Reexamining the Arab revolt through a trove of international commissions

A HISTORY OF FALSE HOPE
Investigative Commissions in Palestine
by Lori Allen
423 pp. Stanford University Press. $30

Excerpted from A History of False Hope by Lori Allen, published by Stanford University Press. ©2021 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All Rights Reserved.

In 1936, the British appointed the fateful Royal Peel Commission as a means to calm the disturbances that had broken out across Palestine—what would become a three-year-long rebellion known as the Arab Revolt. By the end of the revolt, possibly more than five thousand Palestinians were killed, and almost fifteen thousand wounded. At its height, approximately twenty-five thousand British servicemen were deployed to police an Arab population of slightly more than one million. Many Palestinians had decided enough was enough. They had experienced nearly two decades of British mandatory rule; had the League of Nations serially ignore their pleas for representative government and self-determination; watched tens of colonies with some 370,000 Jewish residents grow across their country as Arab peasant landlessness increased; and seen five major investigative commissions come and go. Arabs were declaring publicly that they had “no hope in the fairness of the government and thus, they see no point in cooperating with its Commission,” as Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni explained in the pages of Filastin. For months, Palestinians boycotted the Peel Commission, until political pressure from leaders of Arab states and violent suppression of the revolt by the British finally forced them to give in to yet another investigation. 

The boycott of the Peel Commission is one of the few examples in Palestinian history of a collective refusal to take the bait of international law’s official mechanisms. Although it was only a temporary hiatus in the longer history of continual liberal engagement that this book tells, the significance of this boycott is only heightened by its rarity. The refusal of an international commission highlights how much frustration had to build before this repudiation could happen. But it also shows both how intertwined Palestinian politics had become with the liberal order, and how necessary a contextual change was to boycotting the commission and refusing the Western order that it symbolized. What had changed to allow this refusal was Palestinians’ view of their political horizons, how they imagined the audience to whom they could make their entreaties. 

Arab rejection of the Peel Commission was both enabled by and contributed to the transnational development of an anticolonial consciousness. In the interwar period, international solidarity that formed around the fight against colonialism offered a model and means of struggle that the subsequent focus on international law largely displaced. (That is, until postcolonial shifts at the United Nations delivered a new context for solidarity politics from the 1960s onward, as Chapter 4 explains.) The boycott of the commission and the Arab revolt were part of an attempt to transform the liberal framework that international law and the League of Nations had policed, offering a different universalizing discourse not subsumed by the League of Nations and its articulations of international law. 

Although their main concern was to assert their status as a nation and claim the rights that were attendant on that status, Palestinians were also taking part in an international debate. With appeals to values deemed central to liberalism—with calls for justice, human rights, and their “natural” national rights—Palestinians launched their campaign of civil disobedience alongside more militant challenges to British forces. Within the liberal internationalism of this moment—too often misunderstood as an interwar dynamic of the West exclusively—Palestinians’ anticolonial struggle against the British and Zionists came to be a motivating symbol for Arabs, Muslims, and others. Together they were battling Western imperial ambitions that thwarted their independence. Theirs was an attempt to establish a collective understanding of the correct criteria for sovereignty, which for Palestinians included adherence to liberal values that should guide an international system that was actually international and truly liberal. Palestinians called and summoned into being a broader anticolonial liberal public opinion that was set to become a worldwide political force. 

The Conjuncture That Enabled a Boycott 

As with all remarkable historical events, a confluence of factors enabled the boycott and the Arab revolt. National and international dynamics came together to produce this break with the hegemonic system. In the lead-up to the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, the economic situation had worsened for most Arabs in Palestine. Wages were down, and unemployment had increased. British proposals for representative government had come to naught. There had been outbreaks of violence, partly in response to increasing Jewish immigration. The British had armed the Zionists, whose structures were coming to resemble a state that excluded the Arabs. And the traditional, mostly elite Palestinian leadership had fallen into disarray, while an increasingly mobilized nationalist youth contingent was pressing for stronger forms of resistance. New political parties also were being established. Such were the factors contributing to this pressurized conditions. All was set up for an eventful outburst.

On the international level, the Arab Revolt and Peel Commission came as the League of Nations experiment was crumbling and the storm clouds of world war were gathering again. Japan had already withdrawn from the league in 1931; Germany did the same in 1933; three years later, two Latin American countries (Honduras and Nicaragua) notified the league of their withdrawal; and league condemnation of Italy for its annexation of Ethiopia that same year (the Abyssinia Crisis) led that Mediterranean country to leave in 1937, along with Paraguay that same year. One can read a sense of panic in the snippy tones with which league officials discussed the Palestinian crisis, a crisis that had ruptured the alliance of the British and the league. The tectonics of regional and local political authority was shifting for the Arabs of Palestine too. Although it staged a “great international argument over imperialism’s claims,” the League of Nations became just one of many forums for demanding and asserting political ideas, having lost some of its appeal as a hub of political interaction. The stranglehold on Palestinian politics that the elite leadership had maintained for so long was also weakened, as not only youth, but also workers, peasants, and the Arab Independence Party [Hizb al-ʾIstiqlal al-ʿArabi] expanded Palestinian civic activism. These were people motivated and able to coordinate a popular mobilization. 

The class and gender boundaries of political activity had been breached. Palestinian society in all its diversity—including peasants, women, students, workers, and the educated middle classes—were demanding fundamental change and fulfillment of their nationalist claims. They were doing so through liberal categories of rights and collective and individual freedom. They called for self-governance and democratic representation, and they made demands for economic and social progress and national equality. Youth were studying “the Magna Charta, the English Bill of Rights and the rest of British history—to say nothing of the French, American and Russian Revolutions,” Khalil Totah observed from his perch as a school director from Ramallah in 1936. They had gained a “potent political education” from “the law schools, newspapers, parliamentary procedures etc.” and this was, in Totah’s estimation, bearing “political fruit.” 

The mannered elites of liberalism’s domain—both Arab and Western— had to make way for more pointed refusals of colonialism, grounded in universal appeals to universal values. The time for a fight—its inevitability predicted by Khalil Sakakini during the King-Crane debates—had arrived. In the words of a leader of the revolt, the Arabs had finally gotten “fed up with yesterday’s friend.” 

A World Audience with Common Enemies 

A goal of colonial histories, as David Scott has insisted, is to understand not simply whether or how the colonized accommodated or resisted their conditions. More central, Scott writes, is the question of how “(colonial) power altered the terrain on which accommodation/resistance was possible in the first place.” Perhaps even more important is the question of how the colonized experienced this alteration and perceived the possibilities it opened up for resistance. How did opportunities for solidarity appear to them? The meaning and impact of the transformations in legal and political institutions wrought by the colonizers could never be the product of colonial intentionality alone. To understand what allowed—or compelled—Palestinians to resist engaging with an investigative commission and pursue other avenues for political change, it is necessary to consider how they were reading the world of political tumult that made other political avenues seem possible.

Through new channels of communication and transnational political interaction among the colonized, the idea of “the world” came into being as a new and significant political interlocutor for Palestinians—an audience that has remained a key interlocutor throughout the decades of their seeking independence. Now more diverse and not as dominated by Western actors, “the world” emerged as a justifying source and platform for Palestinians’ humanist calls for justice, for rights, and for humanitarianism as a guiding political ethos. 

A growing regional press gave access to information about what was happening elsewhere, with greater publicity for colonial and anticolonial activities reaching more people. This included daily Arabic newspapers that now circulated widely in Palestine, throughout the Arab world, and beyond.21 Demand for imported publications increased as events throughout the region heated up. Papers from Egypt and Lebanon were brought into Palestine, and Palestinian newspapers discussed what was being written in publications, including those from India, Brazil, the United States, England, and various parts of Europe.

The broadsheets became an interactive and popular forum for public communication. They discussed mass anticolonial demonstrations and strikes under way in Egypt and Syria in 1935 and 1936. Alongside the Moroccan movement for national independence, which was extolled in Palestinian newspapers, the strike in nearby Syria resonated particularly in Palestine, and calls to extend the revolutionary movement into Palestine circulated widely. “Palestine occupied the conversation in Syria, the same way Syria occupied conversation in Palestine,” a newspaper article recorded in 1936. That Iraq had gained formal (albeit nominal) independence was widely referenced in Palestinians’ arguments justifying their own demands for freedom. They also noted that France had signed independence treaties with Lebanon and Syria, while the local press reported on both the Libyans’ struggle against the Italians as well as the Algerians’ battle against the French. They had seen these “Arab-speaking countries getting a semblance of political justice from the British and the French so why not Palestine—and by the same methods of strikes, non-cooperation and civil disobedience?” Khalil Totah asked rhetorically of his interlocutors in London.