Hamas attacks Israel: Yom Kippur War, 50 years on

this looks like a worthwhile book.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/palestine-1936-book-review-the-storm-before-the-storm-23c67da1

‘Palestine 1936’ Review: The Storm Before the Storm
In 1936, revolt broke out in Mandatory Palestine. The ensuing violence would presage the region’s troubles today.

Jews had predominated in Jerusalem since the 19th century, but on the eve of World War I, they formed only 7% of Palestine’s population. Jewish immigration increased sharply after 1922, when the League of Nations adopted the Balfour Declaration as international law. There had never been a Palestinian state—the area was part of the Ottoman Empire—and the Mandate’s Arabs were slow to think of themselves as a modern nation. When the first Palestine Arab Congress had convened in 1919, its goal had not been to create an independent Arab state, but to attach Palestine to “Greater Syria.” Meanwhile, at least a quarter of the Congress’s leaders discreetly sold land for Jewish settlement.​

As Jewish immigration increased further and land sales drove Arabs off the land, Arab responses became more violent and more organized. Though the British created the Jewish Agency to build the institutions of Zionist society, they were unable to rally the leading Arab families to run an Arab Agency. They did, however, create a Muslim religious authority, the Supreme Muslim Council, under Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. During the 1920s, Hajj Amin drifted toward “a distinctly Palestinian nationalism,” according to Mr. Kessler, one with distinctly local enemies: “the Jews and their British enablers.”

By 1933, Hitler was in power in Germany and Palestinian Arabs were rioting against the British. In March 1936, the British high commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, proposed establishing a legislative council that would “grant the Arab majority a far greater voice in its own administration.” Instead the London government affirmed that the Mandate’s primary purpose was to facilitate Jewish immigration.

The Great Revolt began on April 15, 1936, when an Arab gang set up a roadblock near Nablus, singled out three Jewish drivers and shot them. The right-wing Zionist Irgun militia retaliated by killing two Arab fruit pickers. The Arabs of Jaffa then turned on their Jewish neighbors, killing nine with knives, hammers and stones. The British killed two Arabs and declared martial law.

Hajj Amin, already the head of the Supreme Muslim Council, announced the formation of the Arab Higher Committee, with himself as its leader, and called for a general strike. His demands were “an end to Jewish immigration, a prohibition on land sales, and the establishment of representative government that reflected the country’s Arab majority.” The strike lasted six months and was Hajj Amin’s “finest hour,” as Mr. Kessler puts it, but it also put the nascent Palestinian cause in conflict with the smaller but more organized Jewish community, not to mention the world’s most powerful empire.

David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish Agency’s leader, responded with a policy of havlagah, or restraint, which he hoped would encourage the British to arm the Jews as allies. He also convinced the British to let him set up a Jewish-run port at Tel Aviv to export Palestine’s biggest export, citrus fruits, most of which were grown in Jewish-owned fields. The first shipment included a crate of Jaffa oranges for the new king, Edward VIII. In an “hour of disturbances,” Ben-Gurion was moving toward his lifelong goal, “Jewish autonomy on every front: political, cultural, and economic.”

The strike ended after Hajj Amin secretly appealed to the neighboring Arab governments for support. This was the first case of “regionalization,” Mr. Kessler observes, and it successfully turned Palestine into a pan-Arab issue. The British sent a commission of enquiry to Jerusalem, where it conducted more than 50 secret interviews at the Palace Hotel, including with Hajj Amin and Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. The commission proposed partitioning the Mandate into Jewish and Arab states, and reducing Jewish immigration to 12,000 a year. This was a “major, incontestable achievement” for the Arabs. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion accepted partition as a strategic victory, but Hajj Amin rejected it and called for jihad.

The revolt continued as a guerilla insurgency. The British suppressed it with tanks, aircraft, mass detention, demolitions, torture and executions. As war in Europe neared, they bolstered Jewish militia squads. The nucleus of the future Israeli army, Mr. Kessler notes, was being “massively trained and armed by the world’s preeminent military.” With partition now imminent, Jewish settlers raced to stake claims, erecting settlements at key strategic locations.

The Great Revolt’s “singular, undeniable achievement” was forcing a British retreat from the Balfour Declaration, including its fatal consequences for the Jews of Europe. The price was the wrecking of the Arab economy, the exodus of much of the Arab “political, commercial, and landed elite,” and Hajj Amin’s alignment with Nazi Germany. In fighting the revolt, the proto-Israelis strengthened their economy and social unity, and expanded their territorial claims. They built up centralized institutions and a disciplined, experienced army. Before Jewish-Arab civil war broke out in 1947, the proto-Palestinians had “effectively already lost the war, and with it most of the country, a decade in advance.”

Mr. Kessler, who previously worked as the Jerusalem Post’s Arab affairs correspondent and as an editor and translator at Ha’aretz, is the first to tell this story from all three sides (British, Arab, Jewish) and use sources in all three languages (English, Arabic, Hebrew). He has done an exceptional job and opened new vistas on troubles past and present. The “grim but familiar pattern” that began in 1936—the vocabulary of partition, the dynamic of terrorism and repression—grinds on nearly a century later. The conflict can have one winner, or two losers.



https://a.co/d/8UrVNjE