In Search of Popular Sovereignty: British Rule and the Great Revolt (1936–39) in Palestine

Charles Anderson, Western Washington University

Research Grant, 2018

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My first book project is a history of the popular rebellion by the Palestinians in the 1930s against British rule and the Zionist settler project it fostered. The “Great Revolt” (1936–39), as Palestinians call it, was an independence struggle that rejected Jewish state-building and aimed to preserve Palestine for its Indigenous Arab majority. The revolt was at the time the greatest mass mobilization in Palestinian national history; it was also the most protracted anticolonial rebellion anywhere in the Arab world during the interwar period.

My book examines the social origins, organization, and history of this complex event, the defeat of which paved the way for Israel’s creation and the shattering of Palestinian society in 1948, and for the regional turmoil that has ensued since.

One of the primary aims of my research is to investigate the roles of peasants, workers, youth, and their allies in making the revolt in a way that deepens our understanding of their leadership capacities. Although Arab society in Palestine is usually understood as rigidly hierarchical, dominated by patriarchal families that had an interlocking grasp on landowning, trade, and government office, British rule and the growth of Jewish colonization under its wings brought about profound social, political, and economic changes.

The “youth trend” became the largest, most organized constituency within Palestinian politics, and using its hands-on methods, cycled through various tactics in the early 1930s from social uplift to street protest, to forms of direct action that sought to emulate and override state functions.

The resulting destabilization of Arab society, coupled with the failure of Palestinian elite diplomacy to make progress toward national goals and independence, produced radicalization. This process fostered a shorter Palestinian rebellion in 1929, followed by a hothouse period of increasing stridency and self-organization (1929–36), and finally issuing in militant anticolonial revolution (1936–39). Fearing for their own dominance and distrusting mass mobilization, Palestinian elites tried to suppress, control, or harness the growth of restive currents, but they were largely borne along by the tide.

The first part of my book examines generational and political-economic transformations in Arab society and the emergence of newly assertive constituencies among youth and the peasantry. Beginning in the late 1920s young men began to aggregate into youth associations and scout groups which promoted patriotic ideals and encouraged attention to everyday problems of Palestinian communities (e.g., land loss, labor market competition, impoverishment).

The “youth trend” became the largest, most organized constituency within Palestinian politics, and using its hands-on methods, cycled through various tactics in the early 1930s from social uplift to street protest, to forms of direct action that sought to emulate and override state functions. Paradoxically, its efforts typically failed, but they generated Arab approbation and encouraged militant action. Some of the key problems youth sought to remedy stemmed from the deteriorating condition of the Arab countryside, where British policies exacerbated peasant indebtedness and produced a burgeoning, alienated “landless class.”

British bias towards the Zionist enterprise, manifested in a variety of domains from tax policies to land tenure, was predicated on a colonial version of trickle-down economics that saw Jewish settlers as the economic core of the colony whose rising prosperity would lift all boats. Instead, growing Arab destitution led to dispossession and displacement to urban shantytowns, where the first secret revolutionary organization took hold among former peasants. 

The Great Revolt has primarily been seen in its paramilitary dimension as an armed insurrection, but as detailed in the second section of my book, the key to its power lay in its organizational ingenuity. In each phase the uprising yielded dynamic new institutions—from popular committees to revolutionary courts to an intelligence apparatus—that proved essential to mounting and sustaining the rebellion while bolstering the newfound authority of its supporters.

Building on prerevolt impulses towards tactics that emulated the popular sovereignty desired by Palestinians, these institutions rallied public participation and forged a government-in-the-making aimed at overthrowing and replacing the British regime. By providing the revolt with a sound organizational basis that integrated much of the population into rebel frameworks, the insurgents were able to establish an alternative regime to the colonial state, to endure through great hardship, and for a brief period, to conquer much of the country.

During its long campaign against the rebellion, the British counterinsurgency escalated from the use of collective punishments (e.g., fines, home demolitions, curfews) to a liberal version of total war that targeted Palestinian society as a whole. British suppression of the revolt was harsher than has been understood, relying on mass incarceration, the systematic use of human shields (i.e., hostages employed on the battlefield), the barring of free movement, and ultimately, the reconquest and occupation of most of the country.

My book reveals that the scope of official violence was obfuscated by the military and has been hidden from researchers. With their society in ruins and their movement crushed, the Palestinian people were deemed unworthy in British eyes of any subsequent role in determining the future of Palestine.