Ghassan Kanafani

The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine

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It is the colonized against the colonizer in its fullest and most rigorous definition, one that considers the full complexity of class exploitation and class relations, national oppression, and the geopolitical correlation of forces; the colonized against a colonizer that wields the might of imperialism's unconditional support. Only with this clarity of analysis can we correctly assess the true obstacles confronting the Palestinian cause, which along with the Zionist colonial project include the Arab landowning and ruling classes inside Palestine and across the region, the British, and, now more than ever, the United States and its imperialist project of global hegemony. And only with this clarity can we correctly assess the forces of resistance, which include the Palestinian peasant class, the landless, the workers, the intellectuals and artists who take the side of the proletariat, the Arab masses and their organizations, socialist and communist parties, and the international working class positioned against imperialism in all contexts and forms.

With this clarity, Kanafani guides us to resist the isolation of the Palestinian cause as simply an issue for the Palestinians alone, or for the Arab states alone. When Zionism is understood as an imperialist project in its origin and its agenda, it becomes an enemy of all of humanity, and the Palestinian cause a banner for all of humanity.

In fact, this was not a random, unexpected, or even unintended result of an otherwise meticulously drawn up plan. On the contrary, the Zionist leadership was fully aware of the consequences from the start.

Decades earlier, Theodor Herzl himself had stated that "we must seize the privately held lands in the areas allocated to us from the landowners. The poorer inhabitants must be quietly moved beyond the borders by securing work for them in the countries to which they will relocate; we will deny them employment in our country. As for the landlords, they will join our ranks." The Histadrut offers a clear formulation of the reality: "to allow the Arabs access to the Jewish labor market would mean that Jewish capital would be directed toward Arab development, and against Zionist objectives. Moreover, employment of Arabs in Jewish industry will lead to class divisions in Palestine along racial lines:

Jews as capitalists using Arabs as laborers. We would thereby recreate in Palestine the same unnatural conditions that lead to the emergence of anti-Semitism in the Diaspora."

A pamphlet distributed by the Communist Party's Executive Committee that same day stated that "Jewish workers live among you. They did not come here to oppress you but to live with you, and they are ready to fight alongside you against those moneyed enemies, be they Jewish, Arab or English... If the holders of wealth incite you against Jewish workers to secure themselves against your retaliations, will you allow yourself to continually take the bait? The Jewish worker, a soldier in the revolution, has come to join his arms with yours as a comrade in the resistance against the English, Jewish and Arab capitalists... we call on you to fight the rich who have sold the country and its people to the for-eigners. Down with the English and French lances, down with the Arabs and foreigners amassing fortunes...."35 What is astonishing in this long statement is not its abstract and fantastical analysis of the struggle, but also the fact that the word "Zionist" is completely absent in the text.

In other words, the pamphlet completely avoided mention of the very thing that posed the danger felt by the Arab worker and peasant on a daily basis, the same danger likely felt by the fifty-five "Jewish" communists beaten up by the Zionists of Tel Aviv that morning.

The small and middle peasants were battered by such policies. The resulting impoverishment and land loss were seriously aggravated by Zionist practices embodied in the slogans of "exclusively Jewish labor" and "buy only Jewish products." Further compounding this immiseration was not only that it led Jewish agricultural and industrial employers to hire exclusively Jewish laborers and pay them higher wages, those higher costs of production were born by lower and middle Palestinian classes in the form of higher prices on an array of essential goods. The campaign for the Hebraization of production encouraged Jewish inhabitants to choose Jewish-produced goods over lower priced Arab alternatives.

Abject poverty, crushing oppression, and centuries of class and national repression combined to establish the “perfect system” for defeatism, fatalism and political quieticism that was reflected in the most widespread, popular proverbs and sayings. It was up to the Palestinian intellectuals, and especially the popular poets in the countryside, to face the massive challenge of altering the culture of subservience while themselves still under the influence. In truth, a group of Palestinian intellectuals strove to do just that from the earliest stages of Palestinian struggle, playing an important role in forming a progressive consciousness. The resulting relationship between both the vernacular popular poetry and the struggle was not one of mere description and documentation, but a deeply dialectical one.

“If only a leader of ours would fast Like Ghandi, for his fast might do good

He won't abstain from food; in Palestine a leader dies if it weren't for his food

A spot he can save to rest his bones.” 

Yusuf al-Isa in a 1920 issue of al-Nafa'is stated: "Palestine is Arab, Arab through its Muslims, Arab through its Christians, Arab in its patriotic Jews. On what basis does the Zionist foreigner sell it off... the storms of Palestine will not quiet if it is severed from Syria and rendered a national home for Zionism...."

According to one well-known Qassamist, al-Qassam devised his strategy as one that would unfold in four stages: first, psychological preparation and spreading revolutionary spirit; second, the establishment of secret groups; third, the formation of committees, each with a particular task such as collecting donations, purchasing arms, military training, security and espionage, propaganda and infor-mation, and political communications; fourth, armed revolt.

It was turning back the clock that would prove impossible. Al-Qassam's movement was the expression of the natural form that would be able to decisively remedy the swelling contradiction. It did not take long before different committees and formations began to proliferate.

The traditional leaders now had to choose between standing in the way of the rising tide of the popular will to fight, or to try and somehow absorb the flood by positioning themselves as its ossified bowsprits.

At no point in the entire history of the Palestinian struggle was the armed popular revolution as close to victory as it was in those months stretching from the end of 1937 to the beginning of 1939. The British military's hold over Palestine was severely weakened, and the colonizer's prestige had plummeted to new depths of ignominy. The high esteem with which the masses held up the revolution became the primary force across the country. As a result, British decision makers hardened in their conviction that they had to depend on Zionist military force if Britain wanted long term control over the situation.

The Zionists had, after all, created conditions unique among Britain's colonies by offering itself as a local force sharing common cause with British colonial objectives, fully charged and mobilized against the indigenous population.

British repression escalated with unexpected intensity. The growing number of police raids, mass arrests, and executions exhausted the revolution, but did not put an end to it. The British came to realize that the revolution—in its essence and its substance as well as in terms of its local leadership-was a peasant revolt. This led the British to attempt to sow divisions in society by giving preferential treatment to urbanites. The revolutionary spirit that had taken hold throughout Palestinian society led to the mass adoption of peasant headdress (the kufiyah and 'igal) in the cities so that villagers visiting the city would be harder to single out for repression by the authorities. As the situation developed, the revolutionaries forbade all from carrying their identity cards with them to further hinder the authorities' ability to distinguish between urbanites and peasants.

In July 1936, the masses east of the Jordan River held a popular conference in the village of Um al-'Amad under the leadership of Mithqal al-Faiz in which they decided to give their full support, in terms of material and fighters, to join the Palestine revolution. As Prince Abdullah dedicated his regime's resources to the repression of the movement that developed, the British decided to treat Transjordan as a connected theatre of their war against the Palestinian revolutionaries, especially as it pertained to the movements of revolutionaries. The role played by the collaborationist regime in Amman was not limited to its repression of the Transjordanian mass movement that emerged in support of the revolution. It closed the roads connecting Transjordan to Iraq in order to prevent support arriving from there, and restricted the movements of Palestinian leaders who had been forced to expand their activities in Transjordan after the British sealed off Palestine's northern frontier using barbed wire fencing. Amman crowned its collaborationist and counterrevolutionary resumé when, in 1939, it arrested two Palestinian revolutionary leaders (one of whom was Yusuf Abu Durrah, mentioned above) and handed them over to the British who executed them a few months later. In that period in particular, the Transjordanian regime's forces became especially active alongside British troops and Zionist armed gangs in hunting down revolutionaries.

In the summer of 1937, the force was branded the "Jewish Settlement Defense" and later became the "Jewish Settlement Police." It was organized and developed across the country under the tutelage of the British Mandate, who took responsibility for the units' military train-ing. In 1938, the force was augmented by an additional 3,000 recruits.

Altogether, these formalized Zionist forces played a direct role in the violent repression of the Arab revolutionaries, especially in the north.

In June 1938 the British decided that it behooved them to carry out offensive operations against the revolutionaries, which led them to institute military instruction courses through which large numbers of Haganah units received their training. These units would later form part of the backbone of the Israeli military.

Construction of the pipeline had just been completed in 1934 with the purpose of carrying crude oil from the Kirkuk oilfields in northern Iraq to Haifa, and had been the target of numerous guerrilla attacks. The particular significance of these attacks was their remarkable symbolic value: the Arab revolutionaries recognized the value of petroleum to the British exploiters, and blew up a section of the pipeline for the first time on July 15, 1937 at a location near Irbid (northern Jordan). They followed this with numerous other attacks, targeting sections of the pipeline near Kawkab al-Hawa, Iksal, 'Afula, Tal al-Adas, Tamrah, Kufr Misr, Jisr al-Majami', Jinjar, Bisan, and Indur (Ain Dawr). The British proved unable to defend this vitally strategic pipeline, explicitly stating this inability on several occasions, while the "masoorah," as the Arab peasants called it, became enshrined in folklore glorifying acts of popular heroism.

reference to nixon’s attempt to withdraw american involvement through expansion of the south vietnamese military

Through imperialist men-on-the-spot like Wingate, and reactionary leaders like Prince Abdullah and the members of his ruling class, the British were able to pave the way militarily and economically for the Zionist movement to assume a position as the advance-guard protecting British imperial interests. This process developed alongside the British camp's certainty that the Palestinian national movement was not in a state of revolutionary-ness that would enable it to take on this united front of enemies. The British were thus able to arrive in this early moment at the strategy that the US would, thirty years later, call "Vietnamization."

And so it was that the Zionist movement in Palestine entered the 1940s with barely an obstacle on the battlefield. By the end of the world war, the international climate was particularly favorable to Zionist ambitions given the atmosphere of psychological and political sympathy that proliferated as Hitler's criminal massacres of Jews came to light. The Arab regimes that surrounded it were bourgeois regimes embroiled in a historical crisis, and lacked any real power. Nor was there in Palestine's Jewish community at the time an effective leftist movement that could push against the force of the Zionist current; it was, for the most part, a society imbued with the ethos of the settler colonist.

this is how arafat should have negotiated

The overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs strongly rejected the report, forcing the British government to admit its inability to implement its own proposals, and prompting it, in November 1938, to invite representatives of the Arabs of Palestine, of the neighboring Arab countries, and of the Jewish Agency to deliberate with them on the next policy. On this basis, the London conference was inaugurated on February 7, 1939 in the presence of representatives of Arabs and Jews. This conference failed to reconcile the two parties, so the British government issued, on May 17, 1939, the "white paper" that proposed the creation of an independent Palestinian government over ten years, in which Arabs and Jews could participate, linked with Britain by a treaty that guaranteed the commercial and military interests of the two countries. There would also be consultations with the League of Nations with a view to end the Mandate, provided that 75,000 Jewish immigrants would be allowed to enter over the next five years and the British High Commissioner would be granted the authority to prevent and regulate the transfer of land. The Zionist leaders completely rejected this white paper, as did the head of the "Arab Higher Committee" Hajj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini.

Izz al-Din al-Qassam (1882-1935) was born in Syria, spent his early years studying to become an imam, and became involved in anti-colonial activities against the Italian invasion of Libya and the French occupation of Syria. He arrived in Haifa in the early 1920s and joined the struggle against the British occupation of Palestine, organizing and leading early forms of armed struggle that conducted attacks on British and Zionist military and police stations, as well as settlements.

He was martyred in 1935 after a ten-day manhunt by the British police. His funeral, which became a mass demonstration of Arab unity against colonialism, was attended by over three thousand Palestinians, the majority from the peasant and working classes. Strikes were held in various Palestinian and Syrian cities in reaction to his assassination.

His defiance inspired revolutionary sentiment and armed struggle in the Palestinian and Arab populations until today.