Summary
The regimes of the Arab states surrounding Palestine are the second of the three enemies in Kanafani’s thesis on the defeat of the 1936-39 revolt, alongside the Feudal-Clerical Leadership and the imperialist-Zionist enemy. Their peoples appear in his account as a source of revolutionary energy; their regimes appear as an instrument for containing and ending the revolt.
Details
- Kanafani states the thesis in his introduction: between 1936 and 1939 the Palestinian revolutionary movement suffered a severe setback at the hands of three separate enemies, the second of them the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.6 / printed p.10).
- He gives those countries a double role: their Pan-Arab mass movement catalysed the Palestinian revolutionary spirit, while their regimes did everything to curb and undermine the Palestinian movement, because a sharpening conflict in Palestine threatened revolutionary violence in their own countries, which forced the Arab ruling classes to support British imperialism (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.6 / printed p.10-11).
- Britain, Kanafani says, liquidated the revolt in part by employing its extensive influence with the Arab regimes, which played a major role in that liquidation (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.22 / printed p.42-43).
- The mediation of Amir Abdullah of Transjordan and Nuri al-Said in the summer of 1936 failed, but in October 1936 the Arab Higher Committee, in obedience to the Arab kings and amirs, called off the strike and the revolt (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.23-24 / printed p.45-46).
- The Arab kings and amirs then obliged the Palestinian leadership to end its boycott of the Peel Commission, a second intervention in less than three months, and the Arab regimes, especially Transjordan, strongly supported the right wing of the leadership led by the National Defence Party (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.24 / printed p.46-47).
- At the 1939 London Round Table Conference in February 1939, Kanafani says, the Arab regimes subject to colonialism were destined for the second time in less than two years to impose their will on the Arabs of Palestine (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.26 / printed p.50-51).
- Kanafani adds the attitude of Transjordan under Amir Abdullah and the internal counter-revolution as two interconnected factors that played a prominent role in frustrating the revolt, and judges the attitudes of Iraq and Saudi Arabia at the London Conference not much better than that of the Jordanian regime (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.27-28 / printed p.52-55).
- The disappointment ran in the other direction as well: Abu Salma’s chronicle of the 1936 revolt in verse bitterly records the way the Arab regimes abandoned it and calls for the homeland to be liberated from the kings (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.16 / printed p.30-31).
Related pages
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Amir Abdullah, Nuri al-Said, Transjordan, National Defence Party, 1939 London Round Table Conference, Feudal-Clerical Leadership, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine