacher Izz al-Din al-Qassam who had been shot in his cave already in 1935 — and they ambushed British convoys, blew rail lines, attacked Jewish settlements, and took up the rifles passed down from the days of the Turks.

The British answered with savagery. They blew up houses in old Jaffa to clear sniper alleys. They demolished the village of Halhul. They hanged Arab fighters by court martial. By the year five thousand six hundred and ninety-nine, when the revolt was at last crushed, five thousand Arabs were dead, four hundred Jews were dead, two hundred British soldiers were dead, and the Palestinian Arab leadership had been broken — the Mufti exiled to Lebanon, then to Iraq, then to Berlin, where he would later seek the audience of Hitler. The revolt did not stop the Jewish home; it weakened the Arab capacity to resist what was coming.

Half a loaf is better than no bread; we will accept partition, but we will not give up the principle of the Jewish state.David Ben-Gurion to the Zionist Executive on the Peel Commission report, July 1937

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, sometimes called the Great Arab Revolt or the Great Palestinian Revolt, is the subject of Ted Swedenburg's Memories of Revolt (Minnesota, 1995, oral-historical), Matthew Hughes's Britain's Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt (Cambridge, 2019, military-historical), and Rashid Khalidi's The Iron Cage (Beacon, 2006, political-historical). It unfolded in two phases separated by the Royal (Peel) Commission inquiry: a six-month general strike from April to October 1936, and an armed insurgency from autumn 1937 to spring 1939.

The revolt was triggered by accumulated Arab grievances over Mandate-era developments: rapid Jewish immigration following the Nazi seizure of power in Germany (61,854 Jews entered Palestine legally in 1935 alone, the highest annual figure of the Mandate), increasing land sales to Jewish institutions through the Jewish National Fund, and the perceived British failure to deliver on promises of representative self-government. The 13 April 1936 attack by followers of al-Qassam on a Jewish convoy near Anabta and the subsequent communal violence in Jaffa on 19 April marked the start of organized resistance under the newly formed Arab Higher Committee, chaired by Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini.

The Peel Commission, led by Earl Peel and including the historian Reginald Coupland, conducted hearings in November-December 1936 and published its report on 7 July 1937 (Cmd. 5479). It proposed the first partition plan: a Jewish state of about 5,000 square kilometers covering the Galilee and coastal plain, an Arab state federated with Transjordan covering the rest, and a British-administered corridor including Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Jaffa. The plan also envisioned compulsory transfer of populations — about 225,000 Arabs and 1,250 Jews — across the proposed borders. The Zionist Congress in Zurich, August 1937, narrowly accepted the partition principle 299-160; the Arab Higher Committee rejected it absolutely.

The military phase of the revolt, from October 1937 to spring 1939, was conducted by rural irregular bands (fasa'il) led by figures including Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, Aref Abd al-Razzak, Yusuf Sa'id Abu Durra, and the Syrian volunteer Fawzi al-Qawuqji. British countermeasures included Charles Tegart's expanded Palestine Police force, the construction of the Tegart wall along the Lebanese border, the Special Night Squads under Captain Orde Wingate (which trained Jewish Haganah members in counter-insurgency, including the future Israeli generals Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan), and the use of collective punishments. By 1939, total Arab deaths exceeded 5,000 with about 14,000 wounded; Jewish deaths approached 500; British military and police deaths reached approximately 250. The St James's Conference of February 1939 and the resulting White Paper of 17 May 1939 capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years and effectively shelved partition.

The 1936-39 revolt destroyed the Palestinian Arab leadership of the older generation, scattered its national institutions, and left the field clear for a Zionist movement now backed by international Holocaust-survivor advocacy.Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage (2006)