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A
If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
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B
This episode of Empire contains detailed descriptions of violence which some listeners may find upsetting.
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A
General Allenby entered Gaza on 9th November 1917. Emptied of all its inhabitants after the bombardment of the city, it served as Allenby's gateway into Palestine, a role it had played for past conquerors since the time of of Thutmose III in 1400 BC. Like his illustrious predecessors, Allenby marched on to Jerusalem. This time there were no trumpets or drums, no ringing of bells or flying of flags when the General entered Jerusalem on 11 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 I, Allenby'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 city's assembled dignitaries could scarcely have imagined what was to come for them as they stood in line to watch Allenbury's arrival and hear him guarantee freedom of religion and sanctity of the city's holy places and announce the imposition of martial law.
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B
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand.
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A
And me, William Durample.
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B
And that is just a taste of the 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.
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A
Many, of course found themselves expelled from their ancestral homes and villages in the Nakba, 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.
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B
Needless to say, this is obviously a highly contested history, it's tricky terrain, but here to guide us through it over the next two episodes on the British Mandate, I 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 MAU MAU and in her book Legacy of 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 from.
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C
First of all, thank you for having me. In some ways, I stumbled on this topic because I was in my Legacy of Violence book, which you referenced, I was planning on writing a book about counterinsurgencies post World War II. And when I really started to get to the nub of things, I realized you cannot understand post World War II 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 did we get to where we are today? What is it that. The past is being prologued? And I think we'll have an opportunity, opportunity to unpack some of this. But it's deeply controversial and most importantly, deeply, deeply painful for all of those involved.
- [03:52]
A
Caroline, we dealt very briefly with the Belfort 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 World War, the British ended up promising the same patch of land not to one, not to two, but three different, entirely different peoples, and got themselves in the tangle, which is still unraveling in front of us as we speak.
- [04:27]
C
Absolutely. The headline to this in some ways is the period of time after Balfour is so deeply over determined by the nature of this agreement. And, you know, I think a few things. One, Lloyd George comes to power in 1916 in the war, and he's a deeply ardent sort of Christian Zion. And you layer on top of that the absolute sort of genius of Chaim Weizmann. He's a Belarusian. He comes to the UK originally a chemist.
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A
Isn't he a chemist?
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C
He's a professor at Manchester, the father.
- [04:57]
B
Of something called industrial fermentation. And the reason I say this is because it's important, and 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.
- [05:24]
C
So you must understand that Wiseman persuaded many in the British Cabinet that their Christian faith led them to take a position that aligned with British and, of course, Zionist interests. And as I say in some of my own work, you know, in this game of political chess, Weizmann 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 Weitzman goes ahead and he negotiates with Washington by lobbying his friend of the US Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis, who in turn lobbied the then President, Woodrow Wilson. So with all this lobbying, Weitzman, he ends 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 it just in case anybody missed it, just very briefly, because that Balfour Declaration is exceptionally important to understanding 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, Alfred Balfour to Lord Rothschild 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 supported the declaration. Lord Corzin, for example, argued that the term national home was too vague and certainly no basis for British commitment to set up an independent state.
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B
I mean, you mentioned Curzon, and that may come as a surprise to some people, because we've only ever talked about Curzon 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. 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. That's right, isn't it? At the time, there was a lot of opposition to this.
- [07:41]
C
Absolutely. I mean, Curzon is. But One, Right. And if we take, for example, Edwin Montague, at that point, he's Secretary of State for India. He's one of the few Jews in the cabinet. He is derisively called Montague. He is resoundingly critiqued on his view over 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 Balfour Declaration. He, much like Curzon, 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, that this is a great place for them to land. And I think ultimately it's for both Montague and Curzon. It's also the ambiguity of the term national home. It's not just somewhere that they can send somebody for sort of biblical purposes that Curzon 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.
- [08:43]
A
Were you implying, Caroline, that in a sense, Weizmann is playing on anti Semitic stereotypes when he's selling this project in Downing Street?
- [08:53]
C
Unquestionably, he is. I gesture to this in Legacy of Violence, and certainly in other times when I've spoken. If you look at Weizmann, just for his political shrewdness, he's a genius. And to understand how we move from the Balfour Declaration through 1948, one has to understand the kinds of leadership. And Weizmann understood how to play these folks, and he understood how to play into 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.
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A
He could charm people unquestionably.
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C
And also he understood the British psychology insofar 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 speaking to.
- [10:03]
B
Let's just talk and go back to where William started, which is the arrival of Allenby 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 sort of the Ottoman Empire in ashes, where you've got something new to replace it, there is this idea that this, you know, British rule might be the thing that brings stability. I mean, speak a little bit more of that.
- [10:41]
C
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 divines. 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, 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 gestured to, Anita. 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 administrations coming in after wars, food shortages, inflation. Here we've got also horrible locust Pl, public health, the Spanish influenza 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.
- [11:58]
A
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 in Gallipoli earlier in the war. War. And this conquest is confirmed by the League of nations mandate. In May 1920, the mandate for Palestine under the Covenant of the League of Nations is granted. Tell us about that and what it actually means in practice.
- [12:23]
C
Caroline, 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 6 that it pledges to promote Jewish immigration and land settlement. Right. That there 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 Zionist, 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 Peel Report poor and flip flops on white 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 Mandates Commission, which is pro Zionist.
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B
To remind people who perhaps may not know, the League of Nations is the first global intergovernmental organization that predates the United Nations. I mean, you could call it a protean United Nations. And it was founded in 1920 after World War I. And you know, the underpinning of this organization 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.
- [14:18]
C
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 Musauro calls 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 organization, but it is by no means anti colonial. And I think it's. That's important to point out as well.
- [14:58]
A
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.
- [15:19]
C
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 until about 1925. And Samuels 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 Zionists two things that they wanted most of the right to send immigrants to Palestine and the right to buy land. 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 Samuels 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 Haj Amin Al Husseini. The Al Husseinis are 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, there that represents Arab interest, because we're beginning to see discontent amongst the fellaheen or the peasants who are becoming increasingly without land or access to land.
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B
Well, we should also say, I mean, discontent is within the family as well, because you talked about Edwin Montague before. They are cousins. So you've got Sir Herbert Samuels and Edwin Montague, who believe in very, very different things in the same family. And just, you know, just a little pencil sketch of Sir Herbert Samuels. This is a bloke who's born in Toxteth in Liverpool. A Liberal like Samuel Montagu, former cabinet minister, but diametrically opposed to what his Liberal cousin is thinking and saying out loud. And we. We should really sort of give a little picture of when Sa arrives first in Jaffa, because, you know, he doesn't underplay it, does he? His arrival, it isn't like the Allenby coming on foot in all humility, arrival. It's something very, very different.
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C
Oh, yeah, he comes off in his arrival and, you know, he's got the whole thing going on in grand vice regal style with the plumed hat 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 Arabs and he's going to save the 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 they're somehow going to another be able to civilize this area of the world.
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A
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. He is appointed by Herbert Sarah 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 Arab 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 Jaffa and land being bought and settled. And the mufti in the end becomes the greatest opponent of all this. But initially he's regarded as someone that Samuels can work with.
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C
Absolutely. And again, this is straight out of the British imperial playbook. Right. They come in and in this case you have the Al Husseinis and you have the Na', Shubibis, right, The two big families, elite families in this area.
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A
Who had been there since the time of Saladin, I think. And one of them has got the keys of the Holy Sepulcher given to him by Saladin or one of the early Ayyubid rulers.
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C
Precisely, precisely. And so in these initial years under Samuels, 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 purse of about £50,000 a year. That is no small matter. And he begins in sort of parallel to what the Zionists are doing, sort of the process of quasi incipient state building. Right. He has networks of, of orphanages and institutions and schools. He oversees the restoration of Haram Al Sharif, which is of course becomes a very contested site in the 1920s. One of the most important Muslim holy places in the Old City, we should.
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A
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 Buraq, the Al Aqsa Mosque, which is a separate building two 150 yards away. And on the side of it is The Wailing Wall, which is the remains of the ancient Jewish temple.
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C
Precisely.
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A
And this, in a 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 religions. A short distance away is Christianity in the Holy Sepulchre.
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C
Precisely. And to be very clear, for hundreds of years, a flexible understanding of all right, whereby the Muslims who had legal claim to all of this, and allowing access to various religious groups, and ultimately, when Weismann comes in and he ends up eventually in the later 30s, moving to Palestine. But this becomes the initial issue of contestation of Rio when it comes to a head part, because Weissman looks at this and complains to Baltfour 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 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.
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B
Right. We should circle back to something you just said a second ago, which is is Weizmann 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?
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C
We should also say that there's Weizmann, but at the same time, there's another key figure for the Zionist community, and David Ben Gurion. Right. He's also an immigrant. He had come earlier in 1906 from Poland. He runs the Zionist labor movement, the Histatrit. 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 a 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 Weizmann 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. We're seeing a 20% increase year, 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.
- [23:48]
B
And we should say, I mean, you know, he comes from tsarist Poland. Others who are coming, prominent members of this Zionist movement, are coming from places in tsarist controlled 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 massacred in these tsarist controlled areas.
- [24:21]
C
Unquestionably. Nina and I think that we cannot lose that very important thread in our conversation, right, that the 19th century response to antisemitism, which you've already discussed in your previous episode, right, is it 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 Arab, 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, 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 fellaheen who had been there for decades, if not centuries. And so we see this kind of snowballing effect, which, by the way, from an historian 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 said, right. We have a push factor coming from the anti Semitism and persecution in Europe. And then, of course, when we get the Nazi seizure of 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.
- [25:46]
A
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.
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B
Welcome back. So just before the break, Willy 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.
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A
Suppress dissent in Ireland.
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B
Yeah, and I mean, what are they doing there, Caroline? And who sent them?
- [26:43]
C
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 are already seeing some of sort of this dust up, this sense of anxiety, of potential conflict. Imagine you've got this tinderbox. And into that they send the match of the Black and Tans.
- [27:23]
A
For those who may not have remembered what happened in our Irish episodes, give us a one minute sketch of the sort of stuff the Black and Tans were up to in Ireland. Burning down houses.
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C
The Black and Tans are largely demobilized soldiers from World War I that were sent over expressly to be a paramilitary force. They were augmented by what were, were what were called Churchill's auxiliaries, who are seen to be even worse than the Black and Tans. But the Black and Tan 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 same paramilitary force in Palestine.
- [28:27]
A
When I was growing up in Scotland, you used to talk about someone being duffed up when you meant someone was beaten up. And this phrase which has entered the language comes from one of the Black and Tan Douglas Duff.
- [28:37]
C
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 action. So for example, he talks about the fact that 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 hung it on the wall. You know, he has his own very self incriminating writings. He has his own autobiography.
- [29:16]
B
Well, he talks about lesser breeds, doesn't he? I mean, without any self edit at all.
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C
And I think what's so shocking is that especially for somebody who came at this topic from Post World War II 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 faux 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 to Palestine to do exactly the same thing.
- [29:52]
A
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 in Jaffa and the Yishuv, which is a word we'll be using a lot today, which means the new Jewish immigrants in Mandate Palestine, they have various organizations too which are looking to their own defense. But the most hard line of these guys is Zev Jabotinsky who talks about his idea of an iron wall. Now he's already got form 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.
- [30:39]
C
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 Weizmann 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 founds 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, he's very consistent with this in 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. The world resists 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 our 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.
- [32:27]
B
Again, a tinderbox that is now being surrounded with petroleum 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 is used to defending Stettles from attacks from other places and very much has that mentality. What's happening around and about.
- [32:55]
C
Yeah, I think we have several things going on, Anita. First, I think we would be remiss if we didn't point out that another element that is contributing to the landlessness of the fellaheen are the colonial taxation policies, the imposition of the colonial will that the local fellaheen have to come up with money to pay their taxes. Often they are either selling some of their own land or they're 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 Ayaan, 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 increasing 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.
- [34:00]
B
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 tithes at a time when I do not possess the necessary means of subsistence for myself and my family. In the circumstances, I am from forced to appeal to a rich person for a loan which I undertake to refund together with an interest rate of 50%. 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 meager sum. You know, these tithes 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.
- [34:50]
C
Absolutely, absolutely. And I remember that doing the research on that. And I have to say it's in Palestine's gaining Arabic language newspaper Palestine. And it was a matter of picking one. I mean, the number of folks writing in with similar kinds of stories needed that there is just no way to get out from under this. And of course that compromises the authority, moral authority of people like the mufti.
- [35:17]
A
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, 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 Jaffa 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, this sense of growing tension, crippling colonial tax burdens, limited access to credit. We just saw ridiculous loan sharks offering 50% interest rates. 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 in Fellahedeen were already landless by 1930. One third of the agricultural population.
- [36:39]
C
It's extraordinary.
- [36:40]
B
You're describing something that is going to be inevitable, but it does blow in 1929. Just tell us how that manifests itself.
- [36:48]
C
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 accounts differ, whether Mizrahi young teenager kicks a football into an Arab garden or did he steal a cigarette? Nonetheless, we see a spark and massive amounts of violence around the sacred Muslim site in Jerusalem, Haram al Sharif.
- [37:37]
B
Okay, so, I mean, we should say so. And 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?
- [37:54]
C
I think we see this often, Anita, throughout the Empire. It's that one event that you don't expect. So this happens and it sparks again, sort of that analogy of the match 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 squads. The Haganah was developed by the Jewish community as a defense force associated with, often with Ben Gurion. 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 their violence, their 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.
- [39:05]
A
So Hebron is a place that 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 defence squads in 1929. Tell us what happens in Hebron at that point.
- [39:24]
C
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? Raymond Caffaretta, 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 a. What was. He recognizes what was an Arab constable, right, named Issa Sharif from Jaffa, who is there with a dagger in hand, about to kill a Jewish woman who is smothered in blood. And he takes out his gun and he shoots this man 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 spills out into other areas like Gaza, we see that Arab neighbors who had 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. Both perpetrators of violence, as well as protectors of their Jewish neighbors and friends.
- [41:04]
B
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, their 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 neighbour, 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.
- [41:47]
A
Now, in the aftermath of this violence, when this wave of violence, 929 end, 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 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. It doesn't get wiped out. There are various other places where people begin to move from mixed areas in exactly the same way. Nita, as you were 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 Karim, which 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.
- [43:19]
C
Yeah, I mean, interestingly, there's a huge trove of first hand accounts at the Imperial War Museum if you want to go find these. And you know, they talk of what's called at that time, the third degree. Right. And that can be anything from waterboarding to, you know, what they call it, hoisting the water can, pouring sort of a thin trickle of water through a.
- [43:39]
A
Coffee pot into someone's nose.
- [43:41]
C
Into somebody's nose. Right. And they're very clear about not wishing, as they say, to have their skirts of our garment soiled, 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, off a bad apple. But in fact, this is systemic. They know it. It's part of the system. It's part of the. 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 in certainly knowing that this is going on, condoning it, and then doing very little, if anything, to stop it.
- [44:29]
A
Now, in the news reports today from Gaza, we hear a lot about the Al Qassim Brigades. And just to conclude this episode now, let's just introduce Al Qassim, 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 Qassim. Who was he and what did he represent and what was his legacy?
- [44:54]
C
Sheikh Izzeddin Al Qassim is an extremely important figure. First of all, he's Syrian born. He'd fought with the French in Syria. He 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 Qassim, he learns of they 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 Qasem 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 Qassam Brigades today.
- [46:10]
B
And Al Qassam 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.
- [46:17]
C
Absolutely.
- [46:18]
A
And they describe themselves as mujahideen.
- [46:20]
C
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 Qassim not just to the 1930s, but going forward, that this ignited Arab nationalism in a way that nothing else had before.
- [46:47]
B
Right, okay. Because you've got somebody talking about jihad sort of bringing in the vernacular of a religious doctrine and a religious war in a place where religions have lived together peacefully for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
- [46:59]
C
Precisely.
- [47:00]
B
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. EmpirePoduk.com is where we are. EmpowerPoduk.com till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan.
- [47:20]
A
And goodbye from me, William Durmpel.
- [47:28]
D
Alastair Campbell, here from the Rest Is Politics. Now, we've just released a series on one of the most controversial and consequential people of the past 50 years, Rupert Murdoch.
- [47:39]
E
I think you can argue that he is the most consequential figure of the second half of the 20th century. He holds power longer than anyone else in our time and it's meaningful power. It's phenomenal power.
- [47:54]
D
Power without responsibility. The prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages. This is where he becomes not just a newspaper owner, he becomes a major newsmaker.
- [48:03]
E
Fuck Dacre publish. There is always a premium on bringing him gossip. I don't know what you mean by downmarket and upmarket, that is so English. Class ridden snobbery. When you talk like that, how you get it doesn't make any difference. Actually, to be perfectly honest, whether it's true or not doesn't make much difference.
- [48:22]
D
There is a massive, massive scandal brewing. This was industrial illegal activity. And that I think is what really cuts through to the public and thinks you people are really, really bad.
- [48:34]
A
I would just like to say one sentence. This is the most humble day of my life.
- [48:40]
E
There is no Donald Trump without Fox News. His dream was always to elect a president of the United States. The bitter irony is that that turned out to be Donald Trump, a man he detests. He is conquering the world. There is nothing less than this methodical, step by step progress to take over everything.
- [49:06]
D
To hear more, just search the Rest Is Politics. Wherever you get your podcasts.