Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939

The Center for Arab Unity Studies published the book Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939 by British researcher Mattew Hughes (translated by Musab Bashir).

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Jewish population of Palestine did not represent more than three percent of the Palestinian Arabs or owned more than one percent of Palestinian land. Despite the increase in Jewish immigration after the establishment of the Zionist movement at the end of that century, the Zionist project would not have been achieved without the unlimited British support for it, in return for the British quest to abort any Palestinian or Arab national effort to confront this project. This book presents a historical reading of the British colonial role in establishing the Zionist entity and in suppressing the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine (1936-1939), which came to confront the Zionist settlement project.

The book presents in detail the events of that revolution based on newly released British documents and reports, as well as some Israeli and Arab documents and sources, all of which helped to provide a detailed account of the brutal British colonial practices in Palestine to suppress the 1936 revolution, including torture, starvation, killing, assassination, execution without trial, burning homes, besieging and bombing Palestinian villages, and spreading dissension among the Palestinian people… in return for providing all kinds of political, economic, military, logistical and training support to the Zionist immigrants to strengthen their settlement and control over the Palestinian lands.

The book also presents an account of the experience of the Great Arab Revolt in 1936 and the practices and weaknesses that contributed to its suppression, in light of a divided Palestinian reality and a fragile and dependent Arab official situation. It is a novel, despite its reliance to a large extent on British sources and reports, which helps the Palestinian people and its national forces to benefit from it and take lessons for the future.