298. Gaza: The British Occupation of Palestine (Part 8)

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, ad free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to MPa Club at www.mpaapoduk.com This episode of MPaer contains detailed descriptions of violence which some listeners may find upsetting. General Allen B entered Gaza on the 9th of November 1917, emptied of all its inhabitants after the bombardment of the city. It served as Allen B's gateway into Palestine, a roll that had played for past concurs since the time of Tutt Moses III in 14100 BC. Like his illustrious predecessors, Allen B marched on to Jerusalem. This time there were no trumpets or drums, no ringing of bells or flying flags. When the general entered Jerusalem on 11th of December 1917, the first Christian to capture the holy city since the crusades, he did so on foot in a show of humility, intending to assure its people that he came as a liberator. It was a carefully choreographed moment. And coming amidst the darkest days of World War 1, Allen B's triumph was what the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had so badly wanted a much needed Christmas present for the British people. But the cities assembled dignitaries could scarcely have imagined what was to come for them as they stood in line to watch Allen B's arrival and hear him guarantee freedom of religion and sanctity of the city's holy places and announce the imposition of martial law. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arden. And me, William Durimple. And that is just a taste of this story that we're going to tell in the next three episodes, a story that can be viewed from three very different perspectives as a painful episode in the decline of the British Empire, as the triumph of the dream of a Jewish state after the horrors of the Holocaust, as the tragedy of the people of Palestine who paid the price for British failure. Many, of course, found themselves expelled from their ancestral homes and villages in the Nuckbah as we will be discussing in a future episode, ending up on the sand dunes of Gaza, many of them, in 1948. And the story is still unfolding on news episodes every day. Now needless to say, this is obviously a highly contested history. It's tricky to reign. Here to guide us through it over the next two episodes on the British mandate. I am delighted to say welcome back to Pulitzer Prize winning historian Caroline Elkins. You'll remember Caroline, professor of history at Harvard University was here with us before talking about the Mao Mao. And in her book Legacy of Violence, a history of the British Empire, she deals really unsparingly with some new documentation that we've never seen before with this really difficult and controversial period of history. Caroline, welcome to you. First of all, thank you for having me. And in some ways, I stumbled on this topic because I was my Legacy of Violence Book, which you referenced. I was planning on writing a book about counterinsurbancy's post-war war two. And when I really started to get to the nub of things, I realized you cannot understand post-war war two and not understand Palestine. And that's what brought me to Palestine and where I undertook several years of research, trying to get at the crux of some of the questions that we'll be discussing today. How do we get to where we are today? What is it that the past is being promulgated? And I think we'll have an opportunity to unpack some of this, but it's deeply controversial and most importantly, deeply, deeply painful for all of those involved. Caroline, we dealt very briefly with the Belford Declaration at the end of the last episode, but it's something that you deal with in an extraordinary manner in your Legacy of Violence. I've been reading about this now for months and I found your take on it absolutely fascinating, coming from a very different perspective to most of the other writers. And do you want to just give us a brief sketch of how it was that during the first war, the British ended up promising the same fact of land, not to one, not to two, but three entirely different peoples and got themselves in the tangle, which is still unraveling in front of us as we speak. Absolutely. The headline to this in some ways is the period of time after Belford is so deeply overdetermined by the nature of this agreement. And, you know, I think a few things. One white George comes to power in 1916 in the war and he's a deeply ardent sort of Christian Zionist. And you layer on top of that the absolute sort of genius of crime, whitesmith. He's a bellarison. He comes to the UK originally a chemist, isn't he? A chemist. He's a professor at Manchester. The father of something called Industrial Fermentation. And the reason I say this is because it's important to me. It will be hugely important during World War I because he develops a stabilizing component for explosives. And that is how cordite is born, which is like a real game changer when you're fighting wars. And that's why he has such a huge position. He's a scientist at the end of the day. Why does he have the ear of people in power because he's developing something that they very much need? So you must understand that Weissman persuaded many in the British cabinet that they're Christian faith and let them to take a position that aligned with British and of course, kindness, interest. And as I say in some of my own work, you know, in this game of political chess, Weissman was a master even toward those within the Jewish community who challenged him, who challenged his point of view. And we have to bear in mind that there was not sort of deep consensus, not yet on many things. And even then there would be time before there was consensus. And Weissman goes ahead and he negotiates with Washington by lobbying his friend of the US Supreme Court and we brand DICE who in turn lobbied the then president Woodrow Wilson. So with all this lobbying, Weissman, he ended up sort of making contact with leveraging powerful people in very important places. And it's that convergence and his incredible political acumen that you end up with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. And I know you covered this in a previous episode, but I want to go over just in case anybody missed it very, just very briefly because that Balfour Declaration is exceptionally important to understand what happens later on in Palestine. And what happens is this declaration is contained in a letter from November 2, 1917 from the then British Foreign Secretary Al Fertr Balfour to Lord Watt Child to pass on to the Zionist Federation, which announced government support for, and this is important quote, a national home for the Jewish people. But not everybody, not everybody in British politics support of the declaration. Ward Corson, for example, argued that the term national home was too vague and certainly no basis for a British commitment to set up an independent state. I mean, you mentioned Corson and that may come as a surprise to some people because we've only ever talked about Corson in relation to India where he had no problem in the fact that there were people living there before the Brits came along. I mean, he wasn't, you know, talking about moving them out, but he was certainly talking about ruling over them. He is not the only one though who is uncomfortable with this idea of having a place, the size of Wales that will house Jewish people because there are Jewish people who are saying, "Hang on a minute. What are you doing? You're playing into the hands of those who want to get rid of us from other countries around the world and put us into one place." I mean, that's right. Isn't it at the time there was a lot of opposition to this? Absolutely. I mean, Corson is but one, right? And if we take, for example, Edward Montague at that point, he's Secretary of State for India. He's one of the few Jews in the cabinet. He's derisively called Montague. He is resoundingly critiqued on his view of the dire affair while he clearly speaks and embodies sort of this horrible anti-Semitism that is ongoing. He himself is not in favor of the bound for decoration. He, a much like Corson, is pointing out to the fact that this is not empty land. And also to your point, Anita, there are those who want a national home for biblical romanticism. There's those who want the national home because they want to get rid of the Jews. Now, this is a great place for them to land. And I think ultimately it's for both Montague and Corson. It's also the ambiguity of the term national home. It's not just somewhere that they can sense them for sort of biblical purposes, that Corson and Montague and others are saying this is really sort of the, if you will, the Trojan horse for creating an independent state for the Zionist project. Are you implying Caroline that in a sense, Weitzmann is playing on anti-Semitic stereotypes when he's selling this project in Downing Street? Unquestionably, he is, I gesture to this in legacy of violence and certainly in other times when I've spoken. If you look at Weitzmann just for his political shrewdness, he's a genius. And to understand how we move from the Balfour decorations through 1948, one has to understand the kinds of leadership and Weitzmann understood how to play these folks. And he understood how to play not just anti-Semitism, but to play into stereotypes. I speak for over a million Jews. He didn't speak for, he spoke for a handful of them, but he had them believing this. And I think in that sense, he was a very shrewd operator. He could speak to the highest level in the British cabinet all the way down to those in the military. He understood the language of the people he was speaking and their psychology. And was charming. He could charm people. Unquestionably. And also, he understood the British psychology in so far as he internalized their own language. He spoke about things like the moral effect of violence, which was a very British term. And he adopted that within his own discourse. And so he was very clever in how he used, not just under his EQ, but how he understood the language of those who he's speaking to. Let's just go back to where William started, which is the arrival of Alan B. And this promise that he makes to the people who are applauding politely as he makes his walk into Jerusalem, saying that all religions will be respected here. We talk about it with Eugene Rogan as well, about the fall of the Ottomans and the rise of this 30 year rule of Palestine at the beginning of that, where you've got the Ottoman Empire in ashes, where you've got something new to replace it. There is this idea that this could work. British rule might be the thing that brings stability. I mean, to speak a little bit more of that. Sure. I mean, look, I'm talking to the two most popular podcasters on empire. Have you heard that line before? Right? That somehow or another, we're going to heal these divides that by the way, we're also going to help create. We are somehow or another, the hubris of coming in that the idea of developmentalism, the idea that we are the purveyors of civilization, the idea that we will bring rule of law. This is the kernel, the crux of 19th and early 20th century empire. And I think we see this playing out certainly to what you gesture to a need, right? I mean, if we look at the situation in Palestine, 400 years of Ottoman rule, we see this kind of power vacuum going on. We have the British military administration coming in. And again, we see British military administration is coming in after war food shortages and flation. Here we've got also horrible, a locus plague, public health, the Spanish and full winds that comes in. We have massive displacement for both Jewish and Arab communities experiencing these kinds of hardship. And so to imagine that the British are going to come in into this situation and say, we can fix this. Only we can do this is something that we hear repeated over and over again throughout the empire. So the British take Palestine by conquest in 1917. They defeat the Ottomans, they defeat many of the same regiments who've been fighting them and deliberately earlier in the war. And this conquest is confirmed by the League of Nations mandate in May 1920. The mandate for Palestine under the covenant to the League of Nations is granted. Tell us about that and what it actually means in practice. This is a very important question. I want to be very clear. I have a fabulous colleague named Susan Peterson and she talks about this in her book The Guardians. And she really is one of the first to pinpoint the fact that it's the Balfour agreement that is incorporated into the terms of the mandate. Right? And so what that means, for example, if we look at the nature of the mandate, we'll see under article six that it pledges to promote Jewish immigration and land settlement. Right? That would be a Jewish agency that would be recognized by the administration. There was no parallel Arab agency. The commitment to a Jewish national home, a sacred trust of civilization, quote unquote, that would also protect the interests of those non-Dionist, non-Jewish members of the community. But nonetheless, the permanent mandates commission, which is known as the PMC, has full oversight to this mandate. And when we see in the years ahead, we'll have the Shaw Commission and the P.O. Report and flip flops on light papers. But the British are now fully boxed in. They cannot change the Balfour agreement. It is what is called the quote-unquote rule of the land as incorporated into the League of Nations mandate and overseen and enforced by the Permanent Mandate's Commission, which is prosionist. To remind people who perhaps may not know, the League of Nations is the first global inter-governmental organisation that predates the United Nations. I mean, you could call it a protein United Nations. And it was founded in 1920 after World War I. And the underpinning of this organisation is never again. We will never have a situation where countries are allowed to create circumstances where the world can be dragged into war. And that is the League of Nations, the rubber stamps this mandate. Precisely Anita. And just to add to that, the other important thing on this is that the Americans exit, right? So Wilson exits and at the end of the day, it's Britain, the powers of empire who are largely driving sort of the nature and tone of the League. And something that sort of historian Mark Moussare called imperial internationalism. That in other words, the idea was that the British was getting empire right. And we're going to incorporate the British model into how we think about internationalism in the imperial way. So if we even think about on the bigger scale, the League of Nations is this first international organisation, but it is by no means anti-colonial. And I think that's important to point out as well. Now, how quickly do the British officials on the ground realize that they have a square that's going to be very difficult to circle or the other way around? That these two different aims, protecting Palestine and establishing a national home for the Jewish people, that these are two aims which are very difficult to square. You know, look, I think, as we mentioned before, Herbert Samuel comes in as the first high commissioner for Palestine. And he's there from 1920 to 1925. And Samuel is staunchly pro Zionist. He comes in. He cleans house a bit within his administration, getting rid of people who are anti-Zionist officials. And what's very important here is he reverses existing policy. And he gave Zionist two things that they wanted most of all. The right to send immigrants to Palestine and the right to Bineland, right? In this period of time, what we see is sort of that unleashing increasingly of tensions around increasing the number of immigrants and then increasing land sales, often from absentee Arab landholders. And Samuel begins to get a sense of discontent pretty early on. And one act of appeasement is he decides that he's going to appoint something or create something called the grand mufti of Jerusalem. And he appoints Hajj Amid al-Husani, the al-Husani's are a very prominent family in this area. And he's a young man. The first mufti is only in his 20s. And he feels as though this is somebody through whom he can do business. So one of the first concessions is that actually they say, wait a minute, we're going to actually have to have somebody there that represents Arab interests because we're beginning to see discontent amongst the fellow heen or the peasants who are becoming increasingly without land or access to land. But we should also say discontent is within the family as well because you talked about Edwin Montague before they are cousins. So you've got Sir Herbert Samuel's and Edwin Montague who believe in very, very different things in the same family and just a little pencil sketch of Sir Herbert Samuel. This is a bloke who's born in Toxeth, in Liverpool, a liberal, like Samuel Montague, former cabinet minister, but diametrically opposed to what his liberal cousin is thinking and saying out loud. And we should really sort of give a little picture of when Samuel arrives first in Jaffa because he doesn't underplay it, does he? His arrival. It isn't like the Alan Beer coming on foot in all humility arrival. It's something very, very different. Oh yeah. He comes off in his arrival and he's got the whole thing going on and grand bice regal style with the plume pad and the cock feathers and his tropical whites. And again, in some ways, he's embodying in his persona and comportment and his dress, the British imperial hubris that somehow or another, he is literally the sort of British version of the white knight showing up and he's going to create this national home and he's going to sort of deflect and deal with these pesky issues around the the Arabs and he's going to save it. And by the way, high commissioner after high commissioner after high commissioner for the British speak in terms of there was no greater heartbreak for them than Palestine. But at this point, he's in full regalia because the British are full of confidence and self confidence that there's somehow going to another be able to symbolize this area of the world. Now, the British make many mistakes and many assessments that they make early in their mandate are subsequently revised and one of these, of course, is the Mufti that you mentioned. This he is appointed by Herbert Samuel specifically because he thinks he's someone he can do business with. He thinks he's amenable. He thinks he'd be able to help to still our resentment against the immigration and against this creation of a Jewish home, which is beginning to happen now. Physically, you can see people arriving at the docks at Haifa and in Jaffa and land, big board and settled. And the Mufti in the end becomes the greatest opponent of all this. But initially, he's regarded as someone that Samas can work with. Absolutely. And again, this is straight out of the British imperial playbook. They come in, and in this case, you have the Al Husseinis and you have the Nasr-Bibis, right? The two big families, elite families in this area, who have been there since the time of Saladin, I think. One of them has got the keys of the Holy Sepulchre given to him by Saladin or one of the early Ayubid rulers. Precisely. And so in these initial years under Samuel, they choose the Al Husseinis. And once again, they underestimate the Mufti. He comes in, he encourages sort of the collective action of Arab dignitaries. He sets up the Supreme Muslim Council. He himself now has powers of patronage. The position that was given to him by the British gives him a person about 50,000 pounds a year. That was no small matter. And he begins in sort of parallel to what the Zionists are doing, sort of the process of quasi-Insipient state building, right? He has networks of orphanages and institutions in schools. He oversees the restoration of a Haram al-Sharif, which is of course, it becomes a very contested site in the 1920s, one of the most important Muslim holy places in the Old City. We should explain this is what Jews call the Temple Mount. On top of it is both the dome of the rock, which is the place that Muslims believe the prophet descended to heaven on the Burak, the Al-Aqsa mosque, which is a separate building, 250 yards away. And on the side of it is the Wailing Wall, which is the remains of the ancient Jewish Temple. Precisely. And this in the sense is the heart of the whole problem, because here you have physically expressed in the middle of Jerusalem a sacred site that is claimed by two different, as short distance ways Christianity in the early Seppokah. Precisely. And to be very clear, for hundreds of years, a flexible understanding evolved, right? Whereby the Muslims who had legal claim to all of this and allowing access to various religious groups. And ultimately, when Weisman comes in and he ends up eventually in the later, there is moving to Palestine. But this becomes the initial issue of contestation, of real when it comes to a head, part because Weisman looks at this and complains to about for of the sort of miserable dirty cottages and the derelict buildings. And we would do a much better job in maintaining this site. And that ultimately is where we see sort of a centering of some of the of the conflict. To your point, the Mufti absolutely understands this. He is trying his best to build a leadership that can contest what he sees as this rising tide that is coming so quickly and so furiously toward them. And what's very interesting in my research, I actually was able to interview the nephew of the Mufti who lives in the United States and he really emphasized to me early on and obviously one has to be careful about how one thinks about some of the evidence, but really saying early on they understood fundamentally where the spark of the initial violence was going to happen. It was going to happen in this location that you so eloquently laid out for us, William. Right, we should circle back to something you just said a second ago, which is right, it's been moves to Palestine and the year is 1937 and he comes with a specific task in mind, an organization called the Zionist Commission in Tel Aviv. Tell us what was that and what was its aim and what did he do? We should also say that there's white Smin that at the same time there's another key figure for the Zionist community in David Bengurian. Right, he's also an immigrant. He had come earlier in 1906 from Poland. He runs the Zionist labor movement, the the history, right, in some ways he's also undertaking a kind of parallel state building process that we see the Mufti trying to undertake, right, and he's improving working conditions. He's got vocational training and most importantly in my mind, he promotes the Hebrew language and culture. Right, in other words, this is sort of if we think about one of the most important elements in sort of state building and Zionist state building, it's around the Hebrew language and culture. And so what we're seeing by the time we have white Smin coming, right, we see the acceleration that had been taking place of Jewish immigrants into Palestine. Moving from that 60,000 number, I mean, it's quite remarkable. The step ups were seeing a 20% increase, you know, 30% increase, and by the time he comes, there had been sort of a long standing if you will, policy of attracting immigrants into this area, into Tel Aviv, which becomes sort of almost like a European-like city of Jewish and Hebrew culture. And we should say, I mean, you know, he comes from Zarisk Poland, others who are coming, prominent members of this Zionist movement are coming from places in Zariskontrolled, Russia, Poland. And they're coming because they've been driven out time after time from their own lands by pogroms. They have a legitimate fear of staying where they are because they've seen generations before. They have no reason to doubt that it won't happen to generations that come after who see their entire livelihoods wiped out sometimes communities masochered in these Zariskontrolled areas. Unquestionably, and I think that we cannot lose that very important threat in our conversation, right, that the 19th century response to anti-Semitism, which you've already discussed in your previous episode, right, is Zionism. And it gathers this kind of new momentum under the Balfour Declaration, right? And of course, not surprisingly, as it's gathering this momentum, you see increased resentment by the area of local Arab population, and increasingly living in some way side by side, we see an increasing separation of these populations. Much of the Arab population remaining in the rural areas, and a lot of the urbanization that's taking place, we just mentioned Tel Aviv, certainly taking place around the Zionist immigrants, and that's not to underestimate the large Zionist land purchases that are taking place, and immigrants moving into those areas, displacing the fellow heen who have been there for decades, if not centuries. And so we see this kind of snowballing effect, which by the way, from an historians standpoint, where change over time happens often in centuries, not decades. This is happening very, very quickly. We have to underscore that in terms of the influx of Jewish immigrants for the reasons that we set, right? We have a push factor coming from the anti-seminicism and persecution in Europe, and then of course when we get the Nazi seizure power in 1933, this accelerates even more, but then we have the pull factor of the idea that of course this land belongs to them. So we have the immigrants coming in, but it isn't just Jewish immigrants. We also have British auxiliaries turning up at the docks in Jaffa, and among these are people we've met before in our Irish series. After the break, we're going to hear how some of the most infamous figures in British imperial history also arrive in Palestine at that period, and this is the black and tans fresh from Ireland. Welcome back. So just before the break, Willie mentioned that we were going to meet people that we have become familiar with here on empire, and that is the black and tans. They are a paramilitary organization that is sent in to clean up Ireland and suppress dissent in Ireland. Yeah. And I mean, what are they doing there, Caroline? Who sent them? Yeah, I mean, they are quite intentionally after Britain loses the Irish War of Independence, 21. They are together with one of the commanding officers, Tudor, who is one of Churchill's best friends loaded up onto a boat and sent to Palestine. The whole point of sending them there was to bring their repressive tactics to bring some law and order. By the early 1920s, as we mentioned before, we already seeing some of sort of this dust up, this sense of anxiety, of potential conflict. Imagine you've got this Tinder box. And into that, they send the match of the black and tans. For those who may not remember what happened in Irish, I'm saying, give us a one minute sketch of the sort of stuff that black and tans were up to in Ireland burning down houses. The black and tans are largely demobilized soldiers from World War One that were sent over expressly to be a paramilitary force. They were augmented by what were called Churchill's auxiliaries, who are seen to be even worse than the black and tans. But the black and tans becomes the code word, even in today, in English language parlance, of horrific repression, burning buildings, disappearing people in the night, summary execution, torture of all forms imaginable, waterboarding, horrific uses of burning and hot irons, you know, the kinds of things as anyone observing this period of time is just unimaginable. They are critiqued about this at the time in Ireland, so they know full well. There's no surprise to anybody. There's full cabinet discussions about what these folks are up to, and they decide quite deliberately to take them and recreate that the same paramilitary force in Palestine. When I was growing up in Scotland, you used to talk about someone being duffed up when you met someone was beaten up. And this phrase, which has entered the language, comes from one of the black and tans, Douglas Duff. Yeah, it's a person. And it's not surprising. I mean, Douglas Duff comes in and he talks about sort of going berserk, right? And going berserk means losing all sense of any filter or restraint from horrific actions. So for example, he talks about the fact that there's a there's a cigarette tin can hanging on the wall of one of the police stations from where one of the police officers had bashed the head open of an Arab and the brains came out and they put it in the little cigarette tin and and and hung it on the wall. You know, he has his own very self-incriminating writings. He has his own autobiography. Well, he talks about Les Dupreeze, doesn't he? I mean, without any self-ident at all. And I think what's so shocking is that especially for somebody who came at this topic from post-war war two, and I thought, oh, Kenya was a one off and all the rest, that this is the sort of stuff that they were doing without compunction in the 1930s and by the way, with the phone knowledge, not just of the high commissioner, but all the way back to the highest levels of governance in Whitehall and in Downing Street. And by the way, those highest levels of governance knew this was going on in Ireland and they quite intentionally put them on the boat and send them the Palestine to do exactly the same thing. So it's not just the black and tans that are the only paramilitaries that are being organized in this growing atmosphere of increasing tension, more and more immigration is coming in, the Arabs are wanting to resist it. They're not sure what to do. There's the beginnings of violence, there's riots and jaffa. And the Yashav, which is a word we'll be using a lot today, which means the the new Jewish immigrants in Mandate Palestine. They have various organizations too, which are looking to their own defence. But the most hard line of these guys is if Jabotinsky, who talks about his idea of an iron wall. Now he's already got formed before he arrives in Palestine, hasn't he, Caroline, of paramilitary units protecting other Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. And he brings this concept to Palestine. Tell us about that. One often thinks of him as being quite important when we think about sort of this uncompromising sort of revisionist Zionist movement. And by that, I mean, he is demanding early on a much harder line approach than certainly, Widesman and also Ben Gurion, right. And he has a history of this. He is tough as nails. He's Russian-born. He's a soldier. He co-found the Jewish Legion in the British Army in the First World War. Later establishes a paramilitary group in Latvia. And he eventually establishes what we come to know in Palestine as the militant organization of the Irgun, which is described by the British as a terrorist organization, right. Locally, it is thought of as a self-defense group, but he calls for this kind of iron wall to protect this very new enterprise that is being set up for the Jews. And he's one of the first, he's very consistent with this and his writing, where he's talking about Native populations. In this case, the Arabs. And he's referring to the Native populations. And he's saying that Native populations around the world resist colonists, right. As long as it has just the slightest bit of hope of getting rid of those who are colonizing them. And so he recognizes that he's got to break the Arab will, right. And to prevent in the long term any kind of Arab claims to this transformation of Palestine into what becomes the land of Israel. And so he's extremely important for a story in getting back to a point that you made before he focuses on the holy sites in the old city. For him, that becomes the point of the struggle in the early 1920s. He's relentless about this. And in some ways sets up a bit of a showdown between himself and the Arab population over the rights to this religious site. Again, a tinderbox that is now being surrounded with petroleum. To talk about the way in which Arab life is going on while this new entity is springing up in its midst again with people who are well versed in protecting their people. I mean, you know, you just talked about a man who has come from Eastern Europe and has used to defending stettles from attacks from other places and very much has that mentality. What's happening around and about? Yeah, I think we have several things going on in need. At first, I think we would be remiss if we didn't point out that another element that is contributing to the landlessness of the felahine are the colonial taxation policies. The imposition of the colonial will that the local felahine have to come up with money to pay their taxes. Often they are either selling some of their own land or their mortgaging small plots. Larger plots are being sold off. And what we see is a breakdown in what we might consider the moral and religious economy amongst the Arab population. So the Mufti, part of the Ion, the noble people, and they are supposed to enable access to land. And so what we see is this unraveling of a kind of local moral economy and increase in demands which we're going to see coming into place later on for more and more sort of extreme responses to both the British as well as to the increase in sort of Zionist immigration and land purchases. You have this very affecting piece that you have found written in 1911 by an Arab Christian in Jaffa, which sort of talks about what the pressures are like at the time. He says, I sell my land and property because the government compels me to pay taxes and tides at a time when I do not possess the necessary means of subsistence for myself and my family in the circumstances. I am forced to appeal to a rich person for a loan which I undertake to refund together with an interest rate of 50 percent after a month or two. I keep renewing the bill and doubling the debt which eventually forces me to sell my land in order to refund my debt out of which I took only a mega sum. You know, these tides and taxes that you're talking about which are imposed by the British state are a little bit like taking a loan from a loan shark which you are never ever ever going to be able to pay back. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, and I remember that doing the research on that and I have to say it's in Palestine's Canadian Arabic language newspaper at Palestine and it was a matter of picking one. I mean, the number of folks writing in was similar kinds of stories needed that there was just no way to get out from under this. And of course, that compromises the authority, the moral authority of people like the Mufti. So in the 1920s, we get the foundation of the Jewish National Fund and this increases the tension because the Jewish National Fund gets large sums of money together from the diaspora, specifically aimed at purchasing great blocks of land from absentee Arab landlords. In the 19th century, there'd been a moment when the great merchants of Beirut had bought up a lot of the land in Palestine and they are still the landlords. And these guys are now being approached by the Jewish National Fund to sell their land. And when the land is sold to the Jewish National Fund, all the Arab tenants who've lived there, possibly for generations, are kicked out. So you see descriptions of people in Jerusalem or in Java of these landless peasants sitting in the streets begging or looking for work and soliciting ways of keeping their lives together, having been evicted. And so this again, the sense of growing tension, crippling colonial tax burdens, limited access to credit, it was just saw ridiculous loan sharks offering. 50% interest, right? Yeah. And then you get thrown into that bad harvest, the effect of the global depression. And as much as one third you write in your book of the impoverished Palestinian fellow had been already landless by 1930, one third of the agricultural population. It's extraordinary. You're describing something that is going to be inevitable, but it does blow in 1929. Just tell us how that manifests itself. Going back to the contestation over the religious sites within the old city. And this comes to a head, comes to a head even earlier than that in sort of 1928 or so. Ultimately, the British issue a white paper on this, saying after there's some initial violence around this saying in this white paper that in fact this holy area belongs to the Muslims. That settles nothing. And we see increasing tension going on. As often happens, there's a spark in August of 29. There's a great deal of controversy whether contemporary counts differ, whether Mizrahi a young teenager kicks a football into an Arab garden or to these deal with cigarette. Nonetheless, we see a spark and massive amounts of violence around the sacred Muslim site in Jerusalem, a Haram al-Sharif. Okay, so I mean we should say. So I'm the Mizrahi you refer to is a Jewish teenager who is stabbed to death by Arabs and you know, this contested what happens and what leads up to it, but no contest that it happens. And that becomes the spark. So what happens straight after that? I think we see this often in either throughout the empire. Is that one event that you don't expect so this happens and it sparks again sort of that analogy of the match in the in the tinderbox. And at this point we see several Jews are killed in Jerusalem. There are complaints that the British forces don't come in. At this point we have what are the Haganah Jewish defense swans. The Haganah was developed by the Jewish community as a defense force associated with often with Ben-Gurian. It becomes increasingly important over time. They're coming in to try to defend things. At the end of the day it's into this that we then get Douglas Duff, the paramilitary forces that are coming in and in fact this is precisely when people like Duff say they're going berserk and they unload. They're violence, they're anger, their repression is directed largely at all sides at this point in time, but certainly by the Arabs and eventually we start seeing the movement of this violence out of this area further south into Hebron where we have some absolutely gruesome attacks going on which we have some incredible eyewitness accounts by police officers from the time. So Hebron is a place where it has a very ancient Jewish presence and there'd been a Palestinian Jewish community there for centuries and indeed relations were so good in Hebron that they hadn't called the Haganah in so there were no Jewish defense swans in 1929. Tell us what happens in Hebron at that point. Yes, I mean this is a site of horrific attack, both against the Jews who had been there for quite some time, as well as a moment where one can see longstanding familiarity and protection offered by the Arabs. So what do I mean by this? Kaferrata, Raymond Kaferrata, a British police superintendent who had been in Ireland and he describes what happens in Hebron as worse than anything he had seen in Ireland in the 1920s. And he goes in and he says he hears the screams coming from a room and he looks up and he sees an Arab in the act of cutting a child's head off with a sword and then he looks further ahead and he sees what was he recognizes, what was an Arab constable, right? name Issa Sharif from Jaffa who is there with a dagger in hand about to kill a Jewish woman whose mother in blood and he takes out his gun and he shoots his man, right, on the spot. At the same time, what we're also seeing is that there are many within, we see this not just in Hebron but as some of this violence fills out into other areas like Gaza, we see that Arab neighbors who have been living side by side with Jewish neighbors for decades and decades sheltering and saving their Jewish neighbors and protecting them. And so we see this sort of this in some ways what Duff describes is what we see this kind of frenzied amount of violence where anger is coming out on both sides and at the same time we're seeing Arabs both perpetrators of violence as well as protectors of their Jewish neighbors and friends. So can I just say how familiar that sounds to anyone who has talked about the partition of India into India and Pakistan where you have areas where people have lived together for centuries the families go back hundreds and hundreds of years and suddenly they are being forced to pick an action either you carry on being a friend and a neighbor or you believe that these people are now your enemies overnight and the awful perpetration of horrific violence that took place during that time and also heroic, you know sort of protection of people because you say no I'm not going to be that way. I mean again again it just comes down again to human beings behaving in the worst of ways and possibly in the best of ways all at the same time. Now in the aftermath of this violence when this wave of violence 29 ends in all 133 Jews and 116 Arabs have been killed and the Arabs mostly killed by the British police, 339 Jews and 232 Arabs are injured. Now this has a major effect on several communities particularly Gaza. Gaza is one place where there was a tiny Jewish community in the early 20th century and that presence ends at this point. They're so frightened there in Gaza that they leave. Safed is another ancient center of Jewish presence in Palestine in our coffee story where we had the story of coffee where that happens partly because of the the Safed Jewish community who import coffee beans from Yemen. This extraordinary bit of the history of coffee happens there. That community gets very badly affected by this. There doesn't get wiped out. There are various other places where people begin to move from mixed areas and exactly the same way any of you are saying in India, neighborhoods which have been mixed for centuries end up becoming either one or the other. But the thing that really happens is heavy repression now by the black of towns. The gloves are off and you describe some extraordinary and horrific things in your book. I'd never read anywhere else and one of the reasons that we asked you onto this show is the extraordinary research you've done on British repressive methods at this time. Tell us what the black and towns do. Yeah, interestingly, there's a huge trove of firsthand accounts at the Imperial War Museum. If you want to go find these and they talk of what's called at that time the third degree. That can be anything from waterboarding to what they call it, hoisting the water can pouring a thin trickle of water through a coffee pot into someone's nose. Into somebody's nose. They're very clear about not wishing as they say to have their skirts of our garment soil that they're often giving these orders to others to do. But ultimately, they're also doing it themselves. Just horrific forms of torture with cigarette burns and the squeezing of testicles and the tearing off of skin. I mean, they would explain at the time somebody like Douglas Duff as a one off, a bad apple. But in fact, this is systemic. They know it. It's part of the system that it's part of both the practices, the legal regime that is established, which we'll talk about some more, I think, importantly when it comes to the Arab revolt. These are not one-offs. This is state-directed violence, right? Or, and certainly knowing that this is going on, condoning it and then doing very little of anything to stop it. Now, in the news reports today from Gaza, we hear a lot about the Al-Kassam regays. And just to conclude this episode now, let's just introduce Al-Kassam, the historical character who appears at this point leading some of the areas of Arab resistance to this sort of thing. Caroline, tell us about Al-Kassam, who was he? And what did he represent? And what was his legacy? Sheikh Isadine Al-Kassam is an extremely important figure. First of all, he's Syrian born. He'd fought with the French in Syria. The eventually comes to Palestine. And when I spoke a moment ago of the breakdown of the moral and political economy, right, the religious economy, in his sermons, he is encouraging the dispossessed Arabs to resist the police, to resist the Jewish land purchases, to fight in an armed struggle, right? And it's a kind of incipient Arab nationalism that we see taking place. And Al-Kassam, he learns of, he'd begin having smaller military attacks. He learns of a shipment of armaments that are intended for the Haganah. And he and a small band attempt to intercept this and they are captured by British forces. And rather than be arrested, he is killed by the British forces. He goes down as a martyr and quite importantly, it's Ben Gurion who says at that moment that this was a crucial moment in the rise of Arab nationalism in this area that Kassam then becomes really not just for the period in the 1930s, but going forward. His name is associated through a kind of cult of heroism and self-sacrifice. And of course, his name lives on in the name of the military wing of Hamas, also known as the Al-Kassam Brigade today. And Al-Kassam himself does count at the time his actions and the actions of his followers as a jihad. I mean, he says this is a holy war. Absolutely. And they describe themselves as Mujjahadin. You know, it's an important note for us to end on. Insofar as, the British dismissed him as a charlatan, right? They underestimated the depth of resentment and frustration and desperation of the Arab population. And it was not the British, but it was Ben Gurion who understood the significance of Al-Kassam, not just to the 1930s, but going forward that this ignited Arab nationalism in a way that nothing else had before. Right. Okay. Because you've got somebody talking about jihad, sort of bringing in the vernacular of a religious doctrine and a religious will in a place where religions have lived together peacefully for hundreds if not thousands of years. Precisely. Look, we will pick up this story in the next episode. Thank you so much, Caroline, for being with us and we'll have you back again. And if you can't wait for the next episode, that's fine. You don't have to just join the club, mpupoduk.com is where we are. mpupoduk.com. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durantple. [Music]