Let’s start with the present, not just in the sense of the horrors being inflicted on Palestine right now, but the present as part of Palestine’s still-active past. The brutal Anglo-Zionist repression of the great Arab Revolt of 1936–39 was followed by the Nakba of 1948, the Six-Day War in 1967, the 1982 siege of Beirut, led by Ariel Sharon, and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the two Intifadas, the continuous raining down of terror by Israel since then. Yet the post-October 7 genocide seems to have had a bigger global impact than any of these.
Yes, something has shifted globally. I’m not sure why those historic episodes did not have the effect of completely changing the narrative—the popular narrative, in particular. I don’t want to speculate about things like social media. But this has been the first genocide that a generation has witnessed in real time, on their devices. Was it the first in recent times in which the us, Britain and Western powers were direct participants, unlike others, in Sudan or Myanmar? Did the work of pro-Palestinian advocates over a generation or more prepare people for this? I don’t know. But you are right that as a result of the horrors that have been inflicted on Gaza over eight continuous months, and which are still being inflicted now, something new has happened. The displacement of three quarters of a million people in 1948 did not produce the same impact. The 1936–39 Arab Revolt is almost completely forgotten. None of those earlier events had anything like this effect.
The Arab Revolt has always fascinated me as one of the major episodes of anti-colonial struggle, which has had far less attention than it deserves. It began as a strike, became a series of strikes, then developed into a huge national uprising which had British forces tied down for over three years. Could you give us an explanation of its origins, development and consequences?
The Arab Revolt was essentially a popular uprising, on a massive scale. The traditional Palestinian leadership was taken by surprise, just as Arafat and the plo leadership were surprised by the First Intifada in 1987. Both uprisings were sparked by minor incidents; in the case of the Arab Revolt, it was the death in battle of Shaikh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam in November 1935, killed by British forces. Born in 1882 in Jableh, on the Syrian coast, al-Qassam was a religious scholar, trained at Al-Azhar, and a militant anti-imperialist, who fought against all the Western powers in the region, beginning with the Italians in Libya in 1911, then the French-Mandate forces in Syria in 1919–20. He ended up in British-Mandate Palestine, where he lived and worked mainly among the peasantry and the urban poor. Al-Qassam’s killing had an enormous amplitude, such that within a few months it had helped to detonate the longest general strike in interwar colonial history. The best account is by Ghassan Kanafani, the great Palestinian writer assassinated by the Israelis in 1972; it was to be the first chapter of his history of the Palestinian struggle, unfinished at his death.footnote1
Kanafani’s analysis stands to this day. Among other things, he underlined the economic impact on the popular classes of increased Jewish migration to Palestine in the 1930s, after Hitler came to power; the sacking of Arab workers from factories and construction sites, in line with Ben-Gurion’s policy of ‘Jewish Labour Only’; the eviction of 20,000 peasant families from their fields and orchards, sold to Zionist settlers by absentee landlords; rising poverty. These popular revolts erupt when people reach a point where they just cannot go on as before, and in this case social anger combined with powerful national and religious feelings. The Palestinians rose up against the full might of the British Empire—which, in a century and a half, had not been forced to grant independence to a single colonial dependency, with the sole exception of Ireland in 1921. The Arab Revolt was crushed by what was still the world’s most powerful empire, but the Palestinians fought for over three years, with perhaps a sixth of the adult male population killed, injured, in prison or in exile. In the annals of the interwar period, this was an unprecedented attempt to overthrow colonial rule. It was only suppressed by the deployment of 100,00 troops and the raf. This is a forgotten page in Palestinian history.
Did not this defeat also lead to a demoralization within the Palestinian masses, so that when the Nakba proper began in 1947, they still had not recovered from the terror of 1936–39?
The defeat of the Arab Revolt created a heavy legacy that affected the Palestinian people for decades. As Kanafani wrote, the Nakba, ‘the second chapter of the Palestinian defeat’—from the end of 1947 to the middle of 1948—was amazingly short, because it was only the conclusion of this long and bloody chapter which had lasted from April 1936 to September 1939.footnote2 What the British did was later copied in almost every detail by the Zionist leaders from Ben-Gurion onwards. For that reason alone, it’s worth recalling the cost to Palestinian society. At least 2,000 homes were blown up, crops destroyed, over a hundred rebels executed for possessing firearms. All this was accompanied by curfews, detention without trial, internal exile, torture, practices like tying villagers to the front of steam engines, as a shield against attacks by freedom fighters. In an Arab population of about a million, 5,000 were killed, 10,000-plus wounded and over 5,000 political prisoners were left rotting in colonial jails.