Arab militants pilfering from a military vehicle during the Great Revolt 1936-39.
“Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries round-about her.” - Ezekiel 5:5
This is part ten of the FAI Publishing series Center of Nations which examines the history of the modern State of Israel in the midst of an increasingly hostile world.
the revolt
In the wake of the Fourth Aliyah and the massacres of 1929, events continued to escalate in the Promised Land throughout the 1930’s. The economic downturn caused by the influx of olim between 1924-29 eventually roared back into an economic boom as cities like Tel Aviv, Jaffa and Haifa absorbed the new labor force and grew into industrial hubs. A major port in the coastal city of Haifa was constructed, factories and oil refineries were built, and the Jewish artisan, educational and agricultural sectors continued to grow. Despite the ongoing threat to Jewish communities and the recommendations of the Shaw Report, Jewish immigration to the Land was not blunted, but continued to accelerate throughout the early 1930’s in what is now regarded as the Fifth Aliyah.
Jewish immigrants arriving in Haifa Port during the Fifth Aliyah (1929-39).
Although reasons for Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine were varied, the single largest factor for the Fifth Aliyah was the ascension of the National Socialist party in Germany, and the virulently anti-Semitic rhetoric of its leader, Adolf Hitler. Beginning with his consolidation of political power as Fuhrer, Hitler’s government enacted a series of policies and laws that dramatically curtailed the freedoms of Jews in Germany. Equally alarming was his public calls for a united Germanic state across central and Eastern Europe, which began to materialize in the German annexation of Austria in 1936 and the subsequent annexation of the Czech Sudetenland in 1938. Wherever the Reich spread, state-sponsored anti-Semitism followed. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe saw the writing on the wall and emigrated in the mid-1930’s. Due to persistent immigration restrictions in the United States, over 250,000 Jewish migrants made their way to Eretz Yisrael between 1929-1939, mostly fleeing from Central European nations in the path of the expanding Third Reich. The Fifth Aliyah was by far the largest, more than doubling the Jewish population of the Land to reach almost a half-million Yishuv, constituting almost one-third of the total population of Mandate Palestine. Jewish Agency land purchases more than doubled in the 1920’s and 30’s as well, reaching almost 155,000 hectares (385,000 acres), including large tracts of land along the coastal areas, the fertile Jezreel Valley, and throughout the Galilee. Although most of the resulting growth from the fourth and fifth aliyot were in the coastal cities, rural agrarian communities also grew in number from 77 to 200 in the same timeframe.
Many Arab leaders and parties were dismayed by the rapid growth of Jewish population, land, and wealth. One such leader was Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Palestinian Arab of Syrian origin who formed an anti-British and anti-Zionist group of militants in 1930 named the Black Hand. Five years later, the group had grown to almost 800 members, who routinely engaged in sabotage against British rail lines and Jewish agriculture. After a deadly skirmish with Palestinian police, al-Qassam was surrounded by British forces and subsequently killed in an ensuing firefight. His death became a rallying call for anti-Zionist Arabs across the Land. In addition to the death of al-Qassam, Palestinian Arab leaders also witnessed the success of labor strikes and public demonstrations in achieving independence for other Arab nations in the region. Iraq had won independence from the British crown in 1931, Syria had secured negotiations with Paris for independence in January, 1936, and Egypt had negotiated independence from Britain in March, 1936. Many Palestinian Arab leaders followed suit one month later in April, calling for a general strike and the nonpayment of taxes. They demanded that British authorities prohibit Jewish immigration and land purchases, and also called for the formation of a national government, in which Arab parties would hold a decisive majority. A coalition of Arab parties was formed, called the Arab High Committee, led by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Although the rival Nashashibi clan dissented and remained aligned with the British, al-Husseini’s clan managed to exert enough influence to make the strikes and shutdowns effective in Arab communities across the Land.
Militiamen and women of the 1936 Arab Revolt.
Not only did British mandate authorities rebuff the demands of the Arab High Committee, they also began a campaign of repression. Ordinances were enacted which prescribed collective punishment against Arab communities if any of their members engaged in subversive activity. When the followers of the late Izz ad-Din al-Qassam began sabotaging British railroads and pipelines in mid-1936, British forces raided the towns of the attackers to conduct weapons seizures and to arrest suspects. When militants attacked rural Jewish communities, killing two Jewish residents, the British military began arming and coordinating with the Jewish Hagenah defense force. When rebels attempted to derail a British troop transport train arriving from Egypt, the mandate authorities ordered the arrest of Palestinian Arab leaders, who were transferred to a detention camp in the Negev Desert. The situation continued to deteriorate throughout the summer and fall of 1936, as the Qassamite militia was reorganized into regiments along several fronts, while an additional 20,000 British troops were deployed to Palestine in what authorities called a "direct challenge to the authority of the British Government.” A convoy of British troops was ambushed by Arab militia on the eastern road to Tel Aviv in June, leading to a “pitched battle” during which a British non-commissioned officer was killed-in-action. The general strike was finally ended and hostilities ceased in October, only after British commanders managed to apply enough pressure through other Arab leaders in the region to convince their Palestinian counterparts to back down. An estimated 1,000 Arab militants were killed during engagements with Jewish and British forces in just six months.
The Commission
In the aftermath of the revolt of 1936, the British government dispatched Lord William Peel to conduct an inquiry. The Peel Commission investigated the causes of the Arab strike and insurgency before publishing its report in July, 1937. It observed, “though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary, improvement in the economic situation in Palestine has meant the deterioration of the political situation.” Admitting that Jewish immigration and development in the Land had far outstripped British expectations, the report also remarked that, “The continued impact of a highly intelligent and enterprising [Jewish] race, backed by large financial resources, on a comparatively poor indigenous community, on a different cultural level, may produce in time serious reactions.” As a result, the commission recommended that the Land be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states, including the voluntary resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Jewish lands, compared to a Jewish resettlement numbering just 1,200. The proposed Jewish state would be centered in Galilee and would extend down the coastline, while the Arab state would span across the central plains and the Judean hills to the Jordan River, including the southern Negev. The holy cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth would continue to be occupied under an international mandate, with a proposed corridor to the sea.
A map depicting the partition of proposed Jewish and Arab states in the Peel Commission Report, 1937.
Zionist leaders were receptive to the Peel Report, and the British government initially accepted it. However, the implementation of the report’s recommendations was stalled when Amin al-Husseini and his allies in the Arab High Committee rejected the proposed partition and resettlement plan outright, followed by a renewal of Arab hostilities. The British commissioner of the Galilee region was assassinated by Arab gunmen in September, 1937, followed by a British declaration of limited martial law across Mandate Palestine. All Arab parties and committees were dissolved, and al-Husseini was removed from his positions in the Supreme Muslim Council and the Islamic Waqf. Many Arab leaders suspected of subversive activity were arrested and exiled or interned in a detainee camp near Acre. Meanwhile, the right-wing Jewish Revisionist Movement, led by Jewish Legion veteran and Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, also rejected the Peel Commission’s recommendations. To Jabotinski and his followers, all of Etetz Yisrael belonged to the Jewish people alone. A group of Hagenah commanders had formed a radical splinter group in 1931 under the leadership of Avraham Stern, a Jabotinsky devotee and leader in the Betar movement. Named Irgun Zeva'i Le'um (abbreviated in Hebrew as Etzel) the group considered British occupation to be the primary threat to the Zionist cause, and Stern became involved in illegal weapons smuggling from Europe in the mid-1930’s. With the resumption of the Arab revolt in September, 1937, Etzel publicly eschewed the Hagenah’s philosophy of Havlagah, or self-defense, instead employing offensive, retaliatory tactics, including indiscriminate attacks against Arab communities and the sabotage of British infrastructure.
Despite British efforts to quell the revolt through a series of arrests and military tribunals, the radical factions on both sides continued to escalate the level of violence throughout 1938. British forces were bolstered by additional reinforcements, and the Arab rebel stronghold in the Old City of Jerusalem was eventually re-occupied. British tactics against Arab rebels grew more draconian throughout this period, as it was assessed that “practically every village in the country harbours and supports the rebels and will assist in concealing their identity from the Government Forces.” Arab communities suspected of hosting rebel personnel or weapons were cordoned off, and any adult males attempting to flee were shot. British veterans later reported scattered incidents of atrocities, including the indiscriminate machine gunning and burning of Arab villages after British troops were killed by snipers or mines, and the use of captured rebels as human shields for the protection of British trains and convoys. Over 200 Jews and more than 400 Arabs were killed by rival factions between June,1938 and September,1939, and over 1,200 Arab irregulars were killed by British forces.
Although the mandate authorities had cooperated with the Hagenah in the revolt, events in both the Land and abroad began to sour British-Jewish relations. The death of two British soldiers at the hands of the radical Etzel faction in 1939 caused a row with the Hagenah, and although many members of the splinter faction agreed to cease offensive attacks and return to the regular self-defense forces, Stern and other radicals held out and continued their insurgency against the British occupation. The continuing violence worried British authorities in London, who were facing the specter of war with Nazi Germany, and who needed good relations with Middle Eastern Arabs for oil and military alliances. As a result, the Zionist-friendly Peel Report was discarded in favor of another commission, which revised the partition plan to include much smaller Arab and Jewish states with limited sovereignty, no Jewish-Arab resettlements, and a continuing British mandate in the Galilee. This time, both Arab and Zionist leaders rejected the proposal. But most importantly, a moratorium on Jewish land purchases was proposed, as well as a limitation on Jewish immigration to only 75,000 olim between 1939-1944. In a major blow to the Zionist movement, the British government began the restrictions on immigration. Therefore, the Fifth Aliyah came to an abrupt end in the fall of 1939 at the worst time possible, as the growing storm over the European continent was about to break out into Blitzkrieg, with the greatest cataclysm in Jewish history following closely behind.
Gabe Caligiuri is the editor of THE WIRE, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.