1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

The 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine was a three-year campaign of strikes, guerrilla warfare and terrorism, directed by the Arab Higher Committee under the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, against British rule and against the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine. It opened with the roadside murder of Jewish civilians in April 1936, killed several hundred Jews and roughly 5,000 Arabs, a large share of them murdered by rival Arab bands, and ended with Britain appeasing the violence: the White Paper of May 1939 capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 just as the Third Reich was closing every other exit. It is one of history’s clearest cases of terrorism paying, and paying catastrophically for people who had nothing to do with it.

How it began

The revolt did not begin with a demonstration. On 15 April 1936, gunmen of the Qassamite movement, followers of the preacher Izz ad-Din al-Qassam whom the British had killed in a shootout the previous November, stopped cars on the Nablus-Tulkarm road, separated out the Jews, and shot them; Israel Khazan died on the spot and Zvi Dannenberg died of his wounds days later. The next night, Jewish gunmen killed two Arab workers near Petah Tikva in reprisal. On 19 April, Arab mobs in Jaffa began lynching Jews in the streets; within three days, 16 Jews were dead.

On 25 April 1936, the country’s Arab factions united under the Arab Higher Committee, chaired by al-Husseini, the British Mandate’s own appointee as Grand Mufti. The Committee declared a general strike and demanded an end to Jewish immigration, a ban on land sales to Jews, and an Arab national government, in effect the annulment of the Balfour Declaration and of the Mandate for Palestine that the League of Nations had made binding in 1922. The strike ran six months and was accompanied by ambushes, sniping at Jewish towns, the burning of fields and orchards, and attacks on rail lines and the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline. Jewish attempts at coexistence long predated it, and Arab violence against the Yishuv long predated 1936; the pattern is documented at who attacked first, before Israel even existed.

The Peel Commission and the second phase

Britain answered the strike with a royal commission under Lord Peel, which reported on 7 July 1937 with the first partition plan ever proposed: a small Jewish state on roughly a fifth of western Palestine, an Arab state on most of the rest joined to Transjordan, and a British corridor around Jerusalem. The Zionist leadership, deeply divided over the tiny territory, voted to negotiate on the basis of partition. The Arab Higher Committee rejected the Peel Commission’s plan outright and rejected any Jewish state in any borders.

The revolt reignited. On 26 September 1937, rebels assassinated Lewis Andrews, the British district commissioner for the Galilee, in Nazareth. Britain outlawed the Arab Higher Committee; al-Husseini fled to Lebanon in October 1937 and directed the campaign from exile, on his way to Baghdad, where his incitement fed the 1941 Farhud pogrom, and then to Berlin, where he met Hitler on 28 November 1941. The 1938 peak brought the revolt’s worst atrocity against Jews: on 2 October 1938, Arab bands attacked Tiberias and murdered 19 Jews, 11 of them children. Britain deployed some 25,000 troops, one of its largest overseas garrisons anywhere, and by mid-1939 had crushed the rebellion with a harshness that included over 100 executions, mass detentions and village demolitions.

The toll, including the Arab-on-Arab terror

The commonly cited figures: about 5,000 Arabs killed and roughly 15,000 wounded, several hundred Jews killed (most counts exceed 400), and around 200 British soldiers, police and officials. What the “popular uprising” frame conceals is where much of the Arab death toll came from. The Mufti’s bands ran an internal terror against Arab “traitors”: mayors, mukhtars, land sellers, and the rival Nashashibi faction, whose “peace bands” fought the rebels in the field. Historians estimate that a quarter or more of the Arab dead were killed by other Arabs. Thousands of the community’s most capable figures were assassinated, exiled or driven out, a decapitation of Palestinian Arab leadership and fighting capacity whose effects were still visible when the same leadership chose war again in 1947.

What the revolt won: the White Paper

Militarily the revolt failed. Politically it succeeded completely. With war against Germany approaching, Britain decided the Arab world had to be appeased, and on 17 May 1939 issued the White Paper: Jewish immigration capped at 75,000 over five years and subject to an Arab veto thereafter, severe restrictions on Jewish land purchase, and an independent, majority-Arab Palestine within ten years. This reversed the core purpose of the Mandate, and the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission found it inconsistent with the Mandate’s terms. Its timing was the tragedy: the gates of the Jewish national home slammed shut in the very months Europe’s Jews needed them most. Al-Husseini, remarkably, rejected even the White Paper because it did not end Jewish immigration at once.

The rest of the record, and what it does not convert

Arab grievances were real: Jewish immigration had surged after 1933 as German and Polish Jews fled persecution, and Arab tenants were sometimes displaced when land purchased legally from (often absentee) Arab landowners changed hands. British repression was brutal by any modern standard: collective fines, home demolitions, torture allegations, and the destruction of much of old Jaffa. And the Jewish side did not stay uniformly clean: the Haganah held to an official policy of restraint (havlagah), but the breakaway Irgun rejected it, and its bombs in Arab markets in Haifa and elsewhere in 1938 killed dozens of Arab civilians, attacks the Jewish Agency and mainstream Zionist leadership condemned. None of this converts a campaign that opened with sorting travelers by religion and shooting the Jews into “resistance,” and none of it changes who led the revolt, what he demanded, or where he went next. The revolt also built the fighting force it meant to destroy: Britain armed thousands of Jewish supernumerary police and Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads trained Haganah men, experience that carried into 1948.

Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini · The Peel Commission · Who attacked first, before Israel even existed · British Mandate · Wikipedia & the Conflict: the full audit · The Oldest Hatred