The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine

Summary

This booklet is a collection built around Ghassan Kanafani’s Marxist analysis of the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine, framed by a front introduction, an essay on his political writings, a memorial poem, and closed by his short story Letter From Gaza, a tribute to him, and a biography. Kanafani argues the revolt was defeated by three enemies acting together: the local reactionary (feudal-clerical) leadership that headed the national movement, the regimes of the surrounding Arab states, and the imperialist-Zionist enemy. His background chapters trace how Jewish immigration, Jewish capital and the British Mandate together dispossessed Arab workers and peasants and destroyed their independent organisations before 1936, while a resistance culture carried by poets and popular poetry mobilised the countryside. The revolt narrative follows the Qassamist spark of November 1935, the spontaneous April 1936 outbreak and general strike, the strike’s ending by Arab kings’ intervention in October 1936, the peasant-led second phase of late 1937 to early 1939, and the revolt’s exhaustion by September 1939. Kanafani counts 5,032 Arabs killed and 14,760 wounded, and argues the revolt’s most serious result was that the military and economic foundations of the Zionist settler entity were laid in 1936-1939, so that the defeat of 1947-1948 was the conclusion of a chapter that began in April 1936 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.28 / printed p.54; PDF p.31 / printed p.60).

What the file is

• The PDF (35 pages) is a designed re-edition: the colophon (PDF p.2) gives design and editing by design_atelier_, typesetting in Adobe Caslon Pro and DIN, a source at newjerseysolidarity.org/resources/kanafani/, publication by the Tricontinental Society, London, 1980, and states Kanafani’s essay was published, in addition, by the Committee for a Democratic Palestine, New York, 1972. The cover names the publisher as COMMITTEE FOR DEMOCRATIC PALESTINE (PDF p.1). The PDF file itself was created in 2013 (PDF metadata).
• Contents, with printed-page starts (PDF p.2): Introduction 04; Political Writings of Ghassan Kanafani 06; Poem for Ghassan Kanafani 08; Introduction to the 1936-1939 Revolt in Palestine 10; Background: The Workers 12; Background: The Peasants 20; Background: The Intellectuals 26; The Revolt 35; Letter From Gaza 61; A Tribute to Ghassan Kanafani 65; Biography 68.
• Layout: from PDF p.3 onward, each PDF page holds two printed pages side by side (PDF p.3 = printed p.4-5, and so on). PDF p.35 is a single printed page, a full-page photograph of Kanafani beside the biography text.
• Text copy: the supplied text copy (raw/1972-kanafani-1936-39-revolt.txt, from Josh’s memex vault) has a = PDF p.N = marker for every page, 1-35. Its OCR reads across each two-page spread in an interleaved order and interleaves footnotes into the body, so passages have to be reassembled in printed-page order. Line-break hyphenation and occasional OCR errors occur and are flagged in the reading notes in reading/kanafani-1972-1936-39-revolt.md (for example their rendered as tire and in as ill in the Arab Higher Committee statement on PDF p.23, and force rendered as farce on PDF p.29). Nothing in the file was found unreadable; PDF p.3, p.31 and p.35 were also checked in the original PDF.
• Attribution inside the booklet: the front Introduction, the Political Writings essay and the Poem are unsigned in the text as read. Letter From Gaza is by Kanafani. The Tribute reproduces excerpts by S. Marwan from Al Hadaf, July 22, 1972 (PDF p.33 / printed p.65).

Section by section

Introduction (front matter) — PDF p.3 / printed p.4-5

An unsigned biographical introduction. Kanafani was born in Acre in 1936; his family was expelled from Palestine in 1948 and finally settled in Damascus; he worked as a teacher and journalist in Damascus, then Kuwait, then Beirut, where in 1969 he started Al Hadaf, the weekly paper of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He moved from the Arab Nationalist Movement toward Marxism alongside George Habash, holding that the Palestinians’ problems could not be solved without a social revolution throughout the Arab world. He was killed when his car exploded in July 1972; his sister’s account of Saturday, July 8, 1972 records that his niece Lamees, seventeen, was killed with him, and that the day before he had refused her plea to give up revolutionary work for his stories. His wife’s memoir is quoted for his aim of developing the resistance from a nationalist Palestinian liberation movement into a pan-Arab revolutionary socialist movement, and a letter to his son is quoted at length on what it means to be born a Palestinian. An epitaph from his comrades closes the section.

Political Writings of Ghassan Kanafani (front matter) — PDF p.4 / printed p.6-7

An unsigned essay on Kanafani as a political writer. It opens with the Israeli occupation authorities’ ban, in the last week of October 1977, on a Nazareth theatrical adaptation of Men in the Sun, and the demonstrations that followed, addressed by Tewfik Zayyad, poet and mayor of Nazareth. It argues his writings crystallised a conviction of a total duty to remain Palestinian; discusses Return to Haifa (1969); and presents his 1970 PFLP pamphlet The Resistance and its Problems as at publication the most daring and responsible critique of the dynamics of Palestinian resistance, analysing three interconnecting criteria: the political-theoretical line of the resistance, praxis (particularly the armed dimension), and organisation and leadership. It states that Kanafani, believing a people struggling for liberation must know their history and that existing written history is colonial history, set out to write the modern history of the Palestinian people’s struggle, of which the study of the 1936-39 revolt was the initial piece, left unfinished by his assassination. It also credits him with introducing the Poets of resistance (Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim) to Arab readers, with being the first Arab writer to interpret Israeli-Zionist literature, and notes his funeral was perhaps the biggest political demonstration in Lebanon since Nasser’s death.

Poem for Ghassan Kanafani (front matter) — PDF p.5 / printed p.8-9

A memorial poem headed with the title Men in the Sun. It answers his killing with increased determination, in the image of the pen in one hand and the gun in the other, and quotes his saying that his generation is not the generation of revolution but the generation that will give it life. It ends by identifying him with the homeland he was exiled from: he was the homeland, the revolution, the pen and the gun.

Kanafani, Introduction [to the essay] — PDF p.6 / printed p.10-11

Kanafani states his thesis: between 1936 and 1939 the Palestinian revolutionary movement suffered a severe setback at the hands of three separate enemies, which together would remain the principal threat to the nationalist movement in all subsequent stages: the local reactionary leadership, the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine, and the imperialist-Zionist enemy; the study concentrates on the structures of these forces and the dialectical relations among them. He explains why the national movement’s upper structure stayed under semi-feudal, semi-religious control despite an intense nationalist experience accompanied by armed struggle since 1918: the Zionist challenge gave the national contradiction predominance over social contradictions, and the feudal-religious leadership had its own conflict of interest with British imperialism, which had found in the Zionists a more suitable ally, so it promoted a degree of revolutionary struggle, raised progressive slogans and gave positive leadership in a critical phase. He explains the conciliationists of the 1930s as the urban upper bourgeoisie, whose interests came to coincide with the Jewish bourgeoisie controlling industrialisation, and states the double role of the surrounding Arab countries: their Pan-Arab mass movement catalysed Palestinian revolutionary spirit, while their regimes curbed and undermined the Palestinian movement because a sharpening conflict in Palestine threatened revolutionary violence at home, forcing the Arab ruling classes to support British imperialism. Finally he states that in 1936-1939 the militaristic, aggressive character of the Zionist colonial society crystallised, the Palestinian working class was relatively contained and defeated, a progressive Jewish labour movement and Jewish-Arab proletarian brotherhood were undermined, the Palestine Communist Party was isolated, the Histadrut dominated the Jewish labour movement, and the Arab labour federations in Haifa and Jaffa fell to reactionary leaderships.

Kanafani, Background: The Workers — PDF p.7-10 / printed p.12-19

Jewish immigration is treated first as an economic fact: 150,000 Jews immigrated between 1933 and 1935, bringing the Jewish population to 443,000, or 29.6% of the total, against a 1926-1932 average of 7,201 immigrants a year and an average of 42,985 a year in 1933-1936; German Jewish entries are given as 9,000 in 1932, 30,000 in 1933, 40,000 in 1934 and 61,000 in 1935 (PDF p.7 / printed p.12). Of 2,562,000 Jews who fled Nazi persecution, the text says the USA accepted 170,000 (6.6%), Britain 50,000 (1.9%), Palestine 8.5%, and the USSR 1,930,000 (75.2%); 10-12% of the 1933-1935 immigrants were classed as capitalists, and the immigration is said to have been designed to concentrate European Jewish capital in Palestine to dominate industrialisation and provide a Jewish proletariat (PDF p.7 / printed p.12-13). The Jewish labour only policy is said to have led to fascist patterns in the settler society and to a competitive struggle between the Arab and Jewish proletariats at every class level. Figures for 1935: Jews controlled 872 of 1,212 industrial firms, employing 13,678 workers, against about 4,000 in Arab firms; Jewish industrial investment was PL 4,391,000 against PL 704,000 Arab, and Jewish capital held 90% of Mandate concessions (PDF p.7 / printed p.13). A 1937 official census is cited for a Jewish worker receiving 145% more in wages than an Arab counterpart, 433% more in textile factories, 233% in tobacco. George Mansour’s report to the Peel Commission for the Federation of Palestinian Arab Workers in Jaffa is quoted extensively: 98% of Arab workers had a well below average standard of living; the Federation’s 1936 census of 1,000 Jaffa workers found 57% earned less than PL 2.750 against a PL 11 minimum family income; by the end of 1935 there were 2,270 unemployed in Jaffa alone, for five reasons, four directly connected with Jewish immigration (PDF p.7-8 / printed p.13-15). Histadrut membership rose from 74,000 at the end of 1935 to 115,000 at the end of July 1936; Arab workers in the four settlements of Malbis, Dairan, Wadi Hunain and Khadira fell from 6,214 in February 1935 to 617 in a year; Haifa’s Arab soap factories fell from 12 in 1929 to four in 1935, and pearl exports fell from PL 11,532 to PL 3,777 between 1930 and 1935 (PDF p.8 / printed p.14-15). Kanafani quotes and then rebuts Yehuda Bauer’s claim that Palestine on the eve of 1936 had enjoyed real prosperity from imported capital: Bauer omits continued immigration, the influx of capital climaxed in 1935, and Arab dismissals long predated the crisis; he quotes Sir John Hope Simpson’s report against investing in unprofitable industries to justify immigration (PDF p.8 / printed p.15). He quotes Herzl on seizing private land and evacuating poor inhabitants, and a Histadrut statement against allowing Arabs into the Jewish labour market (PDF p.9 / printed p.16). The Arab labour movement’s paralysis is attributed both to Zionist terror against the Communist Party and to the feudal-religious leadership, whose Mufti’s group assassinated Michel Mitri, president of the Federation of Arab Workers in Jaffa, in the early 1930s; Sami Taha of Haifa was likewise assassinated years later (PDF p.9 / printed p.17). A long treatment of the Palestine Communist Party follows: its 1 May 1920 Tel-Aviv demonstration and statement, which nowhere mentioned the word Zionist; its isolation until its Seventh Congress at the end of 1930, whose resolutions admitted an erroneous attitude to Palestinian nationalism and a failure to become active among the Arab masses; its programme of Arabisation, its maximalist slogans, and its failure to carry them out, with splits in the 1936 revolt, 1948 and 1965; the conclusion is that the Party’s failure, the weakness of the rising Arab bourgeoisie and the disunity of the Arab labour movement left the feudal-religious leaderships to play the fundamental role as the situation escalated to explosion in 1936 (PDF p.9-10 / printed p.16-19).

Kanafani, Background: The Peasants — PDF p.11-13 / printed p.20-25

The rural conflict is presented as primarily nationalist in form: Jewish colonisation achieved only 6,752 new colonising settlers against its state-building plans, but expropriation of nearly one million dunums, almost one-third of the agricultural land, impoverished peasants and Bedouins, with 20,000 peasant families evicted by 1931, and destroyed a rural society in which agriculture was a social, religious and ritual way of life, not merely a mode of production (PDF p.11 / printed p.20). Dependence on agriculture in 1931 is given both as 151 per thousand Jews against 637 per thousand Arabs and as 19.1% of the Jewish population against 59% of Palestinian Arabs. A 1936 survey of 322 villages found 47% of peasants owned less than seven dunums and 65% less than 20, against 130 dunums as the minimum to feed an average family; 1933-1936 land purchases by Zionists came 62.7% from landowners residing in Palestine, 14.9% from absentee landlords and 22.5% from small peasants, reversing the 1920-1922 pattern of 75.4% from absentee landlords; Wadi al-Hawarith (40,000 dunums), Shatta (16,000 dunums) and the eviction of 8,730 peasants from Marj Ibn Amer (240,000 dunums), sold by the Beirut feudal family of Sursock, are given as cases; 50,000 Jews in agricultural settlements owned 1,200,000 dunums against 500,000 Arabs owning less than 6,000,000 (PDF p.11 / printed p.20-21). Jewish sources are cited that of the land acquired by three large Jewish companies by 1936, 9.4% came from individual peasants. Dispossessed peasants turned to seasonal labour and then to unskilled work in the cities: the Arab Cigarette and Tobacco Company in Nazareth paid 210 mostly ex-villager workers an average of 29.5 piasters a week, against 170-230 piasters for a Jewish woman tobacco worker (PDF p.12 / printed p.22). The 1930 Johnson-Crosby figures put a peasant’s net annual income at PL 19.5 after tax (PL 3.87) and loan interest (PL 8), against PL 26 needed for a family’s expenses. Fiscal policy is treated as discrimination: tax exemptions for Jewish immigrants and Jewish industry; average import tax rising from 11% at the start of the Mandate to over 26% by 1936, with 400% on matches; a regressive income tax of 25% on an income of PL 22.37 against 12% on salaries over PL 1,000; and Archbishop Gregorius Hajjar’s story to the Peel Commission of a government committee on Roma village’s olive oil chaired by the director of the competing Oil Company (PDF p.12 / printed p.22-23). The effendi class, living off land rents and loan interest and not investing in industry until the 1940s, is judged a form of exploitation by far more ruinous to the peasants than Zionist colonisation. The Bedouins, 66,553 in 1931 against 103,000 in 1922, are presented, quoting the Communist Party congress material, as a desperate potential revolutionary force that in fact made up, in the text’s figure, nearly 35% of the population, and played a principal role in 1929 and 1936 (PDF p.13 / printed p.24). The section closes on the feudal-clerical leadership: dismissed by British imperialism from the post of chief agent in favour of the Zionist movement, its fundamental role became a struggle for a better position in the colonialist regime, waged by rallying the anti-colonial classes behind a progressive programme and mass slogans it was neither willing nor able to push to their logical conclusions (PDF p.13 / printed p.24-25).

Kanafani, Background: The Intellectuals — PDF p.14-17 / printed p.26-33, concluded on PDF p.18 / printed p.34

Education under the Mandate opens the section: the Director of Education admitted in 1930 that since the beginning of the occupation the government had never provided funds to build a single school; in 1935 it turned down 41% of Palestinian Arab applications for school places; of 800 villages, only fifteen had girls’ schools and 269 boys’ schools, 517 villages had neither, and there was no village secondary school; 1931 school attendance per thousand was, for Palestinian Muslims, 251 males and 33 females; for Palestinian Christians, 715 and 441; for Jews, 943 and 787 (PDF p.14 / printed p.26). Against that, Palestine had a pioneering Arab cultural role: about fifty Arabic newspapers between 1904 and 1922, literary associations and clubs from the early twenties, graduates flowing from Beirut and Cairo, and translation from French and English. Kanafani’s subject is the effect of the crisis on the literary movement: a popular culture and above all popular poetry expressing rural awareness and mobilisation despite illiteracy. Urban intellectuals, mostly of feudal or commercial petty-bourgeois affiliation advocating a bourgeois revolution the objective conditions could not support, remained under the traditional leadership, yet, he states, not a single Palestinian writer or intellectual of the period failed to join the call for resistance. Examples are documented in order: Wadi al-Bustani, the Lebanese-born American University of Beirut graduate settled in Palestine, first to warn against the Balfour Declaration the month it was issued; his January 1920 reply poem in Haifa’s Karmel to Ma’ruf Al-Risafi’s poem for the High Commissioner; and the record of his inquiry after leading a demonstration on 28 March 1920, in which he denied a seditious line on the ground that it violated the metre and rhyme (PDF p.15 / printed p.28-29). Iskandar al-Khuri’s lines to Balfour at the opening of the Hebrew University, dated 1927 in the text; the culmination of the nationalist poets in Ibrahim Tuqan, Abu Salma (Abd al-Karim al-Karmi) and Abd al-Rahim Mahmud, with a further list of writers; Yusuf al-Isa’s 1920 Al-Nafa’is editorial; and a roll of 1930s writers including Arif al-Arif, Khalil al-Sakakini, Najati Sidqi (presented as probably the first chronicler of the Arab nationalist movement to use a materialist analysis) and Isa al-Sifri (PDF p.15-16 / printed p.29-31). Tuqan is quoted exposing the 1932 national fund (eight of those responsible were land brokers for the Zionists) and, from 1929, the big landowners who sold the country; his epic on the executed martyrs Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jumjum and Ata al-Zir; Mahmud’s 14 August 1935 line to the visiting Amir Saud asking whether he had come to visit the Aqsa Mosque or to say farewell to it before it was destroyed (PDF p.16 / printed p.30-31). Abu Salma’s chronicle of the 1936 revolt is quoted for its contempt for the Arab kings who abandoned it, and the popular poet Awad’s poem, written on his Acre cell wall the night before his execution in 1937, is quoted (PDF p.16 / printed p.31). Popular songs are then quoted as the revolt’s call went to the extreme of selling one’s mother to buy a gun; the gun destroyed the old walls of submissiveness, whose proverbs are listed, while patriarchal feudalism remained ossified above the effervescence (PDF p.14 / printed p.27; PDF p.17 / printed p.32). The synthesis: class struggle mixed with national interest and religious feeling inside an objective and subjective crisis; young intellectuals, sons of rich rural families, incited revolt, rejected by both the old relationships and the new Zionist-colonial alliance; religion functioned as a form of national and class resistance, as in the Prophet’s Birthday celebrations turned into nationalist rallies; and the feudal-clerical leaderships imposed themselves at the head of the mass movement by exploiting the weakness of the Arab urban bourgeoisie, of the small Arab proletariat and of its Communist Party (PDF p.17-18 / printed p.33-34).

Kanafani, The Revolt — PDF p.18-31 / printed p.35-61

The narrative starts from disagreement over the first spark: Bauer’s commonly regarded start, Palestinian Arab crowds in Jaffa attacking Jewish passers-by on 19 April 1936; the account of Isa al-Sifri, Salih Mas’ud Buwaysir and Subhi Yasin, a Qassamist ambush of 15 cars on the Anabta-Nur Shams road; and al-Kayyali’s February 1936 armed band around a Haifa school built with Jewish-only labour; all sources, Kanafani says, rightly treat the Qassamist rising as the real start (PDF p.18 / printed p.35). The Peel Royal Commission’s two causes (the desire for national independence, and aversion to the Jewish national home) are dismissed as one inflated cause, and its six secondary factors and the leadership’s three slogans (stop immigration, prohibit land transfer, democratic government) are set out, then judged incapable of expressing the real situation: the real cause was the climax of the conflicts of a society being transformed from an Arab agricultural-feudal-clerical one into a Zionist industrial bourgeois one (PDF p.19 / printed p.36-37). A special place is given to Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam: dismissed by several Jewish historians as a fanatical dervish and ignored by many Western historians, he is presented as the symbolic point of encounter of the Palestine problem’s factors (Syrian-born at Jabala, an Azharist, a veteran of the 1919-1920 Syrian revolt against the French condemned to death, in Haifa from 1921 building secret groups with advanced organisational intelligence); his three-stage programme (psychological preparation, secret groups and functional committees, then armed revolt); his going out to the Ya’bad hills with 25 men on the night of 12 November 1935 to spread the call rather than declare the revolt, his accidental discovery, his death under the slogan Die as Martyrs, and the masses following his body 10 kilometres on foot to Yajur (PDF p.19-20 / printed p.37-39). The traditional leaders’ response is documented: al-Qassam’s earlier request, through Sheikh Musa al-Azrawi, that Hajj Amin al-Hussaini coordinate a countrywide declaration of revolt was refused as premature; his funeral was attended only by poor people; six days after his killing, representatives of the five Palestinian parties told the High Commissioner in a memorandum that without a generally satisfactory answer they would lose all influence over their followers; by the fortieth-day ceremony the leaders had mounted the wave he set in motion; and the British High Commissioner wrote in the same sense to the Minister for the Colonies (PDF p.20 / printed p.38-39). The April 1936 outbreak and the general strike declared on 19 April 1936 are described as spontaneous, the leadership lagging then dominating; the six parties that emerged after the Arab Executive Committee’s dissolution in August 1934 are listed with their leaders and class bases (Arab Palestine Party, Jamal al-Hussaini; National Defence Party, Raghib al-Nashashibi; Independence Party, Auni Abd al-Hadi; Reform Party, Husain al-Khalidi; National Bloc, Abd al-Latif Salah; Palestine Youth Party, Ya’qub al-Ghusain), and judged a superficial multiplicity representing neither the 59% of Palestinian Arabs who were peasants (1931) nor the mass of the country (PDF p.21 / printed p.40-41). Weizmann’s 23 April 1936 Tel-Aviv speech is noted; the Arab Higher Committee was formed under Hajj Amin al-Hussaini on 25 April 1936; in the countryside the revolt took the form of civil disobedience and armed insurrection, and the 7 May 1936 Jerusalem conference of about 150 delegates resolved on non-payment of taxes from 15 May 1936 if Jewish immigration was not stopped (PDF p.22 / printed p.42-43). British repression struck the organisational cadre (61 strike organisers arrested on 23 May; the two most proficient organisers, Auni Abed el-Hadi and Mohammad Azat Darwazeh, arrested) while four leaders were permitted to travel to London on 12 June; the Emergency Regulations’ sentences cited from al-Sifri run from six years for possessing a revolver to two weeks for possessing a stick (PDF p.22 / printed p.43). A British estimate put about 1,000 Palestinian Arabs killed in 1936; house demolitions included 220 houses in Jaffa on 18 June 1936 rendering 6,000 homeless, 825 huts in total (computed from the four figures the text gives: 100 in Jabalia, 300 in Abu Kabir, 350 in Sheikh Murad and 75 in Arab al-Daudi), and 143 village houses by al-Sifri’s estimate (PDF p.23 / printed p.44). Volunteers from the Arab world are recorded (Sa’id al-As, killed October 1936; Sheikh Muhammad al-Ashmar; Fauzi al-Qawuqji, who entered in August 1936 and declared himself commander in chief), with the burden still borne by dispossessed peasants and their own officers. Britain’s acceptance on 19 June 1936 of the organic link between the safety of British interests and the success of Zionism is quoted; an estimated 20,000 British troops arrived, martial law was decreed on 30 September 1936, and after the mediation of Amir Abdullah and Nuri Said had failed in the summer, the Arab Higher Committee’s statement of 11 October 1936, in obedience to the Arab kings and amirs, called off the strike, and the General Command of the Arab Revolt in Southern Syria-Palestine wound up its operations in November (PDF p.23-24 / printed p.45-46). The kings then obliged the leadership to end its boycott of the Peel Commission; the Defence Party broke the boycott; the Mufti was caught between his right and his left; the Peel Report of 7 July 1937 recommended partition and a Jewish state; and in September 1937 the assassination of Andrews, District Commissioner of Galilee, by four commandos believed to be Qassamites, outside the Anglican church in Nazareth, restarted a revolt the Arab Higher Committee had condemned the same night (PDF p.24 / printed p.46-47). The second phase, late 1937 to early 1939, is presented as a peasant revolt in almost complete peasant control, directed substantially against the British, with local commanders of poor peasant origin such as Abd al-Rahim al-Hajj, the revolt’s command outside Palestine in Damascus, and the armed popular revolt never closer to victory than in those months; an Arab approach to the Zionists for an agreement on severing relations with Britain is quoted as rejected, while Zionists in the police rose from 365 in 1935 to 2,863 after additional recruitment, and Britain kept the Mufti as undisputed representative because the alternative was the leaders of the revolt in the mountains (PDF p.25 / printed p.48-49). Universal wearing of the keffiya and agal in the towns, the temporary occupation of towns in 1938 (Hebron, Beersheba, Tiberias, parts of Nablus), and repression figures for the period (about 2,000 long prison sentences, more than 5,000 homes demolished, 148 hanged in Acre prison, more than 5,000 imprisoned) follow (PDF p.25-26 / printed p.49-51). Britain abandoned partition in November 1938; the February 1939 London Round Table Conference, with Jamal al-Hussaini accompanied by representatives of the independent Arab countries, is presented as the Arab regimes imposing their will a second time, while fighting continued (February 1939 official figures are listed). Exhaustion is attributed to leadership vacillation and to the objective weight of two British divisions, air squadrons, the police, the Transjordan Frontier Force and a 6,000-strong quasi-Zionist force, with security expenditure risen from PL 826,000 in 1935 to PL 2,223,000 in 1936; the killing of Abd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad in March 1939 is called a crushing blow, after which the local commands collapsed (PDF p.26 / printed p.50-51). The causes of failure are then analysed: the Palestinian Communist Party’s five causes (absence of revolutionary leadership, individualism and opportunism of the revolt’s leaders, lack of a central command, weakness of the Party, the inauspicious world situation), supplemented by the Party’s closeness to the Mufti, its failure to Arabise and reach the countryside, the great gap left by the violent transformation of society, al-Kayyali’s additional causes (weariness, military pressure, hope in the White Paper, lack of arms, French suppression of the Damascus headquarters), and the two interconnected factors of Transjordan under Amir Abdullah and the internal counter-revolution: the Defence Party as the Transjordan regime’s legal representative, its history summed up in a long quotation from Anis Sayegh; Transjordan’s suppression of its own support movement, closure of the roads to Iraq, and the 1939 handing over of Yusuf Abu Durrar (also spelled Abu Daur) to the British, who executed him; and the peace detachments of Defence Party leaders such as Fakhri al-Nashashibi, armed and directed with the English (PDF p.27-28 / printed p.52-55). The revolt is summarised as struck at three vital points: the subjective (leadership incapacity), the Arab (regimes’ collusion), and the international (the colonialist camp’s alliance with Zionism). Losses: the best estimate, from official British admissions checked against other documents in Walid Khalidi’s From Haven to Conquest, totals 19,792 killed and wounded: 5,032 Arabs killed (1,200 in 1936, 120 in 1937, 1,200 in 1938, 1,200 in 1939, plus 112 executed and 1,200 killed in terrorist operations) and 14,760 wounded, with detainees of about 816 in 1937, 2,463 in 1938 and about 5,679 in 1939, scaled by population to British and American equivalents (PDF p.28 / printed p.54-55). The Zionist side of the period is then documented: two parallel policy lines, the closest alliance with Britain (the 20th Zionist Congress in summer 1937 ready to accept partition) and continuous internal mobilisation under Ben Gurion’s slogan of no alternative; Weizmann is quoted on the complete similarity of interests between the Zionists and the British in Palestine; economic gains during the revolt include roads, the paving of the Haifa-Tel-Aviv road, the expansion of Haifa harbour and the construction of Tel-Aviv harbour, supply contracts for British troops, 50 new colonies in 1936-1939, Jewish building investment of PL 1,268,000 in five towns in 1936-1938 against PL 120,000 Arab investment in 16 villages, and exports of locally manufactured goods rising from PL 478,807 in 1935 to PL 896,875 in 1937 (PDF p.29 / printed p.56-57). The military build-up under British supervision follows: 12,000 Haganah men in 1937 plus 3,000 in Jabotinsky’s National Military Organisation; the Quasi-Police Force idea of spring 1936 as cover for the armed Zionist presence and a framework for training the Haganah; its renaming as Defence of the Jewish Colonies and then Colony Police in summer 1937, 3,000 new members in 1937, British instruction courses in June 1938 training Haganah cadres who later became cadres of the Israeli army, ten well-armed Colony Police groups totalling 14,411 men at the beginning of 1939, and 62 mechanised units by spring 1939 (PDF p.29 / printed p.57). Zionist defence of the Haifa-Ludd railway (434 men in spring 1938, 800 six months later) and of the Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline (built 1934, first blown up by rebels near Irbid on 15 July 1936 and repeatedly afterwards at a long list of places, guarded in Jordanian territory by Shaikh Turki ibn Zain of the Bani Sakhr); British efforts toward a Zionist air force, characterised as an early form of the strategy the Americans 30 years later called Vietnamisation; and Charles Orde Wingate, sent to Haifa in autumn 1937 to form the nuclei of Zionist striking forces, teaching his pupils at Ain Daur, among them Moshe Dayan, and characterised as equipped with an unlimited racialist hatred for the Arabs (PDF p.30 / printed p.58-59). The essay closes: claims that the Arabs stopped their revolt to let Britain fight Nazism are naive, and refuted among other things by Hajj Amin al-Hussaini taking refuge in Nazi Germany throughout the war; the 1936-1939 situation explains the stagnation of the Palestinian nationalist movement through the war, its head broken and scattered, its base weakened and its social fabric worn out; the Zionist movement entered the 1940s with the field practically clear, stepped up its partial conflict with British colonialism in the mid-1940s after long years of alliance, and plucked the fruits of the defeat of the 1936 revolt in 1947, so that the second chapter of the Palestinian defeat, from the end of 1947 to the middle of 1948, was only the conclusion of a long and bloody chapter lasting from April 1936 to September 1939; the Mufti’s men’s assassination of Sami Taha in Haifa on 12 September 1947 is given as an instance of the defeated leadership’s repression of the communist left (PDF p.31 / printed p.60-61).

Kanafani, Letter From Gaza (short story) — PDF p.31-33 / printed p.61-65

A first-person letter to Mustafa in Sacramento: the narrator, accepted for civil engineering at the University of California, announces he has changed his mind and will not come. The letter recollects their childhood in the Shajiya quarter of Gaza, their parting at Cairo airport, Mustafa’s contract with the Ministry of Education in Kuwait and the small sums he sent, the narrator’s own later contract in Kuwait and his gluey, vacuous life there, his hatred of Gaza and his plan to flee to California and liberate himself from supporting his mother, his brother’s widow and her four children on his UNRWA schools salary. On holiday in June he visits his mother; at his sister-in-law’s request he visits her wounded daughter Nadia, thirteen, in Gaza hospital; he lies to her about presents from Kuwait, including the red trousers she had asked for; she lifts the coverlet and points to her leg, amputated from the top of the thigh. He learns Nadia lost her leg throwing herself on her little brothers and sisters to protect them from the bombs and flames in the house, when she could have run and saved herself. Gaza becomes brand new to him, its sadness a challenge, something like reclamation of the amputated leg; he refuses Sacramento and calls on Mustafa to return, to learn from Nadia’s leg what life is and what existence is worth. See Ghassan Kanafani and Gaza.

A Tribute to Ghassan Kanafani (S. Marwan, excerpts) — PDF p.33-34 / printed p.65-67

The headnote records Kanafani as a member of the PFLP Politbureau and its spokesman, assassinated in Beirut on July 8, 1972 by Israeli agents, and a grave threat to the Zionist entity for turning an ideology and political line into popular literature. Marwan’s excerpts present Kanafani’s conception of imperialism as a mobile body laid over the world; the Al Hadaf slogan All the Facts to the Masses, and the paper’s self-definition as the ally of all those carrying on armed and political-ideological struggle; his adopting and defending the interests of the toiling masses of the Palestinians, the Arabs and the international oppressed classes, and, as a Marxist, the path of armed struggle as the only way to defend the oppressed; his teaching that the goal of education is to correct the march of history; the primary contradiction as the one with imperialism, Zionism and racism, soluble only by united and steadfast armed struggle; his rejection of all compromises and bourgeois or divisive solutions; his comment on the martyred Patrick Arguello; his judgement that the results of the imperialist assault would be directed against the oppressed masses to prevent them from mobilising and fighting; his statements on the Vietnamese revolutionaries’ internationalism and that the Palestinian cause is a cause for every revolutionary; and his saying to the Al Hadaf staff that everything can be robbed and stolen except the love that emanates from a human being towards a solid commitment to a conviction or cause.

Biography — PDF p.35 (contents: printed p.68)

A short closing biography, beside a full-page photograph: Ghassan Kanafani, Palestinian journalist, novelist and short story writer, born in Acre, Palestine on 9 April 1936, lived in Jaffa until May 1948, when he was forced to leave with his family first to Lebanon and later to Syria; lived and worked in Damascus, then Kuwait, then Beirut; in July 1972 he and his young niece Lamis were killed by Israeli agents in a car bomb in Beirut; by his death he had published 18 books and written hundreds of articles on culture, politics and the Palestinian people’s struggle; after his assassination his books were re-published in several Arabic editions and his novels, short stories, plays and essays collected in four volumes; many of his literary works have been translated and published worldwide, and his literary talents gave his Palestinian work universal appeal.

Key passages

• “Between 1936 and 1939, the Palestinian revolutionary movement suffered a severe setback at the hands of three separate enemies” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.6 / printed p.10).
• “By July 1937, the real wages of the average Palestinian Arab worker decreased 10% while those of a Jewish worker rose 10%.” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.7 / printed p.13).
• “Every plot of land bought by Jews was made foreign to Arabs as if it had been amputated from the body of Palestine and removed to another country.” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.11 / printed p.21).
• “We are taking your money so that we can fight the enemy and defend you.” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.18 / printed p.35).
• “if they did not receive an answer to this memorandum which could be regarded as generally satisfactory, they would lose all their influence over their followers, extremist and irresponsible views would prevail and the situation would deteriorate” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.20 / printed p.39).
• “calls for all acts of violence to be stopped completely, and that there should be no provocation towards anything liable to disturb the atmosphere of the negotiations, which the Arab nation hopes will succeed and obtain the full rights of the country” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.23 / printed p.45).
• “leave no-one who can represent the Arabs except the leaders of the revolt in the mountains” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.25 / printed p.49).
• “There is a complete similarity of interests between the Zionists and the British in Palestine” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.56).
• “the conditions for the Zionist victory had in 1948 been created in the period of the Arab revolt.” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.28 / printed p.55).
• “Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America.” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.33 / printed p.65).
• “Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you.” (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.33 / printed p.64).

Evidence the work relies on

As the booklet presents them, Kanafani’s essay relies on: Said Himadeh (ed.), Economic Organization of Palestine (American University of Beirut, 1939), for economic series on immigration, wages, industry, land and education; Nathan Weinstock, Le Sionisme - Contra Israel (Maspero, Paris, 1969); the collection of Arab testimonies before the British Royal Commission (al-Itidal Press, Damascus, 1938), cited throughout as Collection, including George Mansour’s report for the Federation of Palestinian Arab Workers and Archbishop Gregorius Hajjar’s testimony; Yehuda Bauer, The Arab Revolt of 1936, New Outlook, Vol.9 No.6 (Tel-Aviv, 1966), quoted and argued against; Abd al-Wahhab al-Kayyali, Modern History of Palestine (Beirut, 1970), for political narrative and official correspondence; Sami Hadawi, Palestine Under the Mandate 1920-1940, for land acquisition shares and the leadership’s three slogans; the three revolt histories of Isa al-Sifri (Jaffa, 1937), Salih Mas’ud Buwaysir and Subhi Yasin, for incidents, sentences, demolitions and the Qassamist programme; the Palestine Communist Party’s Seventh Congress theses via Communist Internationalism and the Arab Revolution (Dar al-Haqiqa, Beirut); Documents of the Palestine Arab Resistance (1918-1939) (Beirut), for the Arab Higher Committee’s 11 October 1936 statement and the General Command’s November 1936 statements; Walid Khalidi (ed.), From Haven to Conquest (IPS, Beirut, 1971), for the loss estimate; Percy, Palestine’s Economic Future (Lund Humphries, London, 1946), cited for the 1931 class structure (footnote 15, PDF p.21); Nevill Barbour, attributed in the text with no footnote for the figure that 90% of the revolutionaries were peasants (PDF p.21), and cited through his Nisi Dominus for the account of Andrews (footnote 27, PDF p.24) and for the frontier works built with Jewish labour (footnote 48, PDF p.29); Anis Sayegh, The Hashemite & the Palestine Question (Beirut, 1966), for the Defence Party’s record; David Ben Gurion’s writings, for Haganah and Colony Police figures; the newspapers Davar, Jewish Observer and Al-Ahram (1 March 1939); the Peel Royal Commission report and British official reports and correspondence, quoted through the above; Theodor Herzl, Selected Works; the Exco Foundation for Palestine study (Yale University Press, 1947); Haim Hanagbi, Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr, The Class Nature of Israel, New Left Review 65 (1971); Matzpen No.5 (April 1971); and, for the literary background, Abdul Rahman Yaghi, Modern Palestinian Literature (Beirut), Taufiq Ziyad’s works on popular poetry and literature, Nimr Sirhan, Our Popular Songs, and Yusra Arnita, Folkloric Arts in Palestine. Full citations, by page, are in reading/kanafani-1972-1936-39-revolt.md.

Analysis

Kanafani’s method is a class analysis organised by his three-enemies thesis: he first establishes the material position of workers, peasants and intellectuals from statistics, testimony and contemporary reports, then reads the revolt’s political history as the interaction of the feudal-clerical leadership, the surrounding Arab regimes and the British-Zionist alliance, returning at the end to the balance sheet of who gained materially and militarily in 1936-1939. His evidence base inside the essay is secondary literature and published testimony collections rather than documents he himself unearthed: the economic argument rests heavily on Himadeh’s 1939 survey and on Mansour’s testimony as preserved in the 1938 Damascus collection; the narrative of the revolt rests heavily on al-Kayyali, al-Sifri, Buwaysir and Yasin. Where those sources disagree (the first spark; the scale of prosperity before 1936, where he argues against Bauer), he says so and takes a side. His perspective is that of a PFLP Marxist writing a usable past for the resistance: the same booklet’s front matter presents the study as the first piece of a projected modern history of the Palestinian people’s struggle, and its analysis is openly partisan, for example in calling the settler society’s development fascist in character, and in judging the effendi class’s exploitation of the peasants as more ruinous than Zionist colonisation. Limits visible from the text itself: several figures are in tension within his own presentation and are recorded under Open questions; some claims rest on a single cited testimony collection; and the booklet gives no Arabic original, translator or translation history for the essay. Critiques of the work by others appear only when they are themselves ingested sources, and none has been ingested yet.

People, organizations, places and events

People: Ghassan Kanafani, Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Amin al-Hussaini, Abd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad, Wadi al-Bustani, Ibrahim Tuqan, Charles Orde Wingate, David Ben-Gurion, Amir Abdullah, Nuri al-Said, Raghib al-Nashashibi, Chaim Weizmann, Theodor Herzl, Fauzi al-Qawuqji, Andrews, Sami Taha, Michel Mitri, Abu Salma, Abd al-Rahim Mahmud. Organizations: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Histadrut, Palestine Communist Party, Arab Higher Committee, Haganah, National Defence Party, Independence Party, Arab Executive Committee, Quasi-Police Force, Jewish Agency, National Military Organisation. Places: Gaza, Jaffa, Haifa, Transjordan, Acre. Events and instruments: 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Peel Commission, British Emergency Regulations, Balfour Declaration, 1939 London Round Table Conference.

Concepts

Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Jewish Labour Only, Arabisation, Feudal-Clerical Leadership, Surrounding Arab Regimes, Resistance Poetry, Peasant Revolt, Imperialism.

How it relates to other sources

This is the first source ingested into the wiki, so there are no other sources to agree or disagree with yet. Within the file itself, the front matter, the Tribute and the Biography frame Kanafani’s essay from the same PFLP standpoint the essay is written from, and Letter From Gaza restates, in fiction, the essay’s recurring image of land and limb lost to colonisation (the amputated plot of land, PDF p.11 / printed p.21, and Nadia’s amputated leg, PDF p.33 / printed p.64).

Open questions

• The text states that Jewish ownership of urban and rural land rose from 300,000 dunums in 1929 to 1,250,000 dunums in 1930 (PDF p.11 / printed p.20). The 1930 date sits oddly with the surrounding figures and is recorded here as written.
• Two different measures of dependence on agriculture in 1931 are given on the same spread (151 per thousand Jews and 637 per thousand Arabs; and 19.1% of the Jewish population and 59% of Palestinian Arabs) (PDF p.11 / printed p.20).
• The Bedouins are counted at 66,553 in 1931 and also said to have made up nearly 35% of the population (PDF p.13 / printed p.24).
• The Mufti is said to have been in Damascus since the end of January 1937 (PDF p.25 / printed p.49), in a passage that follows the events of September 1937.
• A footnote dates a Baghdad letter to the British Foreign Minister 31 Oct. 1930 in a context concerning the 1939 London Conference (PDF p.28 / printed p.54).
• The opening ceremony of the Hebrew University attended by Balfour is dated 1927 (PDF p.15 / printed p.28).
• Authorship of the front Introduction, the Political Writings essay and the Poem is not given in the file.
• The essay’s Arabic original, and any translator or translation history for this English text, are not given in the file.
• Spellings vary inside the file: Lamees (Introduction) and Lamis (Biography) for Kanafani’s niece; Sursock and Sursuk for the Beirut landowning family; Abu Daur and Abu Durrar for the leader handed over in 1939.
• The bibliography identity of the work cited throughout as Collection is given only through its uses (for example, the collection of Arab testimonies before the British Royal Commission, al-Itidal Press, Damascus, 1938, footnote 10 of the Workers section).
• The book gives two different figures for executions: it states that 148 persons were executed by hanging in Acre prison (PDF p.26 / printed p.50), but its loss estimate counts 112 Arabs executed (PDF p.28 / printed p.54).

Coverage

PDF p.1-35 of 35, read in full. Reading notes: reading/kanafani-1972-1936-39-revolt.md, with chunk headings PDF p.1-10, PDF p.11-20, PDF p.21-30 and PDF p.31-35 covering every page with no gaps.